Ais knew her task was suppression.
That, and to stall for as long as she could, until Lefiya and Mama Riveria finished their magic.
With her objective clear, Ais felt her mind was crystalline now, none of that fog-shrouded daze from before.
I can do this!
The pitch-black wind had granted the girl the power to ignore all magic completely.
But it didn't stop there.
To Ais, that boundless darkness stood for something more powerful, more terrifying still — it was —
The girl's wind was innate.
Though she'd lost much of her memory of the past, Ais could now recall a little, bit by bit.
Not in a dream, but right now — as her mother's name whispered softly in her ear, as the Black Wind coiled soundlessly around her.
Ais remembered.
From the very beginning, she had possessed the power to control wind.
Not because of a god's [Falna], but from the moment she woke — no, from further back still, long, long ago, earlier than any memory she now held.
Like a newborn infant, the girl searched the depths of her own memory.
She seemed to grasp something faint and half-there.
Not the hazy dreamscape, but a concrete, truly existing "reality."
"A child needs a father — how about you take the role, Albert Waldstein?"
"Uh —"
"Forget it. You're always away from the city anyway, so it wouldn't make any difference whether you were around or not."
"Maybe that's better, though? A [Hero] father who's never home, always off saving other people..."
"That's rather nice~"
"Stop saying such embarrassing things."
The chattering voices were faint and half-there, no images to them, yet they were truly etched deep in her soul.
"Then, from today on, this child will be called 'Ais.'"
"It sounds like your name, Aria."
"She looks like her too — strange. Where did you find this child?"
"She's an orphan."
The city always had many, many orphans — some the children left behind by soldiers and [Hero]es who'd fallen in the great crater, others brought from all corners of the world by merchants or mercenaries. Word had spread among the kingdoms that the churches and [Hero]es here at the fortress would take in children, so they were all shipped over in a rush.
Even though this was the most dangerous place of all.
Perhaps, for those parents, it was a kind of despair too — unable to raise their own children, so that with even a sliver of hope, all they could do was pray to gods who didn't exist that their child might go on living well.
That they could at least get something to eat, and not freeze to death in the cold.
Ancient scenes of "Orario" began to rise before her eyes. In her daze, Ais truly traveled to a place far, far away, where she had lived for a long, long time.
Because —
"Was Aria born looking the way she does now?"
"?"
"Spirits don't grow up, do they?"
"Lesser Spirits do. Intermediate Spirits and Great Spirits, though — I'm not sure. I've certainly never seen them grow... never really thought about it."
"Then won't this child be lonely someday?"
A slightly silly yet lovely woman's voice — someone Ais knew very well.
"By the time she's grown into a middle-aged woman, even an old granny, Aria will still look the way she does now."
"Ah —"
The memory ended there.
But Ais understood that her mother had left one sentence unspoken — namely...
"By then I'll probably have died long ago."
In that city of the past, everyone had long been ready to lay down their lives at any moment. And so.
"This child is the hope of the future — she carries the future of all of us."
And therefore.
"She has to grow strong."
That last sentence, Ais said to herself.
The girl had always been stubborn, and she knew the sense of "mission" she'd been born carrying.
And so, things long sealed away in dust, never once dwelt upon, finally surged up in her like a rising tide.
That was —
Could merely imitating her "father's" practice from memory really be enough to produce sword techniques so strong they'd astonish even the Martial God?
The answer, of course, was no.
Because her own talent simply wasn't that great — not next to Ryuu, nor Isagi, nor Ottar of Freya Familia, nor Allen Fromel... nor everyone of the former Zeus and Hera Familias.
"The strongest genius in the city's history" was just a slogan the Guild put out to rally people's spirits.
Ais knew this perfectly well herself.
And most importantly.
Ais had noticed that when she learned to use a new weapon, she was actually rather clumsy.
Did that mean she only had a talent for the "sword"?
Possibly.
But perhaps it meant that long, long ago, she had already learned how to use the "sword" to fight Monsters.
Her skill wasn't, as she'd once believed, something learned by imitating her father in dreams.
Rather, it was a kind of bodily instinct forged long ago through countless battles and hard training.
Its source was, in all likelihood, still her father.
But.
There was a world of difference between the two.
If from the very start she had commanded tremendous power — if, as Isagi and Mama Riveria had said, the girl she'd once been had been able to descend into the depths of the Dungeon alongside great [Hero]es like Albert Waldstein —
then she ought to be far stronger.
Even as a small child, she could never have been at the so-called Lv.1 of someone freshly granted a [Falna].
What she needed now was to reclaim the power she'd once had!
CRACK!!
The ice began to splinter, unable to bear the crushing weight.
By rights this was all but impossible. Ice formed by magic was no ordinary block of ice; in theory, so long as the magic didn't disperse, it would exist forever.
It was like a fireball conjured by magic — one that couldn't be doused by rain, that could even burn beneath the sea.
But here and now.
Ais accomplished all of it through pure Strength alone.
Even the magic was crushed to pieces under the mighty pressure of that "pitch-black wind"!
And the twin-headed dragon at the center of the seal began to contort violently, its flesh compressing and rupturing again and again until even the bone beneath — brilliant as gold and jade — was laid bare.
Though it still stood firmly in place, its whole form had been utterly disfigured beneath the pressure.
More importantly.
This, right now, was only the prelude.
The sword in the blonde girl's hand had yet to fall.
The [Desperate] let out a mournful cry in that moment, its trembling shriek drowning out even the raging gale, stirring in Ais a pang she could scarcely bear.
This was, after all, a weapon that had been at her side for so long.
To an adventurer, a weapon was life itself — the most precious "family" and "companion."
And now.
It was about to die.
Ais knew that if she swung this blow, the [Desperate] would surely shatter completely. But there was no other way. The battle had to go on, and there was no turning back now.
This was what it meant to be an adventurer.
"If merely dying were enough to defeat a thing like that, maybe that would even be a good thing — plenty of people actually held to that thought —"
The voice that suddenly reached her ears made Ais freeze.
That was...
Her father's voice — the man whose face she'd long forgotten, whose words she'd forgotten, the silent back she could only watch from afar.
CRACK!
The Sword of Despair shattered.
The instant Ais swung it down, the pitch-black wind wound about it, grinding it to nothing.
That was pure Strength.
Wind itself was, in a sense, destruction.
As one of nature's calamities — flattening forests, crumbling mountains, razing cities to the ground — the formless yet violent, surging wind had always been a byword for "destruction."
And now.
What Ais wielded was that power, close to its very essence, pure and undiluted.
"Be destroyed."
the blonde girl murmured.
"[Great Gale]."
Her earlier ultimate technique, "Lesser Quaking Gale," had gathered all its power at a single point, grinding and spinning without pause, compressing to the utmost extreme to form its destructive force.
This "Great Gale," by contrast, was purely and utterly a matter of confining the raging, surging pitch-black wind — the wind that could tear apart all things — within a single bounded range.
Then spinning, spinning, spinning yet again!
No pattern, no method of any kind — wind was by nature a thing formless and without order.
It only needed to churn.
Blow, blow, blow!
The great winds swept past without end, colliding and grappling against one another, then bearing infinite pressure down upon the thing trapped at their center, the wind's tearing pull rendering its body wholly unable to move.
And what this formed was precisely...
the [Seal of the Dragon Valley].
It wasn't some magic with a cool-sounding name, but a prison forged from the pure essence of wind.
Here and now.
What Ais had grasped was that "miracle" mighty enough to hold even the [Black Dragon] immobile for a thousand years.
"Now!"
As the Sword of Despair broke apart completely, the blonde girl's voice carried out from the surging black wind.
No hesitation.
Between comrades there had long been nothing but pure and absolute trust.
And so.
Lefiya and Riveria unleashed the magic they'd long held ready, in the very same instant.
The main attacker was still Her Highness the Elf princess.
Lefiya was only assisting, and hadn't given her all. The reason was simple: battle was no reckless gamble, and if both mages burned through all their magic at once, then what if the enemy still had one breath left?
They had to stay ready for the next fight at every moment.
And besides —
Riveria was confident that she alone would be enough. After all, the magic she was about to use was that magic.
"Grow!"
Haruhime's level-boosting magic, Uchide no Kozuchi, came down on the Elf woman's head right on cue, renewing another stretch of buff time.
And almost at the same moment.
Riveria's magic was complete.
[Vas Windheim] — that emerald wave of light, mighty enough to destroy all things!
The radiance of the magic swallowed up all of the blonde girl's pitch-black wind in an instant, stretching ever onward, blasting even the rock wall at the end of its path into a gaping hole.
All was utterly silent.
Only long afterward did the magic finally settle, and only then did the Dungeon seem to begin mending that enormous "wound" the magic had bored into the cliff face.
As for the twin-headed dragon.
It had vanished. All that remained in its place was a strangely colored Magic Stone woven of azure and crimson, along with a pair of massive dragon horns in those same hues.
Ais held the Sword of Despair — already crumbled to ash, nothing left of it but the hilt.
In silence, she walked over and gathered up the Magic Stone and the materials.
Lefiya, who'd stood braced and ready, let out a breath, then watched Gareth walk off into the distance to help up Finn, who was resting in a corner.
The battle on this side was truly over.
Everyone quickly downed their elixirs, healing their wounds as best they could, then made ready to return to the safe floor on floor 28 for a temporary rest.
I wonder how Isagi and the others are faring over there.
So everyone thought.
Hopefully.
Things were going smoothly on the boy's side too.
"It's Forgetting!!"
Inside the arena woven from massive vines, as Isagi's words rang out, every mind felt as if it had been struck hard with a great club — and realization dawned on every face.
This boss... no... this "SSS"-rank hunter was, just as expected, exactly like the rest of its kind — a colossal cheating bastard!
Even its very mechanics were a lie!
Its ability wasn't at all what he'd guessed before. It was quite simple: the true body was "invisible," plus "Forgetting"!
That thing standing at the center of the arena the whole time wasn't the boss at all — it was a decoy!
The real boss.
Was actually an invisible thing — perhaps more than one, since it could attack everyone at the same time.
And getting hurt by it stacked up the "Forgetting" status bar.
Whether it was your weapon feeling wrong in your grip, or forgetting a part of your own body — this was the cause of it all.
In fact.
Just now, Isagi and the members of Freya Familia had even forgotten the fight they'd just had with the boss, believing they were only laying eyes on this thing for the first time.
Terrifying!
Like a looping dream — if they hadn't realized this, they'd likely have been trapped in an endless, repeating cycle.
But once the "trick" was seen through —
as had just happened now, with Isagi and everyone grasping its ability —
then this thing's mechanic stopped working.
Maybe it was because "Forgetting" most feared being remembered — or being recognized — or maybe it was the inevitable price of the Dungeon granting this thing so absurd a mechanic.
Either way, the rest of the fight would be simple.
Finding the invisible boss's true body was no difficult task for Isagi and the members of Freya Familia.
Especially.
Since Ryuu-senpai seemed to have a special method for it.
That was fire. Alise's fire could set aflame everything around the Elf girl, blanketing the entire boss arena in a great blaze.
And within it, the place where the boss existed would inevitably take on a concrete outline as the flames burned.
Even if it was invisible, it would have nowhere left to hide.
Just as Isagi had said before, a so-called mechanics boss was exactly this: once you knew their mechanics, clearing and defeating them became incredibly simple — everything falling into place as naturally as water finding its course.
____
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