Storming the Nol Den (3)
This was my first time seeing a real Dimension Gate with my own eyes.
The only (spontaneous) Dimension Gate I'd ever experienced had been hidden behind a building at an intersection, and everything after that I'd only encountered through videos or photographs. As for the original webtoon — that was a drawing, so it hardly counted.
And so, my honest assessment upon seeing one in the flesh was... it was deeply surreal. It kept giving me the nagging feeling of, is what I'm looking at actually real?
"Take a good, long look now. Later on, you'll get so used to them that just glancing at one will annoy you."
Instructor Shim Jae-gyeong had considered that, and given the first-years some sightseeing time.
Standing beside her, the second-, third-, fourth-, and fifth-years gazed down at us with kindly eyes and expressions that said, we were all just like that once, too.
"It kind of... feels like watching movie CG."
"Yeah, same here. It's a really weird feeling."
The Dimension Gate was, broadly speaking, a cone-shaped vortex. Viewed from the side, it was a fan; from behind, a circle of five-colored spirals converging toward a central point; from the front, a round mirror that reflected an entirely different world.
And like the surface of a lake, that mirror rippled and shimmered. The faint glimpse of a cave beyond gave us some idea of the otherworldly environment inside.
"Alright, alright. If you're done gawking, we're moving out."
At the instructor's gesture, the first-years lined up in their assigned formation.
The upperclassmen, by contrast, moved to enter right away — which they could do since, unlike us, they'd been holding their formation from the start.
In case anything bolted out to play, the soldiers guarding the police line near the gate stepped aside to clear the way.
"You might get motion sickness on your first crossing. Enter one at a time, after I go through. Watch your head."
The three assistant instructors and the upperclassmen entered first, followed by Instructor Shim Jae-gyeong. Once she passed through, her figure was smeared into something like 360p resolution by the rippling surface.
Kkada-kkada.
The instructor had sent her whole body through the Dimension Gate, but left one hand behind on our side. Between the blurred, smeared arm and the hand poking out, the gate wavered gently like the surface of a lake.
The crisp, unblurred hand waved us forward.
Gulp.
Except the cadet ahead of me showed absolutely no intention of stepping inside, so I went first. Thankfully, the entry order hadn't been assigned.
Splish.
The instant I touched the Dimension Gate, a peculiar sensation swept over my entire body, as if I'd dipped myself into lukewarm water.
"Ughhhh."
"That feels SO weird."
The other cadets filed in behind me. I stepped aside to make room for them and took stock of my surroundings.
The air really is different here.
The first thing I felt upon entering the Dimension Gate was that the air had changed. The gate had formed at the edge of a forest, but the interior was a cave, which made the discrepancy hit even harder. It wasn't stuffy or smoky, exactly, but it had that particular staleness of stagnant, settled air.
"Quiet. Nobody shouts inside a Dimension Gate."
The rule when entering a gate was to move as quickly and quietly as possible. If things went wrong, you could get massacred right at the entrance without ever mounting a proper resistance.
Of course, this was a gate of a grade where that would never happen, and we weren't the point team either, so it wasn't really an issue... but Instructor Shim Jae-gyeong wasn't about to let it slide.
The face that had been grinning away outside turned hard and lethal, and she glared at us.
"Secure your sightlines."
The entrance of the cave had been pre-lit for visitors. Deeper in, however, had not. A darkness without a single point of light welcomed us with a gloomy, oppressive weight.
Clack.
The upperclassmen at the front switched on their mounted tactical lights. They must have cranked the brightness up, because the path ahead lit up in an instant.
Keong, keong-keong!
What the lights revealed wasn't just the terrain.
Small, living creatures squirmed in the shadows born of the gravel floor and the uneven walls — the tunnel was straight, but that only meant the shadows clustered in predictable lines.
Small-to-medium-dog-sized hyenas that stood upright on two legs. Nols.
"Combat ready."
Before Instructor Shim Jae-gyeong had even finished speaking, the upperclassmen were already in their fighting stances.
Swords, spears, axes, flails. Weapons that looked like they belonged in a museum waited in the cadets' hands to be swung.
"Advance."
The point was taken by the fifth-years. The third- and fourth-years flanked and followed them, with the second-years filling out the rear.
Behind them came Instructor Shim Jae-gyeong and the assistant instructors. That was also the defensive line meant to protect the first-years.
Keong-keong!
Every step the cadets took made the lamplight sway and roll.
The light must have been blinding from the nols' perspective, because each time it shifted, they shrieked keong-keong and shrank back. Their eyes, reflecting the beams, gleamed brilliantly.
Ke-aek!
Then one brave nol lunged forward and roared, presumably to intimidate us. It had precisely the opposite effect.
One of the fifth-years burst forward and thrust out a spear. The stabbing motion partially blocked the tactical light on his chest, but since the weapon itself carried a light too, his field of view never fully collapsed.
Thwuck!
The spearhead plunged into the roaring mouth, tore through the soft flesh, and punched deeper still, into the skull beneath.
A brief, sickening crunch, and then the spear tip burst out through the back of its head. All of that took exactly one second.
Squelch!
The fifth-year withdrew the spear with an immaculately clean motion. The weapon that had skewered the nol's head came back trailing blood.
The light mounted thirty centimeters below the spearhead was lightly dabbed with blood, adding a reddish tint to its glow.
Ke-aek! Keong!!
The smell of blood — whether from human or animal — carried something that irritated the nose and stirred aggression. You could call it a trigger for the survival instinct.
Having watched one of their own die, the nols began rampaging in earnest.
Their vastly inferior builds didn't seem to register in brains smaller than a piece of sushi.
Keong! Keong-keong!!
Ke-aeng!
The nols came surging in a mass. It looked like the majority of the cave's population had answered the call, because their numbers leapt past a dozen.
Most of them charged upright on two legs; the ones wanting extra speed dropped to all fours. In an instant, the nols' front line slammed into the fifth-years.
"Hup!"
Squelch!
Given the sheer numbers, they could have been overwhelmed — but the upperclassmen responded with remarkable composure. With the fifth-years holding firm as an anchor, the ranks behind them kept their heads.
They held an exquisite distance — close enough to help in a heartbeat, far enough never to interfere with one another — and cut down every nol that entered their reach.
"2-1! Cover 3-4's left flank! Your side's wide open!"
"4-2! One's slipping through! What are you doing!"
Their handling wasn't perfect, though. Fourteen-odd cadets facing thirty-plus nols at once left little room for anything better.
If we had guns, this would be different.
With firearms, even a threefold disadvantage in numbers — or worse — would have been no problem. At this density, simply hosing the tunnel with sustained fire, no precision aiming required, would kill three or four nols a second.
That discomfort and disadvantage was exactly what made training close-combat personnel so difficult. The effort expended and the risk absorbed were wildly out of proportion to the results.
And then there was the larger problem that battlefields demanding melee combat tended to be the most dangerous places of all.
"Uh, uhh!!"
Right then, one of the nols they'd failed to deal with finally slipped through. The first-year standing directly in its path panicked and did nothing but raise his voice.
My hand closed around the issued flashlight on pure reflex.
Pap!
My right arm yanked the shrieking first-year backward even as it thrust the flashlight forward. My fingers were set to Throw mode on the beam.
The flashlight — sacrificing spread to concentrate everything into a focused core of light — planted itself directly in the nol's line of sight. Blasted by the enormous luminance, the nol's pupils contracted to slits.
A bonus, of course, was that it was now effectively stunned.
"Don't panic, you little punks!"
WHAM!
Behind me, Instructor Shim Jae-gyeong's flail came around. It would have intercepted the nol at that speed even if I hadn't reacted.
The iron head at the end of the flail crushed the nol so hard it became unrecognizable as anything that had once been alive.
"Gahk!"
"Hkk."
The cadets who'd held up fine watching the otherworldly creatures die — even watching footage of creatures being put down — covered their mouths at this one.
Slashing and stabbing were relatively clean. Things that burst were genuinely too much.
"You lot are safe. So WATCH properly! This is the bare minimum you'll have to handle!"
As she roared, Instructor Shim Jae-gyeong's eyes flicked to me for a moment, then locked forward again. Under normal circumstances I'd have brushed it off, but combined with her suddenly ferocious tone and bearing, it almost looked like she was a little angry at me.
Well... I can sort of understand where she's coming from.
Before becoming an instructor, Shim Jae-gyeong had been someone who ran real frontline operations.
I didn't know what injury had forced her into early retirement, but the Dimension Gate's influence on her couldn't have been zero.
Even if her injury had come from something else entirely, it wouldn't have mattered.
The more time someone spent in the field, the better they understood how dangerous it was. It made sense that her nerves would be wound tight. Either way, her sharpness existed for our sake.
More than anything, this environment is just terrible.
Nols were creatures even civilians could kill without much trouble, if they did it right. It was only their numbers that made them a problem; the nols themselves weren't much of a threat.
The environment, though, was another story. A place where you couldn't see a hand's width ahead without artificial light was profoundly hostile to human beings.
Lights aren't a cure-all. Take a bad hit and they can break, and depending on the angle, there are plenty of places they can't reach.
Worse, there were times when the light held by the person behind you blocked your own view. Your sightline, cut off by your own shadow.
And this place is still rated a Grade 2 environment.
Grade 2 was the label for environments that required some preparation but posed no serious hindrance.
A place where you were blind without equipment and hampered even with it had somehow received the assessment of, eh, this is nothing much.
If Grade 2 is this bad, what on earth are Grades 3 and 4 like? I heard that from Grade 7 up, environments are so hostile you can barely even enter.
From what I remembered, a zone made entirely of lava was classified Grade 7. Or places with no oxygen at all, for that matter.
"...Hm?"
Then my gaze caught on a particular corner.
It was a wall — but one oddly hollowed out, perfectly suited for hiding something.
Room enough not just for a dog-sized nol, but honestly for a person too, if they tried.
Well, there's no nol in there...
From Instructor Shim Jae-gyeong down to the assistant instructors, there wasn't a single weakling among them. These were not people sloppy enough to miss one nol hiding in a hole like that.
...Then why does it keep bothering me?
And yet my eyes kept drifting back to that spot, weirdly enough. A sense of déjà vu kept tapping at my shoulder.
"Focus!"
Instructor Shim Jae-gyeong snapped from up front. It wasn't aimed at me, but it stung all the same.
Right. Focus.
As if anything could actually be there.
So thinking, I took hold of the Twin Dragon Sword strapped to my back. My other hand smoothly released the sling's connectors.
Chok!
Immediately after, my arm thrust the tip of the Twin Dragon Sword into the hollow of the wall.
A sharp, ringing jolt traveled down the blade and into my body. The hard, distinctive resistance of struck stone.
It was just my imagination, then.
Waves of memory from the Hwasa third exam had washed over me, and I'd jabbed at it half in dread. But no — nothing there.
This is why they say you shouldn't watch too many manga and novels.
By then, the upperclassmen had just about finished clearing out the nols around them.
Most of the cave's population had swarmed us earlier, so there couldn't have been many left.
"Moving."
Taking that into account, the fifth-years picked up the pace a little. Even so, it was about one step per second — but in an environment like this, even that was a bold stride.
Clack.
I retrieved the Twin Dragon Sword and cinched the belt again. The cadets around me gave me odd looks for it, but since nobody said anything, it didn't matter.
"Left wall gap. One."
Thwuck!
"Right ceiling. One."
Thud!
The upperclassmen advanced methodically, mopping up the nol stragglers one by one with thorough sweeps. Truly the polish of veterans.
"Hey. Maybe you should pause before you pass that, or go around."
"Huh?"
"You'll get splattered with blood, standing there."
They'd missed one — a nol clinging to a corner of the ceiling.
After a moment's debate over whether to speak up, I decided to quietly warn the cadets nearby.
As one or two cadets stopped in puzzlement, Instructor Shim Jae-gyeong swung her flail.
"You bastards lost your minds, didn't you! You MISSED one!!"
With the roar, the creature's head burst like a watermelon, spraying blood and gore in every direction.
"Aaaaagh!"
"Hgak!"
The cadets I'd warned dodged the downpour of wreckage without a scratch.
The ones who'd ignored me and kept walking were another matter. Those poor souls were screaming.
It had been pure luck on my part, but the cadet who'd heeded my warning gaped at the carnage, mouth opening and closing.
"Th-thank you..."
"Don't mention it."
It really was nothing, so I answered with a shrug.
"And the upperclassmen couldn't even spot the first-year hiding in the BACK?! Fine for the second-years, but anyone third-year and up, get on your knees! You call yourselves Hwateuksa cadets after that?!"
...Then again, what had been nothing to me had apparently become something to the upperclassmen. I hadn't imagined the instructor would actually hear me.
I prayed this wouldn't turn into the upperclassmen holding a grudge against me. Soon enough, the end of the cave came into view.
"...So that's the Dimension Core."
"Weird-looking thing."
At the cave's end, the Dimension Core that formed and sustained this gate was waiting for us.
Its appearance, though, was far more mundane than the gate's. For one thing, it looked like something a person could plausibly build by hand.
"Keep at least two meters back. Don't even think about touching it."
Broadly speaking, it was a sphere a meter in diameter. The surface looked smooth, and its color shifted from moment to moment. It emitted light on its own, but the brightness was worse than a nightlight — useless even as a light source.
"Um, Instructor."
"What."
"How hard is a Dimension Core, exactly?"
At one cadet's question, Instructor Shim Jae-gyeong — her face still sharp, though considerably softened from its peak ferocity — stroked her chin. With the nols fully cleared out, she seemed to have relaxed a little.
"It's, uh, how do I put this. You know candy apples? Apples with a hardened sugar shell? It's about like that."
"...Sir?"
"It's hard, but not, like, that hard."
A genuinely unexpected analogy, but I had a feel for what she meant.
Roughly: hard to break by hand, but smash it with a hammer and it cracks.
"So it's more fragile than I expected."
"That's about right. But the feeling of it is worse than that."
"...?"
"There's something like a barrier around the Dimension Core that neutralizes impacts. That's why you have to get right up next to it before you can actually break the thing."
Instructor Shim Jae-gyeong stepped briefly out of the protective formation. Then she set a canteen down on the rock that cradled the core like a nest.
"Watch closely."
She flung the canteen's cap at the canteen. With a sharp tik, the cap bounced off. The canteen it had struck didn't so much as wobble.
"And now, from over here."
She placed the canteen again, some distance from the core, and threw the cap. Judging by the size and speed of the motion, the force was almost identical.
CLANG!
The result, however, was completely different. The canteen that took the hit toppled over backward.
"Because of this fucked-up property, the only way to deal with a Dimension Core is to find it and smash it yourself."
"Whoa..."
"It's also why we don't just fire missiles or nukes or other high-yield ordnance into the gate to solve things. There is a limit to the energy a core can neutralize — but even that limit only holds as long as the environment itself holds up."
For cave-type structures like this one, people said the cave acted as a bunker — that even if it collapsed, you'd only get buried, and falling rocks wouldn't crack the core.
The explanation flowed on. Maybe because we were hearing it on-site, it sank straight into my brain.
"In any case, that's it for today's field exercise! We're heading back."
"Yes, ma'am!"
Unless we were here to break the Dimension Core, there was nothing left to do in this otherworld. At the instructor's order, the cadets retraced their path back out.
With the enemies gone, the formation was considerably less claustrophobic than before.
"Hey, Instructor."
"Hmm?"
I took advantage of that looseness to ask what had been nagging at me since earlier. Her face, buried in shadow, shifted faintly.
"For, um, educational preservation purposes — is it really okay to kill all the nols?"
In a game, you could wipe out every monster in a dungeon and they'd just respawn, but reality didn't work that way. Here, once you killed them all, they were simply all dead. The otherworld inside the gate would just be empty.
"Oh, that. It's fine — you just restock the nols. They show up at gates all the time, and we've already captured plenty of individuals."
"Ahh."
The solution, it turned out, was simpler than I'd thought.
I felt a satisfying click as the question finally resolved itself.
"...?"
"Is something the matter?"
"No, it's just... something smells like urine..."
"Isn't that the nol smell?"
"Is it?"
What happened after that, well. On the way out, the instructor did pause for a moment and tilt her head — but that was all.
We returned to the academy without a single one of us having shed so much as a drop of our own blood.