The Ant Cave Shortcut
While I was fixing the map for a moment, Jangcheok caused an accident. I’d told him to stay put, damn it… but he couldn’t even wait that short while and started messing with everything around him. The man had lived long enough to know better, yet here he was acting like a child. I had no idea what he was thinking!
I shouted toward him. “Are you okay?”
“Hajun! The—the wall suddenly split open… It’s a cliff! We’re falling!”
Boom! The dungeon shook once more. The wall split completely, swallowing Jangcheok whole. Sion, who had been trying to help him, got dragged in as well.
Clatter-clatter-clatter…
“Jangcheok! Sion!”
I peered through the gap in the broken wall, but it was too dark to see anything. Just like Jangcheok said, it was a sheer drop below. The only thing visible was a thick iron chain unraveling violently.
Roa came running, crossbow in hand. “Should I shoot?”
“No. Hold on.”
The rattling of the chain echoed loudly. Dungeon. Secret wall. Iron chain… The pieces clicked together in my head. This was that.
“Whoa. For real.”
Shortcuts. Every dungeon had them. Some didn’t, but the vast majority did. Their designs changed depending on the dungeon’s theme, and this was one of those chain-and-platform types. The overseers called them elevators or portals.
Roa bit down hard on her lower lip. “The two of them…”
“They’ll be fine. Probably.”
My prediction went like this: the secret wall vanishes, Jangcheok and Sion fall, and an elevator platform is waiting below. The platform activates, the chain unravels, and the two of them descend to the lower floors. They would likely be safe. Shaken, sure, but not in any real danger. They’d arrive at the dungeon’s lower level just like that.
Dungeon Overseer’s shortcuts were designed to help you if you progressed normally. If you found a hidden room and forced your way into a shortcut, either the entrance or exit would be blocked by bars, making it impossible to proceed. And crucially, the game had never featured an event where the party got separated or left behind.
This was a first.
“This is driving me insane.”
If those two knew how the elevator worked, they would find the mechanism to go back up. But what if they didn’t? What if the device was hidden and required reading a specific phrase to reveal it? Then they would be completely trapped underground.
Just me and Roa. The two of us would have to carve our way through an ant-infested dungeon to rescue a balding middle-aged man and a skinhead trapped below.
Boom. A deep rumble echoed. They must have reached the bottom.
“What do we do?”
How should I know? We were just fucked.
“For now, let’s look for the control device ourselves.”
“Control device?”
Roa seemed to be seeing an elevator-style mechanism for the first time and struggled to grasp the concept.
“This is the entrance, and the dungeon basement is the exit. You can operate the movement from either side. If we find that device, we can pull it back up.”
Even as I explained, I wasn’t holding out much hope. I knew exactly why Dungeon Overseer’s shortcuts were practically useless. Like I said, this game was a roguelike.
Roa anxiously scanned the crypt, then soon discovered something hidden near the secret wall—a cross-shaped hole.
“Necromancer! Look at this!”
She sounded thrilled, but I felt nothing.
“It must be the device made by the underground people!”
“This is the control device.”
“Hurry and use it!”
“It needs a key to operate.”
“…A key?”
“Yeah.”
“Where would that be… Ah.”
“Underground. Probably in the Ant Cave warehouse.”
Exactly. Even though it was a roguelike, the game wasn’t going to let you farm or grind in peace. To use the shortcut freely, you first had to clear the treasure room on the dungeon’s final floor. In simple terms, the shortcut was a courtesy feature—clear the warehouse on the last floor, then comfortably ride back up.
So the answer was obvious. Either obtain the key on the final floor and return, or find a path on the final floor and link up with the others.
Fuck. No matter what, we had to reach the final floor.
“…”
And with a Level 1 Guardian in tow, no less.
Suddenly my chest felt tight. I should have known it was going too smoothly. For now, we would wait. Maybe those two idiots below would figure out the elevator and come back up. I decided to give them a generous half-day.
Sitting quietly and reviewing the situation, a deep wave of irritation washed over me. I had literally just told him to stay still. It couldn’t have been more than ten minutes. Yet Jangcheok had gone off on his own to inspect the crypt walls, somehow found the secret wall with ridiculous luck, fallen into the elevator, and flown straight to the dungeon’s final floor.
Fantastic.
All because of that gold fragment. What was so special about gold? His eyes had glazed over at the mere possibility of treasure.
◈ Market Value: 9,500 Ron
“…”
It really was expensive. Not just a little—very expensive. Still, fuck, it couldn’t possibly be worth more than a human life.
Sigh… That old man. Maybe he felt it was time to retire and wanted one last big score. Fuck.
Getting angry by myself would only hurt me. I decided to think coldly.
First, the mission’s success. With the party leader gone, whether we could complete it was now uncertain. I would need to rescue the leader before we could even consider continuing the mission, but without a map or any information, returning now would obviously lead to a hearing. They would ask what happened to our party members. In the worst case, they might even suspect murder inside the dungeon.
This was my last chance. If I went back like this, my career as an explorer was finished. Whether it turned out well or poorly, I had to see it through. The water had already been spilled.
“Roa.”
“Y-yes?”
Roa jumped in surprise and looked at me.
“What do you want to do?”
She hesitated, then answered. “For now… wait here…”
“And if they don’t come back?”
“Then…”
Roa took a small breath. “We have to go down and rescue them.”
Maybe it was because the answer was so obvious. I simply nodded blankly. I hated talk about going to rescue someone. In the end, when an accident happened in a dungeon, extreme situations always followed. Those who could live would live. Those who had to be abandoned, should be abandoned. It was an eternal truth that losing one person was better than total annihilation.
The overseers understood this well. But explorers didn’t. Or perhaps they pretended not to. Almost no one could abandon a dying comrade right in front of them and run away alone. That was what Daro had done, and what Jian had done. So what happened to them? I knew all too well. They all died.
Career or not, the correct choice might be to quit and head back up right now. Honestly, that seemed like the right answer to me at the moment.
But there was still hope. Unlike last time, the danger wasn’t confirmed. It wasn’t a situation where an Orc Warrior stood waiting with a greatsword. It was a dangerous gamble, but if luck was on our side, we could survive. No one necessarily had to die.
“…”
Suddenly, doubt flooded in. There was no point in worrying like this. Was I an overseer? No, I was an explorer. Right now I was nothing more than a low-level Necromancer walking the dungeon in person. A bottom-tier Necromancer that no one liked. That was me.
It was stupid, but I was still going down. I would go down and rescue Jangcheok and Sion.
“I’ll help. Let’s go down together.”
When I held out my hand, Roa stared at it for a moment, then shyly shook it.
“Um.”
“Yeah?”
“Can I… call you more comfortably? Not that it’s comfortable for the Necromancer or anything, I mean…”
She was worrying about the strangest things.
“Call me Hajun.”
“Then…”
Roa’s small lips moved. “…Hajun Oppa.”
Hmm. Whether she was timid or just spoke in a somewhat frustrating way, she seemed to have a good heart. Not many explorers got along closely with each other. Maybe it was because she was still Level 1. Roa clearly had a lot left to learn. Which probably meant she was that pure.
Somehow, if left among the Guardians, she seemed like she would become an excellent Guardian later. An excellent Guardian meant one who was completely blocked off in every direction and impossible to communicate with. The less a Guardian could communicate, the more people praised them as excellent. Every faction that appeared in Dungeon Overseer worked that way.
“If only they returned safely…”
Roa offered a pointless prayer. It was a futile hope.
As expected, even after half a day passed, the chain holding the elevator didn’t budge. Jangcheok and Sion were definitely trapped underground.
“Roa.”
Roa, who had been sitting against the wall in a daze, reacted to my voice.
“It’s time to move.”
“What? If we wait just a little longer…”
“Waiting longer won’t help. We have no choice but to go down ourselves.”
Roa looked reluctant, perhaps uneasy about tackling the dungeon as a two-person party. But we couldn’t stay here forever. Once I had decided to move, I hardened my resolve. No matter what it took, I would clear this damn dungeon.
“Let’s go.”
The basic party composition in Dungeon Overseer was four people. The early dungeons weren’t particularly large. I had called the Ant Cave big, but that was only in comparison to the goblin dungeon. The late-game dungeons were enormous. There were countless insanely huge ones. By the time you were tackling those, parties of six to eight people became possible.
When you entered a dungeon, numbers mattered first. Because you often had to kill dozens or even hundreds of enemies, every single person’s firepower was precious. You could clear a dungeon with four or fewer, but the reason we always tried to bring exactly four was here.
The safer the dungeon run, the better. But sometimes, in extreme situations, you had to clear a dungeon with fewer than four members. Unexpected accidents that cost party members, a shortage of available explorers, or events that restricted numbers.
In those cases, overseers usually aimed for a clear by finding a bypass route, grabbing the objective, and escaping rather than forcing a frontal assault. Eat and run. The core of this playstyle—also called eat-and-run, dog-geo, or ninja—was vision blocking through stealth and assassination through noise control.
When your numbers dropped, the number of allies exposed to the enemy dropped as well. Less exposure meant fewer fights. You could move quietly and secretly.
Me and Roa. Our two-person party was currently moving through the Ant Cave as quietly as possible. There were many ants, but the number of corridors and rooms was far greater. Most of the roaming ants were worker ants, and the number we encountered in any corridor was at most three or four.
Like right now. When we ran into two ants, we had to handle them quickly and silently.
“One worker ant at the end of the left corridor. Another one behind it.”
It was a number two people could handle.
“They haven’t spotted us yet. They don’t seem to be moving with any particular purpose. We should be able to kill them.”
As soon as I spoke, Roa drew her crossbow and loaded a bolt.
Damp moss, unidentified mucus, and luminescent mushrooms blooming sparsely along the ant corridors. Hiding her body in a gap between bluntly protruding rocks in this foul-smelling, unpleasant place, Roa took aim at the ant.
Creak. The crossbow, drawn taut by its string, trembled unsteadily as if it might snap at any moment. But the instant Roa steadied her breathing and focused on her target, the weapon became perfectly still.
The target was the ant’s nape—a vital point that could silence it in one shot if hit.
Distance to target: forty meters.
“Shoot.”
At my command, the bolt flew with a sharp twang. It pierced cleanly through the soft joint in the ant’s neck. A clean hit.
“Hmm.”
When its companion suddenly died from a flying bolt, the nearby ant touched the corpse with its antennae. It was sniffing the bodily fluids leaking from the hole in the neck.
Forty meters. My running speed was pathetically slow, but it was still a distance I could cover in a few seconds.
Roa hurled a dagger, tearing open the ant’s belly. Shiiiing—
In that moment, I reached the ant and swung my saw knife with all my strength. The heavy blow severed all the ant’s right legs at once. The chitin-covered legs snapped like dry twigs, shattering and falling in a heap.
The ant that lost three right legs tilted and collapsed. I quickly pinned its struggling neck under my foot, then sliced its head off with the saw knife. The ant died without much resistance.
While Roa, her robe pulled over her head, ran up and retrieved the bolt, I wiped the ant fluids off my saw knife on the moss and sheathed it on my back.
If we kept fighting like this, we had a real chance. The road ahead was long and harsh, but in this moment, I could smile with genuine satisfaction.
“Good work.”
“…”
Roa simply gave a small bow in reply.