Chapter 119: Welcome to the First Floor, Kids!

When the two women stepped out of the tent at dawn, they were even cleaner than the day before. As always, Aria’s magic had left no trace of what had happened inside.

They crossed the camp, still steeped in the early morning chill, to the spot they had agreed on the night before to meet the others.

The three youngsters were already waiting, side by side. They had dark circles under their eyes and tense faces.

"Looks like some of you didn’t sleep a wink, despite my advice..." said Frelja, back in her full armor and hanging on to the arm of the woman beside her.

Arielle let out a small laugh.

"It’s not just any dungeon, after all."

Frelja caught the innuendo at once and turned her head toward Arielle with a questioning look that clearly meant: Starting already?

But before it could go any further, Zoyra spoke up.

"Looks like the two of you, on the other hand, slept very well, judging by how cheerful you are this early. Good for you..."

She was looking at the two women, who were practically whistling, clinging to each other with the carefree ease of two lovers who had only just found one another.

Why do I hear bitterness in her voice?

Arielle laughed again.

"You’re wrong there, little one. I can assure you we didn’t sleep a wink all night!"

"Huh?"

The reaction came from all three youngsters at once... and from Frelja herself.

It took all of them a moment to catch the innuendo, which wasn’t entirely false, but wasn’t entirely true either.

The three youngsters turned bright red, and so did Frelja under her helm, and it was in an awkward silence, broken only by Arielle’s laughter, that the group set off toward the dungeon.

At the end of the path through the forest, two guards stood in front of the entrance and stopped them to ask for their adventurer cards.

According to what people said, it was a simple check, to keep any civilian who was too curious or too reckless from wandering inside. But Frelja understood perfectly well that it was surely also a way to gather information on the adventurers, to know who went in, what they did, and who never came back out.

After all, I’m in a good position to know.

Once their cards had been checked, they started down a corridor of entirely natural stone, with nothing spectacular about it. Frelja and Arielle brought up the rear, letting the youngsters lead the way.

After a while, Jin stopped. He held his hand out in front of him, palm facing the ground, and closed his eyes.

"Earth Doll."

At those words, clay-brown quantimanas broke away from the flow and gathered in front of him into a small ball. It began to spin, growing thicker, taking on a clearer and clearer shape in that same brown, then two arms sprouted from it, two legs, and finally a head, before it dropped to the ground and landed on its own two feet.

A small earth doll now stood before them.

"Show us the way," Jin said simply.

The doll immediately set off and went ahead to scout the corridor at the front of the group, in case there were traps or an ambush farther on.

So this is what Jin’s property can do...

Under her helm, Frelja’s eyes were wide as she watched the little thing, now come to life, walk calmly ahead of them, step after step.

According to what Aria had told her, it was Jin’s affinity with a particular property of quantimanas, Living Earth, that favored him and allowed him to cast many spells of this kind.

But there was a difference between an explanation and seeing it with her own eyes. Starry-eyed, Frelja drew closer to the doll, then closer still, until she was walking crouched beside it, examining it from every angle without being able to stop smiling.

For the three youngsters, the sight was utterly absurd, and they were all asking themselves the same question.

Why was this rank-S adventurer so obsessed with a simple rank-D spell?

"Probably just someone who enjoys life..." Jin murmured, a little too loudly despite himself, with a shrug.

But the words had barely left his mouth when a dazzling light flooded the end of the corridor. Their eyes, long accustomed to the gloom of the tunnel, shut on instinct, and each of them raised an arm to shield their face.

When they finally opened them again, their jaws couldn’t help but drop.

The corridor opened onto a small rise from which they could see far ahead, and below them stretched a gigantic forest, as far as the eye could see. The trees were enormous, their trunks covered in moss, and in places the ground disappeared beneath pools of stagnant water and patches of sodden earth. Here and there, a white mist drifted between the trees and clung to the lowest branches.

And in the middle of it all, they could make out adventurers. Some parties were nothing but small silhouettes in the distance, at the edge of a clearing. Others, closer by, were already making their way into the forest, hacking through the vines and branches blocking their path with their blades.

"Wh-what is that?" asked Arthur, who always seemed so calm. "Why is there something like this underground?"

Arielle’s voice answered him, sharp and sure of itself.

"Don’t forget we are in the home of an invader, one who, from what people say, is an exception even among their kind."

Frelja, beside her, nodded.

"Everything we know about ordinary dungeons doesn’t work here."

In this world, dungeons, whatever their rank, were never anything more than ruins from another age, tombs, monster lairs, or other places of that sort. No one had ever seen an underground world holding an entire biome, like the one spread out before their eyes.

Zoyra then turned to Frelja, understanding slowly dawning on her face.

"Is that why you told us to just rest, and that there was no point preparing? Because you knew it wouldn’t make a difference?"

Huh?

Frelja was caught off guard by the misunderstanding, but didn’t let it show.

"Yes, yes... that’s it..."

"But how did you know? The other adventurers don’t share any information, they keep everything to themselves."

"Uh... intuition, I guess?"

"Mhhmmm..."

Zoyra said nothing more and turned her gaze back to the landscape of the first floor, looking thoughtful.

Jin, for his part, didn’t waste any more time. Confidently, he pointed to a trail that a party of adventurers a little farther on had already cleared through the vegetation.

"Let’s take that path. It’ll be less risky that way."

Oh~ oh~ He may look a bit dim, but he’s not half bad as a scout, is he?

Everyone agreed, and so the little Earth Doll set off again at the front, at its own pace, with the rest of the group following behind.

~~

While this freshly formed party was beginning its expedition into the dungeon of the Calamity of Greed, far below, an entirely different scene was unfolding.

On the last floor.

There, a meadow of soft grass stretched as far as the eye could see, bordered by an immense lake whose perfectly still water reflected the light. At its center rose an enormous tree, its trunk climbing from the ground until it almost touched the sky, a true world tree, straight out of the elf novels Freya used to devour.

At its foot stood a crystal hive that never stopped growing, around which hundreds of bees now buzzed.

Right beside it stood a stone cube with a luxurious door, behind which lay the bedroom, just as luxurious.

And on the other side, the dungeon core pulsed slowly, next to Freya’s throne.

Freya herself wasn’t sitting on her throne. She was there, in her real body this time, sitting right on the grass, legs crossed, her face focused.

Just as she had in the tent, she was drawing quantimanas one by one to her hand. But this time, they weren’t red. They were a clay brown.

Little by little, a small ball of earth formed above her palm and began to spin. It thickened, stretched, an arm started to emerge...

Then everything collapsed all at once, and a small pile of damp earth splattered onto the grass.

"Tch... Not like that..."

Freya wiped her hand on her leg, took a long breath, and started again.

This time, the ball held longer. Two arms emerged, then a leg, and just as the second one began to appear, the head came loose and rolled into the grass, before the rest fell apart as well.

Freya stared at the little pile of earth for a moment, lips pressed together.

But despite all her failures, she didn’t lose heart. Because at that very moment, through the vision she shared with her replica, she could still see Jin’s little Earth Doll on the first floor, walking at its slow pace ahead of the group, one step after another, along the trail through the trees.

Freya pressed both hands to her cheeks.

"Kyaaah~! Sooooo cute~! Look at those tiny little legs~! I want it, I want it, I waaaant it~!"

Then she reached out toward the flow once more.