Chapter 34
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Translator: 8uhl
Chapter: 34
Chapter Title: The Legion's Gratitude (5)
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[You have conquered the 35th Floor and taken another step forward. This is where the story truly begins. This is Chapter 3. Look at the screen; I will show you the newly added functions.]
I checked the app.
The once-empty screen was now jam-packed with various interfaces.
"What's this?"
[Tap on that. It is the Shop. A system shop that all Players can use.]
I touched the new icon.
Just as it said, it was a shop selling various items.
My eyes fell on [Execution Ticket: 500G (Limit 2)].
The tutorial reward I could have chosen was 1,000 Gold.
If I had chosen that and held onto it, I'd have two Execution Tickets by now.
Of course, there was also a high chance I would have died without being able to endure.
"Thanks to that, my Gold is now at 0. How do I earn Gold?"
[There is only one way to obtain Gold. Kill enemy Units and Players.]
"...What?"
At the same time, my Gold, which had been at a definite 0, began to climb.
And the rising number stopped at exactly 100G.
[Those rats we defeated last time. The app judged their value to be a mere 100G.]
A value that was one-fifth of an Execution Ticket.
My gaze hardened.
It was brutally cold and clinical.
A species that once thrived and developed with dreams and hopes had been utterly annihilated, yet nothing remained.
[This is reality. It would have been the same even without the app.]
"That's true, too."
I let out a wry smile.
[Though it's only 100G, you should be able to acquire something helpful.]
I browsed the items in the shop.
It seemed the items mentioned as being helpful to me in Chapter 3 were indeed from the shop.
"There are items for Players and for Units."
[They are all things that can create variables in the game.]
I seriously considered the items.
I had to choose carefully.
With the money I had now, I could only buy one thing.
To prove my abilities to Cha Ji-yeon and work with her, I needed to buy something that would help me right now.
"How about this one?"
For exactly 100G, I picked an item that seemed to fit my criteria.
A shimmering, transparent liquid was contained within a bottle.
The fact that it was a consumable was the most bothersome part, but it was an item that could give me everything I wanted.
[The choice is yours. The item has been selected. By spending your Gold, you have obtained 'Moonlight Fury'.]
Moonlight Fury.
Based on the description, it was an item that granted the power of a Moon Wolf, a creature with outstanding physical abilities under the moonlight, for a short period.
"This isn't what I think it is, is it?"
[It probably is. The Moonlight Fury you just purchased is undoubtedly the racial trait of a species that exists somewhere, sometime.]
I drew a sharp breath.
This shop really sold everything.
*
"Oppa. He's there, right?"
"Tell her I am."
"Hoo."
Having finished her preparations, Kang Do-yeon sighed, as if she had heard my words relayed to her.
The preparations were nothing special.
We were going to climb up through that giant hole in the ceiling, past the 35th Floor.
[Naturally, the Legion dispatched scouts first.]
Scouts capable of flight and with good mobility began to ascend through the air.
The enemy did not react to their small size.
If there were more of them up there, it would be fine this time as well.
"Switch the screen. How is it?"
[This is an interesting result as well.]
The screen changed along with the meaningful text.
I could now see what the Legion was focused on.
[An ordinary cave. But it is vast.]
"...A village? No, a city?"
To my eyes, the structures stretching out below looked like some kind of residential facilities.
There was a place that looked like a plaza, and another that seemed to be a fortress.
Its scale was enormous.
[Kang Do-yeon reached a similar conclusion to yours, and the Legion accepted her opinion. This is the nest where a certain species used to live. One piece of evidence is that the architecture and the symbols and writings carved everywhere match the structures on the 35th Floor.]
"They could have been a people who lived underground. Then what in the world were the structures on the 35th Floor, the mummies guarding it, and this pit leading to it?"
I scratched my head.
There was still far too little information to properly understand what this place was or where we were.
[This is the 36th Floor... and a passage to the 37th Floor has been discovered.]
Around that time, the scouts found the passage to the next floor.
[However, it is sealed by an unknown power.]
"Nothing's ever easy."
The scouts couldn't pass through.
It was like the spiderwebs of the spiders that had blocked our way when we first stepped from a small branch to a large branch, the Great Floor.
"Doesn't that just mean we have to smash our way through?"
"We still need to know what it is to deal with it."
"We don't have a choice right now."
Kang Do-yeon coolly nodded her head.
I was at a loss for words and shut my mouth.
[The Legion is of the same mind.]
The Legion's soldiers began to move.
The winged, flying species were the first to cross the void and pass through the hole.
[It's happening again. Those wraiths of unknown resentment once again block our path. The Legion has no intention of wasting time. The order to advance has been given to all forces.]
The moment the flying species reached the 36th Floor.
The underground city, which had been dead silent, erupted with monstrous shrieks.
The mindless corpses we had seen on the 35th Floor.
They poured out from houses and buildings, the symbols drawn all over their bodies glowing.
[They are quite annoying. We learn nothing from eating them, they provide little nutrition, and above all, the unidentified power that moves them is a power we do not yet know.]
"There's... something."
I frowned, watching them clash with the Legion's flying units.
The ones we met on the floor below were clearly well-built, armed warriors.
But this time was different.
While there were armed warriors mixed in, the majority were not.
Some held tools that looked like farm implements, while others were completely bare-handed.
There were even hunched-over elders and still-small children.
'What in the world happened here?'
My mind grew even more complicated as I watched Kang Do-yeon, who had climbed up through the hole, kick off the ground with other Legion soldiers, swinging her sword and fists.
"There are more of them, but they're nothing special."
And the sight of her splitting an enemy in two with a single slash, a brilliant smile on her face, also troubled my heart.
"A flow. There's definitely a flow."
In the heart of the fierce battlefield.
Kang Do-yeon kicked away an opponent impaled and neutralized on her sword and muttered to herself.
The wraiths fought desperately against the black tide that endlessly crawled up from the pit.
There was no hesitation in their actions.
They were like programmed machines.
"Then who did the programming?"
Kang Do-yeon's eyes glinted with a red light.
The Legion had already experienced a mysterious, invisible power once before.
Through the wraith and the moth, the leader of the guardian spirits, it had come to realize the existence of souls and had succeeded in partially understanding them.
So, it wasn't impossible for it to sense something similar.
"There. It's over there. The end of the city."
Kang Do-yeon pointed to the exact opposite side, towards the end of the cavern where a large structure stood.
Assault-type soldiers, the size of large horses or bulls, bared their teeth and charged toward it.
Using their powerful force derived from mass and muscle, they literally trampled the resisting wraiths.
Leading the charge was a Legion soldier based on an earth dragon and a cave boar, possessing a hard head-carapace and strong jaws.
The creature swung its large, hard head, batting a wraith away.
[A new enemy has appeared.]
But in that instant.
The massive Legion soldier's neck was literally split in half.
What made it possible was a single man with a sword.
Like the other wraiths, his entire body was covered in symbols, and he stood guard before the building, holding a faintly glowing blue sword.
Behind him, dozens of warriors exuding a similarly extraordinary aura appeared to defend the building.
[We were right. The clue is in the place those things are guarding.]
The Legion's gaze also turned toward it.
With her lips set in a firm line, Kang Do-yeon stepped forward.
The large amount of energy the Legion had invested in her was meant for times like this.
[It sliced through the armor of the Legion's sturdiest assault-type unit in a single blow. This means the defense of an all-purpose unit cannot withstand it. It also means that our swords, honed from carapaces, will be cut the moment they clash.]
"Then how should I fight?"
A faint smile on her face, Kang Do-yeon used the cells of her entire body to maximize her senses.
She autonomously controlled not only her five senses like sight, hearing, and touch, but also internal nerves for balance and reflexes.
"Keuk..."
On top of that, sensory organs unique to cave creatures, which she hadn't possessed before, began to form on her body.
Organs for detecting minute vibrations, organs for sensing faint electromagnetic waves, and so on.
As her senses expanded, her eyes unfocused, and her body trembled.
The sudden flood of information into her head from her amplified senses caused an overload.
But that was when the Legion's Hive Mind, which shared a single consciousness with her, stepped in.