The Ant and the Grasshopper (3)
The two of them speared every last one of the swarm of ants that came flooding at them.
Seo Yoon clearly had a gift for this.
She absorbed Lee Jun's advice at remarkable speed. At this rate, her combat instincts alone would reach A-Class in no time.
I can't wait to see how far she climbs once we cure the mana overload.
Still, there were definite shortcomings — and while no human can be perfect, this was, in Lee Jun's judgment, an almost fatal flaw.
"Ms. Seo Yoon, one moment."
"Haah... haah... Yes, sir."
Winded, Seo Yoon turned an attentive ear to him.
"That last fight was very good. Like I've mentioned before, you really do learn quickly."
"Thank... you."
"But there are things you'll need to fix."
There was only one thing Lee Jun wanted to say to her.
Techniques and tricks were all well and good, but in the end, you had to build a foundation. What he meant by "foundation" was a fighting style of her own — something Seo Yoon had agonized over and honed for herself.
Put simply: before copying anyone else, she needed to find a method of combat optimized for her own body and drill it until it was second nature.
"......."
"I noticed you watching my style closely and trying to imitate it. But you and I couldn't be more different."
"Do... we?"
"We absolutely do. You have far more aptitude for this than I do."
"More than you... sir?"
Of course.
Seo Yoon's talent was head and shoulders above Lee Jun's own.
"I brute-force everything with experience. The only thing that puts me above the hunters currently active in the field is that one thing, and nothing else."
He had been thrown into every imaginable situation, and he had clawed his way out of all of them. The experience points that came from that were an asset no one could afford to dismiss.
But that was all it amounted to. Flip the statement around, and it meant that any other hunter, given the same experience, could easily knock a Lee Jun off the board.
"I know that one day you'll surpass me, Ms. Seo Yoon. And that day may not be very far off."
"I..."
"When that happens, I'll broker a move to a better place for you, and I'll sponsor your promotion reviews so you can rise to a higher-ranked hunter. That's what a management agency is for in the first place."
To cultivate capable hunters and send them out into the world. To contribute, in that way, to humanity's ability to stand against the gates. And once those capable hunters held the line properly, a hunter with not a scrap of mana would retire completely — and live out his days safely in a stable society.
"I see. That's... how you see it, sir."
"I'm an S-Class in name only. Having you stay under me benefits no one — the Association, a guild, anything would be better for you. Socially speaking, it's the right move too."
"......."
Seo Yoon wore a complicated expression. She was probably picturing her own future for the first time.
Graduating from a management agency's development roster, becoming an outstanding hunter, making a name for herself. To Seo Yoon, that must have seemed like something from another lifetime — the idea of herself becoming a high-ranked hunter.
And yet Lee Jun had declared it to Go Seok-gu outright. That within three years, he would produce five S-Class hunters.
He'd rigged the contract a little as insurance, but the declaration had been made in earnest.
Because if humanity couldn't manage even that much, it would be annihilated in the end.
"I will make you an S-Class hunter, Ms. Seo Yoon. I guarantee you that I'll keep that promise to the letter."
"...Understood. Then I will strive accordingly."
The words "S-Class" might land on her as a burden. But then again, everyone who stepped into this industry was chasing that seat, weren't they? S-Class hunter.
He was telling her he would take her to a star no one could grasp.
And yet a flicker of unease showed in her face. It seemed to stem from the limit imposed by her mana overload.
Hmm. Right.
Here, then, was a time for a boss to offer some real comfort — and lend her some strength.
With that thought, Lee Jun wiped the blood from his hands, and then took Seo Yoon's hand in his.
"S-Sir...?"
"It might feel like a distant thing. A difficult thing. But I'm not going to give up. So please don't give up either, Ms. Seo Yoon."
"I— I understand. So, um... that is..."
Squirm, squirm—
Through the hand he held firmly, he could feel Seo Yoon's fingers wriggling. She had turned her head away entirely, avoiding his gaze.
This was... ah. She was embarrassed.
"Ahem."
Lee Jun let go of her hand.
He'd meant to put some strength into the gesture, and instead he'd only drained the air out of the moment, hadn't he.
"Shall we... move on to the next floor, then?"
"That... would probably be for the best."
They swiftly scattered the awkwardness before it could settle, and set off at a brisk pace toward their next objective.
Giant Ants shared behavioral patterns with real ants. A few details differed, but on the broad strokes, they were the same.
And among those similarities was the fact that... they dug tunnels and lived in them.
"Here we are."
They had reached the entrance of the Giant Ant nest.
A nest inside a nest, huh.
It felt like a bad pun, but since they'd started calling it the Ant Nest, so be it. Though considering the one who'd named this place was the Director of the Technology Bureau... it probably was a bad pun.
Regardless, this was the crux of clearing the floor. The second floor couldn't be cleared without going inside the burrow.
"So this is... the nest."
"It is. It's a little more dangerous inside, so stay sharp."
"Yes, sir."
With that, the two of them stepped into the tunnel.
Given the ants' sheer size, the entrance was easily wide enough for a person to walk through. Even the workers were considerable, and the soldiers — bigger still — had to be able to pass, which presumably explained the scale.
The interior was laid out like a labyrinth. What's more, it was vast, so unless you took the optimal route, you would get lost without fail. Wander badly enough, and you could miss the respawn window entirely.
"The paths are... truly convoluted. I'd almost doubt this is the second floor."
Seo Yoon was right on the mark.
It was something Lee Jun had been chewing on for a while now, too.
It does feel strange, calling this the second floor.
Dungeons of this type normally ramped up difficulty floor by floor, step by step. But this second floor was harder than the third — and the reason was none other than this maze of a layout.
As long as the only problem is the paths, difficulty doesn't really factor in, does it?
Fair point, honestly. However tangled the corridors were, a stealth-class from the martial branch or a handful of utility skills from the special branch could crack the place wide open. A week at the outside would be plenty.
What does that have to do with— oh!
Right. Here, no matter how generously you counted, you had a twenty-four-hour limit.
Exactly!
The Ant Nest was a double dungeon. It had to be cleared like any other gate — but at the same time, it sat inside a dungeon, and so the respawn timer applied.
That was what made this place fundamentally unlike a standard gate assault. Stretch the clock however you liked, you had to clear one floor within a single day. Fail, and every monster you'd already killed came back — and you had to kill them all over again from scratch.
And that introduced one more problem. A problem unique to this second floor.
On the second floor... there existed a single entity that never, under any circumstances, left the deepest reaches of the burrow.
That would be...
Right — the Queen Ant. The queen of the Giant Ants.
She had almost no combat power whatsoever, but she made her home at the very heart of this tangled warren.
In other words, the key to clearing the second floor was simple: could you locate the queen before the respawn timer ran out?
But then killing the queen and mopping up the remaining ants would take forever, wouldn't it?
No. If that were the mechanic, a small party could never clear it at all.
Then what?
The chamber where the queen dwelled. The moment an intruder set foot inside it, every Giant Ant on the floor converged on the queen's room.
You simply ate them all as they came.
One thing to watch out for: if you killed the queen first, the ants panicked and scattered to the four winds. At that point, the run was effectively a failure. So a team that didn't know this and killed the queen up front was better off just escaping the second floor entirely.
So we just leave her alive?
Nothing to be done about it. And the queen has no combat power anyway.
Still feels wrong, though, doesn't it...
But what could he do? These were the things they were.
Hmm... then the exit?
Once every ant was dealt with, you just went back up to the surface. The gate always manifested above ground.
You're sure? Aren't you never supposed to be sure about things like this?
Sadly for you, this one is a certainty. A gate never appears in terrain altered by living creatures.
Why not?
How should I know? Take it up with the god who built the Ant Nest.
Well... he had once floated a hypothesis — that it came down to how the gates formed. That a gate was created through a massive quantity of mana, and terrain freshly reshaped by living things simply couldn't hold that much of it. But there was no way to verify that at present. He could ask the Technology Bureau's director someday, if he were truly curious... though honestly, he wasn't curious enough for that.
Lee Jun was no scholar or researcher.
Anyway — back to business.
When you gathered all of these mechanics together and looked at them as a whole, something odd emerged. Weighing every reason above, the second floor seemed almost... designed on the assumption that the raider already knew every path by heart.
Granted... if that's simply how it was built, there's nothing to say about it.
Dungeons, after all, had no codified laws. Even the notion that difficulty rose steadily with each floor was nothing more than an inference drawn from everything observed so far. If a newly discovered multi-layered dungeon turned out to run its difficulty in reverse, no one had any grounds to complain. Dungeons and gates were just like that.
In fact, this habit of forcing everything into a template and crying foul whenever reality didn't fit could itself be dangerous thinking.
To be trapped inside a mold was... to have no way of predicting when, or how, you would die. For hunters who lived perpetually at the mercy of inventive causes of death, that was utterly lethal.
For now... focus back on the run.
It was about time they started crossing paths with the patrolling ants.
And.
Before the thought had even finished forming, two ants came rounding the corner ahead of them.
Their heads were twice the size of the workers he'd seen earlier — their whole bulk far greater, and above all, their menacing mandibles were honed to a razor's edge.
"Soldier ants."
Lee Jun said quietly to Seo Yoon.
"Among Giant Ants, they're the ones designated as soldiers. Their destructive power goes without saying, but their mobility, their judgment — everything is a step above the workers."
Giant Ants mirrored the real thing in both role and way of life. Naturally, then, there were those who served as the soldier caste. Giant Ant Soldiers.
The old Lee Jun would have needed considerable time and effort to bring down a single one. Back then, he'd handled them with explosives instead — luring them down an unused passage and burying them outright with a blast. For someone who knew every corridor of the nest by heart, it had been the easiest and fastest method.
But.
Today would be different.
"First, I'll show you how to fight them. Like I said earlier — don't fixate on tricks. Focus on how the soldiers move."
"...Understood."
"Good."
With that, Lee Jun advanced slowly toward the soldier ants.
Sensing something subtly off in the air, the creature chose to watch and wait rather than charge outright.
So they really are smarter than the workers. Not that it changes much.
He exhaled once, slow and steady.
At the same moment, Lee Jun drew something from the Pocket.
A beloved, long-missed sensation flowed through his hand. Something old and crude... something black. A weapon that should have come as a pair — of which only one side remained now.
"Good timing, actually. There's something I've been meaning to test."
Pablo's tonfa.
Right hand closing around it, Lee Jun charged at the soldier ant.