The Secret Passage
I let out a low groan. “Ugh…”
Right now… what time is it?
In this underground dungeon with neither sun nor moon, telling time was impossible. That was exactly why so few explorers kept regular schedules. Once you stepped into a dungeon, you didn’t adjust the day to yourself—you adjusted yourself to the day. When I slept, it was night. When I woke up, it was morning. If I was hungry, it was lunchtime. If I felt peckish, it was dinnertime.
We had found a hidden path behind a massive painting in the royal palace’s central vault and decided to rest there for a bit. It was a secret room the ghost had told us about. Whether the explorers had already looted it or thieves had cleaned it out after the kingdom fell, I couldn’t say. But despite its name, not a single gold coin remained. Anything of value had long been stripped away. All that was left was a hard floor covered in a thin layer of dust.
I’d only meant to catch a quick nap, but I had no idea how much time had passed. Since it was definitely a short rest, maybe four hours or so?
“Roa.”
She was sleeping so deeply that she probably wouldn’t notice if someone carried her off. I felt bad waking her. Exploring a dungeon meant constant stress even when you weren’t doing anything. You had to stay tense at all times because you never knew what might jump out at you. Fatigue built up naturally that way. It wasn’t that Roa slept a lot.
“Roa. Wake up. We should get moving soon.”
Before falling asleep, she had stubbornly insisted on taking the night watch. I’d asked what the point of a night watch was in a secret room, but apparently her thoughts on the matter differed. In the end I’d left her to it and gone to sleep alone.
What had she said right before I drifted off? Something about how a Guardian’s eyes never close? Yeah, right. Her eyes were definitely closed. Roa was sleeping like a fairy, her violet hair scattered around her like a halo.
“Roa?”
“Mmm…”
She was completely out of it. I handed her some preserved rations first. Breakfast or lunch—whatever it was—the menu was disgustingly tough jerky and a handful of peanuts.
When I first started as an explorer, I thought the supply corps had screwed up when I saw this jerky. To anyone’s eyes, it looked far closer to dog chews than food. But after watching other explorers happily gnaw on it, I understood. Still, no matter how I thought about it, it tasted like the supervisors must have been skimming the good stuff for themselves.
Anyway, I popped the dog-chew-like jerky into my mouth and softened it with water. Eating it with a peanut or two at a time gave it a nice savory flavor. Someone once told me that the moment this crap started tasting good, you’d become a true explorer.
Fuck this shitty dungeon.
“How’s your body feeling?”
When I asked, Roa, who had been blankly chewing the jerky, flinched in surprise. Her face turned bright red as she asked back,
“Did… did I fall asleep?”
Why was she asking me that? When I didn’t answer, she must have remembered what she’d said before falling asleep, because she started squirming in embarrassment.
I had clearly told her we didn’t need a night watch.
“You don’t have to push yourself.”
Roa froze with the jerky still half in her mouth.
“I’m the guide. If you overdo it, it’ll be harder to deal with problems later. No one’s going to scold you for resting a little.”
From what I’d seen of Roa’s personality so far, she always tried to pull her own weight. She was strangely timid, too. Maybe that was why I kept feeling the urge to encourage her.
Roa spoke in a quiet voice.
“…It’s because I feel too sorry. I almost got us caught by the ants so many times… I feel so bad toward you, Oppa… It feels like I only ever make mistakes…”
People with high self-esteem don’t apologize so easily. Apologizing itself isn’t bad, but constantly feeling sorry and putting yourself down isn’t healthy.
Roa had definitely been a big help in the dungeon. The problem was that she treated her successes like they were nothing while treating her mistakes like mortal sins.
Was it just her personality? Or had she grown up in an environment that made her this way? I couldn’t tell.
I patted her on the shoulder.
“You’re doing well. There’s no way I could’ve gotten this far alone. Just keep doing what you’ve been doing.”
I had no complaints about Roa. If she just stayed the way she was, that was more than enough.
Roa, who had been chewing the jerky, suddenly pulled her robe over her head and stood up.
“Where are you going?”
She answered in a slightly damp voice.
“…The bathroom.”
Ah. The bathroom. That was a serious issue.
A little while later, Roa returned. Her face looked much brighter, and she wasn’t wearing her hood anymore. There were tear tracks on her cheeks, but I didn’t mention them.
“Let’s go, Oppa!”
As long as her mental state didn’t break, we were fine. We’d rested enough. We headed back into the dungeon.
There was one big problem with trying to pass through the royal palace.
The ants loved the rooms humans had built. It wasn’t called a royal palace for nothing—there were dozens of chambers created by the ancient underground people. I had no idea what the palace staff had used them for, but they had long since become nothing more than the ants’ playground.
The ants particularly favored the neatly carved rooms. They even used them as nurseries for their young.
The palace’s layout was incredibly complicated. Corridors and rooms tangled together like a spiderweb, reminding me of randomly generated dungeon structures. I could already feel it—the unmistakable aura of that luck-dependent piece-of-shit game…
It would be nice to find an empty room, but the odds of that were extremely low. Discovering an ant workshop would be bad. A nursery would be even worse. And if we stumbled on a soldier ant barracks? We’d be completely fucked. Game over.
Our exploration speed slowed dramatically. We checked once before entering a corridor. Again while securing a retreat path. And one last time before opening a door. We wasted a lot of time confirming enemies and assessing the situation.
It couldn’t be helped. The more we rushed, the higher the chance of running into enemies. With only two people in our party, even a single group of ants was dangerous.
Imagine running into twenty black ants. That meant ten per person. There was no way a proper fight could happen. Our combat strength was on a completely different scale from a four-person party.
The dungeon was dark and gloomy, like a scene from a horror game. Many rooms had luminous stones embedded by the underground people that glowed like light bulbs, but in rooms where the stones were broken or stolen, the only light came from faint glowing mushrooms.
The black ants’ bodies were hard to see in the darkness. Let your guard down even a little, and you’d suddenly come face to face with one staring blankly from a dark corner.
“Oppa.”
Roa, who had been listening at the door, called out to me.
“How is it?”
She shook her head.
Roa was currently using her Guardian class’s future sight to check whether there were enemies on the other side of the door. Something unknown filled the space beyond. I didn’t know what it was. But one thing was certain—if we opened the door now, we’d be screwed.
I took out the map and drew a large X over the path. This route was blocked too.
“Next is to the left from here. The room across the next corridor.”
We were currently searching for a way down to the palace basement. We moved slowly from empty room to empty room, gradually descending. This was already our fifth miss. I’d thought empty rooms would be rare, but I hadn’t expected them to be this scarce.
Still, we didn’t get discouraged or give up. That was proof our morale was still holding up. We just had to be patient and keep searching.
“This place…”
Following the map, we moved to the next destination. We stood before a door decorated with elegant, antique ornamentation. At a glance, it looked like a room that would have belonged to fairly high-ranking nobles. It gave off a good feeling.
“Rooms like this usually have secret doors.”
Roa carefully examined the door. She listened for any sounds coming from the other side. She stayed perfectly still, ear pressed close… then gave a faint smile and nodded.
Jackpot.
When I pulled the door, nothing happened. It seemed they had locked it from the inside with a latch. I carefully slid my saw blade into the gap and cut through the latch.
Clink.
The latch fell, and we entered the empty room.
The inside was so dark that nothing was visible. I rummaged through my pack and lit a torch. It burned brightly like the midday sun, giving off a thick scent of resin. We split up and searched the room.
“Hmm?”
In front of a bed where pitiful antique lace hung, I felt a sense of dissonance. The feeling under my feet was different. No—my footsteps had changed. From a hard sound to something more resonant. It was certain. This was…
“Roa, come here.”
With Roa’s help, I pushed the bed aside. A hidden cover was revealed beneath it. It was the secret passage leading down to the basement we had been searching for so desperately.
“We found it!”
“We found it!”
In our excitement, we forgot we were supposed to stay quiet and shouted. Roa jumped up and down, grabbing my hand. We had finally found it. The key to locating Jangcheok and Sion was sleeping right below us.
“Congratulations, Oppa!”
After celebrating for a while, we deliberately put on calm expressions. We still had a long and dangerous road ahead. We had to pass through the palace basement and reach the ant cave’s storage area. There was still dungeon left to explore. We couldn’t let our guard down until the job was done.
Even so, the fact that we had safely made it through the palace past hundreds of ants filled us with joy.
Thump. Thump.
When I knocked on the floor, a hollow echo suggested an empty space beneath. The cover had a lock on it. It was designed so that only the right key could open it, but I had my saw blade. Maybe the reason necromancers carried saw blades around was because there were so many situations in dungeons that required sawing.
I placed the saw blade against the lock and cut away enthusiastically. After about two minutes of sawing, the expensive “Steel Saw Blade” I had bought cut through the lock with a cheerful sound.
Finally.
I tossed the severed lock aside and spoke to Roa in a playful tone.
“Ladies first?”
Roa burst into laughter.
The cover hadn’t been opened in a long time. When we lifted it, an unpleasant creak sounded as dust cascaded down. A sour stench rose sharply from the gaping hole below.
Roa placed her foot on the wooden ladder.
“Huh?”
She slipped immediately.
“Roa!”
I hurriedly grabbed her arm. Roa’s expression hardened.
There was nothing to slip on. Why?
“Oppa… I just… stepped on an ant…”
…What?
I quickly thrust the torch into the secret passage. Glossy black carapaces began to appear as countless ant larvae were revealed.
“Fuck…”
A terrible, unidentifiable stench rose from the deep, dark hole. One of the ant larvae lifted its head toward us.
“Roa! Get back right now!”
I slammed the entrance to the secret passage shut.