Freya
She was quiet for a moment. Simply quiet — sitting with the fact that he had not stopped at Floor 15 once the pattern was confirmed. Had not treated the data as sufficient and turned back. Had kept going, with Hogni openly beside him and Lux Tenebris having just torn him open from the inside, all the way to the entrance of Floor 22 before finally turning around.
On his first dive. In forty-eight hours.
She let that settle.
Then she withdrew from the visual memories entirely, letting the Falna's light shift from narrative to arithmetic — the underlying numbers, the true measure of what forty-eight hours in the Dungeon had made of him. She moved to the raw data with the calm precision of someone who had done this ten thousand times, ready to catalogue his growth.
She reached his Status and read it.
And what she read made her eyes almost bug out.
—
Status:
Maximus Stilbon
Freya Familia
Devil (Low Class)
Level 1*
[*Notice: Level Up available.]
Stats:
Strength: I 97 - EX 3243
Endurance: H 123 - EX 3342
Dexterity: H 115 - SSS 2978
Agility: H 108 - EX 3012
Magic: H 107 - EX 3956
Lineage Powers:
Devil
Destruction
?
Magic:
Ars Magna
Independent Action
Skills:
Lux Tenebris
—
The silver needle slipped from her fingertips, clattering uselessly on the floor.
She didn't hear it fall. She didn't feel the cool air of the room or the distant muffled sounds of the city below. The world had narrowed entirely to the expanse of Max's back and the impossibly dark, crisp hieroglyphs she had just pulled to the surface.
She stared. She blinked. She stared again.
For the first time in her years on Gekai, the Goddess of Beauty forgot how to breathe.
Three thousand.
The numbers mocked her. They defied logic, laughed in the face of the grand design the gods had spent centuries building for the Lower World, and shattered every known boundary of the Falna.
The absolute limit for mortal growth before a Level Up was supposed to be S-Rank, stopping stubbornly at 999. To break into the thousands — the fabled SS or SSS rank — was a distinction reserved only for the most miraculous, history-defying anomalies. A once-in-a-generation exception.
Max had not simply broken the barrier. He had driven a battering ram through the ceiling, climbed to the top of the wreckage, and built a castle there.
EX.
It wasn't a standard rank. It was the Falna system experiencing a catastrophic overflow, forced to create an entirely new designation simply to quantify the absurdity of the vessel before her.
Her mind moved across the arithmetic of it. To accumulate over three thousand points across four separate stats seemed impossible — until she recontextualised the last forty-eight hours.
Of course, she realised, her eyes tracking across the numbers. It wasn't just the monsters.
He hadn't simply slaughtered thousands of creatures across twenty-one floors. He had faced a coordinated ambush of twenty-four experienced adventurers. He had engaged in a life-or-death duel against a Level 3 combatant wielding a cursed weapon — and won. For a Level 1 to kill a Level 3 was a feat worthy of a Level Up on its own.
But Max had done that while still actively pushing deeper into the Dungeon. He had crossed the threshold twice — Floor 8, then Floor 15 — allowing Lux Tenebris to forcibly expand his capacity each time, making room for a flood of Excelia that would have ruptured a mortal soul entirely.
A mortal couldn't hold it. But a Devil could. It was clear.
Her eyes settled on the race classification: Low Class.
The words sent a particular thrill through her — not of immediate expectation, but of anticipation for what came after. If this was Low Class. If this absolute absurdity was merely the baseline of his kind — what came next? Middle Class? High Class? Something beyond that entirely?
How high did the ladder go?
She could have asked him. She could have demanded the hierarchy of his species right then and there. But she pushed the thought aside. No, she decided, a quiet smile touching her lips. The mystery is far more delicious. I want to be there when he achieves it himself.
And with stats this high — with an accumulation of Excelia that broke the conventional S-rank ceiling three times over —
Could he skip a Level entirely?
She remembered the Guild's records—rare, almost mythical cases of adventurers gathering enough high-quality Excelia to bypass a level entirely. If he levelled up now, would the overflow push him straight to Level 3?
She needed to know everything. Her instinct was to scream. To laugh. To grab his shoulders and shake him, demanding to know how it felt to hold a hurricane inside his skin. She wanted to praise him until he drowned in it, to validate every ounce of potential she had ever seen in him.
But no.
The thought stopped her cold. She looked at his back—the tension in his shoulders, the way he waited for her verdict.
Max was driven by a hunger she rarely saw. He fought like a man running out of time, desperate to catch up to a standard only he could see. If she praised him now—if she treated this anomaly as a miracle—she risked shattering that drive. If she told him he had already done the impossible, he might stop reaching for more. He might become satisfied.
And satisfaction was the death of growth.
If I want him to reach the summit, Freya realized, a cold resolve settling over her awe, I must normalize the impossible. I must make him believe that this is merely the baseline. That I expect nothing less.
A sharp, unexpected pang of sorrow twisted in her chest. She hated the necessity of this decision. To deliberately withhold her pride, to artificially diminish the magnitude of his achievement and let him believe his absolute best was merely 'acceptable' felt like a betrayal of the vulnerability they had begun to share. She was punishing his success to fuel his ambition.
Forgive me, she thought, a fleeting, private moment of regret washing over her. It is a cruel deception, I know. But your fiery resolve... your penchant for pushing boundaries... they require a furnace, not a pedestal.
She made a silent vow to herself. When he finally reached the First-Class ranks—when his foundation was unshakeable and his power fully matured—she would tell him the truth. She would make up for this necessary coldness, explaining how he had terrified and delighted her on this very first dive.
She forced herself to breathe. Centered herself. Wrestled the giddy, laughing goddess and the guilty woman back behind the mask of the composed Queen of Orario. She couldn't let him see how rattled she was—not yet. She needed to hold the composure long enough to watch his reaction unspoiled.
With that, she began the play.
"You can level up, it seems," Freya said.
Her voice was calm. Steady. Almost casual, as if she were commenting on the weather rather than a history-breaking status sheet.
-◈ -
Max
Lying beneath her, he blinked.
That's it? he thought.
A sudden, heavy weight dropped in his chest. It wasn't just disappointment; it was a cold flash of Imposter Syndrome colliding with the brutal reality of Orario.
He'd expected something more. A sharp intake of breath. A long silence. Maybe a 'well done' if he was lucky. He'd just soloed to Rivira on his first dive, surviving a Level 5 assassin and slaughtering an Evilus cell, for crying out loud.
Tough crowd, he sighed internally.
But then a realisation surfaced, sharp and sobering, pushing the self-pity aside.
Of course she isn't surprised. She's Freya.
She watched Ottar—a Level 6 monster—train daily. She had seen many adventurers rise and fall for years. To the Goddess of the strongest Familia, a Level 1 clearing twenty floors wasn't a miracle. It was the bare minimum requirement to stand in her presence.
I have cheats, Max reminded himself, his hands tightening as his Devil's Pride flared, replacing the self-doubt with a hard, aggressive heat. I have a Devil's body. I have Ars Magna. I have knowledge of the future. And even with all that... I only just met her expectations.
The thought didn't crush him; it galvanized him. It recontextualized his entire achievement. He hadn't broken the game; he had just finally started playing at the level required to survive in her world.
If this is the standard, Max thought, his jaw setting, then I have a long way to go.
He shook his head slightly, a wry, self-deprecating smirk touching his lips. He'd been foolish to think reaching Floor 22 on his first dive was the ultimate, mind-blowing achievement, completely forgetting that he was standing in a Familia composed entirely of combat-crazed fanatics. If this was merely the baseline, he could only imagine what blood-soaked, impossible trials others had dragged themselves through just to 'prove' their worth and earn a fraction of her attention.
But he wasn't going to be just another fanatic. He was going to be the anomaly.
I'm going to make her gasp eventually, Max resolved, an ambitious thrill shooting through him. He wanted to shatter that composed, perfect Goddess mask again. He wanted to draw out the raw, unguarded woman he had seen waking up in the silk sheets the morning after his baptism—the one whose eyes had widened in genuine, breathless surprise just from seeing him in her chair.
I'll reach the summit before her precious Warlord. I'll hit Level 8 before Ottar does. That will get a reaction for sure.
He nodded to himself, accepting the mountain he had just decided to climb.
He didn't know the exact figures of his status yet, but he could feel the physical reality of his growth. The Excelia was sitting on his back—dense, heavy, and almost uncomfortable, like a room packed far beyond its intended capacity.
He knew from the anime about the possibility of a double level up. Ryuu managed to reach Level 6 from Level 4 in one update before the Great Faction War because her feats were so phenomenally compressed. That lore filled him with sudden hope.
If I'm overflowing with Excelia like I think I am, Max thought, his pulse picking up. Could this be a double Level Up? Could I hit Level 3 right now?
"Before we do anything," Max said, forcing his voice to remain steady, refusing to fish for the compliment he clearly felt he hadn't earned yet. "Can I see my current stats?"
Freya raised an eyebrow slightly — not at the request itself, but at the precision of before we do anything. He wasn't asking out of vanity. He was asking because he intended to make an informed decision, and he wanted the full picture in front of him before committing to anything the system couldn't reverse.
She pressed a blank parchment to his back, copying his stats, and gave it to him.
-◈ -
Max went through his status in a daze.
...Is that a typo?
It was his first honest thought. He actually brought the parchment closer to his face, squinting at the ink as if the lighting in the room might be playing tricks on him.
Strength... EX? Agility... EX?
And Magic... 3956.
His brain stuttered. The numbers refused to compute. He knew he'd grown. He felt stronger. But nearly four thousand? That wasn't growth. That was a clerical error. That was someone falling asleep on the keyboard and holding down the '9' key.
Wait, he thought, his mind racing through the lore he remembered. Wasn't 'SSS' supposed to be the hard ceiling? The absolute limit of potential?
What the hell was 'EX'?
Is this a Fate rip-off now? he wondered wildly. Am I a Servant?
No. Hard no.
His brain immediately rejected the premise. A Servant was bound by Command Spells, summoned to fight a specific war, and ultimately disposable once the Grail was won.
Technically, I'm part of a 'Family,' he reasoned. I can leave this Familia whenever I want. Technically. Even though Freya gave me the Falna, she doesn't order me around like a Master ordering a Servant.
He paused, a wry thought crossing his mind. Okay, wrong comparison, because I am me. She might order the others around, but with me, it's... different.
So, he was partly a servant in the definition of service, but not in the Fate sense. The dynamic was too fluid.
The better parallel is a Hidden Village, Max decided, nodding internally as the Naruto logic clicked into place alongside his Shunshin and Fire Style. I'm a Shinobi. The Familia is my Village, and Freya is the Kage. I wear the crest like a forehead protector. I take missions, I rank up from Genin to Jonin (or Level 1 to Level 3), and I fight for the village's interest.
It fit better. A Shinobi was a tool, yes, but they had lives. They had agency. They weren't summoned ghosts running on a timer; they were soldiers building a legacy.
He nodded to himself. Yeah. That tracks perfectly. I'm just a Leaf Shinobi with a very possessive Hokage.
Grounding himself with that bit of otaku logic, he looked up at Freya, momentarily breaking his internal spiral to shoot her a look that plainly asked, Are you seeing what I'm seeing?
Freya caught the look. The corner of her mouth quirked upward, and she gave him a single, slow, amused nod. It was a silent admission that bridged the gap between them: Yes. It is truly ridiculous.
He looked back down, a bubble of nervous laughter rising in his throat. I am looking at a corrupted save file.
He started to turn fully, ready to ask if the Falna was broken, when his eyes snagged on a glint of silver on the floorboards.
The needle.
It was lying there, forgotten. Not placed on the table. Dropped.
The realization hit him harder than the numbers.
She dropped it.
Freya had been shocked enough to fumble.
I got her, Max realized, the shock in his chest transmuting into a sudden, electric thrill. It wasn't a typo. And she wasn't unimpressed.
She had seen these numbers, her mask had slipped, and then she had slammed it back into place before he could turn around. Now she was giving him amused nods, pretending this was just another day at the office.
He felt her gaze on the back of his neck now. Cool. Expectant. Waiting to see if he would break.
She's testing me, he thought, his hands tightening on the parchment. She recovered instantly. Now she's waiting to see if I scream like a rookie or accept it like a Warlord.
He looked at the sheet again. The numbers were insane. But as he traced the ink, remembering the heat of the fire on Floor 12, the crushing weight of the ambush on Floor 14, and the sheer, unending climb from Floor 22...
I earned this.
He took a slow breath, forcing his heart rate to level out. He crushed the urge to cheer. This is real!
If she was going to pretend this was normal, he would play the game. He wouldn't give her the satisfaction of seeing him falter.
Max lowered the parchment, his hand steady.
"Alright," Max said, his voice impressively level, though his throat felt dry. "That checks out."
He handed the paper back, meeting her gaze with a calmness he had to manually construct.
"Go ahead, Lady Freya."
-◈ -
Freya
While Max was mulling over his ridiculous stats, Freya was closely observing him.
She sat perched upon his waist, her weight a light but possessive anchor, her eyes tracing the contours of his back where the heat of the update still lingered. She noticed the way his muscles were wound tight, like a coiled spring, and the faint, rhythmic tremor in his hands as he gripped the parchment she had given him. Up close, the scent of the Dungeon still clung to him—not just the copper of blood and the tang of ozone, but a deeper, primal musk of survival that made her heart thud against her ribs.
She watched the subtle play of expressions across the sliver of his face she could see and basked in it.
Her mind was already quietly turning over the arithmetic of the overflow. The sheer volume of accumulated Excelia should, by any conventional standard, have forced the system to skip a level entirely. She had seen it happen before. The math here was comparable, perhaps even exceeding those legends.
And yet, as she probed the structure of his status, the system had stubbornly refused the jump.
She traced the pathways the overflow had taken instead of converting—and found them leading inward, not upward. The excess hadn't been wasted or lost. It had been claimed. Redirected by something deeper in his soul before the Level Up mechanism could even reach it.
Lux Tenebris, she mused, her eyes tracing the pulsing ink with awe. You aren't just a passive gift, are you? You're a glutton. A hungry, relentless thing.
She understood now why the double level-up had failed.
To hold three thousand points in each stat... most souls would have shattered like glass under that pressure. But this skill didn't let that happen. It took that torrential flood of experience and turned it inward, using it to hammer at the foundation of his being. Naturally, it demanded a toll, strengthening the very structural integrity of his vessel before it would ever allow the walls of a new level to rise. It isn't just helping him grow; it's making sure he has the capacity to become a real monster.
But even with that deduction, the sheer amount of remaining energy made her wonder if the system might bend in another way. If it couldn't force a double level up, perhaps the Falna could be coaxed into manifesting multiple Developmental Abilities at once? It was a theoretical impossibility, but Max was a walking anomaly.
She kept that thought to herself for the moment, maintaining her mask of serene, unbothered judgment.
"Before we proceed," Freya said, her voice dropping to a smooth, carefully even purr, "you should know—the overflow you accumulated was significant enough that a double Level Up was... within the realm of possibility."
She paused, letting the potential hang in the air for a heartbeat before crushing it with a tone of casual finality.
"However, the system denied it. The excess appears to have been absorbed elsewhere—most likely into Lux Tenebris, or into what your status is still choosing not to show me. You will not be skipping a level today."
Max absorbed that without a visible flinch, which told her he had already suspected something of the kind.
Disappointing, he thought privately, his hands tightening almost imperceptibly against the leather of the couch. But not surprising. Lux Tenebris had pushed me twice on the way down, burning my back with the heat of forced expansion. It made a brutal kind of sense that it takes first claim on the way back up as well. The skill doesn't give anything for free; it taxes the very growth it enables.
"Understood," he said. "Thank you for checking." He paused for a beat and continued. "I'm ready to level up."
Freya nodded, her fingers brushing the nape of his neck. Pulling another needle, she pricked her finger once more, bringing the fresh bead of ichor down to the center of his back, directly over the Falna's core.
Drop.
The sensation was different this time. Not the invasive, structural heat of the initial update—it was a rhythmic pulsing instead, a wave of pressure expanding outward from his spine like a stone dropped into still, dark water.
The hieroglyphs shifted. The characters for Level 1 dissolved, swirling into ink smoke before reforming sharply into a single, bold new character.
Level 2.
The pulsing stopped. No second surge. No cascade.
Freya observed the transformation with focused curiosity. As the ink settled and the gold light receded, new characters began to bloom beneath his primary stats—a cluster of potential Developmental Abilities unlocked by his ascent. She leaned in, reading through them carefully.
Hunter – Improves abilities against monsters that the user has fought before and gained Excelia from.
Mage – Allows the user to access a magic circle which improves their magic's power, widens its effect range, and makes Mind usage efficient.
Swordsman – Allows for efficient usage of the sword with most swings landing true.
Chain Attack – Increases the power of attacks delivered continuously.
Fortune – Fortune favours the bold. The bolder the host, the more fortunate they become.
Four of the five were standard. Useful, practical, and expected for a swordsman-mage hybrid—with the exception of Hunter, which conventionally appeared only at much later levels. To see it now was a testament to the sheer variety of creatures he had slaughtered in just two days.
Then there was the fifth.
Freya read the Fortune description twice. Then a third time.
In the rigidity of the Falna system, where descriptions were almost always precise—functional, mechanical, and quantified—this kind of language was incredibly rare. Fortune favours the bold. It described a behavior, not an ability. A disposition, not a threshold. She had encountered descriptions this philosophically vague only a handful of times across her time on Gekai, and every time, without exception, the ability in question had turned out to be something the system itself struggled to categorize cleanly.
The hieroglyphs for Fortune carried an unusual stroke complexity beneath the surface—a density that hinted at something layered and responsive rather than static. This wasn't a simple probability modifier. It was a skill that watched how its bearer moved through the world and responded accordingly.
Her curiosity, already simmering, reached a quiet boil. She wanted to see what he would do with a tool that rewarded his own recklessness.
"These are your options, Max," Freya said, her voice deliberately neutral. She listed each one aloud, reading the descriptions without inflection, letting him weigh them without her bias coloring the air.
Beneath her, Max went quiet. She could feel the particular quality of his stillness—not the relaxation of rest, but the heavy, calculating concentration of a man playing a high-stakes game.
-◈ -
Max
As he listened, his mind began working through the options with methodical efficiency.
Mage — a pass. Ars Magna and Independent Action already bypassed the inefficiencies baked into this world's magic system. He didn't need a circle to improve efficiency when his relationship with mana was already operating on entirely different principles. Completely redundant.
Chain Attack — also a pass. His fighting style wasn't built around attrition or accumulation. Power of Destruction was a single, overwhelming application of force. If he was hitting something multiple times, the first hit had already failed. Chain Attack rewarded a pattern he was actively trying to move away from.
Hunter — he considered it seriously. He had already noticed how quickly his body adapted to monster movement patterns after the first encounter; Hunter would formalize and accelerate that instinct. Solid. Genuinely useful. But it felt like codifying something that was already happening naturally, and the acceleration it offered didn't feel like the kind of edge that changed outcomes.
Swordsman — he paused here longer.
He would be the first to admit, if only to himself, that his swordsmanship was built almost entirely on instinct, momentum, and magic compensation. The rapier worked because it channeled Power of Destruction efficiently and because its speed suited his movement style—not because he had any particular technical foundation to speak of.
Dexterity sitting behind every other stat by a visible margin had already made the case on its own. Not to mention he was already thinking of approaching Hogni to train him in swordsmanship once he was done with this. All his plans would jump by leaps by picking Swordsman as it would push him further than his current approach had. It was the intelligent, long-term choice.
But then there was Fortune.
Fortune favours the bold. The bolder the host, the more fortunate they become.
He turned it over carefully. The phrasing was active, conditional—it described a relationship between behavior and outcome rather than a fixed modifier. Which meant it did nothing for an adventurer who played it safe and everything for one who didn't.
He thought about what bold had looked like in practice over the last forty-eight hours. Walking into Floor 22 on his first solo dive. Entering a dragon fight because the sight of a genuine hoard had made him excited. Mapping a kill corridor and waiting in the dark for twenty-four people to walk into it. Challenging the Warlord of Orario before he had so much as a Falna to his name.
Bold, as a strategy, had produced results that careful wouldn't have reached.
He had one question before deciding.
"Lady Freya," Max said, craning his neck slightly. "Is there a chance I could take two? I have enough Excelia, surely."
Freya hummed, a flicker of genuine interest crossing her expression. It was the exact thought she had entertained moments ago. "Let us try."
She placed her finger back against his skin and attempted to draw the pooled Excelia into two separate channels simultaneously—Swordsman and Chain Attack, running parallel.
The ink rebelled immediately.
The moment she locked the flow into the first channel, the energy designated for the second shifted color—from the warm gold of active potential to a flat, inert grey. The system closed around it like a door shutting. One vessel. One step. The rule held regardless of how much was left in reserve.
"It seems the world has limits even you cannot negotiate," Freya murmured, drawing the test ink away cleanly. "One choice only."
Max accepted it without argument. It had been worth attempting.
He thought about what had made each of those things possible, and the single thread ran through all of them: his Isekai.
If he hadn't been bold enough—or perhaps just socially desperate enough—to accept a juvenile gym club challenge in search of his fellow weebs, he wouldn't have been walking on the street that night. If he hadn't made the split-second, reckless decision to hurl himself at a literal personification of death to save a girl he didn't even know, he would still be a student with a bookshelf full of dreams instead of a Devil with a back full of power.
Everything he was now—every drop of ichor in his veins and every EX-rank stat on his sheet—was the direct result of a gamble.
I am the living personification of a high-risk, high-reward bet, Max realized.
In this world, being careful was for the residents who had something to lose. For him, the foreigner, the madman, the anomaly, "Bold" was the only setting that made sense. If Fortune truly tracked behavior, it was the only ability that wouldn't just buff his stats, but would buff him.
He felt a soft movement against his shoulder and turned. Kairu, resting on the bed, gave a tiny, resonant pulse—a soft, vibrating Ki that echoed through their bond.
Max didn't need words to understand it. The slime was all-in. It was a nudge of encouragement, a vote of confidence from the only companion who had seen him at his most desperate.
If even Kairu thinks I should double down, who am I to argue?
Max smiled, a quiet, dangerous expression that finally showed the ego flickering beneath his human shell.
"Boldness has worked out well for me so far," Max said, his voice dropping into that calm, aristocratic resonance.
He looked at the parchment one last time. "I will take Fortune."
With a single, elegant nod, Freya channeled her will, pushing the vast reservoir of overflowing Excelia straight into the newly formed pathway.
The golden light flared one last time, searing the hieroglyphs into his skin. The word Fortune solidified, glowing warmly before settling into the pitch-black ink of the completed Falna.
Finally, she pressed a fresh sheet of parchment to his back, lifting a physical copy of his new status and carefully set the parchment aside, her eyes lingering on the broad lines of his back.
With a long exhale, she locked the falna, hiding the impossible, history-breaking truth of his existence from the prying eyes of any other god or mortal.
Now, it was time for some ans—
Before she could think any further, a cheerful and excited slime bounced in front of her on Max's back eager to get his stats updated as well.
--> Devil in a Dungeon <--
AN:
Damn, what an update. Hope you all were satisfied looking at the numbers. It is frankly a lot and there is a reason why all those extra points couldn't be used.
The back and forth between Max and Freya might be too much for some, but that's the best way I felt I could capture both of their perspectives effectively instead of making a mess out of it.
Obviously Max went for Fortune, he is cool like that. And just so you know, the listed DAs are not the only ones he was eligible to. There are 2 more, 1 is Abnormal Resistance, and the other is Strong Body, I felt both of them are useless to him and so I didn't even add.
In the next chapter, we will see how Kairu did and the final Status sheets of them. Hopefully we will also find some answers to the questions Freya has as well.
As always, don't forget to share your thoughts on the story in a review/comment.
Hope you didn't miss me too much ;)
If you'd like to read 8 chapters ahead(around 40k words), support my work, or commission a story idea, visit p.a.t.r.e.o.n.c.o.m/b3smash.
Please note that the chapters are early access only, they will be eventually released here as well.
Next update will be on Tuesday.
Ben, Out.
Disclaimer: I don't own anything.