Artificial Dungeon (3)
"Three ahead! They're coming at once!!!"
"Magic!! When's the magic going to be ready?!"
"Casting! Casting takes time! Buy me some time!!"
"Eek…! H-help me!!!"
"Hup….!"
The shouts pouring in from every direction were enough to leave Rosaria's ears ringing, but she set her sights on the problem right in front of her first. Drawing a deep breath, she tensed every muscle in her body with elastic readiness and bolted straight ahead.
"Hyaaah—!"
Thud—
—Gueh?!
In the same motion that carried her toward Rasel—who was rolling across the ground, barely dodging a goblin's spear tip—she launched herself into the air and drove a kick clean through the torso of a goblin that had been grinning smugly down at him.
Struck by Rosaria's kick at full speed, the goblin let out a single strangled cry and went flying off into the distance.
"You okay?"
"Ah… th-thank…"
Still sitting on his rear, Rasel looked up at the girl who had just saved him and was trying to squeeze out a word of thanks when—
"If you're fine, get over to Rachel already! Buy her casting time!"
"Huh?! Ah…. th-that…"
"Hurry!!!"
"Eek!! Yes!!"
As if there wasn't a second to spare, Rosaria hustled him over to Rachel and took off running again.
Her next destination was Gren, who was barely holding off three goblins with a single sword, buying Rachel the time she needed to cast.
"Duck your heeeead!!!"
Rosaria hastily scooped up the wooden spear with its rusted tip that the goblin she'd just kicked had been carrying, then bellowed as she prepared to throw.
"Wh-what?!"
Whoosh—
"Hyeek?!"
Still locked in a struggle with the goblins, Gren registered the shout a beat too late. The instant he ducked in panic, the sensation of a spear tip grazing through his hair sent a full-body shiver racing down his spine.
Thuk—thuk—
—Guek?!
-Kek?!
-Krere?!
But the effect was unmistakable.
As a contractor of the wind spirit Ariel, Rosaria could manipulate not only the bullets from her guns but most projectiles of any kind. The spear was larger than a bullet, so the control took more effort and couldn't quite be called perfect homing—but adjusting its trajectory enough to land true was well within her reach. The spear she'd thrown punched straight through two of the goblins.
"Th-this!!"
Slash—!
—Go… gahk…!?
The one goblin that managed to twist its head aside and dodge the spear was finished off the moment Gren surged back to his feet.
"I'm ready!!!"
At the same time, Rachel finally signaled that her casting was complete.
"Sideways!! Get out of the way!!"
"Hup…!"
"Hyeek?!"
Everyone locked in combat with the goblins immediately rolled clear, opening a clean path forward.
"Lightning Bolt!!!"
On cue, lightning erupted from Rachel's staff.
—Grerererererek?!!
"…I-is it over…?"
"Hah, haah…! Haah…!"
"Th-they're all dead, right? Right?"
The bolts fanned out in a wide arc and reduced the goblins ahead to charcoal. Moments later, the mountain of goblin corpses crumbled into ash and drifted away on the air.
All that remained were a dozen or so mana cores that had served as the goblins' nuclei. Combined with what the party already carried, Team D-19 had already collected several dozen goblin cores.
It had all started on their first night in the Artificial Dungeon.
After the initial goblin fight, Rosaria's group moved a little more carefully than before. Advancing through pitch-dark corridors that never saw a single ray of sunlight, relying solely on a magic lamp, took a heavy mental toll. Moving in a constant state of heightened tension against the possibility of more enemies, they ultimately failed to clear the day's planned route and ran out of time.
Unable to cover the intended distance, they decided to camp for the night.
Chewing on tough jerky and slowly working through rock-hard bread soaked in water, they found themselves gaining a new appreciation for just how good the meals at school actually were.
Afterward, they set a watch rotation by the clock. The so-called blankets were barely better than nothing, so they used them as pillows and draped their outer clothes over themselves instead. Everyone not on watch fell asleep almost immediately.
The hard ground and the dungeon's chill made for miserable conditions, but after such an exhausting day, sleep claimed them at once.
And that was the problem.
The first watch fell to Gren.
He had been through this dungeon before, and back then standing watch had been so uneventful it hardly mattered. Settling against the wall with a certain numbness, he sat there half-aware. Even after nearly getting wrecked that very day by the goblins he'd so casually dismissed, he had already forgotten the lesson. His head began to bob, and before long he was asleep.
If anything happens, there'll be a loud noise and I'll wake up, he told himself.
That complacency came back as a disaster.
Crack—
"…..Mmm… wh-what…………huh?"
Dozing in a half-dream, Gren stirred at the sound of something glasslike shattering nearby and cracked his eyes open.
And then—
—Keruk?
A green monster stood right in front of him, drooling as it stared him down.
His gaze drifted lower. The chipped dagger in the goblin's hand was buried in his own lower abdomen.
"Oh, shiiiiiiiiit!!!!!!!!!!"
—Guek
He screamed on pure reflex and lashed out with a fist. The goblin's face crumpled as it tumbled backward across the ground.
"Shit!"
He looked down at his wrist. Of the three Life Crystals that had been shining brilliantly, one had gone dark.
Ambushed in his sleep, he had lost one of his three lives.
"Uh…? Eh…?"
"Wh-what's going on?"
"Mmmh…."
One by one, the others stirred and sat up at Gren's shouting.
"Huh? Wh-what is that?!"
"A g-goblin!"
"Hyeek?!"
Seeing the goblin still twitching limply where Gren's fist had dropped it, the party scrambled to their feet in alarm.
But it wasn't over.
—Keruk
—Krerek…!
—Kekkek!
"Ah, shit."
Watching a pack of goblins close in around them with heavy footsteps after the successful ambush, Rosaria let a curse slip out unbidden.
From that point on, Rosaria's group weathered wave after wave of goblin assaults. This was already the fifth attack.
No sooner had they cleared one wave than another pack came charging in. Unable to get any real rest and forced to keep moving and fighting hard, they had each burned through a fair number of Life Crystals.
Gren, fighting on the front line, was down to a single crystal. Rachel and the others had each lost one as well.
"At this rate, we'll collapse long before we ever reach the center."
Rosaria was the first to speak up as she collected the mana cores the goblins had left behind after the latest wave.
She was right. In their current state, reaching the center was impossible. Far from arriving early and waiting, they stood a very real chance of being wiped out on the way.
It wasn't that the goblins were particularly strong. They had fended off enough ambushes by now, and the goblins' behavior had grown more lifelike—but at the end of the day, they were still just goblins.
The real problem was stamina.
After hours of wandering the dungeon without proper sleep, constantly fending off periodic goblin attacks, everyone except Rosaria was trembling so hard they could barely stand still.
If I could just use my guns, this would be so much easier…
Rosaria clicked her tongue in mild regret, recalling the feel of the pistols holstered at her shoulders.
She had brought them, but before the exam she had made a promise with Felix.
The guns she carried were so far beyond academy-level balance that using them to steamroll the exam would be no different from cheating—and Rosaria had agreed with him on that point.
So for this exam, she had placed a restriction on herself: exactly one shot. A single bullet, and no more.
Even with that limit, Rosaria still had energy to spare. Unlike the others, she was still going strong, and she had already realized that if she got serious, she could handle the goblin raids entirely on her own.
But that would defeat the whole point of taking the exam. So she had been holding back—not just with the guns, but with her raw strength as well—limiting herself to appropriate support.
Why go that far? Because pure raw power is cool.
But even that pure-strength performance seemed to have reached its limit.
"We should focus on recovery first and make survival the priority from here on."
Rachel backed Rosaria's suggestion, proposing they change their objective.
"If we keep going like this, we won't pass—we'll probably get disqualified."
"Th-that's… right…! I can't take much more…! And our p-position…! We ran so hard we… w-we're way off course…"
Even Rasel found the courage to chime in, urging a change of plans.
However—
"…Shut."
"Huh?"
"Shut up!! You think it's that easy just because you say so?!"
The problem was that Gren, the team's leader, had no intention of agreeing.
"What changes if we scrap the plan here? Just sit around and wait it out? While we're wasting time, everyone else is pushing straight ahead!"
"But the situation right now…!"
"What situation?! If it weren't for you and your slow-ass magic, we'd have arrived ages ago! We're behind because of you!"
Preferring his own opinion over his teammates', Gren started sniping at Rachel's movement speed, barking ugly and loud.
"…Ha. How pathetic, bringing that up now. Do you have any self-awareness that you're the one who fell asleep on watch and got us ambushed?"
"Th-that's…!"
Rachel refused to take it lying down and called out the blunder he had committed. Gren flinched.
"If you want to be treated like a senior as team leader, you should at least not act like this, don't you think?"
"Shut up! Shut up shut up!!!!"
She kept driving the point home, and he completely lost it.
"If you don't want to listen to me as leader, fine! Want me to eliminate you right here and now?"
Shing—
His pride as a senior, his inferiority complex at falling behind the rest of the team, and the anxiety of having only one Life Crystal left—all three fused together, and Gren forced through an argument so absurd even he should have found it ridiculous.
The result was that, eyes flipped with rage, he drew the sword from its scabbard.
"…You do understand what this means right now, don't you?"
"Go on, try that fancy magic of yours. I'll put a hole through your neck before you finish casting."
"You really are a low, pathetic human being. I'm almost embarrassed to call you a senior. How did someone like you even get into this academy?!"
"Um… p-please stop…!"
"Stay out of it, coward. Unless you want to die."
"…….."
Raising their voices had been fine up to a point—so long as no one crossed the line.
But Gren had crossed it completely, and the already cold atmosphere of the dungeon turned colder still.
The standoff stretched on as the two of them stood ready to swing weapons and cast magic at each other at any moment, both with palms slick with sweat.
"……."
And Rosaria, who had been watching the whole scene in silence—
"Ah, fuck this. I'm done. I'm not putting up with it anymore."
Thud—thud—
"Wh-what the hell are you doing?! You want to die too?"
"Step aside. This needs to be settled!"
Her brow deeply furrowed, Rosaria walked straight into the space between them. Both parties started yelling at her as if she were in the way.
"…Everything's allowed here except murder, right? So team kills are fine, then?"
"You look at this situation and still call that a—"
Boom—
"…Huh?"
"“Huh?”"
Gren, who had been mid-rage at Rosaria's remark as she calmly eyed his blade, simply vanished.
Or rather, "disappeared" was the more accurate word.
Rachel and Rasel blinked at the empty space where Gren had been an instant before—then a massive impact and shockwave hit, and both of them cried out.
Gren was just as stunned.
He had only blinked once, and somehow he now found himself embedded in the dungeon wall—a thoroughly novel experience.
Crack—
"…Huh? Huhh?"
At the same time, his last remaining crystal shattered. He stared blankly at the bracelet that had gone completely dark.
And then—
Fwoosh—
"Wai—what the…! Hey, hey!! You son of a bitch!!!!!"
A blue magic circle etched itself into the ground beneath him, and Gren's form began to fade.
Anyone whose Life Crystals were all destroyed was reverse-summoned out of the dungeon by warp magic, the same way they had entered.
"You're not getting awa—"
Whoosh—
Realizing he had just been eliminated from the exam with every crystal broken, Gren tried to scramble up and charge—only to vanish mid-shout as the reverse-summon took him.
"Hmm… so that's what it feels like?"
Rosaria watched him go without much interest.
"Hey."
"….."
"….."
"Hey."
"Y-yes."
"Y-yes…?"
She turned to the two people still staring at her in a daze.
"I'm the team leader now. Anyone got a problem with that?"
Crrrack—
Rosaria lightly closed her hand around a chunk of rock debris created by the wall she'd just destroyed, and squeezed.
Crumblesh—
Watching what had clearly been solid stone turn to powder in her grip, the two of them found themselves thoroughly persuaded by Rosaria's wise judgment and bowed their heads in rapid succession.
Going forward, Family Is Possessed by Romance will serialize six days a week.
Just one day off per week for me....