Temporary Ally and the Promised Path 4
Han Se-ah had carved a tunnel so low that even she had to hunch her back, and the massive Naga had to press his belly scales flat against the dirt just to squeeze through.
Viewers flooded the chat with complaints—that the camera angle was killing their necks, that catching a glimpse of Mamang's rear was doing something equally uncomfortable to certain other body parts—but as the tunnel stretched on longer than expected, one by one they changed their tune and started praising Han Se-ah for conserving her mana.
Just as her mana pool was scraping bottom, the tunnel suddenly opened wide.
"A foul, reeking stenchhh… it reeksss…"
"Mmm, yeah. This definitely feels like a tunnel with a source of corruption at the end."
Whether by deliberate level design or pure coincidence, the passage ended at precisely the length an Intermediate-grade mage could manage while carefully rationing her mana—and beyond it lay a corridor that was unmistakably artificial.
The path Han Se-ah had forced open with Earth Control had been little more than a beast's burrow. But the widened passage ahead had smooth walls, and tree roots braced the earthen ceiling like mine supports, holding it up with uncanny precision. No one could look at it and call it a natural cave.
If the corridors of the thirtieth floor had felt like a research lab or a maintenance bay, this place felt like an underground base built by earth spirits or dwarves—a long, deliberate tunnel. Of course, the toxic stench rolling in from the far end was vigorously arguing that this was no fairy-tale hideaway.
"I shallll… take the lead…"
"Alright. I'm counting on you."
Black scales covered even his humanoid upper body, so a few casual pats were enough to knock the dirt clean off him. The black Naga rose to his full height—and that alone made the sheer width of the corridor, and how thoroughly artificial it was, hit home.
The rest of the party seemed to take the widened passage as the true start of the exploration. Every one of them swallowed hard and sharpened their focus. With the black Naga's broad, reassuring back ahead of them—and me right behind him—no one was wound too tight. They simply honed their fighting spirit to a fine edge.
But even that keen edge began to dull as the endless tunnel kept going… and going.
"It's longer than I expected."
"…It's not just long. There's a very slight downward slope the whole way. And the tunnel's been curving left, little by little. We're spiraling down into the earth, slowly but steadily."
"The archer'sss… sensesss… are veryyy… sharp…"
As if to prove Grace's words, the long corridor simply continued. Nothing but the reek of corruption, not a single monster in sight. The viewers started thrashing around in boredom and talking among themselves.
The topics? The party's rear views, briefly emphasized while entering the tunnel, and the black-scaled Naga warrior whose entire body was covered in jet-black scales. Apparently something large, dark, and imposing had a mysterious power to win over Korean netizens.
The chat decided "black Naga warrior" was too long and at some point locked in the nickname Black Naga-kun, and I nearly laughed out loud. I'm not usually the type to crack up easily, but this place had its charms.
"Human… warriorrr… are you… amused…?"
"I didn't think we'd find it this fast. Back in the day it took almost a whole month just to locate the passage."
"You look forward… to the struggle… yesss…"
The black Naga warrior beside me had read my expression with uncanny precision. He'd noticed me holding back a grin while trudging along the boring dirt path and tossed me a question, so I brushed it off with a vague answer.
How was I supposed to tell him that bored viewers had started mass-producing crude photoshops of him on the forums under the name Black Naga-kun? Thanks to that, even our player Han Se-ah—whose conversation might get censored but whose laughter absolutely could not—was grit-teeth deep in forced laugh-suppression content.
"Hrzmlrgh… If I start snickering while we're digging into a suspicious tunnel, people are going to say I'm poisoned or possessed!"
It started with Black Naga-kun photoshops and escalated into national-pride clips of foreign streamers cheering for "18-Mecha-Porn-Girl Han Se-ah" and her thirtieth-floor golem-riding footage. From there it spiraled into completely unrelated Heroes Chronicle black-history reels of streamers doing every kind of physical comedy imaginable.
The broadcaster who stripped a goblin of its leather underwear mid-combat slapstick. The one who, like Han Se-ah, wandered a city for map exploration and ran into a working prostitute in a back alley—earning a three-day ban. And Kim Seok-hyeon, who'd taken a donation to demonstrate martial forms while riding a golem, only for a half-repaired knee joint to snap clean off and dump him on the ground.
…That guy somehow ghosted his way all the way to the thirtieth floor and was still out there doing nonsense.
Khup…
Anyway, a parade of black-history clips was being gloriously preserved under the name of "video donations" and used as ammunition against Han Se-ah. And the fallout was reaching me too.
Lots of viewers meant lots of videos, and the tunnel was long. As a professional streamer, Han Se-ah had zero reason to kill the momentum by turning video donations off. A few brain-rot clips mixed in, and plenty of videos I didn't recognize—but there were always some that could make you laugh cold, no prior knowledge required.
Watch some guy try to tame a horned rabbit because it looked cute, take a horn straight to the lower body, then scream like a water deer and thrash around on the ground—you have to laugh. With time passing, the number of people doing insane things seemed to be climbing one by one.
"Have you… noticsssed…?"
"There's something in a wide cavern up ahead."
The silver lining was that the cavern appeared the exact moment I covered my laugh with a cough, so I could pretend I'd sensed hostility all along.
Following the endless tunnel down, down, and further down, we arrived at a vast cavern. Inside, just as we'd expected, was something like a monster production factory.
Tree roots tangled densely across the ceiling and walls, bracing them in place, and connected to those roots was an enormous mass of flesh. If you ignored the heartbeat-like pulsing and the nauseating pink color, it almost looked like a root vegetable—a giant potato.
And when that round lump of flesh split open like an egg, what crawled out from inside was—
"…I am Manasssh! Upon a warrior'sss name, I ssswear it! I will chew them alive and kill them all!!!"
Naga warriors with scales dyed pitch black. At least they weren't mass-producing named-tier specimens—these were clearly smaller than Manash, who'd guided us here.
Manash, standing ramrod straight with his trident, looked about 2.5 meters tall. The mindless Naga lined up over there were roughly 2.1 meters. Factor in the long serpentine tails stretched across the ground and the difference was probably close to a full meter.
Watching his own kind get stamped out like cheap copies, he leveled his trident forward in fury and began condensing mana. His black scales started to gleam in the dark, and dark-blue mana clearly rippled along the elongated trident—easily two meters long.
"…Go wild if you want. We're past the point of turning back anyway—we have to break through."
"I thank youuu, warrior!"
We had to smash everything here regardless, and if I did the smashing, the ceiling might come down. The moment I decided to ease off the leash and let him charge, he thanked me like a knight preparing a lance charge. This was a space he'd discovered himself—he could have gone a little more berserk—but he had something of a Buddhist-warrior vibe about him, and apparently valued courtesy more than expected.
After expressing his gratitude, he made no attempt to hide himself, letting out a piercing battle cry. Clamping the trident—wreathed in dark-blue aura—against his side, he shot across the open ground like a mounted lancer in a full charge.
Kaduk. Kwa-deu-deu-deuk—
His serpentine lower body undulated left and right so violently it looked like heavy construction equipment tearing up the floor. Then, at a speed that left afterimages, the black figure was already far across the cavern.
"…He's incredibly fast."
"I lost track of him for a second…"
As expected of someone who'd reached the Upper-grade—our Intermediate-grade party members flinched and stared blankly at the dark-blue aura blooming on the far side of the cavern.
If he'd appeared as an enemy, he would have been strong enough to shatter even Irene's protective holy magic. It was the kind of power that declared, starting from the fortieth floor, that this was no longer Intermediate-grade territory. Honestly, coasting to the fortieth floor on a natural 3★ and a natural 4★ was a bit much.
Roughly as I'd expected—if the hundredth floor was the summit, then the moment we passed the fortieth, our party would need to start fighting for their lives. And even then, we'd probably need to add another star each before reaching the fiftieth.
"Aaaahhh! O flow! O cycle! Return to the earthhh!"
Maybe for the fortieth-floor boss, I should sit out and let the party handle it alone—wake them up to the need for leveling. The title of world number one didn't actually matter to me. My quest goal was for Han Se-ah to clear this world, not for her to clear it as world number one.
While I was turning that over, Manash went completely berserk, swinging his trident like the blades of a shredder.
The mass-produced Naga warriors looked like they were barely straddling the line between Intermediate and Upper-grade. They seemed one step short of projecting aura—kill a few people, get stronger, and they'd probably climb into the Upper-grade. Monsters evolving by hunting humans was a classic cliché, after all.
But Intermediate-grade was still Intermediate-grade, even on the cusp—and their opponent was a fully matured Upper-grade fighter, pouring out aura in a frenzy and reducing everything around him to rubble. Just as the doppelgangers couldn't pierce me, these Naga warriors couldn't pierce his black scales and dark-blue aura. That much was obvious.
"Looks like we don't even need to step in."
"Don't be so sure. Look over there—this cavern isn't the end."
While Manash alone tore the cavern apart with his trident, Grace had found a passage leading further down.
Surely we weren't going to have to keep descending over and over… of course we were.