Chapter 40: Adventure Isn't Just Fighting — It's Also About Relationships.
...
Floor thirty-seven. Every wall was assembled from compacted bone, pale and dense. From the central mound of skeletal debris, something climbed — Udaeus, the floor boss, dozens of metres tall, a giant made entirely of remains.
Kihara produced a mallet-shaped weapon and drove it into the ground.
A pale violet field expanded outward from the point of impact. The skeleton soldiers Udaeus had summoned toppled in sequence, one after another, like a line of dominoes falling across the chamber floor. The black sword embedded beside the boss shattered. Udaeus itself pitched forward and hit the ground with a sound like an avalanche, raising a wave of crushed bone that rolled across the floor.
"Don't just stand there — go finish it. I can't move."
Finn snapped back first. One sharp command and the rest of the team came with him.
"Riveria — use Rea Laevateinn at full power. Everyone else, charge!"
The weakening effect of the Wavering Mist Sword went further than Kihara had expected. Udaeus, stripped of its weapons and its summoned army simultaneously, offered almost nothing in return. The Loki Familia hit it at full strength and it was over.
Three minutes.
The team turned to look at Kihara with the specific expression people reserve for things that have fundamentally altered their understanding of a situation. He stood where the field had pinned him, expression slightly uncomfortable, and made a request.
"Could everyone move to the thirty-eighth floor for a moment? The weapon has a side effect I need to deal with. Aiz — I need your help with something."
The floor boss was dead. No new monsters would spawn. Finn agreed without hesitation — in his assessment, a person carrying a weapon capable of suppressing and disarming a floor boss was now the single most tactically valuable individual in the entire expedition. He'd accommodate a brief delay.
Once the team had cleared the floor, Aiz looked at Kihara with her standard unreadable expression.
"Are you injured?"
"Turn around. Hold your hands in front of your thighs, loosely."
"Like this?"
"Yes. Hold that."
"...What is this. It's very warm."
"Don't grip. Just stay still."
Aiz pressed her lips together. The heat radiating from behind her was difficult to interpret, but she trusted him enough not to ask further questions. She stood where she was and let him settle against her.
The expedition that followed was, by any historical standard, the smoothest the Loki Familia had ever run.
With the Wavering Mist Sword available, floor bosses ceased to be a strategic problem. Finn didn't need to allocate mental energy toward boss-fight planning — he could focus entirely on navigation and route optimisation. The expedition cleared floor after floor, and when the weakened forty-ninth floor boss fell, the Loki Familia stepped onto floor fifty for the first time.
"We stop here. Supplies are down to the margin."
The team rested for an hour. Aiz and Kihara arrived at the fiftieth floor rendezvous point while the others were still recovering.
Aiz had not mentioned what the side effect involved, or how it had been addressed. From her perspective, she had simply stood still with her hands in front of her, then cleaned them afterward — the residue was some kind of white liquid substance, composition unclear — while Kihara recovered. She'd contributed nothing useful, which bothered her somewhat. She decided she would offer him another session with the breastplate at some point to compensate.
On the way back to the surface, word reached them of something unusual: an uncontrolled monster surge on the seventeenth floor. Minotaurs had broken upward into the middle floors — a rare and potentially serious incident. What made the story notable was that a group of monsters capable of speech had intercepted them and killed every one, saving a number of adventurers in the process. The rumour was spreading: something in the dungeon is protecting people.
None of that was Kihara's immediate concern. He was at home dealing with the side effects of deploying the Wavering Mist Sword, which was a weapon belonging to the Seven Deadly Sins Arms framework — each of which amplified the user's corresponding impulse when activated. The Wavering Mist Sword's domain being what it was, the effects were predictable.
Using Aiz as a brief outlet had addressed the immediate pressure without solving anything structurally.
Lili, for her part, emerged from the week's activity with an unexpected discovery. The extended and intensive use of her transformation magic had apparently broken a constraint she hadn't known was there — the Cinderella skill no longer required the target form to be physically close to her own proportions. With sufficient information, she could now replicate essentially anyone. The realisation settled in her expression as quiet, satisfied calculation. She began practicing in secret.
While Kihara had been on the expedition, Ryuu had continued her own work in parallel — tracking down residual Evilus activity while maintaining her shifts at the Hostess of Fertility. The dungeon rumour about the speaking monsters had been the trigger: in the days following the story's spread, a poaching Familia in the Daedalus Street area had dramatically increased its operational tempo, which drew her attention.
Their methods carried traces of Evilus patterns she recognised. She followed them and confirmed: their target was the Xenos — specifically, their blood, which apparently had properties that could trigger the dungeon's self-defence response. An operation with no value for a legitimate poaching organisation, motivated purely by destabilisation.
Evilus remnants. She was certain.
She went directly to the Hestia Familia.
Kihara heard her out, considered for a moment, and said: "Wait here."
He went to Ouranos.
"Evilus remnants. I have a confirmed location chain. I can't handle a god-level target alone."
"If the confirmation is solid, I can mobilise the Freya Familia, the Ganesh Familia, and the Loki Familia for a joint operation. The condition is certainty."
"That's all I need. Give me some time."
He returned.
"Follow the trail with me and we find the god. Once we have the position, I can call in all three major Familias."
Ryuu stared at him. "You can actually do that."
"Ryuu. Dungeon adventuring isn't just about the fighting. Knowing the right people matters as much as anything else. Trust me on this."
"...Alright."
After the expedition, Aiz had found herself wanting to understand something she couldn't quite name. Kihara operated at Level 6 capability while registered at Level 3 — the gap didn't fit any framework she could apply. She gathered herself and went to the Hestia Familia to ask him directly.
She was informed that Kihara had been out every day that week, working with Ryuu from the Hostess of Fertility on something related to expanding the Joja Cola distribution network.
A market survey. Perfectly ordinary.
Something in Aiz's chest registered a response she couldn't immediately categorise. She sat in her room with her hand pressed to the centre of her chest, experiencing the unfamiliar sensation of something having been taken from a place she hadn't known to be guarding.
When this kind of confusion came, Riveria was where she went.
Riveria listened to the question, covered her mouth, and then produced a smile of the warm and knowing variety.
"It seems you've grown up a little, Aiz."
"I've always been growing."
"That's not what I meant. Come here — bring your ear close. I'll tell you a few methods for getting Kihara's attention away from Ryuu."
.....
Thank you for reading.