chapter03 · 088-ep88
Episode 85: Genocide Ojou-sama!
The lower layers of Okutama Valley Dungeon had become a hell of screaming.
"Someone, anyone! Someone save m—"
"Yes! I'll save you right now, desu wa!"
DOGOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOON!!
The screams of executives of Black Tiger, truly one of Japan's strongest clans, and the intermittent shocks of murderous fists dealt out to them without a word of dialogue rang on and on, with the crunch of shattering bones echoing everywhere.
And what you could hear from the depths of the gloom wasn't only the death cries of Black Tiger's executives, several of whom exceeded level 2000.
"Now, next I'm coming your way, desu wa~!"
"I'll catch up with you shortly, desu no~!"
"I know where every one of you is, so rest assured, desu wa!"
Great shouts that might have been encouraging rescuees—or else might have been cornering prey mentally—echoed through the lower-layer passages, coming from every direction at once.
"Hah...! Hah...! Hah...!"
And through that horror-movie hell of a lower layer ran a shadow at full speed, breath ragged, hair in wild disarray.
One of Black Tiger's executives.
Toko Dodomeki, her usual composure cast off entirely.
Detection-specialized she might be, but she was over level 900, and with various magic equipment boosting her, she displayed formidable physical ability. She carved monsters to pieces with her favorite knife, at times let off blasts from her magic cannon weapon, and raced through the lower layers at tremendous speed.
All to outpace the monster coming to punch them to death under the pretext of "lifting your hypnosis"!
But—
"Hah...! Hah...! No way... what IS this... no... nooo!"
She couldn't feel herself escaping at all!
By her unique skill, which keeps tracking the position of anyone she has once seen, Toko grasped Karin's position and movement speed with precision. Thanks to it she could pick the route that kept the most distance from Karin, and she had somehow kept fleeing until now... but that superb unique skill also pressed Karin's abnormal specs squarely upon her.
The absurd movement speed of <Demonic Dragon Armor: Storm Style>.
The detection accuracy that plunged straight toward the other Black Tiger members without a moment's hesitation.
Feeling all of that information more clearly than she could bear, Toko's heart was already all but broken.
There was no running from this.
She almost wanted to sever the remote sensing itself, receiving this flood of terror.
"N-no... I can't... if I cut that monster's marking now, I'd have no way of knowing where she'd come from...! It would only shorten the time until I'm caught...!"
Even so, knowing the enemy's position did nothing to make escape to the surface seem possible. What on earth was she supposed to do?
"R-right...! The Anti-Dungeon Division...! If I beg the Anti-Dungeon Division for help...!"
Cornered, Toko remembered her other marking target—the Anti-Dungeon Division's key members, pushing toward them.
"The Division are Karin Yamada's sympathizers; even if they found our corpses, they might hush it up...! But surely if they saw Karin Yamada trying to kill us with their own eyes, they'd stop her...! Honestly, going by how devoted to her they seem, that's doubtful, but they're the police, for what that's worth! Better odds than being caught by Karin Yamada in this witness-free lower layer!"
Yes.
Even if running all the way to the surface was hopeless, linking up with the Anti-Dungeon Division barreling toward them might still work. Survival would remain a long-shot gamble either way, but it was far better than fleeing blindly on.
Decided, she worked out the fastest route to join the Division while avoiding Karin's direction—and,
"Hello, hello, testing, testing—can you hear me, I wonder?"
"...........................Hah?"
It was when Karin Yamada's voice abruptly resounded inside her own head that Toko Dodomeki finally concluded her brain must have broken from fear.
"Ah, I thought it connected. I'd been feeling I was being watched now and then for a while now—and I see, you're tracking my position with a detection skill, aren't you? I thought it strange. Among all of you, yours was the one presence that kept moving, accurately, away from me."
"............!? !?!?!?"
What!? What IS this!?
Hah!? Don't tell me she's sending thought-waves straight through the mana I emit for position tracking!?
While Toko's legs gave out on the spot at the utterly incomprehensible situation, the voice in her head showed no sign of stopping.
"It seems conversation isn't possible, though, desu wa. But even in a hallucination, a voice that resounds directly in your head like this will surely convey my intent. And so—I've now pinned down your position with a thorough reverse-trace, and I shall come rescue you as priority before you open the gap too far for me to follow! So rest assured, plea—"
"NYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!"
Before any thought could form, instinct-driven terror made Toko cut her marking of Karin. And with it, Karin's voice, too, cut off dead.
She really—she really had been speaking directly into her head through the position-tracking skill!?
What kind of logic is THAT!? Did she use some other insane piece of magic equipment!?
"I-I—more importantly... run... I have to run...! That monster is coming to kill... me...!"
Trembling before a death sentence, Toko dragged herself upright. But—
"Wh-where... which way do I even run...!?"
She couldn't tell how to flee.
Having cut her marking of Karin, she couldn't know Karin's position until she laid eyes on her again. Normally it would be as simple as going opposite to where Karin had just been... but at that movement speed, her position of seconds ago was worth nothing as a reference.
"S-sitting still is the worst move! For now, toward the Anti-Dungeon Divisi—"
"Found you, desu wa."
""
Her heart very nearly stopped.
How long had she been frozen under the shock of the reverse-trace and the mental call?
From beyond the dungeon's gloom there stood an ojou-sama in a dress, wreathed in a terrifyingly quiet storm.
Her figure was, in a word, 'bizarre.'
Black Tiger's executives—genuine Japan's-strongest members, several beyond level 2000, over ten of them beaten already, Ouko included—were floating around Karin, battered and rope-bound.
It looked for all the world like a bunch of bloodied human grapes.
At the sight of Karin, like Count Dracula impaling enemy soldiers to crush their will to fight, Toko slumped to the floor where she stood.
"Ah... aah..."
SPLOOOOSH!
At the sheer terror, her pride and her dignity and everything else came pouring out.
But this was no time to worry about that,
"N-no, wait—stop—please listen, Karin ojou-sama! It's true we attacked you, but that was all Kuroi! We tried to stop him! B-but Kuroi—he was the one, it was all—"
"Yes, yes, I see, don't I."
Karin nodded along at Toko's desperate begging for her life.
"So that's the shape of the hypnosis they put you under—the 'it was all Kuroi' setting, is it? Oh—and I'll tell no one of your little accident, and I'll take proper measures so it's never discovered, so rest assured, desu wa!"
Ah. No use. Nothing gets through to this monster.
With that world-weary thought as her last—DOGOOOOOOOOOOOOOON!
Toko Dodomeki's consciousness cut off there.
And so, one by one, Black Tiger's mightiest were "saved," even as clan master Kuroi ran himself ragged through the lower layers, drenched in sweat.
"What!? What IS this!? What is going ON!?"
Clutching at his head, Kuroi howled, face a portrait of total incomprehension.
"It's wrong... why has it come to this!? My intuition never ached once...! A collapse like this was absolutely impossible... it could never have turned into this trampling...!"
The cause of his confusion was, first and foremost, Karin Yamada's absurd strength—and, just as much, his own unique skill, which had failed to detect this worst of all possible outcomes.
Why on earth—why could he not foresee a nightmare future like this?
If only my men hadn't broken and run there, we could have buried Karin Yamada then and there... he considered for a moment, but the hypothesis soon evaporated. His unique skill would have predicted and warned even against the outcome of his men fleeing and being crushed individually.
He cannot see concrete futures the way a true precognitive can, but on the single point of warning him of crises in advance, that skill's performance is beyond peer.
Despite which, the reality before him made no sense to Kuroi none at all.
"Damn it! DAMN IT! But it's not over! I am not finished yet!"
His physical abilities buttressed by top-grade equipment, Kuroi shouted to rouse himself as he forced his way through the lower layers.
"Something has changed—or else even considering overseas escape, my intuition has stopped aching! Honestly, even then it looks nothing but a losing bet to me—but the buds of a comeback have surely sprouted! I'll escape this hell and rebuild, no matter what!"
Losing nearly everything he'd built up over the years hurt beyond bearing, but some assets lay sleeping abroad as well. Overseas is a proving ground crowded with powerful explorers, and the standing to be had there would be lower than what he held now. But with this peerless danger-detection skill, revival is possible anywhere!
And before such a Kuroi there appeared a vast, many-branched crossroads.
Having lost detection-adept Toko, choosing a route that avoided Karin Yamada and the Anti-Dungeon Division seemed impossible. But—
"My danger sense serves at times like these as well. Pick the path where the intuition doesn't ache—or else the one where it aches weakest!"
And so Kuroi stepped a single foot onto each path in turn, testing whether his intuition answered.
But,
"...Hah?"
Finished testing the safety of the branches, Kuroi stood frozen in place.
"Why... why does the intuition fail me on EVERY path!? It warns of no danger whatsoever!?"
It was an impossible state of affairs.
Even were every option a route brimming with top-grade danger, by the strength or weakness of the intuition he should at least be able to choose the least terrible path!
If all paths were equally dangerous, well and good—but for the intuition to answer on no path at all, in this situation, was past senseless and into pure terror.
"Why!? Why!? What is happening!? What am I to do now!? Which way am I to go!?"
The unbroken string of malfunctions from the powerful skill he had trusted since the day he became an explorer.
The composure he had kept alive by the conviction that with this unique skill, anything could be managed, finally crumbled, and a boundless anxiety came bearing down on him all at once.
And then,
"Phew. The last one at last, desu no! I'm so glad everyone's rescue made it in time before the monsters could take you!"
"...Hah!?"
At the voice from behind him, Kuroi whirled around, aghast.
"...!? Wh-why have you caught up already!?"
What stood there was a madwoman wreathed in a terrifyingly quiet storm.
Karin Yamada, hauling the 'corpses' (not corpses) of seventeen battered Black Tiger members behind her as if to say "you're next in line for this."
"Wh... aat...!?"
Wrong... it's absolutely wrong!
Why did my intuition not ache as this woman closed in!?
Not only that.
The moment we decided on the ambush; the moment we opened fire on her—there was no shortage of moments the intuition SHOULD have cried out! Why does it fail so completely against this one woman!?
"I—I've got it...!? I see—that's it!"
Before a death-terror so absolute his very hair had begun to fall out, Kuroi's brain spun past panic and into overdrive, arriving at the conclusion that had been a blind spot for no reason other than Karin Yamada's power being too vast.
"Ha—how simple it all is! Ha, hahahahahaha! My danger-sense intuition failing to fire means this 'desperate situation' is no danger to me whatsoever!"
Saying so, Kuroi released every weapon he carried.
"Yes! That's it! The intuition not firing when we decided on the ambush, when I chose at the crossroads, and now—means I can defeat YOU! In other words, this was the route where, in place of my men and assets, I take your head and build a standing firmer than ever before as the Emperor of Darkness! Ha, haha—think calmly, and chasing down and crushing every executive after an abyssal broadcast must cost her dearly—so this is nothing but a golden opportunity!"
The conviction of victory.
Having found his one-shot reversal route, Kuroi spun his mana up with everything he had.
"Truly, this danger sense is a unique without equal. After all, it lets me confirm the correct answer lying beyond a route that looks like nothing but ruin—one any ordinary man would be certain to avoid! Though I've drifted somewhat from the front lines as clan master, I am level 2000! Even against a monster, with every weapon I've gathered here, striking while she's spent—victory is possible!"
Into his weapons he poured one-blow-certain-kill mana.
With body and soul entire, Kuroi committed to a do-or-die charge.
"You picked the wrong opponent, Karin Yamada! This is your gra—"
"Yes, yes, that's the hallucination talking, desu no."
DOGOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOON!
"Gahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!?"
The next instant, fist to face, Kuroi was slammed into the dungeon wall with tremendous force. An injury bordering on a caved-in face; keeping consciousness at all was touch and go. Damage that made continuing to fight impossible.
"Gah... ah...!? Wh-why... why...!?"
I was supposed to WIN this fight—Kuroi, genuinely bewildered, writhed under hellish pain, and from overhead a voice came falling down, without a hint of exhaustion in it.
"Really now. Hypnosis bat-sama should show far more realistic hallucinations. The head of a Japan's-strongest clan could never possibly be THIS weak... —eh!? I-I of all people grew careless, assuming you were the last one, desu wa!? This person was wearing damage-reducing magic equipment, wasn't he! I meant to knock him out in a single blow, since the hypnosis was proving hard to break... My apologies, desu wa! I'll ease your pain right away, desu no!"
"Aah... aah... s... stop..."
At Karin's words, unmistakably meant as a finishing blow, a voice leaked from Kuroi with his pride and everything else in ruins. But Karin was hardly about to stop now—
"WHYYY!? With an absolute danger sense, WHYYY has it come to thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis!?"
DOOOGOOOOOOOOOOOOON!
The terror of being trampled by an incomprehensible being, the reality of everything he had built collapsing, the chaos of his lifeline unique skill failing him utterly—as all of it bore down at once in a despair without precedent, the very moment his heart broke, an extraordinary shock detonated inside Kuroi's body.
With his prolonged agony thanks to that half-excellent magic equipment of his, Kuroi's consciousness sank into the dark.
—Later, the Anti-Dungeon Division's detection-specialist detective Yoichi Fukusa, who handled Black Tiger's interrogation, put it this way:
"Ahh, I see... with a danger-sensing unique skill that powerful, they'd been dodging every crisis all this time—arrests, irregular monster encounters, the lot—which is how they scaled the organization up so fast. So this time too, they convinced themselves they could beat Karin ojou-sama, and that's how they came to commit this outrage."
"But you know, that type of superb detection skill has a weakness. Just like how I couldn't read Karin ojou-sama's level—against an overwhelmingly superior being, it simply stops functioning."
"This is only a hypothesis, but Kuroi's unique skill could probably detect indirect crises—'crises arising from Karin ojou-sama continuing her activities,' like arrest by the now-expanded Anti-Dungeon Division, or the clan being shrunk and dismantled—but it couldn't sense far enough to reach the future of getting utterly clobbered BY Karin ojou-sama herself, so he charged headlong into the worst possible option. Or maybe Karin ojou-sama is simply so far beyond spec that the skill glitched."
"Powerful unique skills are a mixed blessing, really. The more excellent they are, the later you discover their weaknesses and their spec limits; you can't break out of the accumulated record of successes, and you end up repeating your sure-win pattern on autopilot—and by the time you notice, you've made a fatal blunder."
And so, on this day.
Black Tiger, one of Japan's truly strongest clans, met its effective dissolution, its principal members annihilated and arrested.
〇
"Whew. Somehow, I have managed to save every single one of them, desu wa!"
After putting Kuroi fully under.
Karin let out a great breath, a job well done.
"Now. All that remains is to carry everyone to a hospital on the surface... but even explorers, with all their raised recuperative power, mustn't have their bones knitting in strange directions, so I had best re-do the ropes, hadn't I."
Karin set the Black Tiger members gently down on the ground and untied the ropes.
And it was right then—
"!? Wh-what IS this flood of incoming calls, desu no!?"
The communication-suppression device had presumably been Kuroi's.
Broken by the shock of Karin's fist, communications across the whole area recovered.
The smartphone on Karin's arm buzzed in wave after ceaseless wave.
What the center of the screen displayed was the log of calls made to Karin since the connection had died:
Kamishiro Honoka: 20 missed calls Sasaki Mafuyu: 15 missed calls Mitsuki: 126 missed calls
And with the signal back, the comments on her frozen stream began to flow again.
【C'mon, it's STILL not connecting!?】
【This is seriously bad! Something definitely happened!】
【They're saying the Anti-Dungeon Division stormed in—let's just calm down and wait it out!】
【This is Karin ojou-sama, the one who charged the abyss! Nothing could happen to her in the lower layers!】
【It's gotta be an equipment problem!】
【But this stream was prepped against Black Tiger interference, right...? Cutting the comms would take them doing something to her directly inside the dungeon...】
【Worried about Karin ojou-sama here, but Mitsuki-sama ran off shouting 'It was definitely those garbage bastards!' with a sword in hand—no telling what that runaway made-in-Japan ojou-sama might do, it's bad!】
【Is Karin ojou-sama all right!?】
【Ojou-sama, please be saaaaaaaafe!】
"A-awawa...!"
At the sheer volume of voices worrying over her, Karin trembled.
(R-right—an event like the feed suddenly cutting out mid-dungeon-stream was bound to worry everyone, wasn't it! F-first I must at least let them know I am safe, or it won't be Elegant, desu no!)
Karin hurriedly reconnected the floating camera.
Setting it afloat, she resumed the stream.
"Everyone, I am terribly sorry for the worry! As you can see, I am completely, entirely fine, desu wa~!"
【!】
【!!】
【Ojou-samaaaaaaaa!】
【Th-thank goodneeeeeeeess!】
【See, I told you nothing could happen to ojou-sama in the lower layers!】
【↑this guy was suuuper pessimistic in his past comments, LMAO】
【WAAAAAAAH! What a relief, desu waaaaaa!】
【After finally blowing those allegations away, dying would've been no laughing matter—SO relieved, desu no!】
【Somebody tell Mitsuki-sama fast and stop that runaway made-in-Japan ojou-sama!】
@Mitsuki: Ojou-samaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!
【Guess there's no need now, desu wa!】
The comment section exploded at the sight of Karin in full health.
Karin breathed out in relief at the scene... but immediately after.
【Hm? Eh, wait, um, eh, what is that...?】
【Hah?】
【Wait】
【O-oi oi...】
【Eh, are there... dead people there?】
【Karin ojou-sama, what is that field of corpses behind you, desu no!?】
【Eek...!?】
"Eh"
The mood of the comment section changed in an instant.
Eh? What is it? —and looking properly at her own stream screen, what sat framed neatly behind Karin was Black Tiger's members, strewn about bloodied. With no explanation offered, it was the very picture of a massacre scene—and,
【U-um... isn't this... what they call... caught in the act...?】
【Eh, wait—lots of these faces are caved in so I can't be sure, but isn't this Black Tiger's principal members!?】
【Hah!? What is this!?】
【(This is bad, right...?)】
【Oi, don't tell me Tiger's main force got wholesale slaughtered here!?】
【Every last one of them with a fist-sunken face... and the ojou-sama's fists dyed bright red...】
【C-could this be... Black Tiger, desperate, went for an ambush, and ojou-sama counter-killed them to a man... that sort of thing...?】
【Not only forgetting to end her stream—she goes and accidentally restarts the broadcast herself right after the slaughter. Ain't that something (voice shaking)】
【W-well, if it's Black Tiger, (accidentally killing them) is fine by me...】
【A-anyway, Karin ojou-sama, now Genocide Defendant Yamada, had best be made to faithfully perform her 'civic duty'...】
¥50,000 @Attorney Mitsurugi
E-erm... judging at a glance, this appears to be a situation where Black Tiger, driven desperate by Karin ojou-sama's abyssal floor-1 conquest, ambushed her and was countered. Furthermore, Karin ojou-sama, explorer though she may be, is a minor. Ordinarily homicide carries no suspended sentence, but... even allowing for possible excessive self-defense—surrounded inside a dungeon by this many—winning a reduced sentence or a suspended one looks entirely feasible, so if you should so wish, I will take the defense; and depending on circumstances, there is even the option of using the superchat payouts once they process to assemble a yet finer defense team...
"N-no, desu nooooooooooooooooooooo! I haven't killed a single—w-well, I certainly did pummel them most thoroughly, but... th-there are circumstances, desu nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!"
Grasping that an accusation vaster by far than "all your achievements were staged" was now on the table, Karin went pale and screamed at the top of her lungs.
Fortunately, the floating camera's purely mechanical recording function had survived its flight failure, and the footage of Black Tiger's condition and the battle with them was later released in full. Karin proved her innocence—if anything, of brilliantly repelling an ambush with the bare minimum of counterforce—but the footage's impact was, presumably, too strong.
On top of the abyssal sortie, as the monster who had beaten a Japan's-strongest-class clan to a pulp, Karin came away with yet another un-Elegant epithet: "Genocide Ojou-sama."
――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――
The †Emperor of Darkness†, who panicked so hard he turned absurdly eloquent despite not being a streamer.
And with that, the deep-layer arc (and not just the deep layers), which ran far longer than intended, is complete. Next time is the live-reaction forum thread for the released footage, and the time after that a regular forum thread. After that, the main story resumes, desu no.
So if you found it enjoyable, I would be delighted if you'd hit the ☆ below or follow from the top-right menu so more people can read it! Where I land in the rankings changes the number of new ojou-sama readers completely, desu wa!