51. Into The Depths

My battered sword knocked aside a demon’s talons.

My stamina was bone-dry; from here on, it would be a pure battle of willpower.

“Pull yourself together.”
“S-Sis! Help me!”
“Then it won’t be training.”

At some point Seraphina had taken her hands off and was simply watching us.

“I can’t drink it!”

Even as she said it, Lillian tipped yet another potion down her throat. Well, thanks to her, I was at least starting to get a feel for handling a swarm of enemies at once.

“Hrnngh!”

“That makes six deaths in total.”

Still, big sister that she was, Seraphina really would step in to save Lillian whenever death actually loomed.

Demons over on her side, demons over on ours, huh.

She was the one who’d run us on a marathon straight out of hell, all the way here from the house.

I didn’t know which of the 72 Demons ruled this Abyss, but depending on the opponent, Seraphina might well be able to clear it single-handed. Empire Knight Commander is a rank earned on pure skill alone, after all.

“Haah. Is it over?”
“…Big Sis.”
“Aaah, sorry! It’s not over! It’s not over!”

Mercifully, this time the cliché didn’t trigger.

And then, just as a brief lull was settling in…

Thud.

The ice knights were hurling the demon corpses that clogged the bridge off the edge.

I seized the chance to catch my breath and looked around. A harmony of red and blue.

Pools of blood lay strewn with sliced-off flesh and viscera, and ice crystals had formed where Seraphina’s thrown spears melted away. Two battlefields of opposite extremes meshed tautly around Lillian at the center, staining the bridge into a portrait of hell.

And just as we were taking in the gory carnage we’d wrought during that brief lull…

“Ugh, my whole body aches. It aches. Now it’s really, truly over.”
“Kieeek!”
“…Sorry.”

To think a delivery could be so unwelcome. But this one had evolved a little.

The enormous shadows clinging to the ceiling came pouring down. Tattered, torn wings sprouted from their backs.

Could’ve given them something nicer.

Even though they were enemies, an odd pity welled up in me. Of course, that pity hadn’t sprung from their ragged wings.

“Whoa.”

Seraphina had no wings, yet there she was, flying through the sky. The instant the soles of her feet touched empty air, she conjured transparent ice footholds, then stepped off them and ranged through midair as if climbing invisible stairs.

In her sword’s wake, demon corpses plummeted.

At that, the things hastily wheeled around and charged at Lillian and me.

“Gulp!”

The instant she tipped a potion into her mouth, Lillian summoned vines. But still clumsy at striking enemies in the air, she let the demons dodge them with ease.

“Eeergh!”

The moment Lillian stamped her feet in frustration…

“Big Sis!”

I snatched her arm and yanked her toward me. With her whole focus fixed above, she hadn’t noticed the demons crawling up from the underside of the bridge, about to seize her ankles. If I hadn’t pulled her, Lillian would have been in serious danger.

Crrunch!

I stomped down on the fingers reaching for her ankles. With the sound of bones crushed to pieces, they shrieked and tumbled off the cliff’s edge.

The demons swarmed in without a moment’s rest. Having cleared every last one from the air, Seraphina slipped back into bystander mode.

My visibly flagging speed must have made Eve judge this a crisis.

If I can’t get past a monster wave this measly, there’s no way in hell I clear the boss fight.

“Bring it.”

I cut the last demon down, then pulled up the skill info Eve had readied for me earlier.

Not even Eve had yet figured out what that ominous feeling actually was.

In any case, I ended the battle without ever resorting to Overclock.

Fighting in perfect condition is asking for too much.

Even with no recovery potions, even when hard-won gear gets lost, the adventure has to go on. Because there’s that electric thrill of clearing a boss with your character’s HP in tatters, on the brink of death.

“…Haah.”

Lillian let out a ragged breath and slumped to the floor.

“Catch your breath for a bit, then let’s move out.”

Lacking even the strength to answer, she only nodded.

But unlike me, who’d meant to give Lillian a moment to breathe…

“While we dawdle here, Valerian may already have cleared his trial.”
“…Let’s go.”

Lillian struggled to her feet.

I wanted to brush it off and help her along, but…

Well, it is a fact.

Just as she’d said, Valerian had probably torn through the bridge without holding back at all, butchering the demons in a swift, decisive blitz.

He might already have reached the second gate.

Against lower-rank demons of this caliber, even a few thousand of them wouldn’t last against Seraphina and Valerian, not if they died and revived a hundred times over. That was the measure of how strong the two of them were, and yet…

Wait, couldn’t we have done the same?

Watching her ride Lillian so hard set my mouth itching to say it: Sister, if you’d shown your real skill from the start, wouldn’t this all have been possible? Of course, the itch stayed just an itch; there was no chance in the world those words would ever make it out into the open.

At any rate, Seraphina’s brutal truth-bomb had Lillian wobbling as she hauled herself up.

“Let’s hurry. I can’t lose to Big Bro Valerian.”

We set off again. At the bridge’s end, we reached the towering second gate.

But the door was shut tight, and our way was blocked by a grotesque mass. A hideous, gigantic lump of flesh, it looked like dozens of lower-rank demons fused into one. A gem sat lodged dead center in its chest, glowing with an unusually red, radiant light.

“Kuoooooo!”

Spotting us, it loosed a shriek and lunged.

I didn’t dodge. Instead, I bored straight into its embrace.

“Lower-rank scum bunched together is, in the end, still just lower-rank scum.”

Its huge body split in two and crashed to the floor with a heavy thud. All bulk and no substance, it was like a balloon. As it fell, the red gem in its chest dropped free with a sharp clink.

Lillian picked up the fallen gem.

“Huh?? Isn’t this the gem Dad showed us?”

What the thing had dropped looked exactly like the Demonblood Stone Kairon had shown us.

Lillian turned the gem this way and that, and her eyes went round.

“Huh? But there’s something inside it.”
“Big Sis, hand it here.”

Lillian’s eye for things wasn’t bad. After all, inside the gem was the key that would lead us to the next gate.

I took the gem from her and held it up high.

“W-wait!”

Crack!

Before Lillian could stop me, I smashed the gem down against the ground. It shattered, and the key inside popped out.

“Ta-da.”
“Heh.”

Leaving Lillian’s dry chuckle behind, I picked up the key and fit it into the keyhole of the second gate.

Creeeak—.

The instant I inserted the key, the towering door of the second gate swung open on its own.

Normally, in an Abyss, once you take down the last enemy, the first gate clears automatically. Only a Demon Abyss bothers with an annoying contraption like this, hiding a key inside a fake Demonblood Stone.

If I’d been the developer, I’d have built it with exactly that intent.

Humans can’t help but snap up that bait. Because greed is practically a human instinct.

My legs, as I mulled these thoughts, were already carrying me into the second gate. Foolish of me, even, knowing full well that what lay ahead was a trap the demons had set.

Slam!

Once Lillian and Seraphina had stepped inside as well, the door of the second gate shut on its own.

“I-it won’t open!”

Lillian panicked and strained to pry the door open again, but it was locked tight and wouldn’t budge.

“Wh-what do we do? I think we’re trapped.”

At Lillian’s mounting fluster, Seraphina spoke.

“Good.”
“Good?”
“It means the enemy can’t flee either.”
“…I’m so glad you’re on our side, Sis.”

Lillian came pattering over and hooked her arm through Seraphina’s.

Guess she doesn’t entirely hate it.

I’d expected her to recoil in disgust and peel the arm off, but surprisingly, Seraphina just stood there. The two of them really were a pair of sisters I could never quite figure out.

In any case, what greeted us beyond the second gate was a green barrier spread out in a dome. Inside it, no monster could touch us, but in exchange we were blind to everything beyond it.

“Step outside this and we’ll run into the next enemy.”

Seraphina had grasped the structure of the Abyss to a fair degree.

I set Lillian and Seraphina’s chatter as background noise and drew up a plan.

The second gate of a Demon Abyss always had a mid-boss waiting, and this stage’s was guaranteed to be Cerberus. The problem was that our party’s composition was the worst possible matchup against it.

Three heads. A rabid dog spewing ice, fire, and poison from each.

Its flames melt away Seraphina’s ice magic, and its poison fog withers and kills off Lillian’s plants. And its ice breath locks down my feet, sealing my mobility.

The perfect counter-pick.

Worse still, Lillian was drained from spending mana back at the first gate. If we ran into it unprepared, it’d be a brutal fight no matter how I looked at it.

I made my decision.

“Sister. I’ll go out first and check what’s beyond.”
“You will not.”

Seraphina cut me off flat.

“Most likely, the moment we step outside this barrier, some new monster will be waiting for us. So let me go check first.”
“The best time to ambush is when the enemy is trying to gauge our strength. Therefore, denied.”

She wasn’t wrong, but that only held true when the opponent was humanoid.

For one thing, Cerberus’s heads stand over three meters tall. A half-baked ambush wouldn’t so much as graze a single hair on it.

There was no way I could tell the two of them I knew the future.

After agonizing over it, I spoke.

“I know your words are absolutely right. But just this once, please move according to my call.”

I bent ninety degrees at the waist and bowed my head.

Some people would ask why on earth I had to go this far.

Seraphina is strong, so she’ll be fine. To her, Cerberus is hardly any different from a lower-rank demon.

But Lillian and I are another matter.

Lillian, who was struggling just to stand, would very likely fall back into a panic the moment she laid eyes on Cerberus. For that stretch of time she’d be exposed to danger, and Seraphina wouldn’t let Lillian die.

I don’t want to succeed at the clear by getting carried.

Some people wouldn’t understand. But to me, this is a matter of grave importance.

“Fine. Ten minutes, then. If you’re not back within that, we join you.”

Seraphina accepted my proposal on that condition.

“Yes!”

This was enough.

Let’s drop at least one of Cerberus’s heads within those ten minutes.

With that resolve, I stepped out of the barrier.

And then.

“…What kind of sound… will your… fingers… make?”

The utterly unforeseen appearance left me frozen stiff.