Retire 391

391 Inside (3)

The strategy for clearing this remote dungeon in Gangwon Province is laughably simple.

Catching the crocodiles that inhabit the dungeon isn’t exactly easy. Even if they can’t see, that doesn’t mean their other senses are dull. Besides, in modern society, what really raises the difficulty of a dungeon isn’t the form of the monster, but its size. No matter how big a human gets, it’s hard to surpass two meters. But monsters? There’s no limit.

And compared to humanoid monsters, it’s harder to predict their attacks. If it’s got one head, two arms, two legs—well, its movements are pretty similar to a human’s, unless an arm suddenly extends or something.

But insects, shellfish, crocodiles… In daily life, you don’t usually fight mosquitoes for your life, and you rarely get into a duel with a crocodile.

And just because it looks and moves like a crocodile doesn’t guarantee anything. What if it suddenly breathes fire?

In the end, fighting monsters mostly comes down to the Hunter’s own combat skills and improvisation.

“Should we just smash everything?”

“If we were going to do that, we’d have come in officially. If we asked Hunter Imi-seon, she’d have gotten us in quickly.”

Hope and Han Taekyung chatted as they examined the cracks and crevices.

We’d made it to the spot where newly hatched baby crocodiles emerged. Hope still said she couldn’t sense anything, but Han Taekyung insisted the dust-like stuff was getting thicker. Like Hope, I couldn’t see anything at all.

I had no idea exactly what Han Taekyung was seeing. Hope just shrugged, and Han Taekyung himself said he couldn’t explain it well—he just had a feeling.

“No.”

I cut into their conversation.

“Last time, we had the excuse of collecting dungeon data.”

Imi-seon had covered for us well enough.

“With all the attention on us now, going into the same dungeon again could draw unnecessary interest.”

I didn’t care about attention on myself. The only thing that couldn’t be revealed was Hong Seok-yeong’s injury.

“That’s why we snuck in. Same goes for clearing the dungeon—better to avoid it if we can…”

“But?”

“If there’s no other way, we’ll do what we have to.”

“I’m not fighting those crocodiles!”

“I told you, I’m not going to make you…”

Like I said, clearing the dungeon is easy.

If you try to take those crocodiles head-on, of course it’s hard. It’s not just one; there are so many you can’t even count them.

But… well. This stinking stuff… it’s highly flammable.

Very flammable.

Just toss in a spark and run for the exit, and the whole place will go up in flames.

“If we’re lucky, the core will be damaged too. If not, we just come back and smash the core.”

“That’s… convenient.”

“Fire is usually a good solution.”

There’s a reason my sister went around setting things on fire.

It’s the kind of crazy stunt you can only pull in a closed-off dungeon. Of course, you can’t just set a fire without a plan. You have to check the layout, see if there are any monsters that can withstand fire…

No, this isn’t what I should be talking about.

“If it comes down to it, we set a fire and get out. If we need to, we break things.”

“Doesn’t that defeat the point of sneaking in?”

“Who’s going to know what we did here?”

“……”

“Why do you think we bothered sneaking in?”

“……”

Han Taekyung just stared at me. The lenses of his sunglasses gleamed.

Hope looked at me, too. Her hair had grown long enough to be tied back in a single knot. She twisted her hair around her finger, then grabbed Han Taekyung’s shoulder.

“Let’s go, senpai!”

“All right, junior!”

“…Wait. Just don’t break things recklessly.”

“It’s all babies in there anyway! It’s fine, it’s fine.”

“They’re not even babies—they’re eggs! If we break them all, it’s perfect!”

“That’s not perfect. Who knows what’ll happen if we shock them…”

“How many Hunters do you think are here? Why worry about that?”

“There are only three of us?!”

“Be careful! That’s not why we’re here!”

Han Taekyung gave a smug thumbs-up and grinned.

“All dungeons are enemies of humanity. I, Han Taekyung, have always wanted to be a hero saving the world since I was a kid!”

I sighed.

“It was a trend when I was little. Transforming with a belt, piloting robots, that sort of thing…”

Han Taekyung hummed an unrecognizable tune as he felt along the wall. Hope, who’d been just as fired up, caught my eye, pointed at Han Taekyung, and spun her finger by her ear.

To me, they were both the same.

“I’ll smash it!”

“If you collapse it, we’ll all die.”

“Han Taekyung doesn’t make amateur mistakes like that!”

I sighed again.

---

I don’t know how big crocodile eggs are on Earth, but they can’t be this big.

Some were the size of ostrich eggs, others reached up to my knees. The deeper we followed Han Taekyung into the space inside the wall, the more varied the sizes became.

Judging by the size of the baby crocodiles crawling out of the wall, they couldn’t have come from the largest eggs. Near the wall, there were lots of broken shells—those were ostrich-egg sized.

The larger eggs showed no signs of hatching. Were they infertile? Then again, considering the size of the crocodiles in the ravine, it didn’t make sense for them to lay eggs in such a small space. Just how was this dungeon structured?

“These are… like fossils.”

“Fossils?”

“Whether they’re empty or the thing inside died, nothing’s going to hatch from them.”

Hope tapped an egg lightly. It sounded like knocking on stone.

“That’s odd.”

“What is?”

“There are drag marks here.”

Hope pointed at the ground. When I shone my light, I could see that an egg had been dragged.

“There are footprints, too. Someone’s been here.”

“Someone? But there’s no other way in…”

“There might be a passage on the other side.”

I frowned. Judging by the length of the ravine, it wasn’t impossible.

“Or maybe there’s a simpler way.”

“A simpler way?”

“Like rebuilding the wall after.”

“……”

Yeah… that wasn’t impossible either. I stared into the darkness, then followed after Han Taekyung again.

I didn’t find any suspicious traces on the wall, but you never know. I only noticed the flame that burned Kim Yuhwa’s body at the last moment. My brother might have pulled some trick here.

“Mr. Han, what do you think?”

“…It’s hard to say.”

At some point, Han Taekyung had taken off his sunglasses again.

“Earlier, it was easy to follow because there was only one trail, even if it was faint.”

“And now?”

“There are too many. I can’t tell anymore.”

Han Taekyung blinked rapidly, then pressed his palms against his eyes.

“At least there’s only one path here. Otherwise, it would be even harder.”

“…Let’s push through a bit more.”

“You’re not going to say we can stop?”

“We can’t turn back now.”

“Of course.”

Han Taekyung lowered his hands.

He steadied his breathing and started walking again.

The deeper we went, the fewer ostrich-sized eggs there were. What remained were huge, hardened eggs, with no sign of life at all.

That was a relief. If eggs that size were still viable, things could get ugly. We’d have to smash every one to prevent them from hatching, and that would take ages.

“…Oh.”

At last, Han Taekyung stopped.

All I could tell was that this passage with the eggs was absurdly long. The fact that there had been an incline along the way only made the dungeon’s structure more mysterious.

“This… I think this is it?”

Han Taekyung didn’t let me keep ignoring reality by focusing on dungeon structure.

I looked at the enormous egg he pointed to. It came up nearly to my chest.

“This one?”

“To my eyes, it’s… you know that dust?”

“Yes.”

“It’s spewing it out, almost like pollen.”

This?

The eggs had gotten bigger as we went deeper, so it wasn’t that surprising.

There was no sign of life inside, and the surface felt cold, like stone.

But Han Taekyung was serious. He wasn’t the type to joke about this.

“Step back a second.”

“Huh?”

“Just move back.”

As I was examining the egg, Hope suddenly urged me to move away.

I did so without thinking, then realized too late. Hope stepped back with one foot, raised her hand, and with a clenched fist…

“What are you doing!”

“This is it, right?”

“So?”

“We need to see what’s inside. Isn’t that why we came all this way?”

Hope gestured at the broken eggshells, utterly unruffled.

She was right, of course. Absolutely right, but…

Damn it. Focus.

We needed to check inside.

It felt and looked like a rock, but it was still an egg. Around the hole Hope punched, the shell crumbled away. The inside was empty.

Click.

“This…”

“What? It was already cracked?”

“So this really was the one.”

“Junior, didn’t you believe me?”

“It’s strange. I still can’t sense anything.”

Hope noticed that one part of the shell had broken in a clean, straight line, unlike the irregular cracks from her punch. It was an unnaturally neat cut.

Someone had already sliced the shell open and then carefully sealed it again.

Who?

My brother?

Or Kim Yuhwa?

Maybe both.

Or maybe someone entirely new.

The shell, already fractured, slowly split further. With a little pressure, fine cracks spread across the surface like a spiderweb.

It didn’t matter. There were eggs everywhere. My focus was on what was inside.

The egg split. The shell crumbled completely at my feet.

I shone my flashlight inside.

There was no unhatched monster corpse, as I’d half-feared. Instead, there was a long stick-like object, tightly wrapped in a black plastic bag.

The bag was too small, so one end stuck out the top, the other the bottom, with a hole punched through the lower part to thread it through. The handle was tied off with a knot to keep it from slipping out.

It was clearly the work of a human.

I handed the flashlight to Hope and carefully untied the knot. Halfway through, I just tore the plastic. The object inside was so familiar that I couldn’t help myself.

“…Huh?”

As I tore the plastic, a sword emerged. Han Taekyung recognized it.

“That looks just like your sword, senpai.”

I looked at the sword.

My sword. My sister’s sword. My brother’s sword.

No. The sword I have is my sister’s. She used it, then passed it on to me. Even if my brother had used it before that.

But this sword, hidden in a plastic bag, is not my sister’s sword. Of course, it’s not mine either. It’s a sword that neither my sister nor I have ever touched…

…My brother’s sword.

Hope, for all her antics, was sharp. She would have realized what it meant for there to be two identical swords.

It’s fine. Gamble had already suspected as much, anyway.

I turned the plastic bag that had covered the sword inside out. Even after removing the sword, there was something else inside.

“……”

A police ID.

The name: Kim Yuhwa.

A short-haired police officer smiled up at me from the photo.