Max
Floor 19
"Let the dungeon hide and seek begin!"
The words left his mouth and the Shunshin took hold in the same breath.
The corridor snapped past him. It wasn't the sensation of running—it was something cleaner than that, the particular feeling of the world agreeing to get out of his way. The air pressure shifted, the stone walls blurred into a single continuous grey, and then Floor 19 opened ahead of him and stopped being stone entirely.
He felt the difference the moment he crossed the threshold properly.
The walls were wood.
Not stone dressed to look like wood—actual wood, dense and old, the grain running in long continuous lines up surfaces that curved slightly inward the way the inside of something living curves. The ceiling above him was more of the same, ribbed with thick wooden arches that interlocked overhead like the bones of something vast.
The floor underfoot had give to it, faint and subtle, but present—the particular resilience of material that had grown rather than been cut. He was inside a tree. Not near one, not beneath one—inside, in the way Floor 18's great tree had suggested was possible and Floor 19 had simply decided to commit to at scale. The Large Tree Labyrinth.
The light was different too. No crystals here. Instead, moss covered every surface it could reach—thick and blue, radiating a cold, steady glow that didn't flicker and didn't cast shadows so much as eliminate them, filling the corridor with the flat, even luminescence of somewhere that had its own ideas about visibility.
It was beautiful in the way things are beautiful when they're also slightly unsettling. The blue deepened in the recesses between the wooden arches, pooled in the gaps between roots where the floor wasn't entirely flat, and gave the whole corridor the quality of being underwater without any of the inconvenience.
Max took it in for exactly as long as the Shunshin allowed—which was not very long—and kept moving.
Then his skin started to prickle.
Not in pain. Not quite. Something finer than that—a thousand small pinpricks pressing against the surface of him all at once, like static that had decided to have ambitions. It started at his hands and arms where the armor didn't fully cover, spread across his neck, found the gaps at his collar and wrists and tested them with patient thoroughness.
He felt his body register the contact and simply decline to engage with it further. As he ventured deeper, the sensation didn't escalate. It didn't sharpen into anything useful. It just persisted—low and continuous, like standing in light rain that couldn't quite decide if it wanted to be taken seriously.
Unbothered, Max simply ran deeper.
The wooden walls thickened around him as the corridor curved, the arches growing more elaborate, the moss denser, the blue light pooling in long luminescent rivers along the grain of the floor. The pinpricks continued—accompanying him through two bends and a wider chamber, testing the same gaps at his collar and wrists, finding the same answer each time.
Somewhere around the third junction, the sensation simply stopped arriving with any conviction. Not gone, exactly. Just quieter, the way something gets quiet when it has run the same test enough times to know the result.
By the fourth corridor, it had faded entirely.
Max slowed fractionally, checking himself out of habit. Nothing. No numbness, no heaviness in the limbs, no edges of something trying to take hold. His Devil physiology had processed it the way it processed most things—absorbed the contact, found nothing worth escalating, and adapted without asking his permission.
Huh, he thought.
He remembered the Large Tree Labyrinth in passing from the anime—something about environmental hazards, adventurers needing specific preparation or Abnormal Resistance before attempting these floors. He hadn't paid much attention at the time, not expecting to be standing in the middle of it. But the pinpricks, the patient way they'd worked at the gaps in his armor, the gradual fading as his body simply got used to them...
That was probably the ambient poison, he concluded.
He considered that for a moment. Then he shrugged and kept running, because it hadn't done anything, and there were more interesting things to think about.
Without delay or warning, as if the dungeon realized an intruder had entered and ought to be addressed, the monsters arrived. A bear spawned from the far wall with the sudden solidity of something that had always been there and was only now choosing to show it. Massive, shaggy, already oriented and charging before its feet had fully settled, its roar filling the corridor with a sound that had genuine mass to it.
Behind it lumbered something porcine, tusks low and gleaming, hooves digging into the wooden floor. And to the left, a lizardman held its position—scales dull blue in the moss light, slitted eyes moving with the calculating patience of something that had learned not to rush.
Somewhere in the recesses above the arches, something skittered.
Max's eyes flicked upward. Legs. Many of them. Moving along the ceiling with the unhurried confidence of something that lived up there and considered the floor optional. He couldn't make out the full shape in the blue light—insect, certainly, large enough to matter—and then it was behind him, and he'd already decided it wasn't his problem.
This is Hogni's floor now, he reminded himself. All of it.
He read all three ground-level threats in a single sweep and kept running. His Auto-Evade created the sequence to deal with them automatically and he dismissed it just as automatically. This wasn't his dive. The contract was running.
He slowed only when he'd put enough distance between himself and the entrance that Hogni wouldn't reach this chamber for several minutes at minimum.
More than enough lead.
He snickered before he could stop himself. He could clearly imagine it—Hogni released from his enforced blindfold, adjusting his hood with wounded dignity, settling his hand on his hilt, and walking directly into a bear, a boar, a lizardman, and whatever had been moving along that ceiling.
And then handling all of it anyway, because Hogni was exactly the kind of person who would honor an agreement even when he'd been maneuvered into it by a devil with a magic parchment and a very cooperative slime.
He'd been building the plan since Floor 16. The contract structure, the terms, the Kairu distraction—assembled quietly in the back of his mind while they walked, waiting for the right moment. And now it was running perfectly, and somewhere behind him, he had a Level 5 Executive loose in the Large Tree Labyrinth, clearing a path in his general direction with absolutely no idea how much excelia he was accumulating.
Freya is going to love this, he thought, with deep satisfaction.
He felt the familiar ping in his mind—the quiet pulse of the teleportation circle, sitting at knee height in the inner wall of the cave on Floor 18 that only two people in the world could open, one of whom didn't have hands.
Just in time.
He poured mana, felt the circle forming under his feet, and disappeared out of Floor 19 entirely.
The blue moss light vanished. The wooden walls vanished. The distant sounds of a bear vanished.
What replaced them was the quiet dark of his newly claimed cave, the faint hum of his wards at the perimeter, and the particular stillness of somewhere that was his and only his. He exhaled slowly, let the stress dissipate from his legs, and looked at the dissipating magic circle in the middle of the room.
Right, he thought, focusing. Time to get started.
-◈ -
Many Hours Later
Hogni
Floor 22 received him the way the dungeon always received people who earned their way down—with complete indifference and immediate killing intent.
The hours between Floor 19's entrance and here were, in a word, relentless.
It started manageable enough. The first corridor gave him Bugbears—three of them, big and aggressive, exactly what he expected from this floor—and he moved through them with the clean efficiency of someone who knew the footwork. The drop items went to Kairu without him needing to think about it. The slime moved along the floor behind him with the focused industriousness of something that had a job and intended to do it properly.
Then the dungeon stopped warming up.
The encounters compounded fast. Battle Boars, Lizardmen, Mad Beetles whose shells turned his first two strikes clean before he adjusted his angle. What began as sequential became everything at once, and Hogni stopped cataloging and started simply responding. He found his rhythm in it—the old rhythm, the one that lived in his feet and shoulders and didn't require conscious instruction. His breathing settled into the long, even cadence of someone who had decided this was the work now, and the work was fine.
Then the Firebird appeared, and Hogni stopped moving for a single second.
It arrived in a wide corridor with the dramatic entrance of something that understood its own significance—trailing flame that left char marks along the wooden walls, its body pushing heat back against the cool blue moss glow, filling the entire space with flickering orange that had no business being this far underground. He hadn't seen one in years. He had forgotten, in the accumulated routine of surface assignments and escort missions, what it felt like to look at something rare and feel the recognition of it land properly in his chest.
Not in alarm. Something older than alarm. Something that hadn't had anywhere to go for a long time.
He fought it properly. Not efficiently—properly, the way you fight something that has earned the effort, every exchange given the weight it deserved, the sword finding its lines with the precision of decades while the Firebird tested those lines with everything it had. It was a long fight. It was a beautiful fight.
When it ended, Hogni stood in the char-blackened corridor breathing steadily, the blue moss light reasserting itself around the fading embers, and felt a profound, uncomplicated peace settle over him. No performance of timidity, no careful management of the Mistress's expectations. Just the blade, clean and honest.
Then the damn Gun Libellulas broke his brief zen.
Three of them dropped from the ceiling in tight formation while he was still oriented from the Firebird, their shot-silk wings cutting the air with that high, thin sound that gave exactly enough warning to know what was coming and not quite enough time to close every angle. He deflected the first volley cleanly, the second mostly, and two blasts from the third found gaps he hadn't covered in time. He took them without stumbling and drove the sword through the nearest one before it could realign.
The third fired at his shoulder.
Not at him—at the slime on his shoulder.
Kairu went very still.
The stillness lasted perhaps two seconds. And then it got to work.
What followed was efficient in a way Hogni found both impressive and slightly alarming. The slime handled the Gun Libellula with a thoroughness that suggested it had strong feelings about being disturbed—snapping a pressurized water-whip through the air that bifurcated the insect perfectly—collected the remains with the same calm practicality, and resettled on his shoulder with the air of something that had made its position on the matter definitively clear.
Ki! He heard Kairu's satisfaction as they moved forward.
Hogni caught the Dark Fungus in his peripheral vision—the spore cloud already forming at the corridor's edge—and stepped wide without breaking stride, giving it the berth experience had taught him it deserved.
Floor 21 opened ahead, and with it the Mammoth Fools, a cluster of them already agitated in the wide chamber beyond the connecting corridor, their enormous frames filling the space with the particular energy of something that was looking for an outlet and had just found one.
Hogni exhaled slowly. Settled into his stance.
And let loose.
It was glorious. Somewhere in the fourth hour of it, completely lost in the dance of Victim Abyss, he realized with a mild shock that he had stopped thinking about Max entirely.
Not out of negligence. The dive had simply taken over. The thrill of it, the old familiar rhythm of clearing floor after floor, the particular pleasure of being somewhere that demanded everything and gave nothing for free. He had genuinely, completely forgotten he was supposed to be chasing anyone.
The 22nd floor received him with the same dungeon indifference as everything below Floor 18. He moved through the entrance corridor with his hand on his hilt, Kairu alert on his shoulder, and let his awareness expand outward the way it did when he read a new space. He looked for the boy seriously, perhaps for the first time since he had begun enjoying the dive. Looked for any trace—a ward edge, a disturbance in the floor's natural state, the specific quality of someone who had passed through recently.
Nothing.
He checked again. Still nothing. No sign of passage, no magic residue, no indication that a Level 1 had recently sprinted through here at an unreasonable speed.
How, Hogni thought, did he manage to pass through three floors of monsters whose base threat level starts at Level 2 without engaging a single one? Without leaving a single footprint?
He turned the question over. Arrived at no satisfying answer. Filed it alongside the other things about Maximus that he had decided to stop trying to explain with conventional logic. A sliver of guilt pierced through the afterglow of combat. If he fell... if the swarm caught him while I was dancing with a Firebird...
Beside him, Kairu vibrated.
Not the casual pulse of someone noting something interesting. A single deliberate vibration—the specific frequency of a creature communicating pay attention in a language Hogni had apparently learned without noticing.
"You know where he is," Hogni said in realization.
Ki, said Kairu, with great satisfaction.
"Then what —"
A hand landed on his shoulder from behind.
"Boo."
Hogni moved before the word fully registered—combat reflex, pure and unthought. The sword cleared its scabbard in a single motion, his body already rotating into a defensive stance, every moment of training answering a threat that his nervous system had decided was real before his mind could weigh in on the matter.
He stopped the blade exactly two inches from Max's face.
Max stood there with his hand still raised from the shoulder tap, looking deeply, genuinely delighted, tears forming at the corners of his eyes from the effort of not laughing. He looked completely fresh—not a scratch, not a drop of sweat on his brow, entirely unburdened by the hours of traversing the Large Tree Labyrinth.
Hogni stared at him in shock.
The sword stayed where it was for one more second, then lowered—slowly, with the deliberateness of a man choosing composure over every other available option.
Max wiped the corners of his eyes and composed himself with the visible effort of someone who had waited hours for this exact moment and found the reality exceeded the anticipation.
"Got you," he said, with profound happiness. "Finally." He glanced down at Kairu, who was watching the entire exchange with the alert satisfaction of an accomplice whose contribution was pivotal. He tilted his head at the slime. "You felt it too, didn't you. The shift when he stopped looking."
Ki~ said Kairu, and jiggled once with what could only be described as smug agreement.
"You were loving it," Max said, looking back at Hogni. His tone softened from playful to genuinely respectful. "The fighting. I could feel the tremors."
Hogni straightened his hood with dignity, preserving his pride. "I maintained awareness of my surroundings."
"You absolutely forgot about me."
A pause.
"...The Mammoth Fools on Floor 21 required significant focus," Hogni muttered into his collar.
Max's mouth curved. He let it go, which Hogni appreciated more than he would ever admit.
A moment passed between them—not uncomfortable, just the easy silence of two well-acquainted people. Hogni looked at the corridor of Floor 22 around them, at the depth of it, at the number attached to it, and felt a strange, unburdened happiness settle in his chest.
Then he turned to Max with the familiar question on his tongue.
"Are you ready to go back now?"
Max looked at him for a moment. Then nodded.
"Yeah," he said. "We did what we came to do."
He said it simply, without the edge of performance that had been in him earlier, and Hogni believed it.
And so they started back up.
-◈ -
Max
The return was quieter than the descent.
Not because the dungeon was less present—if anything, Floor 21 seemed to register their upward direction as an affront and made its feelings known—but because neither of them needed to fill the space between encounters with anything.
There was no urgency driving the pace now. The descent had a target pulling it forward. The ascent had nothing pulling it anywhere, and so they moved at the honest speed of people who had done the work and were simply going home.
Hogni cleared what crossed their path with the steady efficiency of someone whose edge was properly used and hadn't yet dulled. Max followed him, as promised, without engaging—watching the floors rise back with interest.
By the time Floor 18's crystal light appeared above the connecting corridor, the sky had changed entirely.
Not afternoon anymore. Not even evening. The central crystal had dimmed to a deep amber, the blue rings around it darkened almost to indigo, and the doubled lake below held the reflection of something that looked very much like a sky deciding to become night. The forest was quieter than they left it, the blue moss glow from the lower floors still faintly present where the light carried up from the corridor behind them. Rivira's palisade sat lit against the dark in the distance, small fires visible through the gate gap.
Hogni realized, with mild surprise, that they had been going for close to twelve hours.
"Let's eat," Max said, beside him. He said it with the tone of someone announcing something they had already decided several floors ago. Then, after a beat—"I'm starving."
Hogni gave a single nod and said nothing. But he was hungry too, and had been for a while, with absolutely no intention of admitting it. It had been long enough since his last worthwhile dive that he had forgotten how thoroughly the work burned through a person. And the last thing he wanted was to hand the boy across the fire another reason to tease him—the jump scare on Floor 22 was already more than enough material for one dive.
-◈ -
They bypassed the town and found the same flat rock at the cliff's edge without discussion. Max dropped his pack, got the camp stove going with ease, and started laying out what remained of his rations. Less than before, but enough—the dried meats, the last of the bread, a handful of ingredients that became a serviceable stew over a small fire while the false night of Floor 18 settled properly around them.
Hogni sat across from him, pulling his grey hood back, and watched the fire without speaking for a moment.
"I went to the stew place in Rivira earlier," Max said, not looking up from the pot. "When I was scouting."
"And?"
"Not worth the price." He stirred once. "I couldn't tell what was in it, and the woman behind the counter looked like she was deciding whether to charge me more for asking."
Hogni considered this. "The food here has never been the point."
"I know." Max glanced up briefly. "Doesn't mean it has to look like boiled boots."
Hogni accepted the wooden bowl when it came. He ate without rushing, the fire doing its small, honest work between them, the amber-dimmed crystal sky completing its cycle somewhere above. He thought, without particularly meaning to, about the past several hours. About the Firebird in its charred corridor. About the rhythm that had come back to him between Floors 19 and 21—the old rhythm, the one that predated his elevation into an executive.
About the boy across the fire who had made it possible without being asked.
He understood something now that he hadn't, fully, at the start of the day. Maximus was not a Level 1 in any sense that mattered. The number on his Status was a formality the Falna hadn't caught up with yet.
Hogni didn't say this. He simply ate, and watched the fire, and noted it.
"The stew place also had two options," Max said, breaking the silence. "Both involving meat. Neither explaining itself."
"That has been true for as long as I have been coming here," Hogni said.
"Isn't this better?"
Hogni looked at the stew, then at Max. "It is, in its way."
The conversation stayed easy like that—nothing consequential, nothing that needed to go anywhere. Max refilled his canteen, offered Hogni the last of the bread, and let the fire burn down at its own pace.
-◈ -
When they finally packed up and turned toward the forest path leading to the floor's entrance, Max paused for a second.
His hideout was right there. Tucked into the roots just beyond the treeline. The teleportation circle sat on the stone floor of his cave, humming quietly at the edge of his awareness. Folkvangr was on the other end of it. His actual bed, and the specific luxury of sleeping horizontally on something that wasn't stone or root, was just one step away. He could be there in the time it took Hogni to reach the Floor 17 stairs.
He wanted to use it.
He wanted to with a clarity that was almost physical. His calves ached. His shoulders throbbed from the sheer weight of existing in the dungeon for this long without a break.
No shortcuts, Max told himself brutally, his hands tightening. My growth depends on effort. The descent is only half the battle. If I skip the climb with Hogni, I cheat myself out of the stamina conditioning.
He squashed the temptation firmly, picked up his heavy pack, and walked toward the floor entrance behind Hogni without saying a word about it.
-◈ -
The ascent took until late afternoon of the following day.
It was brutal in its own way. Seventeen floors of vertical stairs, sloped tunnels, and uneven terrain. Neither of them pushed the pace. The dungeon registered their upward direction as it always did and they moved through it at the honest speed the floors required. Max's physiology kept his muscles from tearing, but it couldn't stop the lactic acid from pooling in his thighs. Every single stair was a mental battle against the urge to snap his fingers, activate a teleportation circle, and vanish.
But he kept his head down, forcing his body to adapt, pushing the limits of his Falna until the ache became just another background noise.
The architecture reversed back through its numbers around them: the bedrock of the Cave Labyrinth giving way to misty corridors, the air lightening in increments until it carried the faint quality of something connected to the surface above.
Once they reached the Upper Floors, Hogni's presence shifted. The easy quiet between them narrowed back into professional distance. He began to shadow Max, his hand returned to his hilt, and his eyes moved to the corridor ahead. Back to the assignment. Back to what he was here to be.
Max stopped a few yards from the final exit to Floor 6 and turned back to him.
"Thank you," Max said. "For agreeing. For going deeper." A beat, then with open, vicious satisfaction—"Hedin's going to absolutely hate going through all those magic stones."
The corner of Hogni's mouth moved. Not quite a smile, but close enough to count.
"He will," he said, and left it there.
Kairu chose that moment to launch from Max's shoulder to Hogni's. The slime landed, steadied himself, and passed the drop items—everything collected across the middle floors, sorted neatly—into Hogni's storage pouch.
Then, Kairu extended a tiny pseudopod and pressed it gently against Hogni's dark cheek.
It was the first time Kairu had fought alongside anyone but Max. Three floors filled with the toughest monsters he had faced so far. Apparently, that meant something to the slime.
Hogni went very still. Then, slowly, tentatively, he raised one gloved hand and rested it on Kairu's gelatinous surface.
A single pat. Brief, deliberate, and not repeated.
Ki~ Kairu chirped in absolute joy.
Max watched this and said nothing. Some moments were better left alone.
After a few seconds, Kairu bounced back to Max's shoulder. Hogni straightened his hood, turned, and stepped back into the shadows of the Upper Floors with the composed quiet of someone resuming their role.
Max watched him go, then turned toward the exit and started walking.
The Upper Floors were busy, adventurers moving in both directions with the purposeful density of a city that ran on this. Fresh parties were heading down, armed and provisioned, brushing past the exhausted solo adventurer trudging upward. Max gave them a wave at each pass, easy and unhurried, fueled by the particular good mood of someone who went deep and came back with everything he went for.
The last corridor narrowed, then widened again, and then the dungeon entrance stood ahead of him with the pale afternoon light pouring through from the other side.
He stepped through the great threshold of Babel.
The sun hit him properly for the first time in two days—not the crystal approximation of it on Floor 18, but the actual thing, warm and unambiguous, coming in at a low afternoon angle. The city noise arrived with it, the layered ongoing sound of Orario remembering to be itself.
Max stopped at the base of the tower for a moment, letting the crowd flow around him, and simply stood in the light.
Two days. Twenty-one floors. A hidden super-villain base established, an Evilus cell decimated, a fortune made in monster drops, and a massive growth in power.
Not bad, Max thought, tilting his face upward toward the actual sun, feeling the ache in his legs as a badge of honor.
Not bad at all.
--> Devil in a Dungeon <--
AN:
Phew, finally, Max did it. Out of the dungeon!! Now we get into the juicy part of a dungeon dive: Status Updates. Though I have few scenes planned before that, so maybe we will get there in Ch 31 or 32 and I'm very excited to write that as there are few big things planned.
Aside from that, I have few more scenes planned for this chapter, but this felt like a natural ending and so I didn't push it and it was a nightmare to get it till here as the scenes didn't fit well when I first wrote it and so I had to rewrite it many times.
Here is an offer from my side: For anyone who guesses 1 unique aspect correctly, I will give a shout out and they would get a chance to add 1 thing to the story - may it be a minor character, event or anything that doesn't mess too much with the plot. Unique aspect means beyond the stat numbers.
As always, don't forget to share your thoughts on the story and any suggestions you have on what else Max could try in a review/comment.
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Next update will be on Tuesday.
Ben, Out.
Disclaimer: I don't own anything.