We've Got a New Family Member! #4
"No. I said you could bring whoever you wanted, but this one's a bit—"
Dawn.
Lee Jina frowned as she loaded gear into the back of the truck.
"Why is Jina looking at this Illinoi with such eyes, huh...? Is this Illinoi not interesting to the 'rift' or something, dasu...! Going together, dasu...!"
Illinoi had started insisting on coming along to the rift, and she wasn't taking no for an answer.
But honestly, I thought it might be fine.
According to Jina, the place we were headed this time—the Dragon's Nest—had no monsters or nasty vegetation to speak of. There's no such thing as 'absolute' safety in this world, but with Kwang-kwangi, Ang-ang-i, and even Keongkeongi coming along, our combat power was already overflowing. One nymph more or less was nothing I couldn't handle with room to spare.
Of course, Illinoi declared her confidence for all to hear.
"This Illinoi does not need any help, dasu...! Every nymph must have the power to protect her own body, dasu...! The nymphs who couldn't are all dead, dasu...!"
Passion just oozing out of her, that one.
And so, with no better option, we decided to take Illinoi along.
Flap, flap—
Right at that moment, a great beating of wings sounded from somewhere, and the enormous owl Kalinoi touched down in the truck bed.
There was only one thing that could mean.
"Kalinoi. You want to come too?"
Had she just always wanted to ride in the back of a truck?
The real problem, though, was that Kalinoi boarding made Keongkeongi furious.
━Grrrr…!
Among the animals that had become my family, there were certain compatibilities—or incompatibilities—that simply couldn't be ignored.
Keongkeongi and Kwang-kwangi, for instance: the instant they laid eyes on each other, they'd throw themselves into a brawl, each trying to test the other's strength. They'd calmed down a bit lately, but until fairly recently it was constant fighting, I'm telling you.
That made traveling with both of them difficult.
They were better now, sure.
But the relationship between Keongkeongi and the Tiger Owl Kalinoi was another story entirely—far beyond repairing. Because the Tiger Owl Kalinoi was a fearsome apex predator.
She sat higher up the food chain than Keongkeongi, the Prime Dog-Squirrel himself!
You could rightly call her his natural enemy.
"A dog-squirrel and a tiger owl cannot go together, dasu...! Though if Keongkeongi evolves and becomes a much more powerful sting-mink, then the story changes, dasu...!"
In other words, until Keongkeongi evolved, taking him and Kalinoi anywhere together was simply impossible.
What was I supposed to do?
No one else projected reliable firepower the way Keongkeongi did.
But Kalinoi had already settled herself firmly into the truck bed, showing no intention of hopping off or flying anywhere else.
With a sigh, I took Keongkeongi back down.
"Oinoi. Look after Keongkeongi for me, okay?"
"Understood, it is so…! Just leave everything to this Oinoi…! Besides, it is far too early, so this Oinoi declares she shall sleep more…!"
Four in the morning.
It was certainly an hour when most things were still asleep.
Rumble, rumble—
At last, Lee Jina's truck pulled away.
The rift we were bound for, the Dragon's Nest, lay deep in the mountains of Gangwon-do.
A valley where stream water ran crisp and cold.
Toward the place where the ridgelines rolled and heaved, I kept climbing.
"Hey, Jina. How long do we have to keep going up? This spot barely shows up on the map. Are you sure the rift's really around here?"
"It is. We're almost there."
"Mhehehe, this Illinoi is a mountain nymph, dasu...! Climbing this mountain, the power is overwhelming, dasu...! Everyone come quick here, come, dasu...! You are all much too slow, dasu...!"
Illinoi, it turned out, was a mountain nymph, born of the mountains themselves.
Where Oinoi drew renewed vigor from forests, Illinoi drew hers from high stone slopes—and climbing this one, she positively crackled with energy.
Then, in the middle of all her bustle and scrambling, Illinoi discovered something.
"Ahh…! Looking at this thing, dasu...! There is something like an abandoned temple here, dasu...! Very, very old, dasu...! Looks so full of germs, dasu...!"
An abandoned temple?
Curious, I looked—and there was indeed a great boulder, and beside it a structure you could fairly call a shrine. Inside, old, grime-caked Buddhist statues sat in lotus position, small dolls had been arranged about, and paper talismans were stuck to the walls.
Something about it made your skin crawl.
Despite hauling heavy gear up a steep mountain, Yu Ari wasn't even breathing hard as she spoke.
"Looks like a shrine the shamans built. And it's been abandoned. It has the look of a place you shouldn't touch carelessly. Senior, doesn't this feel like a scene out of a horror movie?"
Slick—
She grabbed my arm and started trembling.
Ari had a girlish side to her, like a high schooler, and creepy scenes like this seemed to genuinely unsettle her.
Truthfully, I felt uneasy too.
Not because of curses or horror-movie vibes, mind you—just because abandoned places like this were bound to be crawling with bugs and filthy as anything.
"Are these things the gods of this tiny land, dasu…? Worshiping dolls as gods—how very laughable, dasu…! A god should at least be someone like Zeus who commands the lightning, dasu…!"
Clench—
Illinoi balled her fist.
The next moment, she began raining punches down on the shrine's abandoned dolls and statues.
"In the name of Zeus, this Illinoi smites all foreign-born gods, dasu...! Punishment, dasu...!"
Thud-thud, thud-thud-thud-thud—
Under Illinoi's fists, the statues and dolls shattered one and all.
Ari trembled on.
"You look like you're about to receive divine punishment yourself."
"There is no god stronger than Zeus, dasu...! The gods of these statues are lesser than Zeus, so they can do no harm to this Illinoi at all, dasu...!"
It was a very strange claim.
When I asked her about it, Illinoi insisted that Zeus was such a genuinely powerful god that even if every god in the world ganged up on him at once, they couldn't bring him down.
Could that really be true?
I tried picturing the gods of those statues locked in battle with Zeus, god of lightning, but the image just wouldn't come together.
Anyway.
We climbed on, and at last discovered a place you could call an abandoned 'building.' Its peeling paint bore a pattern that looked distinctly military.
Jina spoke up.
"This used to be managed by an army engineering unit nearby. It got abandoned when the unit was disbanded. Supposedly, the rift opens here every dawn. You know the gang Flower, right? They found it and hired me."
So that was it.
Gangs had started discovering rifts of their own and privatizing them, had they?
Slick—
I pushed open the rusted iron door and stepped inside.
And there it was: a blue portal humming a deep woooooong— inside the building.
The size was exactly right for the mouth of a C-rank rift.
"Then we go in."
When rifts get named, they're sometimes given codes by scale, like 'T-234.'
But others, like the Dragon's Nest, earned intuitive, descriptive names.
The C-rank rift known as the Dragon's Nest was, quite literally, a place like a dragon's lair.
Dragons were carved everywhere throughout the structure's interior—the ceilings soared, the pillars were magnificent, and the floor was buried under heaps of treasure: gold coins, what looked like holy grails, and more.
"Everyone look at that, dasu...! There are so many coins made of gold, dasu...! With this, this Illinoi could buy ten whole robot snails, dasu...!"
Chachachararara—
Illinoi's face lit up at the sight of gold coins spilling everywhere.
Ari and I were both gaping too.
"This is basically a treasure field."
"Can we actually take any of it?"
Slick—
Ari picked up a gold coin.
But Jina shook her head.
"The moment you carry something outside the rift, it turns to dirt and vanishes. Of everything in here, the only thing we can take out is the flowers. That's what we came for, after all."
So that's how it was.
Plenty of things inside a rift simply couldn't leave it. All this wealth spread before my eyes and not a coin of it mine to take.
A feast painted on paper, as they say.
Slick—
Soon, checkerboard-shaped platforms appeared before us.
"Traps everywhere from here on. Just follow exactly where I step and you won't get hurt. Step on the wrong tile and the spikes up on that ceiling will fire out and turn you into a skewer."
So instead of monsters, this place was stuffed with traps.
We walked the already-disarmed traps in a careful line behind Jina.
After walking for a good while, we came upon carved figures: squat little men with scruffy beards.
"These are carvings of foreign gods, dasu...! Now that this Illinoi looks properly, it is clear this place is the ruin of a foreign god's temple, dasu...! This Illinoi can tell, dasu...! Same as that abandoned shrine earlier, dasu...! An abandoned temple ruin, dasu...!"
Illinoi judged the site to be a temple.
What god had it worshipped, I wondered?
Didn't really matter to me.
"Kalinoi. Keeping up okay?"
Slick—
I turned around.
The enormous owl Kalinoi was trotting along behind me, tip-tap-tip-tap—, and something about it was genuinely funny.
Feed her some beef and she becomes so obedient, huh.
Pat—
We pushed through the traps for a long stretch and descended into the deeper basement levels of the structure.
And then we froze in astonishment.
Flowers.
An unbelievable number of flowers were blooming right before our eyes.
A flower garden underground?
The impossibly high ceiling glittered with luminous stones like a field of stars scattered across deep blue, and somewhere a soft, artificial breeze drifted past, gentle as a sigh.
A genuinely breathtaking scene.
Even Illinoi soon let out a sigh of admiration.
"A rather splendid scenery, dasu...! Flowers that remind this Illinoi of the homeland soil, it is so...! Very gorgeous, dasu...! The stones set into the ceiling are like the stars of heaven, dasu...!"
Splendid in every respect.
I looked at the flowers, each bearing five red petals, and asked Jina.
"Jina. The flower you were looking for—is it that one?"
"No. I'm searching for the way into the next room. This is the rift's final chamber. There has to be a mechanism in here somewhere that leads onward, but I haven't found it yet."
"I see."
"If I find the next room, we might locate the core of this rift too. And if we do, maybe we'll be able to walk out with all those gold coins after all."
It made sense.
Then Jina added a warning.
"For the record, don't go breathing in the flowers too deeply. These aren't ordinary flowers. They have a special effect that makes it impossible to lie. That's why we named them the Flowers of Truth."
A flower that makes you incapable of lying?
Just as I was thinking there was no end to the strange things in this world, Yu Ari began to tremble violently.
"Ari? What's wrong?"
"Um... I already breathed in the flower scent! I could instinctively tell it wasn't poisonous! And I thought maybe this flower might be a hint for getting to the next room! Also, I just really love flowers!"
Boing—
Ari rattled off things I hadn't even asked about, one after another.
It felt like she'd been force-fed a truth serum.
Ah, Ari. Your innocent, honest-girl sensibilities got you into trouble again.
"It's fine. Ari, you don't tell lies anyway."
Ari trembled harder.
Then she clamped both hands over her mouth and shouted through them.
"I do tell lies though!"
Ari tells a lot of lies?
What kind of lies could she possibly have told?
"Ari. You lied to me too?"
Tremble, tremble—
Ari convulsed as though wrestling with her own soul, her whole body shaking. The pressure of the palms pressed over her mouth grew tighter and tighter—
Until at last, eyes screwed shut, she blurted it out.
"...The time I said I ordered one pizza and split it with a friend—THAT WAS A LIE! I ate the whole pizza by myself! I was supposed to be dieting! But I restarted my training and I got so hungry...!"
Boing—
Ari devoured an entire pizza alone?
Slick—
Then Jina put a hand on my shoulder.
"Hey, Haildo. Don't ask pointless questions. Everybody's got secrets they'd rather keep buried."
Fair enough.
Still, I couldn't help feeling a little relieved.
"I was honestly starting to worry—you always eat like a baby bird in front of me. Glad it's nothing serious. Eating well is a good thing. It's proof you're healthy."
Ari's face flushed crimson, and she fidgeted about, clearly at a complete loss for what to do with herself.
Shaking her head back and forth in a whawawawa— blur.
"Senior, I'm SO embarrassed right now…! But at the same time, I'm feeling this strange sensation too…! This flower, I think it's making my senses even sharper…! Over there, that spot…!"
Slick—
Yu Ari pointed at something with her finger.
There was nothing there—but a moment later, the ghost spider Kwang-kwangi slowly revealed itself.
━Hio-ong…?
"Whoa."
Had Ari just sensed Kwang-kwangi while it was perfectly concealed in the flower bed?
That was truly, genuinely astonishing!
So these Flowers of Truth were a constitution-matched item that boosted the power Ari possessed as a detection-type ability holder!
Just then—
Illinoi shouted.
"Everyone look here, dasu...! It is certain that this Illinoi has found the way to the next room, dasu...!"