“Onee-sama!!” You can’t help but hear a high-pitched voice in your head, recalling one of those scenes in anime. The one where you see a character running to the big sister, with tears in eyes, crying for help.

Yeah, right! You think to yourself for a second imagining doing that very same thing, before swapping that image away from your mind like a little white cloud. First of all, is Ariadne even your big sister? Is she your little sister? At the time this question did not seem important—all that mattered was that she was, in fact, your sister!

Usually, little sisters don’t have jugs that big! It’s pretty much one of the core “big sister” tropes! You find yourself unable to let go of the question. And even though you haven’t seen her naked (if the bra that didn't cover even half of her chest could be considered clothes), you could tell that her breasts easily rivaled Epsilon’s. On the other hand, even with all of the fighting she has done, her skin still looked so smooth—not even a hint of a single wrinkle or deficiency!

"Huh?" You just realized that even though you've seen Ariadne get wounded, she never has a single scar on her. Either way, she can’t possibly be any older than her early twenties! Though age in fantasy settings is often relative, especially for monster girls. She might as well be fifty years old and you wouldn’t know. Not that she seems mature enough mentally for that age. And straight up asking a girl her age is almost always considered rude.

And yet, that image of running to your sister for help is far closer to reality than you might prefer, as you find yourself going up a narrow flight of uneven, stairs. You nearly fall over, chin first against the stone. Several steps have big chunks missing and the last torch you have in your hand barely illuminates the path before you, struggling to keep the flame going.

As you run up the stairs, out of the lower dungeon levels, you think back to the events of a couple of minutes ago. At first, you considered treating the bunnies yourself but quickly realized that you have no idea what to do. Hot water and clean towels would be a good start to clean the wounds and prevent an infection, but where to find those? Even now you sincerely doubt there’s plumbing installed somewhere in these walls with central heating and hot water.

And Alpha recoiled when you so much as reached out to her. So, you ended up leaving her there, sitting in the cold and dark, together with the sleeping Beta, and had Delta drag the unconscious sadists to a different cell just in case, before locking them all up.

“Shit!” You curse when you exit the staircase and finally reach the main hall. You agreed to meet up with Ariadne outside, in the open air, and have no idea where she even is right now!

Not able to see even halfway across the hall you end up putting your hand against the nearest wall and walking alongside it, searching for a doorway. When you pass the second collapsed one in a row, you are slightly relieved that, perhaps, the search will not take all night. At the same time, you grow increasingly worried about the state of this place and whether one of these days the ceiling will crumble on your head if you don’t fix it up real soon.

When you reach the very same corridor that Ariadne let you through to reach the previous Demon Lord, the first thing you do is get your master key out to unlock every door there is. Turns out there is no need—none of them are locked in the first place. So, you just open the wooden doors and check if there is a room where Ariadne is sleeping.

As you turn a corner you see light at the end of the corridor—coming from the very room your father is in. You rush inside and find the minotaur girl on the squishy, dark-red, meaty floor, lying against the bed of nails and crying. The bed is empty.

She looks up at you with red, puffy eyes and tears running down her face and speaks in a quavering voice between her sobs, “H-he’s… gooone!”

Unable to control herself Ariadne hides her face in her arms and bawls.

It would appear that someone has stolen your father’s corpse while you were away.