Retire 471

471 Rotating Grass (3)

Daniel glanced at Hope with a suspicious look.

I understood. If I were Daniel, I too would have wondered whether Hope was a human, a monster, or perhaps something even more unidentifiable—an alien from another world.

Unfortunately, Hope was all three. Daniel’s suspicions were justified.

“How about the others? How wide is the affected area?”

“Even Mr. Hong, who was right next to me, ended up incredibly far away. If there are any other people….”

And since there was no way to properly resolve those suspicions, we decided to ignore them.

If he was that curious, he could quit his job and join our guild.

My father had asked me to look after him, but honestly, if Daniel decided to secretly report everything to his superiors, there was nothing we could do about it.

It wasn’t as though we hadn’t considered that possibility. If it happened, so be it. Maybe we’d misjudged his character, or maybe he was just bold enough not to fear Hong Seok-young or Kim Chaemin. If it was the latter, my father might even be pleased.

Besides, in this situation, it was impossible to have a conversation while excluding Daniel.

“No? The magic was tangled only… in that office? Just there.”

“The office with the painting of the sailing ship?”

I recalled a painting that had hung in Grimes’s office as I asked.

“Yeah. That one. We’ll have to clean up, though.”

“Clean up?”

I quickly understood what he meant and frowned.

“If there wasn’t anyone else in that office, then no one else got caught up in this. In fact, that’s why I was able to come in at all. If there had been a crowd, I wouldn’t have been able to enter the dungeon like this….”

Hope pointed to the blue light shining in the distance.

“Either way, it would have gotten messy. People would have died trying to rescue others, or died trying to escape.”

“What’s going on around the gate that makes it so bad?”

“It’s a complete disaster.”

Hope declared, his tone ominous.

---

“I don’t know!”

Hope also shook his head firmly when it came to Haley Lawton.

I’d wondered if things might go a little more smoothly, but it seemed there was no room for such luck.

Sometimes I wondered if this guy knew anything at all, but then, every now and then, he’d act so convincingly that I’d be reminded of how unknowable humans truly are. No matter how useless or annoying someone seems, they always end up having their uses.

Like Han Taekyung, who ignored my order to stay quietly at the hotel, wandered around the city, and detected the magic explosion; or Hope, who, after hearing from Han Taekyung, snuck into the Cactus Mirage office to figure out what had happened.

Perhaps because he was conscious of Daniel, Hope’s explanation had some gaps, but those of us who knew the circumstances could easily fill them in.

Since the dungeon gate had been forcibly opened, they’d pried apart the warped magic and snuck in through a spot other than the gate.

Hope didn’t say it, but that method was probably similar to the way Sam Bloom or Haley Lawton had forced open dungeons before. The difference, perhaps, was that we had Han Taekyung, who could see into the dungeon through that twisted magic.

“But isn’t he dead?”

“No. He’s alive.”

“He looks like he’s about to die, though.”

“There’s a skilled doctor with him, so he won’t die.”

Hope nodded at Daniel. Daniel, uncomfortable at hearing his name, hunched his shoulders. Lawton, dangling in Daniel’s grip, swayed along with him.

It wasn’t that losing an arm was a minor injury, but for a hunter, it wasn’t so severe that he’d be completely out of his mind. Kim Chaemin had played a big part in that.

“You didn’t see the core’s location?”

“Unfortunately, that seems to be asking too much.”

“So we have to search this entire dungeon….”

Kim Chaemin shuddered at Hope’s answer. He didn’t like dungeons filled with red sand. More than anything, the open plain threw off his sense of distance.

Still, the gate was the simplest way through. That was why, despite Hope’s warnings, we were heading toward the lake where the gate was supposed to be.

“So what’s in that lake, anyway?”

Even after moving for quite some time, the distance to the lake didn’t seem to shrink.

“Well, um. How should I put this?”

“Don’t leave anything out. Explain as thoroughly as possible.”

“I’m not leaving anything out!”

He really had grown a lot compared to the old days.

Thinking of Eva Robinson participating in classes with the children at school, I wondered if Hope wouldn’t be better off in that group as well. Wasn’t he about the same age as Eva Robinson? He wouldn’t stand out much among the kids, and judging by his mental age, he sometimes seemed even younger than Yoo Ji-eun, so it would suit him perfectly.

“…A flower?”

“You said you wouldn’t leave anything out.”

“No, I’m serious. Listen.”

Han Taekyung, too, had benefited in a way from the explosion of chaotic magic. Just as Hope had helped him land in a safe spot instead of at the gate, Han Taekyung had been able to see farther than usual.

“It’s called Rotating Grass. The one I tried to burn earlier. When it touches water, it unravels like this… turns into something like a worm.”

“You know that thing?”

“It showed up in Australia once. In the desert. I was a kid at the time… I never went in myself, but my mom and dad didn’t come home for a month, so I remember it. That’s when Sandra and I became friends.”

From Gamble’s perspective, it was questionable whether that counted as “becoming friends.”

But that wasn’t what mattered.

“I only learned the details much later. That dungeon was declared impossible to conquer.”

“The gate?”

“Yeah. The gate itself came up from underwater. After the dungeon broke out, the lake where the dungeon appeared was made off-limits. Is it still that way? Ask Sandra later. She knows more about it than I do.”

He was surprisingly knowledgeable about monsters, but not about social systems. I was starting to get a sense of Hope’s areas of interest.

“There’s no way to travel through it. At least, not on land. If it touches water, it burrows into the host’s body.”

“A parasite?”

“No, not that. It’s closer to a plant. It just follows its instinct to reproduce. It puts down roots in your skin and blooms a yellow flower. That flower is toxic and contaminates the water.”

“…That sounds dangerous.”

“It is. There’s a reason it was declared impossible to conquer.”

“I’ve never heard of a dungeon like that.”

Hope chuckled at my words.

“You have no idea how much information our country hides.”

“They hide it?”

“It’s embarrassing, isn’t it?”

“Hmm.”

“If you knew how many dungeons in Australia are just left alone because no one can deal with them, you’d be shocked.”

If it were somewhere like the Alps in Europe, it couldn’t be hidden. But Australia wasn’t like that. Most of the country was desert. Did the isolation and resulting evolution of plants and animals affect the types of monsters found in dungeons?

If monsters that made gate entry itself impossible were common, as Hope said, the association would have made it widely known.

“Sandra said they just don’t want to admit they can’t handle their own country’s dungeons.”

“But there are places like the Alps.”

Since they couldn’t handle it alone, the neighboring countries formed a community.

Maybe Australia, being an island, couldn’t form an organic alliance like Europe, but there were still countries grouped together as Oceania. In reality, New Zealand hunters were almost always paired with Australians.

“The Alps are different.”

But my father shook his head at my words.

“Pardon?”

“They joined forces because they had someone else to blame.”

“…….”

“Look at the U.S. this time.”

My father glanced at Daniel, who was silently following along, carrying Lawton.

“They tried to hide what happened at Yellowstone.”

“Ah.”

“Exactly.”

“…I—I’m sorry?”

“It’s not your fault.”

Even so, Daniel shrank back, looking uneasy.

It was strange. When I’d first been introduced to him at the training academy, he’d seemed so much more confident, the very image of an elite.

That’s why experience matters. Just because you’re good at hunting monsters doesn’t mean you understand everything about the world. Even the missions carried out by American intelligence agencies wouldn’t involve getting tangled up in something as wretched as the end of the world.

“Hmm.”

The lake, which had always seemed so far away, was finally drawing near.

“Hmm. I don’t know about anything else, but it certainly doesn’t look inviting.”

The water stretched along the mountain, looking more like a river than a lake. It was so wide that it was hard to see the other side.

Maybe it really was a river. But even in a dungeon, rivers flow. Who knew where that stream led? It was one of the dungeon’s mysteries.

The enormous pool of water before us was perfectly still. With no wind, there were no waves. The surface only seemed to ripple because something beneath the water was moving.

The first thing that caught my eye was the yellow flowers Hope had mentioned. Most were submerged, but here and there, petals poked above the surface. The ones touching the water glowed a vivid yellow, but the parts above the surface were so withered and shriveled, it was hard to believe they were the same flower.

It wasn’t just the flowers—the stems, or perhaps the branches, were the same. Like hundreds or thousands of worms let loose, tiny branches waved their roots in the lake. Even in the shallower parts, it was like this. I couldn’t imagine what it must be like in the deeper, darker parts.

“There’s a gate in there….”

Kim Chaemin kicked a small stone at his feet. It rolled and tumbled before plopping into the lake.

Ssssk….

A branch, waving its roots, clung to the stone, then let go when it found nothing useful.

“…….”

It puts down roots in your skin, he’d said.

“Hm.”

Kim Chaemin glanced at the unconscious Lawton, then took out some food. Most of the supplies we’d brought into the dungeon were long-lasting, but since we were tackling a relatively well-studied dungeon this time, we’d brought some snacks as well.

Kim Chaemin tossed a piece of bread into the lake.

Plop.

He’d gone out of his way to buy it from a famous bakery near the lodging, saying there was no reason we couldn’t eat well even in a dungeon.

It was just a fist-sized bun, so soft that pressing it left an imprint.

The reaction in the lake was different from with the stone. The plant—or monster, whatever it was—latched onto the bread. While the stone was quickly released, the bread was wrapped in roots. They even competed with one another, stretching out roots, tearing the bread to shreds. It was a savagery no plant should possess. In an instant, the bread was torn to unrecognizable pieces.

After watching for a moment, Kim Chaemin produced a single rose in his hand. The rose, tossed into the lake, met the same fate as the bread. No, while the bread left a few crumbs floating, the rose was devoured without a trace.

“…There’s a gate in there?”

“Yeah.”

Kim Chaemin looked at my father and me with a rare, troubled expression.

“This isn’t going to work.”

“It won’t?”

“My magic can’t break through that.”

The archmage admitted defeat.