Quest (4)
It was obvious I was the one in the wrong.
It was the kind of rotten stunt you could draw in a picture book and still have people call it trash.
I’d wager that even if Solomon himself came down to pass judgment, he’d still call me guilty.
I had gambled on losing Kim Hyunsung’s good opinion, and yet the situation was, if anything, better than expected.
That bastard, Lee Gicheol, had vanished into the maw of the ogre, and one of Jung Jinho’s lackeys was glaring at me as if he wanted nothing more than to kill me on the spot.
I’d created conflict, and Kim Hyunsung’s reaction wasn’t bad either.
I didn’t know whether he understood I’d done it on purpose or not, but I was more than satisfied with the result.
I’d sent one bastard straight into the ogre’s stomach without lifting a finger.
I’d even gone so far as to make myself the victim and had lost a tooth for the trouble, but in return I’d won the warm concern of my beloved, precious companions. A beautiful and proper outcome, if you asked me.
But I hadn’t expected Jung Hayan to make that face again.
Physical contact with another woman was forbidden.
Is that forbidden too?
Anyone touching my body was also forbidden.
She’d been biting her nails with a creak, creak sound when, noticing that I was still sprawled on the floor, she hurried over to me.
But she hadn’t given up her hostility toward him.
“O-Oppa!”
Still, the moment she saw blood leaking from my mouth, all other thoughts seemed to vanish.
What was more absurd was how she even stroked her ring as if she were about to pour mana into it.
That holy-power ring Jung Hayan carried wasn’t meant to heal scrapes like this.
When I gave her left hand a slight squeeze, she seemed to understand what I wanted and didn’t cast the spell.
Tears were already pooling in her eyes, and they kept spilling from those huge eyes without pause.
“A-Are you okay? What do we do…? What do I do?”
“Of course I’m okay. It was my fault, so… there’s nothing we can do.”
My mouth tasted bitter for no reason.
Losing a tooth had left one side of my cheek numb, but I couldn’t show that it hurt.
If I so much as acted injured, Jung Hayan might whip a spell at the other side of the room on the spot.
Please endure that part for me… I’m begging you.
Firing first from my side definitely wasn’t the worst option, but if possible, I wanted to keep the whole affair in the position of the victim.
Seeing that Kim Hyunsung still hadn’t moved, he was probably hoping for the same thing.
“Hhhhk….”
She kept touching my face as if the world had ended.
She was swallowing back sobs, hiccuping again and again, and looking so close to a panic attack that I found myself wondering whether Jung Hayan was still in her right mind.
Her face was a mess of tears and snot.
Anyone looking at her would think I was dying. For a reaction to a single missing tooth, it was far too intense.
“Are you okay? You’re okay, right? Hic… o-okay, right?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. It’s nothing. Don’t worry about it, Hayan. I’m really fine. Really. It doesn’t hurt at all.”
It hurt, sure, but it wasn’t a serious wound.
Part of me was grateful that she cared this much over something so small, and part of me found it a little frightening.
“You bastard! How dare you!”
Park Deokgu was angry too.
To be fair, it had only been one punch because of a mistake.
But the reactions from Jung Hayan and Park Deokgu had probably blown far past whatever that bastard had expected.
By this point, even Jung Jinho had to be getting flustered.
Of course, the most flustered of all was the one who’d hit me in the first place.
He’d sensed the bad omen in the sudden shift of atmosphere.
Just when things had seemed like they were about to be wrapped up, Jung Hayan’s reaction had thrown a new wrench into the works.
There had been some margin of error, but it was still a pretty solid piece of politics.
A magician’s trick that turned the aggressor into the victim in an instant.
Something more magical than any spell I could cast had just happened right in front of me.
Pfft.
I knew I shouldn’t be smiling, and yet my mouth kept tugging upward.
I knew I shouldn’t be showing this face, and yet I couldn’t stop myself from grinning.
In the end, it was Jung Jinho who lowered his head.
“I’m sorry, Kiyoung.”
“It’s all right.”
“I don’t even know what to say. I understand that you didn’t mean any harm. If you hadn’t used magic for us, something much worse could have happened. Rej… I mean, Jaejun, is probably a little worked up because Gicheol, whom he’d been with for a long time, died. Please try to understand. Jaejun?”
“But….”
“Jaejun. You need to apologize. It couldn’t be helped, and this was the best choice available. If it hadn’t been for Kiyoung, we all might have died.”
I wasn’t sure whether he was glancing at Jung Jinho for approval, but the guy who’d been scowling nonstop finally bowed his head as well.
“I-I lost my temper for a moment. I’m sorry….”
His fists trembled.
He couldn’t even look me in the eye, let alone finish the sentence properly. He probably knew he needed to apologize, but the words wouldn’t come.
He didn’t seem like the sort of person who was naturally inclined to apologize in the first place, and the expression on his face didn’t look like remorse anyway.
If anything, he looked like someone barely keeping his anger in check.
“It’s all right, Jaejun. I can understand. I was a little careless myself, and… I can’t say anything that will comfort you, but I sincerely apologize.”
Of course, I wasn’t sincere either.
“I’m… sorry.”
I could see him forcing his head down.
I didn’t particularly feel as though I’d received an apology, but that was separate from the fact that I felt great.
Pfft.
If the bastard hadn’t had anger-management issues, I might have been the one forced to keep bowing my head instead.
More worrying than him, naturally, was Jung Hayan.
This is…
If she was thinking of doing the same thing she’d done with Park Hye-young, then I’d be the one stuck in a tight spot.
I’d already firmly nailed down Jung Jinho as the culprit in the Park Hye-young incident.
If she suddenly vanished off somewhere with one of Jung Jinho’s lackeys and then came back to find him hacked to pieces, Kim Hyunsung might start suspecting Jung Hayan.
And of course I’d end up on the list of suspects too.
I wanted to stop her, but the look on her face suggested she wasn’t going to listen anyway.
She was clenching her fist so hard her nails were digging into her palm, and when I saw the wound she’d made there, it looked like her attack on him had already become a foregone conclusion.
Not bad.
If I looked at it a little more positively, it really wasn’t bad at all.
Simply put, Jung Hayan moving on her own was a net benefit to me.
If Kim Jaejun died, Jung Jinho would effectively lose his hands and feet.
But why is she…
Still, the sight of Jung Hayan quietly picking up my broken tooth was like watching a bomb that could go off at any moment.
“We should get moving for now, Kiyoung.”
“Yes. Let’s do that. Sorry for causing a scene.”
When I slowly pushed myself upright, Kim Hyunsung slipped his arm under mine as if to support me, but this wasn’t an injury bad enough to need that.
Still, sticking close was the right move for now.
I had to decide the timing for pulling the trigger myself.
Since she hated having her odd side discovered, if I stayed beside her, she probably wouldn’t blow up for the time being.
“Can you walk?”
“Of course.”
“If it’s too difficult….”
“No, I’m really fine. Hyunsung, let’s just get out of here for now, like you said.”
“Yes.”
The iron door was still firmly shut.
It might not open until the quest was complete, or it might only be made to open from the outside, but one thing was certain: if we wanted to survive, we had to complete whatever quests this dungeon was hiding.
Coincidentally, the quest’s name was also Survival.
“Maybe what that woman called survival or clearing was referring to the quests here.”
Jung Jinho’s words were clearly meant to ease the atmosphere.
He probably just wanted to say anything at all.
Everyone, including Jung Hayan, was keeping a wary eye on Jung Jinho and his lackeys.
It was only natural for him to fight to narrow that distance, even a little.
I’d thought about letting it slide, but it turned out I was thinking along similar lines myself.
“I was thinking the same thing. The first floor actually seems to have no real meaning, and this place feels like the main stage for survival and clearing. If survival means getting out of the current situation, avoiding or overcoming the monsters, then the clearing quest would be resolved at the same time. If that hypothesis is correct, then the first floor really was a place with no meaning at all.”
In other words, however this turned out, we had to solve survival and clearing at once right here.
I glanced at Kim Hyunsung, and he didn’t seem to object.
He was probably too focused on finding the way ahead to pay close attention to the conversation, but since he didn’t say anything, it looked like my theory and Jung Jinho’s had merit.
Survival and clearing—both of the things the woman had mentioned on the first floor—were supposed to happen here.
“I understand survival, but….”
“There may be something like a boss monster here.”
“Ah.”
“That would be the normal pattern. From the status windows and classes, this place is pretty similar to an online game. If this weren’t the tutorial, there might have been a whole set of conditions for clearing it, but if it’s a dungeon focused purely on survival and clearing, then there’s probably some other kind of monster here. Killing that monster would likely be the clearing condition.”
“I think the same thing, Kiyoung.”
“It’s just a guess. Another possibility is that the solution is finding a path out.”
“You mean a way to escape outside.”
“Yes. It could be a way out, or it could be some device that lets all of us escape. There are a few other possibilities, but none of them are coming to mind.”
Or not. It was just the sort of half-baked speculation anyone could make, a string of nonsense I tossed out of my head. Jung Jinho and even Yoo Seokwoo were probably thinking the same thing, but there’s a difference between thinking it and saying it out loud.
“You’ve been considering a lot of things, Kiyoung….”
Yoo Seokwoo muttered under his breath.
There was a slight edge to his voice, as if he were asking whether I’d deliberately tossed a fireball into the room. I naturally brushed it off with a smile.
He was the one threatening my life, after all.
“It’s just delusion.”
Just delusion.
As we kept walking, no monsters appeared like they had before.
There were a few occasional sightings, of course, but nothing that could really be called a battle like the one earlier.
Because another disturbance might break out, we dealt with them as quickly as possible, and nothing like that earlier accident happened again.
Our pace had slowed to a crawl because we were exhausted, but even so, we found a little room to breathe.
What was funny, though, was that mana was refilling on its own.
Kim Hyunsung still frowned from time to time, and Jung Hayan kept staring at Kim Jaejun, but thankfully nothing happened.
As for Jung Hayan in particular, whatever grievance or resentment she’d been harboring seemed to swell every time she looked at me with my mouth swollen shut, and every so often she would burst into tears on her own and mutter to herself while shaking her head.
The one who seemed most thrown off by her sudden tears was Park Deokgu.
Despite his earlier boasting that he was used to women, he seemed completely unable to figure out how he was supposed to comfort Jung Hayan.
And honestly, anyone would have found the whole situation strange.
What was even more unsettling than the tears, though, were the words she’d whispered in a tiny voice while her head was bowed.
Her voice was so quiet I couldn’t hear it properly even though she was close by.
From the fragments that did catch my ear, it sounded like she was saying…
He has to die.
But I didn’t show that I’d understood.
That would be better for me too.
I could be certain of that.
“I’ll take revenge for you.”
It was better to act like I hadn’t heard a thing.
That much I knew for sure.