ch61-ch80 · 081-ch80

Chapter 80

Bulge, crackle, grind — Strange sounds echoed as Seno Kyohei's body metamorphosed, and Shirazawa Kana stared in blank disbelief. She wasn't the only one — Yuki, and everyone else, couldn't grasp the meaning of what was happening in front of them, and forgetting themselves was unavoidable.

That there was a teleport trap in the hidden room — fine, she could accept that, a hundred steps of concession.

For a third-floor trap, it was nasty, but if it was the kind that randomly teleported in monsters from other floors, then they'd just gotten an unlucky roll. She could accept that.

But — what was this?

How, exactly, did a human body swell up while making those sounds... and how did a hundred-seventy-five-centimeter height balloon to two and a half meters?

The hand-and-a-half sword Seno had been holding lay on the floor. Broken, sure, but clearly the one he'd always used. He absolutely had not picked up some cursed sword.

"Gah, ah, aah — AAAAAAaagh—!!"

A roar like someone had strung wire through his throat and was plucking it.

A voice that oozed visceral disgust and an unquestionable threat — the kind of voice that could only come from something fundamentally Other than them.

That finally yanked Kana's consciousness and thoughts back into her body.

"Retreat! Yuki-kun, the president and Takahashi-san! Maeno-san, with me—"

The words — meant to draw the thing-that-had-been-Seno — never made it to the end.

Maeno, screaming, broke into a run first, and Seno closed the distance and slammed a hit into her back that sent her flying. It looked like the involuntary motion of swatting at something that moved too close — not even a full-force swing.

Even so, Maeno's body sailed about fifteen meters down the unobstructed straight corridor, hit the floor, and kept rolling.

"Re... treat...? Retreat... why would we retreat...?"

The thing-that-had-been-Seno said, in something like Seno's tone. The vocalization of a lion forced to talk through the rumble in its throat.

"Seno-kun! What... what's happening to you?!"

Leaping to put distance from Seno, Kana called out for now. Not because she thought dialogue might work if he still had his wits — but because it might buy even a sliver of time.

Crackle, crackle — the strange sounds stopped.

Both shoulders had widened bizarrely to either side, the upper arms oddly thin while everything from the elbow down was freakishly thick. The chest was swollen, but the waist was narrow. The waist, hips, and thighs were still close to their original size — his pants had survived. But from the knee down, the thickness and silhouette called to mind a demon-type or gargoyle-like monster.

A chimera of beast and man.

That was the impression at a glance.

"...Shirazawaa..."

A low growl rumbled in his throat. His skin had hardened into a stone-like texture, his chin jutting out like a horn, his mouth torn up almost to his ears, and the eyes hidden beneath his bulging brow were glowing gold.

Only the sky-blue streaked tips of his hair still strongly preserved the old Seno Kyohei.

"Shirazawa Kana. And you... are Seno Kyohei-kun...?"

Thump, thump — hearing her own heart pound loud enough to be obvious, Kana confirmed at the edge of her vision that President Hatoba and former-camera-operator Takahashi were being helped up by Yuki. Hatoba seemed to have come to, and was staring at Seno's back in shock. Takahashi had apparently grasped the situation first — like a person in a horror movie hiding from a monster, he had a hand pressed over his mouth, holding his breath.

"...Shirazawa... Hayasaka... Hayasaka Toru... I, me, am..."

Muttering — though "muttering" undersells it, the voice was loud — Seno raised his enormous right hand and pressed it against his own head. Like he was fighting off a headache.

Beyond that beast, Hatoba and Takahashi quietly stood. Yuki was looking at Kana with concern, but being concerned wouldn't improve the situation by a millimeter.

The mana pressure radiating from the thing-that-had-been-Seno was, by any reckoning, A-rank or above. Far more intense — and far more abhorrent — than the Gold Bear that had just appeared.

Hah, hah, hah — the sound of ragged breathing.

In this tense situation, the noise felt gratingly out of place — until Kana realized it was her own breathing, and almost broke into a wry smile. Her knees were trembling; given any excuse, she'd collapse, cover her eyes and ears, and scream bloody hell.

But she couldn't do that.

Because Hayasaka Toru wouldn't.

"Haya... saka...?"

Growling, the beast muttered, then released the hand that had been gripping his head, stared at it vaguely for a moment — and then growled again.

...Probably — he'd laughed.

As if he'd become aware of his own transformation.

In those golden eyes — not reason, but something like self-awareness, lit up. Reason, he probably didn't have. Because the mouth torn open to his ears had shaped itself into a smile.

"I see... Shirazawa. If I kill you... Hayasaka's gonna be pissed, isn't hee."

In an instant.

The two-and-a-half-meter beast was right in front of her.

◇◇◇

She'd fallen for Hayasaka Toru in middle school.

Incredibly enough, Hayasaka himself mistakenly thought they'd first become classmates in high school — but they'd actually been in the same class in middle school too.

It was just — back in middle school, Kana hadn't been a Shirazawa.

Kana's father was a mean, cunning little coward who used to hit her mother often. Her mother was the now-uncommon "stand by your man" type — she'd obeyed her father's nonsensical logic, taken the beatings and the verbal abuse and bowed her head, and then afterward apologized to Kana with "I'm sorry."

No, that's wrong. I don't want an apology.

Mom, you should divorce that man ASAP.

By late elementary school, Kana had started thinking like that, and being at home had become agonizing. But she loved her mom, felt sorry for her, and couldn't bring herself to abandon the family as "trash."

Whether fortunately or not, her mother had a friend.

A man who was her mother's childhood friend — an uncle Kana had liked since she was small. Unlike her father, he was kind. He'd bought Kana all sorts of things, and though she learned this only later, when her father had been giving the family only a bare-minimum living allowance, this uncle had apparently been providing economic support on the sly.

From what she was told, in college her mother had been "stolen away" by her father, and before anyone knew it, Kana had been born. In short — the uncle had his childhood friend girl stolen from him.

Kana ended up feeling a little contempt for her mother, who'd chosen that awful father over the kind uncle. But still — call it the bond of blood, or the result of the love her mother had poured into her — she couldn't bring herself to hate her mom.

Looking back at herself, Kana figured she had no right to loudly denounce her mother.

After all — she hadn't been able to raise her voice against her father's petty cruelties either.

Around the time she entered middle school, Kana was thinking about getting a recommendation into a famous, faraway high school. Her father was a man who put on a good face for the outside world, so he'd have had no choice but to praise a daughter who'd produced results. She worried about her mom being left behind at home, but Kana staying home didn't seem to do much good.

Whether Kana was home or not, her father would have kept piling small acts of DV onto her mother. In fact, even after she'd graduated from elementary school, the verbal abuse, the contempt, the emotional harassment from her father toward her mother hadn't stopped. It had even reached Kana — meaning, she'd... wanted to escape.

One day, she saw something ugly at school.

A much-younger Seno Kyohei had started in on Hayasaka Toru as a target for annoying harassment. The reason — she didn't know, and didn't want to know.

At first it was small stuff. Dropping Hayasaka's name into the middle of a conversation and laughing uproariously, deliberately bumping shoulders in passing and playing up how much it hurt. While people let those little things slide because they were a hassle, the behavior slowly escalated.

Hayasaka Toru hadn't put up with it.

Around the point where onlookers were starting to think this had crossed a line, Hayasaka — without caring who was watching — had said outright, "Do it one more time and I'll punch you in the face."

Hayasaka Toru wasn't a particularly conspicuous kid in class. He wasn't the sort of person you'd categorize as "outgoing." He didn't have a lot of friends. Quiet, the kind of person who never laughed with a big voice. That was probably why he'd been picked as a target.

And he'd pinned Seno down with a perfectly ordinary face.

Seno probably hadn't expected to be called out like that. Bullying a quiet kid in class for fun and getting openly counterattacked — that wasn't something people accustomed to degrading others could've imagined.

Result: Seno's nose had been broken.

Because Hayasaka Toru had done exactly what he said.

He'd warned him. Seno had ignored it, sneering at Hayasaka with a smirk. So he'd punched him, no hesitation.

She remembered the classroom erupting. There was a lot of blood, and Seno's face as he clutched his nose in pain had stuck with her.

It was the face of someone saying — my dignity has been injured. A victim's face.

In that moment, Kana felt as though light had pierced through a gap in the thick clouds covering the inside of her heart. She'd been saved, she thought.

You have to fight back against someone who crosses the line.

It's just a matter of where you draw it.

If you can't draw lines, you'll end up enduring it until you die.

After that, Kana leaned on her uncle, piled up evidence of her father's DV. Her uncle hired a lawyer, persuaded her mother, and managed to finalize the divorce.

Her father's actions left evidence everywhere — once she decided to fight, he was nothing more than a legal weakling. No division of assets, no claim on child support, all future contact forbidden — and so her parents divorced. About a year and a half later, her Shirazawa uncle married her mother.

The kind uncle became a kind father.

Kana, now Kana Shirazawa, entered a local high school — and spotting Hayasaka Toru, who'd gone to the same high school... she'd waited for the right moment and confessed.

The days that followed were, without a doubt, happy for Kana.

Walking with the person she loved, talking, holding hands, hugging, holding each other. Being treasured, treasuring in return. Ahh — the world didn't require going out of your way to look down on others or despise them. There was plenty of fun, plenty of joy, wasn't there?

— If only the 'Dungeon Rampage' hadn't happened.

If only that hadn't happened, they'd have gone to the same college, not become explorers, and peaceful happy days would've continued. Hayasaka Toru surely wouldn't have shied from the effort of keeping it that way. Neither would Kana.

『If you're an explorer, there's probably something I can do to help... I think. My contact info hasn't changed, so if you're really in trouble, get in touch.』

She remembered.

No — that was wrong.

This was — a flashback. The kind you see right before you die.

She'd heard about it somewhere. When a person is on the verge of death, the brain supposedly spins at full power searching for hints on how to avoid death, or something. Whether that was true, she had no idea. But — she'd found the hint to survive this crisis.

◇◇◇

If she'd let that beast's thrusting arm go, she'd have been grabbed by the throat and hoisted into the air. Her life would've been snuffed out easily.

So she slipped half a step left, barely dodging the arm, pulled a short whip from her magic bag, took another step in, and slammed the whip across the beast's face.

Aside from her usual chain whip, she kept a Russian nagaika — basically a club-like whip — as a sub-weapon. She'd picked the whip because she hated close combat, but in the end, getting closed on was getting closed on. So she'd gone with a short whip, which handled similarly — and it turned out to be a fairly vicious weapon.

Of course, she didn't expect it to do anything against something that had become an A-rank-or-above monster.

But — if this beast was still Seno, then getting hit in the face might still bother him.

"Bah— gih!"

It wasn't pain, but a "I hate that" growl — the beast clutched his face. Kana didn't hesitate; she broke into a run toward Yuki and the others, shouting to their still-shocked faces.

"Twenty seconds! Buy me twenty seconds — even while running!"

She kept running as she said it, blowing past Yuki and the others and down the corridor.

She didn't look back. Whether they bought her time or not, what she had to do didn't change. Pulling the mobile terminal from a holster on her belt — not the magic bag — she called Hayasaka Toru.

The only reason she'd been able to call without hesitation was that she'd been wavering about whether to call him last night too... so it paid off.

She kept running, pressed the terminal to her ear, and listened impatiently to the ring tone. After what felt like an eternity, the voice she'd wanted to hear more than anything.

『Hello. Shirazawa? What's up?』

"Hayasaka-kun... I'm sorry! Noumi Dungeon, the third floor! A human turned into a beast-like monster, and it's attacking us! Help!"

『On my way.』

The truly bare-minimum reply, and the call cut.

Ah — that was Hayasaka-kun for you.

An angel's ladder coming down through a gap in the thick clouds in her heart.

Kana stopped running.

She turned and looked at Yuki and the others running toward her. Hatoba, Takahashi... Maeno wasn't there. She'd been thrown the other way. The beast was slowly chasing Yuki and the others. Like an adult playing tag with children — a sickening, mocking motion.

"Yuki-kun! Get back to the dungeon entrance and wait! I called for help! Bring him, use your 'special ability' to find me, and come save me!"

Saying that, she pulled out the chain whip and dropped her weight. Of course she wasn't going to fight head-on. But if they just kept running together, they'd all definitely be killed. Either way, the beast's target seemed to be Kana — so this was the option that minimized casualties.

Monsters, except during a 'Dungeon Rampage,' don't leave dungeons.

But — the thing-that-had-been-Seno Kyohei?

Even if they somehow escaped, what the Seno-beast would do once outside the labyrinth — Kana couldn't say. Of course, after slaughtering everyone here, this beast heading for the outside was also entirely possible... but keeping it inside was probably the lesser evil.

"What about you?!"

The one who stopped for just a moment to ask was club president Hatoba. Kana was actually impressed that he could even hold a conversation in this situation. Maybe he, like her, had something he held in his heart.

"I'll draw it and buy time. I might get killed quickly, so please run. I'm probably the one it's targeting."

The moment she said that, the beast, a few meters away, deliberately stopped, spread both arms in a mocking gesture, and muttered "Shirazawa."

A creepy horror, and a sensation like being crawled over by a swarm of insects.

"...Sorry. It's on you. Takahashi, run with Watanabe. Take out any monsters along the way. I'll somehow recover Maeno."

"Shirazawa-san...!"

"I called 'Toru-bro,' so he'll come save us. Make sure you bring him."

Saying that, she cracked the whip — Paan! — That was the signal; everyone started moving. The only ones standing still were Kana, and the beast-that-had-been-Seno Kyohei.

What in the world had led to this?

She couldn't understand at all — but anyway, here they were.

"For the record, I've been despising you this whole time, Seno-kun."

She somehow managed a smile as she said it.

The beast found that amusing too, apparently — it laughed with a lion-like rumble.

"— I'll shred you to pieces and violate you, Shirazawa—"

And so began the worst game of tag in the world.

The kind where "it" holds back, just to toy with the prey.