DanMachi Vol.14

INTERLUDE: THEY BEGIN TO STIR

"It has stirred."

The elder god's soft-spoken words echoed through the darkness.

Ouranos's bulging eyes were fixed on the Dungeon spread beneath his feet.

"Stirred? Surely you don't mean...the Juggernaut?"

The reply came from a fist-sized crystal.

It was an oculus, and on the other side of the magic item was Fels.

The oculus was in the Chamber of Prayers beneath the Guild Headquarters. Ouranos—the god who prayed to the Dungeon—may not have been perfect, but he did have a grasp of the general situation. Or more accurately, he sensed the presence of a certain monster there.

The ruinous Juggernaut had risen again after an absence of five years. The presence of this "apostle of murder" that had massacred Astrea Familia, to which Gale Wind belonged at the time, was enough to fill Orario's founding god with extreme foreboding.

"Yes...it has strayed far from the zone where it emerged and is descending the floors."

That ruinous creature had begun to move.

And not merely within its own floor. It was crossing multiple floors, so many that Ouranos could discern its movements from the surface.

A terrifyingly rapid dive ever downward from the Water Capital where one would have expected it to emerge.

"I can't believe it...Considering its origins, the chances it would leave the floor where it spawned are...!"

Fels who at the moment was accompanying the Xenos in the fight to capture the man-made dungeon Knossos—sounded puzzled.

For the Juggernaut to appear, the Dungeon had to suffer massive damage.

When that happened, the living Dungeon responded defensively by summoning its antibody. In other words, the point of the Juggernaut's existence was to obliterate any traces of the invading pathogen adventurers on the floor where it had spawned. Under normal circumstances, even if the monster's targets fled, it would never travel several floors to pursue them.

"...What is happening?"

The reality was that the delusions of a tamer were causing the monster to pursue a certain boy and elf.

But even an omniscient god, and the founding god of Orario at that, could not parse the details of what was happening in the Dungeon when it fell so far beyond established understanding. Ouranos and his companions on the surface were able to grasp only that an irregularity was occurring.

"And this response...a Monster Rex has appeared in the Water Capital?

Did the Dungeon ignore the regular spawning interval and dispatch it...?"

Ouranos also noticed another action by the Dungeon that was impossible to ignore.

The face of the wizened god, who was mockingly called the "immovable one" by the other deities, twisted into an unmistakable grimace.

"What will you do, Ouranos?"

"...Send reinforcements to the Water Capital. Even if they are unable to resolve the situation, we need to know what is happening."

"But we are still fighting to capture Knossos. Few forces are available to have Loki Familia take the lead. If you order a mission and the regular procedures are followed, they'll never make it in time!"

The voice emanating from the crystal was filled with anxiety. Ouranos realized that when Fels said the troops wouldn't make it in time, the immortal mage was talking about the safety of Hestia Familia. Ever since the incident with the Xenos, Fels had been willing to risk everything for the sake of Bell Cranell.