When Five People Gather, One of Them Is Bound to Be Trash (4)
“Aaaaghhh!!”
Of course she’d scream. A monster was charging straight at her, its gaping maw opening and closing like a starving beast.
If she hadn’t jabbed her spear out first, none of this would have happened in the first place.
Their intelligence was hardly worth praising, and if she’d stayed calm enough to read the situation, she would have realized Park Deokgu could have stopped the thing barreling toward them.
But Park Hye-young, that damned woman, had chosen not to observe the situation calmly. She had chosen, instead, to unleash her fear with everything she had.
“Damn it!”
Park Hye-young had twisted the situation exactly like some crude cartoon sketch of disaster.
The monsters were sensitive to sound.
Ordinary conversation wouldn’t carry far, but a scream that loud meant they had surely noticed us now.
There was a good chance every monster nearby would come running.
Kim Hyunsung seemed to be thinking the same thing. After he severed the head of the monster he was fighting, he drove his sword into the chest of the one Park Deokgu had pinned down.
It was a little hard to compare his movements to anything a human could normally do, but Kim Hyunsung had no time to worry about that now; even he could tell the situation was turning bad.
The monster was trembling violently, but that wasn’t the problem right now.
“We’re leaving this place immediately.”
“Damn…”
“S-sorry…”
“Kiyoung, you take Hye-young and Hayan. If anything happens, Deokgu will open the way.”
“What about you, sir?”
“I’ll draw the monsters’ attention. Leave a mark and I’ll find you. Rather than heading straight for the Shelter, it would be better to detour a little, Kiyoung.”
I gave a vague nod.
If we led all the monsters now interested in us straight back to the Shelter, that would be no different from inviting them to a buffet.
Kim Hyunsung looked like he was trying to resolve the crisis in his own way, but his expression was far from good.
For all that he was a regressor, Kim Hyunsung was still a rookie in the middle of growing up.
He could handle a certain amount, sure, but if their numbers swelled too high, it would be impossible to fight them all in a confined space like this.
“Hyung, which way…?”
“We’ll take the long way around.”
“I-I understand.”
It looked like Park Hye-young had finally realized what kind of mistake she’d made, because her face had gone pale as she stared at us.
She’d understood that if she slipped up again, there might be a real chance she’d end up screaming for good.
“Get up.”
“Y-yes. Yes…”
“Stick right beside us when you run.”
“R-right. Understood.”
Jung Hayan said nothing.
She only stared around the area, looking vaguely as though she were lost in thought.
“Hayan.”
“Ah… yes! Oppa.”
She didn’t look frightened at all.
Come to think of it, Jung Hayan, who would one day become a great archmage, came to mind. Since she was a mage as well, she might be able to help if an uncontrollable situation arose.
The odds of survival are high.
We could absolutely make it back alive.
“Then, let us have fortune on our side.”
“You be careful too, sir.”
“It’ll be fine.”
Park Deokgu immediately lifted his shield and started running.
Park Hye-young, too, followed behind us with a terrified expression.
A flash of irritation surged through me, but there was no time to bicker now.
Instead, I began reciting the spell I’d been storing in my head.
I was piling mana into a tower. It wasn’t much mana, but in a moment of crisis it was the kind of magic that could save us once.
“You can recite while running?”
“Don’t talk to me. It’s giving me a headache.”
That was how hard it was to focus on the chant.
Moving my feet and hands while thinking about something completely different in my head was, by nature, a difficult thing to pull off.
This is hard…
“I, beseech Thee…”
The tower of mana I kept trying to build kept collapsing. I couldn’t concentrate properly. It felt like my head was about to burst. My brain seemed to be overloading.
Slowly. Just one at a time.
If I imagined there was nothing around me and kept reciting, it was possible.
So I slowly began stacking the tower again.
We hadn’t even encountered any of the monsters yet.
I still had time.
“Lord, I beseech Thee, answer my voice and grant me the power to burn my enemies.”
The incantation had to be long. It was an irritating spell, certainly, but the spell carved into my head was definitely taking shape in my hands.
A sphere of fire. A sphere of fire the size of a human head had gathered in my palm.
“Well, damn! When did you learn something like that?”
“Don’t talk to me, Deokgu. It makes it hard to concentrate.”
Reciting the spell was work. Maintaining it was work too.
I had to keep patching the swaying tower of mana so it wouldn’t collapse, had to keep balancing it.
This is insanely complicated.
In comics, anime, novels—those sorts of stories—magic always looked like something you could just fling out casually.
But in reality, it was enough to make your head split open.
It made me wonder whether the true prerequisite for becoming a mage wasn’t mana, but intelligence.
“Which way now?”
“Left.”
And of course, having to give Park Deokgu directions in a situation like this only made my irritation spike higher.
“Grrrrrraaaah!”
I heard the voices of monsters echoing from far away. They seemed to be farther off, so I couldn’t tell exactly how many there were.
“How many?”
“About two.”
“Take them on yourself.”
“I’ll handle it, Hyung.”
“It doesn’t matter if you can’t kill them. Just open the path.”
“Leave it to me.”
I heard the sounds of crunching bone and wet, tearing flesh.
Watching Park Deokgu’s back as he kept running made him seem appropriately dependable.
I found myself thinking of him as a bit of a tank.
“Next!”
“Right.”
“Grrrrraaaaaaah!”
“How many?”
“Looks like too many to count…”
I immediately thrust out my arm.
“Fireball.”
The sphere of flame I’d been sustaining in my hand paused, then shot forward in a straight line.
I hadn’t expected the recoil.
My hand jerked skyward for a moment from the force of the blast. Even as the spell flew, I didn’t stop calculating the structure of the incantation in my head.
I’d gone to the trouble of memorizing it, so I wasn’t about to let it warp off in some strange direction halfway through.
It exploded against one of the monsters with a thunderous boom, scattering fire in every direction.
With a sharp crack, the monsters caught in the blast were flung aside, engulfed in flames.
The aftershock of the explosion drove a gust of wind back toward us.
Park Deokgu naturally stepped in front with his shield to block it for us.
Most of the monsters that had slammed into walls or been swallowed by the fire let out screams and went flying, and he turned to look at me again with obvious shock on his face.
It had been a lucky hit, really—this was a narrow space and they’d been packed in tightly—but he was probably reacting to the ripple of magic spreading through the area.
“Whoa… Hyung.”
“Huff… huff…”
My legs began to wobble from the sudden drain of mana.
Still, I’d managed to carve open a path.
“Again.”
It was right then that I felt something was off.
“Ah!”
Park Deokgu also looked back without thinking, then stared at me in surprise.
Jung Hayan, Park Hye-young.
The two of them had fallen behind the group.
“Since when…? You haven’t seen them?”
“I-I thought they were definitely still following us until just a moment ago…”
“You idiot.”
I swallowed the curse that was climbing up my throat.
This was my fault.
I’d been so focused on reciting the spell that I hadn’t noticed when the two of them had broken away from us.
The fact that Park Deokgu hadn’t noticed either was a little unexpected, but they must not have gone far.
The real question was whether the girls still knew the route.
Jung Hayan might remember, maybe, but Park Hye-young—the useless little troll—wasn’t the type to memorize a route in her head.
She’d probably been struggling just to keep up.
“H-how… I’m, I’m sorry…”
“It’s not your fault, Deokgu. I should’ve paid more attention. Damn it.”
“So what do we do now?”
It was the question I wanted to ask myself.
If the only one who had broken away from the group was Park Hye-young, I’d have left her behind without hesitation.
But Jung Hayan was with her, and that was the problem.
She was a winning lottery ticket with the future already guaranteed. If I lost her in a place like this over something this absurd, I wouldn’t even have the energy to laugh bitterly.
I was not fond of gambling.
But when necessary, you had to make a move.
“They’re definitely still alive.”
“Th-then…”
“If they had any sense, they would’ve left some kind of mark we could recognize. For now, we’re turning back.”
“Good thinking, Hyung.”
Most of the monsters following us from behind were probably being handled by Kim Hyunsung.
What mattered were the stragglers swarming in from every direction.
It was hard to cast the spell again.
My mana was already at rock bottom, but I thought I could squeeze out one more use if I pushed myself.
“Do you remember roughly when we lost them?”
“W-well, even when we met those two monsters earlier, it seemed like they were still running with us. I-I definitely saw them with my own eyes… and I didn’t even hear them scream…”
I couldn’t remember it clearly either.
Even while I was chanting, I remembered the two of them running after me together.
It would be right to assume they disappeared while I was maintaining the spell.
“Let’s go for now.”
“Understood.”
At first I’d been a little flustered, but the more I thought about it, the more wrong it all felt.
Park Deokgu might be slow, but he wasn’t such an idiot that he’d fail to notice two people disappearing at once.
And neither was I.
Besides, Park Deokgu’s agility stat wasn’t high to begin with. If anyone could fall behind, it would be Park Hye-young, not Jung Hayan.
They hadn’t been caught by a monster.
Maybe they’d triggered some trap hidden in the dungeon itself, but the probability seemed low.
We’d already passed through this route once.
If there had been a trap here, Kim Hyunsung would have warned us.
Then I remembered the look Jung Hayan had given Park Hye-young a moment ago.
No way.
It was too early to make any judgment, but if she’d wanted to separate herself from us, I could understand it to a certain extent.
I didn’t know exactly what spell she’d been reciting, but if she’d cast something else while I was focusing on my own spell, there was a chance I wouldn’t have noticed.
I’d had no breathing room to keep the spell maintained and watch the situation ahead at the same time.
Park Deokgu, with no mana at all, definitely wouldn’t have noticed what Jung Hayan was doing.
Kim Hyunsung was too far away from us to factor in.
I hated even thinking it, but I decided I’d have to consider the possibility that Jung Hayan had wanted a moment alone with Park Hye-young.
The question is why.
I didn’t want to think bad thoughts, but there was no helping the growing unease in my chest.
As Park Deokgu and I ran toward the front, I began to feel a faint trace of mana, just like I had when we found the dungeon entrance.
Damn it…
“Deokgu, faster.”
“Did something happen?”
It was only a guess.
But the faint scent of mana I could feel was giving weight to my theory.