Pioneer Project 1
Whether the Earth Beetles only showed up when we were boring tunnels with the Vacuum Stone, nothing at all happened while we ran the auction for the byproducts and Mana Stones. Still, the Stone Dwarves weren't operating on beast-level intelligence — they had to have something that protected or concealed the city from those creatures.
The bidders were the older Stone Dwarves, Old Man Bobo among them. Craftsmanship came with years of experience, after all. The younger ones only knew basic processing work; researching an unknown ore like Mana Stones was something the elders took on themselves.
"Alright then, let's start the auction. This is what the softies call a Mana Stone — an ore packed with an absurd amount of mana. And I'm putting up fifteen kilos of Lava Stone."
"What kind of auction is that?! That's basically emptying your whole warehouse — who's supposed to match that?"
"Hey, take it easy!"
"Shut it! If you've got a problem, drag out everything in your warehouse!"
"Even if we did, it still wouldn't be enough!"
Of course, Old Man Bobo had no intention of giving up a named-grade Mana Stone, so he'd started the whole thing by strong-arming everyone from the jump. Whatever Lava Stone actually was, the moment he bid fifteen kilos of it, the other Stone Dwarves clustered around the Mana Stone started heckling him mercilessly.
Bobo didn't care one bit. He just got angrier, demanding to know if anyone present could beat fifteen kilos of Lava Stone. Was he not even planning to raise the price gradually — just dumping his entire stockpile in one go? Still, for a race so used to trading, they didn't seem interested in cheating us even when the units involved were ones we didn't understand.
"This is… an auction?"
"Doesn't even feel like an auction — more like we just sold it straight to Old Man Bobo. Anyway, that Lava Stone stuff might come in handy on the high-altitude floors, right? Just from the name it sounds like it'd be hot. And if we head to the harpy nests, there's eternal snow and all that, isn't there?"
Whatever Lava Stone actually was, the Mana Stone auction was over in five minutes flat. A few Stone Dwarves who never even got a chance to bid — whether out of lingering regret or sheer obsession with ore — latched onto Old Man Bobo and refused to let go.
From what I could overhear, the alchemy workshop and the gem-cutters were clinging to him begging to split it, while Bobo, apparently a blacksmith on the alloy side of things, was fully intent on melting the Mana Stone down.
Split it, melt it, polish it — every possible argument flew back and forth until Bobo, thoroughly sick of the whining, bolted away on those short little legs of his. And that was how the second day of the defense came to a close.
Yesterday a King Earth Beetle had shown up, so maybe today it'd be a Great King Earth Beetle. Maybe its shell would be gemstone instead of metal — that was the kind of nonsense floating through my head on the third day.
"H-here? This place?"
"What in the world… happened here…?"
"We've only been boring the tunnel for three days. Where is this?"
Old Man Bobo hurriedly shut off the Vacuum Stone that had been blasting light toward Granny Pipi's city — and a ruined city appeared before him.
As if insisting it had once been a Stone Dwarf settlement, empty underground caverns held buildings carved from rock. Stone streetlamps lay broken at the waist, no longer casting any light, and the buildings themselves looked like cookies a child had accidentally stepped on — crushed and crumbled to pieces.
At the sight of it, the Stone Dwarves began surveying the city with glowing crystal lights that looked suspiciously like idol light sticks. We naturally stuck close to Old Man Bobo, ready for anything.
"There's… nobody in the city."
"Weren't you not able to sense Stone Dwarves?"
"That was before we met Old Man Bobo. Now I can pick them up to some degree. At the very least, there are no living Stone Dwarves left in this city. …Unless they're curled up hiding their presence like animals in hibernation, I guess."
Han Se-ah swept the area with light magic while Grace casually drew her bow and scanned every direction. Nothing registered on an archer's senses, so she stated her conclusion with full confidence.
Even with Grace's assessment, the bewildered Stone Dwarves kept their short legs busy, scurrying around to inspect the city. It made sense — Granny Pipi's city was supposedly a distance that human merchant caravans covered over the course of years by wagon. Of course they were thrown off.
Even accounting for how slow freight wagons were, other cities should have been months away. Yet here sat a ruin at barely three days' distance — less than two, if you subtracted the Vacuum Stone's rest periods. Hard to believe was putting it mildly.
Probably feels like driving from Seoul to Incheon and suddenly running into a ghost town. Like you've been hexed by a spirit.
Everyone except the young Stone Dwarves held back by their parents for safety reasons began exploring the ruins.
They poked through shattered stone houses with those idol-light-stick lamps — rods tipped with glittering crystals — but of course nothing turned up. A five-star archer had already declared the city empty, so a hollow shell was exactly what we got.
Still, the absence of Stone Dwarves and monsters didn't mean the traces of their lives were gone. I could feel it on my skin — Old Man Bobo and the elder dwarves' expressions were growing grim.
"This place… isn't this Lili's city? The one that did the gem-cutting?"
"But that's not even in this direction, and it's nowhere near a three-day trip…"
"That building over there — looks like the one our kids built for them when they went to buy gems. …It's pretty wrecked, though."
"The materials they used for construction, too, and some of the less-destroyed shops look familiar."
They didn't only trade with other races — the Stone Dwarf cities clearly did plenty of business among themselves. Old Man Bobo and the others recognized whose city this was almost immediately.
Come to think of it, they seemed to rotate the Vacuum Stone between cities too, so of course they'd travel around trading other ores. Lava Stone from Bobo's mountain range, Vacuum Stone from Pipi's range — that sort of arrangement. While I was turning that over, the dwarves put their heads together and started murmuring among themselves.
The Vacuum Stone, the Mana Stones and byproducts from hunting Earth Beetles, and now Lili's ruined city on top of it all. At this point, even if someone wanted to doubt Han Se-ah's words, the evidence had piled up far too high.
"For the buildings to be smashed up this bad, did those King Earth Beetles show up in bulk and just body-check the whole place? But why isn't a quest popping up?"
"Please tell me we don't have to find something in this insanely huge ruin. I'd just be sitting here twiddling my thumbs waiting for Grace unnie to solve it."
While the Stone Dwarves seriously put their heads together, trying somehow to make sense of a reality that made no sense at all, Han Se-ah was also touring the city under light magic and chatting with her viewers.
Something that looked important had appeared — a whole ruin — and yet the quest window hadn't updated, so she was wandering around hunting for whatever might serve as a trigger. The game's story was moving forward, but the quest log stayed silent, leaving her with nothing to do but pace the ruins and spin theories.
Whether this was just a place we were passing through, or not even that — just set dressing to plant some foreshadowing — Han Se-ah kept whining about the quest window refusing to update. Beside her, the rest of the party hardened their expressions and began surveying the surroundings.
"It's all stone, so it's a little hard to tell, but something insanely heavy came down on this from the outside, right? Most of the building debris fell inward."
"Yeah. It doesn't look like it shattered and sent fragments flying every which way — more like it got crushed from the side walls all the way up to the ceiling and just toppled over. Completely the opposite of when snowfield ogres smash a village and scatter wreckage in every direction."
"Hmm, was this an inn? I heard Stone Dwarves don't need food ingredients, but there are vegetables here that haven't gone bad yet. This place must not have been ruined for very long."
With neither monsters nor Stone Dwarves around, the party moved quickly, looking over the area. They examined building debris, checked collapsed walls, and found withered scraps of vegetables inside the structures, chatting among themselves as they went.
Seemed they all agreed that something massive and slow had body-slammed its way through the city.
The traces were so clear it was hard not to see them. Something even bigger than a King Earth Beetle — something you'd have to call a Great King Earth Beetle — had clearly stomped around the city the way a robot vacuum roams a floor. Buildings that had completely collapsed had taken a direct hit; ones with only a side wall down had been clipped halfway.
"Ah, wait. There's something I need to check."
"What is it?"
A thought struck me, so I brought the party over to Old Man Bobo and asked a single question — whether this city also had a staircase connected to the surface.
"Well, of course it does. This city sold gemwork to the softies too."
The fine details of the city's layout might differ, but apparently every one of them had a staircase at the far end of the cavern for outsiders to come and go. I was curious how they even hauled cargo up those towering stairs, but that was a question for another time.
I led the party — who looked like they'd just realized something — hurriedly up the stairs and out of the cave into the safe zone. Black harpies on patrol came into view.
"Hanna, you leave any mana wedges behind?"
I meant for her to pull up the minimap.
"…It's the 42nd Floor. We only recorded it last time and moved on because it was an awkward time to rest. This is that cave."
Han Se-ah, catching on and opening the minimap, answered.
And just like that, a passage from the 41st Floor to the 42nd Floor had opened.