Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?, Vol. 5 (25 page)

Whoosh.
He could hear air whistling by his ears a moment before the heel of a sabaton iron boot buried itself in his chest. Eyes flying open as all the air in his lungs was expelled, Bell was once again launched backward. Landing flat on his back and fighting for breath, Bell quickly rolled away from the spot after sensing a violent aura coming right for him. The place where his head was just a moment ago suddenly crumbled. A stomp attack had just landed.

Absolute hell was waiting for him as Bell climbed back to his feet.

An unrelenting storm of punches and kicks were unleashed on his body.

“HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!”

Blood and dirt flew with every blow. Left-right, right-left. The audience roared with excitement as Bell was pushed closer and closer to the edge of the stage. Their arms waving and fists pumping, Bell was caught in a fierce whirlwind of bloodlust.

The boy was seeing stars every time a blow landed, but he came to realize that he couldn’t see the attacker.

Struggling to stay conscious, Bell focused on the area directly in front of him and tried to assess the situation. This wasn’t a Skill—maybe Magic? He had never encountered anything like this and was much too slow to react. Taking punch after punch, explosions of pain erupted all over his body.

The force of each hit sent his body right and left, flicks of blood scattering across the stage floor.

“Smash his head in, Mord!”

“Amazing! We can’t see ’im either?!”

“Rip that smart-aleck rabbit’s nose clean off his face!”

There were still sounds. Iron boots were clicking, the air was rustling.

However, all the noise surrounding the duel canceled them all out. Bell had no way to predict where Mord’s next blow was coming from.

Even shifting his body when he could feel the attacker’s aura did little to protect him. The amount of damage Mord had inflicted using this strategy had completely negated Bell’s Agility advantage despite their Statuses and Levels being fairly equal. Bell’s half-a-second delayed reaction was becoming his downfall.

Mord used Bell’s lack of knowledge as a shield and didn’t give him any time to react.

“Get back in there!”

“…?!”

Bell had been forced all the way to the edge of the stage. One of the onlookers shoved him back toward the center. Leaning forward to catch his balance, Bell took another direct shot to his ribs from Mord’s knee.

His consciousness was unstable. But the pain from every punch and kick was not the cause.

It was the spite, malice, and hostility of people.

Bell had never encountered anything like that before. Not once had he been trapped in a whirlpool of hate and jealousy. This was his first time confronting the darker side of humanity.

—It was making him dizzy.

Jeers and insults were hurled at him from every direction, joyous laughter and piercing glares as well. Light-headed and with a twinge of fear, Bell realized that this stage was in a completely different world from the one that he knew, the warm, supportive realm that he called home.

It was an adventurer’s baptism of fire.

This was part of being an adventurer, a rite of passage. Now, this was what made an adventurer.

Wine and women, riches and titles were all required to make an outlaw’s party.

Bell gritted his teeth in a desperate attempt to stay conscious even as the blows kept coming.

Bell and Mord’s very one-sided duel was surrounded by a ring of excited adventurers yelling at the top of their lungs.

Two sets of eyes watched the “show” created by the outlaws from a safe distance.

“You have vulgar taste…Do you seriously find watching this kind of fight interesting?”

“Harsh, Asfi, very harsh.”

Hidden in the canopy on the edge of the forest overlooking the stage, Hermes shrugged as his follower glared at him with unyielding eyes.

“You said that you wanted to see the power of Bell Cranell with your own eyes…Did you come all the way down into the Dungeon to see something like this?”

“Actually, I was hoping to see him fight a floor boss, but that didn’t work out so well.”

A shade of disappointment filled Hermes’s orange-colored eyes as he watched Bell jerk and shake below. “This is even more sadistic,” Asfi responded with a tone of sadness in her voice.

“Going out of your way to give them my helmet, informing all of those adventurers…I’m beginning to think you have a grudge against him.”

“Oh? I’d call it tough love.”

“It’s impossible to call this love.”

“Now hear me out. Sooner or later, adventurers were going to bare their fangs at Bell. You said it yourself, he wasn’t well-liked, yes? Bell was naïve, and at that rate he would eventually meet up with something far crueler. Vulgar or not, I wanted him to understand this side of humanity.”

Asfi fell silent at her god’s level of tolerance and acceptance of all types of people.

Not only did Hermes inform them of a way to get Bell isolated, but he’d also provided a magic item that allowed them to avoid any entanglements with the Kenki. He’d even asked them to entertain him with a show.

This might have gone too far to be a simple test for Bell, but perhaps it was exactly what he was hoping for.

“But while I can’t deny I’m enjoying this on some level, I’ve done something terrible to Hestia.”

“…And if the boy should fall here?”

“Then he didn’t have what it takes, that’s all.”

Hermes didn’t take his eyes off the fight, even as he responded without hesitation to Asfi’s questions.

Until finally, he lifted his eyes to a different angle and said:

“But even now…both Bell
and the others
shine brightly with the thoughts of their friends.”

“—Found ’em!”

Welf signaled to the others as soon as he caught a glimpse of a large group of adventurers.

There were three people behind him: Ouka, Mikoto, and Chigusa with her backpack.
Shf-shf-shf
, all of them quickly ran through the grass in the forest to meet up with him. Moving as a group, they analyzed their surroundings and made their approach.

“
Loki Familia
really did leave us behind.”

“Let’s consider our options after we have safely recovered Mr. Bell and Lady Hestia.”

Mikoto and Ouka exchanged words while equipping themselves with short bows and arrows from Chigusa’s backpack.

“Just to warn you guys, I’m pretty useless against people that strong. All I can do is seal their magic!”

“That’s plenty.”

Ouka nodded at Welf before joining Mikoto behind a large tree root. The two of them made eye contact for a moment and jumped into the air, unleashing arrows toward their opponents.

“Oi!” “What was that?!”

“The ones who were with the Little Rookie! How the hell did they find us?!”

Although the shots came from behind them, the upper-class adventurers drew their weapons and deflected the arrows with ease, proving their skill. Mikoto and Ouka fired four arrows per second, creating a rain of unrelenting projectiles. The adventurers who had been watching the fight quickly broke away from the stage and ran toward the source.

“This was part of the plan anyway! Wipe them out!”

“Who the heck would be intimidated by Takemikazuchi’s banner, huh?!”

The fastest of the upper-class adventurers quickly maneuvered through the arrow rain, shouting threats as they went. Ouka saw the first few break through their ranged attacks when he fired his last arrow. He discarded his short bow without hesitation.

“Chigusa, a spear!”

“Sir!”

Taking one from her a second later, Ouka moved to engage.

“Too slow, nimrod!”

A werewolf with particularly high Agility sidestepped Ouka’s first strike. Smiling as he made it past the first defense, the werewolf turned his claws on Mikoto, who had just thrown down her own short bow.

“—Yah!”

“?!”

Seizing the opportunity, Mikoto quickly grasped hold of her attacker’s wrist and flung him cleanly over her shoulder.

The werewolf landed square on his back. Before he had a chance to register the pain, however, Ouka stomped straight into the werewolf’s gut with all of his might.

“
Gheh?
”

“We are followers of
Lord Takemikazuchi
, yes?”

The werewolf’s body flinched in response. Ouka and Mikoto’s teamwork had put one of the upper-class adventurers completely out of commission.

Being a god of combat, Takemikazuchi made sure that all of his followers were proficient with many types of weapons, even empty-handed fighting styles. Not limited to just bows and spears, Ouka and Mikoto were able to adjust their battle style to fit any situation.

With their supporter Chigusa by their side, the two of them were able to respond to the newcomers as well. Using a mixture of techniques and battle savvy, the three of them moved to find the most advantageous position to continue the fight.

“The sons of bitches are hard to put down…!”

“Idiots! We’ve got the numbers! Surround and overwhelm them already!”

The last of the upper-class adventurers arrived to join the fray, yelling at those who were already engaged in combat.

Welf looked on, overwhelmed as adventurers just kept coming.

“Hey, there’s too many of them!”

“We’ll have to use the trees to our advantage…Stay close!”

Ouka’s voice was steady and in control despite the twenty enemies brandishing their weapons in his direction.

Welf took his place to form a four-man cell as they used the landscape for protection during the brawl.

“Hey, what’s going on?!”

Hestia’s eyes went wide as the sounds of battle echoed through the forest.

She could tell that this was no skirmish but something much, much bigger. The sound of clashing swords and small vibrations through the trees was more than enough to make her shiver in fright.

She had a bad feeling that this had something to do with the “lesson” Mord had planned for Bell. Something bad was happening to him, she knew it. Fighting hard against the ropes cutting into her
wrists and ankles, she desperately tried to get answers from the men Mord had left behind.

“Ahh…Sounds like they’re having a good time…”

“Dammit, I wanna go watch…”

“—Hey! No ignoring gods! That’s an order!”

The two adventurers sitting on the ground on either side of Hestia just stared blankly back at her. “Urrggghhhaaaaaaa!!” she yelled as her face bulged with rage. Unfortunately for her, her small build was not the least bit intimidating. Her captors weren’t sure how to react.

“!” “Who’s there?!”

“Huh? Huh?”

Hestia looked left and right in rapid-fire succession as the adventurers suddenly sprang to their feet.

Rustle, rustle.
They quickly spotted movement in the thick bushes just beyond their hiding place—two long, white ears emerged as a rabbit poked its face out from behind the leaves.

“B-Bell?”

“’Course not!”

“Al-Miraj, eh?…Scared the shit out of me.”

The rabbit monster flicked its head from side to side, its red eyes scanning the surroundings before it hopped out of the bush. Holding a honey cloud in its small hands, it quickly bounded through the area and out of sight as if looking for more fruit.

One of the adventurers breathed a sigh of relief, but then suddenly furrowed his brow.

“Wait a second, why would there be an Al-Miraj on the eighteenth…?”

That particular rabbit monster only appeared on the thirteenth and fourteenth floors of the Dungeon. Monsters tended to attack anything they perceived as a threat, including other monsters. So how could one Al-Miraj, a fairly weak monster, make it all the way down to the eighteenth floor on its own? The adventurer couldn’t shake the feeling that something was amiss.

He stepped away from Hestia and toward the spot where the rabbit disappeared when suddenly—
splat splatt!

“Huh…?”

“
Ghaa.
”

Something hit him square in the chest. Honey-colored juices ran down the front of his armor. He looked toward his ally; the man had been hit in the head with the same thing.