Chapter 24: The Plunderer (1)
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 24: The Plunderer (1)
A rank-nine mana stone was equal to one slice of stonebread. In other words, each loaf had a value of about twenty stones.
So, what about a rank-eight mana stone? Unfortunately, one death fiend was worth only five goblins.
"What? You mean it's only a hundred stones?!"
"...Including those ghouls it summoned, we have three hundred stones total."
Of course, even taking that extra bit into account, there was no denying that the amount was low, especially considering that we had just risked our lives for it.
"Bjorn... How much was that bread we ate at the inn?"
"...I remember it was about three hundred stones."
"Then... That means I can taste its sweetness every time I take down a death fiend!"
Apparently, the cream pie we had eaten earlier had established itself as a new unit of measurement for Ainar. Of course, if you divided our earnings by 8:2, that would only be 0.2 Sweetness per death fiend... But I decided that I'd rather not tell her that.
"Bjorn! This is not the time to stand around. Hunt! Let's go hunting!"
The disappointment didn't last long. I smiled as I saw Ainar radiating enthusiasm once more. In this respect, working with a barbarian wasn't bad. I liked Erwen as a comrade, but the downside was that she was rather passive about everything. It was a lot easier to get motivated this way.
"Okay, let's go!"
After that, we continued to hunt around the area for death fiends. If it took more than twenty minutes to take down each one, our business wouldn't be profitable even if we earned three hundred stones per fiend, but... The first attempt should always be considered an exception, not the rule.
"Kwoooh!"
"Behel-aaah!"
Each time we came across a death fiend, we cried out the name of our ancestral god and charged. Then we'd each grab a leg, lift it up, and throw the monster to the ground.
We named this strategy the Double Barbarian Tackle.
Bam!
A fallen death fiend was easy prey. As we hammered each monster's head at a distance further than arm's length, the monsters soon disappeared into motes of light. That all took about three minutes.
The moment the monsters fell to the ground, they realized how screwed they were and summoned ghouls, which made it difficult for us to shorten that time any further.
"Woooh!"
As the hunt continued, the speed with which we filled our mana stone pouch also increased. However, we were not satisfied with that and accelerated our pace more and more.
This was because, come the third day, hunting death fiends would become impossible. If we hadn't reached the second floor faster than anyone else using that bug, we wouldn't have even dared to take these guys on. They normally never traveled alone. Handling two was possible, albeit difficult, but groups of three or four would be tough with just the two of us.
[14:27]
I checked the time and decided to take a break. Although the saying was that you should strike while the iron was hot, accidents always happened in moments of haste.
"Bjorn, I'm thirsty."
"Drink it sparingly. The corpse flower only blooms tomorrow."
"Corpse flower?"
The corpse flower was our only means of replenishing our drinking water in the Land of the Dead. When the time came, flowers would bloom on the vines that covered the rubble, and you could find water inside them if you cut them open. When I told her this, Ainar's expression went stony.
"Bjorn, isn't that a bit unsanitary?"
Honestly, it was. I'd heard that it was okay to drink, but I still wasn't all that up for it either. However, this was not something that someone who slept in a five-person room with ten filthy people should be complaining about.
"Do you have an alternative, then?"
"No! I will drink it!"
After resting for about twenty minutes to replenish our energy, we continued hunting again. Finally, when we were just about to collapse from exhaustion, we finished hunting our seventieth death fiend. That meant that we had earned more than twenty thousand stones in a single day.
This is much better than only hunting rank-nine monsters.
However, the essence I was hoping for had not appeared.
***
"Atrocious" was not a strong enough word to describe the drop rate of an essence. That was why most people who played the game had to develop a leveling strategy based on whatever essence dropped for them at the beginning. But the skill of the player determined how well that went.
It was for that reason that I had been looking forward to coming here. A death fiend's essence was among the top essences you could get in the early stages.
The problem is that there's no sign of it appearing.
Its ghoul-summoning active skill, Call of the Dead, was honestly quite underwhelming, but its passive skill, Body Preservation, was good enough to make up for it. Of course, absorbing their essence wouldn't give you the ability to regenerate like those bastards... But since my Immortality Imprint increased my healing factor already, my compatibility with the essence was very high.
[02:57]
I listened to Ainar's snoring as I checked the time. A day had already passed, and the second day had begun.
From now on, we'd have to fight two death fiends at once, but in some ways, I was relieved.
At least now we wouldn't look strange if we ran into other adventurers. Again, adventurers were the ones I was the most worried about.
"Ainar, get up."
"...I-I didn't eat it!"
"It's time to trade shifts."
Three hours per person. After resting for a total of six hours, we began a second day of once again hunting death fiends without issue.
"Kwoooh!"
They came in twos today. Their combined active skills summoned twenty ghouls now, but hey, we may as well give it a shot. Our success in this endeavor was thanks to the fact that we had learned and refined our technique for dealing with them countless times on the first day.
Boom!
Before the creatures knew what was happening, I ran forward and flung one onto the ground. Then we knocked the other down as well. A single misstep could make things quite precarious for us... But whenever that happened, we just ran without looking back.
"Ainar, run!"
"Oh!"
The death fiends were slow to move and had a habit of not following you if you moved out of their territory, so things weren't too dangerous yet.
The corpse flower was our only means of replenishing our drinking water in the Land of the Dead. When the time came, flowers would bloom on the vines that covered the rubble, and you could find water inside them if you cut them open. When I told her this, Ainar's expression went stony.
"Bjorn, isn't that a bit unsanitary?"
Honestly, it was. I'd heard that it was okay to drink, but I still wasn't all that up for it either. However, this was not something that someone who slept in a five-person room with ten filthy people should be complaining about.
"Do you have an alternative, then?"
"No! I will drink it!"
After resting for about twenty minutes to replenish our energy, we continued hunting again. Finally, when we were just about to collapse from exhaustion, we finished hunting our seventieth death fiend. That meant that we had earned more than twenty thousand stones in a single day.
This is much better than only hunting rank-nine monsters.
However, the essence I was hoping for had not appeared.
***
"Atrocious" was not a strong enough word to describe the drop rate of an essence. That was why most people who played the game had to develop a leveling strategy based on whatever essence dropped for them at the beginning. But the skill of the player determined how well that went.
It was for that reason that I had been looking forward to coming here. A death fiend's essence was among the top essences you could get in the early stages.
The problem is that there's no sign of it appearing.
Its ghoul-summoning active skill, Call of the Dead, was honestly quite underwhelming, but its passive skill, Body Preservation, was good enough to make up for it. Of course, absorbing their essence wouldn't give you the ability to regenerate like those bastards... But since my Immortality Imprint increased my healing factor already, my compatibility with the essence was very high.
[02:57]
I listened to Ainar's snoring as I checked the time. A day had already passed, and the second day had begun.
From now on, we'd have to fight two death fiends at once, but in some ways, I was relieved.
At least now we wouldn't look strange if we ran into other adventurers. Again, adventurers were the ones I was the most worried about.
"Ainar, get up."
"...I-I didn't eat it!"
"It's time to trade shifts."
Three hours per person. After resting for a total of six hours, we began a second day of once again hunting death fiends without issue.
"Kwoooh!"
They came in twos today. Their combined active skills summoned twenty ghouls now, but hey, we may as well give it a shot. Our success in this endeavor was thanks to the fact that we had learned and refined our technique for dealing with them countless times on the first day.
Boom!
Before the creatures knew what was happening, I ran forward and flung one onto the ground. Then we knocked the other down as well. A single misstep could make things quite precarious for us... But whenever that happened, we just ran without looking back.
"Ainar, run!"
"Oh!"
The death fiends were slow to move and had a habit of not following you if you moved out of their territory, so things weren't too dangerous yet.
Shhh—!
Each battle took about ten minutes. In reality, three out of every ten attempts we made were failures, but since we got to deal with two at once, our profits ended up being similar to the first day. On the first day, it had taken quite a while to even find the monsters. However, as we neared evening on the second day, groups of three started appearing from time to time, and as time passed, the frequency of our encounters with them increased as well.
"We should leave this area soon."
"A wise warrior knows when to retreat."
When the second day was coming to a close, we left death fiend territory and all associated regrets behind. Then we returned to the sticky, muddy field and found a suitable campsite.
It was around that time that we encountered a group of other adventurers for the first time. They were a group of three humans, and they were prowling through the dark, relying on a torch just like us. It was only after we were within ten yards that we could actually see each other.
"What are you looking at?" Ainar asked coldly. "If you don't have any business here, get lost."
"Ahem, excuse us."
The group passed us by and disappeared back into the darkness. It was quite interesting. They had only gotten twenty steps away, and I could still faintly hear the sound of their footsteps, but the light of the torch they were holding was no longer visible.
So that was what people meant when they said that most of the floors in the labyrinth could absorb all light. It seemed that even the glow of a torch was almost impossible to see with the naked eye, even from just ten yards away. As I was pondering this phenomenon...
"Bjorn, we must move," Ainar said, her voice hard. "They know where we are. The walls here are convenient, but it would still be safer to find a new campsite."
Indeed, she was right. I had been thinking the same. However, I couldn't seem to get used to this.
Who is this woman? Growling at other adventurers to get lost...
It was like she had suddenly switched personalities.
"Bjorn, humans cannot be trusted."
"...Agreed."
Now that I thought about it, Ainar and I had one other thing in common, other than the fact that we were both barbarians... A distrust toward humans.
It seemed something had happened to her during her first expedition as well.
I'll have to ask her about it later.
"Then let's go," she replied.
Soon after, we packed our bags and moved on. However, it was difficult to find a campsite with as good a location as our last one.
Do we have to compromise and just settle for having one wall protecting our backs?
As I was thinking this—
"Ugh..."
We heard a groan from somewhere not too far away.
"Mm!"
It was not a banshee. First of all, it was not a woman's voice, and...
"...W-Wait!"
It sounded coherent.
"H-Help—"
God damn it. We should've just set up camp somewhere else. After a cut-off scream, there was silence.
"That wasn't a monster attack," Ainar whispered.
I know. I have ears too.
It was rare for a person to bother begging for their life when fighting a monster. What had happened was obvious. Someone had just killed another person.
Shhh—!
Each battle took about ten minutes. In reality, three out of every ten attempts we made were failures, but since we got to deal with two at once, our profits ended up being similar to the first day. On the first day, it had taken quite a while to even find the monsters. However, as we neared evening on the second day, groups of three started appearing from time to time, and as time passed, the frequency of our encounters with them increased as well.
"We should leave this area soon."
"A wise warrior knows when to retreat."
When the second day was coming to a close, we left death fiend territory and all associated regrets behind. Then we returned to the sticky, muddy field and found a suitable campsite.
It was around that time that we encountered a group of other adventurers for the first time. They were a group of three humans, and they were prowling through the dark, relying on a torch just like us. It was only after we were within ten yards that we could actually see each other.
"What are you looking at?" Ainar asked coldly. "If you don't have any business here, get lost."
"Ahem, excuse us."
The group passed us by and disappeared back into the darkness. It was quite interesting. They had only gotten twenty steps away, and I could still faintly hear the sound of their footsteps, but the light of the torch they were holding was no longer visible.
So that was what people meant when they said that most of the floors in the labyrinth could absorb all light. It seemed that even the glow of a torch was almost impossible to see with the naked eye, even from just ten yards away. As I was pondering this phenomenon...
"Bjorn, we must move," Ainar said, her voice hard. "They know where we are. The walls here are convenient, but it would still be safer to find a new campsite."
Indeed, she was right. I had been thinking the same. However, I couldn't seem to get used to this.
Who is this woman? Growling at other adventurers to get lost...
It was like she had suddenly switched personalities.
"Bjorn, humans cannot be trusted."
"...Agreed."
Now that I thought about it, Ainar and I had one other thing in common, other than the fact that we were both barbarians... A distrust toward humans.
It seemed something had happened to her during her first expedition as well.
I'll have to ask her about it later.
"Then let's go," she replied.
Soon after, we packed our bags and moved on. However, it was difficult to find a campsite with as good a location as our last one.
Do we have to compromise and just settle for having one wall protecting our backs?
As I was thinking this—
"Ugh..."
We heard a groan from somewhere not too far away.
"Mm!"
It was not a banshee. First of all, it was not a woman's voice, and...
"...W-Wait!"
It sounded coherent.
"H-Help—"
God damn it. We should've just set up camp somewhere else. After a cut-off scream, there was silence.
"That wasn't a monster attack," Ainar whispered.
I know. I have ears too.
It was rare for a person to bother begging for their life when fighting a monster. What had happened was obvious. Someone had just killed another person.
Fuck, what kind of shitty mystery is this? I'm not a fucking detective.
Not wanting to get involved, I grabbed Ainar's wrist and backed away slowly. But whoever it was seemed to sense us.
"Who's there?"
The voice was cold and low. It was gruff, but it was definitely a woman's. We held our breaths and went stone-still at the same time.
But at that exact moment—
Pyuuu! Boom! Boom!
Something like a flare was shot into the sky, and it faintly illuminated a radius of about fifty yards. Thanks to this, I was able to see the eyes of the person who had just spoken. The distance between us was less than fifteen yards.
If Erwen had been here, she would have been able to detect her presence from a distance and avoid this situation entirely.
"Hmm, a newbie?"
The strange woman looked at us and came to an immediate conclusion. The feeling was mutual.
A dagger dripping with blood. Four scattered corpses...
"...A plunderer."
"First time seeing one?" the woman asked calmly.
"You could say that."
It's my first time seeing one as professional as you.
"I see."
The woman was not at all concerned that we had seen the scene of the crime and just nodded her head serenely. And I suspected I knew why.
***
Plunderers—those who professionally hunted adventurers.
They generated a high income by looting adventurers' equipment instead of mana stones. Of course, if caught, you would be sentenced to death the moment you returned to the city. But that rarely happened.
Although it had been in self-defense, I had also killed six adventurers and hadn't been investigated at all. There was no way for people in the outside world to know what happened inside the labyrinth. Not unless someone said something.
"...You're not wearing a mask."
This was the most disturbing thing about my current situation.
This bitch is operating as a plunderer with her face in plain sight.
She was a little over five feet five and skinny. She had red hair down to her shoulders, a tattoo under her eye, and half of her right ear was missing. It wouldn't be difficult to track someone with these features down.
If this were the modern day, the suspect could argue a lack of evidence... But this was a world where magic existed. This meant it was possible to distinguish truth from lies without physical evidence.
"...Were they members of your party?"
"Well..." The woman looked down at the bodies and shrugged. "They might've thought so."
That was why her face was bare, then. As I asked questions with obvious answers, I quickly took stock of the facts I had in front of me.
There were four bodies in total. Due to the quality of the equipment they were carrying and the fact that there was a wizard in the group, I could tell that they were adventurers who were active on at least the fifth floor or above.
Also, three of the corpses had sustained no visible injuries. However, since there were traces of vomit and blood on their lips...
Were they poisoned? And maybe the man who died last had resistance to it, so he survived a little longer?
I hoped this hypothesis was correct. Our situation would be bleak if she were a talented assassin who could kill four mid-level adventurers herself without leaving a single wound.
Rattle, rattle.
Soon, the woman squatted down and began skillfully removing the equipment from the corpses. She placed each item one by one into a bag. The bag seemed to be enchanted with magic because large, bulky items seemed to fit into it without a problem.
Fear was followed by envy. Just possessing an item like that made the difference between her and us desperately clear.
"Barbarian."
The woman called out to us. I didn't answer.
"Are we going to fight?" Ainar asked me quietly.
She was amazing. If it had been Erwen, she would have been shaking in fear right now. Was this what it meant to have a warrior's pride, wanting to fight an enemy no matter how powerful they were?
I kept my reply brief.
"I am thinking."
To be honest, I wanted to avoid a fight. The difference in our levels was obvious just by looking at the equipment she was holding. If her skill in combat was as impressive as that equipment... Even taking into account that it was a two-on-one situation, our odds would be much lower.
Whooom—!
The flare burned out, and the light in the sky vanished, plunging us into darkness once again. I immediately made a decision.
"Run. At full speed."
Pride doesn't save lives.
Fuck, what kind of shitty mystery is this? I'm not a fucking detective.
Not wanting to get involved, I grabbed Ainar's wrist and backed away slowly. But whoever it was seemed to sense us.
"Who's there?"
The voice was cold and low. It was gruff, but it was definitely a woman's. We held our breaths and went stone-still at the same time.
But at that exact moment—
Pyuuu! Boom! Boom!
Something like a flare was shot into the sky, and it faintly illuminated a radius of about fifty yards. Thanks to this, I was able to see the eyes of the person who had just spoken. The distance between us was less than fifteen yards.
If Erwen had been here, she would have been able to detect her presence from a distance and avoid this situation entirely.
"Hmm, a newbie?"
The strange woman looked at us and came to an immediate conclusion. The feeling was mutual.
A dagger dripping with blood. Four scattered corpses...
"...A plunderer."
"First time seeing one?" the woman asked calmly.
"You could say that."
It's my first time seeing one as professional as you.
"I see."
The woman was not at all concerned that we had seen the scene of the crime and just nodded her head serenely. And I suspected I knew why.
***
Plunderers—those who professionally hunted adventurers.
They generated a high income by looting adventurers' equipment instead of mana stones. Of course, if caught, you would be sentenced to death the moment you returned to the city. But that rarely happened.
Although it had been in self-defense, I had also killed six adventurers and hadn't been investigated at all. There was no way for people in the outside world to know what happened inside the labyrinth. Not unless someone said something.
"...You're not wearing a mask."
This was the most disturbing thing about my current situation.
This bitch is operating as a plunderer with her face in plain sight.
She was a little over five feet five and skinny. She had red hair down to her shoulders, a tattoo under her eye, and half of her right ear was missing. It wouldn't be difficult to track someone with these features down.
If this were the modern day, the suspect could argue a lack of evidence... But this was a world where magic existed. This meant it was possible to distinguish truth from lies without physical evidence.
"...Were they members of your party?"
"Well..." The woman looked down at the bodies and shrugged. "They might've thought so."
That was why her face was bare, then. As I asked questions with obvious answers, I quickly took stock of the facts I had in front of me.
There were four bodies in total. Due to the quality of the equipment they were carrying and the fact that there was a wizard in the group, I could tell that they were adventurers who were active on at least the fifth floor or above.
Also, three of the corpses had sustained no visible injuries. However, since there were traces of vomit and blood on their lips...
Were they poisoned? And maybe the man who died last had resistance to it, so he survived a little longer?
I hoped this hypothesis was correct. Our situation would be bleak if she were a talented assassin who could kill four mid-level adventurers herself without leaving a single wound.
Rattle, rattle.
Soon, the woman squatted down and began skillfully removing the equipment from the corpses. She placed each item one by one into a bag. The bag seemed to be enchanted with magic because large, bulky items seemed to fit into it without a problem.
Fear was followed by envy. Just possessing an item like that made the difference between her and us desperately clear.
"Barbarian."
The woman called out to us. I didn't answer.
"Are we going to fight?" Ainar asked me quietly.
She was amazing. If it had been Erwen, she would have been shaking in fear right now. Was this what it meant to have a warrior's pride, wanting to fight an enemy no matter how powerful they were?
I kept my reply brief.
"I am thinking."
To be honest, I wanted to avoid a fight. The difference in our levels was obvious just by looking at the equipment she was holding. If her skill in combat was as impressive as that equipment... Even taking into account that it was a two-on-one situation, our odds would be much lower.
Whooom—!
The flare burned out, and the light in the sky vanished, plunging us into darkness once again. I immediately made a decision.
"Run. At full speed."
Pride doesn't save lives.