The White Hand
Day four.
Simon climbed the same hillside as yesterday, the one with a clear view of the surrounding landscape. With a spear forged from dungeon minerals slung over his shoulder, he swept his sharp gaze across the vast plain. A herd of buffalo-like monsters was moving together through the tall grass—massive bodies sheathed in brownish mineral plating, tails lashing like whips.
Whew, there's a filthy lot of them.
It was Herseba's remark. The wand that was her settled primly atop Simon's head.
Kid! You're not planning to catch all of those, are you?
"Nope. I just need one or two—the right ones."
The right ones?
Simon nodded.
"Find me one with wounds on its body."
Wounds, wounds... one of 'em's been hurt, huh.
Herseba rose higher for a better look, and Simon scanned the scenery below once more.
The monsters of this dungeon didn't prey on one another, and they never fought. There was no such thing as territorial disputes, struggles over food, or males competing for females.
There was only one circumstance in which they fought.
The moment they saw an outsider from beyond the dungeon—that is, a human—they would charge in a frenzy, determined to catch and devour it.
Which means a wound on its body means it fought outsiders. These monsters never fight each other.
Simon looked down at the book in his hand. It had come from the belly of a monster he'd killed before.
Maybe I can get my hands on another one of these, too.
Kid! Found one! Over there!
Following Herseba's pointer, Simon spotted it—a monster covered head to toe in claw marks. Better yet, something long and spear-like was still embedded in its ore-hide.
"Nice work! That's exactly the one."
Kicking up dust, Simon raced down the hill.
Once he'd worked out the method, hunting the monsters became far easier.
He would bludgeon the monster with his pre-made mineral weapons to shatter the ore plating on its surface, then cast curses on the exposed flesh—or have Overlord gut it with his bladed tentacles.
And as for Herseba—
GYAAAH! GYAAAAAAAH!
She was tearing around in a blind panic, drawing the eyes of every other buffalo herd. Thanks to her heroic efforts as living bait, Simon was able to lure out the exact monster he wanted and take it down in safety.
"Hup!"
Two stacks of the motion-sickness curse, Sickness, disrupted the monster's movements, but it was still thrashing violently in resistance. Simon, clinging to its back, wobbled this way and that—until he spotted the spear shaft lodged near its abdomen.
There it is!
He seized it in both hands and hauled with everything he had.
Blood burst outward as the spear came free with a satisfying pull. Its blade, like the one Simon carried, was made of mineral.
Definitely not something a Kizen student left behind.
The spear looked old and weathered. Simon felt his hypothesis fitting together more and more snugly.
At last the monster collapsed, unable to endure the nausea and blood loss any longer.
Simon quickly doused its body with a scent-masking potion as well, then dragged the carcass off to a safe spot.
Crackle, pop!
A successful hunt like this one meant meat and clues.
Having made camp atop a steep hill, Simon built a fire and skewered several cuts of meat on branches to roast.
"Good work out there, Herseba."
It was BRUTAL!!
Simon soothed the whimpering wand and pressed on with the butchering. Once again, the stomach held a skull and a scattering of personal effects. There was a book in there, too.
"Jackpot!"
Simon laid out his spoils with a proud grin. He already had three books to his name.
Among the 647 students digging for the dungeon's secrets, his results stood in a league of their own.
By the way, kid.
Herseba the wand hopped over and planted herself in front of the book.
Why would a book like this be inside a monster? And who wrote it?
"I've got two hypotheses."
Simon held up his fingers.
"One—people entered this dungeon before we did. Two—people have always lived here."
Either way, there were people.
"Yeah."
They seemed to have been wiped out by the monsters' attacks. Even so, the traces of their struggle remained—writing books, forging weapons, doing what they could to survive in this place.
Simon opened the book. It was filled with a squiggly language he'd never seen in his life, along with all manner of illustrations.
Can you read it?
At Herseba's question, Simon shook his head.
"It's a language I've never seen either. But there are so many pictures I can at least guess what it's about."
Simon decided to use this new knowledge to craft a better mineral weapon.
There was a special technique for working the ore.
"Like so."
He set a raw chunk of mineral on the ground, perched a sharp-edged stone near one corner like a flintknapper's chisel, and brought another stone smashing down on top of it.
Clang!
A bright, ringing sound rolled across the hillside.
A few strikes at each of the four corners, and with a deep crack the ore split cleanly into rough, workable pieces.
Ooh! So THAT'S how you do it!
From there, he wedged a shard of ore firmly onto a spear shaft, poured on adhesive potion, and let it dry—done.
They were single-use, sure, but driving one into a monster would smash through its hard shell while piercing the flesh beneath, dealing serious damage in one blow.
As Simon fashioned spear after spear, his thoughts drifted.
Still... there are way too many mysteries left unsolved.
The monsters of this dungeon didn't eat.
As a result, their digestive organs had withered to almost nothing, and their excretory systems had vanished entirely. That was why the skulls and objects they swallowed sat intact in their stomachs.
But no matter how he turned it over, something about creatures that big staying active without consuming food felt deeply wrong.
There had to be an energy source substituting for food. He needed to find out what it was.
And above all, the real question is how I connect all these clues to the Dungeon Lord's location.
Four days in, and the dungeon still refused to give up so much as a thread to pull. Flopping back into the grass, Simon leafed through the books he'd collected earlier.
One of them was an encyclopedia of the dungeon's flora and fauna.
Unable to read the script, he simply flipped through the pages, studying the pictures.
Huh.
The very last page.
A human being.
A drawing of a person sitting cross-legged in meditation. Grass and plants were growing over the figure's body, and from the ground below, a white hand reached up toward them.
What's this supposed to be?
Simon's expression turned serious as he sat up straight.
Feels... symbolic, somehow.
Roc Island. The Kizen Main Auditorium.
"And we're back! Day five of the promotion exam already!"
The host, Konrad—dark circles carved deep beneath his eyes—lifted his stack of papers. His face was worn ragged with exhaustion, but his voice rang out loud and professional all the same.
"Time for a quick mid-exam review! Five days in—how are our students holding up? Professor Hong Peng!"
"It's rough."
Hong Peng rested her chin on her hand and stared at the monitor feed.
"Dungeon clears are gonna take a whole lot longer than I figured. Call it a month. Maybe two."
Every student had a clear objective—defeat the Dungeon Lord—but in that brutal environment, they were too busy being battered from every direction just to think about it.
Staying alive was hard enough on its own, and the exam was steadily warping into something less like a dungeon assault and more like a dungeon survival test.
"Good grief, they're falling apart out there."
The host shook his head at the feed, where one student—starved of food—was gnawing on raw mineral and losing a tooth for the trouble.
"At this rate, we're headed for real disaster! Especially if this drags on past a month or two like Professor Hong Peng says—it'll be nightmarish! Let's hope somebody takes down that Dungeon Lord fast and puts an end to this for everyone's sake!"
Hong Peng nodded along.
"The one bright spot is the students who formed parties."
Elisa Celine's four-person party. And students like Dik and Jamie had completed three-person parties as well.
They shared monster-hunting methods with each other and secured food through coordinated hunts. Once survival stopped consuming all their attention, they'd have room to spare for the hunt for the Dungeon Lord.
"And oh—look there!"
Right on cue, the feed showed a blue-haired boy sprawled by a campfire, turning the pages of a book.
His face was clean, and he looked remarkably well-fed.
Years of rough country living on his family's rural estate had made Simon fiercely self-sufficient—unlike the other suffering students, he was keeping up a stable life even inside the dungeon.
"Look at him, lounging around reading a book. What do you suppose that is he's reading?"
the host asked. At that moment, Hong Peng's eyes went wide.
"...I'd like to revise my estimate."
"Pardon?"
"Not two months. Two weeks."
A satisfied smile crept across her lips.
"It's all ridin' on that Simon boy right there."
Day five.
The moment Simon woke, he jolted upright in shock.
Overnight, the hill that had stood near his camp was simply gone. He'd pitched his shelter behind it, counting on it as cover—and woken to find the landscape bare and open all around him.
And where the hill had stood, there was now an enormous footprint.
Simon followed it—and found a colossal monster, shaped almost exactly like the vanished hill, ambling along and rubbing itself against the trees as it went.
"No way..."
Simon hastily pulled out his encyclopedia of the dungeon's flora and fauna and flipped through it.
Monster illustrations on the right pages, plant illustrations on the left. He'd breezed past it without a second thought, but only now did he see the pattern.
All of this dungeon's monsters were—
!
A chill crawled up his spine, and Simon whipped his head around.
The instant his eyes fell on the great trees stretching overhead, his breath caught in his throat and raw fear bloomed in his chest. Never in his life had ordinary trees—trees you could find anywhere—felt this terrifying.
...Of course. The plants and the animals alike were all covered in mineral. The animals never ate. And some of the plants had faces—eyes, noses, mouths.
Shadowing the monsters in secret and observing them, Simon had pieced together several crucial facts.
The monsters of this dungeon transformed into features of the surrounding terrain—into parts of the dungeon's very landscape. Trees, hills, boulders.
When they pressed their bodies flat against the ground and hunkered down, their organic tissue underwent a change, hardening into a specific object—rock or plant, whichever fit. And it worked in reverse, too: a creature that had become a plant could turn back into an animal.
By the common sense of the continent, such a thing was impossible. But the monsters of this dungeon, at least, possessed that physiology.
...I need to watch my step.
He'd also figured out how the dungeon's monsters obtained energy.
When their reserves ran dry, they became plants and recharged through photosynthesis and other such means.
Which means...
Simon flipped to the final page of the encyclopedia. The picture of a human—not a monster—transforming into a plant. And beside it, the white hand.
What is this trying to tell me?
He decided there was no harm in experimenting. Simon resolved to try imitating it, at least once.
He tied lengths of cord across sheets of ore to fashion a kind of mineral garment, draped it over his body, and settled into a cross-legged meditation pose.
"Hooooh."
A light, deep breath, and he closed his eyes.
Clearing his mind and heightening his focus with eyes shut was one of Simon's signature strengths.
And before long—
...Ah!
He felt his consciousness begin to drift.
He nearly let it slip away entirely. He had to cling to his reason, whatever it took.
Focus. Focus.
Some thirty agonizing minutes of holding tight to the fraying thread of his sanity—
Tap.
Something rose from the ground: thin, white, like the finest terminal nerve—and it tried to connect itself to Simon's body.
Simon pretended not to notice. Before long, the thing seemed to realize that he was not a monster of this dungeon—and fled in what could only be described as abject terror.
Simon's eyes snapped open.
That just made contact with me. I'm sure of it!
That was the true identity of the white hand from the encyclopedia's final page.
And Simon could feel the lingering aftersensation of it all over his body.
Even standing up from his seat, he could tell exactly which direction the white nerve had retreated.
The corner of Simon's mouth, still dazed, slowly curled upward.
...Found you.