Chapter 32 — It's No Coincidence
Chapter 32 — It's No Coincidence
Translation: GodTL
An emperor who united an entire continent with a sword blessed by a Dragon.
The words stayed with me.
Sia had once told me that every person who truly drew out the power of a Dragon Bone Sword eventually carved their name into history. Swordmasters. Kings. Conquerors. People whose lives had changed the moment the blade answered them.
I didn't know whether the 'Dragon-blessed sword' in the inscription was truly a Dragon Bone Sword. But if it was, then the Garden of the Dragon Sword might not be a simple training dungeon at all. It might be a monument—or a grave—left behind by someone who had walked the same path I was only beginning to touch.
If there was even one clue here, I wanted it.
Of course, looking at it objectively, the odds didn't seem good. I wouldn't know until I entered the Gate, but for now it was nothing more or less than a slightly unusual Gate. Maybe "Dragon-blessed sword" was just a grand name for an ordinary sword with a Dragon carved into its hilt.
Still... coincidence was becoming harder to believe.
While I was lost in thought, Tae-seong asked, "What are you thinking about, Min-jun?"
"I was just thinking how fascinating it is that they mention a Dragon-blessed sword. We haven't even established whether Dragons exist." I said it casually, pretending I knew nothing.
After all, there hadn't been any reports of Dragons yet. Officially, at least.
Juwon, who had helped Tae-seong explain the Gate to me earlier, joined in. "We've got Gates and orcs and everything else. Who says Dragons can't exist? For all we know, they might already be living among us."
He said it lightly, as if making a passing joke. Did he have any idea that it was true?
The vehicle braked with a brief screech.
Before long, the vehicle arrived at the dungeon Gate. We put on our equipment and entered in turn.
The raid had begun.
The moment I stepped through the Gate, the strange name suddenly made sense in the worst possible way. Beneath a painfully bright sky, countless swords jutted from the earth like gravestones. Weeds swayed around the rusted hilts, and farther ahead, a colossal statue of a Dragon coiled around a sword watched over the field.
Dungeon Gates were always unnatural. This place felt different. It didn't resemble a battlefield so much as the aftermath of one—a garden planted not with flowers, but with blades.
What kind of combination is this?
The enormous Dragon statue stood at the center of it all, towering over the sword-filled field. The longer I looked, the less it felt decorative. It felt like a marker.
"Strange, isn't it?" a Hunter said as he approached while I was looking around. "Today's my first time here too, Min-jun. Doesn't this place feel different from the dungeon Gates we usually go to?"
"I was thinking the same thing. I just can't seem to get used to it."
As we chatted, Tae-seong clapped his hands to get our attention. "The monsters will be swarming in soon. Everyone, get ready."
Already? That meant monsters would appear from somewhere, but I couldn't see any no matter how I briefly scanned my surroundings.
Then black smoke began to bleed from the swords buried in the ground.
My hand tightened around the Dragon Bone Sword.
"...Ghost-type monsters?"
"Oh, I forgot to explain. I'm so used to coming here with the same people." According to Tae-seong, there was only one kind of monster we'd face in this dungeon Gate.
"It's a monster you can only find in this Gate. It doesn't have an official name, so we call them 'Sword Remnants' among ourselves."
That reminded me of something I'd learned at the academy: dungeon Gates could have unusual monsters you wouldn't encounter in other Gates.
"Is there a particular way to fight them?"
"It's similar to fighting other ghost-type monsters. And—"
Before Tae-seong could finish explaining, the smoke pouring from the buried swords twisted together. The mass swelled, shrieked, and rushed us like a wave of living darkness.
How was a swordsman supposed to fight a ghost-type monster again? I recalled what a professor had told us at the academy.
"Swordsmen are a terrible match for ghost-type monsters. If you ever have to face one, focus on concentrating even more mana than usual at the tip of your sword."
The point was that, against a ghost-type monster, where and how a swordsman swung mattered less than concentrating mana at the blade's tip. I gathered as much mana there as I could and swung as fast as possible.
My blade passed through the black mass.
For an instant, the wraith split cleanly in two—and I felt no resistance at all.
Then both halves turned back toward me. They moved as though being cut apart had meant nothing, already knitting themselves together as they came.
I poured more mana into the sword and struck again. This time the blade tore through the core of the wraith, and the creature burst apart into smoke that did not return.
"Phew."
I'd grown a little stronger, and my equipment was incomparably better than before. Even so, that had been far too easy. Ghost-type monsters were normally a struggle to kill. They were tricky to begin with, and I was a swordsman on top of that.
I dealt with the wraiths charging at me the same way and checked on the other Hunters.
Tae-seong, a B-rank mage well suited to fighting ghost-type monsters, had climbed onto the statue at the center of the dungeon. Like a leader, he watched over the Hunters, myself included, and kept the monsters in check as needed. Since this Gate was used to train lower-ranked Hunters, he seemed ready to step in if anyone's lack of experience left a gap in our defenses.
The other Hunters, meanwhile, were having a hard time holding off the Sword Remnants. I was the only swordsman among them, so in theory, I should have been struggling most of all. Instead, I was cutting them down with an ease that surprised even me. Tae-seong looked amazed too as he watched from his perch on the statue.
A Hunter passing by said, "Min-jun, are you really D-rank?"
"Yes."
"You should get retested. You look at least C-rank to me."
If other people thought so too, maybe I was growing faster than I'd realized. But that was beside the point.
When does this end?
The Sword Remnants came without pause. Every time one fell, black smoke crawled from another buried sword. The field itself seemed to be producing enemies faster than we could erase them.
Kill one. Another rose. Cut that one down. Another screamed into existence behind it.
"This is killing me."
Even if these had been slimes, classified among the weakest monsters, their sheer numbers would have been overwhelming. The Hunters elsewhere seemed to be in the same position, panting and grumbling. The healers' constant, intensive care had kept anyone from getting injured, but fighting monsters for two hours without a moment to catch our breath was another matter.
So this was why guilds used dungeon Gates as training grounds. The monsters didn't merely test technique. They ground down concentration, stamina, and nerve until mistakes became inevitable.
Exhausting as it was, this seemed like a good way to gain a lot of combat experience in a short time. But I had something more important to do.
And I'd nearly forgotten the reason I had come here in the first place: the Dragon's power.
I always told myself to keep that in mind, yet sometimes I forgot. Like right now. I wasn't sure when it had happened, but I'd become so preoccupied with fighting monsters I was poorly matched against that I'd lost sight of my ultimate goal.
It's not too late to start.
If this entire place was somehow connected to a Dragon-blessed sword, then simply fighting normally would be a waste. I needed to make the sword respond.
"One hour left!"
Tae-seong's booming voice announced that we had an hour until the dungeon Gate was cleared. Two-thirds of the three hours had already passed. The other Hunters probably wished that last hour would hurry by, but I couldn't afford to think that way.
The others wanted the final hour to disappear as quickly as possible. I felt the opposite. If this Gate truly had anything to teach me, I had sixty minutes to force it to reveal itself.
What should I do now?
I returned to the two ideas Rokan had drilled into me—dominion and will—but this time I sharpened them into something concrete. I wasn't merely going to survive the Sword Remnants. I was going to erase every last one from this field.
Will alone wasn't enough. I needed to change the way I used the sword—something reckless enough to break the pattern we'd been trapped in.
There was a B-rank Hunter backing us up, so our safety was reasonably assured. I decided to change tactics.
The strategy I chose was to subtly change the structure of the mana in my sword. I wasn't a mage who handled mana professionally, so making such a fine adjustment would be difficult.
I have to do it.
Until now, I had used mana to release force through the blade. I reversed the idea. Instead of expelling energy, I would make the sword take it in. If the Sword Remnants were unnatural existences, then I would answer them with an unnatural method of my own.
It was a terrible experiment to try in the middle of a raid. But this was a Dragon Bone Sword. And we were standing in a place called the Garden of the Dragon Sword. If there was ever a moment to gamble on the weapon, this was it.
"Ah." A realization struck me. Could the reason I'd been having such an unusually easy time against ghost-type monsters be this sword?
The realization cost me a heartbeat of attention. A Sword Remnant, larger and darker than the others, was already on top of me.
It struck. I braced for pain—and felt almost nothing. Barely a sting.
Why? The Sword Remnant had clearly charged at me full force, just as hostile as it was toward the other Hunters. How could I be so unaffected?
Then I can go further.
I stopped defending. Completely. I drove straight into the wraiths and swung with everything I had, leaving openings any sane swordsman would have protected. They flooded into those openings and struck me again and again, but their attacks barely registered.
"Min-jun!" Tae-seong shouted urgently when he saw how exposed I was. I signaled that I was fine and swung my sword even more aggressively. The other Hunters seemed just as startled, but I had no time to pay attention to their reactions.
With every swing, something gathered inside the blade. Not mana. Not the familiar Dragon power either. Something colder. Older. The sword was taking something from the Remnants.
I don't think so.
I couldn't be sure, but it seemed unlikely that all these wraiths were connected to Dragons. Then what were these energies?
Then the balance changed. The Dragon Bone Sword began to pull my arm instead of the other way around. Each swing came faster than the last, guided by a rhythm I hadn't chosen.
A low hum rose from the blade. Gray light seeped along its edge, replacing the aurora radiance I'd seen before.
"Wh-what...?"
The sword ripped itself from my grip.
Before I could even reach for it, the Dragon Bone Sword shot across the field toward the statue like it had finally found the place it was meant to be.