The Maze (3)
“So, let me get this straight. You’re saying that thing’s made from a whole unicorn horn?”
“Yep.”
“And when you pressed it against my arm, it started glowing?”
“Whoa! A virgin!”
“…Yona, you’ve been carrying it around just fine, so you’re in the same boat!”
“Whoa! A virgin too!”
“I should just stop talking…”
After hearing the brief explanation, Beni let out a long sigh while clutching her purple hair.
“Ah, but Beni, that’s not what’s important right now.”
“Was there ever anything important to begin with?”
Beni, still trembling from having her virginity tested mid-fight, snapped back with barbed words. Yet the way her eyes kept darting between me and the dagger made it clear that my own chastity mattered more to her than her own. Well, that made sense. In this gender-reversed world, women surprisingly preferred men who were still pure. While the influence of the Goddess of Love meant polygamy or polyandry wasn’t condemned, people still placed special value on someone’s first time. In that sense, it was hard to tell whether a man was a virgin or not—women at least bled, but men showed nothing. So a clear, easy-to-read result like this was bound to draw attention.
I shook the dagger ostentatiously before tucking it back into my subspace ring and shook my head.
“Did you really think I was just messing around? You saw it yourself, Beni. That corrupted earth spirit collapsed on the spot.”
“…Ah. If you’d just broken its mana stone, it would’ve disappeared, not collapsed.”
“Exactly. I was too startled to grab it, but there’s probably a mana stone lying around somewhere over there.”
I pointed behind me with my thumb. Shadow was there, swallowing entire piles of raw ore and spitting out only the good ones. The mana stone was probably mixed in with the rejects.
“By the way, Shadow’s really competent. It’s hard to tell what’s inside raw ore unless you’re an expert, right? That’s why I was planning to just grab anything that looked special and get it appraised at the guild.”
“Well, I’ve been to the second floor before. Back then I made Shadow memorize what raw ore looks like. Of course, I still remember too.”
The second floor was still considered the upper levels of the labyrinth, so maps and all sorts of information were perfectly organized and distributed for free or at low cost. The classification of ores guarded by corrupted earth spirits was one of them.
Beni shrugged once, then tilted her head and continued.
“Anyway, I get what you’re trying to say. You think it’s strange that the corrupted earth spirit reacted to the unicorn dagger, right?”
“Yeah. Just in case, I wanted to ask—can spirits even have sex? I mean, not just high-ranking spirits with clear forms, but lower ones like the one we just fought.”
Spirit hybrids were extremely rare, but they did exist. The torn remains of the God of Life had affected the spirits as well. Still, being able to breed with other races was a completely different matter from enjoying the act itself. Spirits weren’t born through normal reproduction—they emerged naturally. They were beings without sexual desire. Those rare hybrids were probably just the result of responding to someone else’s request… or perhaps a desire to have offspring. At the very least, it wasn’t because of lust. So then, why had that earth spirit been so decisively affected by the dagger’s special effect?
“Don’t tell me some lunatic’s been going around sticking it in the ground?! Or maybe they’re shaping the dirt into something to get impaled on?! Doesn’t the thought of a crazy serial rapist who gets off on soil sound terrifying?!”
“…Good grief. What am I supposed to do with this pervert?”
Beni let out a deep sigh. Then she stood on her tiptoes, puffing out her flat chest in a smug pose. She was clearly trying to imitate a teacher, but no matter how you looked at it, it just looked like Beni doing a teacher cosplay. She opened her mouth.
“The Unicorn Dagger does contain power that harms non-virgins. But it has other abilities too, doesn’t it?”
“Poison? Don’t tell me the soil was toxic…”
“Not that! Purification! Purification! You’ve been saying it yourself this whole time and still didn’t notice?! What do you think ‘corrupted’ means?!”
“Huh? But strictly speaking, monsters are just insane, stronger creatures, right?”
“Usually, yes. Normal monsters are just ordinary plants and animals that got stronger. But spirits are different.”
According to Beni’s explanation, spirits were fundamentally avatars of nature or messengers of the gods. They weren’t created by mixing the blood and flesh of other beings—they were simply born from power itself. That made them pure in both the best and worst ways.
“But something foreign like madness got mixed into those spirits.”
“Their purity got tainted?”
“Exactly. And when nature gets tainted, we call it pollution.”
“Aha.”
The unicorn horn wasn’t just a mop-like ultimate weapon. It was packed with effects like enhanced natural healing and purification. I’d never experienced it myself, but apparently most poisons wouldn’t even work on me.
“Wait a second. So does that mean the madness got cured?”
“Of course not. The spirit’s body couldn’t withstand the clash between the purification power and the erosion from the madness, so it collapsed. Ah, maybe at the very, very end its mind cleared for a moment. Though it would’ve only been for an instant, so it probably didn’t mean much.”
“……”
Only now did the creature’s final words start to bother me. It had just kept repeating “do,” right? Until now I’d thought it was calling me a thief, but maybe it meant something else. Like “run away” or “help me.”
“…Beni. How do you know all this stuff, anyway? I’m not trying to be nosy, it’s just surprising how detailed your guess is. I was wondering if all mages know things like this.”
“Hmm. I don’t think that’s it.”
Beni shook her head. She gently stroked Shadow, who had just finished sorting and returned with only the good ores and mana stones in its belly, then continued.
“Experiments involving madness—I’ve experienced them firsthand. That’s how I know. They didn’t just experiment on people; they used monsters too.”
“Ah.”
So it was just from personal experience. I scratched my head awkwardly, and Beni deliberately curled her lips upward as she spoke.
“Alright! We’ve rested enough, so let’s move on. Either way, we’ve got a weapon that works great against corrupted spirits now, right? That means we can hunt safely and easily!”
“When you put it like that, even resting feels like a waste of time!”
“It actually is a waste. Especially since from now on you’ll have to come with Rydia. We can’t make Shadow do the baggage carrying, so even if the fighting’s easy, we’ll have to head back quickly because of the loot.”
“……!”
Now that I thought about it, she was right. Beni was only filling in for Rydia for today—she’d never said she’d keep coming to the labyrinth with me. I had to squeeze out every last drop of profit while Shadow was here…!
“Please take good care of me today!”
-Kruung?
I tapped near Shadow’s massive eye a few times, then immediately dropped to the ground and pressed my ear to the floor. A faint, regular heartbeat echoed through the stone. Using the heart left behind by the Earth God as a landmark, I recalculated the optimal route.
“We should go this way! Don’t fall behind, okay?”
“You think I’d get lost on the second floor? You’re the one who needs to be careful!”
I led the way with a bewildered Beni in tow. We cut through the maze-like interior without hesitation, turning every monster we encountered into mana stones. The kobolds couldn’t detect my stealth and went down easily, while the corrupted earth spirits noticed the moment I drew my weapon—but they still collapsed from the slightest graze, so they weren’t difficult either.
They say the easiest floor in the labyrinth is the second. The first floor is tough because you lack experience, and the third is hard because the monsters are simply stronger and the gimmicks are more dangerous. The second floor, on the other hand, has relatively average monsters, no particularly dangerous traps, and you already have some experience built up—so it’s manageable. I was starting to understand what that meant. I’d thought the first floor was a cakewalk except for the Thorn King, but the second floor was even more so. Of course, that would change if we ran into different monsters. Something like the Spider Queen, which traveled with dozens of baby spiders, would be a different story. I was confident I could handle one or two of them better than anyone, but fighting multiple enemies at once made me uneasy. Stealth would break after the first couple of strikes, and my stamina was still fragile compared to actual second-floor adventurers. Still, we weren’t planning to go that far yet, so it wasn’t an immediate concern.
What I needed to focus on right now was—
“Die!”
“Kogok…!”
—stabbing the back of kobolds that were endlessly digging at the ground, and—
“Your treasure looks useful, so I’ll be taking it!”
“Dododododod…!”
—robbing the storerooms of corrupted earth spirits. How many times had we repeated this cycle of moving without rest until we grew tired, piling up loot? Eventually—
“…Shadow says it’s full.”
“Eh.”
Shadow, who had been devouring everything without end, declared a strike. Thinking back, we really had fed it a lot. I was willing to bet today’s earnings alone matched what we’d made in the past week.
“Can’t be helped. Shall we head back now?”
“Yeah. By now the sun’s probably long set on the surface. If we don’t want Elly to scold us, we’d better hurry.”
“…I’ve been thinking this for a while, but both you and Rydia seem to like Elly and fear her at the same time. Did something happen?”
“Well, there are things between women that men just don’t understand.”
“???”
No matter how much I pressed, Beni refused to give a proper answer. Still pestering her, I searched for the nearest safe zone. And then—
“Something feels off.”
“This looks like a path we’ve already taken.”
Despite having a pathfinding skill, we were lost. Something had gone wrong.