Ch.21
"Bell-sama, something is wrong."
Lili said it from three steps behind me, her voice gone flat. Survival mode. The girl who'd lasted five years in the worst Familia in Orario on instinct alone. I didn't answer because she was right and I'd known it for two minutes already.
Floor 9 was silent. The corridors were wider down here, the stone rougher, the ceiling high enough that the Dungeon's blue-green glow diffused into a dim wash instead of the close sick light of the upper floors. We'd been walking for a while and I hadn't heard a single footstep that wasn't ours. No monsters. No other parties. No distant echo of steel on stone or grinding of the Dungeon walls birthing a new batch of goblins. The air smelled like wet rock and nothing else.
"Lili noticed it on the stairs," she said. Her hand was on her crossbow, the bolts already loaded. "No adventurers passed us going up. At this hour there should be dozens."
She was right about that too. Mid-morning on a weekday, the upper and middle floors should have been crawling with parties. We'd passed a group of three on Floor 7 and hadn't seen anyone since.
The corridor ahead branched into a wide chamber. The far wall was visible from here, rough stone, the ceiling arching up into shadow. An intersection. Four passages leading out in different directions.
My pulse was steady. I made it stay that way.
I knew what this was.
The ambush three days ago had been the evaluation. Allen and the Gullivers, testing whether I was ready. Allen's voice, flat and certain: Satisfied. Reported back to Freya, who'd been watching through her Divine Mirror from the top of Babel. And Freya had turned to Ottar, and Ottar had gone down to Floor 17, and somewhere in the last three days the strongest man in Orario had selected a Minotaur and trained it to fight with a weapon and driven it up through the floors to this one.
The trained Minotaur. The fight that made Bell Cranel a legend.
My great deed.
We entered the chamber. The ceiling was high enough that I couldn't make out the details of it, just darkness and the faint glint of mineral deposits catching the glow. The four exits were evenly spaced around the walls. The floor was flat and open, maybe thirty feet across. An arena.
"Bell-sama-"
The ground shook.
A single heavy impact, like a boulder dropping from a height. Then another. Footsteps. Coming from the far passage, the one directly ahead. Each step sent a tremor through the stone floor and into my legs.
It rounded the corner.
The Minotaur from Floor 5 had been big. Seven feet, barrel-chested, wild. An animal. This one was over eight feet tall and its proportions were wrong for a monster. Shoulders too wide, arms too long, the musculature corded and defined in a way that said someone had worked it to the limit over and over. Its fur was darker than the Floor 5 Minotaur's, almost black, slicked back across its skull. One horn. Massive, curving forward from the right side of its head, thick as my forearm, tapering to a point that caught the Dungeon light. The left horn was a jagged stump broken at the base.
It was carrying a greatsword.
The weapon was enormous. A slab of dark metal taller than I was, single-edged, with a straight crossguard and a grip wrapped in leather. It held it in one fist, blade resting on its shoulder, and the casual ease of the grip told me everything I needed to know. This thing had been trained. It knew how to use that sword the way a swordsman knows, with weight distribution and intent, because somebody had spent a week beating the technique into it.
Ottar. Level 7, strongest in the city, and he'd made this.
The Minotaur's eyes found me across the chamber. Red-black irises, deep set in a skull that was too intelligent for a monster. It looked at me the way the Gullivers had. Measuring.
"Lili."
"Lili is not leaving."
"Lili. Run."
"Bell-sama, Lili can-"
"RUN."
The word came out harder than I meant it to. She flinched behind me. I didn't turn around. Couldn't. The Minotaur had shifted its weight to its front foot and the greatsword was coming off its shoulder.
"Get to the passage we came from. Go up. Don't stop."
She didn't move for a beat. Her breathing was behind me, rapid shallow pulls from someone whose body wanted to run and whose loyalty wouldn't let her.
"Please."
She ran. Her footsteps receded behind me, fast, her boots slapping the stone floor, the backpack rattling with every stride. The sound faded into the corridor we'd come from and then it was just me and the Minotaur and the silence of an empty floor.
I drew the Hestia Knife.
The white mithril caught the glow. Warm in my hand. The hieroglyphs along the blade were faint lines of divine script that pulsed once when my fingers closed around the grip. Same recognition as every time since that alley. Living metal. Two hundred million valis and thirty hours of a goddess's knees on cold stone, and it was alive in my palm and ready.
The Minotaur charged.
It was fast. Faster than the one on Floor 5, faster than anything at Level 2 should have been. The greatsword came off its shoulder into a diagonal cut that split the air with a sound like tearing canvas. The blade was a dark blur and I threw myself left and the edge passed close enough to pull at my shirt and the wind of it pushed my hair across my eyes.
I landed on my feet. Barely. Ais had drilled the footwork into me over weeks of being thrown into walls. Three-step lateral, weight on the balls, stay low. The Minotaur's swing carried it forward and the greatsword bit into the stone floor where I'd been standing. Chips of rock sprayed upward. It wrenched the blade free without slowing down and came at me again.
Overhead this time. Both hands on the grip, the sword coming down like an executioner's stroke.
I stepped inside the arc.
It was the only option. Too close for the blade to connect. My body pressed toward the Minotaur's chest and the greatsword crashed into the stone behind me and the impact vibrated through the floor into my bones. I was inside its guard for half a second, the Knife in my right hand, and I drove it into the gap between its ribs.
The blade went in two inches. The Minotaur's hide was thick, denser than any monster I'd fought, and the mithril had to work for the penetration. The Knife bit into muscle and the Minotaur's body jerked and its fist came around and slammed into my shoulder.
I went sideways. The blow launched me and I hit the chamber floor on my back and slid. My shoulder screamed. The force of a Level 2 enhanced strike against S-rank Level 1 Endurance. It didn't break anything but the pain was a white sheet across my vision.
I rolled onto my feet. The Minotaur was touching the wound on its ribs. Blood on its fingers, dark and thick. It looked at the blood, then at me.
It was angry now.
Firebolt.
The bolt of crimson lightning left my hand and crossed the gap in an instant. The Minotaur brought the greatsword up and the bolt hit the flat of the blade and detonated. Sparks and heat and smoke. The explosion knocked the sword back but didn't break its grip. Through the dissipating flash its eyes were steady and furious.
It had blocked my magic with the sword. A monster had parried a spell. Because somebody had taught it to.
It came again. Three strides that covered the distance in a second and a horizontal cut aimed at my midsection. I used the footwork. Ais's lateral three-step, drop low, change direction on the third beat. The sword passed over my head close enough that the displaced air pressed against my scalp. I came up on the other side and slashed at its leg.
The Knife scored a line across its thigh. Shallow. It didn't slow down. The return stroke was instant, a backhand that used the greatsword's momentum to reverse into a rising cut. I pulled my stomach in and leaned back and the tip of the blade drew a line across my chest from hip to collarbone. Shallow. Burning. Blood ran warm down my front.
We separated. I was breathing hard. The Minotaur wasn't.
The cut on my chest bled down my stomach and soaked into my waistband. My shoulder ached from the punch. The two-inch stab wound on its ribs was the only mark I'd left, and it was already clotting.
I was S-rank across the board. The strongest Level 1 in the history of Orario. And this thing was faster than me, stronger than me, and it was learning. The feint I'd used to score the thigh cut wouldn't work again. The lateral footwork would only buy me so many half-seconds before it adjusted its swing arc to catch me mid-step. Firebolt couldn't get past the greatsword. I was outmatched.
I'd known I would be. That was the point. The great deed was killing something you shouldn't be able to kill.
The Minotaur circled left. Slow. Patient. The greatsword held at mid-guard, the edge pointed at my center mass. Its red-black eyes tracked my feet. It was watching for the three-step.
I went right instead. Sprinted toward the wall of the chamber, then pushed off the stone and launched myself at an angle. The Minotaur read it half a beat late. Its slash came in behind me as I crossed in front of it and the blade hit the wall and the impact sent cracks spiderwebbing across the stone.
I was behind it. For one breath.
I drove the Knife into its back. The mithril went deeper this time. Three inches, maybe four, between the shoulder blades. The Minotaur bellowed. The sound was deafening in the enclosed chamber, a raw animal howl of pain and rage that vibrated in my chest. Its body twisted and an elbow caught me across the jaw and I tasted blood and stumbled back and the Knife came out of its back red to the hilt.
The Minotaur spun. The greatsword came around in a wild arc, no technique, just fury. I ducked under it and the blade screamed over my head and my hair parted from the wind. Came up. Firebolt.
Point-blank. Into its chest.
The bolt hit and the explosion blew us apart. I skidded backward on my heels and the Minotaur staggered, a scorch mark across its sternum, the fur singed black. But it was still standing. The greatsword was still in its hand. And the rage in its eyes had gone cold.
It came at me and I had nothing left to surprise it with.
The next exchange was the longest. I used everything. The footwork, the feints, the misdirection, every trick Ais had beaten into me on the wall at dawn. The greatsword came in at angles I had to spend my last margins of agility to dodge. A rising cut split the air beside my ear. A thrust I sidestepped caught my forearm and the edge bit through to muscle and blood ran down my fingers and made the Knife slippery in my grip. An overhead slam that I rolled under missed my skull by the width of a hand.
My legs were shaking. My chest wound was bleeding freely now, the blood hot against my skin in the Dungeon's cold air. The forearm cut made my right hand pulse with every heartbeat. I was slowing down.
The Minotaur was not.
It drove me back toward the wall. Step by step, each swing tighter, each recovery faster. My dodges got smaller. The margins between the blade and my body shrank from inches to less. I was running out of room and I was running out of time and the Minotaur knew it.
It raised the greatsword overhead. Both hands. Full force. The killing blow.
I watched the blade reach its apex and start to fall and I knew I was supposed to die here if I didn't do something I'd never done before. I knew because I'd watched this moment on a screen in another life, from a couch that didn't exist anymore, and I'd thought that looks cool without understanding that the blood was real and the fear was real and the only thing between me and the sword was whatever I could pull out of my chest in the next half-second.
The feeling started in my chest.
It wasn't the Falna. The Falna lived in my back, in the hieroglyphs, in the divine circuit that connected me to Hestia. This was deeper. Behind it. Under it. In whatever part of this body was mine and not just borrowed.
Heat. Building. Rising through my ribcage and spreading into my shoulders and flowing down my right arm. The Hestia Knife pulsed in my hand. The mithril responded and the divine script along the blade lit up, white-gold, bright enough to cast shadows on the chamber walls.
Light gathered in my right hand. White. Clean. It concentrated around the Knife's grip and radiated outward, wrapping my fingers, then my wrist, climbing my forearm. The warmth filled my hand and kept going. The chamber flooded with it and the Dungeon's blue-green glow drowned under white.
The greatsword fell.
I stepped forward.
The Knife hit the descending blade.
The sound was a detonation. White against dark steel. The greatsword fractured from the point of contact outward. Cracks raced through the metal like ice on a lake. The dark surface split apart. Shards of the blade spun into the walls and ceiling. The impact traveled up the Minotaur's arms and its fingers opened and what was left of the greatsword fell to the floor in pieces.
The Minotaur stood there with empty hands and white light in its eyes.
I drove the Knife into its chest.
The mithril went through the hide, through the muscle. Through the ribs. The white light carried the blade forward with a force I didn't own and couldn't have generated. The Knife sank to the hilt. The tip punched through the back of the Minotaur's body and into the air behind it. The light flared once, blinding, and for an instant the chamber was noon-bright, every crack and mineral deposit visible.
The Minotaur looked down at me.
Its red-black eyes were close enough that the fractures in the irises were visible. Its breath was hot and wet on my face, heavy with blood and mineral and the smell of a monster that had been pushed beyond what it was supposed to be. Steam rose from around the Knife's blade where it entered its chest. The white light was dimming. Fading from my hand, from the blade, retreating back into wherever it had come from.
Its mouth opened. A low, broken sound came out. Almost a word. The tension left its body. The shoulders dropped first. Then the arms went slack. Its knees hit the stone floor with a double crack that echoed off the chamber walls.
I pulled the Knife free.
The mithril came out clean. The white light had cauterized the wound, or burned through the blood, or done whatever it was. I didn't understand it. The blade gleamed in my hand, unstained, the hieroglyphs still carrying the faintest residual glow.
The Minotaur fell forward. Its face hit the stone.
I stood there for three breaths. The warmth in my chest faded. My legs gave out and I went down on one knee, the Knife's point resting against the stone floor, my head bowed, my breath coming in ragged pulls that echoed in the empty chamber. Blood dripped from my chest, my forearm, my jaw where its elbow had caught me. It pattered on the stone between my knees. The Minotaur's body was already dissolving, the edges going first, crumbling into black dust that drifted across the floor in a wind that didn't exist.
A magic stone sat where the body had been. Larger than any I'd seen. The size of my fist, deep violet, pulsing with a faint inner light.
A spider was building a web in the corner of the chamber where two walls met the ceiling. I watched it place threads with mechanical precision, oblivious to the dissolving monster and the bleeding adventurer and the white light that had filled its home. It just kept building.
Footsteps in the corridor behind me. Fast. Small.
"Bell-sama!"
Lili's voice broke on the second syllable. She appeared at the passage entrance, her crossbow in both hands, her brown hair wild from running. Her eyes went to me, on one knee in the middle of the chamber, covered in blood. Then to the magic stone on the floor. Then to the dissipating cloud of black dust.
Her mouth opened. Closed. Her brown eyes were too wide for her face.
"Lili saw a light," she said. Barely any voice behind it. "From the corridor. White light. Lili thought-"
She stopped. Swallowed. Her crossbow was shaking in her hands.
I looked up at her from one knee. My chest hurt and my arm hurt and my jaw was swelling and I was covered in my own blood and the remnants of a monster that should have killed me. The Hestia Knife sat warm and clean in my grip.
I was grinning. Couldn't help it. Couldn't have stopped it if I'd wanted to.
"Hey, Lili."
"Bell-sama is injured."
"Yeah."
Her chin trembled once. She bit down on it. Then she was moving, crossing the chamber at a run, her backpack bouncing, dropping to her knees beside me. Her hands went to the chest wound first, pulling cloth from her pack, pressing it to the cut with small fingers that weren't quite steady.
"This is deep," she said. The flatness was back in her voice. The professional calm she put on when things were bad enough that anything else would crack.
"It's fine."
"It is not fine. Bell-sama is bleeding from four places."
"I killed it."
She looked at me. Her brown eyes were wet at the edges and her jaw was set hard and she was pressing the cloth against my chest with both hands and her knuckles were white.
"Lili knows," she said quietly. "Lili saw."
I put my hand over hers on the cloth. Her fingers stilled under mine. The magic stone pulsed faintly on the floor beside us, violet light catching on her wet eyelashes, and the last of the Minotaur's dust settled around our knees like black snow.