The Evil God of Darkness (7)
The moment I stepped into the dungeon, what greeted my eyes was the exact scene of the Burrow Estate I'd seen just moments before.
Or to put it more precisely, you might call it a mansion where time had simply stopped mid-motion.
Maids frozen mid-gossip, their polishing cloths stilled against the floor.
The head maid, locked in place by the very scowl she'd been directing at them.
The pendulum of a grandfather clock, swinging one last beat before hanging in the air alongside the second hand.
A valet striding briskly down the corridor. A cook doomed to hoist his heavy load for all eternity.
As I stood there gazing at a scene like someone had wandered into a photograph, I drew a deep breath and channeled Divinity into Ankir, spreading it out around me.
To sweep away the darkness.
But the scenery around me didn't budge an inch.
...Ah. So that's what this is?
You little bastard. You went and prepared the most dog-shit gimmick of them all.
"That's unusually cautious of you."
'I happen to know nothing about this place.'
A dungeon created by Tariki, existing only in this world he built for me alone. A gift prepared by that gloomy piece-of-shit lolicon, stuffed to the brim with his own personal idea of romance. The instant I let my guard down for even a heartbeat, my head would leave my shoulders, no doubt about it.
Being forced to one-coin clear a dungeon on my very first attempt. If a game had pulled a mechanic like this, I'd have asked the devs whether they were born with heads or not.
I was forcing a laugh to calm my nerves when Halbae suddenly shouted in alarm.
"You don't know?! What do you mean you don't know?!"
'Yep. I don't know a single thing about it?'
"...You must be joking."
'I swear on the Chief God's name, I have no idea what's in this dungeon.'
I figured swearing to that pervert Chief God wouldn't exactly inspire confidence coming from a blasphemer like me, but fortunately Halbae took my words at face value.
"What manner of madness is this?! You set foot in a place built by someone in poor condition whose sole purpose is to kill you?!"
'This much is fine.'
"Fine? What in the world is fine about—"
'What could that gloomy moron Tariki possibly do anyway?'
While giving Halbae a breezy answer, I sharpened every sense I had.
And then, from within the frozen stillness of the Burrow Estate, a faint sound reached me.
Armor clattering and rattling — so that'd be death knights, then.
Two of them.
And their armament... hearing the whistle of something slicing through air, I'd guess swords?
I moved my shield on instinct alone — but Iron Wall told me I needed to block somewhere else entirely.
Oh. Not there, huh?
Ting!
My defense had been off-balance, and my center wavered slightly with the impact.
Judging that damage would keep stacking up if I continued the fight like this, I detonated Divinity across my shield's surface to freeze the death knights in place and fell well back.
The Divinity drain stung a little, but it beat letting the strain accumulate in my body.
"What is happening?!"
'Grandpa. You can't hear that?'
"Hear what?! This place is silent!"
Dammit. So Ankir's protection doesn't extend as far as Halbae.
'Do you know what sensory disruption is? Something you run into when fighting against Tariki.'
"...You're telling me that shroud blankets this entire dungeon?!"
Sensory Disruption.
A pattern you'd encounter facing the revived Tariki in the boss fight of his seal. A gimmick that strips away all five of your senses through the power of Tariki himself.
In the base game it was implemented by staining the screen pitch black, killing all sound, and painting over your HP bar and status window in pure darkness. It was the mechanic that showcased just how formidable and infuriating Tariki was as an opponent — though from the player's side, it just felt like learn it or die.
Not that there was no counter, of course. Bring an item capable of sweeping away darkness, something like Ankir, and you could recover your hearing.
The other four senses? Those were gone for good. Your only path through the pattern was pure sound-play — navigating by audio alone until you could bring Tariki down.
Reading about it was already miserable, and playing it made the curses pour out on their own — and yet the gimmick's reviews weren't actually that bad. It was a one-and-done pattern to begin with, and once you properly memorized the strategy, clearing it was simple enough.
Among the veterans, plenty of people even grumbled that this was an upper-tier Evil God pattern and should have been harder than it was.
The reason this mechanic ended up earning the burning hatred of the community — the people hopelessly obsessed with Soul Academy, to be precise — came almost half a year after the base game's release.
That was when some trash-tier modder discovered you could inject the full sensory disruption gimmick into every room of Tariki's dungeon.
Truly, that absolute scumbag was a diligent, hardworking scumbag. He even went to the trouble of writing up a whole manual explaining the injection method and its applications, for the benefit of all the other degenerates.
And thanks to him, I lost count of how many sensory-disruption dungeons I had to slog through afterward.
Terrifying even to look back on. So many runs died the instant a single mistake slipped out that I practically lived with profanity glued to my lips.
The whistle of splitting air came again, and I raised my shield.
This time I trusted none of my own senses, relying solely on Iron Wall's cry.
I can make mistakes. Iron Wall only ever shows me the optimal movement.
Because I was moving as though chasing Iron Wall's teachings, countering the enemy's attacks was an impossible dream — but I refused to grow impatient.
One of these knights had so kindly demonstrated for me exactly what happens when impatience drives you to gamble.
Block. Block. And block once more.
After enough repetitions of that cycle, my own senses slowly began to resemble Iron Wall's voice.
'Diagonal, from upper right.'
Straight from the upper ri— oh. So that's what a diagonal sounds like.
Got it. Correcting.
Little by little.
'A wide horizontal slash.'
Wide, horizontal. That one was exact.
'Followed by another knight's charge from the left.'
I called the attack from the left, though I missed it being a charge.
No wonder the sound had been so heavy.
The gap between one judgment and the next narrowed, and narrowed.
'Attacks from both sides together.'
Both sides, together.
At some point, the moment arrived when the two judgments matched perfectly.
It was a strange sensation.
The only sense I had left to me was sound. All that met my eyes was the frozen photograph of the Burrow household — and yet, I could see the shape of the knight standing before me, drawn in my mind as clearly as if he stood in daylight.
Well then. Time to start hitting back.
Most of my five senses were wrecked — but the enemy still had all five of theirs, intact and working.
Which means they could hear my voice. And if they can hear my voice, I can provoke them.
"You pathetic degenerate bone-boys♡ What are you planning, ganging up on a girl who can't even see?♡ No dicks and yet so devoted to your desires — I just don't get it~♡ Frustrated in life, were we?♡ Ahh, I see, I see — a couple of losers who never once held a woman's hand?♡ Right?♡"
Before I'd even finished the sentence, I heard swords raised high beside my ears.
From above, coming down.
'Top to bottom.'
A moron's attack, all power and no thought behind it.
'A heavy strike.'
Dodge, then punish the opening — and shatter the skull.
'Dodging is safer than blocking.'
KRAK!
The sound of a skull bursting apart bored into my eardrums like a drill.
Shame I couldn't feel a thing in the hand swinging the mace. The best part of swinging one is that heavy, satisfying weight transferred into your palm, after all.
Dealing with the remaining death knight wasn't difficult. Now that I'd recovered my senses, the death knights were nothing but toys that couldn't measure up to Frey — let alone Arthur.
Once both of them were dealt with, the scenery at the estate's entrance shifted.
The frozen tableau of the Burrow household vanished, replaced by the wreckage of the battle that had just torn through it.
And soon after, when my five senses returned, the first thing that reached me was the smell of blood.
Too thick to ignore — that reek stabbed straight into my nose.
"Girl! Do not look down! You must not lower your head, you must—"
Halbae shouted in a panic at whatever he had seen — but my chin was already tilting downward.
Ah. So that's why he told me not to look.
There were knights there.
Not white bones. Not death knights trailing rotted flesh.
Humans.
Skulls caved in, dead before their eyes could even close. Faces laid flat against the floor, leaving pools of blood where their last words should have been.
The moment I faced them, something surged up from inside me.
I tried to force it down, and failed.
My body had already left my will behind.
Several heaves later, when I finally lifted my head with my throat burning, I met the lifeless eyes of the dead yet again.
Staring at nothing, at no place at all.
"Lucyyyyy!"
The voice flooding my skull startled me into looking up.
"Lucy! Snap out of it!"
'...I'm out of it.'
"Then raise your head and look at the ceiling! After that, feel nothing but the energy beneath your feet!"
'What are you even talking about?'
"No time for questions! Do as I say, now!"
Half my mind had already wandered off somewhere, so without grasping what he meant, I did as Halbae instructed and reached for the energy below me.
It was bizarre. My senses judged the knight corpses I'd just laid eyes upon to be monsters.
Not the faintest trace of humanity clung to them.
'...Fakes?'
"Yes. Fakes."
'But what I just saw—'
"Think, child. This is a dungeon that permits only a single human to enter. Do you truly believe another person could be standing in this place?"
Halbae was right. As long as the dungeon's restrictions held, anyone entering besides me was impossible.
Which meant the things lying beneath me right now — those things that looked so unmistakably human —
were fakes.
A surprise gift Tariki had prepared just for me.
...That gloomy little shit. He'd been aiming for this from the very beginning, hadn't he?
He never intended to subdue me with the dungeon's mechanics at all.
He'd assumed it would be cleared — and planned to gnaw away at my mind the whole way through.
"Do you understand? You did not kill a single person. You merely struck down monsters. And so—"
'I get it, Grandpa. I get it, so give me a second.'
What a joke.
So this was Tariki's idea of my clear route? Bury me under guilt and suffocate me to death with it?
Ha. What a gloomy little scumbag.
It's such a quintessentially evil-god move that praise just pours out on its own. Fine. I'll admit it — your little scheme was horrifyingly effective. If it weren't for Halbae, I'd still be staring at those corpses right now.
What irritated me even more was that even now, knowing full well this was all Tariki's handiwork, I was still terrified to lower my gaze — and that iron-blood stench still turned my stomach.
...KRAK!
Even after I'd blasted the skull off the thing impersonating human corpses, a hot red emotion kept simmering in my chest.
The joy of conquering a brand-new dungeon had died by dinnertime. All that remained was pure fury aimed at Tariki.
Closing my eyes and steadying my ragged breathing, I set my feet forward once more.
"Child. Are you all right?"
'No.'
Being honest here — not even a little.
Considering the way those two knights' faces had branded themselves onto my eyelids the moment I closed my eyes, decent sleep was off the table for a good while.
'But it won't interfere with smashing this dungeon to pieces.'
My opponent answered my gift with one he'd poured his whole heart into — so it's only fair I return the favor with something of my own.
Ahh, I really hope Nakrad's face is nice and firm.
That way I can beat the mace into it that many more times.
"...I see. Understood."
'By the way, Grandpa?'
"What is it now."
'Why won't you call me Lucy like you did just now?'
"Wh-what nonsense are you spouting? You must have heard things."
'Nope? Heard it loud and clear. "Lucyyyyy!" — with all that desperation in your voice, too.'
"Bah! Enough of that! Focus on clearing the dungeon, and nothing else!"
Puhahat. Grandpa. Aren't you being a little too adorable for a man your age?
...
Thank you.
Because of you, I'm feeling a little better.