Chapter 386: The Resurrected Queen (Patreon)

They say the more clearly you remember a dream, the shallower your sleep must have been.

Isagi slept deeply.

So when he woke, he couldn't recall a single thing that had happened in his dream — though surely something had happened — his only evidence being the many girls lying around the edge of his own bed when he opened his eyes.

[Wait, why are Alfia and Miss Asfi here too?!]

Isagi blinked, startled.

But then he glanced over at the Goddess of Beauty, who was snoring away while hugging what looked like a pudgy little piglet of a "pet," and somehow it all started to make a strange kind of sense.

That Aphrodite really could always come up with something new.

And besides.

The girls' sleeping faces weren't all quite the same.

It was hard for Isagi to put into words, but Ryuu, Ais, and the two goddesses Aphrodite and Artemis all had a certain rosy, cherry-blossom flush lingering on their pretty faces — the unmistakable afterglow of something he knew all too well.

By contrast, Alfia and Asfi both wore expressions of pure, gentle warmth, the kind of blissful look you get after a wonderful dream.

They looked similar at a glance, but if you paid close attention, the difference was actually quite large.

He only felt a wave of exhaustion pass through his body.

Why was he so tired?

He had no idea. By rights, he shouldn't have been.

On top of that, there was also this strange, hollow feeling of emptiness…

He shook his head.

Isagi simply slipped out of bed with practiced ease, careful not to wake anyone, got dressed, and stepped outside.

The summer night lay quiet.

A mountain breeze drifted in, carrying a moment's coolness.

The warm yellow lanterns swayed gently in the wind. Following memory and instinct, Isagi soon made his way to the open-air hot spring in the courtyard.

This was a hot spring inn, after all.

Every courtyard had its own open-air bath like this — not large, tucked away at the end of a gravel path deep in the yard, surrounded by high walls on every side. Beyond that, only thick white mist rose and drifted off into the deep night sky.

Isagi let his body relax.

He felt some of his strength returning already.

Probably because he'd slept an entire day, he wasn't particularly hungry now, and his mind felt unexpectedly clear.

He was already thinking about how, once he got back to the city, he could head straight back down for deeper exploration — the plan had somehow become simple: keep pushing deeper into the Dungeon, and once he hit around Lv.10, go take down the [Black Dragon].

That was more or less the plan.

So —

—

Isagi's thoughts drifted, though, to something else: the "secret of the Dungeon."

Setting aside the Three Great Quests.

For adventurers, venturing into the Dungeon was simply taken for granted.

Of course.

Many adventurers treated it as a job — after all, going down into the Dungeon, defeating Monsters, and gathering valuable materials and Magic Stones for a reward was simply how they made a living.

In a certain sense.

Isagi thought adventurers were basically "miners."

There really wasn't much difference — fundamentally, both went down into the earth in search of "gold."

Just a far more dangerous version of it.

Add to that his earlier trip back a thousand years and his conversations with Aria and the others, and Isagi had started turning over a question in his mind: "Will the Dungeon ever disappear?"

As far as he could tell, there seemed to be no way to resolve the Dungeon completely.

Or rather.

Maybe things as they stood now actually were the "best case scenario."

As long as it could keep going the way it was, that was enough. Perhaps that was exactly the content of the gods' [Appointed Time] with the Dungeon?

If the Dungeon lost.

Then it would simply keep honoring the pact, on into the future...

Isagi recalled something Ouranos had once said.

That when adventurers finally, truly understood — and truly saw — the "real" Dungeon, they would end up feeling sorry for her instead.

Probably because, in that [Appointed Time], she really was the one being wronged.

Isagi's mouth curved into a wry twist.

He thought of the Xenos, and of that backstory repeated over and over in his own special Dungeon: that the [Dark Mother only longed to see the sky].

If that really was all she wanted, then yes — it was pitiful.

But the disasters caused by Monsters were an undeniable fact, so Isagi still wanted to know the Dungeon's true secret.

Maybe.

This was also tied to the "changes" now appearing in the deep layers of the Dungeon.

His mind drifted back to earlier.

After his first exploration of the deep layers, whether alone or together with the girls, he'd gone back down several more times since.

At this point.

One thing he could basically confirm was this.

The deep-layer Dungeon really was different from before. If he had to put it into words, it would be…

[The Dungeon has gotten smarter.]

And this kind of "smart" was different from the Dungeon he'd explored before.

How to put it exactly...

Every Dungeon he'd explored before — upper, mid, or lower floors — had, to Isagi, always been something understandable, even something he was quite familiar with.

It had even given off a certain "clumsy" feeling.

As if the Dungeon had been learning something the whole time — cooking up special bosses, storylines involving Monsters, NPCs you could talk to, all kinds of items to pick up.

The deeper you went.

The more tricks the Dungeon pulled out, eventually even reshaping the terrain and appearance specifically around you.

But all these changes were "fixed." In other words, once you arrived, it simply was what it was — even where something didn't quite make sense, it wouldn't shift on the fly, but sat there placidly, unbothered.

By comparison.

To Isagi, the deep layers right now felt much more like the Dungeon of a thousand years ago.

He hadn't gotten to experience it much before returning to the surface after his trip back in time, but he still remembered it clearly.

The Dungeon back then had felt, quite simply, "alive."

It could change at any moment, adjusting itself in real time to the situation, even learning from its mistakes — conjuring, on the spot, Monsters specifically suited to counter your abilities.

It could even swallow the Monsters it had conjured back down and create new ones in their place…

And back when he'd been in the deep layers before.

The "bosses" he, Loki, and the rest of the Freya Familia had run into — that was exactly the same phenomenon.

Those things hadn't started out strong.

They had been "learning."

Adapting to how he and everyone else attacked, gradually figuring out countermeasures, then striking back — sometimes even growing suddenly stronger, presumably because the Dungeon had absorbed power from other Monsters and fed it into them.

That, fundamentally, was why those bosses had given everyone such trouble at the time.

And clearly.

The Dungeon's handling of it back then had still been somewhat "crude," nowhere near as adaptive as it had been a thousand years earlier — probably because they simply hadn't gone deep enough yet.

He thought back to what he'd once seen in that dream.

At the very bottom of an impossibly deep darkness, a "girl" sleeping quietly.

Her.

Was she really, slowly, waking up?

And the deeper one went, the more one could sense her presence and will — until eventually, would she return to that "complete form" she'd had a thousand years ago?

On the second day after returning to the city.

Isagi didn't choose to head straight back down to the deep layers. Instead, he went to "revive" the [Empress] from a thousand years past — or more precisely, to plant an "undying curse" on her, making her his contracted follower as well.

As for that.

The Empress herself didn't seem to feel much of anything about it. She was simply astonished that Isagi could actually pull it off.

Had future [Heroes] really advanced this far?!

Magic that could bring someone back from the dead — that was the stuff of legend. Even a Great Spirit might not manage such a thing!

But what left her even more astonished was the state of the Dungeon these days...

"None of this is the same at all! How is it so different from before?!"

There was even a castle now?!

Monsters wearing armor?!

There was even something like an entire kingdom down there?!

As for that.

Isagi found it hard to explain — mostly because it would've been such a hassle — so he just let it go.

Either way, if she ever went back down into the Dungeon in the future, she'd be going with him anyway.

But what surprised the Empress most of all.

Was coming to the city itself, and seeing with her own eyes, a thousand years later, the very city they had once fought to protect —

"It's so beautiful!"

The words came from her with genuine, heartfelt wonder.

Night had just fallen over Central Park, packed with adventurers, and the woman's beauty drew a sea of eyes toward her.

As the [Empress] of the Amazon tribe.

The Empress's beauty rivaled even the Goddess of Beauty herself, and with Isagi standing right beside her, suddenly everyone — men and women alike — turned to stare, nearly sparking a dangerous crush of a stampede.

There was nothing to do but hurry the woman away from the scene.

With their combined ability, the two of them slipped away in an instant, ending up atop an empty building in a quiet stretch of the district nearby.

Looking down at the bustling streets below, and the countless lit windows stretching into the distance, the Empress began, little by little, to feel the reality of this Orario a thousand years in the future.

Especially when she looked toward Babel not far off.

The tower built above the [Great Pit] — that had once been everyone's shared dream.

Relief washed over her.

So this was what the future looked like. She could finally, truly, set her heart at ease.

An expression of boundless tenderness settled over the Empress's face. She had heard Isagi speak of the future city before, but a boy's words could never fully translate into a real image — no matter how she'd imagined it, the [Empress] of a thousand years past could never have pictured Orario's future looking quite like this.

"If Aria could see this, she'd be so happy too—"

Of course, she didn't yet know what had become of Aria and the [Black Dragon].

Because the Empress had died inside the Dungeon — before the Black Dragon left it, sensing that something monstrous was about to emerge, she, one of the few real combat forces the city had at the time, had gone down to investigate.

By her own account.

The Dungeon back then had felt like a true, bottomless "abyss."

Every floor had simply ceased to exist.

Beneath the Great Pit lay an even vaster pit.

And then.

The Empress had encountered the wounded Black Dragon down there, fought it, and ultimately died.

As she recounted this part of her past.

The frustration on her face was plain to see, unmistakable.

And in the end, what she'd thought was — if even she couldn't stand against it, couldn't stop that monster, then the city now would have to rely on Aria and the others alone…

"So really, Isagi, having you here puts my mind at ease."

Her way of speaking was always a little odd.

The Empress murmured this, but Isagi understood what she meant well enough.

Knowing he came from a thousand years in the future, knowing the city still stood a thousand years later — in her final moment, that had let her know the world hadn't ended because of what happened.

That was probably the gist of it.

And Isagi, without hesitation, told her outright why he'd brought her back.

To take down the [Black Dragon].

"Absolutely!"

Especially once she learned what had happened to Aria.

"I'll come save you. Just wait for me, Aria!!"

"Then let's both do our best."

"Right!!"

He brought the Empress back to the [Court of Stars].

Isagi found himself thinking.

Whether he should let the Empress receive Goddess Astrea's Falna and become an adventurer.

Come to think of it.

If she became an adventurer now, would her level still start at Lv.1?

He had no idea what would happen.

There was no precedent for this either. According to the gods, no matter how strong you were before becoming an adventurer, your level always started at Lv.1 — which meant that even among Lv.1 adventurers, actual strength could vary enormously.

Ais could vouch for that too.

As the saying went, since Albert Waldstein had once taken her down into the deep layers, an eight-year-old Ais back then must surely have had strength no worse than a first-class adventurer.

And yet, after receiving Loki's Falna, the girl had still started as a Lv.1 adventurer.

There was another piece of proof besides that.

Isagi had once heard from Riveria that long, long ago — some ten or twenty years back, when Loki had first come down to the mortal realm and was still traveling the world — she'd found Finn first, then Riveria, and only last of all, Gareth.

The dwarf at the time hadn't gotten along at all with either the elf or the pallum, and apparently they'd actually come to blows the first time they met.

Finn, though only a Lv.1 adventurer back then, had been completely overpowered in raw [Strength] by Gareth, who hadn't yet received his Falna.

To be precise.

Apparently he'd been literally thrown out of the tavern.

By rights, that should have been utterly impossible — even a Lv.1 adventurer's physical body was worlds apart from an ordinary, non-adventurer person's.

Not to mention that Finn, by then, had already had some time to season himself as an adventurer, with Stats that had already improved — he wasn't a brand-new Lv.1.

But once Gareth received his own Falna.

He too became a Lv.1 adventurer with every single Stat sitting at "0."

There was something delightfully strange about that.

The panel might look identical, but the reality behind it could be worlds apart.

Which raised the question.

If the Empress really did become an adventurer, and leveled all the way up to Lv.8, what would her strength be like then?

Double what it was now?

Or something else entirely…

Isagi was genuinely curious.

The Empress, for her part, had no concept of any of this whatsoever — she was fuzzy even on what exactly a "god" was, let alone understanding things like "Falna" or "stat panels."

Right now, she had only one problem.

"Isagi, I'm hungry."

Fair enough.

Time to let this one try his signature secret-recipe mini burgers.