No Holidays for Hunters (2)
After a short while of rest, Lee Jun woke the two of them up just before midnight—the Ant Nest's respawn time.
"Mmm… Boss?"
"Come on, up you get. It's almost time to start clearing."
It was 11:50 PM. He'd woken them ten minutes early on purpose—to show them the gimmick of the fourth floor and the changes that came with the respawn. They would be coming back here often, after all, which meant sooner or later they'd inevitably be caught in the dungeon when the respawn hit. Better to experience it for the first time on the relatively safe fourth floor, he'd judged, than to be caught flat-footed somewhere deeper.
"There'll be a respawn at the stroke of midnight. Once it passes, we'll begin the real run."
"Mmnyaahh… yeaahh…."
Choi Jeong-hyeon managed a yawn and an answer at the same time. She'd slept a good two hours, but apparently it hadn't been enough. Well, back at the dormitory she used to get a solid eight hours every night. Probably just one of those people who needed more sleep than most.
And what about Seo Yoon? She typically slept no more than four hours and kept a rigorously regular schedule—perhaps an extension of that habit, because there wasn't a trace of drowsiness about her. Lee Jun glanced back and forth between the two utterly different women and smiled faintly.
Interesting, seeing them side by side like that.
This was the first time the team had crossed over a full day mid-run with this lineup. Getting to know each person's quirks one by one like this was part of the pleasure of clearing a dungeon—and part of building the bonds that turned strangers into comrades, too. It had been the same with his old Arcana companions. Pablo had the worst sleeping habits of the lot, and Ebra's snoring could shake the walls. They'd ended up camping on bare dirt more nights than he could count… but looking back now, he thought of those as good memories.
And just as Lee Jun was drifting through this and that reminiscence, Seo Yoon—whose drowsiness had lifted first—spoke up while gazing at the sky.
"There's no change here with the passage of time."
"Mm, that's right."
It varied floor by floor, but the fourth floor's sky stayed bright around the clock. By his rough reckoning it always looked like two in the afternoon. Of course, he knew that from his regression, so he kept it to himself.
"Thorough as always."
Just in case.
"Hmm? Really? Don't you want to start sharing some of it with someone else, though? Carrying it all alone must get lonely."
For some reason her nasal whine stretched longer than usual tonight. Lonely, huh. Hard to say. He'd never really thought about it—wasn't the type to, for one thing, and it hadn't been all that long since he'd regressed, for another. And… as much as he hated to admit it, that was partly thanks to this woman.
"Me?"
Yes.
"Fufufu, and would you care to elaborate on exactly what you mean? Out of your own mouth, please."
…This is why I hate talking to you.
"Oh, I'm getting the full story on this one. Out with it!"
And there was nothing worse than this creature getting smug about things. Still, he couldn't deny the facts—and he didn't particularly want to, either.
Silhouette knew about the regression. She shared his memories. Because of that, conversation between them flowed naturally, opinions passing back and forth without explanation. And that, in a way, resolved exactly the loneliness she'd teased him about.
Which is what makes it strange that this creature is the one filling that role.
They had fought each other with their lives on the line, for one thing. Looking back it felt almost like an old anecdote—oh, that happened, didn't it—but they'd both come genuinely close to dying.
"Oh, come on. Don't be so coy about it. What matters is now, right?"
That was true enough.
"Besides, it wasn't exactly mutual life-or-death, was it? I was taking it easy."
You lost, and yet somehow you never shut up.
"Hmph. I was going easy on you. If I'd really wanted you dead, you'd have died the moment we started!"
And that, everyone, is what we call a loser's excuse. She fell for his bluff completely at the end, after all.
"N-no I didn't!"
With that final declaration, nothing more came back from Silhouette. Judging by the vague emotion drifting over from her side of the bond, she'd sulked. Well, leave her be and she'd be chattering away again before long. For now, it was time to focus on the run.
The fourth floor of the Ant Nest—the floor where monsters scurried busily along the ledges of a sheer, dizzying cliff. Its difficulty was the kind that was easy if you called it easy, and hard if you called it hard.
"On this floor, we have to hunt down the poligots leaping between the cliff faces."
Poligots. Gentle, herbivorous monsters that resembled goats. They weren't aggressive in the least—if anything, their habit of fleeing from humans was exactly why they'd been rated as D-Class. The problem arose from the combination of their nature, the fourth floor's environment, and the Ant Nest's peculiar rules.
"Like every other floor, you can't move on to the next one until every monster on this floor has been dealt with."
"Hmm… then wouldn't it be easy to just knock them all off the cliff?"
"I wish it were that simple, but unfortunately that won't work."
Lee Jun had once thought of the exact method Choi Jeong-hyeon had just proposed. In a previous run. And he had never once tried it again.
"On this floor, there's no ground beneath the cliff."
"…I'm sorry?"
Meaning: anything that fell off that edge would fall forever.
"Well, not literally forever, I suppose. Living things grow old and die eventually."
"…Then if we fell in there…"
"I can't say what would happen. I've never fallen in myself."
"……"
"……"
Neither Seo Yoon nor Choi Jeong-hyeon had anything to say to that. Yes—this floor hadn't earned its number for nothing. Take it at face value and it was simply unclearable. In his previous run, Sisela had breezed through here with her ability. As a Tamer, she could easily lure the poligots over to safe ground. The problem, absurdly enough, had come after—when it was time to dispatch the gathered herd. Sisela had burst into tears.
But then again… she had a point.
She adored animals more than anyone he knew. And frankly, watching a hundred goats get slaughtered before your eyes would make even a grown, hardened man recoil.
"Right now, we have no means of luring them to us. So we have no choice but to take them down one at a time."
Which meant the real challenge was keeping the poligots from plummeting off that cliff. Having to worry about the monsters' welfare. Part of him wanted to ask what this was all even supposed to be.
Just then, Choi Jeong-hyeon, watching the goats hop between the rock faces, asked a question.
"Um… you said we need to clear this floor before midnight, right?"
"Right. The time limit is twenty-four hours."
"Then… what happens if we go over?"
Instead of answering, Lee Jun looked at his watch. Fifty-nine minutes. The respawn would arrive soon enough—and with it, the answer to her question.
"Whatever happens, don't panic, and don't move from where you're standing. Moving is dangerous."
"Yes? What do you—"
"Thirty seconds."
Thirty. Twenty. Ten. Nine… eight… seven….
With each tick of the countdown, the expressions on Seo Yoon's and Choi Jeong-hyeon's faces shifted. Nerves, probably. Hmm. Had he scared them too much? It really wasn't that big a deal.
And then—
The numbers on his watch all hit zero. 12:00:00. The respawn had arrived.
"This is…"
"Ah— it's dark…!"
The two women seemed thrown by the sudden change. No—not seemed. Lee Jun couldn't see a thing either. When the Ant Nest hit its respawn time, everything went dark. But not the kind of darkness they knew. It wasn't that a light source had vanished; conjure light with magic and you still couldn't see your hand in front of your face. Darkness that was purely conceptual. Nothing worked against it.
"Boss, this is…"
"Just wait ten seconds."
"Uwaaah… y-you're still next to me, right?"
"Of course. It'll brighten any moment now."
Roughly thirty seconds passed, and then their vision flooded back to brightness. And everything reverted—back to the state it had been in when they first set foot in this place.
"Uuungh…"
Choi Jeong-hyeon winced against the sudden brightness. It wasn't actually blinding—almost certainly a reflexive reaction.
"Well? What do you see?"
"Uh… did anything… change?"
She looked around, but nothing had. The tent pitched behind them stood untouched; the pot and dishes before it sat exactly where they'd left them. And the three of them were unchanged as well.
"Everything looks the same to me…"
"That's right. Right now, nothing has changed."
"…I'm sorry?"
The Ant Nest's respawn only affected the monsters. Unlike an ordinary dungeon, even altered terrain did not revert when the respawn came. Instead, the terrain shifted every time they crossed from one floor to the next, regardless of the clock—and on certain floors, that could be exploited to clear the run at speed.
"……"
"Seo Yoon?"
"…Yes?"
Lee Jun called out to her—she was standing there with a dazed look, glancing around at their surroundings. She seemed her usual self, yet something felt subtly off. It was a small change, but he'd spent nearly three months working beside her. He could feel at least that much.
"Is something bothering you?"
"No, I'm fine."
"If anything feels off in your body, tell me immediately. Going through a respawn can bring on symptoms similar to mana intoxication."
Truth be told, though Lee Jun himself couldn't sense it, a staggering volume of mana churned through the floor during a respawn. This time they'd simply waited it out on the fourth floor without touching anything, so he'd expected no complications. But Seo Yoon's mana overload had not been fully cured yet. Something unexpected could still go wrong.
"Thank you for your concern, sir. I am truly fine."
"Hm… all right, understood. Still—if anything feels strange, say so right away. It's not just your safety on the line, Seo Yoon. It's the lives of everyone on this raid."
"Yes, sir. I'll keep that in mind."
Seo Yoon answered with a nod—but she still seemed to be wrestling with some vague wrongness she couldn't name. Choi Jeong-hyeon hadn't noticed that much, but even so she kept a worried eye on her colleague. To every question in the younger woman's anxious barrage, Seo Yoon answered only that she was fine.
Well, she's not one to dig her heels in over something that matters… so she really must be fine.
Given Seo Yoon's character, she would never risk dragging others into danger. Judging by that, there shouldn't be anything that would compromise the run. So for now, back to the Ant Nest.
"Now then, let me walk you through how we'll take this floor."
Two things demanded attention on the fourth floor of the Ant Nest. First, the time limit. Second, the terrain.
"There is a twenty-four-hour limit, but honestly, time rarely runs short. What matters is the terrain."
With that, Lee Jun drew a massive sniper rifle from his Pocket and walked to the edge of the cliff, setting it up with the ease of long habit.
"Our one priority is keeping those maddened poligots from falling off that edge. That comes before everything else."
Choi Jeong-hyeon blinked at him.
"Yes? Mad… with rage, you say?"
Instead of answering, Lee Jun dropped prone and shouldered the rifle.
Clack—
A poligot leaping between the rock faces slid into his scope. He steadied his breath, held it for a moment, and eased the trigger back.
Taang—
"…One."
A single corpse, its skull pierced clean through, tumbled off into the abyss below. And in the same instant, every poligot nearby scattered in all directions at once—at a speed the eye could barely follow.
"That's…"
"That speed is their baseline. And it's only going to get faster."
Now, the real run begins. Ninety-nine to go.
With every kill, the herd grew wilder. He could pick them off with the rifle up to around fifty, but past that, long-range attacks simply stopped working. That was when the true floor began.
"Whew…"
Lee Jun drew a breath and swung the muzzle toward his next target.