CHAPTER 107
CHAPTER 107
Chaos Realm Dungeon
‘However, my original life had already been toyed with by fate enough.’
Born as the eldest daughter of a poor but intelligent household, she had already suffered greatly at the hands of fate in her previous life.
Things like being a reincarnator, a transmigrator, or having half-demon blood were not really that big of a problem.
Compared to the realistic pains of life—poverty and wretchedness, hunger and frustration—those were nothing. Pain that lacked any drama, yet weighed heavily on existence.
Even if this was a world inside a game or whatever, Idnia would walk the path she had chosen with her own conviction and spirit in this very moment.
If fate wanted to toy with her, then let it try. At the very least, she would smile in return.
Steeling her resolve, Idnia threw the dungeon entry ticket onto the altar.
As Idnia stepped through the transfer gate of the altar, the surface of a ruined city greeted her.
A city broken by debris that had fallen from the sky.
It appeared to be a fairly advanced civilization. If compared to Earth, at least around the 18th century. Buildings in an Art Nouveau style using green steel frames and glass lay collapsed among structures blending Rococo, Baroque, and Gothic elements.
It looked as if a European street in the modern world had been destroyed.
‘There were no Art Nouveau-style buildings in Duneis either. The civilization here must have been more advanced than the Empire. Or maybe it’s just because this is a game setting.’
Idnia made a cold assessment as she looked at the ruined city.
The relic dungeons of Duneis Academy were remnants of an ancient civilization’s city.
The ancient civilization that had originally owned Duneis Academy had achieved remarkable magical and scientific advancements, but after dabbling in forbidden magic, they came into contact with a certain aberrant god and were annihilated in an instant.
As a result, space-time was distorted, and this place became a zone where otherworldly distortions and fractures from across the world coexisted.
The reason Duneis Academy has transfer gates spread across the world is precisely because they were created in an attempt to resolve this phenomenon…
They were made to restore a twisted tangle of spacetime.
Rather than being created for the purpose of using transfer gates, the gates had to be created as a means of unraveling and correcting this warped spacetime.
A place that speaks to how unstable and terrifying this world is—one could call it the vault of the world.
But the truth behind it is rather simple.
‘The game company just bought cheap assets and mixed them together randomly as a background.
Well, they bought random assets and mixed modern and past, Eastern and Western elements all together, then attached a plausible justification to the setting.’
At first it was created that way, but as the game became a hit and more developers were added, the quality of the background improved, while the original early settings remained intact.
From the perspective of the game company, it may be a dungeon created for such absurd reasons… but from the perspective of someone actually entering the dungeon, it was a truly horrifying place.
The dissonance and shock between seeing it on a monitor in a game and experiencing it in reality was no small matter.
Idnia frowned as she looked at the storm of distorted spacetime swirling above her head.
In the darkened sky, time and space twisted and rotated overhead.
Beyond it, things that should not exist occasionally came into view.
Dinosaurs, gigantic insects, seas filled with grotesque monsters breathing…
‘…A convenience store sign.’
Idnia dodged as a convenience store sign from Earth fell from the sky.
From the vortex of spacetime, various objects and monsters were falling and crashing down.
Idnia avoided them and stared blankly at the convenience store sign.
It was an object from Earth.
Ah. In that moment, the shock she felt was beyond what she could imagine, enough that it felt like her heart might tear apart.
Simply encountering something from Earth made her heart swell with longing, as if it might stop beating.
On Earth, it would have been nothing more than discarded trash, yet why did it shake her so deeply here?
‘If it arrived here in a broken state… does that mean Earth has been destroyed? Could it be that Earth has fallen sometime after the era I lived in? No, that can’t be it. First, I should focus on my purpose here.’
Idnia calmed her trembling heart and looked around.
“It’s quite vast. I’ll have to descend into the deeper layers here…”
Idnia first took out her magic wand and cast a spell.
As she activated a light spell to illuminate the surroundings, at that very moment, something suddenly leapt out from the debris.
A goblin launched an attack, trying to snatch Idnia’s magic wand.
Goblins, the green species commonly appearing as monsters in many games, are, in the world of Awakening Girl Concert, interdimensional species that emerge from distorted spacetime touched by the aberrant god.
In other words, extraterrestrial lifeforms. Aliens, one could say.
They easily submit to stronger beings, and despite that, they possess weak psionic abilities, giving them surprisingly good language acquisition relative to their individual intelligence.
The problem is that even with their low individual intelligence, they are quite adept at underhanded tactics.
To think they had been lying in ambush within the rubble. Idnia, who had been careless due to their small size and dark green skin, was caught completely off guard.
“Ka-kak! We got her!”
Confirming that their ambush had succeeded, the goblins emerged from among the building debris and piles of dead wood.
It seemed there were goblins lying in wait.
They had beaten up lower-ranking goblins and forced them to lie in ambush along paths frequented by people, while they themselves hid nearby and waited.
A goblin hiding underground would ambush a mage, grab the magic wand to disrupt spellcasting, and in the meantime, other goblins would attack.
It was a fairly effective ambush method.
That is, if the opponent were anyone other than Idnia.
“Oh my.”
As a goblin clung to her magic wand, Idnia casually twisted its head.
With a dull crunch.
This was not the kind of outcome one would expect when a goblin hangs onto a female mage’s wand.
Idnia effortlessly snapped the goblin’s neck as easily as opening a bottle cap.
The goblins watching were so shocked they froze.
“Ah, so…”
Idnia grabbed the head of the goblin whose neck had been broken and was convulsing while still clinging to the wand, tossed it lightly, and swung her black iron magic wand like a bat.
With a sharp crack!
With a refreshing sound, the goblin was reduced to what had once been a goblin, shattered and sent flying.
With a splat, blood and flesh splattered onto the faces of the goblins who had emerged expecting their ambush to succeed.
“Ah, I was practicing wizard ball and… hmm. This will need to be censored.”
Idnia handled the goblin ambush nonchalantly and looked at the remaining goblins.
“Eh?”
“What is that human?”
The goblins had yet to grasp the situation.
“It seems there’s no need to suppress my Overlord Technique here.”
Idnia released the Overlord Technique she had been suppressing.
A shadow fell over the goblins’ faces.
The slender, beautiful girl’s appearance vanished, replaced instead by a heroic figure who looked like she could dry up rivers by letting horses drink them dry and flatten mountains into plains by sharpening swords against them.
Moreover, astonishingly, the black iron magic wand in her hand absorbed the Overlord Technique and grew larger along with it.
What had originally been a slightly short self-defense three-section staff expanded into something closer to a flail in size.
“……”
“Kiiik?!”
The goblins’ faces turned pale.
“W-we can’t win!”
“Let’s run!”
The goblins, startled, began to flee.
These were goblins who had previously delighted in bullying the weak among themselves, lying in ambush and expecting to reap spoils.
But the moment they realized they were the weak, they instantly changed their stance and ran away.
Seeing this, Idnia reached down to pick up a stone from the ground, then paused.
Was it really appropriate for a student of a magic school to resolve everything with brute force?
‘What would Isolde have done? If I want to find her whereabouts, I should also think like a mage.’
Thinking that, Idnia picked up the black iron magic wand.
Like the wand her father once used, it had grown in response to the Overlord Technique, and it was a wand that would not be damaged even if aura was unconsciously infused into it.
With the Overlord Technique active now, Idnia suppressed her aura while raising her magical power and lightly cast a spell.
Crackle…
Mana churned.
The Overlord Technique resisted the flow of magic, making spellcasting difficult.
She would need to grow accustomed to using magic while the Overlord Technique was active.
‘In this case, focusing on the activation words rather than mana works much better, right? Ah, that’s right. I should summon the fire spirit.’
Carefully, Idnia cast her spell while maintaining the Overlord Technique.
A flame pistol was summoned onto her shoulder.
As soon as it appeared, the flame pistol began firing repeatedly, chasing after the goblins.
Rat-tat-tat!
Though it took the form of a pistol, its rate of fire was on the level of a submachine gun. Flaming bullets poured out in rapid succession, striking the fleeing goblins, who screamed and collapsed.
Some goblins died from the flame bullets, but others did not.
Compared to actual bullets made of lead with copper jackets, flame bullets lacked penetrating power.
While the high heat burned flesh deeply and caused greater pain, depending on clothing, the amount of sweat on the skin, and the angle of impact, they did not always result in fatal wounds.
The goblins that survived endured the pain of their burning flesh while waiting for Idnia to let her guard down. However…
‘Wait, come to think of it, the ambush had already failed. What happened to a successful ambush?’
The goblins clutched small metal daggers in their chests, wondering whether such blades could even pierce Idnia now.
It was like trying to hunt a tiger with a butter knife.
Of course, goblins did not actually have butter knives, but they could instinctively sense the gap between them and Idnia.
Even if they somehow succeeded in another ambush now, could these tiny blades make a difference?
Moreover…
Rat-tat-tat!
Before Idnia needed to lift a finger, the flame pistol spirit delivered a finishing blow.
“Kieeek!”
The goblins that had been lying on the ground burned to death, and their own ambush plan fell apart.
“Ah, so some were still alive.
Well, it doesn’t cost anything for the fire spirit to attack, so there’s no harm in confirming kills.”
Idnia fell into thought as she watched the merciless assault of the flame pistol spirit.
‘Thinking like a mage, in a place like this where navigation is complicated, there would naturally be markers left behind. Perhaps invisible magical marks only recognizable to oneself?’
So Idnia used a mana detection spell. However, the problem was that this dungeon was already saturated with chaotic mana.
‘Ah, ordinary marking spells won’t work. Then perhaps it responds to specific commands—like a remote-controlled magic. Hmm. In that case, what should I do?’
Indeed, Isolde’s magic was far more refined than Idnia’s current capabilities, so Idnia had no way to track her.
‘Should I just search on foot? Hmm. It’s too vast. Hm?’
At that moment, Idnia spotted a large box lying in front of her.
It was a box containing 1.5-liter PET bottles.
Around it were broken carbonated drink bottles and some that remained intact…
“…Wow.”
Without thinking, Idnia absentmindedly picked one up.
A thought that it might be a trap crossed her mind afterward, but before she could regain her composure, her hand had already reached out.
“It’s a brand I haven’t seen before, but… hmm, the condition seems fine. I should take this… ah?”
Among the carbonated drinks, faint footprints could be seen.
They were clearly shoe prints.