Glutton
Glutton
“I’m gonna poop! I’m gonna poop!”
“Hey!”
“I took my pants off!”
“Ah—no, don’t!”
“Ugh…!”
“….”
“…What the hell? Nobody’s coming out?”
The boy tugged his pants back up with a sigh.
At that, Isabella’s expression shifted. She had been gripping her dagger, ready to spring an ambush.
Her lips twitched.
She looked like she was fighting hard not to laugh.
But this was Necrovalley.
The city of the dead.
The idea that a little boy and girl could be wandering an underground dungeon connected to Necrovalley defied all common sense.
And then there was the conversation itself.
They mentioned a hidden camera.
There were no hidden cameras in Pangenia.
So they had been summoned from Earth?
That was strange too.
I was the last one summoned.
Before becoming a Player, when I had been playing as Wilhelm, the concurrent user count had been one.
In other words, every other gamer had already been summoned as a Player.
And now, suddenly, new summons?
Is this connected to Pangenia’s collapse?
Collapse. Erosion.
Perhaps it was even linked to the “First Rift” that opened once the erosion hit ten percent.
“Hey! People!”
The boy shouted the moment I stepped into view.
He looked about twelve. Soft cheeks, a cute face that had never known real hardship. He wore glasses and a blue short-sleeved shirt embroidered with an elephant.
“See? I told you it was a hidden camera.”
“People… in a place like this? I don’t hear any crows, though.”
The girl looked even younger. Her hair was braided long down her back, freckles standing out across her face. Compared to the boy, she was remarkably calm.
“Mister. This is a hidden camera, right?”
“We’re trapped too.”
“Huh…?”
The boy’s eyes began to tremble.
It wasn’t a lie. From this point on we had to find a way out; if we failed, we would be no different from lost children.
The underground dungeon of Necrovalley shifted its paths from moment to moment.
The boy spread both arms and shrugged.
“We’re screwed. These people are useless.”
“They’re still adults. Better to rely on grown-ups than little kids like us.”
“You think so?”
“Mister, and pretty big sister. I’m Jin-ha, and this fatty is Jin-woo. What are your names?”
“We are…”
Isabella started to speak; I raised a hand and stopped her.
“How long have you been here?”
Jin-ha pushed out her lower lip and shook her head.
“I don’t know. Every time we hear a crow, monsters jump out. I lost my phone, so I have no idea how much time has passed…”
“Summoned from Earth?”
“Of course we’re Earthlings. Wait—are you not from Earth, mister? Are you an alien?”
Earth. Judging by the names, they were Korean.
Coincidence?
She’s looking at them like she wants to eat them up with cuteness.
Isabella already seemed completely smitten with the two children.
Had she always liked kids this much?
“Did you get summoned while playing a game too, mister?”
“Something like that.”
“Pangenia?”
“….”
“I knew that game was the problem. I never should have agreed to watch it for this fatty even for a second.”
Jin-ha sighed.
From the sound of it, the two of them had been raising a single character together when they were summoned.
“Anyway, if we just sit here nothing good will happen. We have to get out before the crow caws again.”
“Crow?”
“Yes. Every time a crow caws, monsters appear.”
Just as a bear claims its den, dungeons had masters of their own.
And a dungeon’s nature and traits changed according to that master.
Only by killing the dungeon’s master could one freely explore it.
“Stay close and follow me.”
I took the lead and walked on.
Undead-type monsters.
Zombies shambled about in certain zones of the dungeon.
They don’t attack unless the crow caws, I see.
They showed no aggression. Even if you walked right past them, they never looked your way; they simply bashed their heads against the walls.
As long as you followed the rules, the dungeon was not especially hard to clear. That was probably why the children were still alive.
“Ugh, I’m hungry.”
“You already ate all the chocolate bars?”
“Ages ago.”
“Wait a second, you pig. You said you’d leave one of mine!”
“Oh, right.”
The children chattered away like children do, tension melting now that adults were present.
Isabella watched them with a smile that was almost not a smile.
Come to think of it, whenever children passed by, Isabella’s gaze had always lingered.
In the golden city of Arcana, in Knight’s Garden.
Especially with the more innocent-looking ones, her eyes stayed longer.
Cawww—!
Caw!
“Th-the crow!”
“Eek!”
The cawing of crows suddenly filled the air.
Grrr.
Grrraaah!
The zombies that had been standing still poured out from every direction.
The children shrank back in terror.
Swish!
But the zombies were only Level 3 at best.
Even a thousand of them would be no match for Isabella.
In the blink of an eye she took the heads of five zombies and flicked the blood from her dagger.
Her stats have risen.
After she had given the spirit to the forest and received the thousand-year mandragora in return, she had eaten it. Her movements had become cleaner, freer of waste.
Her talent was blossoming, and her stats had climbed with it.
Grrroooar!
Once the zombies were dealt with, ghouls appeared next.
Level 4.
They were no match for Isabella either. She was cutting them cleanly in two even faster and more precisely than usual.
The progress was smooth, yet I could not help tilting my head.
The dungeon’s clustering is strange.
Ordinarily, dungeons gathered monsters of similar levels.
A place where so many different kinds of monsters with such wide level gaps lived together simply did not exist.
Zombies (Lv. 3), then ghouls (Lv. 4), then after the ghouls a Ghoul Knight (Lv. 6)?
Slash!
The instant Isabella severed the Ghoul Knight’s neck—
“Mm!”
Her body suddenly locked up and went limp.
Had she let her guard down against a Level 6 Ghoul Knight?
No. It was not the undead that had gotten her.
Jin-ha and Jin-woo.
At some point the two children had slipped up behind her; their hands had transformed into scorpion tails.
Isabella’s pupils trembled violently.
Caw!
Cawww!
Having completed their mission, the two children began to caw like crows in unison.
From the very beginning the children had been bait.
Bait the dungeon’s master had cast out to hunt the humans who entered its domain.
My own mind grew hazy.
An extraordinarily potent paralytic poison was already racing through my veins.
Before I could do anything, my body sagged.
The master of the Crow Cemetery.
A gigantic Corpse Crow crowed in triumph before the lavish feast laid out before it.
“I eat. Humans of another world. I evolve again. Knowledge and power overflow!”
Isabella gritted her teeth at the sight of the creature.
Ordinary Corpse Crows could not speak.
They were far smaller as well.
But the Corpse Crow before her eyes was different.
My body… won’t move…
Poisoned by the powerful paralytic, Isabella could do nothing.
She had never dreamed the children themselves were undead.
They had been right beside her, yet she had failed to notice—it was almost absurd.
But they had looked far too human.
Their hearts beat; they showed no signs of decay.
This is no ordinary Corpse Crow.
Corpse Crows were monsters that fed on corpses and then controlled the remains they had eaten.
Yet the one before her had dressed those corpses so perfectly that they were indistinguishable from living people.
It was on an entirely different level from a normal Corpse Crow.
Even so, it had been a mistake. She had let her guard down in a way that was unlike her.
No matter how innocent the children had seemed, she should never have relaxed her vigilance.
She had been caught by a method utterly alien to the monsters of the desert.
“Evolve! Eat! Evolve!”
The Corpse Crow’s eyes were pure madness.
A beak large enough to swallow an ordinary person whole.
She had never even heard of a Corpse Crow the size of a decent building.
Her breath caught. She could not so much as twitch a finger.
The moment she met the crow’s eyes, the paralysis deepened further. Not only paralysis—a powerful curse was layered on top of it.
Her will weakened; her heart began to break. The terror of death slowly consumed her entire body.
There was nothing she could do except lie still and be eaten.
It would pluck out her eyes, peck at her entrails, and savor its feast.
The Corpse Crow opened its beak. Inside, saw-like teeth were visible, and the screams of countless corpses it had already eaten echoed from within.
“Stupid humans!”
“Shut up, you damn crow.”
…That was the moment.
The Saint who had been lying as if unconscious suddenly sat up and began rolling his shoulders as though nothing had affected him at all.
The poison that had left even Isabella completely immobilized.
Combined with the curse, it should have been inescapable.
Yet the Saint drew two swords with leisurely ease.
Whoosh!
The Corpse Crow spread its wings.
A gale rose from the enormous wings, and countless eyes appeared upon them.
All of them belonged to those the Corpse Crow had already eaten. Hundreds of eyes amplified the curse.
It was confident that no one could remain unscathed under its curse any longer.
It did not know why the poison had failed, but escaping this curse was impossible.
The Dream Curse, amplified again and again. The victim would sleep forever, never even knowing they were being eaten.
Thud!
A thick chunk of flesh was severed, and a massive mass dropped to the floor.
What fell was the Corpse Crow’s head.
—What the hell is going on?
The Corpse Crow could not understand.
A human whom neither poison nor the Dream Curse could touch!
More than that, it had no idea when its head had been cut off. As if it itself had fallen under a curse, it could not even perceive the human’s movements.
—A mere human!
Something that should never have happened had occurred.
It was the absolute predator.
It could never endure the humiliation of dying to its prey!
Whoosh! Whooosh!
The Corpse Crow gathered every scrap of malice it had ever consumed and focused the curse into a single point.
The curse that had blanketed the entire dungeon converged to kill one human.
—…It doesn’t work?
Even that failed.
As though the creature were immune to curses themselves.
That… that was no human. It could not be human.
It was a life form completely outside the Corpse Crow’s ordinary concepts.
—…!
When its eyes met the human’s, the Corpse Crow shuddered.
It did not know why.
An indescribable curse far beyond its comprehension was contained within those eyes.
If it stayed still, it felt certain it would be the one devoured by that curse.
The true apex predator of the pyramid. From the very beginning, the prey had been itself—the Corpse Crow finally understood.
But there was nothing left it could do.
Kuuuung!
The Corpse Crow’s body toppled, and at last it met complete death.
It had been strange from the start.
Why children were in a dungeon.
Why they were wandering around dressed in modern clothes.
Because it ate their memories and recreated them from those memories.
The two children had been summoned Players.
But when someone is summoned as a Player, they naturally receive a body of this world.
There was no way they could have brought the clothes they had been wearing.
This place had probably been their Main Quest 1—the stage of survival.
Yet cruelly, the children who failed to survive the quest had become food for the Corpse Crow.
A Level 4 monster grew all the way to Level 8.
A rise of that magnitude was less growth than outright evolution.
By devouring Players, the Corpse Crow had grown stronger. Its body had enlarged; its intelligence had risen. After that it had continued to lure and kill Players.
As the Corpse Crow grew stronger, the dungeon itself would have deepened.
That finally explained why monsters with such wide level gaps had swarmed the place.
But it had been an extremely difficult creature to find.
It hid its true body and used human children—children that any Player would inevitably react to—disguised as living beings.
Utterly vicious, yet plenty of people must have fallen for it.
That was how it made Players drop their guard, paralyzed them with poison, and then ate them alive.
Without Observation, I would have been fooled too.
It had been exquisitely crafted, but I possessed the talent of Observation.
Even without a Hidden Trait, Observation maxed out could catch the slightest off-beat tremor of a heartbeat.
When the other pieces of evidence piled on top of that, I became certain.
I simply played along, because if I had shown any sign of noticing, the true body would have gone into hiding.
If you take that poison without any countermeasures, even Level 10 would be in danger.
The mana poison condensed purely for paralysis that had locked Isabella in place.
As the Corpse Crow evolved, the nature of the poison had grown even stronger.
That was why the Corpse Crow had confidently revealed itself once both of us appeared paralyzed.
But the Corpse Crow could never have imagined.
Giant’s Anti-Magic Power completely decomposes Mana Poison (Lv. 8).
Iron-Blooded Lord’s Heart nullifies Dream Curse (Lv. 9).
Moonlight Butterfly drives away the alien energy in the surroundings.
That I was its natural enemy.
I don’t need to prepare any countermeasures.
Ordinary curses or poisons could never kill me.
Hidden Traits held absolute superiority over ordinary traits.
And I had thirteen of them.
That meant most situations resolved themselves on their own.
Moreover, the Corpse Crow itself was originally a Boss Monster that hid inside dungeons and commanded undead.
Its true body was pitifully weak in both attack and defense.
In other words, the moment I found the hidden true body, the match had already been decided.
You have cleared the Crow Cemetery Underground Dungeon.
The dungeon master Corpse Crow has died. The dungeon returns to its original form.
The dungeon had been cleared more easily than expected.
With the master’s death, every undead vanished, and the ever-shifting geography of the dungeon locked into place.
Exploring it would now be far simpler.
But not everything was finished yet.
The Constellation of Adventure praises your life-risking adventurous spirit, saying they believed in you. Reward contents have been further upgraded.
The Constellation of Fortune lets out a sigh of relief and wishes you luck. Reward contents have been further upgraded.
You possess the Lucky Dice.
You obtain a reward list a total of three tiers higher.
You may select two out of the four listed rewards.
The time for the rewards that were rightfully due!
Oh.
I let out a short exclamation of admiration.
…The Constellations of the Hall of One Hundred Constellations had returned.
The Constellations of the Hall of One Hundred Constellations, who had not welcomed the Goddess’s appearance, had frowned and refused to upgrade the rewards even after Main Quest 4 was cleared.
Apparently they had not turned their backs completely.
Having even two of them appear was fortunate enough.
I looked at the reward list that floated up.
◈ Broken Fragment of the Golden Rule 9h (6+3)
◈ Evolved Corpse Crow’s Core
◈ Eye Collector’s Feather
◈ Tome of Amplification
Four items.
The greatest treasures obtainable from this dungeon!
One among them stood out especially.
A Broken Fragment of the Golden Rule?
Because the Corpse Crow had eaten Players?
I never expected to obtain a fragment of the Golden Rule as a dungeon reward.
There was no need to hesitate.
The Fragment of the Golden Rule and the Tome of Amplification. Those two are the best.
Explaining the importance of the Golden Rule would take forever.
And the Tome of Amplification was a tool that amplified the effects of skills. Having even one would prove useful.
Brrr!
Suddenly one of the items on the list floated up and turned purple.
…What?
The one that had changed was the Evolved Corpse Crow’s Core.
But any fluster was wiped away in an instant by the Iron-Blooded Lord’s Heart.
Instead I quickly guessed what had caused the phenomenon.
It has something to do with a trait I possess.
The only thing that could cause a change like this was a Hidden Trait.
I revised the rewards I would choose.
You have selected Broken Fragment of the Golden Rule 9h (6+3).
You have selected Evolved Corpse Crow’s Core.
Afterward, a black core slowly rose from the Corpse Crow’s remains.
And then…
Gulp!
“Mm!”
…I was hungry.
The instant I saw the Evolved Corpse Crow’s Core, a maddening hunger crashed over me.
Thunder rolled in my stomach; saliva exploded from my glands.
A hunger that even the Iron-Blooded Lord’s Heart could not control. Not my mind—my body itself was screaming for it.
I could not endure this hunger any longer.
At the same time—
Glutton has manifested.
The Hidden Trait “Glutton” had activated.
A trait that had never once triggered until now was reacting to this Evolved Corpse Crow’s Core.
It’s telling me to eat it.
A human who eats a monster’s core.
I gripped the core.
And then—
Crunch!
Crunch! Crunch!
I ate the core.
In that instant—
Predation has been completed.