Trial (4)
Trial (4)
Dojin's ability was Ruler of Women's Hearts, an ability that started out utterly insignificant but evolved in a way befitting its name the more he dealt with women—a growth-type ability.
Though he had been a virgin when he fell into the Otherworld, the number of women he had taken wasn't small by any means, nor was it insignificant.
Prostitutes, classmates from the same class, Otherworld residents, and so on. Having taken all sorts of women, Dojin had gained equally diverse abilities as a result.
'This is... one of them too.'
Dojin recalled two of his abilities: [Sense Sharing] and [Pain-Pleasure Conversion]. Sense Sharing allowed him to unilaterally take on even the pain the other person received, and the conversion ability let him turn that absorbed pain into pleasure.
In short, it meant he could take on all of his party's fatigue and make it as if it had never happened.
'Normally, I wouldn't even think of it....'
Even if he shook off the fatigue like that, it only vanished in an instant—his energy didn't actually recover.
In a situation without recovery potions, it just went from minus to zero, not plus.
But now things were different. Now that he knew the elves' fragrance worked on humans like an elixir, just like their race's mother, the World Tree.
"......For now, Orion, shall we start with you?"
"Huh? What do you..."
Dojin immediately grabbed Orion's hand. Orion flinched in surprise and tried to pull away, but his ability activated faster than that.
Just as Dojin had felt, Orion sensed the fatigue built up in her body vanishing in an instant, and her eyes flew wide open as she stared at him.
"Leader? How is this..."
"Fuuu...... What the hell, you're pretty worn out too...."
Orion looked into Dojin's eyes. They had clearly just recovered moments ago, yet fatigue was already piling up in them again. As if he had taken her fatigue in her place.
Realizing this, Orion grabbed Dojin's shoulders in shock.
"What did you─! Are you okay!? Leader!?"
"W-What? Why are you suddenly like this?"
"Why? Because right now, you─!"
—Used alchemy, Orion started to say, but then she scanned Dojin up and down.
'......He's fine?'
What shocked her was the magic-like feat Dojin had just performed. Sacrifice. Because it had the exact same effect as that alchemy known by that name.
A horrific alchemy that took on all the negative effects from the other person. Yet Dojin seemed far healthier than someone who had used alchemy.
Sacrifice used the user's life force to take on the target's diseases and injuries entirely, making it so dangerous that using it led straight to death.
It was an alchemy born after black mages forced slaves who knew nothing into using scrolls, creating an undead army ignorant of death—a magic Dojin, no mage himself, couldn't know even if he wanted to.
"L-Leader? What did you just do...?"
"My ability. I took all your fatigue."
"No way, then you're not fatigued?"
"I converted that fatigue into pleasure. A bit stiff, but... I'm fine."
"......Fatigue into pleasure? How the hell do you do that?"
"With my ability too."
Orion stared at Dojin blankly upon hearing that. Skill Holder. Come to think of it, he had said something like that.
She didn't know what the ability was exactly, but absorbing others' fatigue and making even that disappear was an utterly absurd power. To the point where she wondered why he hadn't used it until now.
"...Then why didn't you use it until now?"
"Feeling pleasure is tiring too, you know? Without a way to recover, I'd eventually collapse from overload. But now I've got you."
"So, you're still a bit fatigued right now?"
"Yeah, kinda..."
The moment she heard that, she hugged him tightly. True to elven attire, his face buried into the soft exposed upper chest.
She stroked the back of his head gently, sighing to him.
"I was worried... I thought maybe you'd die......"
"...As if that'd happen."
"It was that extreme a situation, so I thought maybe you'd make that choice."
It was groundless worry. But emotions sprouting from misunderstandings often burned even hotter. As the emotions that had surged to their limit slowly subsided, the relief from that gap washed over her body like pleasure.
"If you die now, Leader, we're all dead too, you know? Your life isn't just yours—it's all of ours. Get that straight."
"......I know that without you saying it."
Dojin slowly pulled away from Orion's embrace. It was so warm and comfortable he never wanted to leave, but he had no time to be swayed by such feelings.
He approached Eunha and Raize, who were staring blankly his way, absorbed their fatigue, and distributed stamina to them.
He converted the piled-up fatigue into pleasure to erase it, and the faint remnants were completely blown away with Orion's help once more.
His party's eyes began to sparkle like when they first entered this dungeon. Realizing everyone had regained their energy, Dojin now explained how they would escape this maze.
"We're escaping this maze from now on."
"......How?"
"─Daedalus said to his son Icarus. The only way to escape this maze is to fly into the sky and flee."
Icarus—the name so famous that upon hearing it, Eunha looked at Dojin with a 'no way' expression.
"D-Dojin... That's."
"Yeah, we're flying into the sky to escape."
Dojin said that and pointed to the sky. Into the darkness shrouded by the dark curtain, where nothing was visible.
"Where's the sky in a dungeon?"
"Why do you think there isn't one?"
"Well......"
Raize looked up at the sky. The dark curtain blocked light beyond five meters, hiding the ceiling's appearance too. So there was no way to prove a ceiling even existed.
"...On the 30th Floor, monsters came from the ceiling, right?"
"Is this the 30th Floor?"
"No... right?"
"Then why do you think there's a ceiling here too?"
Well, obviously, common sense─.
It was only then that Raize clamped her mouth shut. The common sense she knew about dungeons was just stuff made up by adventurers who hadn't even experimented or verified, based solely on their own experiences.
Believing that blindly without question was idiotic.
"......So why do you think there's no ceiling?"
"There probably is one."
"What? But earlier...!"
"But these walls aren't connected to it."
"......Why?"
"Because that's rational."
If these maze walls were perfectly attached to the ceiling, moving them would consume massive energy every time.
You'd have to account for friction from the ceiling too, and the ceiling would have to shift a bit.
Utterly inefficient. And inefficient meant irrational.
"Dungeons operate in an extremely rational manner."
Everything in this universe does. It all tries to move in the most convenient, efficient way. Like when Dojin made a straight path from the 10th Floor to the 1st Floor, and the 4D dungeon degraded to 3D.
Changing the dungeon into a maze like this would inevitably create gaps.
"What we need to do is crawl through those gaps above the walls and find the exit."
"......Hey, Dojin. What if... that happens?"
"What?"
"Like... the walls move and squish us flat?"
Classic Eunha thinking. So like her to beware of the worst-case scenario first.
But this time, it wouldn't happen. Dojin had a near-certain intuition.
"No, it won't. If it wanted to kill us from the start, why make a maze? Just send hundreds of monsters or collapse the dungeon—we'd die instantly."
"Oh...... R-Really...?"
"Think of it like taking a test. Teachers can make the problems hard, but they don't stop you from taking it, right?"
They can make problems so hard it's impossible to solve, but not ones with no answer.
In Dojin's view, dungeons operated on a similar structure. There were things that couldn't be explained otherwise sometimes.
"Then we just need to find a way to climb up......"
"I can do it."
At that moment, Raize lightly raised her staff. She sat on her staff and began to levitate just like that.
"Whoa, Harry Potter..."
"Harry Potter?"
"Oh, there's this thing."
Dojin tapped the staff she was sitting on. It didn't lose balance easily. Probably wouldn't even with all four of them hanging on.
"Alright then... Shall we go?"
Dojin said that and grabbed the staff. Eunha and Orion did too. Confirming everyone had grabbed on, Raize slowly began to float up.
And shot toward the top of those towering walls.
Filled with the resolve to escape this maze.
Jjeojeok─!
Seoyun lightly swung her hand, freezing the approaching monster. Back when she was on this floor before, they hadn't died in one hit, but now Seoyun had reached the realm of perfectly wielding her ability without being controlled by it.
"......Fucking awesome. As expected of the main heroine."
"─What?"
"I mean, if our lives got turned into a game or anime, I'd be like the protagonist's sidekick, and you'd be the hard-to-conquer Main Heroine No. 1."
"......What the hell are you saying, otaku. Pissing me off."
"No, I'm an otaku, sure, but it's not supposed to piss you off!?"
Deokgu said that as he moved forward. He tossed out jokes this lightly, but he was taking the situation seriously too.
It was just that, with Dojin—who was basically his girlfriend's guy—gone, he couldn't let both of them mope around while he got depressed too.
Slaughtering visible monsters and invisible ones alike mercilessly, they finally arrived before the 29th Floor.
Deokgu looked at the completely blocked wall and said,
"The map says it's here, but..."
"─Dojin! You there!? Dojin, can you hear me!?"
Aram, hearing Deokgu, pounded the wall and shouted. Her voice echoed emptily only inside the dungeon, not passing beyond the wall.
"Move."
Seoyun pulled her back. Then, enormous wings unfurled from behind her.
Queen of Frost.
The Frost Queen descends.
Jjeojeok, the air freezes, and dozens of ice pillars created that way fly and embed themselves. The dungeon wall, tougher than steel, shatters in an instant.
However.
Kkigigik.
"The wall's moving?"
The shattered wall soon moved, buying time to repair the gap. If it came at them like this, even Seoyun couldn't break through the wall.
But the moment she realized the wall hadn't always been there, another method appeared.
"......Dojin's waiting."
Aram placed her hand on the wall. Her ability rewound living beings' time limitedly, and inorganic matter's time without limit.
Rocks and such? She could revert them to elements that existed billions of years ago, before this planet even formed.
"So, don't block my way."
Kugugung......
The dungeon moves.
The wall opened. They entered inside.