chapter03 · 086-ep86
Episode 83: Saving Lives
"Don't be an idiot, Kuroi! Crushing Karin Yamada directly... that's obviously impossible no matter how you look at it!?"
To crush Karin Yamada with their own hands, inside the dungeon, while she returned from defeating abyssal floor 1's boss unharmed.
At the clan master Kuroi proposing something so utterly reckless, Black Tiger's strongest combatant, the level-2900 explorer, cried out in alarm.
"She's taken down not just the deep-layer floor-4 boss, which even we hesitated to challenge, but an abyssal boss whose abilities are a complete upgrade of mine! What chance of victory could there possibly be!?"
"Exactly, Kuroi-san! Sure, the police and public opinion are riding high on Karin Yamada's exploits and look ready to come at us with everything, but surely not THAT...!? R-right! If it's come to this, we should just take our assets and flee overseas! You said there are plenty of influential people behind the scenes who fear Karin Yamada and are willing to cooperate with us, don't you!? Even if the state threw a full net around us, we'd slip away with ease—"
"Fool! Those 'backers' of ours are already well along in preparing to sell us out!"
"...!?"
At the clan executive who'd let out a pathetic wail after Ouko, Kuroi shouted that such escape routes had been examined ages ago.
"True, the backers feared Karin Yamada's strength and influence and wanted her crushed. But we are long past that stage! THAT is how overwhelming the out-of-bounds strength that monster displayed was!"
Kuroi had never confronted her directly and half-doubted her very existence as some urban legend... but that thing was truly an aramitama. An explorer of country-toppling class, beyond human wisdom. A one-of-a-kind irregularity, of the sort rumored to be concealed by nations that court them behind closed doors.
No one would defend Black Tiger while shouldering the risk of being marked as an enemy by THAT. If anyone was offering cooperation now, it would only be someone scheming to trap them and hand them over to the Anti-Dungeon Division.
Originally, he had hoped Karin Yamada would lose her temper at the relentless accusations and become a nationwide suppression target—the best possible outcome. But now it was THEY who stood to be crushed with full national force.
A situation where doom was plain to see even without <Advance Danger Sense>.
Sitting and waiting meant losing everything, guaranteed.
"Which is why the only way for us to avert ruin now is to crush that monster! And to crush a monster that could topple the nation itself, there is no moment but this one!"
DON! Kuroi smashed the table in half, as if to whip the shrinking executives into line.
"Normally, obviously, there'd be no chance of winning. But that's normal circumstances. Right now that monster has just defeated an abyssal boss—mid-stream, before an audience of over twenty million! If Karin Yamada has a weakness, it's her head and her mentality! On her way back she must be more exhausted than ever! And conveniently, she's in Okutama Valley Dungeon—the terrain is overwhelmingly ours, and there's even a secret passage into the interior that slips past the Anti-Dungeon Division guarding the entrance! A chance like this will never come again! And to prove it—ever since I decided on Karin Yamada's assassination, my <Advance Danger Sense>, which was sounding its alarm until just moments ago, has stopped warning me of danger!"
"""Eh..."""
At Kuroi's declaration, Black Tiger's executives held their breath.
"For the assault, as a precaution, I will go into the dungeon myself! That way I can sense danger with far greater precision—and if the future holds our defeat, my intuition will surely fire before we ever strike! And if it doesn't, that means we can win! Even in the worst case, retreat remains possible; there is absolutely no way we lose! Am I wrong!?"
"""...!"""
He was, indeed, right.
Kuroi's unfair unique skill <Advance Danger Sense> had never once been wrong.
The day a dungeon conquest was halted, a monstrous irregularity had occurred; days after a small piece of mischief was stopped, it came out that the act would have enraged a certain heavyweight... examples of Kuroi's intuition saving them were past counting.
Conversely, whenever Kuroi sensed no danger, even clan mainstays forced to fight monsters above their level in the dungeon had emerged victorious. Black Tiger had dodged crises by Kuroi's intuition while, at the same time, growing strong by overcoming "absolutely guaranteed-safe hells" again and again.
That intuition had by now reached the realm of minor prophecy, and every single Black Tiger executive trusted Kuroi's ability from the bottom of his heart.
...Thanks to decades of association, and to the sheer power of that impeccably accurate danger prediction, they obeyed almost by reflex.
"I see... hard to swallow on the spot, but... if your unique skill says so, then perhaps there truly is a chance."
Even without detection skills, Onikubo and the rest could see that sitting still meant Black Tiger's destruction. And in this situation, if Kuroi said "doing nothing is doom" and "my danger sense isn't reacting to attacking Karin Yamada"...
When Ouko, vitality restored as if sweeping the despair away, declared his agreement with Kuroi, the rest fell in quickly.
What they gathered was Black Tiger's vital assets, moved to this Okutama base in anticipation of a raid on their Tokyo headquarters—magic items that seal magic equipment, superior to the one Kagerou had used; countless armaments not one of which would go for less than hundreds of millions; equipment and items upon items that could be used against Karin Yamada.
After preparing decoys to fool the police presumably surrounding the base, they pushed through the secret underground passage leading from the Okutama base to Okutama Valley Dungeon.
The deepest point of the hidden passage—usually abused for skipping the upper and middle layers and smuggling monster materials out without a record—ended at an exposed stretch of dungeon wall leading to the very deepest part of the lower layers, and there Black Tiger paused as if to run a final check on the plan.
"Above ground, the detection-specialist Detective Fukusa will be on perimeter watch. Even exploiting the blind spot of an underground entry and running our decoys, our illegal entry into the dungeon will be noticed eventually. Unless my intuition aches, it should be fine, but... let's make this monster hunt swift."
"Yeah."
"Leave tracking Karin Yamada's position and the Anti-Dungeon Division's movements to me."
And as Kuroi and Ouko nodded to each other and Toko Dodomeki activated her remote-position-tracking unique skill—ZORU!
With Ouko at their head, having silently carved through the supposedly impossibly sturdy dungeon wall, they invaded the lower layers of Okutama Valley Dungeon directly.
With Ouko and Kuroi at the front, the eighteen-man main force of one of Japan's strongest clans, multiple level-2000s among them, hardened themselves in cost-be-damned top-grade magical armament, and with tense faces pushed on down the dungeon's dim passages to slay a monster beyond monsters.
...without ever arriving at the realization that, thanks to the utter chaos of everything that had happened, his "intuition" concerning Karin Yamada had come to work strangely, strangely unstably.
〇
"Well, truly—one cannot let one's guard down on the way home from a dungeon either, desu wa. Deep layers nearby or not, who would expect an enhanced hypnosis bat in the deepest part of the lower layers?"
On the way back from the abyss.
Karin, having finished (roughly) processing the Humanoid's dropped materials, had returned to the lower layers while keeping her stream going.
She'd assumed the trip back would hold little worth watching, but she was in high spirits thanks to an unexpected haul.
【She even instantly deleted the enhanced hypnosis bat with weird sound waves, lmao】
【Why is it the ojou-sama emitting weird sound waves instead of the hypnosis bat...】
【Hypnosis-wielding deep-layer enhanced variants are normally instant death, you know】
【Compatibility aside, flattening a deep-layer enhanced variant with voice alone is terrifying, no?】
【Well, at this point no mere deep-layer irregular is doing anything to Japan's guardian deity ojou-sama...】
【Swarming monsters sometimes spawn several enhanced variants at once, so stay sharp, desu wa yo!】
【I was thinking of diving the Okutama Dungeon myself, but it's looking like a watch-and-wait situation, desu wa ne】
@Dungeon Bureau: A... a... the item-box material... has been processed with <Divine Artisan> past the point where anyone else could ever use it... a, a, ahh...
【The director-general's still here, lmao】
【Is that Pokkle getting his brain toyed with by Pitou?】
【May he rest in peace, pretty please】
Despite being the return trip, her concurrents weren't merely holding—they seemed to still be growing—and the comments kept scrolling at a considerable clip. With her inhuman dynamic vision Karin read every last one of them, and perhaps because the allegations had been thoroughly dispelled, there was not a single slur among them.
(Mm-hm. The old atmosphere has come back, hasn't it. There do seem to be rather a lot of comments that, hm... revere? me, but that must be one of the internet's little games... With this, I should be able to keep streaming and delighting everyone from tomorrow onward, desu no!)
Well, she was self-aware enough to know she was worn out from twenty-million-plus concurrents and breaking news, and Mafuyu was bound to tell her to work a rest in.
(Whatever else, I'm already looking forward to the next stream, desu wa.)
Perhaps a touch ahead of herself, Karin smiled softly at the restored peace.
"...Hm? Honoka-sama?"
Just as Karin reached the great hall of the lower layers—
the smartphone streaming her comments announced an incoming call.
It was Honoka, who should have been on security duty at the Okutama Dungeon entrance as an Anti-Dungeon Division member.
"Hellooo? Honoka-sama? You calling me—whatever could this be abou—"
"Karin ojou-sama! Escape from there immediately!"
What rang from the phone was Honoka's frantic scream, enough to cut Karin clean off.
"Don't use the regular route—cut through the wall and go straight up! Detective Fukusa sensed suspicious movement; we'll be storming in soon ourselves—krt."
"Eh? Honoka-sama!? H-huh? The call's gone dead...?"
A vehemence unthinkable from the usual Honoka.
Karin's eyes went round at the abruptly severed call. What on earth had happened? Could something have happened to the Anti-Dungeon Division members on guard above? she wondered—but no.
"H-huh? Not just the phone—the stream's acting strange too... Wh-what is going on, desu no!?"
Looking closer, the streaming screen on her smartphone had gone pitch black.
She thought the floating camera had malfunctioned, but the stream wasn't the only thing that had stopped.
The comment column, which had been pouring past at full throttle, had halted entirely; refresh the screen, and all that appeared was the message "Please connect to the internet."
In other words, the anomaly wasn't above ground. It was here.
Her smartphone had no signal.
"Eh, i-it's broken, desu no!?"
At the sudden turn of events, Karin tried to take spare streaming equipment (gifted by Mitsuki) out of her item box. But—
"Not even the item box... ah, the floating camera too!?"
The item box wouldn't open.
And now even the floating camera had lost its power of flight, its spherical body rolling in Karin's palm. As if its magical functions had been completely sealed.
(This feeling—!?)
Just as Karin's eyes went wide at that sensation she'd met quite recently—no, at the aura of a magic-equipment seal even more powerful than that one, given that even the floating camera's flight was dead—
DOOOOGOOOOOOON!
"!"
A monstrous mass of magic came tearing in at Karin, who had attached the floating camera—its recording function alone still alive—to her dress.
An absurd volume of cannon fire had been unleashed down the multiple passages leading into the hall.
Flame, lightning, even laser-like magic with homing functions came pouring at Karin, in quantities that threatened to bury the entire hall.
"?!"
Reading to perfection the scraps of safe ground left inside the hall, Karin evaded the attack flawlessly. But in that moment—
"HRAAAAAAAAAAAAH!"
"Eh!?"
From within the sea of flame and lightning, a single man clad in heavy armor came leaping out.
Having closed on Karin hidden in the flame and thunder, taking no damage from the magic for some reason, the man swung a black greatsword as tall as himself in a perfect surprise attack.
Karin evaded even that flawlessly—but ZORU!
""
The next instant, Karin's body was pulled in toward the black greatsword's trajectory.
An extremely powerful attraction, as if drawn by the force of crudely carved space trying to return to its original shape. And that pull acted not only on Karin but on the magic raging nearby and on the black greatsword's continuing barrage—
"UORAAAAAAAAAA!"
"!"
The black greatsword's blows, now far faster, and the incoming-drawn magic cannon fire.
That plainly unevadable, vicious combo—Karin, her expression pure bewilderment, nonetheless forced her way clear of. Unlike her refined perfect evasions until now, it was visibly, unmistakably a hair's-breadth escape—
Ouko Onikubo, having his attack dodged, curled his lips at Karin, who had apparently had no choice but to devote herself entirely to evasion.
"Heh... hehh. Dodging that on sight—you really are a monster. But you're clearly at your limits, no counterattack to spare—the abyssal conquest while streaming really wore you out, did it? Kukuku, Kuroi's intuition was spot on. The top-grade magic item's effect has sealed her rule-breaking gear too... this might genuinely work."
"Wh-who on earth ARE you people, desu no!?"
"Haah? Like I'd tell you!"
Ouko's natural reply to Karin's bewildered cry.
"You did as you pleased one time too many. That's all there is to it—you die here and now as payment!"
And once more he hid himself in the raging flame and lightning, raining one-sided space-carving slashes out of it.
"It's working! It's working! However strong she is, she's a child naive to human malice! Pile it on while she's still confused!"
The one shouting that with bloodshot eyes was Kuroi, commanding from the rear.
His face hidden by top-grade equipment like the other executives, and, like them, blazing away wildly with the magic cannon weapon in his hands, he stepped out of the passage into the hall, tightening the encirclement around Karin, who could do nothing but evade.
The plan Kuroi had adopted was an extremely simple one, pouring in the executives' unique skills and every one of Black Tiger's highest-grade magical armaments.
First, activate a communication-suppression device of the kind used even in theaters, rigging things so the ambush couldn't be transmitted above ground. Next, multiple top-tier models of the magic item that nullifies a target's magic-equipment effects fully shut down the functions of Karin Yamada's item box. The rule-breaking magical equipment she kept hidden was completely sealed away.
Then, once the stage was set, what was thrown in were countless magic cannon weapons built on the Dragon Cannon's bombardment capability—magic blades that drink the mana saturating the dungeon to amplify their user's mana severalfold and fire wide-area, high-power magic. Limited in number of uses, but unmatched in power; Kuroi had handed that killer weapon to every executive and was unleashing them all as if to spend every shot surrounding and annihilating Karin.
Ordinarily, power and range that excellent would risk friendly fire, making them poorly suited to encirclement annihilation. But one Black Tiger executive's unique skill, <Child of the Melee>, had raised their performance to fiendish levels.
A rule-breaking power: attacks between allies marked beforehand deal no damage. Thanks to it, Black Tiger fired the cannon weapons with total abandon, sealing off Karin's avenues of escape.
And if their own bombardment did no damage, it also meant that Black Tiger's members alone could move freely through flame and lightning that would normally inflict grievous damage at a touch—in contrast to Karin, her movement heavily constrained by the barrage, they were free to rampage as they pleased.
"ORAAAAAAAAAAA!"
From inside the flame and lightning Karin's hands couldn't reach, Ouko poured his powerful slashes down on her, one-sidedly.
Normally, against an opponent who could fell an abyssal boss unharmed—equipment or no—even if attacks landed, who could say how many hundreds of hits a level 2900 would need to finish her. But—
(My unique skill is <Subspace Excision>! A thing that carves space away with limbs or weapon! My one point of difference from that abyssal boss is that the cut is fairly crude, so everything around me except myself gets dragged in... but an attack that carves away space itself becomes a certain-kill blow no defense means anything against!)
Ouko's unique skill was the severance of space.
With it, he could carve away dungeon walls without the slightest impact, entering and leaving dungeons without leaving records. A monstrous power: alone, he could slip through the carved-away space into subspace for the briefest of moments and enter a dungeon without digging at all.
With that rare unique, Ouko had kept felling monsters above his level and climbed to strength counted (officially) among Japan's strongest explorers.
Throwing that far-from-hollow power at Karin with everything he had, Kuroi clenched his fist—"Yes...!"
(Right now you're blocking Karin Yamada's counterattack by striking one-sidedly from within the sea of flame and lightning! And even if she counters, that full-body armor is forged from Insect Warrior Impact's carapace—complete impact absorption! It would take more than a few blows, and with her rule-breaking gear sealed, Karin Yamada cannot finish you quickly! Press aggressively and keep her reeling!)
Karin Yamada's weakness is her mentality!
Batter a girl worn down by a stream past twenty million concurrents with human malice, and she is certain to crumble!
The proof: Karin's face, glimpsed now and then through gaps in the bombardment, was nothing but bewilderment, with not a shred of composure to spare.
"Just keep piling it on! One blow from Ouko and it's our win! She's a monster! Drive her into the ground without a shred of mercy! She's rattled by our killing intent right now! Break her through in one push! Unlike the item box, drawing weapons from inside her body takes time! Pile it on so hard she has no such opening!"
"Karin Yamada's coordinates—drifting west! Thicken the barrage over there so she can't slip away! The Anti-Dungeon Division has reached the middle layers! Given that Ouko-san's unique has already wrecked the regular routes, they'll still need time! Fire calmly and carefully—but do NOT let up!"
"Homing magic skill—<Mighty Rounds, Marvel Rounds>!"
"Homing-grant skill—<Homing Bullet>!"
Toko Dodomeki's sharp-eared command support, and supplementary fire from the executives with homing magic.
Coordination worthy of a boss battle, or better, hammered down without a single gap, and just as Kuroi said, bewilderment unlike any ever seen floated over Karin's face.
(...! Who ARE these people, truly...!?)
Sheer confusion at eighteen people hammering attack after attack steeped in nothing but killing intent into her, without so much as a proper conversation. She had crossed any number of death-grounds with monsters, but this was the first time other human beings had turned such concentrated malice on her.
(Crush me here...!? And these attacks—they truly mean to defeat me...!? They want me dead, here—they are serious, desu no!? Such... such a thing—)
—then, surveying the eighteen encircling her once more,
(to say such things and yet be this weak...!! Utterly... too weak...!!)
—she simply went on, as she had been, deepening her bewilderment.
Because what they said about coming to defeat her and the strength they actually showed matched not at all.
(Eh? Eh? What is truly going on, desu no!? If someone is doing something in this situation, it could only be Black Tiger's people, could it not!? And yet for a clan counted among Japan's strongest coming all this way to defeat me, what they are doing is far, FAR too shabby, desu wa!)
Well, yes, the magic bombardment blanketing the hall is a nuisance, and the armored man who for some reason charges in unharmed with his spatial-severing attacks demands caution. Truthfully, that pull at the first blow did startle her a little.
But if a clan of Japan's strongest class were seriously setting out to crush her, surely they would at least—yes—fire off a vaporize-the-whole-dungeon beam, or tame a pit boss from beyond even the abyss and set it on her! She had seen it in Dungeon Alive!
(And yet these people plainly have no such strength, and their equipment is shabby. Their limit should be meddling with the floating camera to cut the stream—sabotage of that sort... and if that were their aim, the timing of this assault is far too late...)
The more she thought, the less she understood what these attackers wanted.
Her confusion only deepened, and Kuroi, seeing that face, raised yet another cry of delight—"She's panicking! We've got this!"—as the misreading loop rolled on.
(Wh-what should I do... I could defeat them whenever I pleased, but with strength THIS shabby, they might well be poor, pitiable cannon fodder threatened into harassing me by the real Black Tiger-sama... Eh, what on earth am I to do, desu no!?)
If you cannot understand what is happening, you cannot very well strike... her movements dulled with that hesitation, and her evasions grew a shade dangerous—and it was right then.
"———————"
It was when the detection skill Karin had been running hot for evasion caught that presence.
Beyond the passages leading off the hall.
What stood there was the second enhanced hypnosis bat the viewers had predicted.
Wary, perhaps, of the colossal magic bombardment that could easily blow away even deep-layer bosses—or else terrified of Karin, who had so one-sidedly hunted its kin moments before.
The enhanced hypnosis bat quietly slipped away from the hall—but,
"Ah!"
I see—so THAT is what this was!
The presence her detection had snared brought the answer to the ever-bewildered Karin.
It was a simple thing.
The eighteen attackers' true purpose remained unknown—but the reason they had come at her with strength this shabby was now perfectly clear.
(These people—did they catch the enhanced hypnosis bat's hypnosis magic in the middle of some operation or other, desu no!?)
Karin was certain.
Well, for a state of hallucination and confusion, the attackers' responses and coordination did seem a touch too well put together... but an enhanced variant was another matter. It could surely manage complex hypnosis. Honestly, the attackers were so weak that no other explanation for the assault even presented itself.
She had been calling them weak, weak this whole while, but that was strictly a relative judgment, premised on their meaning to crush her. As her detection parsed them, they had strength of their own; they did not seem like people unable to gauge the gap between themselves and an opponent. Normally, no one picks a fight across a difference in power this vast.
Therefore: the attackers being in a state of hallucination and confusion was all but confirmed.
Knowing that, there was only one measure to take, to save them from this vicious status condition.
(Until the hypnosis breaks, I must simply keep delivering strong impacts, desu no!)
"Hah? What've you been muttering about this whole time? Or have you finally grasped the situation?"
"Yes! I understand everything, perfectly and completely!"
To Ouko's puzzled growl, Karin answered in a voice without a shadow of doubt.
"I'll save you right now, desu wa!"
BEKI-BEKI! GOKI-GOKI!
To rescue these people fallen into the dire situation of a powerful hypnosis attack in the lower layers, Karin cracked her knuckles as if to steel herself afresh.
—while pouring a colossal stream of mana into the item box that was supposed to have been functionally stopped.