After a day of non-stop traveling, Hajime felt as though his heart stopped a few times due to sense. At some point Selena's mana signature burned bright and would fall to almost nothing. Yue didn't say anything as she followed him up the floors, she just watched Hajime as he ran up and killed only the enemy that directly got in his way. Hajime noticed Yue was quieter than usual given she doesn't say much, but her eyes tell a very different story. It's as if he could see her very soul and he was conflicted. 'Man I'm going to need to talk to Selena when we get out of here, I'm no black hole.' Hours were spent in silence as they bulldozed their way up the floors back to eighty five.
As both of them finally got to the floor, they didn't have to travel too far to see something that they would never forget. Bodies of Santoryus were scattered in multiple piles all around them, missing arms, cut in half, or were crushed; many of which were soaked with puddles of water pooling around them. On top of one of the piles of corpses, was a lone girl all blooded up and felt like a beast. Selena kept turning her head looking for the next enemy with Intimidation on at full blast. When she noticed Hajime and Yue, she directed the skill towards them and readied herself to attack at any sudden movement.
When they felt Selena's skill wash over them, Yue instinctively took a step back while Hajime reactively reached for Donner. He slowly walks over to Selena while hovering over his gun, hoping to try to calm her down. As he got closer to her, he noticed that there was something strange about her eyes. Her normally blue irises were red and had two commas circling around the pupil. Deciding to ignore it for now, he goes to try to calm her down. "Hey Sele, it's just us. You can lower your fists now." He says as he was taking slow steps to hug Selena.
Once Hajime embraces Selena, the pressure that she exudes disappears while her eyes return to their normal blue. Selena then starts to cry while grasping Hajime, repeating the same few words over and over again, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Please don't leave me behind. I'll get stronger, just please don't leave me."
Hajime looks at her with confusion and concern, having never seen Selena in this state before. He always saw her with a smile and cracking lame dad jokes, overall keeping the mood light. However, this is the first time she is crying and seeking stability in him. "What are you talking about, you are plenty strong enough. There is no reason for us to leave you."
Despite his words, Selena shakes her head. "But you have Yue, and the both of you can kill anything here without me doing anything. It feels like I am just some trophy girl that will break the moment something happens."
Hearing her words, Hajime sighs before he smacks the back of her head. "You are an idiot." he says exasperated. "If it wasn't for you, I would probably be a lot worse than I am right now. You have been one of the two pillars that kept me sane and the one that prevented me from losing too much of my humanity."
Selena slowly stops crying, and shakes her head a bit, replying to his words. "You would have been just fine with or without me." knowing that she was not really needed here.
Getting frustrated at her continued denial of her role in his stability, Hajime pushes her from him a little bit, before he really brings his fist down on her head. Which causes her to cry a little bit from the pain and paying more attention to his words than her memories. "Look, I don't care what you THINK is going on, but I am TELLING you that you hold an important role in my life now. I do care for you and I will be your pillar of strength, just as you are one to me." Hajime says with an annoyed voice, but his eyes were filled with care for her.
Yue sighs in disappointment in herself, not realizing that Selena has been hurting from how she has been treating her. She now realizes that Selena is not a rival fighting for Hajime's attention, but rather a pillar that helped to stabilize him into what he has become so far. However, Yue kept one thing in mind, 'I need to get Selena away from Hajime so that I can clear some things up between the three of us. I just need to know her feelings about him.'
Selena, sniffs a little bit, and in a bit of a timid voice asks, "Really? You really care for me, you won't leave me behind?"
With a bit of exasperation, Hajime reaffirms the same thing he has been saying this whole time, "Yes, of course I care for you, and no, I will not leave you behind. That thing with the boss of the seventy floor was just a fluke. I knew that we would meet up again, and just figured that we should get closer to the end. I just assumed that if you were sent behind us, that you would want the extra training compared to us. As you pointed out, we have tended to just bombard things at a distance and not let you fight." As he explains, he gains a bit of a sorrowful look at the end, disappointed that he has not allowed Selena to feel like a part of the team.
"Look," Hajime starts, "from now on, how about you lead us, and you can start any fight that we might get into. The two of us will be in the back giving you long-ranged support after you engage the enemies. That way you can see how much stronger you really are, and how important you are to this formation. Is that ok with you?" He asks while reaching out to her with a soft smile on his face.
Selena looks at Hajime in the eyes for a moment,searching for any deceit in them. Finding none, she slowly reaches out to his hand. "Yeah, I can work with that." she gingerly smiles back at him.
A few days later
As the trio entered the ninety-ninth floor they were chatting back and forth about the boss of the last floor.
"Selena, you know that your eyes are complete bullcrap, right?" Hajime says with an annoyed look. "I mean, you are able to see through those illusions that the moth was creating!"
Selena quickly moves in front of him and with one eye closed, and satisfied smirk and one of her hands covering most of her face, leaving one eye uncovered, and the other wrapped across her body, all the while blasting Intimidation at full blast "So, this is what it means to kill." 'I am just so glad that my sharingan can see magic along with chakra. Otherwise it would be so useless.'
Hearing this, Hajime cringes at the line and couldn't help but be embarrassed since he did something similar back in middle school. Yue on the other hand, cringed on an instinctual level, but was confused on why she did, as well as why Selena was saying that.
With a bit of a chuckle, Selena turns around and continues towards the next floor with a smile on her face.
After walking from the stairs for a little while, they noticed what looked like a white T-Rex that had a wilting flower on its head. As they got closer to it, Selena's smile started to drop as she noticed the flower was wilting, instead of the full bloom that she swore was supposed to be there.
"So, this should be an easy time then," Hajime says as he readies Donner.
"Hold on, something isn't right here." Selena stops him with her arm, while keeping an eye on the beast.
At that moment, they start to hear the sound of marching coming from two different directions. The three quickly hide behind some rocks and peeks out to see what is happening. Soon enough they are treated to an odd sight, two different hordes of this same creature start to appear and begin to charge at each other. On one side, are these white T-rex like creatures with a pink little flower on their heads. The other side, however, was a horde of undead rexes charging at them.
"Um… what are we looking at?" Selena asks in confusion knowing that what she knew was supposed to be here, is now messed up.
"I think that the T-rexes are trying to clear out the undead, I guess?" Hajime says, perplexed at the sight before them. "Let's just skirt around them. We can probably avoid dealing with two hordes at the same time."
As he says that, they hear movement behind them. As if in slow motion, the three turn around and spot another zombie rex coming from behind them. Hajime instinctually fired at it, in an attempt to kill it. However, he forgot the key factor of the monster, it is an undead. Selena quickly picks up where he left off and slices its head off with her newly forged katana. With its head lopped off, the body falls to the ground, skidding forward a bit with the remaining momentum before coming to a complete stop. Sighing a bit in relief, Selena turns around towards her friends and then goes pale. Hajime and Yue, seeing her face, turn around and see the undead horde turning around to charge them. Following behind them, the flower Rexes were also charging in their direction.
"CRAP!!" Hajime swears as he grabs Yue and tossed her on top of his backpack like a sack of potatoes and runs towards Selena.
Selena turns around and runs alongside Hajime to try and escape the horde chasing after them.
They end up using supersonic step in quick succession in order to lose the two hordes that were chasing the party. Soon they found a body of water Hajime decided to make a camp in the hopes to recover some mana and make more bullets because he had to spend so much just to keep the path clear.
As Hajime began to work on making his bullets, he began to talk, "Hey guys don't you find this floor weird. It's like there are three factions fighting for dominance."
"Ya, it is almost as if the undead are the invasive one. Especially since, from what we have seen of the floor so far, it is a living forest instead of undead like the prairie floor we saw with an undead presence." Selena responds.
"It's weird, the first t-rex seem to have three mana sources come off there body, but we saw some that didn't have the cute flower or were undead and they only gave off two distinct mana signatures" Yue put in her two cents.
Some time later they hear noise come closer and t-rexes start attacking the wall the party was in. Hajime only had enough time to make twenty more bullets in the short time they had to recover. Soon they step out and they see they are surrounded.
"Guys I got this." Selena says as she creates her hand sign more fluidly. She takes a deep breath and starts gathering the nearby water from the lake and makes a twenty five high by twenty five wide wall. Using gale claw triple slash on her blade she cut the bottom. "Kick it now, Hajime."
Seeing that she made a way out he starts to transmute his shoe into cleats while kicking the wall to stay on it and begins to run up it while the wall falls down on the north side of the encirclement. Selena follows Hajime up the wall by channeling chakra into her feet as the wall falls. As the wall was falling down, the T-rexes started to scatter to avoid being crushed. As the wall came down with a boom, it shattered into chunks of ice and killed most of the rexes before them. Along with that, a large plume of dust was kicked up around them.
Selena noticed a strange structure as the wall fell located more to the north from them that looked like a dome that was cracked open like an egg.
"Hey, look over there." Both Yue and Hajime saw the broken egg and they could sense the two powerful mana sources as if they were clashing for dominance. A light show was coming from the hole as if spells were being flung out left and right.
"That is as good of a place as any to find the boss," Hajime says as he guides the trio towards the doom.
Booom, crash, rawrrrr. Could be heard as they got closer
Not too far from the dome they hopped on a tree to try to get a better view of what was going on inside, but at that moment the t-rex that had been chasing them got those weird flowers they saw on one of the hordes they ran into earlier. And they start to run for the open hole leaping into it.
"I think those t-rexes are getting bullied. Look, those flowers that are on their heads and they ran into what can only be said as a meat grinder."
"Better them than us, Yue. I prefer to know what the heck is going on with this screwed up floor. It's like a war zone." Hajime says as he loads Donner to get ready for the next fight. "We need to be careful, since we aren't exactly at one hundred percent. We have been running and using our resources since we got on this floor."
"It doesn't matter if the three of us are together. Put together, we are the strongest in the world!" Yue smiles while looking at Hajime.
'She really doesn't miss any moment to flirt with him hehe.' Selena thought.
"Let's get going, we don't want to miss the party." Hajime says, leaping towards the roof of the dome.
"Hehe, he just wants to see if he gets an easy win in the chaos." Selena says while also leaping up after him. 'What else am I missing.' she thinks, worried on the inside since this floor wasn't at all what she expected.
At the same time, Yue has a soft smile on her face, "Ya he doesn't like to miss free wins."
What could be seen was a mess. On one side there were 7 Skeleton knights all with very unique looks. One looked like Kouki, in terms of demeanor, with a sword shining in holy light as he was shooting a crescent slash at a few t-rexs. On the other side, was a skeleton in full armor fending off some T-rexes with a tower shield and what looks like a cleric, from looks of it with dirt cover robes and was torn in a lot of places where you can see the bones underneath, behind it. To the right and left of the swordsman was a lancer, spearing a t-rex eyes out while in the middle of a leap and an archer shooting arrows to try and kill the ugliest dryad they had ever seen. Further from them was a party of two skeletons, however one dashed away to hide his presence. Whereas the last one, they could not tell since it died too fast. It looked like it was trying to make an earth wall but failed to do so and three t-rexes were ripping it apart.
And in back of it all was what looks like the mother of all undead. The creature was just a floating skull with a single eye socket that was glowing red and ten red glowing lights floating around the skull that look at the fight without taking action, seeming to be in its own *element. It noticed the group's entry from the roof and it turned its focus on them and shot what looked to be 3 different colored beams at them. Yue casted a shield but eyes popped when the beams cracked her shield and didn't seem to be stopping. "Move guys!" Yue shouted with a bit of surprise in her tone. Hajime and Selena end up closer to this undead eyeball thing.
Seems like we can't block it with magic too well. Yue take out those undead soldiers and Selena and I will take out this boss.
With a small nod, the vampire princess turns to face the enemies that would be her opponents.
As Yue readied herself to fight, she noticed a red glow coming from her left. As she turns to dodge, a T-rex moves in between her and the beam, unintentionally saving her. Once the glow died down all that remained of the T-rex was dust, almost like it never existed in the first place. The only thing to say otherwise, is a severed tail that wasn't bleeding.
'I need to avoid that at all cost' Yue turns back towards her opponents and sees the knight, archer, and cleric standing before her.
Yue starts to gather mana for her Azure Blaze so that she could end it in one move. Before she fully completed it, an arrow went through it and the spell destabilized. Narrowing her eyes at the missing spell, she turns her attention towards the archer. 'That one is dangerous. I need to remove him quickly.'
The archer starts to circle Yue and launches an arrow at her. Yue moves to dodge, but before she got too far, a floating green shield appears in her path causing her to crash into it. A second later, the arrow pierces her leg and she noticed that something strange was going on with her mana. It felt almost like she was back in the stone again. Yue quickly yanks the arrow out and turns towards the other two. She notices the cleric with it's staff outstretched and realizes that it was the one that cast the shield. Yue's eye starts to twitch in annoyance.
She launches a firebolt at the cleric, but before it could reach its target, the knight blocks it with its shield. As she tries to go for a larger spell to get through the shield, the archer disrupts the spell, but when she goes for the smaller ones, they get blocked. All the while, she has to deal with the cleric making shields in the air to allow the archer to hit her.
Yue's frustration starts to build up from the coordination between them, keeping the two sides in a stalemate. All she could do was to try to dodge and avoid the shields when they appear. After avoiding another shield, she felt the need to dodge to the right as a beam of gray light passed by where she used to be and continued towards the knight. The knight started to move away as soon as it noticed the beam, however it was too late. As the beam washes over the knight, it moves its hands, as if to block the light from its "eyes", as the bones turn to stone.
Yue, seeing her luck turning, starts to pepper the cleric with firebolts and wind slashes. Without the knight to block the attacks, the cleric attempts to make some shields of its own to block, but they were cast too late. As the first of the bolts hit the cleric, its body went up in flames as the wind blades cut it up into little pieces. With those two out of her way, Yue turns her attention towards the archer.
At that moment she noticed her body wasn't following her command and she turned her eyes to see the grinning dryad. She was about to fall into despair but at that moment she felt something hot pass right over her head shoot what looked to be a yellow flower from on top of her head. " He shot me" puffing out her cheeks like a squirrel is what the dryad saw in confusion. Yue decided to get rid of the dryad to avoid being controlled again. "You shouldn't have done that…" she says as she launches a barrage of firebolts at it. The dryad tries to dodge but was blindsided by the second wave that appeared in her path. With a pained screech, the dryad was set on fire, and a little while later, was just ashes.
With that out of her way, she turns her attention back to the archer. The archer was aiming in the air when she looked at it, it fired an arrow before aiming at her. She was confused about the first shot, however she didn't have the luxury to think about it as an arrow was fired at her. After dodging it, she heard a whistling noise from above. Looking up, she sees an uncountable amount of arrows falling from the sky. Yue created an earthen tunnel around herself and the archer, protecting her from the arrows and limiting the archer's mobility. Yue then creates a boulder in the tunnel and sends it towards her trapped enemy. The archer turns around to try to escape the boulder, but found out too late that the end was closed off and the only escape was through Yue. With a crunch, the archer was destroyed. Yue lets out a sigh of relief at finishing her fight, and turns the boulder and tunnel into dirt once more.
Turning in the direction of the fight, Yue sees Hajime and Selena fighting the skull. 'Time to help them.'
Meanwhile
Selena and Hajime turn from Yue and look at this skeletal monster with the swordsman, lancer, and thief in front of it. Looking at the monster, Hajime smirks and quips, "So, how does this floating hunk of bones attack?"
The skull kept looking at them, and it seemed that the red glow seemed to brighten, almost as if it understood the insult to itself. All of a sudden, one of the glowing lights floated down and fired a red beam at them. With a quick use of Supersonic Step, the two dodged the beam and started to rush at the four. The swordsman and lancer rushes to meet them, while the thief seemed to disappear.
"You get the spearman Haji, I got the swordsman. Keep an eye out for that thief and any beams that might come our way."
"Got it," he replies with a bit of a smirk. Hajime pulls out Donner and fires three shots at the lancer. The lancer sidesteps the bullets as it closes in and launches three stabs in quick succession in response at Hajime. Hajime barely was able to dodge the attacks, but was still sliced a bit on multiple areas. He quickly pulls out one of his handmade grenades and primes it, dropping it as he retreats, hoping to get the lancer envelope into the explosion. However as the lancer approaches the device, its instincts scream to get the device away, it swings the lance to hit it and sent it towards more of the T-rexes, enveloping them in the explosion.
Hajime tsk'd in disappointment and dashed forward hoping to remove the reach that the skeleton had. The lancer raised its spear and it seemed to get larger and turned into a bolt of lightning, and then brought it forward to stab at him. Hajime barely dodges it, but got hit on his stump of a left arm.
"Guuh," he grunts in pain, as electricity starts to course through his body. He bit down on the ambrosia pill that he held in his molar to heal himself. However he never felt the rejuvenative feeling that he knew came from taking it. With a quick look, He noticed that the floating skull was looking in his direction and came up with a theory on what was going on.
'That thing might prevent healing from any source. There is only one way to find out though.' Hajime ran to the side of the monster out of its line of sight before he quickly drank some ambrosia from his vial, which restored him from the damage he took. 'Ok, that confirms it.' "Selena, the skull prevents us from healing if we are in line of sight!" and then fires a shot at the lancer. It dodges the bullet and rushes towards him once more, its lance glowing yellow before it looked like hundreds of thrusts came at him. He does his best to dodge them, but some got through his defenses and slice through his Diamond Skin to create cuts on him. As Hajime jumps back to get a bit of space, the Thief appears behind him, bringing its dagger down to strike. In response, Hajime moves his arm to aim behind him, and fires a shot into the head of the thief, killing it immediately.
"Well, one down and one to go." He says as he readies to charge the lancer. With an application of Supersonic Step, Hajime gets in the guard of the lancer. As the lancer starts to attempt to knock Hajime back, he tosses Donner up into the air. Almost as if in instinct, the lancer looks up despite itself, not noticing Hajime pulling something from behind him.
BANG!
Hajime smirked as he was holding what would essentially be a sawed-off shotgun in his hand. He stands up from his crouched position, putting the shotgun away, just as Donner falls around his head and catches it. "I am glad Selena convinced me to make Berthold, otherwise this would have taken a bit longer to deal with."
He then turns from the remains of the lancer, to see Selena stuck in combat with the skull. "May as well help her out then."
At the same time
As Hajime rushes towards the lancer, Selena pulls out the blade that Hajime had fixed and rushes towards the swordsman. The two clash with different slashes and keep on repelling each other. At one point, when the two break their clash, the thief tries to land a hit on Selena, but she blocks with her sword before kicking the undead away from her.
The swordsman tries to take advantage of her distraction and rushes with a cross slash, and as the sword moves through her, she fades as if an illusion. In her place, an Ice Bomb goes off, freezing the swordsman solid.
"Now for you," Selena says, looking at the skull. In response, the Skull fires a gray beam at her, but she is able to avoid it. "Well, that was just rude." With that, she rushes towards the beast.
The orbs around the skull start to spin around it before they move in different directions before they start to fire beams of different colors at her. The beams were colored pink, red, yellow, brown, orange, teal, gray, purple, and black. Selena, remembering what happened with the red beam when she glanced towards Yue, made an effort to avoid those with a passion, all the while her instincts screamed at her to avoid the black beams. The few glances that she got of those that got hit with the beams, made her wary of what else this creature can do. With the red beams, the T-rexes that got unlucky were disintegrated into ashes, while the ones hit by the black beams, just fell down dead. With the gray beams, they were turned to stone, the teal beams made some fall asleep, the yellow beams had the T-rexes freeze with some spasm, the orange beams made them wither up, the purple beam hit random boulders and lifted them into the air before releasing them, and the T-rexes that were hit with the pink beam started to fight amongst each other.
"That is very scary to have to deal with." She says as she avoids another black beam. However she missed the gray beam that came from behind and hit her right arm, turning it to stone. "Shit," she exclaims as she jumps away. Just as she was about to pull out an ambrosia vial, she hears Hajime tell her about the monster preventing healing in line of sight. She takes a quick look, and sees that it is looking at her, "Tsk" she pulls her hand away from the vials and rushes the monster. The skull looks almost as if it is grinning at her as she tries to close the distance between them. Four of the orbs float between the two, before firing their red beams straight down, causing Selena to make a quick stop to avoid the make-shift wall.
Just as another orb floated beside her, she placed the sword in her teeth and pulled out Abraxos and fired at it, destroying one of the orbs. This action caused the skull to scream in pain, almost as if the orbs are a part of its body.
"That caused you some pain huh. Well, let's see how much you can take then." She then starts her counter assault on the creature.
The skull seems like it is glaring at her, before recalling the orbs around it. Some of the orbs move behind it and fire in an upward angle towards the ceiling, causing rocks to drop at Selena. She moves around the area trying to avoid the rocks, getting lucky a few times. She quickly hides behind one of the larger pieces to catch her breath, when she noticed the T-rexes were no longer attacking everything around them, and most of they were, in fact, running away from the area.
'The Dryad must be dead,' Selena thought, a little happy that one of her problems had been taken care of before splashing her arm with the ambrosia. With her arm no longer petrified she takes her blade out of her mouth, and takes a breath. "Ok, back into the fray."
With Abraxos in one hand and her sword in the other, Selena makes her way towards the skull, taking any shots she could at the orbs, missing most of the shots with their movements. One of the orbs floated behind her and started to charge a beam, when it got shot. Looking at where the shot came from, Selena sees Hajime joining her in this endeavor.
"When you get a chance, try to assassinate that thing. I want to end this as soon as possible."
Rolling her eyes, Selena retorts, "Sure, just keep its eyes off me."
"Easy," Hajime responded as he aimed at one of the orbs. Then a loud bang went off from Donner as three bullets were fired at, seemingly, the same time. The orb tried to fly to the side, but was hit anyway and destroyed, leaving seven orbs remaining.
The skull sent four of the orbs at Hajime, having them fire yellow, brown, and teal beams in rapid fire bursts, making it hard to dodge all of them. At the same time, Selena is avoiding her own set of beams and seeing if there was any pattern that she might take advantage of.
The key thing that sticks out to her, was that the orbs freeze when they charge up their beam. Although knowing this, she was not able to take advantage with the coordination of when they fire making it hard to retaliate. Just as the beams were picking up speed, the two hear from behind, "Azure Blaze!" and a large blue fireball descended on the four orbs that have been harassing Hajime.
"Thanks Yue!" Hajime says as he then fires at one of Selena's harassers.
"Hmph" Yue preens in delight at Hajime's gratitude before refocusing on the matter at hand.
With the sudden intervention of Yue, the tides of the battle shifted heavily towards the trio and the skull grew weary. It recognizes that this will be a losing battle for it, and attempts to leave, floating high towards the top of the dome.
"Oh no you don't!" Yue says as she manipulates the dome to close up on the undead, trapping it with them.
With a smirk on both of their faces, Hajime and Selena utilize Air Dance to close the distance and fire on the last two orbs, leaving just the skull. The skull charges a black beam and fires it, but the two jump above it. Taking advantage of gravity, the two raised a leg and brought it down with the full force of gravity, Steel Leg, and Diamond Skin to crack the crown of the skull. With the force of their move, the skull crashed onto the floor, revealing that the majority of the skull was now broken. The only part that was still whole was a section of the upper jaw.