NOVEL NEXT Interlude: At The Heart Of The World
Sugimoto Sora is confused. This is a new emotion for him, and it is powerful enough to penetrate the intense psychosis of rage, loneliness, and sleep deprivation which he is currently experiencing.
For the last three days, he has been carving a bloody and vicious path through the deep layers of the Infinite Dungeon; when he had discovered Saiki Suzume's betrayal on the Nine Hundred and Ninety-Ninth floor, he had briefly considered turning back and retracing his steps. But the prospect of admitting defeat in any capacity, however minor, had been so completely incompatible with his personality and value system that it had quite handily triumphed over logical thought in his current state.
And so, more out of stubbornness and inertia than anything else, he had given himself a new quest: to plumb the absolute depths of the Infinite Dungeon and discover if it had a back door. Another adventurer might have been tempted by the prospect of legendary weapons or powerful secret Skills, but Sugimoto Sora is so firmly and solipsistically confident in his own power that such things are not considered for even a fraction of a second. He simply wishes to win -- to subdue the so-called Infinite Dungeon to his will and triumph over its challenges utterly, so that all must acknowledge his supremacy. And so he delves, relentlessly and thoughtlessly, steadily increasing the speed and ferocity of the violence he inflicts upon everything before him; the alternative is to stop and consider what he is doing, and that is something Sugimoto Sora desperately does not wish to do at this time.
So driven, he accelerates his pace of destruction; floors that once took him several minutes he now rips through in mere moments. Each kill -- flashing by and forgotten -- brings him closer to the victory that will quench his parched and maddening thirst; but the Infinite Dungeon is, unfortunately, not named in jest. Floors form beneath him as he traverses, myriad and endless, and he will never reach any final chamber.
At least, not under normal circumstances.
As the pace of his cataclysmic brutality continues to increase, the battle becomes a struggle between his aggression and the dungeon's ability to construct new floors in real-time; ordinarily, this would not be much of a contest, but Sugimoto Sora is not your typical adventuring party. And, eventually, the simple physics -- that a sword can destroy a floor full of monsters faster than such a floor can be constructed -- becomes incontrovertible.
And so, Sugimoto Sora abruptly finds himself bursting out of an explosion of death into an empty gray void; he is surprised, but it takes some time for this to register, and by the time it does so he has fallen some distance away from the rapidly-generating floors above him. He drifts, in listless free-fall, for a minute or two, then impacts with great violence into a nondescript flat plane. Naturally, he is uninjured.
He lies there for some minutes; but eventually, the prospect of introspection proves more dreadful than he can bear, and so he rises and begins to wander. Any motion he makes seems to take him back to where he has started; it is so curious and antithetical to his previous lived experience that simply contemplating it occupies him for several long moments. And so it is in this state, staring sightlessly at nothing, that he is attacked.
He is aware of it, of course; a deadly object falls upon him from a great height, and it is with total unconcern that he strikes it out of the air without even looking. But when he turns to see it, he is astonished to discover that his right hand now holds only the hilt of a sword.
The legendary sword Dawnbreaker -- heretofore invincible in all instances of combat -- has been slashed very neatly in half by whatever fell towards him; its blade lies some distance away on the ground, next to the object in question. He approaches it, lips pursed; and after a moment of consideration, he discards the broken hilt without a second glance and picks up the strange newcomer to his personal odyssey.
The sword -- for that is what has nearly split him in twain -- is a katana with a smooth white blade and a long hilt wrapped in bands of orange and indigo, and the instant his hand settles into place beneath the tsuba, he can feel its perfection; it was made, if not for his hands, then for hands so like his own that there is no difference. And although he knows nothing of anything that has come before, he knows its name instinctively -- the Kiku-no-Tsurugi -- and becomes abruptly aware, without any transition, that he is now completely unstoppable.
Gently, almost regretfully, he slices open a minute cleft in the featureless gray plain beneath him; colors and textures roar past in a kaleidoscope of sensation he cannot understand or process, but he does know one thing: this is an exit, and he can take it.
Slipping through the rift, he does not see or sense it seal behind him; for this place, unbeknownst to nearly everyone, is as adept at healing and restoring as it is creating and shaping. But for Sugimoto Sora, who has just plunged into a pyroclastic flow which will eventually eject him into the Lava Mountains, this is all rather academic; he will of course be perfectly unharmed when he emerges, but it's not going to do much for his attitude.