Retire 342
by Cristae342 A Blessing Upon You (1)
A few days earlier.
Busan.
The basement of the Atlas warehouse.
“…Once this is all over, how about going hiking together, Heejae?”
“Hiking?”
I grimaced immediately.
It’s not that I dislike hiking, but anyone who knows Hong Seokyeong knows exactly what he means by “hiking.” That’s not something you can call hiking.
Even if it were real hiking, still…
“Go by yourself.”
“What’s the fun in hiking alone!”
“Hiking is supposed to be a battle with yourself.”
“It’s for socializing.”
“I said no.”
There were no other magical locks on the door. No presence, either, so we simply broke it open. No matter how late the hour, how could there not be a single guard in this secret warehouse? I had no idea what gave them such confidence.
Was this another trap? Or…?
Watching the way the Ark operated, sometimes I wondered if Henry Lehmann was just as thoughtless as he seemed.
Alex Hope hadn’t been involved in the day-to-day operations of the Ark, but he was still a key figure in his own right. Hope always said he disliked getting involved in complicated matters and hated hunting people, so he mostly just helped out with dungeon clean-up when needed. Dungeons rich in resources, like mana grass. Even in those dungeons, not all the monsters were cooperative, he’d said.
Still, Alex Hope, a major player, was aiming to destroy the Ark, and the other two—Noah Michel, the actual operator, and Henry Lehmann—couldn’t even pretend to get along. If you threw Alex Hope into the mix?
I truly had no idea how the Ark managed to maintain its scale… Was it because they absorbed Atlas, the cult research lab? If so, shouldn’t we be calling it Atlas, not the Ark?
And Henry Lehmann seemed more obsessed with Atlas than with the Ark itself.
The more I learned, the more it rankled that the world had ended up in the hands of such an organization. Humanity ought to be ashamed.
Trap or not, the secret passage in the basement led even further down. As I walked along the corridor, marveling that they’d managed such construction, I was surprised to find—
“A gate?”
A dungeon appeared.
Yes. A gate.
That surging blue magic—no matter how you looked at it, it was a gate.
…Why is this here?
No, it’s not impossible, but why hide it like this?
“……”
Hong Seokyeong stood with his arms crossed, glaring at the dungeon gate. The atmosphere had changed so completely, it was hard to believe this was the same person who’d been cracking jokes at me just moments ago.
Without taking his eyes off the gate, Hong Seokyeong spoke.
“This dungeon isn’t registered on your watch, is it?”
“If it were, I’d be surprised.”
“…Is it something like what Sam Bloom did, creating a gate?”
“Well, hmm. Didn’t they say that was a dungeon about to collapse, so they forced the door open? This dungeon looks perfectly stable.”
Hong Seokyeong tapped the grass with his fingers.
I thought about the commotion we’d caused to get in here from the warehouse. About the guy crammed into the back seat of the police car.
The police had moved with such familiarity that I wasn’t too worried, but… whether we’d be able to get in here so easily again was another matter.
In that case—
“We’ll have to go in.”
“Shall we?”
Hong Seokyeong and I spoke at the same time.
No further explanation was needed. When our eyes met, Hong Seokyeong grinned.
We quietly drew our weapons and crossed through the gate.
Since the appearance of magic in human history, the laws of the world had undergone a cataclysmic upheaval.
A cataclysm—there was no other word for it.
A new set of rules had emerged to explain the world, beyond the laws of physics.
Along with the mysterious headache that was the dungeon.
Now.
Busan, the mysterious dungeon beneath the Atlas warehouse.
“See? I taught you well.”
Hong Seokyeong said this as he depleted the emergency rations from my subspace.
“These are the rations of the future? Much better than I expected. Which company makes these? Maybe if I invest, they’ll get to market faster?”
“…Is this really the time for that?”
“If not now, when?”
Hong Seokyeong had his own emergency rations for emergencies, but, true to his word, he seemed to prefer my future rations and ate only mine.
No, you can’t just get these again… I looked at the rations with regret, then shook my head. What’s the point of saving them now? Maybe it’s better to invest in the company, as Hong Seokyeong suggested.
I let out a sigh.
“How much longer do we have to wait?”
“Well… We came in without telling anyone there was a dungeon, so I figure that hunter will start to get suspicious soon. What do you think?”
“…It’s been about a week since I last contacted Irok, so he’s probably going to say something.”
“Smart kid.”
Hong Seokyeong muttered something that might have been praise, though I had no idea who it was for.
I looked away from him and stared ahead.
This dungeon in the underground corridor was enormous. Truly, unimaginably vast. We’d spent days wandering it, but hadn’t found the core. Whatever Atlas had done here—or whatever they’d tried to do that resulted in this dungeon—if we destroyed the core, the dungeon would disappear, wouldn’t it?
But we couldn’t find the core. I glared at what was in front of me with weary eyes.
And there were even stranger monsters in this dungeon.
Creak, screech, creak-creak-kkk…
Its joints bent with an unpleasant noise. Maybe it was just human prejudice to think joints shouldn’t bend that way, but if you could hear them creaking, wasn’t that a problem for them too? Still, the monster impaled on the spear flailed wildly, twisting its joints every which way.
A monster reminiscent of a crustacean was only to be expected in a dungeon with a seaside landscape. In fact, it was a relief nothing had come out of the sea itself. As Tati’s dungeon proved, even the strongest hunter will die if they can’t breathe.
But… the real problem was, was that thing even a monster?
“…I wish Mr. Kim would get here.”
“Kim will get the message and come. What do you think? Does that look like a monster to you?”
Hong Seokyeong pulled a manufactured spear from his subspace and drove it into the crustacean-like monster’s torso, then retrieved his own spear from where it had first been stuck.
Screeech…
Its arms, which looked like crab legs, writhed. I called them arms because there were hands at the ends.
Five fingers, complete with fingernails.
Hands.
Hong Seokyeong severed an arm.
Even separated from the body, the arm twitched for a long while. Transparent blood, sparkling as if mixed with gold dust, splattered everywhere. I grimaced.
“I don’t know.”
“Are they the same as the ones outside?”
“They looked more like monsters, but…”
We’d found the passage leading underground by chance.
The sea looked vast, but the forest was just as enormous. I’d hoped the core would be somewhere in the forest rather than the sea, so after clearing the beach, we headed into the woods.
Even then, I had a feeling we wouldn’t be leaving this dungeon anytime soon. As Hong Seokyeong said, it was likely Kim Chaemin would come looking for us, so we left a marker on the ground. I worried someone else might see it, but since no one had come in so far, it seemed fine, and Hong Seokyeong’s opinion was, “Well, so what?”
“They looked like lobsters.”
“…Please don’t describe it like that.”
“Should we go out for lobster when we’re done here?”
“Do we have to go to America for that? I thought you said you couldn’t spend much time in Korea.”
“…Well, if you didn’t want to be annoyed, you shouldn’t have asked me for help!”
Hong Seokyeong avoided my gaze.
“Anyway, this one feels even more off than the ones outside. You said so yourself.”
“Well… It doesn’t feel right to cut them down. It doesn’t feel like I’m fighting monsters. And those things can barely move properly, can they?”
With joints that bent and twisted at random, it was hard for them to even support their own bodies. I frowned.
Around these monsters, the magic was eerily still. Not just still—completely absent. As if that area were a vacuum.
I stomped down hard on the arm still crawling along the ground. Its physical connection to the body was severed, but a thin thread of magic still connected them. I cut that thread with my sword.
Snip.
Only then did the arm fall still.
Was this really a monster? I wasn’t sure. If it was, then it was some kind of hive creature, and there had to be something else controlling it. That made more sense.
I couldn’t just leave a dungeon like this in the hands of a suspicious organization. We still had no idea where the core was.
In the end, we sat in the dungeon’s depths, regretting not bringing a mage, and ate emergency rations…
“Huh?”
I looked up.
“What is it?”
“I just felt magic…”
It wavered. The dungeon’s magic, which had been so eerily calm, suddenly began to surge wildly.
“Magic?”
“There’s something strange about the movement.”
It didn’t take long to figure out what the writhing magic was. A plant root poked down from the ceiling.
As thin and fragile as the thread of magic I’d just cut from the monster.
And carrying a familiar magic.
Hong Seokyeong recognized it too.
“Ah. With this…”
The delicate root quickly grew. It became a stem, and a small bud formed. A red rose.
“It’s Mr. Kim!”
“Mr. Kim? That was fast. I thought it would take longer.”
“You could say he’s late.”
“That’s not what you said earlier…”
“That’s how it is.”
The rose petals trembled. Since it was Kim Chaemin’s magic, it was only natural that it resembled him, but somehow, I could almost see his face. He’d be yelling at us for thinking of mages as tools.
I shrugged. For all his words, even Hong Seokyeong looked genuinely pleased to see Kim Chaemin.
“Now we can finally resolve this.”
Strange monsters whose very nature was uncertain, and a core hidden away.
It would be faster and more effective to use Kim Chaemin’s magic to investigate than to keep searching the dungeon ourselves.
And, well, he was an archmage. Neither Hong Seokyeong nor I were particularly worried about Kim Chaemin entering this suspicious dungeon alone. We’d already cleared the way, and Kim Chaemin wasn’t the sort of mage to get lost in a place like this.
But—
When the rose blooming on the dungeon ceiling suddenly withered and died. And then bloomed again, and withered again.
That was when we realized we shouldn’t have been so complacent.
Because I’d completely forgotten that, in the future, the place where Kim Chaemin died had also been near the sea.
The rose bloomed and faded at regular intervals, like a signal. As a hunter of the old generation, Hong Seokyeong was strong in analog skills. That was a relief. If I’d been alone, I wouldn’t have realized what it meant right away.
“…It’s Morse code.”
“Morse code?”
“It sounds like a name.”
Hong Seokyeong’s face twisted.
“Henry Lehmann.”
Without a moment’s hesitation, we dashed out of the dungeon.