The Shadow That Finally Awakens (1)
Lee Jun and Seo Yoon were moving away from the boss room as fast as their legs could carry them.
“Almost there. Just a little further.”
“Underst… ood….”
He had shaken Yoon Seol off their tail, but letting his guard down now would be a mistake. She could just as easily blast her way through a protective barrier and come after them.
Granted, that barrier was one of Freya's creations, so it wouldn't crumble so easily. But there was always the unlikely case, and hurrying never hurt anyone.
“Haah… haah….”
Seo Yoon had clearly reached her limit. Her stamina had never been her strong suit to begin with, and the pace Yoon Seol had forced on her had thrown her rhythm off entirely. It was understandable. Honestly, the fact that she'd held on this long already counted as remarkable progress.
“Right here… then right again….”
Lee Jun used the scattered corpses of monsters as signposts to retrace the route they'd come by, sketching the map in his head and narrowing down their position bit by bit. At long last, he reached the place that led to the hidden piece.
“…So this is it.”
A massive wall, covered in a faded mural. The mural chronicled the history sealed within this gate — and while he couldn't decode it with complete precision, the odds were good that it doubled as a hint to the hidden piece.
Finding a hidden piece by pure chance was, for all practical purposes, impossible. Clues like this were concealed inside the gate, waiting to be deciphered so that the path forward could be opened.
“This is….”
“I saw it on the way through. It's probably… related to the hidden piece, sir.”
“You noticed this, in the middle of that whole mad scramble?”
Seo Yoon said it while staring intently at the mural. Well, he had known about it from the start — but letting her believe otherwise didn't seem so bad, so he saw no reason to correct her. And even if he did, what explanation would he offer?
That he'd regressed? Ridiculous.
Shaking off the thought, Lee Jun studied the mural slowly. He already knew how to get in, of course, but he had to play the part. Pretending to decode the wall was simply good theater.
“Looking at this… this gate is tied to the Frilea Continent. I've heard Freya talk about something very similar before.”
Combining the gate information he'd gathered last run with the details plainly visible in the mural, he began his interpretation.
“The Frilea Continent of the Nezer dimension. The dragon at the very top here… is probably one of the Nine Primordial Dragons from Nezer's creation myth. Judging by the color — red — that would be Karkamus.”
The Nezer dimension. Freya's homeland. Whenever she drank, she would regale him with the legends of the Frilea Continent — hours upon hours of drunken rambling that was a trial to endure, but entertaining enough to be worth listening to.
“The ash-gray dragon Grakmare shaped the continent, and the blue dragon Alkaraar filled the seas around it so the land would float. While the other dragons populated the world with all manner of creatures and made the soil fertile, Karkamus, as the story goes, despised that abundance.”
And back to the mural. The colossal dragon painted at the very top was showering the entire world in flame.
And this was… a volcano.
“The natural disasters were born from Karkamus's disgust. This scene is… the first volcanic eruption, I'd say. It might explain why this gate is a lava zone.”
Comparing against last run, it seemed the mural changed along with the gate's theme. When Lee Jun had first entered, the gate had been alpine, and the mural had depicted Altaveraz, the green dragon who created mountains and trees. Half of it had been destroyed, admittedly — but that was after he'd already claimed the hidden piece.
“Well, anyway. The hint for obtaining the hidden piece… should be this part here.”
At the edge of the grand mural, a single glowing red stone jutted out. Around that stone, salamanders — Karkamus's minions, by the look of them — were painted circling toward the right in a dynamic swirl of motion. And where that swirling figure froze mid-stroke…
Bottom-right corner. Three times, evenly spaced.
Tap—
Tap—
Tap—
Lee Jun struck the stone at fixed intervals, then took half a step back to observe.
“……?”
A brief explanation, then straight into action. Stunned by the sudden leap, Seo Yoon could only stare blankly at him. But there was no more explaining to be done here. All that remained was to watch, quietly, as events unfolded.
Grrrrrrrrrrk—
The center of the mural split apart, revealing the hidden chamber behind it — just as Karkamus had first shaken this world at the dawn of time. Like a volcano swallowing the sky and an earthquake tearing the earth, the great mural divided into two halves, far from cleanly. "Collapsed" would have been the more honest description.
“Guess I had the right answer.”
Lee Jun remarked it with perfect calm, then pulled a phosphorus flare from his Pocket and tossed it into the space beyond.
Bang—
“…Hm.”
Nothing changed. He heard the flare detonate, but the pitch-black darkness swallowed it whole.
“Seo Yoon, can you see anything?”
“Nothing at all. It's… absolute darkness in there.”
She was a rogue by trade — a class built to operate even in considerable darkness — and an assassin, its highest tier, at that. If even she could see nothing, his best guess was that the space itself was severed from the world outside.
“Looks like we won't learn anything until we go in.”
The hidden piece left inside was called The Shadow That Finally Awakens. Fittingly enough for that name, it was pitch-dark and deeply unsettling from the very start.
I suppose I'll just have to brace myself.
The better a hidden piece's performance, the harder it was to obtain — that much went without saying. There were exceptions, of course, but exceptions were just that: exceptions. Praying that your gate happened to be one of them was the same as going all-in on a bluff. Most people would call that idiotic.
And yet.
Just as Lee Jun was about to take his first step into the black space—
“…A black dragon?”
He found something in a corner of the mural. A figure that hadn't been there until the door opened. In the spot that had been concealed behind the red stone until moments ago, a black dragon was painted.
“Is this… what the salamanders were circling around?”
The black dragon, Avitatur. Why — why — was the final dragon, the dragon of apocalypse, painted here, in a place devoted to Karkamus's myth?
Avitatur, the wickedest of all the wicked gods, has yet to appear in this world. That day is the end of the dimension — no one knows when it will come. He will emerge the moment it is born into being, you see.
Freya had said it plainly: Avitatur had never once appeared in the world.
So then… how was this image supposed to be interpreted?
“Among decoding methods, a record of something not yet fulfilled is either… a prayer for it to come to pass, or an allegory of something that already has.”
This couldn't be a mural praying for the apocalypse. Whatever its contents, a mural dealing with the Nine Primordial Dragons was a sacred thing. Painting Avitatur into it — the accursed one who had lost even his body and fallen to the outer realm — made no sense. Black mages who worshipped Avitatur would never bother depicting the other nine dragons alongside him.
So that left allegory.
“Is the hidden piece… really beyond this?”
Don't tell me it changed from last run. No — if it had, opening this chamber should have been impossible too. Then what… what was this?
“…Boss?”
“…….”
Lee Jun thought it through. In less than a minute, it would be a full hour since they'd entered the gate. The moment that hour passed, the path to the hidden piece would close for good.
Damn it. I should have interrogated that hunter far more thoroughly last run.
Back then, out of consideration for a hunter who'd walked out of a gate alone and alive, he'd barely pressed the interrogation at all — figuring he could always ask at leisure later. He had never imagined the man would die five days later. In the end he'd gotten almost nothing on the gate, and naturally, the process for obtaining the hidden piece had been lost to the fog.
“…….”
So. What now? Give up here?
And what about the bet?
Lose the bet, and there is no next time.
Deliberation is a double-edged sword for a hunter. Acting without thought is an express train straight to death — but agonizing too long… is like lying down on a sinking ship.
“…Damn it.”
Which meant the time to choose was now.
Lee Jun ran through the arsenal stored in his Pocket. This should be more than enough. He'd stuffed in everything it could hold, so he'd be fine. Whatever lay sleeping in there… it didn't matter. The hunter who'd obtained the hidden piece last run had only been lower B-Class. If someone like that could manage it, so could he.
“…We're going in.”
Lee Jun handed Seo Yoon the bag holding her equipment, and told her — firmly — not to let her guard down for a second. She knew as well as he did that inside a gate, anything could happen at any moment.
“Whew….”
He exhaled and stood before the ruined mural.
Click—
Drawing a single pistol, Lee Jun stepped into the black space first. Seo Yoon followed close behind.
“…How long has it been, since the door opened?”
“Hundreds of years, at least, since we were sealed in here.”
“It was so terribly long that I stopped counting past three hundred.”
“At last… at last, we shall see the light of the outside world.”
“The first ones we meet… I really ought to reward them, shouldn't I?”
Chilling.
The passage was narrow and long. They had been walking for five minutes already, and any hope that something new would appear was quietly guttering out. A wind with no discernible origin kept blowing — as if warning them not to press on. Backward, ever backward.
“Stay right beside me.”
“…Understood.”
Was Seo Yoon rattled too? Her answer came out in a voice that trembled at the edges.
How many more minutes had passed? The corridor, which had seemed like it would never change, gradually widened until it opened into an enormous cavern. The darkness ahead was absolute — not an inch of it visible — but the echoes told them exactly how vast the space was.
“…What in the world kind of place is this.”
Lee Jun prided himself on having braved more gates and dungeons than most. Add in everything from before his regression, and he was likely more experienced than anyone alive in this era. And yet… he had never seen anything like this place.
“…….”
His instinct spoke. This place is dangerous. More dangerous than anywhere he had ever been. Even more than… that final dragon, where he had lost his life.
And then—
“Mm~ ♬ Hee-hee-hee~♪ Hmm-hmm~♫”
A humming voice rang out through the silent cavern. It was a beautiful sound… and at the same time, it raised the hair on his neck.
“…Goddamn it.”
Fwoosh—
“My, my. The first words I've heard in centuries, and they're a curse.”
A woman's voice — seductive, honeyed. The moment it slid across his eardrums, torches began to kindle one by one along the cavern walls.
Fss—
Flss—
Fss—
“How rude.”
“…….”
Before his eyes could adjust to the sudden brightness, while his entire field of vision still swam in a bleary haze, Lee Jun searched desperately for the source of the voice. And in the same instant, Seo Yoon — who had seen it too — spoke quietly.
“Boss… that is….”
Lee Jun didn't answer.
No — he couldn't answer.
He'd had it wrong from the very start. Why had two full raid teams been wiped out in such a featureless, unremarkable gate? At first he'd assumed some external factor was at play. But the reason every investigation had turned up absolutely nothing was simple.
The reason had always been… inside.
And Lee Jun understood, with gut-deep certainty: the thing standing before his eyes right now.
That was the reason.
“Hee-hee~”
A single hum rolled through the vast cavern. In the middle of it, inexplicably, stood a single chair. And seated upon it… was a black silhouette.
“Lovely to see you?”
On his end, the feeling was not lovely at all.