NOVEL NEXT Interlude: The Penultimate Floor of the Infinite Dungeon
Sugimoto Sora is very, very tired. The previous twenty-four hours have not been pleasant for him.
He has been awake for nearly two straight weeks; although his Sentinel Skill allows him to go without sleep, it does not protect him from the consequences in the same way that the Eternal Vigilance Skill Takano-kun possessed would, so he is very grouchy at this point. Things are not made better by the fact that he no longer has any allies; what was once a pleasant and distracting three-way tug-of-war for his attentions between his three beautiful companions did not survive the death and desertion of half his party, and things quickly progressed into the uglier side of human psychology.
After Nishida Akane became convinced (probably correctly) that her Unique Skill of Create Duplicate made her the preeminent competitor for his considerations (embodying a one-woman harem being, after all, a fairly compelling advantage), she began to view Kato Harumi and Sekiguchi Emiko as superfluous, detrimental, and eventually actively hostile to her designs upon his future. By itself, this would have been easily solvable with some deft negotiation, but unfortunately Sekiguchi Emiko's Unique Skill of Precognition informed her proactively of both her peril and the precise consequences of each of her options to address it. This culminated, rather explosively, in a series of unfortunate events which quickly spiraled into a spectacular bloodbath sometime around midnight the previous evening.
When the dust had settled, only Kato Harumi remained; disgusted and horrified by what had occurred, she too fled from the grisly affair (although, unbeknownst to Sugimoto Sora, she is now also deceased -- several of Vius Mak Ghiroth's operatives are out in the cold with somewhat outdated orders, but they are more than professional enough to capitalize upon an opportunity when it presents itself). And so, now, he is the last to remain on the ill-fated and deeply wrongheaded quest to conquer the Infinite Dungeon.
Luckily, this is not as large of a handicap as it would seem -- though the slow and painful process of clearing the first six hundred or so floors while keeping his party members alive did at least increase his Level (though it seems to have stalled out at 49 now for reasons he can't comprehend), it was not without its tribulations and considerations; and now, without companions to slow him down, his progress has become very rapid indeed. Moving at a sprint so fast that the majority of the denizens of the dungeon never even see him before their obliteration, he has been maintaining an average of about one floor per five minutes (though the floor bosses take a little longer sometimes, especially if they have inconvenient abilities such as bottomless regeneration or esoteric damage type resistances and vulnerabilities). He has yet to find an opponent who truly challenges him for longer than the time it would take to eat a medium-sized sandwich; he is simply too fast, too strong, too durable, and too excellent at every aspect of combat for any battle to be more than a tedious exercise in applied problem-solving.
He also has yet to be injured at all; although he cannot see his HP, they have never decreased (and he has a Battle Regeneration Skill which would render it moot if they did), and his Relentless Endurance Skill appears to make it impossible for him to run out of SP as well. On the rare handful of occasions in which he has been unable to dodge an attack, they have done nothing besides fling him away into walls or other obstacles which he crashes through unharmed; his innate Defense is apparently so high that no foe he has yet faced has had sufficient Attack to penetrate it, despite his Constitution being only A-Rank. In fact, the only two aspects of his existence which are not pristinely unmarked are his personal hygiene (which has accumulated a good bit of battle damage at this point, since there are no baths or showers in the Infinite Dungeon) and his psychological state, which is very grim indeed.
It is well known to Sugimoto Sora, who has trained for many years to lead, follow, and manipulate his fellow man, that human beings are social animals; as a result, he is unpleasantly aware of the level of depredation that his mental faculties are currently suffering. Over the course of the panoply of unimaginable violence he has witnessed, suffered, and inflicted since this downward spiral began, he lost what hope he had originally possessed (which was not much to begin with) and is quickly losing the ability to even imagine a brighter future for himself or anyone else. Only two things animate him at this point -- the intransigent, unreasoning pride in himself and his capabilities which his upbringing instilled within the brittle, hollow shell of what might generously be termed his personality, and a dim, inchoate sense of duty which is mostly the nascent result of the first thing. Given time and enough formative life experiences, it may one day blossom into a meaningful connection with and understanding of his fellow sapient beings, but that day is not today.
Striding forward at a hundred kilometers per hour with a palpable air of bored detachment, he carves his way through a literal army of horrible monsters; gargoyles and dragons and tentacled miscellanea part wetly around the blade of the sword called Dawnbreaker, which has yet to demonstrate any capabilities whatsoever beyond a sharp edge and a lack of complaint. But this is more than enough for Sugimoto Sora, who could easily obliterate these enemies with a golf club or even a wooden stick, and so the killing proceeds in an orderly and methodical fashion.
The boss of this, the eight hundred and ninety-ninth floor, is apparently some sort of giant wobbling mountain of blasphemous flesh; it gives birth every instant to another horde of variegated spawn of multifarious races and types, and is probably named something meaningful like Shub-Niggurath or Echidna or some other coy reference to mythology that he is so uninterested by that he has not bothered to look at its Status, because he is by this point quite exhausted of the Infinite Dungeon's bullshit. For approximately three minutes and forty-two seconds, he scourges it with dozens of attacks of various types in an attempt to penetrate its endlessly rejuvenating and squamous flesh, laying waste to the siege of horrors it continuously vomits forth purely by reflex as he does so; and, when the room is nearly five feet deep in corpses and he finally discovers the annoyingly specific combination of circumstances to which it is vulnerable (a frost-infused unarmed attack followed by using the sharpened bones of its children to pierce, in turn, all eighty-six of its profane and inconveniently well-distributed organs), the conclusion to the battle is just as tedious and anticlimactic as all of the others he has fought.
But this is fine. Sugimoto Sora is not here to be entertained; he just has a job to do.
The obnoxious and deadly puzzle which locks the final door takes him another minute to solve; unlike Saiki Suzume, he does not take pleasure in such things and mostly just sleepwalks his way through it. But, when the final door opens and reveals the path down to the nine hundredth level, he does take one second to breathe, because he is just as human as anybody else and the thought of finally finishing all this and getting a bath or even a thank-you is still sufficiently motivating to make him carry on. Then, grainy-eyed and solivagant, he descends.
It will be three more days before he reaches the next boss.