Escape Preparations
I was lying there sprawled out endlessly when a sudden question popped into my head.
“By the way… why does my body feel so heavy? It’s like I can’t even feel anything properly.”
“Oh, that? I had to cut open your side and back to get the ice out, so I pumped you full of morphine.”
“Morphine?”
Like the stuff they give injured people in war movies that makes them go loopy? Out of all the painkillers in the world, she chose a narcotic? No, more importantly—why the hell did she even have that on her?
“I swiped some from my grandpa’s company infirmary, just in case.”
“Isn’t that a crime?”
“It’s not a crime if you don’t get caught. Besides, it’s all going to be mine eventually, so what’s the big deal?”
A regressor who steals an SSS-rank hidden piece and swipes company assets. At this rate, she might start stealing other people’s abilities soon too.
“…You said you cut open my side and back. How did you close it up?”
“Closing it? Easy. I used this.”
A blood-stained medical stapler pulled from the first-aid kit. And from that oversized bag came a half-empty vial of purple liquid.
“An elixir?”
Elixir, or spiritual medicine. The ultimate destination of all-purpose recovery potions—the highest-grade healing item. With something like that poured on top of iron staples, the chances of major complications were low.
I struggled to my feet to check for myself and tried to lift my shirt.
“Ah, I poured some extra elixir on it, but… you probably shouldn’t look at your side or back. I was a little sloppy with the work.”
“Roughly how bad?”
“I could’ve finished with about fifteen staples, but I messed up and ended up using around thirty.”
Oh dear God.
I lifted my shirt, then immediately lowered it again. I could picture exactly what my body looked like right now, and it wasn’t pretty.
Next, I looked at my broken left hand. It was still swollen, but at least moving it felt a little better. I glanced down at the stab wound on my thigh. Blood had dried into the fabric, and I was seriously worried about tetanus. Then I covered my uninjured eye and checked the one that had been clubbed. It was so blurry it was almost unusable. It wasn’t hospital-level bad, but the fact that I was even in this state felt incredibly depressing.
I let out a long sigh.
“I really am a complete wreck.”
“That’s how it always is at first. You’ll get used to it.”
Cheon Mari spoke as if it were obvious I was going to become a hunter. Even if I got out of here, there was no guarantee I’d become one. Plenty of people had tons of mana but lacked the fundamental talent. And even setting aside my low mana, my other talents were pretty much trash.
“Wait, no. Since you actually have talent, you’ll probably get used to it pretty fast?”
“Aren’t you hyping me up a little too much?”
My physical abilities weren’t overwhelming. My combat skills weren’t exceptional. I didn’t even know any decent magic. It really felt like she was laying on the compliments way too thick. Maybe because I was hurt, she was trying to give me both physical and mental painkillers to keep me going.
“Not at all? If anything, the fact that you made it from the lower floors to the upper floors with just a dagger shows you’ve got plenty of talent.”
Anyone could’ve done that. The skeletons I fought were nothing but F-rank grunts anyway.
Given her personality, pushing the topic any further would just make her brag more, so I dropped it. When I gave a lukewarm reaction, Cheon Mari drew her sword and gave it a few practice swings.
“Well, we can prove it from here on out.”
“…Prove it? This isn’t something weird, right?”
“Of course not. Didn’t I tell you earlier? We’re getting out of here within a day.”
She had said that. But I wasn’t sure if it was actually possible. Considering how much of the place had collapsed earlier, the paths were probably broken everywhere. The odds of getting stuck halfway up seemed extremely high.
“We’re not escaping upward.”
Cheon Mari pointed downward. There was nothing but solid stone floor there.
“You want to break through?”
“No. I want to go even deeper.”
Go deeper? It sounded like complete nonsense at first, but it wasn’t entirely ridiculous. Thinking about what was below us, I could guess what she was planning.
“Um… Mari? Clearing the ruins and dealing with the gate don’t really have anything to do with each other, do they?”
Gate clear. It wasn’t exactly nonsense, but it didn’t sound particularly helpful either. In this situation, it seemed far more realistic to crawl through the nearby ventilation shafts and scout around than to clear a gate.
“They don’t. But I have a way to make them connected.”
“What is it?”
“Do you know how the destination of an exit gate is determined?”
Entrance gate and exit gate. The terms had multiple meanings, but they were generally used in reference to dungeon gates. An entrance gate was one that let you enter a labyrinth from reality. An exit gate was one that let you return from the labyrinth to reality. Enter through the entrance, exit through the exit. Take the exit gate and you’d come out the entrance gate.
In other words, Cheon Mari was asking whether taking the exit gate inside the dungeon would spit us out at the entrance gate in reality.
Obviously. It was the most obvious thing in the world.
“The exit and entrance are connected. So of course you’d come out at the entrance gate.”
“Right. Then you also know that dungeon gate locations can shift, right?”
I did. Even in Gray Zone, there was an episode where the protagonist threw himself into a dungeon gate to survive a collapsing building. The protagonist entered the dungeon while the building in reality collapsed. At that point, the player had two choices.
One was to push through the dungeon to the end and clear the episode. It wasted time, but you could get some pretty good items.
The other was to take the exit gate right behind you and return to reality immediately. The episode would be skipped and you wouldn’t get any items, but you could progress much faster.
The unique thing here was that the gate was buried under a pile of rubble. In most media, if a portal overlapped with an object, the user would either explode or get sliced in half. Thankfully, the gates in this world weren’t that inflexible. A buried gate would automatically relocate itself. It was an incredibly considerate system—except for the part where you couldn’t just seal a boss’s gate with concrete to stop it from walking out.
And the rule for when a gate relocated was simple: whether there was sufficient open space above or below it. Even if there was space to the side, the system usually prioritized vertical space.
So if you chose the second option, the protagonist could walk out through a newly formed gate on top of the rubble.
“When a gate gets buried by something, its position changes.”
“Exactly. And that dead hunter uncle from earlier said the dungeon gate here is hidden deep in a room on the lowest floor.”
“Wait a second. You…”
“You’re thinking exactly what I’m thinking. We’re going to collapse the entire gate room, enter the gate, and come out through a newly formed gate on the mountainside.”
It was absurd. It was the kind of plan you’d call outright insane. If there happened to be open space both above and below the hidden room, we’d just be splitting our bodies open for a double suicide ending. Even if there wasn’t space, one wrong move during the collapse could lead to a crushing death ending. No—first of all, I wasn’t even sure there was a way to collapse an entire room.
“How are you going to bury the gate?”
I couldn’t use magic properly, so I was out. That meant she’d have to do it alone with magic. Was that even possible? From what I’d seen of her in the game, she was purely a swordswoman. The few spells she used were mostly ones that linked with swordsmanship rather than high-powered magic.
My doubts only grew thicker. Cheon Mari thumped her chest as if to brush them aside. (For the record, it didn’t make much of a sound.)
“There’s a way for everything.”
From the side of her bottomless bag, she pulled out two rolled-up sheets of paper. They were waterproof-coated, and beautiful fractal patterns were drawn across them.
“Ta-da! Explosion Scroll and Earthquake Scroll!”
“You brought those to a picnic?”
“You never know what might happen in life, right? I brought them just in case—okay, that’s a lie. I was cleaning up my stuff before and was too lazy to take them out, so I just left them in. Then I forgot to remove them before the picnic. That’s why I still have them.”
Ah, laziness really is unbeatable. I understood immediately.
Still, that didn’t make this reckless plan any more sensible. The anxiety of possibly having random open space above or below us. The fear of getting trapped and dying—
‘But if we stay here, we’ll die anyway. No matter how dangerous it is, that option is still better…’
The fear didn’t hit me as hard as I expected. My hesitation lasted only a moment. I nodded at her plan.
“Then before we go, let’s get a few more things ready.”
Before heading down to the lower floor, Cheon Mari had me prepare a few things.
The first was basic knife work. Since I had no idea how to use any weapon—dagger or otherwise—she taught me herself. Receiving a one-on-one blade lesson from a regressor was both incredibly rare and precious.
“Anyway, you go like this—shuk, shuk, shuk, you son of a bitch—while—”
Even if her explanations were kind of garbage.
Still, after about three hours of instruction, I managed to learn the absolute basics.
“Wait, is three hours really enough? Shouldn’t I practice more?”
“We don’t have time for more. Plus, you picked it up so fast that I’ve run out of things to teach you.”
“Huh… the movements are lighter than I expected.”
“That’s how real compressed basics usually are.”
The second lesson was how to imbue a dagger with mana. My body was falling apart the more mana I used, but she said there might come a time when I’d need to deliver a powerful strike, so she taught me anyway.
“Good thing I already learned the mana manipulation techniques at school.”
“Tsk, I’m not entirely sure it’s actually working properly.”
“From what I can see, your mana is circulating correctly. Don’t worry too much.”
When I focused, it felt like something was happening… or maybe not. Even though my mana had increased a little, it was still pathetically insufficient.
The third was consumables. Cheon Mari handed me several unidentified medicines.
“Diphenylmethyl-sulfinylacetamide. Also known as modafinil.”
“Isn’t that a wakefulness-promoting agent?”
It was a drug I’d taken in my previous life when cramming for exams. The results hadn’t been great.
“Hunters sometimes take it during long expeditions.”
“…Is it really okay to use this when my body’s already a mess?”
“It should be fine. The side effects are pretty mild anyway.”
If that was the case, then sure. I immediately popped one to shake off my drowsiness.
My gaze then landed on an unmarked syringe.
“That’s morphine.”
“I see.”
She told me to inject it into my arm if the pain got too bad. When I asked if it was dangerous, she said that since I was an awakener, it shouldn’t cause problems with my nervous system. Still, because there was some risk, it was probably best to use it only if I got seriously injured during a fight or if a wound burst open.
It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing. With our respective weapons in hand, we slowly made our way down to the lower floor.