Chapter 451: Monster Inside the Flower

About an hour later.

In the section leading up from basement 2 to the first floor, we secured ten more dark elves.

"Sniff, sniff. I smell dark elves here."

While our soldiers were busy handling the incubi, Galahad found the secret passages hidden all through the walls and turned up a full ten dark elves. They'd been sealed away in hidden rooms so thoroughly that without him we almost certainly never would have found them.

That brought the number of dark elves we'd rescued to about thirty.

Remembering that there had been more than eighty virgin elves, it wasn't even half, a pitiful number. Still, rescuing thirty dark elves was nothing to scoff at.

"Galahad. Was there any sign of a dryad?"

"No, sir. Unfortunately, I didn't find the Seal."

Asmodine, the Seal of Lust.

Born a dryad, she's a tree spirit who looks almost exactly like an elf, and from what I'd heard, she was a child the Demon King Solomon fathered on the Fairy King. Supposedly she has a pure, fresh sort of charm that's different from the elves.

I couldn't leave a Seal like that in the hands of an idiot like Astaroth to be toyed with. I stood at the mouth of the maze that led to the enemy's core.

"If we go through here, it'll take forever, right? We already burned time rescuing the dark elves."

"The plant dogs waiting in the middle will definitely slow us down."

"But there's no other route. Even flying up through the ceiling is blocked."

There was no passage other than the maze. But when there's no road, you make one.

"Lime, time for your specialty."

"Got it, master. Slamia, everybody gather up~"

At Lime's unhurried call, the Slamias gathered into one spot. Twelve of them came together and started twisting their bodies around one another with Lime's body at the center.

"Minotaurs, lift the Slamias up!"

They were covered in wounds from killing incubi, but six minotaurs hoisted the Slamias up to the ceiling without much trouble. Once Lime, positioned at the center, had picked the right angle, the Slamias began drilling into the ceiling.

Grrrrrind.

The twelve-layered Slamia drill bored upward at about walking speed. The minotaurs who had shoved the Slamias into the ceiling collapsed on the floor, exhausted.

"Halphas. Bring the Harpy Aellos over."

"To ferry everyone up?"

"There's no time to build stairs, and the minotaurs are badly hurt. Right now flying up is the better option."

"What about you, master? Coming up later?"

"...I'm going to need your help with that."

Halphas's expression stiffened. The Harpy Aellos were still down on basement 2, and it would take them a good while to come through the portal.

"You want me to carry you all the way up to that ceiling by myself?"

"I gave you dragon wings, didn't I? You can do it, Halphas."

Halphas covered her face with her hand for a moment, then pointed at the floor in front of me.

"Lay out your robe. I don't think I can lift you as is."

I did as she asked, spread the robe out, and lay down flat on it. She wrapped it around my whole body, grabbed the top of it, and started beating her wings.

"Nnnngh!!!"

The way Halphas's wings churned made her sound like a helicopter. My body did, very slowly, start to lift off the ground.

"Aaargh! Master, this is way too hard!!"

"We're only about six feet up, I think..."

"Then you try lifting yourself!!"

Halphas snapped at me, but I kept my mouth firmly shut. The ceiling was far too high for me to jump, and she was the only one here who could get me up there.

"Get the Legion Commander up there."

"Brothers with lighter wounds, get down on the floor."

The orc soldiers stacked themselves into a tower beneath me as I rose. They pushed me up with their backs, and at one point Halphas was able to set me down on the backs of three orcs and take a break.

"Whew. Master, why don't you just jump from here? Looks like it's high enough."

"Then the orc tower would collapse. We'd take more casualties from me than from the enemy."

"...So I really do have to haul you all the way up there?"

Halphas looked ready to cry, but there was no way around it. After a short rest, she got a firm grip on the robe and shot straight up toward the ceiling.

"Ngghhh!"

Wringing out every last drop of strength she had, Halphas barely managed to get me into the hole in the ceiling. Bracing both hands against the walls in case the thing caved in, I bowed my head to her in sincere gratitude.

"Well done. You may return to base and rest now."

"I, I can't believe I'm being pulled off the line over this..."

Halphas fluttered down to the floor with a hollow look on her face. Lifting me twenty feet up to the ceiling had drained every ounce of her stamina.

"Only those who can still fight, follow me up. We're not going through the maze."

Meri stood at the entrance to the maze with the Virginium Shield raised and the holy sword in hand. It was both a formation ready to kill anything that came out and a warning to keep the enemy from trying anything stupid, like a counterattack, while we crossed over the ceiling.

"Master, you're not going alone, are you?"

Lune came up behind me. I was crawling along on my belly through the ceiling passage, and when I spread my legs she squeezed in underneath me.

"Wherever you're going, I'm not sitting it out."

"How's your hand?"

"This? It'll be fine in a bit."

Lune's hands were badly swollen. They'd go back to normal with time, but fingers that had rained hundreds of arrows down on the incubi were bound to swell.

"Tell me if it hurts. We'll pull back immediately."

The Seal of Lust mattered, but Lune mattered more. I crawled along right on the tail of the slime unit.

"Master, what are you going to do once you have the Seal of Lust?"

"Hmm... toss her in the training room to start?"

"What if she comes over to our side willingly, like Asmodeus did?"

"Come on. She's a Demon King's daughter. She's not going to spread her legs that easily. And they say she's a virgin on top of that. This is a woman who used the last of her power to put a wooden chastity belt on herself."

Asmodeus had known a fair amount about the Seal of Lust.

She said Astaroth had gone after the Seal's privates, and the Seal, sensing the threat, used the power of the trees to lock a chastity belt over her own crotch. Because of that, every single day Astaroth violated every part of her except that one.

"Astaroth's useless, but she does come in handy at times like this."

"Prepping her nice and ready for you to eat?"

"Correct, Lune. I won't even need to soak her in the training room first. Heh heh heh."

All I have to do is enjoy a cake someone else baked. Is there anything happier than that? I swallowed the drool and kept crawling.

"Master, we're through."

Lime and the Slamias stopped drilling. They'd opened a passage leading down, and now all I had to do was jump and I'd drop straight into the core.

"Heh heh heh. Well then, let's go take a look at Astaroth's face."

I set the mace I'd hauled all this way out in front of me. Just falling in felt like a waste, so I planned to make a proper entrance.

"Open the way, Lime!"

"Go get 'em, master."

Lime and the slimes pulled their bodies free and slid out into the passage. I jumped down like I was taking a dive.

Crack!

The hole, which had barely been holding together, gave way under my weight. I fell along with a shower of dirt, and before I could land arm first I yanked the mace I'd dropped ahead of me back into my grip.

"Big brother's here!!"

I swing the mace up. My strength, enhanced through the tattoo, performed the miracle of hauling a mace weighing well over a hundred pounds skyward. My body spun once in midair. And then I brought the mace crashing down.

"The dust cloud is a bonus effect!"

KABOOOOOM!!

Dirt exploded outward in every direction along with a massive blast. With my full weight riding gravity behind it, the mace quite literally blew the floor apart.

"Good day to you, Astaroth."

Once the dust cleared, I leveled a fist instinctively at the spot where the enemy ought to be.

"I've come to grab your ears and crush them. Come quietly and..."

"Hi there, boss man."

A silver-haired dark elf in a teal dress greeted me with her legs crossed. She was perched on a thick branch of a tree structure tall enough to brush the ceiling.

"Welcome to my dungeon. I'm Astaroth, master of the 29th ranked dungeon. And you are?"

"What good will a name do you? Once you're dead you won't know anything anyway."

"Fair point. But I see it differently. When I get to the underworld, shouldn't I at least know who sent me to hell?"

"That I can agree with. Go and tell the king of hell that Astaroth was cast into hell by 'Ras.'"

I picked up the mace. The being in front of me was unmistakably Astaroth.

[Astaroth:, Lv.88, ★★★★☆.]

Four stars, with room to evolve to five. The state of her stars and level looked an awful lot like looking at myself. Which was exactly why I felt relieved.

"Oho, level 88?"

"...Pathetic. Your name is Rok and you're level 89? Damn it."

Astaroth's face twisted into a proper scowl. She and I had both read each other's identity at a glance through the system.

Matchup could change things dramatically, but for now I was ahead on level, even if only by one.

"You're the master of the 29th ranked dungeon and you're lower level than me? Huh? Halphas was higher than you."

"Halphas? ...Ah, that explains it. I thought something was off when they called it the Halphas dungeon. You took Halphas down? How impressive. Are you bragging about killing Halphas right now? Pff. Bragging about a kill you got with the Holy Sword's Hero."

Astaroth was sneering at me openly. I looked her over slowly, top to bottom. The tanned skin was distinctly dark elf, sure, but what caught my eye were the ears, shorter and blunter than a high elf's.

"I heard Astaroth was a demon of the incubus line, but I guess not. ...You bastard, did you go and synthesize yourself?"

"That's right. I mixed dark elves straight into my own body."

Astaroth pulled the front of her dress aside a little to show off her chest. The pink nipples characteristic of an elf were on full display, and the faintly rancid chocolate smell coming off her turned my stomach.

"The chocolate milk has spoiled. Not just past its date; processed milk left out in the blazing sun."

"I have no idea what you're talking about, but it feels incredibly insulting."

"It was meant to insult. How many did you mix in?"

"Hmm... thirteen?"

"Crazy bitch."

Even a dungeon master gambling on synthesizing herself was insane. One slip and her consciousness could be devoured by the material, which was as good as dying forever.

"I thought the system blocked synthesis on a dungeon master."

"When you're about to die, what wouldn't you try?"

"Fair enough, I suppose. So... where are the rest of the dark elves?"

Grin. The corners of Astaroth's mouth stretched to her ears. She spread both arms wide and smiled sweetly at me.

"Isn't the natural thing to ask where all my other troops are?"

"Shut up. You think I don't know you hid the plant dogs in the maze? If you're stalling for time, you picked the wrong play."

Clap! The instant I brought my hands together, the ceiling above the maze's exit collapsed. Astaroth stared at the buried passage and let out a dry laugh.

"Idiot. You just blocked your own escape route."

"Moron. Did you forget I came down from the ceiling?"

"You can't fly, and you're obviously too heavy to jump that high. You sure about this? If you want to run, you'll have to go toward the side the humans are attacking from."

"Hmph. You think you're getting out of here? You die in this room. And since you've conveniently become a dark elf, I'll avenge the ears you tore off all those dark elves."

She wasn't the sort of creature you make an alliance with.

Cutting off elf ears alone was enough that I wasn't going to give her a clean death, and devouring thirteen elves through synthesis was an unforgivable crime.

"No, wait. I've got a better idea. I'll take you prisoner, guaranteed. I'll plant my seed in your womb. You'll bear as many children as the elves you devoured in synthesis, as many as the elves your legion killed, and then I'll kill you."

"Oh my. Take your seed and the elves would all come out as pig elves, wouldn't they? Heh heh. Too stupid to notice you're being stalled with conversation, as expected."

Astaroth snapped her fingers. The enormous tree she was sitting on began to writhe.

"That's my line. I gave you time on purpose, and the best counterattack you can manage is a giant tree monster?"

"Hmhm. It's not just a giant tree monster."

Riiiip.

The upper section of the tree split open in every direction. The petals that unfurled from inside glistened with saliva like an animal's tongue. They were far larger, but the shape was unmistakably the same as a plant dog's petals.

"Ah, damn it. I took the bait."

"What are you on about? You jumped to your own conclusion that I'd hidden troops in the maze."

"...True. That one's on me. But so what? You think mixing twenty level 70s gets you to level 90?"

"It doesn't. That's why I resurrected Caim, Orias, and Focalor, mixed in every last incubus, and threw in a level 85 too."

"...Are you insane?"

I nearly snapped the handle of my mace by accident. Faces of every kind of incubus began surfacing in the bark of the tree monster's trunk. It was as if the vengeful spirits of every demon we'd killed had taken up residence in the wood, and the sight was sickening and grotesque.

Some of the faces looked like dark elves.

"There's no other word for it, you're a lunatic. You ate the elves yourself and built a synthetic magical beast, and then wriggled out of it yourself?"

"Heh heh. Why would I, when there's a better core than me available?"

Clap. Astaroth brought her hands together. Bark began peeling away from the top of the petals, like a bud opening into flower.

Squirm, squirm.

"Ugh."

Inside, protrusions that looked like stamens started moving like tentacles. Even granting that a flower's stamen serves the same role a phallus does for humans, watching them move exactly like the real thing was hideous.

"At least make them all one shape like our Rasil... you damn bitch."

At the center of those stamen cocks. When I saw the woman growing there like a pistil, the foul words came out of me before I could stop them.

"Ahaha! Are you mad? Are you mad?"

Astaroth held her stomach, cackling, and pointed at the pistil woman. She was buried in the tree from the thighs down, and she was completely bare, without a stitch on her.

"What did you do to the Seal?!"

"Synthesis!"

I wanted to tear that breezy laughing mouth of hers wide open. On the lower abdomen of the dryad woman who had become the pistil, a light green Seal of Lust shimmered faintly.

"Let me introduce her! The strongest synthetic magical beast in our Lust Legion!"

Level 95, no less. Astaroth grabbed the breast of the dryad, who seemed to have lost all reason, and winked at me.

"What about it? She's a Seal. Wasn't she given to me to use however I like?"

[Asmodine: Lv.95, ★★★★★.]

Astaroth only smiled, showing her white teeth.

"Why so serious?"