Chapter 330 - 330: Returning to the Past

Autumn was drawing close.

The blazing skies had finally begun to cool.

With nothing much to do, Isagi woke up to find that the girls of the house had all gone out. Some were helping over at the burger shop, others were out patrolling the streets. Ever since Alise and the rest of them had rewritten their fate, they spent every day much like the Ganesha Familia did, keeping order in the city.

Now and then they also took requests from the Guild, heading beyond the walls to subjugate Monsters or run down bandits.

And with autumn nearly here, the goddess Demeter had naturally hit the busiest stretch of her year, dragging Artemis and Aphrodite along with her.

Everyone was busy. He seemed to be the only one with nothing on his hands.

Hmm.

So after he had washed up and eaten, Isagi glanced at the time and found it was only around two in the afternoon. An idea struck him. Why not go back to the Dungeon of a thousand years ago and take another look?

He could come back from the dead, and he had the [Soul Teardrop], so danger hardly entered into it.

It would also be a good chance to keep "exploring" a little further.

If he remembered right, he and the girls had made it exactly as far as the [Great Waterfall] region on the 27th floor.

Of course, the Dungeon a thousand years ago had no real concept of floors, so pinning down where that place actually was would be difficult.

Off he went, then. Isagi had plenty of questions he wanted answered anyway.

What kind of battle had the great [Hero] Albert Waldstein and his companions fought against the Black Dragon a thousand years ago?

And what about the final boss sitting at the very bottom now, the [Empress] of the Amazon race? There was a great deal he wanted to understand.

Also.

The thought came to him suddenly: maybe there was no need to keep exploring that ancient Dungeon at all. Maybe instead—

Following the guidance of the disc, Isagi arrived once more in the world of a thousand years ago.

Before him stood the same ordinary-looking "tower," its long spiral stairway descending, plain and dim as ever. It looked like nothing at all. In truth, somewhere just ahead of him, invisible obstacles or Monsters might already be waiting in silence.

Isagi hadn't forgotten. In this place, the "world" his eyes showed him and the "world" his body actually occupied were entirely separate things.

Not overlapping.

Rather, his "line of sight" and his "physical self" existed apart from each other. Sound came through as well. And touch.

Isagi said nothing. Then he turned on his heel and started back the way he had come.

He and the girls had explored this area for a while, after all, so the route back was thoroughly familiar to him.

And so he made rapid, efficient progress out of the place.

That was right. Isagi had no intention of pushing deeper. He was going back up, back to Orario on the surface.

The reason was simple enough.

If the [Black Dragon] had fled to the far north after being wounded, and had been sealed there in the Dragon Valley, then one thing followed.

Whatever happened between the great [Hero] Albert Waldstein, his companions, and the depths of the Dungeon, the [Black Dragon] would leave the Dungeon in the end.

So why not simply wait for it up on the surface? Why go to all the trouble of clawing his way down?

There was something else, too.

It occurred to Isagi that when the [Black Dragon] emerged from the Dungeon, Albert Waldstein and the others had probably been in the city as well. Or else something must have happened at that moment.

Because by rights, if Albert had wounded the Black Dragon in the deep levels and the creature had then escaped the Dungeon, why hadn't the Black Dragon razed the city? Why had it fled north without so much as a backward glance?

Unless Albert and his companions had chased it the whole way up from the depths?

And most important of all—

which Great Spirit had cast the seal on the Dragon Valley?

That was no ordinary sealing magic. Even if the cost had been that Spirit's own life, a Great Spirit like that should have been a "mighty being" with a name and a history behind it.

And so Isagi's judgment, standing there, was this: the secrets of a thousand years ago did not lie in the depths of the Dungeon. They lay on the surface.

All he had to do was return to the city and wait…

…

The trip back gave Isagi no trouble at all.

Because he could fly.

All he had to do was keep going up. Even where there was no path, he could simply smash through a floor and bore straight upward, and no Monsters came to bar his way along the route. The only real hardship was the loneliness of the climb.

After several hours, Isagi finally emerged from that enormous crater.

And found that a rough, high wall had already been raised around its rim.

Come to think of it, how long had it been since he entered the Dungeon?

Casting his mind back to the first time he had crossed over to a thousand years ago, Isagi thought it had been last autumn. Or was it summer?

A whole year had gone by, then.

That was quite a while.

Which meant the great [Hero] Albert Waldstein and his party had been down in the deep levels for a full year as well?

Hard to believe.

Adventurers needed less sleep as their levels rose, true, but they still ate and drank about as much as ordinary people. Between the strain and the exertion, they usually needed more food, not less.

Were they somehow provisioning themselves inside the Dungeon?

From the look of things here, there was certainly no support team hauling supplies down to them.

Isagi flew, and reached the top of the wall without effort.

The guards all turned to stare at him in astonishment, and once they saw he had come up out of the Dungeon, someone hurried off to fetch what looked like the officer in charge.

Until, at last, a familiar figure came running over again.

It was "Ryuu-senpai"!

No, not quite. It was the woman from a thousand years ago who resembled her so closely: Ryuulu, the famous bard of the Elf race.

"You've come back!"

Elves lived across enormous spans of years, and their memories were correspondingly sharp.

Ryuulu remembered. Isagi and his companions had appeared in the city out of nowhere, and she had been the one to ask them to go down into the great crater — the Dungeon — and see what was happening.

"Your companions… ah… I'm sorry."

Ryuulu recalled clearly that a strikingly beautiful woman had been at the boy's side, one who looked as though the blood of Elven royalty ran in her, along with a lovely golden-haired girl.

Now the boy had returned from the Dungeon alone. What had happened needed no explaining.

In this place, parting and death were simply the way of things.

Sorrow settled over Ryuulu's face, and the guards around her bowed their heads in mourning at the same moment.

Hmm.

Isagi pressed his lips together, and in the end he didn't explain that Riveria and Ais were both perfectly alive, and had simply not crossed over with him this time.

Explaining that he came from the future would have been far too much trouble. And this was hardly the moment for it.

What Isagi wanted to know right now was what had happened over this past year. By the look of things, the ruined city had been fully rebuilt, and the heroes and the guards had begun raising walls again, holding the line against the Monsters coming up out of the Dungeon.

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