The Twitching Wooden Box
The scene had split into three distinct groups, all staring each other down around a mysterious wooden box sitting in the middle of the clearing.
Twitch. Twitch.
A living, moving wooden box… or was there something else inside it?
Whoa… what the hell is this…
Stealth
I slipped into stealth immediately, signaled Yeonhee, and took a wide arc to the right to approach the group from the side.
Lucky me. Now that I know what the box is, I might as well figure out what these humans are thinking.
Three four-man parties had gathered where I drew near. One was mostly middle-aged hunters with decent experience, another consisted entirely of mages, and the last was the Ilseom Guild party—the same ones who had tormented Baek A-rin.
On my way over I passed two massive trees, a rare sight in this dungeon. One had been sliced clean through like a lumberjack had measured it with a ruler before felling it. The other lay in charred splinters, still burning.
Each party must have used their signature skill once. Surprisingly, no one looks hurt.
The fallen giant tree, the refrigerator-sized wooden box in the center, and the three parties locked in a standoff. Put those three things together and the source of the massive roar we’d heard earlier became obvious.
They fought over the box. This is way more interesting than I expected.
Besides the three confronting parties, another fifty or so hunters had formed a loose ring around the perimeter. They looked like spectators who’d come to watch a house burn down. In truth they were hyenas disguised as onlookers, ready to strike the moment an opening appeared.
Our own party members were carefully slipping into that same crowd of hyenas. I could see them from a distance, moving with caution.
When Yeonhee and the summons drew near, the hunters who had been standing with their arms crossed immediately began edging backward. The presence of the summons must have felt oppressive.
The moment our party joined the spectator line, the Ilseom Guild members glanced over, and their faces twisted with open disgust.
“Hurry up and finish this, damn it… This is fucking embarrassing.”
“Who hesitated first? You gonna sheath your sword just because we’ve got an audience? What a moron.”
“Then should we kill them? If even a rumor leaks, we’ll be sent back to Hyunsan and the master will expel us on the spot! You brain-dead bastard.”
“Um~ Seniors… Doesn’t it feel gross having that bitch Baek A-rin watching? Can’t we just leave?”
“Leave? Leave where! We can just wipe them all out and be done with it.”
The short-haired woman who had beaten A-rin tried to act cute, wrapping her arms around the two men, but they were completely fixated on the box.
The people surrounding the box were growing uneasy and started venting their frustration.
“God damn it, they’re swarming like a pack of dogs.”
“That’s why I said we should decide right away!”
“We’re the ones who decide. Who told you to stick your spoon in?”
“I said let’s settle this one-on-one, clean and simple.”
“Fuck off. We found it first, so stop talking shit!”
“Ugh, whatever. Let’s just fight already. Fuck.”
“These Ilseom Guild bastards really are trash, huh?”
“Hey, aunties and uncles. Got any proof you saw it first? By that logic we saw it first. My sight reaches five hundred meters. Want to test it?”
“Son of a bitch.”
Since they had already clashed once, their words were naturally laced with venom. Of course, from the spectators’ point of view, the nastier the fight the better. Watching a brawl was entertaining even in the afterlife.
I turned my gaze toward the wooden box they all coveted so badly. A strange sensation emanated from inside it, tugging at me.
So that’s why… That odd feeling I had from the beginning… This really is the first time I’ve seen one with my own eyes.
I could have touched it while hidden, but I’d heard the stories, so I wasn’t in a hurry.
After all, who touched it first didn’t matter.
Which meant the people currently locked in this standoff were only exhausting their mental strength for nothing.
After roughly grasping the situation, I moved back toward our party. I hadn’t learned much, but one of the mages kept glancing in my direction, and it felt too suspicious to ignore.
“……Is that perhaps…?”
“Yeah. Probably. Otherwise there’d be no reason for this many people to gather.”
“How fascinating…”
“Whoa……”
When I returned to Yeonhee’s side, she was standing on her tiptoes, trying to get a better look at the box now that she’d realized what it was.
There exists a monster called a Mimic. Monster…? Let’s just call it a monster for now.
As always, it had appeared in the world without straying far from the concept people imagined.
An ultra-unique monster that could be encountered at an extremely low probability anywhere inside a dungeon.
And everyone present had beaten those odds and run into one.
I had never heard of so many people discovering a Mimic at the same time. Was this good luck, or bad?
In the middle of a wide clearing where only rotten trees proved the area had once been forest, the lone treasure chest radiated an almost magical allure that excited every hunter who saw it.
Clunk. Clunk!
At first the wooden box had only twitched a little, but now it was openly gesturing for someone to open it quickly.
From a distance it resembled a large safe, but no modern safe was made of wood. It lacked the charm to tempt modern people. A concept error, perhaps?
“A Mimic… This is insane. Some people never see one in their entire lives. What exactly are we supposed to do with it?”
“I-I’m not sure either… From what I learned in training, touching it causes big trouble…”
“There are stories like that. The difficulty of a Mimic is completely random, after all.”
As far as anyone knew, a Mimic reacted in one of two ways when someone tried to open it.
The moment the box was touched, it would either swallow every person within a certain range into a subspace, or it would set conditions and drag only one person inside.
Either way, the person pulled into that subspace had to fight other monsters the Mimic had mimicked, and the rank of those monsters was entirely random.
There were even rumors that defeating the monster didn’t guarantee a good reward.
Some people supposedly won after a hard fight only to die from a curse, though that story had never been confirmed.
The curse rumor is hard to believe. For it to make sense there’d need to be a corpse of someone who received the curse…
However, there was one ability it always granted as a reward: an inventory storage function that automatically collected loot.
For example, back in the Lizardman Swamp when we killed the Lizard Champion, we had to rummage through its body to retrieve the rune that became our share.
Because the rune only reacted once you got within a certain distance. But if you received the ability from a Mimic, you wouldn’t need to dig through filthy corpses anymore. Everything would automatically go into your inventory.
Even the silver you obtained from killing humanoid monsters would pile up in your inventory without you having to search the bodies.
In short, it was an ability that improved the quality of a hunter’s life. I had seen someone with that ability once, and I remembered feeling intensely jealous.
Now that I think about it, what exactly did that person get after killing a Mimic?
Aside from her very small stature and plump figure, I couldn’t recall anything else. It seemed she hadn’t shown me. Or had she? That part of my memory was strangely blurry.
While I was tracing that faint recollection, Ham Eun-yeong muttered with eyes full of fear.
“Those people might summon Necrosquall…”
“……Isn’t that kind of scary-yong?”
It was ten years ago.
A dungeon break occurred in a dungeon in China.
Only a single monster had emerged from it.
After gates connected across the world and the first wave was blocked by the earliest awakeners, the worst casualty count ever suffered by a single nation came at the hands of the Great Calamity known as Necrosquall.
There was a theory that the disaster caused by a Mimic had brought that monster into the world.
The insane creature that had turned an entire Chinese province into ruins was now fortunately in a deep slumber, but no one knew when it might awaken.
Until just a few years ago, the official stance had been that Mimics were catastrophic entities that must never be touched. Not only would the person who touched one meet misfortune, but they could drag everyone around them into disaster as well.
Even though people who had gained the storage ability occasionally appeared in the media.
That long-held belief crumbled when a major daily newspaper published an article claiming there were at least several hundred people worldwide with the storage ability. The numbers simply didn’t add up otherwise.
Most of those who possessed the ability turned out to be top-tier hunters, which only increased the temptation to hunt a Mimic.
Life-changing opportunity.
At some point, that was what a Mimic had come to represent.
Of course, the order might have been reversed—perhaps only the strongest hunters could defeat one in the first place. But when people found themselves in this situation, their minds tended to rewrite the story in whatever way benefited them most.
The hyenas around us.
No one was saying it out loud, but their desire was clearly boiling. To them, that mysterious wooden box probably looked like a lottery ticket that had rolled over for years without a winner.
The endless standoff was finally broken when one man among the spectators bravely stepped forward.