The Sage of the Boulder
The Slayer unleashed a feral scream. “Uwaaaaah!” A primal, violent war cry. Nothing more than a shout, yet it ignited courage in every warrior who heard it.
“Diiiiiie!” With a thunderous battle roar, Alma’s greatsword crashed down onto the Giant Walking Fungus’s head. A feat only possible with her long two-handed blade. The Slayer’s strike, honed for carving up colossal monsters, smashed into the mushroom beast.
Shhhhh... The Giant Walking Fungus’s head split clean down the middle. At the same time, yellow spores exploded outward in every direction. The Spriggan soldiers covered their mouths and stumbled backward.
“Alma!” The Giant Walking Fungus raised its arm. Even with its head split open, the mushroom giant refused to stop. The head wasn’t its weak point. After all, it wasn’t an animal—it was a plant.
“Kgh!” Alma strained to yank her sword free. But the blade was buried too deep. I sprinted forward with everything I had and swung my saw-toothed blade at the creature.
“Hah!” Luckily, despite its size, its body wasn’t particularly tough. I drove the saw in and wrenched it sideways. With a wet crunch like snapping dry straw, the Giant Walking Fungus’s forearm tore clean off.
“Fuck!” A vile cloud of mushroom spores burst out at the same time. I hastily covered my mouth and retreated. Alma recovered her greatsword and fell back… only to immediately reverse direction.
“Die!” Instead of withdrawing, she ripped the embedded blade free and brought it down on the exact same spot again.
The Slayer slices the mushroom giant’s torso like an onion!!!
The Giant Walking Fungus collapsed, split neatly in half. The remaining Walking Funguses were quickly mopped up by the Spriggan soldiers. In the meantime, Seori escorted Mano into the cave containing the Ring of Standing Stones.
Once the situation had more or less settled, I fell back to the rear. I’d been planning to have a few choice words with Noman. But someone beat me to it—Roa.
I watched as the petite Roa grabbed the much larger Noman by the collar and dragged him along like a sack of potatoes.
“W-wait just a—”
Roa slammed him roughly against the wall, then drew a dagger from her belt. She drove it straight down toward Noman.
Thud!
“Eek!” Noman’s eyes quivered violently. The dagger had sunk into the wall barely a few centimeters from his head. A few strands of his severed hair drifted slowly to the ground.
Roa growled in a low voice. “Consider this your warning. If you space out again, next time I really will stab you.”
“U-uhh…”
“The Spriggans got hurt because of you! Do you understand? If you’re supposed to be a guide, then lead properly!”
Noman was trembling so hard he couldn’t even answer. Roa yanked the dagger free, sheathed it, and turned away. Strands of purple hair poked out from beneath her roughly worn hood.
I let out a quiet sigh as I watched. I hadn’t wanted Roa to get angry. After a few dungeon runs, she was starting to become as strict and unyielding as the Guardians from the game.
The more I looked at Noman, the more amazed I became. Did this guy even know what dungeon exploration was? And how the hell had he reached Level 2?
I walked over to him. “What are you doing? Move. Now.”
Noman flopped straight down onto the ground. The man was a walking disaster.
“M-my legs… they gave out…”
“This time it really was your fault. Roa’s usually such a sweet kid. I’ve never seen her lose her temper like that.”
“I-I’m sorry…”
“Good. You should be. Mister Noman, you are the lantern. Got it?”
“…The lantern?”
“Exactly. Don’t do anything. Just hold the seeker lantern and stay out of the way. Tell yourself: ‘I am the lantern itself. I am a lantern carrier.’ Simple as that.”
“…”
I smiled and patted his shoulder. Noman shakily climbed to his feet, grabbed the seeker lantern, and shuffled into the cave. It had somehow turned into an unintentional good-cop-bad-cop routine. Oh well. At least Noman seemed to have come to his senses. That was enough.
Mushrooms grew here and there throughout the cave. Yuri stomped on the pure-white fungi, muttering curses with every step.
“Damn it. The fungal infection has already spread this far.”
The mushrooms’ spores were endless. That was exactly why fungal monsters were such a pain in Dungeon Overseer. As long as they could suck up nutrients, they could multiply indefinitely. Absorb, reproduce, kill, absorb, reproduce, kill… an infinite loop.
We’d killed a few Walking Funguses earlier, but it probably hadn’t made a dent. Down below, there were likely more mushrooms than I even wanted to imagine—and every last one of them would spew spores the moment you touched them.
“Take this.” I handed Alma a detox potion. Then I uncorked one for myself and drank it down.
“…You really do have a lot of potions. Is it okay to chug them like that?” Alma asked with a slightly sour expression as she drank hers.
Of course, if you converted it into money, it was an incredibly extravagant habit. Plenty of explorers died because they were too cheap to drink potions. Sound ridiculous? In the game, people hoarded potions thinking they were too valuable to use and ended up dying with full inventories anyway.
“I’ve got plenty.”
“I’m starting to think you’re an Alchemist, not a Necromancer.”
While we sipped our potions, Yuri and Mano approached the Ring of Standing Stones. Inside the enormous cavern, luminous stones embedded in the ceiling poured down light like sunlight. Massive boulders stood in a circle around them. It looked like a primitive altar, or perhaps a sacred ritual ground.
That was the Ring of Standing Stones. Just as the great forest elves worshipped the World Tree, the Spriggans revered these stones as holy ground and offered sacrifices to them.
“I will now awaken the Sage of the Boulder,” Mano announced, laying out the ritual tools he had prepared in advance. Various jewels and strange implements whose purposes I couldn’t guess were arranged in neat rows. The assisting Spriggan shamans formed a circle around the stones.
“Ooooom…” A strange chant flowed from Mano’s mouth. The shamans responded with equally eerie voices of their own. It sounded like both a spell and a song—an ancient Spriggan ritual.
“Sage of the Boulder…” Yuri fidgeted with the necklace in her hands. I watched her closely, not missing a single movement.
“Oppa, what are you looking at?”
“Nothing. Just thinking.”
Roa plopped down beside me. At that moment, a Spriggan warrior came running in.
“Captain Seori! It’s an emergency!”
“What happened?”
“One of the guards on duty felt vibrations underground. When we checked, it looks like mushroom monsters are digging tunnels.”
Alma, who had been listening nearby, muttered in disbelief. “What the hell? Since when do mushroom bastards dig tunnels?”
Roa wore a similar expression, blinking in confusion. Then she turned to me.
“Hajun-oppa, do you have any idea what’s going on?”
I thought for a moment. Had mushrooms ever dug tunnels in Dungeon Overseer? Not that I could remember. There were monsters that burst out of the ground, but…
“Ah.” Something clicked. I hurried over to Seori.
“Seori, we need to chase that vibration immediately.”
“Chase it? Why?”
I explained carefully. “It’s an Earth Worm. There’s no doubt about it. That’s what’s digging.”
“But the soldiers said they saw it with mushroom monsters…”
“Because it’s gone insane.”
Seori gave me a strange look. I quickly added, “Earth Worms dig through the earth looking for food. But right now the dungeon is completely infested with fungal creatures.”
“Then…”
“It must have eaten the fungi while tunneling. It’s definitely infected and completely mad. Once something’s infected by the fungal strain, the Mycelial Queen can issue commands to it.”
“What?” Seori’s voice rose sharply. Every Spriggan in the area turned to stare at me. The Spriggans had fought the mushrooms, but they clearly didn’t know everything about the enemy. Only I—who had defeated the Mycelial Queen in the game—possessed this knowledge.
My theory was simple. The Earth Worm had been infected by the fungus and literally driven insane. The Mycelial Queen was a monster with the [Psychic] tag. Just as it controlled mushroom monsters through telepathy, it could control infected creatures the same way. The fact that they’d seen mushrooms alongside the digging sounds meant…
“The Mycelial Queen is using the Earth Worm as a vanguard to carve a path. I don’t know where it’s headed, but we have to follow—”
That was when it happened.
Rumble…
The entire cave began shaking violently. Spriggan warriors snatched up their weapons and leapt to their feet.
“Hajun! That Earth Worm you mentioned—”
Alma couldn’t finish her sentence. The cavern floor split open with a deafening crack, revealing a massive hole. Even the boulders that formed the Ring of Standing Stones crumbled and vanished into the pit.
“N-no!” Mano let out a bloodcurdling scream.
“Mano!” Seori quickly grabbed him and pulled him back. Mano rolled across the ground, still shouting. “We were so close! The Sage of the Boulder was almost—!”
From within the enormous hole, a hideous rock worm thrust its head out.
“Kaaaaaaaah!”
A body at least four meters thick. A starfish-like mouth specialized for crushing stone, a squid-like head, and dozens of tentacle-like legs sprouting from its torso. That was an Earth Worm. A truly grotesque monster.
“That thing… I don’t think I can handle it,” Alma muttered, clearly overwhelmed by the creature’s sheer size.
I felt the same. No one here had the specs to take down an Earth Worm.
“Kaaaaaaaaah!” The Earth Worm spread its starfish-like maw wide and thrashed wildly. It was clearly in agony. Yellow mushroom spores were visible in the drool dripping from its mouth.
“Poor thing,” I said.
“That monster?”
“Yeah. Looks aside, it’s actually a gentle creature. The kind that’s perfectly happy smashing rocks all day.”
It was true. In Dungeon Overseer, Earth Worms were non-aggressive monsters. They didn’t eat human flesh. It had only gone berserk because of the fungal infection. But being pitiful didn’t give us any way to help it. The fact that the Mycelial Queen could control it meant the fungus had already reached its brain. Its blood vessels were probably half blood, half spores by now.
That was when it happened.
“Ooooooh! He comes! The Sage of the Boulder!”
Mano screamed like a madman. A huge fissure opened at the exact center of the Ring of Standing Stones, and a monstrous figure emerged.
“…A wolf?” Alma, with her sharp eyes, identified the creature’s shape instantly. It was the form of an enormous wolf. But…
“Why does it look like that?”
One of the wolf’s eyes was missing. In its place, a bloated brown mushroom protruded.
“Sage… of the Boulder…” Mano’s voice grew smaller and smaller.
「Awooooooooo!」
The wolf howled. Mushrooms the size of adult fists had sprouted all over its body. When it shook its tail, yellow spores scattered alongside its fur.
“Kaaaaah!” The giant wolf bit down on the still-raging Earth Worm’s head.
“Whoa. Fuck.”
We were so overwhelmed by the sight that we lost our voices for a moment. After tearing the Earth Worm apart, the giant wolf turned toward the Spriggans. Every single one of them dropped to their knees without hesitation.
“Sage of the Boulder!”
「You are… the children of the earth.」
「A dark voice calls to me… from the abyss, an evil being whispers… an ancient existence summons me. Children of the earth, I ask you.」
「Is what you desire… my death?」
The Sage of the Boulder’s voice was terribly, unbearably dark.