“Anyway… I need to get out. Or I’ll die.”
Hayasaka Tooru—Tooru—spoke aloud the immediate objective, and his eyes fell on Tia, who was standing calmly with the Holy Sword slung across her back.
Looking at her again now, she was stunning.
Her platinum hair was tied back casually at the nape of her neck, and her large blue eyes reminded him of a friendly kitten. She was shorter than Tooru by about a head, and even with the pale-blue light armor strapped across her body, it was clear she was slender for a swordswoman.
Her facial features were different from a typical Japanese person’s, so estimating her age was difficult… She could easily pass for eighteen, though if someone told him she was twenty-six, he’d be surprised but convinced.
She didn’t look like a Holy Sword wielder—but there was no mistaking it.
Simply by standing there and looking back at him, her posture radiated an unshakable confidence.
“Hey, Tooru. I get that we need to escape, but… first, where exactly are we? How did it come to be that Lightbringer and that red-black blade ended up in your hands?”
“…Right. I haven’t really shared the situation.”
Tia raised her hands in a casual shrug. “From my point of view, it’s probably because the Holy Sword found its next wielder and connected to their soul. My consciousness cleared up suddenly, I decided to manifest, and when I did, you were collapsed on the floor, and the other blade—whatever was there—was gone.”
Her smile was easy, unburdened, but not careless. She exuded confidence—a calm certainty that she could handle whatever situation arose, no matter where they were.
“Ah… I’ll explain what happened from my side. If you have questions, hold them until I finish.”
Tooru recounted everything: his work as a dungeon cleaner, the strange high-pitched ringing he heard during yesterday’s cleaning, the same noise today, and the mysterious figure in a hakama that appeared.
He followed the figure, saw it get absorbed into a wall mid-way down a straight corridor, and discovered that the wall was an illusory wall. The floor of the small room beyond was also an illusion…
Then came the fall.
Despite crashing into the floor, he was unharmed. A long straight corridor stretched before him, with a black ogre waiting at the far end. He barely managed to escape, glimpsing the hakama figure again, who disappeared into a wall once more…
Finally, he had ducked into a space beyond the illusory wall, and in the center of the room stood two blades, stuck in the floor. Cornered by the ogre, Tooru had taken both the sword and the katana.
“…So then I blacked out, and when I woke up, before my eyes was—you.”1
“Call me Tia. Not you,” she said.
“I’ll do it if I feel like it.”
“You’re mean, huh, Tooru. But whatever. If this dungeon is anything like the dungeons I know, then you probably triggered a teleport trap,” Tia nodded in acknowledgement.
“Hm.” Tooru clapped his hands lightly and nodded. “Yeah… that’s probably it. The free fall was way too long. If you ignore air resistance, fifteen seconds of free fall is about a kilometer, right?”
In reality there would be air resistance and mass to consider, so the calculation was more complicated, but even then it should have been roughly half that distance.
Either way, falling hundreds of meters without a scratch made no sense. Assuming it had been a teleport trap was the most reasonable explanation.
“You look like you’re thinking about something complicated,” Tia said, narrowing her eyes slightly. “But I think you should be thinking about something else. Not why, but what to do. Right now.”
Tooru nodded. There wasn’t a single point he could argue with.
“Yeah. Let’s assume it was a teleport trap. Probably one-way. That means our current location is unknown, the escape route is unknown, and it’s not even guaranteed that this place is structured to allow escape. If it’s a dungeon you can only leave by teleporting again, that’s really bad.”
“If this is a dungeon, then it will definitely be built so you can escape,” Tia said with complete confidence.
Tooru tilted his head. He’d never heard anything like that before.
“Well, you see… dungeons are sort of like growths on the world. Magical energy, spiritual power, divine power—things like that drift around everywhere, and they form dungeons. And apparently, at their core, dungeons want to let what’s inside come out.”
“…I don’t really get it.”
“Think about it. Dungeons have passages humans can walk through, monsters humans can fight, traps that can be disarmed, treasure lying around. They’re clearly designed to lure people in, right? And if you destroy the dungeon core at the deepest level, they disappear—so why would the core be placed somewhere reachable in the first place?”
“…Yeah. They could just put it somewhere nobody could ever reach.”
“Being conquered is part of their design. That’s why you can escape. Always.”
She smiled reassuringly. “It’ll be fine.”
Oddly enough, that actually encouraged him, and Tooru let out a wry smile.
“Either way, we can’t just hide in this room until we starve. I don’t know how reliable you are yet, but I’ll be counting on you.”
“Of course. Rely on me. I could probably take down something like a fire dragon while protecting you at the same time.”
◇◇◇
The skill of the holy sword wielder Tia turned out to be genuine.
Then again, Tooru—still below D-rank in exploration—didn’t exactly have the eyes to measure someone else’s strength, so even though Tia could take down the black ogre in a single strike, he had no real sense of how she compared to other explorers.
Still, as long as he stayed out of danger, all he had to do was keep memorizing the structure of the dungeon while walking. He had prepared himself for the possibility of struggling in a dungeon that relied heavily on teleport traps, but it seemed that wouldn’t be necessary.
The straight corridor they had come through ended in a T-junction after about five hundred meters, which suggested this dungeon had long, sprawling passageways.
Whether this was actually the Sugai Dungeon, though, was less certain. After all, he had—probably—been teleported somewhere else, and it might even be a completely different dungeon. No black ogres had been recorded in the already-cleared D-rank Sugai Dungeon, so the latter seemed likely.
As he thought this over, Tooru kept his eyes on Tia’s back a few meters ahead. She walked the corridor without any tension, the holy sword still strapped to her back.
“It originally didn’t even have a sheath or fittings. Since it was a blade-less sword, a sheath wasn’t necessary, but it was inconvenient to carry,” Tia said, laughing nostalgically. “So I begged a dwarf blacksmith to attach fittings to the guard. That made it easier to carry.”
Tooru wondered when exactly she meant by “back then,” and whether she was even talking about this world. Somehow, it didn’t feel like it. The past she spoke of seemed like it belonged to the pre-fusion other world.
He kept the thought to himself, lacking proof. The silence felt a bit awkward, so he took out his portable device to check if communication had returned… but it was still out of range.
They were probably in an unexplored area.
By the time Tooru had entered the Sugai Dungeon, twenty-six hours had already passed. He had clearly been unconscious for quite a long stretch.
“Even so… I’m not that hungry, and I’m not tired,” he muttered.
“That’s the effect of Lightbringer,” Tia said as if it were nothing. “Besides its astral attacks, it nullifies low-level magic, resists mental attacks, grants strong protection against dragon-type attacks, and has automatic healing. No pain anywhere on your body, right?”
“…If that’s true, this really is a mythical weapon.”
The passive effects stacked sky-high.
If Tooru hadn’t seen Tia actually swing the holy sword right in front of him, and if she hadn’t demonstrated disappearing and re-manifesting, he would never have believed it.
“Ah… another black ogre.”
Tia muttered, spotting a monster down the corridor, and then sprinted. In what felt like an instant, she covered over thirty meters of poor visibility—and three glowing streaks of light appeared and vanished.
During combat, the normally dull, lead-like blade of Lightbringer glowed pale blue. This effect came from the holy attribute embedded in the sword, resonating with Tia’s own mana.
Up until now, the strongest person Tooru had actually seen was the head of the dungeon department. A middle-aged man in a worn suit, who had sent shivers down Tooru’s spine the moment they met. They’d exchanged only a word or two, yet in that instant, Tooru had instinctively recognized the sheer biological difference in caliber.
Like a small child instinctively understanding that if this adult got truly angry, they couldn’t possibly resist—it wasn’t something verbalized, just an undeniable, cruel “gap.”
It wasn’t a man he could hope to beat with bundled, welded rebars.
And compared to the dungeon department head, Tia was on a completely different level. Even a former A-rank explorer like him couldn’t casually scatter ogres the way Tooru would swat away furballs and rats.
“Aaand I’m back~!”
Tia returned at a ridiculous speed, holding a fist-sized “magic core.” Even if handed to him, Tooru’s belt pouch was already full, so he shrugged off his jacket and used it as an impromptu wrapper to carry the core.
A day’s worth of magic cores collected by Tooru would amount to roughly the size of one or two sushi pieces, worth maybe three thousand yen.2 Given that the cores in the upper Sugai Dungeon were about the size of rice grains, this made sense. Repeating the routine twenty days a month would earn an extra sixty thousand yen beyond the cleaning contract.
The magic core dropped by the black ogre Tia had slain… was likely worth no less than three hundred thousand yen, and could even exceed six hundred thousand.
“‘Magic cores’… they’re still worth money, huh?”
“Don’t know what era you lived in, but yeah, they are. And, by the way, I’m poor. I can’t carry mountains of them, but if I have to throw one away… it feels like my heart dies a little.”
“Ahaha… well, money is important.”
Tia nodded easily enough, surprisingly understanding. After that, perhaps to be considerate, she stopped going overboard with monster kills. She now only eliminated the ones obstructing their path.
Four hours passed since leaving the room with the swords. They finally found a staircase—one that went both up and down.
Turns out, the staircase connecting A and B floors had an “illusory wall” somewhere in the middle. Everything they’d been walking on was effectively a “mid-B floor.”
“…That’s an incredibly mean layout.”
“Yeah. I’ve never seen anything like it. Probably not relevant to clearing the dungeon. That’s why it’s so weird.”
“Hypothetically… if the holy sword had been left behind in the dungeon and the dungeon core was destroyed, what would have happened?”
“Hm… probably a similar structure would have appeared in another dungeon. Dungeons are like the world’s… little patchworks, I guess. If Lightbringer had to disappear with the dungeon, it’d probably just get transferred somewhere else.”
“Huh…”
It didn’t make much sense, but maybe that was how things worked. With that thought shelved, Tooru climbed the stairs. The tricky, mean zone was behind them, and though he didn’t know the floor number, they managed to reach the next level—presumably a proper part of the dungeon. He exhaled quietly.
He then remembered and checked his pocket for his mobile terminal.
Connection restored. Finally, some good news.
But when he looked at Tia, who had been cheerful until now, her expression had tightened into something deadly serious.
A chill ran down his spine.
Before he could react, he glimpsed the back of the ‘holy sword wielder’ as she sprinted. Two seconds later, a loud clang rang out—a sword hitting the ground at some distance.
And in the next instant, Tia was standing right beside him.
“Tooru! I… I can’t go beyond a certain distance from you! Sorry for running off, but… since we’re at it, could you run over there? Quickly! Hurry!”
She spoke with urgent precision, words coming fast, too much for Tooru to process immediately.
“Wait… I don’t get it. Why am I running? What’s over there?”
“Someone’s being attacked by monsters! We have to save them!”
Tia shouted as though it were the most obvious thing in the world.
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