Ah, Making Me Risk My Life Again? (1)

I climbed like a madman, my mind racing the whole way.

If an insect 421 meters away already looked that big, then what the hell was it?

A Meganeura?

But calling it a giant dragonfly from the Carboniferous period felt wrong. The speed at which it was growing was far too dramatic for that.

A Meganeura’s wingspan was only about seventy centimeters…

Yet this thing was still far off and already looked bigger than that to my eyes.

Fuck. Just how huge is this thing?

That’s no ordinary monster.

It’s a giant kaiju. A super-giant kaiju!

Sweat poured out of me.

I tried to gauge my full-speed climbing rate against the monster’s approach.

It looked like I was going to get caught.

The buzzing grew louder, a deafening roar like helicopter blades slicing through the air.

Only ten meters left to the 3rd Basement Level.

But the super-giant dragonfly slowed down once it was a hundred meters away, gradually coming to a hover.

The sight before me was so overwhelming I nearly forgot how to breathe.

Even if you held a regular dragonfly right up to your face, it would never look this massive.

One thing instantly came to mind.

A Boeing 747.

Wingspan of sixty meters.

Body length of seventy meters.

This thing matched that insane scale perfectly.

Unlike the artificial surface of an airplane, however, the raw, living texture of an insect this size was pure terror.

It felt like staring at a dragonfly through a high-powered camera lens on maximum zoom.

Or maybe… I had become a tiny mosquito standing in front of a giant dragonfly.

Suddenly the super-giant dragonfly stopped its charge right in front of me, reared up vertically, and spread its wings wide.

The gale from its wings slammed into me like a giant fan.

I was hurled backward and smashed hard into the ceiling of the 4th Basement Level.

The skin on my face was completely flattened by the storm of wind coming off its wings. I could barely draw breath.

Our eyes met.

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It seemed to be studying me.

Just as I had never seen anything like it, the creature had probably never encountered anything like me.

Then it reached out with one of its legs.

What had looked like a delicate limb now resembled a brutal excavator arm covered in savage spikes.

Was I really about to get eaten?

Even in that moment, I yanked out my adamantium pickaxe.

You fucker!

I’m no ordinary mosquito.

If you want to eat me, you’ll have to risk your own life too.

Brave words, sure.

But the situation was actually pretty damn bleak.

With this short pickaxe, where the hell was I supposed to hit it to even deal one point of damage?

That was when it happened.

The super-giant dragonfly suddenly flinched as if startled by something, then fled at blinding speed.

For something its size, the acceleration was unbelievable.

The crushing pressure of the wind vanished. I dropped, dangling helplessly once more.

I climbed like a lunatic until I reached the 3rd Basement Level.

There I saw my savior.

Bzzzzzzt—

Bzzzzzzt—

Fuck, what the hell is that now?

A super-giant Asian giant hornet?

Luckily, the giant hornet wasn’t after me.

The colossal creature, easily thirty to forty meters long, led hundreds of three-to-four-meter-long subordinates in a furious pursuit of the fleeing super-giant dragonfly.

Whatever. I didn’t care.

I pumped my arms like a machine and shot straight up onto the floor of the 3rd Basement Level.

“Haaah… haaah…”

I lay on the ground for a moment, gathering up the pieces of my scattered soul.

For a while I didn’t even want to stick my head out and look back down at the 4th Basement Level.

Seriously…

Maybe I should just settle for being the master of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Basement Levels and live a quiet life?

That place looked completely unmanageable.

But after a short rest, my thoughts flipped again.

It was the same feeling as swearing “I’m never playing this piece-of-shit game again!” after dying repeatedly in a game, only to pick the controller back up twenty minutes later.

I cautiously poked my head out and looked down at the forest on the 4th Basement Level.

The super-giant dragonfly and super-giant hornet had already vanished from sight.

Instead, something else caught my interest in the scope.

The creature that had just turned part of the forest into a wasteland while carrying off some nameless super-giant herbivore it had targeted.

A super-giant mantis…

Damn.

Even at a glance, that bastard looked over a hundred meters long.

Heh heh heh heh heh~

Hehehe~

Fold. I’m folding on this one.

That was when the hidden quest completion popped up.

Triangle Temple Key?

What’s that?

And then the trial followed.

It seemed “Ultra Fly” referred to the super-giant dragonfly, “Gigan Mantis” to the super-giant mantis, and “Mega Hornet” to the super-giant hornet.

These bastards were asking way too much from a Tower Scavenger who had only just reached E-Class, weren’t they?

I’m not doing it. Fuck that!

But after seeing the reward, my heart wavered again.

A temple that could hybridize monsters…

Hmm.

So this was where the Devil-Bees had originally been born.

Anyway…

Ah, damn it. After seeing that reward…

It really is making me risk my life again.

One week?

In just one week?

My head felt like it was going to explode.

It would be so much easier to just give up…

But for some reason I really didn’t want to.

I realized I was turning into a kind of elite.

Once you give up, the second, third, and fourth times become way too easy. That’s how life gets filled with nothing but surrender.

But if you manage to accomplish something difficult once, twice, three times in a row, and receive the gift of dopamine each time as a reward…

After that, no matter how hard or impossible the next task seems, you burn with the determination to complete it anyway.

You can’t stand not achieving it.

All right. Let’s organize this.

The System never gives you a problem you can’t solve.

First… I needed information about the 4th Basement Level.

And I needed to learn about the three super-giant monsters, especially their weaknesses.

Just then, two or three Devil-Bees flew up, buzzing and clicking as they descended toward the 4th Basement Level.

Where the hell are they going!

Hey! It’s dangerous down there…

You’ll pull aggro…

But then I realized something and slapped my own forehead.

You idiot.

I had been thinking of the 3rd and 4th Basement Levels as completely separate, but that wasn’t the case at all.

The 3rd and 4th Basement Levels were one connected world.

Now that I thought about it, the 3rd Basement Level was nothing more than a house the Devil-Bees had secretly built on the ceiling of the 4th Basement Level.

Bees originally gathered various nutrients from the forest, used them to build hives, and raised their larvae.

They were fundamentally different from centipedes and ogres that could survive on nothing but the flesh of their own kind.

Which meant…

The Devil-Bee workers frequently traveled back and forth to the 4th Basement Level.

They probably understood the 4th Basement Level better than anyone.

I immediately recalled a skill that would be incredibly useful in the current situation.

That’s right.

If I invested one more skill point I could turn them into up to a hundred subordinates, and two more would let me communicate with them.

That would be an enormous help both for gathering information on the 4th Basement Level and for the battles I would have to fight there.

I currently had exactly two skill points left.

A few days ago, after inserting the master key into the 3rd Basement Level, the one point I had left had become two.

When I raised Empress’s Pheromone to stage four and sprayed it on one of the Devil-Bees, the creature flew right up to my face and began hovering.

It felt a little awkward, but I decided to test it right away.

The trial’s time limit was still ticking down even at this moment.

“H-hello?”

The creature performed some kind of dance.

A status window immediately translated its movements.

I didn’t have time to be moved by the fact that I could communicate with an insect. I got straight to the point.

“4th Basement Level. The three super-giant monsters… can you kill them?”

“No way at all?”

“Why?”

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My stomach twisted with frustration.

I sent that one away, caught another, and asked the same question.

“4th Basement Level. The three super-giant monsters… can you kill them?”

The next one gave the same answer.

The reasons varied.

All my strength left me.

Damn it.

Was it impossible from the start?

But then I realized something.

In the human world, most people live in despair.

Everyone is so skeptical about everything.

This can’t be done for this reason, that can’t be done for that reason…

But on the other hand, there are always people who make things happen.

People who squeeze through a 0.1 percent chance and try anyway.

And some of them ultimately achieve massive success through methods everyone else laughed off as ridiculous.

The world we live in was ultimately created by the impossible dreams of those visionaries.

That’s it. Let’s do a full survey.

There had to be at least one “visionary” type among the Devil-Bees…

But there wasn’t.

It took over four hours to interview hundreds of them one by one.

In the end, I couldn’t find a single visionary type.

I only found one clue.

One Devil-Bee said its friend claimed it was possible.

“What? Really?”

“Your friend is a honeybee?”

Well, that made sense.

The 4th Basement Level was so vast that honeybees had to be living there too.

I immediately told the Devil-Bee to bring its honeybee friend.

A few hours later, the Devil-Bee returned with a rather large honeybee.

It was an enormous thirty centimeters long.

But because it was a honeybee, it didn’t have the vicious appearance of the Devil-Bees. It actually looked like a cute character wearing a fuzzy coat.

Just in case, I sprayed it with pheromone.

It couldn’t become a subordinate, but communication was possible?

Okay.

“Hello?”

I asked it right away.

“Is it possible to kill the giant monsters?”

The honeybee danced as if it had been waiting for the question.

“You’re saying you can kill the giant Mega Hornet?”

Oh!

I rubbed its head with my thumb and asked.

“How is that possible?”