Emerald Riverside

Yeonji came to her senses and spoke in a surprisingly calm voice, each word crisp and measured. She didn't look anything like the woman who'd been pouring out slick and losing her mind just moments ago. Whether that was sharp situational awareness or a simple lack of thoughts, I couldn't say. Personally, I was betting on the former.

"Uh... um... so what should I call you now?"

"Hmm? What title do you like? Master?"

I dropped into casual speech without thinking twice. In this relationship, I was already the one on top. She knew it too, so she didn't pick at it. It seemed she'd already accepted her position in her own heart.

"Calling you Master in front of other people might be a little... difficult, don't you think?"

"Fair point."

If I'd ordered her to call me Master for real, she probably would have obeyed. It was the same as with Sujin. I had no idea what kind of mysterious magic my cock possessed, but every woman it swallowed whole ended up meek and pliant for me. Sujin, Luna, Sera, and now Yeonji. No need for honorifics anymore — I'd just call her Yeonji.

"Call me whatever's comfortable."

"Then can I talk casually too? After all this... using formal speech feels kind of weird."

"Go ahead. Whatever's easiest for you."

"Heh. Good thing we dropped the formalities quick. My mouth was itching for it. And down here? Still itching."

Yeonji pointed at her own pussy as she said it. It was swollen puffy — swollen far past the point of reason, honestly. She stroked a hand down over that puffed-up flesh and smiled, slow and pleased.

"Any part of you that's overdone? We're still hitting the dungeon on schedule, so if something's wrong, tell me now."

In a dungeon, even the small things matter. Physical condition especially — that one didn't need explaining. At my words, Yeonji rolled her arms and legs, checking herself over.

"Nothing weird. A little muscle soreness, but one night of sleep should take care of it. One shot of your cock juice, though... I bet it'd heal right up."

She looked at my dick with greedy eyes and licked her lips. Hunter or not, her physical ability was outstanding. She'd blacked out from climax after climax, and a short rest was all it took to bounce back. If she'd been an ordinary person, a night that violent wouldn't have been out of place for three days of unconsciousness.

"That's going to be tough. Sujin looks like she's about to lose it. Look at her. Flooded, same as you were a little while ago. Sujin and I are heading back to our room. We leave tomorrow morning, as planned."

"W-wait..."

The moment I said we were going back to our room, Yeonji caught my hand. The lingering affection on her face, the reluctance in her voice — she clearly didn't want to let us walk away.

A few rounds of sex, and I was already branded deep into her heart. I'd become the most important person in Yeonji's life. Women really are that easy. I could feel the power of Power of Sex all over again.

"What? Already missing it?"

"Yeah... it still feels like your cock ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠is inside my pussy. Can't you stay?"

"Sujin's already at her limit, though. The only thought in her head is getting back to the room and fucking me as fast as possible."

Sujin had been filming Yeonji and me with dedicated enthusiasm, and her pussy was soaked through. If I delayed even a little longer, she was going to jump me wherever we happened to be standing. I could smell her slick from here.

"If it's sex, doing it here is fine. No — I want you to do it here."

"You want a live show? The ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠video wasn't enough for you?"

The stronger impulse, I suspected, was simply that she wanted to stay near me — watching was secondary. I said it that way on purpose, though. Needling her with a dirty joke and watching her react was too much fun to pass up.

If I'd ended up in some ordinary office job, I'd have been the resident creep, the employee every woman in the building rated dead last. Becoming a Dungeon Hunter had been a blessing.

"It's not that I wasn't satisfied..."

Yeonji hemmed and hawed, her face full of affection. She looked like a woman too shy to say she was in love.

"Hm? So that's a no? Then we're going back to our room."

"Ah... no, I want to. I want to watch you have live sex. So stay. I'll just quietly finger myself next to you."

Instead of saying she liked me, she offered that excuse. Saying it directly was apparently too embarrassing. You could argue that was a ridiculous line to draw after we'd already crossed every other one, but even when everything is out in the open, there are still tiny, delicate corners where people get shy. I'd only figured that out recently myself.

In the end, I stayed in Yeonji's room, just as she'd wanted. Then I spent the rest of the day hammering a continuous piston-gatling into Sujin's desperately aroused pussy. We had an expedition in the morning, so I should have kept it reasonable. I crossed the line anyway. And that was entirely Sujin's fault for being too damn horny.

We'd overdone it the night before, but we recovered properly and got ready for the expedition. Dungeon exploration required a reservation. It was less a matter of getting permission than of covering the what-ifs. If a Dungeon Hunter went missing, rescue operations were planned off their reservation record.

Of course, they didn't send a rescue team for every missing Dungeon Hunter. Hunter mortality was already brutally high, and even the Association couldn't respond to every single case. The threshold for a rescue operation was several people vanishing from the same dungeon at once, or a large party — or a raiding group — going missing. A small-time party like ours didn't qualify. Procedure was still procedure, though, so we booked it anyway.

We packed our gear and left the hotel. It had been expensive, but the facilities were solid, and our bodies had recovered well enough. Our destination, Emerald Riverside, was about a ten-minute bus ride from the hotel. They ran a shuttle specifically for Hunters, so we reached the dungeon entrance without any trouble.

"So this is the place."

We stepped off at a riverside shrouded in gloomy fog. There were quite a few people around. This was the boundary line, where the dungeon's influence couldn't be felt, so ordinary civilians were mixed in too. Most of them were merchants who'd come out to gouge the Dungeon Hunters trying to clear this place.

Every Hunter knew it was a tourist trap. They opened their wallets anyway. It was the same principle as the ice cream they sell at mountain summits — you know you're getting fleeced, but you buy it anyway.

The fog was so thick that visibility dropped to less than five meters, but the noisy bustle killed any sense of dread. To prevent accidents, the merchants had bright flashlights going everywhere.

"Look at that standing stone. I think that's the boundary."

Sujin pointed in the opposite direction of the river's flow. A single standing stone, suspicious at a glance, stood by the roadside. The fog limited our vision, but bright light burst from around the stone, just enough to make out its shape. A dolmen-legged slab of rock glowing of its own accord was not a sight you saw every day.

"It's a boundary stone. Emerald Riverside is a typical Closed-type Dungeon."

Yeonji said it like it was obvious. Dungeons fell into five broad categories.

Closed-type, Open-type, Mutation-type, Instant-type, and Special-type. Special-type was a catch-all for everything that didn't fit the first four, which meant every dungeon in existence could be sorted into those five.

A Closed-type Dungeon was exactly what it sounded like: a sealed dungeon with a defined boundary. Its greatest characteristic was that you could tell, clearly, where the dungeon began. The form that boundary took varied. Sometimes it was a standing stone, like Emerald Riverside. Sometimes there was an actual door. Sometimes it was something like the mouth of a cave. Cross that boundary, and a world essentially different from our own unfolded on the other side. The Rounded Nest we'd explored at the training center had been the same. It was easiest to think of a Closed-type Dungeon itself as a kind of otherworld.

Open-type Dungeons were the opposite. There was no obvious entrance, which made it hard to point at a spot and say, the dungeon starts here. In some cases you could distinguish them by unusual terrain or monster distribution, but they never had the hard border of a Closed-type. The biggest difference was this: a Closed-type Dungeon was another world entirely, while an Open-type Dungeon was still part of ours. You could also think of an Open-type as human territory that monsters had seized.

Mutation-type Dungeons were a stranger case — something like a midpoint between Closed and Open. Our world would begin to change under some unknown force, monsters would appear, and eventually the place would transform into something unrecognizable, as if a piece of another world had been grafted on. That was a Mutation-type. They were rarer than Closed or Open dungeons, but because they twisted human territory into something grotesque, they were considered the most dangerous of the lot.

Instant-type Dungeons were also called Instant Dungeons. You entered them through a specific trigger, and the dungeon itself wasn't located on Earth. In other words, an Instant-type trigger was a door to another world.

I still hadn't learned much about Special-type dungeons, so that was as far as my knowledge went. Regardless, Emerald Riverside was Closed-type — and Closed-type dungeons were the most numerous of them all.

Open-type and Mutation-type dungeons occupied human territory, so they were targeted for removal immediately. Unless there was a very special reason — say, the dungeon's ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠yield was extraordinarily high, or it was too dangerous to destroy — they were wiped out as soon as they appeared. Instant-type dungeons were hard to manage because of that trigger system. Triggers came in every flavor imaginable: stepping on a particular patch of ground, jumping in a certain place. An ordinary person could set one off by accident and get dragged in, so Instant-types were cleaned up quickly too, except for the highly profitable ones. Closed-type dungeons, however, were a different story.

Structurally, a Closed-type's entrance sat on human territory. Because there was a designated way in, you could control the monsters coming out just by managing that point. Multiple-entrance Closed-types were a headache, granted, but they were still easier to administer than the other kinds. In practice, the Hunter Association managed a large number of them.

A dungeon you could actually manage became a mine — an unlimited source of expensive monster byproducts. That was why the Association administered Closed-type dungeons directly and regulated their numbers.

Emerald Riverside, for example, was a dungeon the Association could erase in an hour if it felt like it. In the long run, though, that would be a loss. Destroy it, and you lose the continuous stream of byproducts it produces. If the Association didn't have that policy, we never would have had the chance to experience Emerald Riverside at all.

To destroy a dungeon, you smashed its core. Wiping a dungeon out that way was called a Total Clear. Dungeons being managed for byproduct harvesting, however, were not to be destroyed on a whim. Destroying a commercial dungeon was treated as a form of terrorism — a serious crime. A Dungeon Hunter who deliberately destroyed a commercial dungeon without special cause was classified as Demonic on the spot. That was another reason you booked a reservation before going in. If a commercial dungeon was destroyed, the reservation records were how they hunted down the culprit.

"Alright. Let's go in."

Emerald Riverside was a fairly popular dungeon. Besides us, quite a few other parties were visible. Most were five-man teams, with the occasional seven-man group. We were the only three-person party. Maintaining a moderate edge of tension, we walked toward the standing stone.

The moment we crossed it, something remarkable happened. The fog that had been hanging thick until now vanished completely. Proof that this place was a piece of another world. A party that had gone in ahead of us was walking on in the distance. It felt, somehow, like walking the Camino de Santiago.

"They said there are no monsters at the dungeon entrance, so let's pick up the pace."

Yeonji, taking the lead, suggested we move faster.

"Yeah."

We pressed forward against the flow of the river, keeping the pace at a brisk walk. Even knowing there were no enemies, a dungeon was a place where anything could happen. Sujin and I had learned that lesson the hard way back at the training center. So even knowing the path was clear, we didn't let our guard down as we advanced.

The broad road running along the riverbank grew narrower the farther we went. The parties ahead of us were moving faster, and they'd already passed out of sight. This wasn't a marathon, so letting them go first was fine. In a dungeon like this, running into another party face-to-face was rarely a good thing. You just ended up fighting over who had claim to the monsters.

"There's a stepping-stone bridge up ahead."

We'd been walking about ten minutes when the stepping stones came into view. I pulled out my smartphone. Thanks to the efforts of countless Dungeon Hunters, a complete map of Emerald Riverside already existed, and we'd downloaded it in advance. For the record, that wasn't free either. Fuck... the expenses added up more than you'd think.

Yeonji checked my phone as she spoke.

"Cross the stepping stones and you enter Zone 3. Keep going straight and you hit Zone 2."

"Zone 3's spawn list was White Raccoons, Goblins, and Gray Wolves, right?"

"Yeah. Gray Wolves sell well from bone to organs to hide to meat. They're basically this dungeon's main monster."

Sujin clapped her hands, delighted.

"I hope we run into a lot of them."

We'd come here to make money. That meant we moved toward whatever paid. Zone 3 was more dangerous than Zone 2, which also meant it was more profitable.

"We're going to Zone 3."

And so we headed for Zone 3, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠crossing a wide river maybe twenty meters across. The water was the murky color of a paint-rinse bucket at the end of art class. Even being generous, there wasn't a hint of emerald to be found.

"We're heading upstream."