The Corrupted Spirit, despite its madness, possessed a high-level intelligence. It looked up at Ais its pupils constricting in a mixture of confusion and lingering malice.
"Aria?" It wheezed, its voice like grinding stones. "Why... why has the Spirit blood within you vanished?"
The Corrupted Spirit was baffled. Months ago, it had sensed the unmistakable resonance of Wind Spirit blood—emanating from a girl in the upper deep floors.
It had been so electrified by the discovery that it had dispatched its most powerful avatars to capture the "vessel." But then, the signal had simply stopped. The "scent" of the spirit had vanished from the world, leaving it in a state of manic frustration.
It had stayed on the 79th floor, trapped by its own greed for the Black Dragon, planning to scour the surface once the King was captured. It never imagined that the golden-winged "angel" currently holding a sword to its skull was the sa needle it had been searching for in the haystack of the world.
The Corrupted Spirit's face distorted, hovering on the edge of another berserk fit. It couldn't comprehend Leon's intervention.
Leon had not just healed Ais, he had fundantally rewritten her biological code. By reincarnating her as an Angel, he had burned away the Spirit Blood and replaced it with a higher celestial essence.
The wind magic Ais used still humd with the familiarity of her mother's techniques, but the source—the blood itself—was gone.
"Answer !" Ais pressed the sword forward. "Why were you looking for her?"
The Corrupted Spirit's eyes turned cold, its jaw locking in a defiant silence. It had no intention of yielding its secrets to the "traitor" who had stolen its prey.
"Ais, how are you holding up?" Leon asked, his voice cutting through the heavy silence.
He saw the hesitation in her strike and knew she was digging for the truth.
"I suspect that my mother is still alive. This thing... it knows. It wasn't just looking for , it was looking for her bloodline because it has encountered it recently." Ais said, not taking her eyes off the Corrupted Spirit.
She hadn't asked Leon to resurrect Aria because, unlike Riveria's family, she didn't believe Aria was "gone." The Corrupted Spirit's reaction confird it. It had mistaken Ais for Aria because it had a fresh mory of the original to compare her to.
Leon stepped forward, his eyes glowing. He didn't wait for the Corrupted Spirit to volunteer information. He activated the World Contract.
"Answer her." Leon commanded. "Is Aria still alive?"
The Corrupted Spirit's body convulsed. It fought against the invisible shackles of the contract, its teeth baring in a snarl, but the power was absolute. Its mouth opened against its will.
"I do not know if she lives as a mortal. But that woman... she will not die so easily. She is a pest that refuses to be extinguished." It spat, the words forced out by Leon's magic.
The mbers of the Loki Familia gasped.
The confirmation was like a thunderclap.
They looked at Leon with a new sense of awe, they realized he was forcibly stripping the information from a Level 10 entity.
Leon ignored their stares, focusing solely on the interrogation for Ais's sake. "Where is she? Do you know her whereabouts?"
The Corrupted Spirit's gray skin rippled as it struggled, but the answer tore itself free.
"Aria... she has descended. She has gone to the deeper floors. To the abyss where even the light of the Dungeon cannot reach."
Ais's pupils contracted sharply.
...
The Corrupted Spirit finally fell to Ais's blade, its twisted existence extinguished in the light of the abyss.
Before the creature's body could fully dissolve into ash, Ais retrieved the massive, pulsating Magic Stone from its remains and handed it to Leon.
She knew that this particular core, saturated with years of stolen dungeon energy and corrupted divinity, was a relic that only Leon could truly harness.
With the threat of the Corrupted Spirit neutralized, the group wasted no ti.
The expedition had been long, grueling, and had pushed every participant to their psychological limits.
The ergence of the Black Dragon onto the surface weighed heavily on everyone's mind. They needed to return—to see the sky, to verify the damage to the city, and to reunite with those they had left behind.
Though Leon assured them that the rearguard on the 50th floor was safe, the relief was only truly felt when the main force marched back into the high-platform camp.
Seeing the familiar faces of their comrades unhard allowed them to finally breathe.
After a single night of restorative rest, the group prepared for the final ascent.
However, there would be no slow crawl back through the upper floors.
Leon manifested a massive flight spell. With a casual wave of his hand, he enveloped the entire main force in a gravitational field, propelling them toward the surface. Within a single day, the expeditionary force breached the surface.
The gods of Orario were utterly stunned. They had monitored the black dragon's exit and calculated that even a "fast" return from the 80th floor would take at least ten to fourteen days of non-stop fighting. To see the entire force return in forty-eight hours felt like a glitch in reality.
Hestia, Hers, and Artemis rely shared a knowing look. They had seen Leon's magic before, they knew that for him, the concepts of distance and ti were becoming increasingly optional.
—
As the various Familia mbers parted ways to return to their respective headquarters, a heavy silence fell over the city, soon to be replaced by the sounds of celebration.
Every adventurer who had survived the expedition into the "Unknown" felt the weight of their accumulated excelia pressing against their Falna.
At Leon's library, the atmosphere was electric.
Leon's base beca the hub for a massive series of updates.
Belle was the first to sit before Hestia. During this high-intensity expedition, her potential had reached its absolute boiling point. While she didn't possess Leon's mind-boggling numbers, her growth was unprecedented.
Hestia's eyes widened as she traced the lines on Belle's back. "Belle... you've done it."
Despite having only recently ranked up, Belle had pushed every single one of her stats into SSS rank through the sheer life-or-death pressure of the 70th-floor battles. Her excelia was so dense it nearly overflowed.
With nothing more to be done, Belle ranked up to Level 5.
It didn't stop there. The "Support Squad" had faced horrors they never dread of, and their growth reflected it.
Lili, Haruhi, and Mikoto all successfully ranked up from Lv. 2 to Lv. 3, each having reached at least one S rank in their core attributes.
Daphne and Cassandra both accumulated enough feats to level up, but both chose to defer. They refused to rank up until they hit at least an A in their primary stats, unwilling to settle for the B they currently held.
The Artemis Familia fared even better. Having already been tempered by the Antares incident, the expedition acted as the final catalyst for their growth. Nearly every mber of the familia achieved a rank-up.
Even Naaza, the quiet dic from the Miach Familia, achieved a milestone. After reaching S rank in two of her attributes, she ranked up from Lv. 2 to Lv. 3.
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