Chapter 65
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Translator: 8uhl
Chapter: 65
Chapter Title: The End of the Horizon
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Even after receiving all the rewards, the Woodsman's Cabin did not open a rift leading out of the dungeon.
The dungeon's story wasn't over yet.
“----.”
It didn't take long to find San-gun.
He was in a cave deep within the mountains.
The drawing from the diary Paul had shown me before.
It was a cave draped in green vegetation.
“San-gun.”
I stared at the white tiger, who was breathing raggedly.
Thanks to Park Bongsoo's death lifting the curse, the demonic energy that had enveloped the white tiger was gone.
Thus, its wretched state was laid bare.
Chunks of flesh were torn from its body, its legs were broken.
Blood streamed from one eye—it was on the verge of death.
[The Sage informs you that San-gun has sustained fatal injuries that are difficult to treat and has lost most of its sight, taste, hearing, and various other bodily functions.]
Even without the Sage's report, I could tell its condition.
It was a miracle it had managed to drag itself this far.
“You’ve been through a lot.”
If not for this creature, Park Bongsoo and his horde of zombies would have overrun the Woodsman's Cabin long ago.
The dungeon would have gone berserk.
My mother and our family home, right next to the ancestral mountain, would have been the first to be attacked.
“It's as if you protected my mother.”
As I stroked its blood-soaked fur, a low, pained growl escaped its throat.
There wasn't much time left.
I slowly drew my sword.
Then I asked quietly.
“Can I take you with me?”
If it refused, I planned to leave it to face death here and exit the dungeon.
Unlike with Ru, I had no contract with this creature, and if anything, I was the one indebted to it.
“Grrr, grrr.”
I felt a rough texture on the back of my hand.
San-gun licked the back of my hand. Then, it slowly, deliberately nodded its head.
“Thank you.”
“-----.”
San-gun's eyes closed peacefully.
* * *
The Woodsman's Cabin was quiet.
Thanks to Odolph's magic, patches of bushes were scorched black, and the acrid smell of smoke hung in the air.
“My Lord. I have been waiting.”
The ogre sitting in front of the cabin door stood up.
“Good work, Odolph. Where's Paul?”
“Ah, yes… about that…”
But Odolph's eyes wavered slightly.
Don't tell me he was taken by the zombies?
However, his next words revealed something unexpected.
“The zombies didn't set a single foot inside the cabin. The woodsman is fine, of course. However… something unfortunate has happened, separate from that.”
I stepped into the log cabin.
Inside, the woodsman was sobbing, his head buried in the bed.
“Paul.”
“…Ah, Mercenary.”
Belying his rugged appearance, Paul's face was swollen as he looked up.
I gazed at the old woman lying on the bed with her eyes closed and spoke.
“I'm sorry about your mother.”
“No, it's alright. In a way, it's a blessing she passed without having to see a world overrun by hordes of corpses. Still, I wanted to show her the village below one last time before she left…”
Paul caressed the deceased old woman's cheek.
Was this a pre-scripted event, something that was supposed to happen at the end of the quest?
Were his actions, his sorrowful voice, and his swollen face all just part of a staged narrative?
But the scene felt too real to jump to conclusions.
“Thank you, Mercenary. I know everything you've done. You saved my life.”
Suddenly, Paul sat up.
“Yes. I'm sorry, but the village at the foot of the mountain was already beyond saving.”
“I figured as much. It was probably lost long ago. Knowing that, the black beast, too…”
Paul lowered his gaze.
“That beast… it died, didn't it? Protecting my mother and me.”
I didn't answer.
Instead, I asked the woodsman.
“I have something to ask you.”
“Yes, go ahead, Mercenary.”
“How did your late mother treat the black beast?”
“My mother… she thought of it as her own child. You remember that day, don't you? The day she first met the black beast while I was away. Even though the beast never appeared before her again after that, she kept asking for it whenever she was lucid. 'Where has my child gone?' she'd ask.”
“And what about you?”
“Me?”
Paul's eyes turned to me.
“Do you still think of the black beast as just a monster?”
The woodsman was silent for a moment.
But he soon shook his head and answered.
“No. He's family. My mother's son, and my older brother.”
This was probably the story of the hidden mission, "The False Brother."
With an ending like this, I felt I could add a little something of my own.
I took a bead from the bracelet on my wrist.
It was a bead that was half white and half black.
When I dropped it.
*Clatter.*
Mist spread from the bead as it rolled for a moment on the log floor, and a small figure emerged.
- Meow.
A cat with pure white fur.
That's right. It was the very same cat that had led me to the Woodsman's Cabin—it was San-gun.
Like Ru, this one was a ‘Divine Beast,’ so I couldn't just send it to the Lord's Castle, hire it, and summon it in a flash.
They said it would take at least a month for it to regain stats befitting a Divine Beast.
Thus, this was the form it manifested in, with its stats and skills severely nerfed.
“This is…”
The woodsman's eyes widened.
- Meeeow.
San-gun stared at the woodsman with its red eyes.
Then it lightly hopped onto the bed and began to quietly rub its head against the old woman's cheek.
“……”
Paul stared blankly at San-gun as it nuzzled her cheek with a mournful cry.
Would the woodsman recognize it? And then.
*Thud.*
The big, oafish woodsman fell to his knees and lowered his head.
“Brother, you've come. I'm so sorry. I should have protected Mother…”
Large teardrops fell, plop, plop, leaving marks on the floor.
San-gun turned its gaze.
It once again hopped lightly off the bed.
And this time.
- Meeeow.
It approached the sobbing woodsman and rubbed its cheek against his thigh.
“Brother.”
Brother, brother.
Thank you, brother.
Paul repeated those words endlessly.
Not the emotionless repetition of an NPC, but truly like a person.
With a voice swirling with all sorts of emotions.
* * *
An hour later.
I said my final goodbyes to Paul at the portal that had appeared behind the cabin.
“Are you leaving, Mercenary?”
“Yes. The request is complete, so it's time to go back. What will you do, Paul?”
It might have been a meaningless question, but I asked anyway.
Paul rubbed the back of his head and gave a good-natured smile.
“As for me, I have to find a way to live, don't I? I'll bury my mother, pack my things, and head down. I think I'll walk to the end of the horizon. I'm sure there are other survivors out there somewhere.”
“I wish you luck.”
“Yes, Mercenary. Please, take this.”
Suddenly, Paul took something out of the leather backpack on his back and held it out.
A gem as red as blood, pulsating like a heart.
It was none other than a Bloodflow Stone.
But it was a little different from the one I got in the Garden of Sorrow.
The pulsating red energy inside the gem was split into two.
“How did you get this…”
“It's a family heirloom. Please, accept it. I hear this gem holds a mysterious power. For an ignorant and simple man like me, it's like pearls before swine. If you could put it to good use, Mercenary, there would be no greater honor.”
“Then I'll gratefully accept.”
I took the Bloodflow Stone from Paul.
Looking closely, I could definitely feel something different about it compared to a regular Bloodflow Stone.
I put it in my dimensional pocket and turned toward the rift.
“May your path be filled with good fortune, Hanul-nim.”
With the woodsman's voice behind me, I stepped into the rift.
[Congratulations. You have fully cleared the Woodsman's Cabin.]
[Perfect clear and all hidden rewards have been acquired. The dungeon will disappear after a certain amount of time.]
Information windows popped up before my eyes.
That's a relief.
The woodsman could now leave his cramped cabin and journey to the end of the horizon.
Right after I exited the dungeon.
“…There's a reaction from the rift!”
“?”
“It's Hunter Kim Hanul! Hunter Kim Hanul has returned!”
I was faced with an unexpected situation.
The moment I stepped out of the rift and onto the soil of the ancestral mountain.
“Hunter Kim Hanul, are you alright!”
“Are you injured, Hunter-nim!”
About a dozen Hunters urgently surrounded me.
For a moment, I had no idea what was going on.
But the moment I saw the shield emblem on the Hunters' suits and heard a familiar name among their shouts.
“Observation Team Leader Anastasia, thankfully, there are no signs of it going berserk!”
I could roughly guess what the current situation was.
And from behind me, a small hand grabbed my shoulder.
“CrappyGame, CrappyGame!”
“Asha.”
“Are you okay? Are you hurt? Curses, poison, or maybe brainwashing. You weren't hit with anything like that, right?”
I looked at the short-haired Russian Hunter in front of me.
Her oasis-like eyes were filled with worry.
* * *
“So, you're saying a red pattern signal was detected from the dungeon about eight hours ago. And you personally contacted the Dungeon Management Bureau, formed an emergency response team, and rushed over.”
“Yep.”
Asha concisely and neatly summarized the situation.
Eight hours ago was when Park Bongsoo's zombies began their full-scale assault on the Woodsman's Cabin.
It seems the dungeon switched to a red pattern from that point on.
In the end, it didn't go berserk, and the Woodsman's Cabin vanished in a flash of light right after I left, but still.
“Sorry to make you come all this way for nothing. To a rural backwater like this.”
“It's not nothing. As long as I could confirm you're safe, that's all that matters.”
Is that all it was?
Come to think of it, why did she come running here herself with guild members?
She's an A-rank Hunter, but it was strange for Asha, who's in charge of support, to be acting on the front lines.
“But the Aegis Guild Master and the other operations team leaders must have been busy. For you to come all this way yourself.”
“Huh?”
Asha stared at me with a somewhat dumbfounded expression.
“Why?”
“……”
Asha glared at me with what looked like a resentful gaze before she spoke.
“That Hunter you mentioned, the one who was commanding zombies and trying to make the dungeon go berserk.”
“Yeah.”
I had already told Asha about Park Bongsoo.
I was planning to report it to the Association headquarters anyway, so there was no reason to keep it a secret.
“Did the emblem on his suit or any tattoos on his skin have a flag shape?”
A flag. There was definitely an emblem on his suit, but it was faded with age.
But thinking back.
“I couldn't get a clear look, but I think there was a flag-shaped emblem on the suit.”
“That Hunter belongs to the Pathfinder Guild.”
“Pathfinder?”
Pathfinder? Isn't that the guild that was blamed for all sorts of terrorism and crimes ten years ago before they disappeared?
A guild whose members mostly contracted with Demon God-type Divine Seats and followed them blindly.
I see.
If that's the case, Park Bongsoo's madness, cooped up in a dungeon for twenty years, makes some sense.
The Watcher of the Nineteen Hells was a Divine Seat known for bewitching the naive.
“Yep. So, after confirming that, how should I put it…”
“?”
“I got worried.”
*Ahem,* Asha cleared her throat unnecessarily.
“Ah.”
“I don't really know what kind of people the Pathfinders are.”
“Thanks. A die-hard viewer really is on another level.”
“…бревно́.”
“?”
Asha suddenly muttered something in Russian.
Brevno?
“Anyway, there's something else I need to tell you. Speaking of Pathfinder, it seems a few guilds are involved in the recent abnormal phenomena with dungeons and gates.”
“Guilds?”
“Yep, guilds connected to Pathfinder.”
“But Pathfinder was dismantled ten years ago, right? And all the members went to prison.”
They got sentences from seventy years to life, so there's no chance they've been released and are active again.
“Only the Pathfinder Guild itself was dismantled back then. They didn't round up and crush all their subcontractors and affiliated guilds. In fact, some of those guilds are now nipping at the heels of the top three.”
“Ah.”
Asha looked at me with a serious expression.
“It seems there were similar attempts not just with Pungbaek and us, but with Sanarae as well. The reason Pungbaek has been so busy since the Ogre's Sanctuary incident is because they're trying to track them down. But since we don't know how they're inducing these dungeon berserks, it's not at a stage where we can go public yet.”
“……”
“I just wanted you to know, CrappyGame.”
I glanced at the Sage clinging to my shoulder.
In the end, the Sage hadn't found a fragment of ‘Interference’ in the Woodsman's Cabin.
Guilds that instigate dungeon berserks.
If I dig into them, might I find a clue related to ‘Interference’?
“…Game, CrappyGame! Are you listening?”
Suddenly, Asha's clear voice broke through.
“Uh, yeah, I'm listening.”
“Liar. You were clearly spacing out.”
“Sorry. What were you saying?”
“I saw that you were the first one to witness and report this dungeon. I was asking why you came to a remote place like this.”
She'd moved on to personal questions at some point.
There was no reason to hide it, so I answered.
“It's my hometown.”
“Your hometown? Here?”
“Not where I was born, but I lived here from when I was one until I graduated high school. I found the dungeon while visiting my mother and looking around the neighborhood.”
“Oh, so it was your hometown.”
Asha fell silent and looked out at the sea stretching in the distance.
It was evening, and the sunset cast a red glow over the horizon.
It resembled the end of the horizon that the woodsman had set out to walk toward.
“The view is nice.”
“The view's to die for.”
I was about to add that there's nothing else to see here, when.
Asha took out a thermos that was hanging from the side of her suit.
“Want some tea?”
“Oh, that'd be great.”
I was just getting thirsty.
Asha used the thermos lid as a cup, poured some tea, and handed it to me.
The warmth felt really nice.
A cup of tea while watching the sunset over the sea, how atmospheric. Mm, yes. It's all great, but.
“……”
Why did it smell strongly of herbal medicine the moment I took the cup?
Just then, Asha took something round out of a bag at her side and asked.
“Want a raw egg in it?”