Ch.1
My feet were moving before I was.
That was the first thing. Legs pumping, lungs burning, stone floor slamming against the soles of shoes I didn't recognize. The corridor was narrow and gray and lit from no visible source, a sick blue-green glow bleeding from the walls like bioluminescence. My arms were swinging. My body was running. I hadn't told it to.
Behind me, something roared.
The sound hit my spine before my ears made sense of it. Deep and wet and bovine, except bovine things don't shake the walls. I glanced back. Massive. Seven feet tall, maybe more, barrel-chested, covered in dark matted fur, horns curving forward from a skull that was too wide for the passage. It swung a fist and took a chunk out of the wall where my head had been. Stone sprayed against my back.
Minotaur.
I knew that. I knew what that was. And the knowing was the part that didn't make sense, because a minute ago, five minutes ago, I had no idea how long, I'd been sitting on my couch. In my apartment. The one with the bad sink and the landlord who never fixed it. I'd been on my phone. Then I blinked, and my eyes opened here, and my legs were already running.
The body knew what to do. Legs pumping, shoulders hunching through turns, some half-learned instinct for navigating these corridors that I hadn't earned. Muscle memory from someone who wasn't me. The hands were smaller than mine. The fingers were thinner. When I grabbed a corner to swing myself around it, the grip strength felt wrong. Too weak, too light. I was in the wrong body.
The Minotaur bellowed again. Closer.
I sprinted down a corridor that opened into a wider chamber and then narrowed again, veered left at a fork because the body wanted to go left, and ran straight into a wall.
Dead end. The passage just stopped. Rough stone, floor to ceiling, sealed.
I turned around.
The Minotaur filled the corridor behind me. Close. It was breathing hard. Steam rose off its shoulders and its eyes were red-black, small for its skull, locked on me. It smelled like blood and livestock and wet iron. A long string of drool hung from its jaw and touched the floor.
My back pressed against the wall. The stone was cold through my shirt. My heart was going so fast it felt like one continuous vibration instead of individual beats.
I knew what this was.
Floor 5. The Minotaur that escaped from Loki Familia's expedition. The one that chased Bell Cranel into a dead end until Ais Wallenstein showed up and cut it in half.
I was Bell Cranel.
I was in DanMachi.
The Minotaur charged.
There wasn't time to process it. The thing lowered its horns and came at me like a freight train and my body, Bell's body, threw itself sideways. I hit the floor, rolled, came up on one knee. The Minotaur's horns punched into the wall where I'd been standing and got stuck. Stone cracked. It yanked its head free with a shower of debris and swung at me backhanded.
I leaned back. The fist sailed past my face close enough that the wind pulled at my hair.
Agility. This body had agility I hadn't earned. Stats I didn't understand yet. I was Level 1 with garbage numbers across the board, but the body had baseline dexterity that could dodge a charging Minotaur once, maybe twice if I was lucky. Pure reflex. The difference between knowing how to fight and knowing how to flinch in the right direction.
The Minotaur swung again. Left arm, wide arc, faster than the first one.
I moved. Too slow. The back of its fist caught me across the ribs and the world tilted. I hit the far wall shoulder-first and heard something crack. The wall or me, I wasn't sure. Pain bloomed across my right side, sharp and spreading, and I slid down to the floor with my back against the stone.
The Minotaur turned toward me. Slow this time. It knew I was done.
I sat there, against the wall, looking up at it. The taste in my mouth was copper. Every breath lit up my right side. The knife on my belt, Bell's knife, a cheap beginner's blade, might as well have been a toothpick.
Somewhere above and behind the Minotaur, the air moved.
I didn't see her arrive. I saw the result. A blur of gold and white cut through the space between the Minotaur's neck and its shoulders, and the Minotaur came apart. That's the only way to describe it. One second it was a seven-foot monster with its fist cocked back to turn me into paste. The next second the top half was going one direction and the bottom half was going another and between them was a geyser of dark arterial blood that sprayed the ceiling, the walls, the floor, and me.
Blood hit my face like warm rain. Soaked through my shirt. Got in my eyes, my mouth. Copper and iron and a faint sweetness I didn't want to think about. The Minotaur's legs stayed standing for a full second after the rest of it was gone, then buckled and dropped. The thud vibrated through the floor into my spine.
When I wiped the blood from my eyes, she was standing in front of me.
Golden hair that fell past her waist, matted now with streaks of dark red. Gold eyes, light amber, almost yellow, looking down at me with nothing moving in her face at all. Shorter than I'd expected, a frame that looked delicate until you remembered she'd just bisected a Minotaur with one swing. White battle cloth under articulated armor plates, all of it splattered with gore. She held a rapier in her right hand, the blade still dripping. A crystal on the blade caught the Dungeon's glow and split it into colors for a second before the blood ran over it.
Ais Wallenstein.
She was real.
I was sitting in a puddle of monster blood with cracked ribs and a body that wasn't mine, and the thought that drowned everything else out was: she's real. She's standing right there. The sword princess from the anime I watched on my phone on that couch that didn't exist anymore, in that apartment in that world. She was close enough that the blood drying on her jaw was distinct, and her eyes were the exact shade of gold I'd imagined, and she was looking at me.
"Are you all right?"
Her voice was quiet. Flat, almost. The words came out like she wasn't sure she'd assembled the sentence correctly.
I reached up and wiped blood off my mouth with the back of my hand. Looked at the red smear on my skin. Looked up at her.
"Yeah." I got my legs under me and stood. My right side protested every inch of it. I ignored it. "Thanks for that."
She stared at me.
I stood there, covered in Minotaur blood, and looked at her. Held the eye contact. Let the silence sit. In the anime, Bell ran. He screamed and bolted because the shame of being saved was worse than the fear, because he was fourteen and in love at first sight and incapable of standing still while the most beautiful woman in Orario stared at him with blood on her face.
I wasn't fourteen. I wasn't Bell.
"That thing came out of nowhere," I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt. "I'm guessing it wasn't supposed to be up here."
Ais blinked. A single slow blink, the kind that looked deliberate on her but probably wasn't. Her head tilted a fraction to the right. The movement was small enough that I might have imagined it.
"It escaped," she said. "From a lower floor. I was chasing it."
"Well. You caught it."
The corner of her mouth twitched. Maybe. It might have been a shadow, or the blood on her face shifting as she adjusted her grip on the rapier. I couldn't tell if that was the beginning of a smile or just a muscle doing what muscles do.
She sheathed the rapier. Looked me over once, clinical, checking for damage. Her gaze paused on my ribs where I was holding my side.
"You're injured."
"Bruised," I said. "Maybe cracked. I'll live."
"You should go to the surface."
"Planning on it."
She kept looking at me. I'd been around enough people to know when someone was waiting for me to do the expected thing. She expected me to leave. To stutter a thanks and run. To blush, maybe. That was what this face got. It was there in the body's memory, faint and blurry, Bell Cranel moving through the world apologizing for existing.
I didn't leave. I stood there and let the silence stretch because silence was comfortable for me and I was curious about whether it was comfortable for her.
It was. She didn't fidget, didn't fill the gap, didn't look away. We stood in a dead-end corridor on Floor 5, both of us covered in blood that was starting to cool and go sticky, and neither of us spoke.
A piece of the Minotaur's horn, shattered during the kill, lay near my foot. Curved and ridged, about the size of a dinner plate, already dissolving at the edges. I watched the rim crumble into black dust and drift to the floor. Faster than I would have guessed.
"Oi!"
The voice came from above. A figure dropped from a higher passage, landing on a ledge overhead. Lean, athletic, silver-gray hair and sharp features. Wolf ears. Tail. He was grinning, or snarling. Hard to tell the difference with that face.
Bete Loga. Another one I recognized.
He looked down at Ais, then at the Minotaur remains, then at me. Standing. Upright. Covered in blood that wasn't mine.
Whatever he'd been about to say, it shifted. It happened right there on his face. The mockery he'd been ready to spit didn't fit a guy standing in the aftermath holding eye contact. Different material than a guy running away screaming.
"Already got it," he said to Ais, jerking his chin at the dissolving corpse. "Any more?"
"I don't know," Ais said. "There might be one more on a higher floor."
"Then let's go." Bete looked at me again. His eyes passed over me and moved on. "You need an escort out, kid?"
"I know the way."
He snorted. "Suit yourself." He took off, vaulting up the wall and disappearing back the way he'd come.
Ais lingered. One more second. Her eyes met mine and held, a question she hadn't figured out how to ask yet. She gave a small nod.
"Be careful."
Then she was gone. Fast, inhumanly fast, the kind of speed that Level 6 stats buy you. One moment she was standing there with blood drying in her hair, the next the corridor was empty and I was alone with a dissolving Minotaur carcass and the sound of my own breathing.
I leaned against the wall. Let myself feel the ribs for a second. Let myself feel the shaking in my hands that I'd been keeping out of my voice. My fingers were trembling. Bell's fingers. My fingers. I closed them into fists and the trembling stopped.
I was in DanMachi.
I was Bell Cranel, Level 1, solo member of Hestia Familia, with stats that wouldn't scare a goblin and a knife I could probably break with my hands. I was on Floor 5 of a Dungeon full of things that wanted to eat me, and the only reason I was alive was that the most dangerous woman in Orario happened to be chasing a runaway Minotaur through my corridor.
I was also, somehow, totally fine with this.
The Minotaur finished dissolving. Nothing left but a magic stone the size of a grape, violet-black, sitting in a scorch mark on the floor. I picked it up. It was warm. Heavier than it looked.
I pocketed it, pressed my hand against my ribs, and started walking toward the surface.
I had a goddess to meet.