Chapter 17
Flash!
As the brilliant spray of light slowly faded, I looked around.
The Sixth Floor was exactly what I’d heard it would be.
I was standing in the middle of a huge room, big enough to comfortably hold several dozen people. Straight ahead was a narrow corridor barely wide enough for two goblins to squeeze through side by side, and behind me were the return portal and a firmly shut door. Above that door was an hourglass.
Sand began to trickle down through it.
After about an hour, once the sand had run out, the door in the back would open and we’d be able to take the escape portal. Until then, the clear condition for this floor was simple: hold the line against the goblins pouring out from the front.
I looked at Hyeji and gave her instructions.
“For now, please stay safely in the back.”
“Okay.”
Thump-thump.
Wearing her baggy protective gear, Hyeji padded toward the rear and plopped herself down with a flop. Then she started pulling out her equipment in earnest.
Clank. Clank. Clank.
Out of her bag came some random metal plates and wheel parts.
Na Hyeji assembled them in a blink and, with practiced hands, turned them into a folding cart.
Click! Click!
On top of that, another piece of equipment appeared from inside her bag.
A large, sturdy pair of tongs.
Probably brought along to make it easier to pick loot out of corpses.
I nodded to myself.
The gas mask and protective suit were ridiculous, sure... but the folding cart and tongs actually look useful.
She’d clearly had some thought behind it after all. She wasn’t just wrapping herself up like a human mummy for the hell of it.
She’d brought a cart and tongs because she wanted to be efficient, too.
Were the gas mask and protective suit simply evidence that she was a little too prepared?
...No. No matter how I looked at it, she was definitely a trash-tier setup.
A protective suit and a gas mask? Seriously?
If she’d done military service, she’d know exactly how absurd that loadout was.
Ah. Right. Hyeji’s a woman, so she didn’t serve.
Anyway.
“They’ll be coming soon.”
I turned my gaze back toward the front.
And there it was.
Keruk. Keruk!
At the mouth of the long corridor, a goblin waddled out, dragging itself forward.
It gripped a dagger in its hand and shuffled up to the entrance, then lunged at me.
“Keeaaak!”
Tap, tap, tap!
The goblin charged in with quick little steps, and I aimed my staff and fired.
It was Air Bullet.
Pop!
The goblin died with a clean hole punched straight through the center of its forehead.
Flop. Clang!
As it died, the dagger it dropped rang out with a metallic clatter.
“What the heck!”
Na Hyeji, who’d been watching, let out a sharp cry.
Apparently she’d been annoyed enough to take off her gas mask, because there she was, staring at me with a betrayed look in her eyes.
“You could kill them that cleanly?!”
“Well... yeah?”
“Then why did you do that yesterday? Why did you turn them all into bloody pulp?”
“Because they were in groups. It’s easier and faster to blast a big one once than to keep firing little ones over and over.”
“Still, if possible, killing them cleanly makes loot recovery easier and...”
“The important thing is stopping them right away. Loot recovery is secondary.”
Besides, I wasn’t the one collecting loot anyway.
I already had an auto-loot pet, so why the hell would I care about making item collection harder for myself?
No clue. Seriously.
“Then... if you can, please kill them like that from now on. It makes loot gathering easier and better, doesn’t it? Please, I’m begging you...”
“I’ll try.”
Hyeji said that with a desperate look on her face.
But honestly, I had no intention of listening.
Today I was using Wind Cutter.
Hurry up and come already, you goblin bastards. Time to taste the glory of Wind Cutter.
And so I stood there and mechanically butchered goblins as they came.
Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop!
Every time one poked its head out of the corridor entrance, it got its forehead pierced and died.
Since the floor had only just started, goblins were still appearing at about one per minute.
I’d heard that for the first ten minutes, their appearance rate was pretty low like this.
But as time passed, the frequency would keep climbing.
By around the twenty-minute mark, it would be more like ten goblins per minute.
And that wasn’t all.
Every few minutes, a swarm of dozens would rush in all at once.
My eyes gleamed.
Now!
About thirty goblins were flooding down the narrow passage in a noisy mass.
It was a mixed pack of ordinary goblins, goblin archers, and a few goblin warriors.
They were more than worthy sacrifices for my Wind Cutter.
I leveled my staff and unleashed it.
“Cut them in half and die.”
Slash――!
The razor-sharp blade of compressed air cut through the void, gliding forward in a single elegant sweep.
It scythed through the goblin horde charging down the narrow corridor, and then—
Shrrk――.
The goblins collapsed all at once.
All thirty-odd of them split cleanly into upper and lower halves, spilling their guts everywhere as they toppled over.
“Kerururuk?!”
“Kyaak! Keek...?”
“Krrr...?”
Cut in half and lying on the ground, they seemed utterly unable to understand what had just happened.
One after another, the goblins let out confused dying cries before going still.
A quiet, lethal strike.
Wind Cutter was so silent, so razor-sharp.
My hand trembled around the staff.
“Haaah...!”
This feels insanely good!
Blasting things apart with Fireball was great too, all loud and explosive, but...
There was a different kind of appeal in reaping them down with Wind Cutter, like harvesting grain.
Quiet, clean, shhk.
What a refined, elegant spell!
But Hyeji seemed to see it differently.
“Eek! What was that?!”
“Wind Cutter. Pretty cool, right? It just whooshes out and goes swish! Kyaa—feels like I’ve become a sword master.”
“That makes blood and organs spray everywhere! No way! It’ll make picking up loot a nightmare!!!”
“That’s not my problem.”
“Yiiiik!!!”
Hyeji started whining again as she dug through the pile of corpses for loot.
I ignored her.
If she hated it so much, she could’ve become a mage instead of a porter.
Should’ve picked her job properly from the start.
Still, this is kind of underwhelming.
I clicked my tongue.
It was nice feeling the rush of Wind Cutter, but...
The goblins were coming out too slowly.
Dozens every few minutes was all they had?
It’d be nice if hundreds swarmed in at once.
For other hunters, this level of difficulty would already mean scrambling to form a formation, coordinate teamwork, and pull off all sorts of desperate bullshit just to hold out.
But for me, it was all getting erased with a single tap of Wind Cutter, so it felt way too relaxed.
Which made me think, all of a sudden:
Should I just walk into the corridor and kill them all there?
If the goblins were coming out too slowly, wouldn’t it be simpler to go kill them myself?
Oh, that was a great idea.
I should try it right away.
Step, step.
I slowly started walking into the corridor.
Na Hyeji asked nervously, “Um... Jiho? Why are you going into the corridor?”
“Waiting here is too frustrating, so I’m going inside and killing them all.”
“No, just stay here! That’s dangerous!”
“Not dangerous at all.”
If one tap of Wind Cutter could erase hundreds of goblins, what exactly was supposed to be scary?
While I was at it, I assigned Hyeji another task.
“I’m going in and killing every goblin I run into, so please follow behind me with the cart and pick up the loot.”
“...You want me to go into the corridor too?”
“Yes.”
“...”
She didn’t need to sit here twiddling her thumbs for the next forty minutes, did she?
She had work to do, too.
At my words, Na Hyeji’s face drained darkly.
* * *
Hyeji and I began moving down the corridor.
“Ugh... disgusting.”
She put her gas mask back on.
Holding the tongs, she followed behind me, scooping loot into the cart as I led the way forward.
And I marched ahead, step by step.
Kerururuk! Keek!
The moment we advanced a little, we ran into a goblin pack.
Again, Wind Cutter.
Slash――!
The goblins’ upper and lower halves spilled out in a heap.
I trudged onward, stepping on fragments of their entrails.
The farther we went, the more goblin groups we found.
Kieeeeeek!
Kyaak!
Kerururuk! Keruk!
They came in waves, from as few as thirty to as many as sixty at a time.
Every time, I answered with a single Wind Cutter.
Slash――!
Swish――!
Shrrk――!
Thirty goblins, fifty goblins, a hundred goblins—it didn’t matter.
In a corridor this narrow, Wind Cutter was invincible.
As long as they came in a line, the blade of wind would move forward and slice through every body it met.
Thud.
Flump. Flop.
Upper halves spilled from the goblin mob.
A moment later, their lower halves tilted over weakly.
Guts poured out and scattered everywhere...
I twisted my face into a grimace.
“Ugh. Wind Cutter feels amazing, but... yeah, the corpses are absolutely disgusting.”
Because the corridor was so narrow, dozens of goblins had been split in half and piled up all over the place...
The scene was unbelievably brutal.
The floor was soaked in blood to the point that it had practically pooled, sloshing underfoot.
And because the organs had been sliced so cleanly, the cross-sections were grotesquely exposed.
In a way, it was even nastier than corpses blown apart by Fireball.
On top of that, there was barely any room to step, so I basically had to walk over the bodies.
I glanced back.
“Uuugh...!”
Behind me, Hyeji was trembling hard as she rummaged through the guts with her tongs.
I had no choice but to revise my opinion of her.
She’s following along better than I expected. Is it because she has the gas mask and the protective gear? Maybe those absurd things were actually a good buy.
There was so much blood in the narrow corridor that the smell was practically enough to drive a person insane.
Even I had a pounding head and a bitter taste rising in my throat, so the old Hyeji definitely wouldn’t have been able to handle it.
I guessed that, thanks to the mask and suit, she was at least managing not to puke.
In the end, those ridiculous-looking accessories were getting used pretty well.
Maybe she wasn’t trash-tier. Maybe she just had good self-awareness...
Wasn’t there a saying about that?
People who were good at studying all had great self-awareness—what was it, metacognition or whatever.
They set up study plans and carried them out while understanding their own level accurately, which made them more efficient.
And because they could clearly tell what they knew and didn’t know, they made fewer mistakes.
Na Hyeji was a top graduate from Korea University.
As a former study monster, maybe the odds were high that her self-awareness was actually really good.
So if that was the case, she’d probably bought this huge pile of gear because, in her own judgment, porter work would be impossible without it, and she’d splashed out a hundred million won on equipment.
But even so...
“Uuu... Jiho, help me out. This goblin greatsword is buried too deep. I can’t pull it out with the tongs...”
“Use your hands. You’re wearing gloves.”
“Even with gloves, I can still feel it a bit...!”
“Do you know those squishy toys called slime? The liquid monster ones. I see them sometimes while scrolling through MuTube Shorts. Just imagine you’re touching one of those instead of goblin organs.”
“Slime, my ass... blegh! F-fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”
She still looked like total trash as a porter, though.
Still, she was gritting her teeth and forcing herself to keep up somehow.
Well, if she kept going up the tower with me, she’d probably improve a little.
Someday, she’d get used to corpses too.
* * *
I kept moving forward.
Whenever goblins appeared, I cleaned them up with a slash of Wind Cutter, and for a long while, Na Hyeji trailed behind me, whining while collecting loot.
About twenty minutes passed like that.
Then I stopped.
“Why, why did you stop? More goblins?”
“No.”
“Then what is it?”
“The path’s blocked.”
“...?”
That was right.
After walking for twenty minutes, we’d reached a dead end.
All that lay before me was a wall of earth.
Na Hyeji cried out in a delighted voice.
“Then that means we killed all the goblins, right? Yay! Let’s go back quickly! I want to go home and wash up right now.”
“...”
We’d come all the way to the end of the goblin corridor, only to hit a dead end.
It was enough to make me think we’d killed every goblin on the Sixth Floor.
But something felt off.
I definitely heard there were four hundred goblins total on the Sixth Floor. And it hasn’t even been an hour yet.
About forty minutes had passed since we entered the tower.
By now, I’d killed around three hundred goblins.
That meant there should still be about twenty minutes left and roughly a hundred enemies still remaining.
But even though we’d reached the end of the corridor, the hundred enemies that were supposed to still be around were nowhere to be seen.
And there were still twenty minutes left on the clock.
Where the hell were the remaining hundred goblins coming from?
As I stared at the wall in confusion, it happened.
Hummm... hummmmmmm...
Suddenly, the Blue Dots before my eyes began to ripple across the earth wall.
“What the hell?”
Blue Dots were suddenly forming a pattern on a dead-end wall like this.
Was there some kind of hidden spell here?
I examined the arrangement closely.
A big square with four smaller squares inside it. And inside each of those, four even smaller squares...
The pattern repeated in squares.
Maybe this was proof that I’d built up enough experience as a mage by now.
The moment I saw that repeating square pattern, I instinctively understood what kind of magic it was.
This is... earth. Some kind of spell that handles soil and stone.
Looks like an opportunity to learn a new spell had finally shown up.