It was a Tree Dragon.
After Ais and Tiona examined it, they confird that the monster before them was one of the Great Tree Labyrinth's rare creatures — a Tree Dragon, guardian of the Pearl Tree. Only now, the Pearl Tree was nowhere to be found, and behind the great dragon lay a sloping corridor that everyone recognized at once.
It was identical to the passage corridors that connected floor to floor within the Dungeon.
From sowhere beyond it ca the sound of trickling water. The air had begun to carry a damp, heavy mist — which suggested the path ahead led toward the Great Waterfall region.
The Tree Dragon's dead body bore unmistakable, grueso wounds.
Among them were several enormous crossbow bolts. Isagi identified them as belonging to the Dwarf Mam. Beyond that, there were wounds caused by magic, along with traces of pitch-black liquid left on the dragon's body — almost certainly the handiwork of the Elf Airon.
The two of them had taken it down, most likely.
That made the sequence of events straightforward enough.
Before — the Elf and Dwarf who had been traveling alongside himself, Ais, and Riveria. Once they arrived at the forward position that resembled the Under Resort, they must have noticed that Isagi's group had suddenly vanished. Rather than waiting in place, they had almost certainly continued toward their original goal: pushing deeper into the Dungeon to search for the Great Hero Albert and his party.
Airon and Mam had then pushed through the woodland and the corpse-strewn forward position, reached the edge of the cliff face, and entered this stretch of the Great Tree Labyrinth.
But the road they had walked could not have been anywhere near as uneventful as what Isagi's group had experienced.
From the topmost level to here, Isagi's group had spent at most around two hours — essentially a steady march, without encountering any danger or monster attacks along the way.
But there was no way Airon and Mam had managed it in the sa amount of ti.
Because.
As seasoned adventurers — and as a hunting deity — both Riveria and Artemis had examined the Tree Dragon's remains and determined that its death had occurred no more than one month ago.
While the bodies of most monsters dissolve once their magic stone leaves the body, in the wild and even inside the Dungeon, monster carcasses that persist for years are not unheard of. The reasons vary widely.
For Artemis in particular, reading the state of a monster's remains to estimate ti of death was one of her key thods for wilderness survival and tracking certain monsters.
Given that.
The last ti Isagi had been here — when he and Airon and Mam had parted ways — counting the days, it had been close to two months.
Which ant the two of them had spent nearly a full month just making it from the upper levels to this point.
That was an uncomfortably long ti, all things considered. Both of their abilities were on par with first-rate adventurers; even in a normal Dungeon run, getting from the upper floors to here should never take a month — unless the journey had been extraordinarily difficult.
And there was one more piece of evidence that proved just how brutal Airon and Mam's road had been.
The Tree Dragon was missing most of one of its hind legs.
"It was cut away for provisions. And the magic stone was left in the body on purpose — probably to use the carcass as a food reserve."
"Monster flesh rots very slowly. Dragon-type monsters in particular — their remains can last for hundreds, even thousands of years."
Riveria's words left everyone a little stunned.
As adventurers, they all knew what eating monster flesh really ant. It was sothing you only did inside the Dungeon when you had absolutely no other option.
It wasn't that monster at was inedible — it was that eating it produced an almost visceral revulsion. Sothing beyond the practical question of taste or sustenance; sothing etched into the very bedrock of every living person in this world.
Of course, Riveria, with her long career, had seen a few adventurers who had lost their minds entirely. People who had consud monster flesh and blood, even tortured monsters — most of them had experienced sothing truly horrific in the Dungeon, sothing that had broken them on a fundantal level.
But those were rare cases.
For the vast majority of adventurers, eating monster at was an absolute last resort for survival.
And before parting with Isagi, both Airon and Mam had restocked their supplies at the fortress they had found earlier.
Isagi rembered it clearly — the Dwarf and Elf had loaded up with more than enough provisions to sustain the two of them inside the Dungeon for well over a month.
So the fact that, after defeating the Tree Dragon here, they had still taken its at with them when they left — that said everything. The journey to reach this point had been brutal, and had cost them nearly all of their supplies, leaving them with no choice but to resupply however they could.
"Strange—"
Isagi frowned, puzzling over it.
After he had left, could it be that the Dungeon had set its sights on Airon and Mam specifically — harassing them with monster attacks the entire way?
But even so, that shouldn't have delayed them that much.
And then there was the Tree Dragon itself. The way it had been positioned — it looked almost as though it had been standing guard deliberately, except that instead of protecting the Pearl Tree, it had been blocking the corridor leading to the lower levels behind it.
His thoughts churned.
And then, abruptly, Isagi arrived at a terrible conclusion.
"The power the Dungeon had concentrated here wasn't actually that strong. It had been spending most of it on targeting . But once we left — it could pull that power back and redirect it toward Airon and Mam."
"That's very possible!"
"No wonder..."
"Then Isagi — why haven't we run into any danger on the way here?"
"The Dungeon's power in this area is exhausted. It hasn't recovered yet. Or perhaps..."
He paused.
"She changed her mind."
"?"
Isagi gestured for the group to follow and headed toward the corridor behind the Tree Dragon.
They walked the familiar slope.
As they moved, he laid out his thoughts.
"When we first arrived here, the Dungeon was clearly trying to stop us from going any deeper. Spawning monsters. Using the terrain to generate that thick fog, to make people lose their way. The Dungeon's intent was unmistakable."
"It didn't want us to go further in."
"That Tree Dragon guarding the base of the hollow — its purpose was the sa. It was there to stop anyone from descending."
That much was easy enough to deduce.
Furthermore.
If the Dungeon's current objective was to prevent anyone from pushing deeper — to stop them from finding Albert and his party — then a question arose.
From what they could observe, the birth of the Black Dragon had a direct link to the Great Hero's party descending into the Dungeon. But why would that be?
"The Dungeon sensed Albert and his group going deeper, so it gathered its power and gave birth to sothing like the Black Dragon!"
Ais said it quickly, her voice urgent with conviction. It was the most reasonable explanation.
But that imdiately raised another question: why would Albert's party descending cause the Dungeon to begin nurturing a Black Dragon?
If the Dungeon was capable of concentrating all its power to birth a monster like that — why hadn't it done so before?
In all the years prior, even before the heroes had co to Orario — why had it never done this?
"Because the Dungeon has no consciousness."
Riveria's words reflected the view held by most adventurers today regarding the nature of the Dungeon's existence.
The Dungeon was alive.
But at the sa ti, it was not a "living being" in the way that people or gods were. It was an existence entirely without subjective will.
Isagi agreed.
From everything they had observed, the Dungeon had only been reacting — to Isagi, and to the others who had entered it. It had not acted on its own initiative; rather, their presence had triggered corresponding consequences.
Which ant the answer, right now, was this:
Albert's party had done sothing. Sothing that caused the Black Dragon to be born.
The conclusion was almost impossible to accept — and yet, given everything they knew, it made perfect sense.
In truth, even the gods had never understood why the Dungeon, capable of birthing sothing as powerful as a Black Dragon, also produced creatures as weak as Goblins and Kobolds.
The girls fell into thoughtful silence.
Ryuu quickly arrived at the sa analogy — just like the Juggernaut. If the Dungeon's only goal was to kill every adventurer who entered, it could simply deploy that kind of devastating weapon freely. It certainly had the ans.
But it didn't.
Adventurers had long established that the Dungeon was a non-conscious existence, yet few had taken that reasoning one step further: that much of what happened inside the Dungeon was, at its core, nothing more than the Dungeon reacting to specific events. Nothing more, nothing less.
So — what had Albert's party actually done that had caused the Dungeon to begin nurturing a Black Dragon?
Ais went quiet.
She strained to recall sothing — anything — but no matter how hard she tried, her mories always broke off sowhere in that all-consuming darkness. The silhouettes of her father and mother were always so blurry.
What mories she did have of them were ordinary things. In the garden, her father swinging a wooden sword. Her mother sweeping fallen leaves, cooking in the kitchen, calling out for her to co over—
Nothing unusual at all.
But that couldn't be right. Riveria, walking nearby, looked as though she wanted to say sothing but held back.
Because.
Ais had been found in the deep levels of the Dungeon — a little girl of only four or five years old, discovered sowhere past the 60th floor, in one of the most dangerous regions of the Dungeon's depths.
That in itself had always been an unsolved mystery.
And now — might there finally be a chance to learn the answer?
For a mont, everyone seed to retreat into their own thoughts as they passed through the long corridor together.
After a while, the passage opened up.
The sound of rushing water grew more powerful — almost deafeningly loud, like rolling thunder. But paradoxically, it put Ais and the others a little more at ease — because they were back sowhere familiar. And what people feared most was always the unknown. Especially inside the Dungeon, where the more unfamiliar a place, the more danger it promised.
This cavern before them wasn't identical to the Great Waterfall they rembered, but it was close enough that it loosened sothing in their chests.
The chamber ahead was an enormous cylindrical stone grotto — staggeringly vast in breadth, and when they looked down, the depths were simply unfathomable. At its center, a great waterfall like an underground river in freefall poured from the ceiling, fed by streams that burst from the surrounding cliff walls on all sides, converging before plunging straight downward.
The roar it produced was incessant, like constant thunder.
Along the surrounding cliff walls, a spiral path wound downward in broad, sweeping turns. Branching off from it were tunnels that cut in every direction, crisscrossing throughout the rock — a labyrinthine web that went up and down alike. Many of those tunnels were dead ends, opening only into small chambers where underground streams drained away. But others intersected and looped back on themselves, weaving together in all directions, until eventually every path returned to the great waterfall at the center.
Isagi and the girls explored for a while.
They found that the area was, all things considered, genuinely not that different from the Great Waterfall region. There were no monsters, no dangers encountered along the way — but Isagi did not let his guard down. If anything, the silence made him more wary, because the calr things seed on the surface, the more likely sothing was lurking ahead.
Because there was no chance his skill had simply stopped working.
Moisture saturated the air.
The cavern was thick with the indescribable damp scent unique to underground rivers — not unpleasant at all. In fact, with so many underground streams feeding the air currents, the cool breeze it created was almost refreshing.
And then, in the middle of all that.
As they walked on, everyone suddenly stopped.
Around the bend of the mountain path just ahead — a rabbit had appeared.
It was small. Its fur was pure white, its eyes a vivid red. It sat half-upright on the ground, gazing back at the group with that utterly adorable, unassuming look.
Was it just a regular animal?
It didn't look like the monsters known as Needle Rabbits that prowled the Dungeon.
"Thwick!"
Artemis drew her bow and, with breathtaking precision, drove an arrow straight through the rabbit's skull.
The arrow was impossibly fast.
It pinned the creature to the ground a short distance away. Crimson blood spread slowly through the pure white fur.
"It's an ordinary wild animal."
The confirmation brought a collective exhale of relief from everyone — the hunting goddess included.
But then — sothing went wrong.
The rabbit's head suddenly burst open. From the wreckage, green vines erupted, tangled with blooming flowers, twisting together until the creature had transford into sothing grotesque and monstrous.
"?"
It happened without warning.
But even so — this alone was still within the range of what Isagi and the girls could handle. The thing in front of them was nothing.
Isagi had already drawn Moonhide again. Casually, he swept an arc of deep-blue magical energy toward the "rabbit" in the distance.
In an instant, the growing vines were sliced clean through. The creature split in two alongside its body, then withered at a visible speed before crumbling away into dust.
Inside the cleaved flesh, a small magic stone was visible — it had existed within the rabbit's body, and had also been the source from which the vines were growing.
A seed?
The strange notion surfaced in everyone's minds at once.
And then.
More monsters ca pouring toward them from every direction.
At first, it was still things they could make sense of — rabbits and birds. Then crabs and lobsters, the sort of creatures commonly found in the Great Waterfall region. But after those ca massive fish with human arms and legs, and that was when things took a turn that defied rational explanation.
And more importantly.
As these monsters moved, their bodies would suddenly detonate — and from the rupture, green vines would erupt and begin entwining with one another.
Clearly, at this mont, the Dungeon had finally bared her fangs at them as well.
____
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