Deepening 5
The first and second caverns were duds.
Mana readings showed up inside, but they were only production-facility level—no boss monsters. There was no point crawling in through a beast den just to walk forever until the ceiling came down.
Han Se-ah shook her head as she swept the area with the exploration tool, trying to reverse-engineer the caverns’ locations from the animal tunnels. Of course she could be that certain; the tool had been flagged as a quest item and linked straight into the minimap.
The fact that an exploration tool had fused so openly with the game system meant the developers’ intended solution was to search from the outside with Mage Tower support.
“Even if it’s a dud, there was still a production base, right?”
“If we hadn’t found it, would the black Naga have poured into the city from the 40th floor the way the orcs did last time?”
“Pretty high chance. In the end the Demon King seems to want to invade the world outside the Tower through the Tower itself.”
—Anoother worlld… defiled as wellll…
Manash clicked his tongue in disbelief. Another world existing at all was hard enough to accept; that the Demon King was invading that one too was simply absurd.
Well, I had been dumped into a game, so the Demon King was old news—practically tiresome. From Manash’s perspective it had to feel completely different. He’d spent an entire lifetime fighting the Demon King and died, only to reincarnate in another world and run into the same enemy again. Put that way, it almost sounded like the plot of a fantasy novel.
Something along the lines of “I died fighting the Demon King’s army and woke up as an upper-grade Death Knight in another world.” Except for the part where the race wasn’t human but Naga, it fit pretty well.
“Did the Demon King destroy Manash’s world as well?”
—Thaat… I do not know. My laaast memory… was the decision… for a counterattack.
“Ah, I’m sorry…”
—But the fact that the Demon King… is here…
Irene bowed her head, realizing she might have said something rude. My guess was that the Demon King had indeed destroyed Manash’s world, which was why Manash was inside the Tower and the Demon King had reached this one as well.
Whether a Goddess of Life had existed in Manash’s world too, he showed a surprising amount of interest in Irene—or rather, in the teachings of the Goddess she spoke about. Even the kind of scripture study that could easily turn dull held his genuine attention, so Irene happily kept talking.
While Han Se-ah hunted for boss monsters on the minimap and Grace and Katie circled around me, a quiet sermon hour unfolded.
……That actually sounds like important story lore. Mind stopping the sightseeing and listening to Irene and Manash for a bit?
“It’s good that the viewer count is up, but how do I put this… the floor of the quality has dropped way too far, hasn’t it? Why are they dumping stuff that’d be embarrassing even on an anonymous board into my chat…?”
“Hey! Then I should be the one looking at those chats, banning them, and saying it’s hard—I can’t just go ‘Our little Katie’s legs are prettier than her mammaries~’!!!”
Han Se-ah was busy tanking the sudden strike from a long-absent chat villain. She had been munching roasted corn and watching the messy three-way soap opera of Grace, Katie, and the occasional appearance by Charlotte when the degenerate decided to show up.
Thanks to Katie’s moans leaking out of the tent last time, thousands of the worst offenders had been banned and the chat had seemed a little cleaner—but with average viewership in the tens of thousands, a residual force still remained.
Up front Irene and Manash were trading lore-like conversation; behind them Han Se-ah was having a conversation that made her head spin.
“Hanna’s… analyzing the tool or something?”
“From the look on her face, she just had some kind of epiphany.”
And so the “Han Se-ah is a genius” theory was no longer a misunderstanding but established fact and common sense by the time we faced the third cavern.
Beeeeeep————!!!
A cavern packed with something, and—
As if declaring that three duds in a row was unnecessary, the exploration tool’s warning blared at full volume. Irene and Manash, who had been talking up ahead, and Grace and Katie, who had claimed positions on either side of me the moment the path widened, all spun around in surprise to stare at Han Se-ah trailing behind.
Beeeep——!! Beeeep——!! Beeeep——!!
“What? What’s going on?”
“There’s a whole lot of something down there. Not one powerful enemy—just an insane number of them?”
“More than the roots that were making those Naga last time?”
The tool shrieked like a fire-engine siren at a blaze. Only after Han Se-ah, still unfamiliar with the controls, got roasted by the viewers for “partnering with the ENT clinic instead of the dentist this time” did the piercing high note finally die down.
It was originally meant for probing underground dungeons dozens of meters deep or mines hundreds of meters down, so the volume wasn’t just loud—it was downright monstrous.
That threatening signal put everyone on edge. Even the collapsing trap cavern on the first level had held dozens of Naga in reserve. For the alarm to scream this hard meant there were at least a hundred of them, minimum.
—So noisilyyy… it rings?
“There’s something underground, at least… but a mana reaction this strong means it shouldn’t collapse.”
“Something too big to use as a throwaway piece, maybe.”
Katie nodded at Han Se-ah’s confident declaration—clearly she’d read the quest window. Thanks to the genius-mage image, the party showed no hesitation about diving back into a tunnel even after being buried alive once before.
We used Earth Control again to widen the tiny entrance that a single raccoon could barely squeeze through. Come to think of it, if only the entrance was this narrow, did these bastards plan to dig upward from the inside?
“It seems like what Roland said last time was right. Should we collect some soil too?”
“Hm? What about?”
“This underground cavern—even without Hanna lighting the way, you can see a tiny bit ahead. When it was just Roland and me buried, I couldn’t even see his face.”
Despite being under the earth with zero light sources, the darkness was thin enough that you could just make out the path ahead. Like the moment at dawn when the moon has set and the sun hasn’t risen yet, when you pad to the kitchen for water and the outlines are faintly visible. As Katie and I had discussed before, maybe some bioluminescent microbes similar to glowing moss clung to the soil or tree roots.
Hearing that, Han Se-ah pulled a glass bottle from her inventory and carefully scraped soil into it. We had already submitted the tree roots; this time only the soil and whatever new creatures appeared needed handling.
Again we spiraled gently downward—or at least it felt that way. In the soft gloom it seemed we were walking straight, but Han Se-ah’s minimap showed us slowly circling to the right. Last time we had circled left; pure coincidence, maybe?
“Those black Naga from before.”
“Looks like they’re all already born this time. Are they… eating the flesh masses they hatched from instead of eggshells?”
—Truly… disgusting. Will you… entrust the vanguard… to me again?
Past the narrow beast den and the root-supported passage, the same open space appeared. This time, however, the black Naga were not in the middle of being born; they had already emerged, their flesh masses and black serpentine lower bodies tangled in a nauseating heap.
Black Naga slick with viscous fluid coiled together like mating snakes, chewing methodically on the flesh masses. Even by the kindest stretch of the imagination, it was not a pleasant sight.
Whether he felt the same visceral disgust humans did toward doppelgangers or zombies, Manash snorted a sharp breath and readied his trident for a charge.
Which was why my eyes went to our party’s leader. She had read the quest window alone and guaranteed the underground wouldn’t collapse; in a situation like this we ought to listen to the orders of our shining, modest genius mage.
By the 40th floor the titles had gotten impressively long.
“Hanna, what’s the tool saying? Is it safe to fight here?”
“Mmm… as long as we don’t smash the walls and ceiling with aura, it should be fine. The cavern that collapsed last time was probably an empty trap. This one feels like their important production base is farther down.”
—In that case… I go!
At Han Se-ah’s words Manash surged forward like a hound off its leash, aura flaring.
She had spoken in speculation, but given that she was a gamer she had almost certainly read some quest information on her own. There was no need to read every single letter of a quest-item description aloud just because this was a game stream.
So this time I didn’t leave everything to Manash. Shield up, I sprinted ahead. The open space was so packed that I could kill them just by slamming into them without even swinging the mace.
I gripped the shield with both hands and focused mana into it. Mana poured into the mace produced shockwaves and explosions; mana poured into the shield simply made it denser and heavier. Add the passive that reflected part of the impact, and the result was decisive.
“W-whoa… it’s like scrubbing off old grime.”
“Is this the level of an upper-grade who can project mana outside the body…?”
“Even upper-grade knights aren’t that strong. That’s someone who’s been at the upper grade for a long time.”
Dark-blue aura whipped through the open space like a flickering snake’s tongue and the black Naga sliced apart as cleanly as threads against a razor. Beside it Roland, blue aura blazing, crushed them flat the way a steamroller flattens asphalt.
Two streams of absolute violence that ordinary viewers would never be allowed to wield swept the cavern clean, and the camera captured every unhurried second of it.