61. Murderers
61. Murderers
A hero—in this world, a being revered as a savior.
But for all the brilliant days she was living now, the life Kang Su-jin had led in her previous world was nothing special.
She was born into an ordinary family, grew up in an ordinary neighborhood, got along decently at school, pulled decent grades.......
Someone like that existed everywhere, but ironically, the world condemned that very ordinariness as a sin and branded her a failure.
No matter how hard she tried, her life fell short of the "average" that society shoved in her face. She'd been desperately thirsty for it, so wasn't it only natural that the specialness she'd finally grasped became all-consuming?
'It's still not enough. This much won't get me any higher.'
Was it because she remembered the society that condemned mediocrity as a sin?
She was impatient, convinced that even her current starting point fell short of the average for other heroes. But to secure sponsorship from the people of this world, she needed to achieve exactly that.
For Kang Su-jin, who considered even that too slow, the fact that people carrying precious equipment shared the same destination was a powerful temptation in itself....
'What's so strange about it? Precious equipment benefits the world far more in the hands of a hero like me than with a bunch of mere adventurers.'
In a world where people died like trash, everyone called her a hero, so what did it matter if she eliminated the people who couldn't even become heroes and stepped right over them?
Besides, the place they were heading was a lawless zone outside the Empire. No laws to break, and as long as there were no witnesses, her actions wouldn't be a problem.
'If the chance presents itself, I'll just rob them all. Not just the Failed Hero—every single one I meet.'
Hiding those intentions, she arrived at a VIP room inside the guild's tavern.
Already waiting there were adventurers the guild had carefully screened and personally recommended.
"Ah, the hero has arrived."
"Hehe, yes. Is everyone assembled?"
Each and every one was a high-ranked veteran with a mission success rate above eighty percent.
Just by having people like this at her side—unlike that Failed Hero who had to wander around begging—she'd be able to show the world the true extent of her prestige and promise.
"Nice to meet you, everyone. Since we're meeting like this, let's start with introductions."
And they, knowing a hero's prestige, would surely understand her intentions and spare no effort in supporting her.
Utterly certain, Kang Su-jin boldly puffed out her chest and addressed them.
"My name is Kang Su-jin. I am the hero who will be working alongside you from now on. Let us join forces and successfully complete the dungeon conquest ahead of us."
An introduction as brimming with confidence as the equipment she wore.
In response, the adventurers who would be accompanying her introduced themselves with polished courtesy.
"I'm Conan."
"My name is Kim Jeon-il."
****
And the next day.
During the planned dungeon search, I discovered a cluster of corpses: a green-haired woman and her presumed party members.
Probably the corpse of a hero who, like me, had come from another world.
"Eeek!!"
The party leader inhaled sharply, horrified the moment she saw the body.
I turned around and saw the delicate girl trembling so hard she looked ready to collapse at any second.
"A- a person. Dead......"
"Look away for a moment."
Judging by that reaction, she might actually faint.
I signaled the monk in our party, just in case, and he nodded, smoothly stepping in to shield Ga-ram's view.
The other party members, seemingly accustomed to this, approached the corpses without hesitation.
I passed by the mage and vanguard securing the perimeter, walked over to the one acting as scout-sniper, and began examining the corpses scattered across the ground.
"What's the situation?"
"Ah, if it isn't the spearman bro."
The sniper, a guy with a sleazy grin, chuckled to himself. "Heheh."
He quietly pointed out the fallen corpses one by one.
"Well, as you can see—for deaths inside a dungeon, they're in pretty tidy shape."
"Tidy shape... meaning it wasn't monsters or traps?"
"Ooh, you got it. Usually, get caught in those and die, the body doesn't even keep a shape."
The sniper rummaged through the corpses, which already showed signs of rigor mortis and the beginnings of decay.
The way he pried open a corpse's eyelids without a flicker of hesitation showed he was well accustomed to handling human remains.
Though, the same went for me as I examined the corpses alongside him.
"By the way, you could've just stayed on lookout up front, but here you are checking corpses with me. Looks like you're pretty used to this kind of thing yourself, bro?"
"...Well, yeah."
After more than two years in this world, I'd seen hundreds of corpses with my own eyes.
I'd had to retrieve items off bodies—sometimes the bodies themselves—plenty of times, so I was thoroughly accustomed to handling them.
"Single fatal blow to the back of the head, huh..."
No visible external injuries, just a depressed occipital bone.
From that alone, I could immediately deduce the cause of death: instant death via a sneak attack from behind.
"Heheh, that young miss over there looks like she was a hero, but she went quick and painless."
The sniper chuckled, having picked up on the same thing. He was probably mocking how someone who'd been a hero died so pitifully, but something about his words struck me as off.
"No, in a way, this is exactly how heroes die."
"...What do you mean by 'exactly how'?"
"Heroes usually don't die gruesome deaths."
"Ah, well—now that you mention it, that's definitely true."
Yeah. Every hero I'd ever seen die had one thing in common: complacency.
They had power enough to gain the upper hand against monstrous foes of immense strength, but they overlooked the fact that the body wielding that power was still nothing more than an ordinary human.
The less you know, the more arrogant you get—they all started acting like they were something special.
Of course, in their previous lives they might've had the breathing room to realize that kind of foolishness. But this world was a dark fantasy on the brink of humanity's end.
It's not a place that's generous enough to give you time to realize your mistakes.
"Um, Hero. Are you alright...?"
"E- eek!"
"Ah, sorry. I startled you, coming up so suddenly."
In contrast, the hero serving as this party's leader was an adolescent girl who couldn't even handle a single corpse.
She lacked the typical hero's boldness, but because of that, she was that much more cautious. It seemed unlikely she'd die as pathetically as the hero lying in front of us.
Even if the reason behind that cautious attitude was largely me—which I wasn't exactly thrilled about.
"So, bro. You've got a rough idea what this means, right?"
Just as I pulled my gaze back from Ga-ram, the sniper, having more or less finished scavenging the corpses, turned his attention to me.
I knew exactly what that look meant and quietly nodded back.
"...Means there are quite a few 'Murderers' in this dungeon."
Murderer
A term for criminals and turncoats, used as slang in this world pretty much the same way.
They're bastards whose goal isn't conquering dungeons—it's ambushing the parties that do, mainly in places outside the Empire's reach like the one we'd just entered, and stealing their belongings and loot.
In a world without CCTV or black boxes, finding evidence in a lawless zone is damn near impossible. Sell the collected goods on the black market as stolen property, and you've practically pulled off the perfect crime.
In some ways, when it comes to dungeon conquests, they're a breed you need to be more wary of than monsters or traps.
No—given their blatant malice and obsession, you could say they're qualitatively worse.
"Of course, dungeons that have already been conquered to some degree might be different, but untouched places like unidentified dungeons are bound to be crawling with those bastards~"
Damn, this is a pain.
Even for an ambush, there could be Murderers capable of wiping out an entire party with a hero in it, and no telling where they might be.
"Everyone, over here! There's a body over here!!"
Just then, the female mage's voice rang out.
I headed over immediately and found a single corpse crumpled at the bottom of a slope just around the corner.
Part of the dead hero's party?
"Bald guy in black tights covering his whole body... Looks suspicious no matter who's looking at him."
"But he's holding a bloodstained blunt weapon."
"I can see signs of a fight too... So he's the culprit?"
The party members gradually gathered, intrigued.
Among them, I examined the corpse with the sniper, focusing on the weapon in its hand.
Yeah. The shape of the bludgeon roughly matched the depressed back of the head.
"Got several arrows stuck in him here. Looks like he ambushed and wiped the party, tried to make his exit, then tripped a trap and kicked the bucket?"
"Oh dear, how unlucky~"
"Unlucky, my ass. He's an idiot for getting careless in a trap-riddled dungeon, thinking the job was done after raiding one party."
I agreed.
Raiding adventurers was never easy. You had to watch for dungeon traps and monsters, and on top of that, if you ran into another looter, you risked having your hard-earned haul stolen from you too.
Blinded by a moment of greed—this world doesn't let you commit evil in comfort.
"Ooh, treasure~"
The sniper let out a cheerful cry as he rummaged through the looter's corpse without a shred of hesitation.
Curious, the vanguard and mage saw what he was holding and let out simultaneous sounds of admiration.
"A gem looted from that hero... No, is that a magic core?"
"And it looks pretty high-grade. Is that everything they took?"
"Can't be helped~ He was alone. Limited how much he could carry after stripping the corpses."
True—in an unsecured situation, the amount of loot you can haul is limited.
No matter how valuable the equipment, if you want to stay light on your feet, you have to restrict your plunder to small items you can stash on your person.
Yeah. Up to that point, you couldn't really call it strange...
—Creak, clatter.
The moment I laid eyes on that gem, a faint noise came from my armor.
The subtle twisting of the joints meant my armor was reacting to the magic core's power.
Why... No, I understood immediately.
If that wasn't an ordinary gem but a magic core, there was a high chance it was the very 'magic core' that was one of the reasons I'd joined this party.
The guild must have processed it and handed it off to that green-haired hero, but she got ambushed by a Murderer and died the second she received it. I don't know her name, but she's one unlucky lady.
"But hey—you're not thinking of hogging that all for yourself, are you?"
"Ho ho, if I'd planned to take it all, I wouldn't have said a word. I'll entrust it to the hero for now, and later we'll split it according to the contract, so don't you worry~ Here, hero. Take it!"
"Y- yes?"
The sniper eagerly approached and smoothly pressed the gem into her hand. Ga-ram, still not fully composed, looked at the other party members with a bewildered expression.
Obviously, valuables should be entrusted to the party leader for initial inspection, but Ga-ram, unused to these situations, was visibly tense as she glanced around at the others.
Her gaze, when it then darted toward me, still held a faint residue of fear from encountering the corpses.
"Um. But... this belonged to someone else..."
"You don't need to feel guilty."
I stepped closer to Ga-ram and spoke quietly.
"All we did was pick up an item from a corpse. We didn't loot it. If we'd left it behind, it would've just rotted. It's better for the people who died if someone who can use it takes it and puts it to good use."
"I- is that so?"
"Yeah. So for now, you hold onto it."
If I could have it my way, I'd lay out the circumstances and claim rightful ownership right now, but at the moment it was recognized as something recovered during the dungeon exploration, not my property. I decided to let it slide for now.
No need to rush.
I still don't know how, but if Airi's prophecy is right, the moment when I'll get my hands on it properly is bound to come soon.