Cecil thought the mood in the room was seriously strange!
And once Miss Alfia showed up, it got even stranger!!
Right now, the boy and the woman were sitting there with utterly serious faces, discussing Levels.
"The difference between a Lv.8 and a Lv.7 adventurer? Mm… there is something to that. Have you ever heard Ottar or Riveria talk about the old days?"
"Ah…"
Isagi had, of course.
Zeus and Hera Familia had a dismal reputation back then. Whether it was Loki Familia or Freya Familia, nobody ever put on a pleasant face when the subject came up.
At the time, Riveria, Ottar and the rest were still juniors, and they clashed with them constantly — with the result, naturally, being a one-sided beating every time.
Alfia was no exception.
She had once beaten a Lv.4 Ottar without using a single spell, and the man who was now the [City's Strongest] still hadn't let it go.
In those days, only two adventurers in the city stood above Lv.7.
One was the captain of Zeus Familia.
The Lv.8 [Hero], Maxim.
The other was the captain of Hera Familia.
The Lv.9 Empress.
Even Alfia knew almost nothing about them, and the reason was simple: for all her genius, she had been a very young "junior" within Hera Familia.
How the two of them had climbed to Lv.8 and Lv.9, what battles they had fought, what they had lived through — she had no idea whatsoever.
One thing was certain, though.
They were the only geniuses of their kind in a thousand years, and the only adventurers in a thousand years to walk all the way to those Levels.
But there was one thing Isagi was curious about.
"You and Zard reached Lv.7 by defeating Behemoth and Leviathan, one each?"
"Mm."
"Then what about the old Zeus and Hera Familia, with all those Lv.7s, including the two captains at Lv.8 and Lv.9 — where did their [Excelia] come from?"
When Ottar had set out to reach Lv.8, the [Excelia] he chose was to challenge the Monster Rex Balor in the deep levels, alone.
He had been fixated on it to an extraordinary degree.
Perhaps.
Perhaps someone in the old Zeus or Hera Familia had used exactly that sort of thing as the trigger for reaching Lv.8?
"It's very possible. Maybe the captains once went out alone and killed some powerful Monster beyond the city, one sealed away in the ancient past."
Alfia offered it as a guess.
It was plausible enough.
In the ancient era, because nearly every [Hero] was gathered in Orario defending the Great Pit, a great many powerful Monsters were left to rampage across the world with almost no one going out to subjugate them.
Some of them weren't especially high-Level, but there were formidable ones among them as well.
Nearly all such Monsters had been sealed away by the Spirits, but with the passing of so many years, seals inevitably weakened, letting the Monsters within emerge once more.
The Guild handed down mandatory missions of that kind every year.
It would have the city's strongest Familia — Loki's, Freya's — assemble elite squads and go deal with whatever Monster was about to break free of its seal.
At the same time, Familia like Artemis's and Hermes's, who were forever traveling outside the city, were tasked with inspecting the condition of seals across the various regions.
"There aren't any stories left behind, though…"
She wasn't brushing him off.
In Alfia's memory, those two hardly ever spoke, and you hardly ever saw them at all.
The Zeus and Hera Familia of that era were no "one big loving family."
The [City's Strongest] Familia of the past worshipped the law of the strong.
Freya Familia today often had its members fight one another day and night in Folkvangr, injuries be damned — but set beside the old Zeus and Hera Familia, that was child's play.
In Alfia's memory, fights between Familia members really did leave people dead.
It was an age cruel enough that if you couldn't grow stronger, all that remained was to die — or rather, an age in which you had no reason to exist.
Plenty of those who couldn't endure it, along with the wounded and the crippled, transferred voluntarily to the second line and the logistics units.
"Did you ever challenge them?"
"No." Alfia shook her head again.
The truth was that at that height — Lv.8 and above — the captains of the two Familia no longer considered Lv.7s like them worth fighting.
Because it genuinely was a rout.
Alfia couldn't even find words to describe what it looked like when they moved.
During the battles against Behemoth and Leviathan, she and Zard may have been the ones to land the final blows, but the ones who fought head-on, who held the line from beginning to end, who drove the Overlord of the Land and the Overlord of the Sea to the brink of death — those were the captains.
Every part of it, all of it, was the captains' doing.
The gap in Strength was real, and it was incomprehensible. That was the word — even now, when Alfia looked back on that battle, "incomprehensible" was all she could call it.
It wasn't simply a matter of raw destructive force.
Shattering mountains, annihilating cities — those were things a Lv.7 adventurer could manage.
But at Lv.8 and above there existed a gap in Strength beyond all description, and if she had to put it into words, the Alfia of today could only sum it up as this:
[Like a god].
"Goddess Hera once said that Lv.8 is the threshold of the [Hero]."
Zeus had said much the same thing, actually, though it hardly mattered; those two old gods were perpetually at odds, and yet somehow gave the impression that neither could get by without the other.
Or to put it another way.
"Which is to say, [approaching godhood]. Or [demigod]."
"Not even the gods know where that Strength comes from. Perhaps it's one of the possibilities they were hoping for — that the children of the lower world, in the matter of [obtaining Strength], would carve out a road of their own."
Whether in the ancient era.
Or now, becoming adventurers through the gods' [Falna].
"There's a theory that goes: since the Dungeon can possess a Strength that utterly rejects the gods, leaving Divine Power unable to touch its Monsters at all, it follows that the people of the lower world can hold an equal Strength of their own — one that can stand against the gods."
The conversation drifted on in fits and starts.
Isagi and Alfia were both Lv.7 adventurers, and the subject plainly fascinated them.
The boy in particular. His thoughts had already run back to the ancient era — to the Empress, to Albert and the others, and whether their power had already, in some sense, drawn close to what people called "gods."
Thoughts like those carried the night deeper and deeper, until Cecil, sitting off to one side, couldn't find a single opening to speak.
When exactly had things turned into this?
The blue-haired girl blinked from her seat, watching the scene in front of her with no idea what to do about it.
Something about the whole thing felt off!
Was it really the way that goddess said — that on her own, she just couldn't get anything done…?
What surfaced in Cecil's head at that moment was a certain golden-haired, tsundere Goddess of Beauty — Aphrodite!
As a goddess who had already successfully nudged several girls closer to Isagi, she brimmed with confidence, and never passed up a chance to "advise" Cecil in private.
Given that things between the two of them had gone precisely nowhere, the Goddess of Beauty had cut straight to the heart of the biggest problem.
[Cecil, you and Isagi are far too used to each other!!]
Practically family, the pair of them.
And so.
A great many things that ought to have been thoroughly suggestive registered to the two of them as nothing more than business as usual.
For instance: opening your eyes in the morning and seeing the other's face first thing.
By rights, that should be a warm, tender moment.
But for Cecil, waking to find Isagi there could only mean she'd spent too long in the workshop and dozed off, and he'd come to drag her out to eat.
The same went for Isagi. If he woke up to her face, what he'd assume was that some weapon or piece of gear had finished forging and she'd come to haul him off to see it.
So, well. Fair enough.
Faced with the Goddess of Beauty's "charges," Cecil had absolutely no grounds for rebuttal.
But she didn't think it was a problem at all!
The dim-witted girl had clearly failed to grasp certain crucial points!!
Now, though.
She was beginning to grasp them.
Take just now, for example. She'd still been in the bath when Isagi strolled into the room as if it were the most natural thing in the world, showing no intention of leaving, waiting outside until she was done — and then, just as naturally, launching into "business."
And she — wrapped in a bathrobe, drying her soaking hair by the fireplace — had simply chatted right along with him.
It defied belief!
That was an old married couple, hello!! Her father and mother, her brothers and their wives — that was exactly how they lived, hello!!
Now that the absurdity of it had finally dawned on her, even dopey Cecil began to squirm.
Especially since, once Miss Alfia arrived later on, the mood had turned even more serious.
And there was nothing at all she could do to stop it, because it truly was important. As [Hero]es who would one day have to save the world, how the two of them grew stronger, and how a Lv.8 adventurer ought to properly use their Strength… that was the most important topic there was!
All she could do for the moment was wait.
And—
"Are you two hungry?"
Cutting into the conversation, the girl turned an endearing look on the pair of them, and once she'd collected a nod from each, went to arrange a midnight snack.
It was nearly the small hours by now.
But Solingen was a bustling city, after all. Never mind the workshops that never stopped through the night — downstairs from the hotel there were several restaurants and taverns open until dawn.
Cecil dashed off to the bathroom and changed.
Then she left the room, feet light on the stairs, off to buy their late supper.
It would also give her a bit of time to sort her thoughts out.
She wanted things with Isagi to move a step further, of course she did, but the empty-headed girl had no idea what to do next, and she refused to take a certain Goddess of Beauty's "strategic counsel" — talking about that sort of thing with other people was mortifying!!
Mmh…
In any case, she'd try it her own way first. If that really got her nowhere, she could go consult that flaky idiot of a goddess once they were back.
With that settled in her mind, Cecil was soon out of the hotel and heading in a familiar direction, toward a little shop she'd loved since she was small.
She was a local, after all!
She couldn't claim to know every corner of the city by heart, but where to find good food — that much she knew.
A dozen or so minutes down the noisy night street brought her to a restaurant along the way, where she bought a steaming roast chicken and half a roast lamb.
The carved meat filled a great box to the brim, and there was hot broth besides, in a big clay jar.
Eating that in the middle of the night — nothing in the world was better.
Her spirits lifted immeasurably, and the girl hummed to herself as she retraced her route back to the hotel, all the way to the door of her own room.
And only then did Cecil remember!
She'd meant to use the walk to put together a "battle plan," and she hadn't given it a single thought!!
Her head had been full of food the entire way, hello!!
She couldn't believe what an outrageous idiot she was!!
The girl stood frozen outside the door for a solid three seconds before deciding, with a touch of resignation, that she'd sort it out after supper!
Nothing had changed since she'd left.
Isagi and Miss Alfia were seated around the tea table, though the porcelain cups on it held nothing but hot water.
There was some wine in the room's cold box.
But clearly nobody was planning to… wait. Wine?!
A truly terrible idea seemed to occur to her, and Cecil shook her head fast, because she knew her tolerance was hopeless — one mouthful and she'd drop straight into unconsciousness.
Which wouldn't accomplish a single thing!!
Happily, the food was every bit as good as she remembered — better, even, though whether that was because she'd been away so long, she couldn't say.
Miss Alfia still ate in her habitual silence.
And she ate fast.
The greasy bones of the chicken and the lamb rapidly piled into a small mountain on the plates in front of her.
That seemed to leave her a touch embarrassed.
Fortunately, Cecil knew her own appetite and Isagi's well, so she'd bought a generous amount — more than enough to fill all three of them.
Which also meant the meal ran rather long.
Never mind Cecil, whose mind had been wandering from the start — even Isagi and Alfia had half-lost track of where their conversation had left off.
After all.
For two people still at Lv.7, the matter of Lv.8 wasn't exactly distant, but in the end it was still something they could only "imagine," which lent it a certain unreality.
The woman didn't mind that, though. She really was close to leveling.
"Either way, once we're back and I've reached Lv.8, I'll understand all of it."
The road ahead seemed to open wide in that instant.
For reasons she couldn't name, talking with the boy had a way of taking thoughts that had been hazy and clearing them entirely—
Level up, subjugate the Black Dragon. Beyond that, there was nothing that needed thinking about.
Isagi nodded as well.
No amount of speculation could match experiencing it for himself once he actually leveled. But just as the subject finally wound down, just as Cecil, off to the side, thought, "Now's my chance!"—
Perhaps because of a small thought buried deep in the boy's mind.
That impossible-to-ignore pure white butterfly of light appeared, all at once, before the three of them.
"?"
The moment Isagi saw the butterfly, he understood what it meant.
The only thing he didn't understand was this: when it took the shape of that beautiful, elegant "save point," which era would it carry him to this time?
Definitely not a thousand years ago.
Which meant—
Looking at Alfia across from him, Isagi seemed to grasp it. He had a fair idea now of exactly where it was he would be traveling to next.
____
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