The terrain of Floor 59 had changed completely. That was startling, but just as Leo had said, everyone in Loki Familia had already prepared themselves for it, and so they got their composure back quickly.
Only Tsubaki was left in the dark the whole time, wanting to press for answers and getting no chance.
Finn had already started giving instructions, having them form up again.
Bete and Tiona took vanguard as before, Ais and Tione the middle guard, Leo and Riveria the rearguard, with Gareth close by to protect them and one Supporter assigned to each position, while Finn and Tsubaki moved as the situation demanded. The group advanced that way along the dense forest, which had opened up like a corridor.
The whole way, they did not encounter so much as a single monster. They could only faintly hear sounds that seemed like monsters moving around or gnawing at something.
This unusual sight told everyone again that there was a serious problem with this floor.
After all, this was already the part of the Dungeon closest to the front line. As a floor in the Deepest Floors, the monster respawn rate, appearance rate, and even the monsters' perception here far exceeded anywhere ordinary. There were even monsters like the Valgang Dragon, which could sense enemies several floors above it and snipe them from extreme range. And yet on a floor deeper than Floor 58, where the Valgang Dragons appeared, not one monster had shown itself. Wasn't that problem serious enough?
Even on the safe floors, where monsters were not born, monsters from other floors would still turn up. Here not a single one had appeared, which was clearly out of the ordinary.
Even Ais, normally the most sensitive of them all to a monster's presence, could not sense any danger, and the girl's face stayed taut, a faint unease showing in her eyes.
They could only advance holding their breath, staying alert in every direction as they threaded through the dense forest.
Fortunately visibility on this floor was not poor. The vault of the ceiling, some tens of meters above the ground, glowed with phosphorescence the whole way, driving back the darkness, but most of it was covered in green flesh too, which made the sight all the more unsettling.
They pushed forward like that for who knew how long, and then the dense forest ended.
They left the forest and walked into a vast open space with gray earth, so that what lay before their eyes was no longer the same monotonous trees.
And then they saw "that."
"...What is that?"
Tione murmured it, and got no answer from anyone.
They all stared hard ahead, at the sight in the middle of the gray earth.
There, countless worm-types and Violas swarmed in packs, taking up a huge stretch of ground.
Of course, what left them all speechless was not those gaudy multicolored monsters, but the existence those revolting hordes were attending: a female-form monster whose lower body was an enormous plant.
Yes, the kind of female-form monster that appeared once a green orb embryo had parasitized something.
After the worm female-form seen on Floor 50 and the octopus female-form seen on Floor 18, here on Floor 59 they were finally seeing this kind of female-form monster again.
Only, this time the host it had parasitized seemed to be some huge plant monster that lived in the Deep Floors. Its lower body was rooted deep into the ground, its upper body an ugly female torso, with countless tentacles writhing around it, reaching out to the worm-type monsters and Violas nearby and taking iridescent magic stones from them one by one.
The worm-type monsters extended tongue-like organs from their mouths, offering the iridescent magic stones at the tips to the tentacles.
The Violas opened their huge lower jaws too, showing the iridescent magic stones in their mouths.
The female-form refused none of it, taking each magic stone away with a tentacle and swallowing them one after another, a constant crunching sound rising from the feeding.
As for the monsters that had lost their magic stones, every one of them crumbled into ash and scattered across the ground.
Watching this, Leo and the rest all understood, however little they wanted to.
The gray earth in front of them was nothing but a carpet laid down by the dust of monsters that had lost their magic stones.
The quantity was beyond ordinary. The monster remains turned to dust told them cruelly just how many monsters had lost their magic stones and become dust for a stretch of gray earth like this to be laid down.
And a single glance was enough to see that all those monsters' magic stones had been eaten by the female-form in front of them.
"...How long has that thing been feeding like this? And how much has it eaten?"
Riveria said it in something close to a groan.
"An enhanced species..."
Tsubaki's face had gone ashen.
Even without knowing the inside story, she knew this much: the only monsters that ate magic stones were enhanced species.
This female-form monster in front of them was an enhanced species that had eaten who knew how many magic stones and stored up who knew how much power.
This was, in all likelihood, the most terrifying monster anyone present had ever seen.
On that one point, every one of them understood.
Leo included.
Staring at the female-form, he felt a pressure more terrifying than anything he had felt before.
Not even Udaeus, the Floor Boss of Floor 37, came close to this kind of pressure.
And Udaeus was a Floor Boss whose potential surpassed Lv.6.
A monster far stronger than that?
What kind of Level was that?
Lv.7?
Or... Lv.8?
Leo did not know. He only knew that his heart was beating faster and faster, and that a chill had risen inside him, shooting from the soles of his feet straight to the crown of his head.
Then, as if something had occurred to him, Leo turned his head to look at Ais.
"..."
The golden-haired, golden-eyed girl was staring blankly at the female-form monster, as though at a nightmare that should not exist and that she did not want to admit existed, and she had even stopped breathing.
She heard a heartbeat loud enough to rupture her eardrums, like something crying out in grief.
She felt the blood stirring inside her, as if her own body were weeping by instinct.
"How could..."
Ais had identified what that thing was almost at once.
That was exactly why she found it unbelievable, impossible, terrifying like a nightmare.
"How could there be something like that..."
Ais's voice was shaking, and as if refusing to understand what the thing before her actually was, the feet that in the past had only ever stepped forward now staggered back.
"Ais?"
"Ais, what's wrong?"
"Miss Ais?"
They noticed something was wrong with Ais, and voices went up in surprise.
But before Ais could answer, the female-form monster stopped feeding.
"...Ahh..."
She reared her upper body up, and her hideous head let out a faint sound.
She began to tremble, almost writhing, and the sound gradually grew louder.
"...Ahh, ahh..."
It was like a scream, and like a cheer.
With that noise, the female-form's ugly upper body shook and squirmed without pause, and the flesh on it swelled all at once.
Like a pupa eclosing, that flesh split open, and a woman's body with graceful lines was born.
"Laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!"
In that moment the cry of pure delight burst out, becoming a terrible high-frequency wave that felt capable of bursting human eardrums, sweeping the area, and Leo and the others clapped their hands over their ears with pained expressions.
The cry was not ugly. It was quite pleasant to the ear.
But however pleasant a voice was, turned into a sound wave that sharp and awful, it could only be an ordeal.
Tearing out of the swollen husk of flesh, "She" arched her upper body backward and looked up at the sky, and long, beautiful, lustrous hair spilled down her back.
Her supple arms, chest, waist and the gently curving lines of her body were covered in gaudy multicolored raiment, and her appearance was no longer ugly but beautiful, like a goddess.
Her skin was green, her hair was green, her whole upper body was green, and only her eyes were different, with neither pupils nor irises, a gold without any light in it.
Compared to the female-form monster from before, that figure was a world apart.
And it was not just the human upper body. Even the misshapen lower body began to change structure, growing enormous petals and countless tentacles.
The giant creature with a monster's lower body and a celestial maiden's upper body trembled now with joy.
"Wh, what in the world is that thing...!?"
Someone was shouting it, but with sound waves that piercing, no one could hear a thing.
Everyone watched the rejoicing, singing female-form abomination with the shivering eyes of people looking at something they could not comprehend.
"...It's not possible. It's not possible."
Only Ais, who had not even covered her ears, stood frozen where she was, repeating those words.
The stirring of her blood was close to bursting her vessels.
A roar was going off deep in her head.
Her lips kept muttering "not possible," but the agitation of the blood running through her whole body, and that faint sense of resonance, told her again and again that this was something she knew.
In a daze, Ais remembered how she had felt the first time she saw the green orb embryo, back in the town of Rivira on Floor 18.
It had been like this then too. Her heartbeat had quickened for no reason, her blood had boiled up, her body had shaken as if resonating with the thing, and it had made her extremely uncomfortable.
But what she had felt then was far weaker than this.
That was why, at the time, Ais had not recognized what that green orb embryo was.
Now she knew.
She knew, and she did not want to admit it at all.
That thing... that abomination... that woman...
She... was the same as her.
They had the same blood running in them.
That was why the green orb embryo had gone berserk back then, why it had screamed and leapt at a Viola to parasitize it.
And that was why, here and now, the female-form monster had eclosed and transformed into the thing before them.
The green orb embryo and the abomination in front of her both reacted so violently because they were the same as her, because their blood resonated.
"She," crying out at the sky, turned her neck toward where Ais stood and called out.
"Aria!"
"Aria!"
"Aria!"
She had spoken the name of Ais's mother.
"What?"
Finn, Riveria, and Gareth all changed color.
"Aria?"
Bete, Tiona, Tione, Lefiya, Raul, Alicia, and Tsubaki looked lost.
Ais swayed and nearly toppled to the ground.
"Ais!"
Leo caught the girl and held her up.
Ais grabbed Leo's hand in return, gripping it hard.
"Leo! Leo!"
In a voice full of a confusion she had never had before, the golden-haired, golden-eyed girl said the words that struck the whole place silent.
"That thing... that monster... is a Spirit!"
Spirit.
An avatar of a god, a god's beloved, possessing a power of miracles close to a god's, longer-lived than an Elf, more mysterious, more powerful, a born magic race.
An existence that holy, and yet now Ais was saying this...
"She's a Spirit!"
With that shaken cry of Ais's, the whole place fell into dead silence.
Only Leo's eyes kept flickering.
......
In ancient times, before the gods had descended to the lower world, the heroes of Humans had fought monsters with the help of the Spirits.
They received the will of the gods and provided every kind of assistance to the Human heroes, receivers of divine intent, so to speak.
To drive the monsters out of the lower world, they had been sent by a portion of the heavenly gods, charged with guiding Humans in the lower world, and they were weapons as well.
In the past the Spirits had worked with many heroes like that, subjugating monsters together, saving a lower world in dire straits.
In old Orario especially, sitting at the entrance to the Dungeon, that birthplace of monsters, the gods had stationed a particularly large number of Spirits to hold and to fight.
Naturally, that process was not without sacrifice.
Some Spirits died in that Dungeon alongside the heroes they fought beside.
Among them was one Spirit who was devoured by monsters in the Dungeon and who, by some miracle, retained her self, becoming a singular existence that coexisted with monsters.
"She" had lived in this Dungeon all along, living in this bottomless underground.
"She" had existed for at least a thousand years, which was why she had never been able to leave the Dungeon, because after that Humans had put a lid over the Dungeon's entrance.
The divine tower called Babel sealed the Dungeon's entrance and held down countless monsters, keeping them from leaving.
And so, over that long span of years, the Spirit who had been devoured by monsters and forced to fuse with them had her state of being inverted.
"She" was no longer a holy avatar of a god, but had fallen into a monster ruled by primal appetites: devouring, taking, indulging.
"She" was a contaminated Spirit, a defiled existence, filthy and evil.
A fusion of Spirit and monster, a misshapen creature that would leave even the gods astonished, dumbfounded, unwilling to believe.
It was through 'Her' power that the Creatures had fused with monsters and become the same kind of misshapen creature.
The worm-type monsters and the Violas alike were nothing more than tools 'She' had made to collect magic stones, to collect magic power, to collect food.
"She" perhaps knew Ais's mother, which was why she could sense the Spirit blood in Ais and would react so strongly to the wind Magic Ais had inherited from a Great Spirit.
"She" wanted to devour Ais, to take the power of what had once been her own kind.
This was 'She'...
The Defiled Spirit.
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