Chapter 366: The Great Hero's Determination (Patreon)

Doubt was the starting point of defeat, for Ottar.

The Goddess of Beauty's warrior believed himself the strongest — and if that was true, he had to be able to defeat every opponent he faced.

If he couldn't win, he wasn't the strongest.

Naturally, that doubt was enough to make Ottar's near-"invincible" ability fail.

This was exactly what Isagi had been counting on — as long as he himself had no desire to win, he could never lose!

And so. The battle could no longer continue.

As Ottar's doubt in himself deepened, the thoughts in his mind naturally grew more and more tangled.

In the end, the outcome was already sealed.

Atop Babel, the Goddess of Beauty felt no surprise at how the battle had ended.

And besides, it was a good thing.

The strongest had finally realized he wasn't truly the strongest — and only through that could he keep moving forward, and learn how to do it.

Failure was the road one had to walk to grow stronger...

Isagi never told anyone about his fight with Ottar.

The only one who knew of it at all was Miss Heith — though even she had no idea how the fight had ended, since by nightfall she'd already run off to the Hostess of Fertility and never went back to Freya Familia's side all night. In fact, she'd been rather curious about it herself.

After all, the two of them had still been locked in a fight with no end in sight when she left — so how had it suddenly wrapped up? All Isagi could say to that was that the details were... complicated.

A few more days passed like this.

The girls had all grown busy, occupied with preparations for leveling up.

Though they could in theory try challenging the low-floor final boss now — that [Empress] of the Amazon clan from a thousand years ago —

it was clearly safer to wait until a few more of them had leveled up to Lv. 8.

Isagi agreed.

Besides, this gave him time to keep honing his own skills.

And so. While the girls kept grinding levels,

Isagi would, whenever he had a spare moment, head down to the lower floors alone to fight the [Empress].

And so, in the blink of an eye, several more months slipped by—

Spring was gradually giving way to a somewhat sweltering summer.

A light drizzle fell that day.

Ais, too, was finally ready to go with Isagi to that era a thousand years past, to meet her mother, Aria.

By now, it was practically second nature to him.

Over these past few months, Isagi had gone back to that thousand-years-past era whenever he had the chance.

His familiarity with that era was nothing like it had once been.

"Let's go!"

Still beneath the Golden Tree in the courtyard, the young man called out to the girl, and in no time at all, he'd brought her to Orario a thousand years in the past. The place the two of them arrived at now

was right outside the home where Aria and the [Empress] lived.

A light rain was falling in the courtyard just then; it was the middle of the afternoon, and everything around was quiet, save for the occasional sound of soldiers patrolling outside the gate.

Today, at least, nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

In truth, for a long while now, this city of a thousand years past hadn't suffered a single attack from the Dungeon.

According to Aria and the [Empress], that was plainly abnormal.

In the past, Monsters had tried to burst out of the Great Pit at regular intervals, big and small, far too many times to even count.

The Heroes and soldiers had not only built fortresses inside the Great Pit, but had to hold the Monsters back as well.

And there had been times when they couldn't hold the line and were forced to retreat back to the surface — times when even the city itself had fallen.

Humanity and the Monsters had been locked in this tug-of-war for centuries.

A calm like the present one was utterly unprecedented.

It clearly wasn't normal.

Isagi remembered — from the first time he'd come here and found the city already fallen, to now, nearly two years had passed.

As time went on, the Heroes and soldiers of the city had naturally grown more and more aware that something was wrong.

Especially since it had already been two years since Albert Waldstein and the others had gone into the Dungeon. In that time, quite a few people had gone into the Great Pit to search for them, one after another — but they either came back out empty-handed, just as Isagi had,

or they were simply never heard from again.

Aria's response had been to declare the Great Pit sealed off — she neither let the Heroes and soldiers rebuild the fortress within it, nor sent anyone back in to investigate.

It was as if she knew something was going to happen.

This Great Spirit was simply waiting.

Isagi had once thought that Ais's mother might possess some form of foresight.

That she'd known all along what was going to happen, much like himself — a man who came from the future.

She was waiting for the [Black Dragon] to be born from the Dungeon, to rise to the surface, and to trigger that final decisive battle.

Isagi had thought about this for a long while.

Not long ago, he'd decided to lay it all out with Aria and have a deep, thorough conversation about it.

The result was that he'd gotten it completely wrong.

Aria had no gift of foresight.

But what she did know was that Albert Waldstein intended to do something.

It was the exact opposite of what Isagi had guessed before.

He'd once believed the Dungeon was deliberately luring the great Heroes down into its depths, so it could gather all its strength and give birth to the [Black Dragon], meaning to wipe them all out in one stroke.

But from Aria's perspective, all of this had been Albert Waldstein's own decision.

It was this great Hero who had chosen to go to that unfathomably dark, deep end and wage a "decisive battle" against the Great Pit — the Dungeon.

Before his death. There was something he had to do.

"The human body has its limits."

That limit wasn't about lifespan or anything of the sort — it was about 'health.'

"A person is born, becomes a child, grows to adulthood, reaches their prime, and then grows old — and for a Hero, the moment of greatest strength lasts only a few short years."

What Aria was describing was a very simple truth.

A Hero's combat strength didn't only decline with old age — quite the opposite, even in youth, the peak of their strength lasted only a few brief years.

Albert Waldstein wanted to do something while he was still at his strongest.

And his plan was simple enough.

People of that era, like Isagi himself, knew quite a bit about the Dungeon's 'basic rules.' Among them was the 'theory of energy.'

"We've found that while the Dungeon can spawn Monsters endlessly, there's some kind of limit on what it produces — for instance, it can't keep churning out powerful ones over and over without pause."

"And once a particularly powerful Monster is defeated, for another one like it to appear again, a certain amount of time has to pass — maybe months, maybe years."

"So." Albert Waldstein had deliberately let the Dungeon concentrate all its strength, so that it would give birth to the [Black Dragon].

Because that way, once the Dungeon had exhausted its strength, it would stay quiet for a long, long time.

That was the great Hero's plan — simple, and brutally direct.

The city's two years of peace were proof that Albert Waldstein's plan had worked.

Only — neither Aria nor the [Empress] knew what would come after the [Black Dragon]'s birth; they were simply the city's 'insurance,' left behind.

Of course, the two of them knew that what Albert Waldstein was doing would inevitably bring forth some terrible Monster from the Dungeon.

And if, when that time came, even the great Hero couldn't defeat it — then they, too, would make the same choice: to fight it to the very end, even at the cost of their own lives!