Arifureta: From Commonplace to World's Strongest Vol. 2 Read online

  Chapter I: Boy Meets... Worthless Rabbit?

  In a certain location there existed a dark cave where the rays of the sun never reached. The inside of the cave was so silent that one could not even hear the rustling of insects. There was no sign that human hands had ever shaped the rock, and the walls, floors, and ceiling all appeared naturally formed. Still, despite the exceedingly natural semblance of the cavern, it had not a single entrance or exit. One unnatural aspect of this otherwise nature-shaped cave.

  It was, of course, possible that an air pocket had given way to this enclosed space in the ground. However, there was just one other irregularity sitting in the cave’s center that made it quite obvious that this cavern was man-made. A complex and detailed circular geometric pattern carved into the ground. In other words, a magic circle. Were anyone of this era to lay eyes on such a sophisticated circle, their jaws would surely drop. Some of the more faint-hearted might even collapse on the spot. That was just how impressive a circle it was.

  Had it ever been discovered, then it would have been enshrined as a rare national treasure, but as it was it sat languishing under centuries of dirt in the dark cavern. It clearly hadn’t been activated in ages. The magic circle sat there quietly, waiting for its destined master to appear, just like the sacred sword Excalibur.

  Then, for the first time in god knows how long, it began to glow. Tendrils of scarlet mana began tracing their way around the circle’s inscriptions. The light was faint at first, no more than a pinprick, but it continued growing in intensity until the entire room was set ablaze with scarlet light.

  Finally, there was a blinding flash. The brilliant red light drove away the last vestiges of darkness huddling in the corners of the cavern. It was a truly awe-inspiring sight. Anyone present would have been convinced that whatever was coming from the other side of the circle couldn’t possibly have been human.

  However, the light eventually began to fade, and two figures that at least appeared human materialized in the center of the circle.

  “What in tarnation?” One of the figures spoke, his ridiculous outburst destroying the aura of solemnity.

  As the light faded and darkness reigned once more in the cavern, the boy who had spoken looked around in disappointment. He was, of course, none other than the earthling who had been consigned to the depths of hell by one of his classmates during an excursion in the Great Orcus Labyrinth— Hajime Nagumo.

  Hajime had delved a further hundred floors past the hundredth floor that was thought to be the end of the labyrinth, and had discovered Tortus’ secret from the creator of the labyrinth. In the house of the man the gods had labeled a maverick, Hajime had discovered a magic circle that would take him back to the surface.

  The mere thought of being able to return to the surface had left him elated after having spent months in the harsh environs of the labyrinth, where he had to risk life and limb every day just to survive. He had unconditionally believed that what awaited him on the other side of the magic circle was warm sunshine and a gentle breeze. Instead, all he found when he opened his eyes were the same rock walls he’d been gazing at for the past few months. But yelling about it in a strange accent wasn’t going to achieve anything either.

  As Hajime was wallowing in his despair, he felt someone tug on his sleeve. He turned to look down at the girl standing next to him, a quizzical expression on his face. The girl was so short that she barely came up to his chest.

  She had wavy golden-blonde hair, and crimson eyes reminiscent of the red moon. Her lips were a light pink, and her skin was as white as porcelain. At the moment her eyelids were drooping sleepily. But despite that, she still looked like an exquisitely crafted bisque doll. She was, of course, Yue— the girl Hajime had rescued from imprisonment deep in the pits of hell, and the girl with whom he had first begun to climb the stairs of adulthood.

  In order to comfort him, Yue gently started explaining the situation.

  “It’s a secret passage... so he probably had to hide it.”

  “...Oh yeah. You’ve got a point there. This leads straight to one of the Liberators’ hideouts, so it makes sense that he’d need to keep it hidden.”

  Hajime scratched his head awkwardly. Can’t believe I got so excited that I didn’t even realize something that simple.

  Then he poured a little mana into his Treasure Trove, an artifact that opened a gate to an interdimensional room where he could store and withdraw things, and pulled out a green glowstone flashlight. Both Hajime and Yue could respectively use their innate abilities or magic to deal with the darkness, but doing something routine like this helped calm Hajime down.

  Yue chuckled, realizing exactly why he was doing this. Not because she was making fun of him, but because she thought it was kind of cute. For the sake of his own pride, Hajime pretended not to hear her and instead swept his flashlight across the cave.

  “Hm? What’s that?” He stopped his pale green flashlight at a part of the wall that looked distinctly different. There was a perfectly straight vertical line running up the wall, and it stopped at a palm-sized heptagon carved into the wall. A different symbol adorned each of the vertices, and one of them was something the pair had seen quite often over the past few weeks. It was Oscar Orcus’ personal crest.

  Hajime pulled the proof of them having conquered the labyrinth, Orcus’ ring, out of the Treasure Trove and held it up to the heptagon. With a grandiose boom, the stone wall parted, revealing a secret passage.

  Hajime and Yue nodded to each other and stepped forward into the passage. They didn’t find any forks in the road, so they just kept going. There were a few more sealed doors and traps along the way, but Orcus’ ring opened or disabled them all automatically. Both of them were on their guard, but that proved unnecessary as they continued without incident... until finally they spotted a faint light in the distance.

  It was the light of the outside world. Sunlight. The light Hajime had spent the last few months, and Yue had spent the last few centuries, craving.

  When they realized they were but a few steps from basking in it again, they came to a halt and looked at each other. Unable to contain their joy, they grinned and started running toward the light at the same time.

  The light grew bigger as they got closer. Soon, they could feel wind blowing in from outside. It was nothing like the stagnant air they’d been forced to breath for ages. It was fresh and full of life. For the first time ever, Hajime realized what people meant when they said the air tasted delicious. Both of them burst out into the light at the same time. Onto the sweet, sweet surface.

  More specifically, the part of the surface that was known to most as an execution ground. It was nigh impossible to use magic beneath these odd cliffs, and deadly monsters inhabited the bottom of the gorge. The gorge ran anywhere from one kilometer deep at its more shallow ends, to two kilometers deep in places. It could span anywhere from nine hundred meters wide to eight kilometers wide, depending on the area, and it ran all the way from the Gruen Desert in the west to the Haltina Woods in the east. People called it a great gash in the earth dividing the north and the south.

  Its formal name was the Reisen Gorge. And the cave Hajime and Yue had just exited was located at the bottom of it. But even if they were deep in the bottom of a ravine, they could still at least see the sun shining high overhead, and the wind rushing through carried with it the familiar scent of soil and life. No matter how harsh a place they had found themselves in, it was at least still the surface.

  Hajime and Yue’s smiles slowly grew wider as they gazed up at the sun with awe. And, despite how expressionless she usually was, Yue’s
smile was if anything even wider than Hajime’s.

  “We... really made it back...” Hajime lowly muttered, his voice thick with emotion.

  “...Yeah.” Yue’s response was just as expressive. The reality of their escape finally washed over them, and they tore their gazes away from the sun to look back at each other. They stood that way for a second before hugging each other tight and screaming at the top of their lungs.

  “Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!! We did iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit!”

  “Yeah!”

  Hajime lifted Yue up and started twirling her around. Their smiles were completely out of place in the location that had been dubbed hell by the rest of the world. At some point Hajime tripped on a rock, sending them tumbling to the ground. But they found even that funny and started laughing hysterically while lying spread-eagle on the floor.

  By the time their laughter had finally run out... they were surrounded by monsters.

  Hajime stood up amidst the howls of monsters surrounding him on all sides and grumbled to himself.

  “Sheesh, how rude can you get? You could have let us enjoy ourselves a bit longer.” He pulled out Donner and Schlag before pausing for a second and tilting his head.

  “Wait, I think I remember reading something about magic not working down here.” Back when he had just been summoned he had been paying close attention to his classes during training and remembered the inability to use magic being one of its main features.

  “...It’ll get dispersed. But that shouldn’t be a problem,” Yue replied. The reason people couldn’t use magic in Reisen Gorge was because the mana that went into the formation of a spell was dispersed before the spell could activate. Yue’s magic was no exception, either.

  However, Yue was still an ancient vampire princess that had once been feared as one of the strongest creatures in the world. She possessed a massive amount of mana, and now she had the magic stone accessory series at her disposal. All she had to do was cast a spell so large and powerful that the gorge wouldn’t be able to disperse all the mana in time. Hajime smiled wryly when he heard how confident she sounded.

  “How much more does it take?”

  “Hmmm... About ten times as much.”

  So I’ll need enough mana for an advanced class spell just for something simple, huh? That would affect his range greatly.

  “Ah, in that case I’ll handle these guys. Yue, you just focus on keeping yourself safe.”

  “Aww... But—”

  “This is like the worst possible place for a mage like you. You’re at a huge disadvantage here, so just leave it to me.”

  “Okay... If you say so.” Yue reluctantly backed off. She was having a hard time accepting being left out of their first battle on the surface. It probably hurt her pride a little too. She was clearly pouting, after all.

  Though it hurt him to say it, Hajime nonetheless put Yue out of his mind for the moment and fired Donner. He hadn’t even looked as he smoothly brought Donner up and took perfect aim at his target. His movements were so fluid that the monsters didn’t even realize they were under attack. By the time they finally did, one of their comrades had already had its head blown clean off. The rest of them all froze stiff, unable to grasp what had just happened. Only the gunshot’s echoes broke the silence.

  As long as he used ten times as much mana, Hajime could still activate Lightning Field, the spell essential to using his railguns. He smiled fearlessly as he surveyed his opponents.

  “Well, I wonder if you’re any tougher than the enemies I faced down below... Let’s find out, shall we?” He brought his right foot back and slowly lowered his waist while crossing his guns in front of his chest. His artificial left arm was thrust slightly forward, and Schlag was held just a little lower than Donner. With his two guns he would now be able to cover his back and front simultaneously. Hajime placed his prosthetic limb a bit further out than the rest of his body in order to deal with any unexpected situations. This stance was the fundamental aspect of the gun fu he’d pounded into his body after long hours spent training in the abyss.

  There was a murderous gleam in Hajime’s eyes once he finished settling into his stance. His pupils were cold, emotionless pools, hardened by the harsh conditions he had lived through.

  That chilling gaze alone was enough to cause all the monsters present to take an involuntary step back. They could all feel it instinctively. The person they’d picked a fight with was a ruthless “beast.” The pressure was so great that a normal person would have fainted from the intensity of his glare alone. Eventually one of the monsters was unable to stand it and let out a wild roar before leaping forward.

  “Graaaaaaaah!” However, not even a second later there was another loud bang and the second monster had its head blown off without even a chance to react. The headless monster slid to a halt, crumpling lifelessly on the ground where it stopped. A faint wisp of smoke rose from Donner’s muzzle. Hajime didn’t even spare the pitiful husk on the ground a single glance. His swirling torrent of bloodlust was already directed at the remaining herd. What followed was more of a massacre than a battle.

  Hajime didn’t let a single one of them escape. Yes, each and every one of them cleanly had their heads blown off. As the gunshots echoed louder and louder, the monster’s desperate cries grew fainter and fainter. In a mere five minutes, the ground was littered with corpses of monsters.

  He spun Donner and Schlag’s cylinders, reloading them both before returning them to the holsters strapped to his legs. After that, he tilted his head slightly as he surveyed the mountain of bodies.

  Yue trotted briskly up to him.

  “...What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, just feels like that was too easy... I’d heard the monsters in Reisen Gorge were ferocious and brutal, so maybe we came out somewhere else?”

  “...You’re just too much of a monster, Hajime.”

  “That’s a pretty harsh way of putting it. Well, I guess that just means the monsters in the abyss were way stronger.”

  Hajime shrugged his shoulders indifferently and shifted his gaze from the monsters to the canyon walls.

  “Now then, we could probably scale these walls easily enough, but... what do you think? They say one of the seven great labyrinths is in Reisen Gorge. Since we’re already here, wanna look around a bit while we head to the forest?”

  “...Why the forest?”

  “I mean, who wants to go to a desert after all that time surrounded by rock? Besides, I bet there’s more towns on the forest side.”

  “...Okay. You have a point there.” Yue nodded in approval. Judging by how weak the monsters were, it was clear the gorge wasn’t the labyrinth itself. Which meant there must have been a proper entrance somewhere. Hajime’s Aerodynamic and Yue’s wind magic would be more than sufficient for scaling the walls, but they’d have to search the gorge eventually, so there was no reason not to do it now.

  Hajime poured a trickle of mana into the Treasure Trove that he was wearing on his middle finger and pulled out Steiff. It was a large, American-style vehicle with a black body. Unlike motorcycles back on earth, it didn’t use gasoline to run as fuel: it was powered purely by mana. Thanks to that it ran quieter than an electric car.

  He had actually been hoping for a louder engine, since to him that was way cooler, but he only knew how to make simple engines, so he wasn’t able to make a more complicated combustion one. He could control Steiff’s speed by adjusting his mana output. Due to Reisen Gorge’s mana-scattering properties, he wouldn’t be able to keep it running for long.

  Hajime stylishly mounted his motorcycle. Yue hopped on behind him, sitting sidesaddle. She wrapped her arms tightly around Hajime’s waist. Once she was situated, she patted his stomach lightly with her arms and he quickly started pouring mana into Steiff.

  Reisen Gorge ran from east to west with almost no north-south variation. There were almost no side routes either, so it was quite difficult to get lost.

  As there was no worry of losing their way, Hajim
e drove Steiff forward at a leisurely pace as they looked for anything resembling a labyrinth entrance. He had transmuted a machine to the bottom of the motorcycle that smoothed out any ground before the wheels hit it. Normally, an American-style bike would have a hard time dealing with such rough terrain, but thanks to his transmutation they were able to drive through the valley floor smoothly.

  “Feels nice to ride like this, right, Yue?”

  “...Yeah. It really does.”

  They were riding through the wind, basking in the light of the sun, and inhaling the smells of the surface world. For them, that was more than plenty to make their drive pleasant. Yue happily leaned her head against Hajime’s back. Throughout their leisurely drive, Hajime’s hands alone kept moving. He didn’t miss a single shot as he continually dispatched the groups of monsters that came to attack them.

  After a while, he heard a ferocious roar off in the distance. It was more intimidating than the others. At the very least, it was stronger than the monsters they’d faced in the gorge so far. With their current pace, they’d run into it in about thirty seconds.

  Hajime poured more mana into Steiff, rounded a large curve, and found a massive monster waiting for him at the end of the bend. It looked similar to the dinosaurs Hajime had faced in the labyrinth, but this one had two heads. It was a two-headed T. rex. But what was even more surprising was the rabbit-eared girl hopping to and fro beneath it, desperately trying to escape its clutches.

  Startled, Hajime stopped Steiff and gazed at the girl curiously.

  “What on earth is that?”

  “...A bunny girl?”

  “I get that, but why is she here? Are bunny people the type that live in gorges?”

  “...Not as far as I know.”

  “Then, is she one of those criminals that get thrown down here as punishment? I read that Reisen Gorge is a famous execution grounds.”

  “...Hmm. Maybe she’s an evil rabbit?”

  Hajime and Yue had a casual conversation while they watched the bunny girl run for her life. Neither of them seemed interested in saving her. It wasn’t because they were seriously worried that she might be some kind of dangerous criminal that was thrown down here. Hajime simply didn’t have any interest in strangers. He just thought saving her would have been more trouble than it was worth.