Having broken through the Lamia Undead blocking the corridor, Hinata and the others sprinted desperately toward an exit through what seemed to be a windowless underground ruin.
From behind, the Lamia Undead gave chase. Fending off the attacks they occasionally launched was Gobu-taro and the other Goblin Guarders, whom she had assigned to the rear guard.
Leaving the rear in their hands kept them safe from behind.
The real problem was the other Lamia Undead they encountered in their path with every step forward. As long as they didn't link with other packs, their numbers remained relatively small; even so, they far exceeded the usual dungeon cap of five, appearing in groups of nearly ten every single time.
"Here comes another pack!!"
"Hit them with everything you've got!!"
"Leave it to me!!"
"Right...!!"
The one who shone here was Ren Asuha. Ren was an archer explorer whose skills included Bow Aura, which let him loose arrows of aura. Derived from Bow Aura was a high-tier skill known as Arrow Rain.
This skill caused a loosed aura arrow to split in midair, allowing it to rain down from above or sweep across the field horizontally to batter the enemy with a hail of projectiles.
However, activating it required Bow Aura to be active at the same time, and at Skill Level 5, the HP cost was a steep 50 per shot. In exchange, the number of split arrows was also 50.
"Take this—Arrow Rain!!"
The arrow Ren loosed straight ahead split in midair, fanning out wide enough to blanket the expansive corridor.
A barrage of countless arrows rained down upon the Lamia Undead at the far end of the hallway!
Scores of arrows impaled the Lamias. Even so, not a single one fell. Because Arrow Rain received almost no buffs from other enhancement skills, even with their stats boosted by Holy Bless, a single volley couldn't finish them off.
However—drawing his bow once more, Ren aimed at the Lamia Undead that had ground to a halt under the hail of arrows.
"—One more time!!"
A second Arrow Rain struck. Sure enough, this time those that took a mass of arrows into their bodies collapsed, dissolving into particles of light.
Even so, about half survived, but—
"Push through!!"
"Oooorrrraaaagh!!"
"Out of the way!!"
Teruya, Gobu-be, and the rest of the vanguard closed in next. While they couldn't wipe out the surviving Lamia Undead with effortless ease, they brought them down with a few swift strikes or battered them aside to force a path.
They repeated this cycle again and again, breaking through the opened path and pressing onward.
"Heal!"
"Thank you, Hinata-san! Hahaha! I am so freaking stroooong!!"
Intoxicated by the overwhelming destructive power of Arrow Rain—a skill he could usually only fire in critical situations due to its massive HP consumption—Ren reveled in the moment.
'Ren's totally letting it go to his head.'
'Can't blame him, honestly.'
'Rapid-firing Arrow Rain isn't something you normally get the chance or ability to pull off, after all.'
'So, who do you think is the real carry here? Ren being strong, or Hinata-chan being amazing?'
'Hinata-chan.'
"Excuse me?! I can hear you, you know?!"
Regardless of the banter, Ren's annihilation power with Arrow Rain was undeniably high. Suppressing wave after wave of Lamia Undead in short order, Hinata and the others pushed deeper.
Of course, this was their first time here today, and none of them knew the way out.
Yet the Goddess of Fortune seemed to smile upon them... perhaps.
"—!? A slope leading up!!"
Running at the front, Teruya was the first to spot it.
Ahead lay a slope heading upward.
At present, the place Hinata and the group occupied appeared to be subterranean. Not a single window existed, and not a single ray of sunlight pierced the interior.
Naturally, there was no ironclad guarantee this was truly underground. Constructed under an architecture born of sensibilities completely alien to humanity, it wasn't impossible that Lamias simply favored structures untouched by daylight.
Even so, if this place was underground, reaching the surface would naturally require heading up. And for legless Lamias, a ramp rather than a flight of stairs made perfect sense.
Everyone reached the same conclusion.
"Head straight up the slope!!"
"Yeah!" "Roger!" "Understood!"
No one voiced a complaint. Teruya charged straight toward the ramp.
The party accelerated even further. Hinata cast Holy Bless upon herself as well, compensating for her lacking Agility stat. Before the Lamias pursuing from the rear could catch up, the entire party surged up the incline.
There, at the top of the slope, stood a massive, heavy stone door.
"Ram right through, Teruya!!"
"Uwooooooooooogh!!"
Whether spurred by Mayuri's shout or his own momentum, Teruya let out a roar and slammed his full weight into the door.
The Lamia Undead were hot on their heels. If they fumbled with the door, they would be overtaken. That was why Teruya threw his entire body into it—and yet...
"Whoa!? Whaaaaaaaagh!!?"
The door swung open with astonishing ease.
With barely a sound, it swung smoothly inward without conveying any real resistance, welcoming Teruya and the trailing party inside.
Beyond lay a vast, cylindrical chamber. The room was immense, easily rivaling the Floor 10 boss room of a standard dungeon.
Directly across from the door Hinata and the others had entered, another door was set into the far wall, seemingly leading onward.
Because the door had yielded so much more easily than expected, Teruya tumbled headlong into the room. Scrambling to his feet, he spotted the opposite door and opened his mouth to shout, "Let's move!"—when...
SLAM!!
With a thunderous crash, the door they had just entered slammed shut behind them.
"What!?" "What was that!?" "The door—"
The Lamia Undead pursuing from behind had not stepped into the room. Yet that absence only fueled their dread.
Mayuri immediately turned around and threw herself at the closed door, trying to force it open, but—
"H-Hey! This door won't budge!!"
The door that had felt weightless moments ago refused to move even a millimeter.
Though Hinata and the others had no way of knowing, this great hall was indeed one of the correct paths leading toward the surface.
However, it did not open directly to the outside; they had merely managed to ascend from the first basement floor to the ground floor.
In that instant, Hinata quickly pieced the situation together.
A series of deductions flashed through her mind.
She recalled the strange behavior of the Kobolds on Floor 1, and how Saito's group had reacted. Whenever the Kobolds spotted Hinata's group, a few would invariably split off from the pack and make a run for it. Saito and the others had ruthlessly cut them down, refusing to let even one escape.
Factoring in the abnormal malice the monsters in this dungeon displayed toward explorers, a single horrifying conclusion emerged.
(What if the Lamia Undead are intelligent?)
(What if an individual is actively commanding them?)
(If the ones that spotted us went back to report...)
(To ensure our elimination—no, to make absolutely certain we're exterminated, they'd herd us into a place with no way out...)
—It's a trap.
Her intuition screamed it.
Yet there were no enemies in the hall—or so she thought until that very moment.
"—Gh!? Mayu-chan!! Above!! Barrier, now!!"
Glancing up toward the soaring ceiling, Hinata spotted movement coiled within the shadows above and shrieked.
A split second later, a barrage of spears rained down from the ceiling directly toward them.
They were magical spears fashioned from ice.
Ice Magic—Ice Lance.
Countless ice spears poured down in a relentless cascade.
Mayuri's barrier snapped into place just in the nick of time, deflecting the spears above the party's heads.
Almost simultaneously, a massive silhouette along with a multitude of smaller figures dropped from the ceiling's heights.
This time, it wasn't spears.
"—Gh, i-it's huge!?"
It was a horde of Lamia Undead.
A quick glance revealed well over thirty of them, and among their ranks stood one whose sheer scale defied the rest.
Towering above them all, the skeletal monstrosity bore a tarnished crown upon its skull, and its right hand gripped an ornately adorned royal scepter.
—Lamia.
They were monsters that appeared even in standard dungeons, inhabiting Floor 11 through Floor 20. And in the Floor 20 boss room, just as a Goblin King appeared for goblins or an Orc King for orcs, a royalty-class Lamia would reign.
Because Lamias were an exclusively female species with no males, the ruler that manifested was always a queen—the Lamia Queen.
Which meant the entity looming before their eyes was—
"A Lamia Queen Skeleton... would be the name for it?"
Teruya murmured, his cheek twitching, though nobody was listening.
Every last one of them felt an overwhelming, suffocating dread.
If the creature before them was indeed the undead form of a Queen, and if it retained the abilities it possessed in life, they were in the worst possible scenario.
"————!!"
The Lamia Queen parted its skeletal jaws and unleashed a soundless shriek. The spectral fires burning within its hollow eye sockets flared with blinding intensity.
Skill—Leadership.
Skill—Lamia Queen's Order.
The signature skills of royalty-type monsters, designed to empower their thralls.
Naturally, the Lamia Queen possessed them both.
The buffed Lamia subordinates surged forward with speed that completely outstripped anything they had faced so far.
"—Gobunaga!!"
"Gobu!!"
Hinata barked an order through Telepathy. Receiving the command, Gobunaga ordered Gobu-taro and the other Goblin Guarders to step forward and form a wall.
Gobu-taro's squad sprang forward, locking their shields into place.
The Lamia Undead brandishing spears and scimitars crashed into them, slamming down aura-clad strikes.
The force behind their blows was on an entirely different level.
While it wasn't enough to shatter their guard completely, a single lapse in focus would have sent their shields flying.
The spearmaidens and blade wielders focused their onslaught entirely on Gobu-taro's line. Immediately following them, archers and mages loosed ranged attacks from the backline.
Gobu-taro and his squad couldn't deflect them all.
"Kgh—Mayu-chan, please!"
"Leave it to me!!"
Mayuri's barrier absorbed the incoming aura arrows and the endless barrage of Ice Lances.
However, she couldn't keep the barrier up forever. They had to defeat the Lamia Queen and her vanguard somehow, yet—
"Gh!? —Area High Heal!!"
Hinata hurriedly threw healing magic toward Gobu-taro and the guarders weathering the assault behind their shields.
The damage reports she received from Gobu-taro through Telepathy were shockingly severe.
(This is bad! These undead are stronger than Gobu-taro and the others...!!)
She realized with chilling certainty that their stats surpassed even those of Gobu-taro's squad buffed by Holy Bless.
She had two choices.
The first was to throw caution to the wind, go all-out right here, and somehow bring down the Queen and her minions.
The second was to turtle up and focus entirely on defense until the Queen ran out of MP.
With Leadership and Lamia Queen's Order, the Queen should be draining 100 MP every five minutes; given enough time, her MP would run dry. However, Hinata had no way of knowing the sheer scale of the Queen's MP pool.
"What's the call, Mashiron!? Do we hold out and wait for its MP to drain!?"
"No, Hinata-san! Let's fight! With Spell Chant factored into a direct strike, I can ramp up my attack power thirty-two times! I might be able to take the Queen down in one hit!!"
Mayuri and Teruya shouted opposing strategies.
Before Hinata could choose between them, however, comments from the viewers poured out from the drone.
'Wait, Teruya!'
'Don't do it, Hinata-chan!!'
'If that thing has the same skills as a living Lamia Queen, one hit won't cut it!!'
'Lamia Queens have Royal Blood, the high-tier version of Blue Blood!!'
'Not only can it dump all incoming damage onto its minions, it can leech MP from them too!!'
'If you want to drain its MP, you have to kill the minions first!!'
Royal Blood, the high-tier evolution of Blue Blood.
In addition to Blue Blood's ability to redirect all damage taken to its subordinates, it granted the master the power to freely siphon HP and MP from them at will.
In other words, unless they wiped out the subordinates serving as living MP batteries first, they couldn't hope for an MP dry-out. Nor could Teruya's attack power—capable of a 32-fold damage multiplier on direct strikes thanks to Magic Sword—kill it in a single blow.
Practically speaking, that left them with only one real option.
"—Gh!! Mayu-chan, hold the barrier just like that for a little longer! I'm going to expand my summon capacity! After that, we hit them with everything we've got! Focus on ranged attacks! We wipe out the subordinates first and take down the Queen last!"
"Got it!" "Roger!!" "Understood!!"
Opening her Status, Hinata made the call to invest another Skill Point into Summoning.
Currently, she held Summon Contracts with twelve monsters. One of them was Gobuo, the Level 1 Normal Goblin, who couldn't be summoned right now and offered zero tactical value anyway.
That meant even if she raised the skill level, she could only summon three more familiars.
Even so, summoning every shred of fighting power she had, stacking Monster Strengthening with Limit Break to maximize their output, was their only path to victory.
Even if it meant draining her MP completely before they ever reached the surface.
Even going to such extremes, their chances of defeating an enemy this formidable remained uncertain.
(If Takeo-kun were here... he might have been able to strike the Queen and wipe out all her subordinates in a single blow, though.)
Just as he had against the Orc Noble, he could have inflicted a catastrophic blow that even the entire horde couldn't absorb—if it were Takeo.
Or perhaps, with a relentless barrage of Explosive Blades, he could have obliterated them all regardless of damage redirection. Just as he always did in the monster rooms of the Shinjuku Dungeon.
(No... Takeo-kun isn't here, so we have to handle this ourselves...!!)
Wishing for what she didn't have was pointless.
Shaking her head to clear her thoughts, she moved to allocate the Skill Point into Summoning—and it was at that exact moment.
'Ah, AHHH!!!'
'Hinata-chan!!'
'Leveling Junkie Bro is—!!!'
(—Eh?)
Hinata's finger, reaching toward the floating status screen, froze in midair.
Reflexively, she turned her eyes toward the hovering drone.
Her heart gave a sickening, violent thud.
(Takeo-kun...!?)