First Assignment (2)
Wood Class adventurer.
That was the name given to adventurers who received a wooden badge as proof of rank.
As the lowest tier among adventurers, they were generally not very strong. But that was a different matter entirely if they were adventurers of the militaristic Alderich Empire.
Born into such a harsh environment, they were weeded out the moment they failed to get stronger. With any less than decent skill, you couldn’t even become an adventurer in the first place.
“So, you found a dungeon?”
Erich, Frank, and Max—adventurers of that Alderich Empire—were naturally far stronger than the adventurers of other nations.
“Yeah. It’s F-rank, though. We can just go in like we’re out for a stroll.”
“Idiot, for our level it has to be at least D-rank. What are we supposed to do with that?”
It was enough to say they could win even against adventurers of the same rank from other guilds. At the very least, they thought themselves comparable to silver-rank adventurers.
“Still, it’s a dungeon. Worth clearing. If we just harvest some mana grass in there, we’ll be living easy for a while.”
“Tsk. Fair enough, I guess.”
“We’ve got to do jobs like this sometimes, Max. Killing’s nice and all, but if you want to rise high, you need a foundation first, right?”
Of course, even for them, dungeons were places that had to be cleared.
As passages leading into the Demon Realm, dungeons where mana flowed freely were rich in mana grass and magic stones. Each and every one of those had a dozen different uses, so the profits were pretty sweet.
“And hey, you know this is fun too, right? Watching weaklings beg for their lives never gets old. Kk.”
“Heh, true enough.”
Of course.
That was only extra income.
Demonkind.
Beings beloved by mana. Their very existence was no different from a tonic to humans, a means of growing stronger.
Their organs, blood, bones—nothing went to waste. They were excellent materials, good for either consumption or forging into weapons.
“Man, your tastes are weird. What’s so funny about that?”
“Hey, hey, Erich. Isn’t it funny that this bastard Frank is saying that?”
For that reason, almost every human in the Human Realm attempted to clear dungeons.
If they could breach the dungeons and even bring down the Demon Realm itself, they’d be able to mine demonkind as an endless resource.
“Pfft. Exactly. Don’t you remember that female demon from last time? The one with the guy next to her begging for his life, and you just chopped off his head? And now you’re trying to act all high and mighty?”
“She was spouting that crap about how animals don’t have any mercy or whatever, so I taught her a lesson. Even that got boring in the end. You remember the look on that bastard’s face after, like he’d lost everything? That’s the fun part—you’ve got to resist a little, tsk.”
Frank ran a hand over the saw blade in his grip and looked ahead.
He could see the wavering entrance to the dungeon. It was about time they went in. If they dawdled any longer, someone else might snatch it away.
“Enough of that. Hey! Erich! Let’s get moving! How long are you planning to slack off?”
“I’m coming, I’m coming!”
From the shimmer beyond, it looked like… a common stone wall pattern. If so, then there probably wasn’t any particularly dangerous race inside. The nasty demon races usually turned dungeon entrances into their own territory from the start.
Tsk, this’ll be tame again.
That wasn’t what Frank wanted. As the lowest of the low among adventurers, he was always dreaming of something greater.
He couldn’t keep living off help from his older brother forever. Not even if, for now, he was reduced to clearing easy dungeons like this.
Of course, demons had a kind of intelligence to them, and there was some enjoyment in trampling those who begged him to spare their families… but in the end, he’d have to climb higher.
Woooong—
The space rippled, letting the three adventurers in. As usual, Frank took the lead and scanned their surroundings. Among them, he had the most dungeon experience.
Just as I thought. Nothing dangerous here. We can take it a little easy.
The dungeon itself seemed like it had only recently formed. Older dungeons usually had traps laid out from the very beginning. At the very least, this one didn’t.
“Huh. There’s nothing here. Don’t F-rank dungeons usually have a few worms crawling around?”
“Right? Man, how thoughtful. Maybe I should kill it extra painfully later? Heh heh.”
Leaving Erich and Max to chatter behind him, Frank advanced slowly.
Then the scenery, which had seemed frozen in place, began to change.
Whooosh—
Flowers? No, grass?
A breeze drifted from the far side of the passage, tickling his nose. That soft air was mixed with the scent of earth and grass.
Now that I think about it, the floor’s gotten softer too. It feels like I’m stepping on sand now.
The space gradually widened and brightened as well. Peacefully, with neither traps nor monsters in sight.
And then, at some point—
“…Sunlight?”
Frank raised a hand to shield his eyes from the light streaming down from above.
The dungeon had changed completely. Blue sky replaced the ceiling as though they were outdoors, and grass grew here and there, painting a tranquil scene.
“What the hell is this? Was there a dungeon like this?”
“Beats me. First time I’ve seen one too.”
Frank looked farther ahead, away from the sunlight.
What seemed like an artificially laid path stretched straight forward.
And at its end—
“What’s that? A door? Why’s there a door?”
“There’s just a door standing there with no house around it. What, is it decoration?”
A white door.
The kind of wooden door you’d expect to find in a room inside someone’s house.
It stood there all alone, without a single ornament on it.
A door in a dungeon means…
Frank sank into thought. This was an F-rank dungeon. Normally, it should be structured with one room, a corridor, and then a boss room.
This place had already split into two spaces: the stone corridor and this field. In that case, that door was…
“Probably a passage leading to the Demon Realm.”
“What? Seriously? And it’s just sitting there out in the open?”
“Isn’t the boss usually what comes out after you kill it?”
“Usually, yeah… Hmm. Maybe we found something incredible.”
In a normal dungeon, you had to kill the boss before you could reach the Demon Realm. And after that, the dungeon would collapse soon enough.
In fact, the lower the dungeon rank, the faster it collapsed. That was why all prior raids into the Demon Realm had been carried out through higher-ranked dungeons.
To harvest as many resources as possible from the Demon Realm, you needed time. When even an B-rank dungeon collapsed in two days, only an S-rank dungeon or above was suitable as a passage.
But—
“Look. There’s no boss. And yet the door exists. That means this place could be used as a permanent passage.”
“Yeah, that’s true. Isn’t this huge? If we report this properly, we could end up as heroes of humanity!”
“Exactly. Though we’ll have to go up there and see for ourselves. You can only prove it by actually using it, right?”
Max, excitement bubbling in him, picked up the pace. He looked eager to get to the door at once.
“Hey! Don’t go running off! We’re supposed to go together!”
“In situations like this, first come, first served! If you’re upset, you should’ve come faster!”
“Tch, you bastards.”
Frank watched the two charging ahead and then followed after them.
Or maybe the boss simply gave up on defending the dungeon? I’ve heard that happens sometimes.
A bad feeling prickled at him. A sense that he was overlooking something.
But it was only an F-rank dungeon. Even if that was bait with an ambush hidden inside it, there was no way it’d amount to much.
Tsk. Whatever. Good is good.
With that thought, Frank brushed the suspicion away. Whatever this was, it was a good opportunity for them.
“Hey! Frank! Hurry up and come look! There’s something weird here!”
Erich waved him over, shouting. He seemed to have found something interesting.
Frank walked faster. Then the thing in Erich’s hand came into view.
“What is that? A doll?”
“Look at this. This thing moves by itself! It even makes noises.”
「Peep!」
Erich’s hand was gripping the neck of some rabbit doll.
It kicked and twitched as though it were alive, but it was still obviously a doll. Its eyes were crudely sewn on with buttons, and its mouth was just thick thread stitched across.
“Isn’t this the boss? It fits, at least.”
“This shabby thing is a demon? It doesn’t even have intelligence, let alone an attack pattern.”
“Looks that way.”
The unease in Frank’s mind eased a little. This was starting to make sense.
At a glance, the doll didn’t seem to have intelligence or mana. If so, then maybe the door had simply been revealed because the boss lacked the strength to keep it hidden. He had heard of demons like that before, too.
“Seriously? Pfft! The Demon Realm’s a joke. They couldn’t find anything better than this doll to set up as a boss?”
「Peep!」
“This’ll make things easy. Just immobilize it for now. If you kill it by accident, the dungeon might collapse.”
“Hey, Frank. There’s another one over there. Shouldn’t we grab that one too?”
Max pointed toward one side of the field. Another rabbit was hopping around in the grass.
A twin boss, maybe? Tsk. Then we’ll have to immobilize both.
“Let’s catch that one too. Then we can open the door and head back to the guild.”
“Fine by me. Ka-ha, what a windfall this is~.”
Max began walking off, looking delighted. He stepped off the dirt path and headed toward the field—
Crunch-!
“…Huh?”
Max’s head disappeared.
No—it hadn’t disappeared. It had been swallowed.
By a rabbit that had suddenly opened its mouth wide, like a ravenous beast.
“U, uuuugh—!!”
Crunch! Crunch! Crunch!
Max screamed. Every part of Max’s body screamed.
Each time the mouth opened, something horrible could be seen.
Eyeballs, teeth, and organs all mixed together. Nerves, bones, and spinal cord snapped, twisted, and tangled in one another. At the same time, flesh kept getting ground down and shattered—
Crunch-!
It splattered.
What had been Max sprayed out of the rabbit’s mouth and across the field. Flesh, blood, chunks of brain, stomach fluid—everything splattered across the grass.
Crunch-crunch-crunch-!
A ravenous sound followed. Or maybe it was the sound of a tongue dragging over a body? Frank couldn’t tell.
No more sounds came after that.
But then.
Another sound did.
Blink-
Max was still alive.
Because one eye, rolled out into the grass, blinked.
Still alive, even in that state, screaming in silence. He was still alive—
“…A, aaaagh—!!!!”
Erich screamed. Frank was frozen in place, paralyzed by terror that swallowed his body whole.
W-what, what just happened? That rabbit tore Max apart? How? How?
“U, uaaagh—! Aaagh—!”
Erich started running without thinking. Overcome by fear, he began thrashing for his life. Toward the door they had entered through.
He didn’t follow the dirt path. Running straight from here would get him there faster—
Snap-!
“Ah—”
Erich’s scream cut off. His lungs had been ripped apart and eaten. The rabbit had opened its mouth wide and swallowed the area below Erich’s neck.
A head flew into the air. For a moment, it seemed like it would fall—then—
Crunch-!
Another rabbit, one that had come all the way over from the grass beyond, caught it and swallowed it whole.
Crunch! Munch, munch, munch—
It chewed. Digested. Greedily flinging food everywhere, the rabbit minced Erich into pieces.
Frank looked into its mouth. For the first time, he saw inside the rabbit’s mouth.
Countless saw teeth. Teeth so densely packed they were grotesque, shredding Erich to pieces.
Alive.
No—worse. It was being kept alive even after becoming that.
“…Sh, shit. What the hell is this?”
Frank staggered backward. He didn’t even think about fighting.
In an instant.
What had been in the rabbit’s mouth in that instant froze him in place. That horrifying sight made him understand that he could never beat it.
Erich’s eyeballs and heart, his teeth, were scattered and rolling around inside its mouth.
“What, what the hell is that? In an F-rank dungeon. Why the hell is there something like that—”
What had been Erich.
“Th, thi…ng… can’t… be—”
It explained that this was something he could not fight and win against.
I-I have to live. Somehow, I have to live.
Frank ground his teeth together. His head kept working under the instinct to survive. He bit down hard on his lip beneath the crush of that single thought: he had to make it out alive.
W-why did those bastards suddenly attack? By jumping? Or because I grabbed its neck?
No. If that was all it took, wouldn’t they have killed it already? Why, then? What exactly was it that made the two of them have to die?
Frank’s gaze darted around. His mind, the sharpest among the three, found one thing different from before.
Grass.
The grass had grown. As though Erich and Max’s corpses had become fertilizer, grass now covered every inch of the space.
…Right. The grass. It was the grass. They touched that, and those bastards killed Erich and Max. That has to be it.
Then it was clear. All he had to do was step on the dirt path and get out. Then come back with a mage strong enough to fully subdue those dolls.
Carefully, Frank took a step.
Earth. The rabbits showed no sign of aggression. Good, if he just kept going like this—
Whoosh—
“…Ah.”
A breeze blew. The same breeze that had blown when they came in.
But what was different this time was—
Swish—
“Ah.”
The grass, bent by the wind, had grown just enough to brush against Max’s foot.
“……Sa, save—”
Crunch-!
“A, aaagh—!!”
Crunch! Crunch! Munch, munch—
What had been Frank was chewed up and sprayed everywhere.
And then the grass grew.
As though nothing had happened at all.
“…So, to your eyes, newbie, it just looks like it got popped and fell over. This, uh, video?”
“…? Yes. No, uh, it is?”
HotPlace, who had watched the entire recording, looked down at the girl fidgeting in front of her.
She had thought the girl might be a psychopath, since she was so calm after watching a video that was practically a snuff film.
“…D-did I… do something wrong?”
But this reaction—
It was the reaction of someone who had seen something entirely different. HotPlace could be sure of that now.
What she only realized now was that something white had been rolling around at the girl’s feet.
And although the girl had clearly seen it, she hadn’t paid it any attention at all.
Probably—
What had been Frank’s eyeball, if one had to guess.
A blinking, half-crushed eye.
Something was wrong.
Her doll was, and she was too.