110. Finals Are... Out of Service (12)
110. Finals Are... Out of Service (12)
There was no time.
I listened to the footsteps that now seemed almost upon us and thought hard.
Was running an option?
Where could we go?
This room had no other door, and tunneling through the walls carried far too much risk. What if the next room was packed with more monstrosities? What if I broke through the floor and found nothing but traps on the level below?
Shoveling was out. Besides, there wasn't enough time.
Was there a good way?
I looked around the room. My heart hammered hard enough to distract me, but I struggled to remain calm and drove my mind at full speed in search of a solution.
Shoveling was out, as I'd already concluded.
Stand and fight? How many of them were there? Listening to that festival of footsteps, there had to be at least twice our number clustered out there. The count alone wasn't something we could quietly pick off one by one, and even if we somehow wiped them all out, that wouldn't be the end of it. There was a high chance reinforcements would come. And by then we'd be exhausted—physically and magically—from the fight.
If we had Reni with us, maybe, but expecting me to cut down an army with four students and one Thief Cat at my side was like being told to clear a lobby full of gun-toting enemies in an FPS with nothing but a knife. Outnumbered and outgunned, fighting would be nothing short of suicide.
So, somehow, I had to avoid a fight here.
No good ideas... Ah!
"Laperinne, cast a silence spell over the entire room."
"What?"
"Now! And everyone line up against that wall!"
Every sudden idea was a gamble, but there was no time to weigh each risk in an emergency. I swept my gaze across the now-silent room, pressed myself against the wall, and activated a Skill.
"..."
The wall rose as my voice failed to emerge, shaped exactly like the one we were leaning against. It was much thinner, so a single touch would expose us, but who would go around knocking on every wall while searching for people? As though by prior agreement, we held our breath and mouthed our thoughts to one another.
'Drop the spell.'
The moment Laperinne nodded, sound returned. We held our breath as the door creaked open and footsteps entered the room.
We couldn't be caught.
If we were caught...
Tap.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap...
An endless procession of footsteps. A long time seemed to have passed, yet they never stopped. They kept growing closer, then fading away, then drawing near again, as if the creatures were pacing in circles along the walls.
Still, we had to endure.
Patience was the only way out of this situation.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap...
-------------
"A silence spell."
A nod.
Every sound inside the room vanished again. I placed a hand against the wall and activated a Skill.
"Dismantle."
The wall sank downward and revealed the empty room beyond.
"I-I thought we had been caught..."
As though her legs had given out, Shuri sighed in relief and sank to the floor. I looked over the others. They all seemed mentally exhausted after remaining tense for so long. But we had no time to rest. Even a brief pause would lower our chances of making it back alive.
"Wait here for a moment. If by some chance I get caught, I'll draw as much attention as I can, so be ready to escape through the tunnel I dug—"
"Wait. What happens to you in that case?"
"I'll manage. Don't worry about me."
I had spent ten years living among bastards far worse than these. There was no way I'd die here. Ignoring their worried looks, I approached the door.
I quietly grasped the door handle and turned it. The scrape of the hinges grated on my ears. I slowly stuck my head out and listened. Faint footsteps. At least the sound seemed far away.
Why had they shown up here as a whole group?
Where had those bastards gone?
Were they maybe inside the rooms?
I gestured for the party to remain in the room, stepped into the corridor, and pressed my ear to another door. Most of the rooms were silent. One, two, three, four... I cracked open each door that showed no sign of anyone and checked inside. Their layouts were mostly the same, and each contained a corpse.
The bodies lay in different postures and positions, and some wore armor as though they had been adventurers.
Could they have been people who had fallen into this rift? I thought I'd seen similar armor in the market.
At least I knew no one else was here.
Where had all of them gone?
Had they gone to the opposite hallway?
At the very least, this hallway seemed to hold no further information. I thought for a moment, then one plan came to mind, and I returned to the room where the party was waiting.
The group was huddled in the corner, taking a break.
"Everyone, listen. I have a decent idea, and I'm going to try it. I need your cooperation."
"Cooperation? Digging a tunnel?"
"No."
Dig into the ground without knowing what was below us? If we were unlucky, we might fall through to the floor beneath us and end up rubbing bodies with those creatures.
"What should we help with?"
"Stay here and conserve your strength. Drink some water if you can."
"Huh?"
"I'm going to seal this room. I don't know how intelligent those things are, but if I conceal it perfectly, they should not be able to enter. As for me... I'll check the opposite hallway and come back."
"That's far too dangerous!"
"No, this is the safest plan."
"But if you get caught, isn't it all over?"
I looked at Lewis after his protest. He was a pretty-faced bastard who flaunted his romance even in a situation like this, yet he was kind enough to worry sincerely about me. I grinned as I answered him.
"Don't worry. I've got my methods."
The idea had come to me suddenly, but it seemed well worth trying.
"Then rest well."
I waved dismissively, brushed off the party's worried looks, opened the door, and stepped into the hallway before using a Skill.
"Craft."
The spot where the door had been was concealed by a wall. To the naked eye, no one would notice that a room had ever existed there. But with the limited oxygen supply, moving quickly was important.
I hoped it would work as I had planned.
I slipped out of the hallway and pressed myself back against the inner wall of the lobby. The chanting had stopped. So the sounds earlier really had come from the bastards who had been praying in the center. I had no idea what their objective was, but they seemed to be making patrols of some kind.
Where had the corpse been...? There it was.
I approached the still-abandoned body and stripped off its clothes. Then I grabbed the head that had been lying around and removed its hood.
The nearly naked corpse was grotesque. Its body looked like it had been stitched together from multiple corpses, with patches everywhere. The skin colors on its limbs were different, and the sizes didn't match either—parts were caved in, and in some spots along the seams the bone was exposed.
What the hell kind of monster had they made?
Carefully, I turned the body over and checked its back.
[@&*!(!]
...I couldn't read it, but I had a rough idea what it meant.
I used a Skill to dig out the floor beside the corpse and rolled it in. I'd no desire to keep subjecting myself to that eyesore. When I used the Skill again to restore the floor, the body vanished without a trace.
After disposing of the corpse, I quietly mended the torn clothing. It was still covered in blood, but I now had something wearable in my hands. I promptly pulled it over my own clothes.
With half my face covered by a hood soaked in the corpse's blood, I made a fairly convincing cultist.
"Let us see whether they catch me."
Tap.
Tap.
Footsteps approached. I copied the posture of the figures emerging from the opposite corridor and quietly fell in directly behind them. Fortunately, my gamble appeared to have worked.
They didn't suspect me.
For a while, I followed them as they circled both hallways. Walking around while pretending to be a heretic almost made me feel as though I'd befriended those monstrosities. I absolutely refused to become one of the bastards who worshipped a statue shaped like a mass of tentacles, though.
How long were they going to keep circling? It wasn't as though they were exercising. I'd already followed them through the same cycle three times: every room in the hallway, the lobby, every room in the other hallway, then the lobby again. Had sealing the room caused some kind of bug? I thought I'd seen the one in front tilt its head at the sealed doorway and the statue.
Still, I had learned one thing for certain.
At least these were the only creatures on this floor.
So my job was obvious.
I pulled the shovel from beneath my baggy robes and extended it to its full length. At the sound, the monsters all turned in unison and stared at me at the very back of the group.
"Showtime, you sons of bitches."
The Holy Shovel, brimming with rage, traced a beautiful arc through the air.
--------------------------
"Yohan? We heard a commotion outside. Those monsters..."
"I split all their heads open. We are safe."
"What?"
"I said I split all of them."
I'd only avoided touching them because I was worried about reinforcements. Without reinforcements, they were nothing but trash mobs. Using my Skills, I'd smashed them all to pieces before they even had time to scream, so now the first floor was practically a safe zone.
While wiping them out, I'd also found the way down to the second floor.
As it turned out, the dagger from the first creature I'd killed seemed to be one of the keys to the stairs leading down to the second floor. These things moved only according to set patterns, and like broken machines, they'd gone haywire.
It seemed they were normally supposed to repeat a cycle of descending to and returning from the second floor. With one dagger missing, however, the cycle had broken and left them glitched.
For some reason, dungeons always operated according to rules suspiciously close to a game's. Why that applied only to dungeons remained unclear.
Was that because this world really was a game after all?
"I found the way down to the second floor, so we're moving out immediately."
"Huh?"
There was no time to explain every little detail, so I promptly flung the door wide open and beckoned the party out. Fortunately, they followed my order and filed into the hallway.
"Follow me."
I led the party to the statue. Its tentacles had been carved with needless realism. I approached the smaller statue beside it, which depicted a suffering human, and inserted the dagger into a slot near its heart.
At that, the floor in front of the statue slid underneath its base, and a staircase began to reveal itself.
"Laperinne. Use a detection spell."
"Yes!"
While watching Laperinne prepare her spell, I ordered Shuri to cast a light spell. Light illuminated the stairs, followed by the detection spell. The bewildered look on Laperinne's face convinced me that something was down there.
"I think there's something farther inside. A-an enormous concentration of life signs... dozens? Hundreds? But they seem to be gathered into a single mass..."
Laperinne looked at me with a confused expression—eyes searching for an answer. But I didn't have any answers either. The best I could do was draw one conclusion based on the information I had so far.
Dungeons had bosses.
The things roaming the temple had a grotesque appearance, as if they'd been pieced together by cutting and stitching body parts from different people.
The corpses in the rooms seemed to belong to outsiders. Why had they left the bodies lying around? Why had masses of tentacles burst from them?
And lastly, those bastards had been going around the rooms as if searching for something.
The thing below was probably...
"Listen carefully. There's a high chance a boss is down there."
"A... boss, you say?"
"Yes. So... Sif, you stay here. The rest of us will head down and deal with the boss."
"Wait, but if more monsters burst out while you're gone, isn't that dangerous?"
"Craft."
Four walls. A roof. A sturdy door.
"Wait inside there."
"Uh... got it."
At my words, Sif nodded with a dazed expression.
"...Sorry. Making you all go through this much trouble because of me."
Perhaps it was because of her poor condition, but Viola's voice sounded weaker than before. Lewis's party reacted in alarm and immediately began reassuring her.
"No, Viola! How could you say that..."
"Exactly! You don't need to worry, Viola! I'll just kaboom them all away with my magic!"
Perhaps she was nearing her limit. I met Viola's eyes and spoke.
"Just think about what you will eat when we get back. This will be over soon."
I stepped onto the first stair.