DanMachi: How did my dungeon turn into a Soulslike game?

The fight with the Monster was over fast.

Isagi watched as the Empress casually ripped a full-grown tree out of the ground beside her and hurled it like a javelin at the giant Monster far off in the water.

A blinding gold peal of thunder cracked open the sky. The tree became a lightning bolt, and in the space of a blink everything drowned in ghastly white light.

Isagi had his doubts about that tree.

The thing had to be pure theater. Lightning magic that violent would have reduced it to charcoal long before it landed. Or — was that actually some kind of "Additional Magic"?

In any case.

The giant Monster out at sea had barely broken the surface. Nobody even got a good look at what it was before the Empress's magic blasted it apart.

Flesh and blood came down across the whole sky like a storm, enough of it that the little seaside town looked ready to be buried.

But it all crumbled to ash within moments and was gone.

Presumably the Magic Stone inside the Monster had shattered under that same strike.

Now Isagi was certain.

This Empress of the Amazon race had to be Lv. 9. The force behind that one throw was already on par with the magic bombardment Lefiya and Riveria could put out at full power, after a long chant.

"Phew~ Guess I really am pretty strong!"

"..."

Every time the Empress spoke, something in Isagi's head went slightly out of alignment.

Her voice was far too sweet.

Rich, husky, coaxing — the kind of voice he had only ever heard from Aphrodite, the [Goddess of Beauty], and only when the Goddess of Beauty was putting on a deliberate act of wheedling.

And yet, out of that syrupy, coquettish voice, the words that came were as dopey as anything Tiona might say.

It was genuinely hard to know how to react.

Worse still.

It matched nothing at all about that cool, noble, beautiful face of hers.

What was this supposed to be, two people in one?

Right as Isagi was thinking that, the Empress dropped down onto the hillside and planted herself there, apparently with no intention of moving again.

Now what?

"I got up too early!" the woman explained.

"I forgot whether there are more Monsters coming after that one. Let's wait around a while."

This one was a colossal idiot, wasn't she?!

Isagi let out a sigh.

The Empress also behaved exactly like every other Amazon woman — wildly outgoing, instantly familiar. They had met for the first time only minutes ago. Strictly speaking they did not know each other at all; he had not even learned her name.

But she talked to him with the easy comfort of an old friend of many years.

"Oh, right! Names!!"

He had to be the one to remind her.

"What's yours?"

"Isagi. And you?"

Isagi was honestly curious what the [Empress] of the Amazon race was called, because in the fairy tale books she had never left a name behind at all.

"Lady Queen!"

"...?"

"I told you, call me Lady Queen!!"

"Lady Queen is a name?"

"Mm-hm!"

"What kind of name is that?"

"They're all characters, so why wouldn't it be a name?! Look — you're called Isagi, that's two characters. Aria is called Aria, that's three characters. I'm called Lady Queen, and that's four characters!"

"..."

That almost made sense… like hell it did!

Isagi was stunned.

But looking at how utterly serious she was, he could tell she really wasn't messing with him.

Fine.

Probably a cultural thing.

Or maybe.

Maybe she was simply an idiot. So the [Empress] was literally named [Empress]. Unbelievable.

Looking at it that way, the Amazon race of the future had grown up considerably. At least Tiona and the others had proper names.

Isagi didn't dislike her in the slightest. If anything, for reasons he couldn't pin down, he found an Empress like this a little endearing.

Because it was easy.

With almost no pressure at all, Isagi found himself telling her about Ais.

"—You only just got here, didn't you? So how do you know about Ais?"

"Mm… I don't really get it that well myself, honestly. Aria and Albert Waldstein and Celdia and the rest of them said it was to prepare for what's coming later."

"You've heard, right? The Great Spirits are almost completely gone."

Huh?

The woman had just stated another obvious fact.

The "Great Spirits" were finite in number.

And they could not bear children, so of course their numbers only dwindled. Even if a Great Spirit's lifespan might stretch longer than an Elf's, they were the ones who always stood at a [Hero]'s side, which meant they walked into deadly places again and again.

Across the world, in every kind of fairy tale and heroic epic, the most common ending of all was a Great Spirit sacrificing her own life to seal away a powerful Monster.

This wasn't unique to the [Black Dragon]. It was practically a tradition.

Isagi had heard the stories too.

The Spirits had once tried to seal Behemoth and Leviathan as well, the other two of the "Three Great Quests." Every attempt had failed.

He also remembered what Riveria and Ais had described to him before — the "altar" they had seen in the deep levels while subjugating the Corrupted Spirit.

Countless dead Spirits heaped together into something no words could properly describe.

How many Great Spirits had died inside the Dungeon over the ages?

There was no counting it.

Before the gods came down to the mortal world, the [Hero]es who had received a Great Spirit's blessing were the main force standing against the Dungeon — and, naturally, the absolute core of exploring it.

And yet this was how it ended.

Those [Hero]es of old had all died in the Dungeon without a sound. That was all.

Slowly, Isagi began to understand something about this very moment.

The [Hero]es and Great Spirits standing guard over Orario were facing an extremely thorny, extremely important practical problem of their own.

How do you solve the Dungeon permanently?

[The Great Spirits are about to cease to exist. Does that mean there will never be another [Hero]?]

[True, one can become tremendously powerful without a Spirit's blessing — Goddess Fianna, and the current Empress both prove it. But people like that are even rarer than [Hero]es.]

And if.

And if the line broke entirely?

At some point in the future, the Great Spirits would all be gone, and at the same time no one strong would arise who carried justice in them, who was willing to protect others or even lay down their own life.

What would the world become then?

The people of this era had no way of knowing that the gods would one day descend to the mortal world.

And so they — Aria, Albert Waldstein, the Empress — clearly had ideas and plans of their own.

And the answer they had at present.

Was "Ais."

Isagi saw the Empress beside him take on an utterly earnest expression. It did, admittedly, make her look even dopier — but she really was straining every scrap of learning she had ever acquired to make herself clear to him.

"So it's — um — a lot of people actually had this one question, which is, can a Great Spirit bless more than one person at the same time? Or to put it another way, can one Great Spirit give her Strength to as many people as possible?"

"At the start, everyone thought that couldn't be done."

Because Spirits were sacred.

Nearly every legend everywhere in the world tied Spirits to the divine. So people held a Spirit's personal will in absolute reverence, treated her as inviolable and holy, and regarded even asking such a question as taboo.

But.

Faith always undergoes a great many changes when reality pushes back.

Just as, when the gods of the future actually did descend to the mortal world, everyone alive came to realize that the deities they had once worshipped had never existed at all.

And in that instant, Isagi realized something.

He himself.

He was standing, by pure chance, at one of the most critical crossroads in all of history.

____

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