Labyrinth of No Light
From the third floor to the eleventh, the ascending and descending stairways together numbered three or more. From the twelfth floor to the sixteenth, however, there was only one.
They must have heard I entered the labyrinth and come down ahead of me to wait.
There was no guarantee I would even reach the twelfth floor; relying so heavily on uncertainty had seemed reckless. But that no longer mattered.
Having already grasped the enemy’s composition and armament through his soul vision, Hwanin offered Lesim a preemptive apology.
“Lesim. I am sorry.”
=Yes?=
“Those people appear to be hunting dogs of the Skin-peeling Clan, after my emergency rations.”
While watching the light sources approaching from at least a hundred meters away, he gave a brief account of the situation. Lesim and Isilite, who had been staring at the same torchlight, widened their eyes, then immediately filled them with fierce light.
=Trash turns up no matter where you go.=
“There is no need for you to step forward, Lesim. Isilite, protect the young lady.”
=What? Even so, there are eight of them.=
Judging by the volume of their aura, they were second- to fourth-class professionals. No matter how extraordinary Hwanin’s techniques might be, facing eight alone seemed excessive.
Yet instead of an answer, Lesim tasted a sudden, chilling fear as Hwanin’s faint smile brushed over him.
Hwanin unfurled a necromancy using the mid-to-low-grade soul of the Bagil he had already turned into a bead. Heat flooded his body at once, and his throat went dry and scratchy.
He realized instinctively that it was the Bagil’s paralytic-voice trait.
Alien traits like the three-eyed hound’s needle-launching tail or the gelatin cube’s corrosive attack are impossible, but something like this seems to work.
He had no intention of using it. Their relationship had not yet collapsed, so there was no reason to invite unnecessary suspicion.
At that moment the torches on the far side snuffed out with a soft whoosh, and the hunting dogs melted into the darkness. The ninety-five percent certainty he had been carrying reached one hundred.
“Everyone, into the passage.”
=But—!
=Ah, just move like Master said! And take the young lady with you!=
Isilite barked the order, shoved Lesim aside, and carefully lifted Baek Ryeogang before retreating into the central passage where they had fought the Bagil.
=Lights out!=
=Y-yes!=
The light rods extinguished with another soft whoosh, and every trace of illumination vanished.
As darkness swallowed the surroundings, the professionals presumed to be from the Skin-peeling Clan grew cautious. Hwanin watched them through his soul vision and spoke.
“Have you come from the Skin-peeling Clan?”
His voice came out clearer and more ticklish than usual.
=……If you hand over the green Kue even now, we will let you live. Leave the Kue and get out.=
“How unexpected. Ifrivel did not strike me as foolish enough to choose such a stupid method…… Who came up with this idiotic plan? Asiah Rudan? Or the organization’s third-in-command?”
The more Hwanin spoke, the more the eight hunting dogs closed the distance without a sound of footsteps.
They had clearly trained extensively for situations like this.
=A jobless nobody talks too much. If you are stalling for time to run, you are already too late. Our people are waiting for you on the upper floors as well.=
To avoid revealing that he could see them perfectly, Hwanin answered by hurling a dagger at the throat of the one who was blathering.
The distance was roughly sixty meters, yet the dagger, reinforced by the mid-to-low-grade necromancy’s physical enhancement, punched through the hunting dog’s neck with a sharp thwip.
Thud.
Grrrk……
The cervical vertebrae shattered, the head lolled, and the wet bubbling of blood from the hole in the throat echoed through the labyrinth.
The moment their comrade fell, four torches flared to life with a hiss. Three bow-wielding hunters and one two-handed-hammer fighter charged Hwanin at terrifying speed.
Immediately afterward a fire arrow whistled past above his head with a sharp ping. Then came flying arrows of fire, wind, and earth magic.
Their velocity was extreme—comparable even to Urger’s punches.
Hwanin stepped left while flinging a dagger at the second fire arrow streaking toward his thigh.
The instant the dagger pierced the fire arrow, a soft boom erupted and a tongue of red flame large enough to swallow a human torso burst outward.
Power I must not try to parry. Homing capability…… none, it seems.
Even though he had moved, the trajectories of the wind and earth arrows remained unchanged.
Rather than swat the remaining two elemental arrows aside, Hwanin slipped left into a recessed section of wall, both to evade the casters’ line of sight and to take cover.
Cover, however, did not break the gazes of the hunting dogs who had already drawn near; their eyes remained locked on him.
The dogs flung their torches in every direction, creating new light sources.
Pii-ping—
Three more arrows came flying.
Hwanin casually flicked aside the arrows that carried faint heat haze, then locked eyes for a single second with the pig-headed blunt-weapon fighter who had closed to point-blank range. He drove his spear into the man’s chest.
At the (relatively) slow thrust, the blunt-weapon warrior curled a sneering smile, thinking, What kind of amateur is this?
His throwing is excellent, but his spear work is trash!
The fighter intended to bat the spear aside and crush Hwanin’s ribs with a focused impact—
=Ghk?!=
—only to have his own ribs shattered instead.
Reading the attack through the fighter’s muscles, Hwanin twisted the spear, tapped the two-handed hammer’s central axis to throw its trajectory off, and slammed the shaft into the man’s side.
Feeling the satisfying vibration of several ribs cracking under his hands, he reversed his grip and, lightning-fast, drove the spear down into both shoulders, pulverizing the shoulder blades.
=Guaaagh?!=
Then came the front kick.
Thud!
=Guek……!=
The more-than-one-hundred-kilogram bulk flew dozens of meters and smashed into the opposite wall.
The hunters flinched at the sight of their comrade sailing through the air like a ball after only three seconds of contact.
We were told he was jobless? No aura either. So where does that power that flings people like balls come from?
And he neutralized Gary before we could even nock another arrow! Those bastards lied to us?!
The woman with eagle blood in her veins fixed Hwanin with a hawk’s sharp gaze, unable to gauge whether he was strong or weak, and rapidly nocked and loosed an arrow. She kept firing without pause.
The other two joined in, loosing arrows wildly—yet moments later they began to back away as though they had witnessed something impossible.
=H-he’s insane.=
Crack!
The rabbit-eared woman who had spoken toppled backward with a stone axe buried in the crown of her head.
=F-fuck!=
Crunch.
The rat-headed man who had spat the curse in fear also collapsed, eyes rolling back, a dagger embedded between his brows.
“…….”
Hwanin tossed a dagger upward, caught it, and fixed his gaze on the woman whose ears were tufts of zebra-striped feathers, much like Baek Ryeogang’s.
The eagle-feather-eared woman could not open her mouth.
She felt certain that if she did, that dagger would fly and pierce her throat.
Even when the man began patting himself down as though searching for something—an obvious opening—she still could not bring herself to loose an arrow.
This was a monster who had swatted aside nearly forty arrows from twelve meters away. That casual motion had to have some intent behind it.
In the next instant a spark flashed before her eyes, and the eagle-feathered woman felt her consciousness dim.
Is this…… how I die……?
Hwanin confirmed that the fist-sized pebble he had thrown had only knocked her unconscious rather than killed her, then stepped out into the attack trajectories of the casters still hiding near the wall.
The three casters who had been inching forward with spells loaded into their staves flinched and raised their weapons in alarm.
I expected them to fire the moment they saw me. Why aren’t they attacking? Because the shields that were supposed to cover them are gone?
Curious about when they would finally cast, Hwanin recovered the stone axe and dagger lodged in the two hunters’ heads.
I should have bought more throwing daggers.
They were proving far more useful than expected.
Enhanced by the mid-to-low-grade necromancy, the thrown daggers matched the speed of the elemental arrows the casters had loosed. Against non-human species they were lacking, but against fellow humans they were an extremely convenient weapon.
Having retrieved his own dagger, Hwanin returned the favor to the casters who still had not attacked by sending two of his daggers and one taken from a dead hunter flying their way.
Thud—
=Ghk.= =Ghk.=
=……!=
The caster who had fired fire and earth arrows toppled like a puppet with its strings cut, a dagger buried in his skull. The wind caster, however, remained unharmed.
Nothing had been visible, yet the moment the dagger drew near the wind caster, a faint green breeze rose and altered its trajectory.
Hwanin realized that the moderate force he had used—simply because retrieving the daggers later would be a bother—had allowed the caster to survive, and he offered a quiet internal note of admiration.
Wind magic looks more convenient than I thought.
He was out of daggers, and he had no desire to walk all the way back to the thirteenth-floor stair entrance just to pick up the stone axe.
At the sight of Hwanin approaching with the bloodied stone axe in hand, the woman with folded puppy ears began to tremble violently.
She could not comprehend the situation.
The dead had all been thorough in their training.
They had not squandered their earnings on pleasure and gambling; they had trained diligently at the martial halls and learned magic at the association, weathering every hardship—yet they had fallen so emptily……
Watching blood drip, drip from the stone axe, the woman finally dropped her staff, fell to her knees, and began to beg.
=P-please spare me.=
“You should have said that before you tried to kill us.”
Hwanin answered calmly, gently took hold of her chin and the crown of her head, and twisted them one hundred eighty degrees.
Crunch.
Thud—
In life she had been pretty enough, but with her neck spun full circle, tongue and eyeballs bulging from the internal pressure, the corpse was nothing short of repulsive.
Nothing stays beautiful after death.
Looking around, he saw the six hunting dogs of the Skin-peeling Clan floating as souls in midair, staring down at their own corpses in anguish.
「How could it end so absurdly…….」
「Am I dreaming right now? We were wiped out by a jobless nobody……?」
「Aaaah. Aaaaah…….」
The scene felt like déjà vu—reminding him of the human scraps he had met on the third floor. Hwanin issued the command without emotion.
Come.
「?!」
「Ah, aaaah!」
「Uwaaaagh?!」
「S-save meee—!」
He forcibly dragged the six hunting-dog souls in, turned them into beads, then recovered his daggers and tidied up.
Focusing more on psychic training still seemed the better path. When he had fewer than twenty soul beads he had been unable to force human souls into bead form; now it felt as natural as breathing.
He discarded the dagger that had vanished into the dark and the one scorched by fire, then collected the five daggers still attached here and there to the body of the thief-class hunter. Sliding them into his dagger belt, he swept his gaze once more over the corpses strewn about.
Thanks to the light of the torches still burning on the ground, the mixed red-and-black leather armor was clearly visible.
Hwanin approached the eagle-feather-eared woman who lay without any serious wounds.
“If you do not get up, I will step on your neck and crush it.”
At Hwanin’s toneless words, the woman who had been feigning unconsciousness slowly pushed herself upright.
=Are you even human?=
Instead of answering, Hwanin walked over to the pig-headed blunt-weapon fighter and kicked him in the side—right where the ribs had broken.
=Kraaaagh!! K-kkuuuh……. Kkugh!=
The pig-headed man’s scream that made the fine hairs stand on end came just as the eagle-feathered woman was about to speak.
“I will be the one asking questions. Every time you speak without permission, I will cut off one finger. When you run out of fingers, I will take your limbs, and after that, your head.”
=…….=
The words did not sound like a joke in the slightest. The eagle-feathered woman who had been about to protest clamped her mouth shut.
Judging that irritating the man who had annihilated her party in an instant would be far worse for her health than simply keeping quiet, she wiped the blood flowing from her forehead and stood.
The pig-headed man also grasped the situation quickly, yet the pain rising from both shattered shoulders, his side, and his abdomen left him unable to think clearly.
“Both of your lives are currently in my hands. If you cannot accept that, I will make you the same as your comrades.”
=I accept.=
“Remove all of your equipment.”
The eagle-feathered woman failed to understand the order for a moment and hesitated.
If she discarded everything, even the faintest hope would vanish. Should she fight now?
“…….”
But the moment she met the emotionless eyes of the man who had reduced them to this state, she began silently stripping off her weapons and armor.
If she resisted, death was one hundred percent certain. If she obeyed quietly? There might still be a chance of survival.
Searching for any path that might keep her alive, the eagle-feathered woman removed her clan armor—only to find the man still staring at her.
Don’t tell me he wants the clothes too.
Looks like it.
Only after she had stripped down to her linen shirt and shorts and finally to nothing but her panties did the man’s gaze shift.
No—it did not shift away; it pointed at that useless, damned fat bastard.
I have to strip him too?
“…….”
Huu.
Standing in nothing but a palm-sized scrap of cloth that barely covered her crotch while undressing the pig bastard whose arms were now useless, she flushed with humiliation.
But it was better than dying.
Averting her eyes from the glass-like eyeballs of her dead comrades sprawled nearby, she stripped the pig bastard’s armor.
His ragged, pain-filled breaths brushed across her nipples, and irritation surged to the top of her head.
Why didn’t I wear a bra? she regretted.
Perhaps because the commotion had finally settled, Isilite emerged cautiously from the rear passage together with Lesim and Baek Ryeogang.
The three pairs of eyes first landed on the completely naked woman stripping the In-don man of his armor, then traveled in turn over the six corpses scattered about and the heap of arrows piled to one side.
=Ah, Master! The arrows—you weren’t hit by any arrows, were you?!=
Seeing the mountain of arrows on the floor, Isilite rushed toward Hwanin in great alarm—only to stop.
=Ah, not even a scratch.=
“Isilite. Collect anything useful from the corpses.”
=Uh, you’re not leaving them travel money for the afterlife?=
“These are people who deliberately planned to come here and kill us. Whether they fail to enter the garden of the gods for lack of travel money is none of my concern.”
=Y-yes, sir.=
Isilite felt a chill settle in her chest at Hwanin’s words.
Is it really true that if you die without money you can’t enter the garden of the gods?
She considered sewing a small pouch into her underclothes and keeping a single silver coin there as she looted the corpses—until a groan from behind made her turn.
The In-don man’s shoulders, now that she looked closely, were completely shattered; cold sweat poured down his body.
=…….=
Isilite felt genuine pity for the two of them.
Once they learned who her master was, that kind of physical pain would become nothing at all.
Drawing on her experience as a former bandit leader, she quickly collected coin pouches from the six corpses, low-grade processed phase stones from the casters’ staves, and even the equipment the In-chwi woman appeared to have removed.
=Miss Isilite. If you are collecting things, wouldn’t it be better to take the weapons and armor as well?=
=There are eight sets, so we could get three or four silver for them if we sold them outside. But Master doesn’t like us hauling around piles of luggage.=
=Then use this. It is a small subspace pouch with about one square meter of capacity.=
Lesim handed Isilite the compact subspace pouch he had been carrying just in case.
When she thrust her arm inside, it sank in all the way to the shoulder.
Isilite bowed her head in thanks to Lesim, discarded anything that would fetch only a few iron coins, and packed every longsword, bow, arrow, leather armor, and staff.
The eagle-feathered woman, having finished stripping the pig bastard of every piece of equipment, watched with sorrowful eyes as her own gear and clothes disappeared into the other woman’s pouch—then glared at the little bird that was examining her with open curiosity.
If it weren’t for this thing, I never would have ended up like this……!
Kueet!
=Augh!=
Sensing the woman’s hostile gaze, Emergency Food followed instinct and drove its beak hard into the crown of her head. Then it began pecking at every exposed patch of bare skin.
You dared attack my friend and you won’t even reflect! You need a good scolding!
Kueet, kueet!
Peck-peck-peck-peck!
=Ah, ah!=
Caught between the pain of her scalp splitting and the sharp jabs against bare flesh, the eagle-feathered woman felt her temper about to explode.
She swung both arms viciously; the damned little bird hopped back a step, then lowered its head, raised its tail feathers, and began swaying them left and right.
=……!=
Recognizing the attack posture angry Kues displayed, the woman swallowed hard and shot a look of fury and pleading toward the brown-haired woman who seemed to be the bird’s keeper.
Damn it! Do something about this bird!
=Emergency Food. Pecking is fine, but it’s still a professional so it’s strong. If you stick your head in and get counterattacked it’ll be dangerous, so just step on it or kick it.=
Kue? Kueet!
You crazy bitch!
Instead of stopping the bird she was egging it on; the woman recoiled in horror just as Hwanin was quietly conversing with Baek Ryeogang and Lesim.
=I am truly sorry, Hwanin. I never intended to cause you such great trouble…….=
“Is your body all right now?”
=I have a mental-protection spell linked to the core of my staff and am maintaining it. I am fine for the moment.=
As she said, Baek Ryeogang was enveloped in a soft green light.
The light connected to the thick green gem set in the staff she held; it was clearly supplying phase force from a phase stone to sustain the spell.
“That is fortunate.”
=…….=
“…….”
Feeling a dull ache in her chest under Hwanin’s emotionless gaze, Baek Ryeogang continued.
=Allow me to introduce myself properly. I am the second daughter of a sixth-class Ho-jok family of the Baek clan; my name is Ryeogang. My father is Baek Jung-ik, lord of the port city of Praber in the central-eastern region of Radsea.=
Radsea was the name of this continent; the port city of Praber was a place Hwanin remembered seeing at the edge of the central map Susaga had shown him.
Though called a port city, it was not on the sea but on a lake as vast as an ocean. Its size was said to be about 1.4 times that of Wayford.
He wondered whether she was trying to pressure him with status, yet Baek Ryeogang showed not the slightest such intention in her eyes.
=When I first said the road back would not be easy, it was for the reason you guessed. As far as I know, there has never been a case of someone in circumstances similar to yours successfully returning to the place they lived in their previous life.=
“……Are they being held in the capital of the Racial Alliance?”
=I do not know what warning you received…… but if I speak honestly of what I know, it is true that the Merianol Racial Alliance gathers dimensional wanderers like yourself. However, they do so not for experiments or research, but to prevent the indiscriminate transmission of knowledge into our world.=
A sharp intake of breath came from the side; Lesim’s eyes had gone as wide as lanterns.
=Therefore, when the Racial Alliance hears news of dimensional wanderers, they bring them—almost by force—to the capital, Passage, and place restrictions on their going outside. Beyond that, I understand they guarantee freedom. That is also why I asked whether you wore a hooded cloak for that reason.=
Arms folded, Hwanin listened to the explanation and nodded once more.
Up to this point it aligned perfectly with the warning Hiern-Zod had given him.
At the time he had assumed the reason was human experimentation and dissection. Viewing it as detention and confinement made far more sense.
Hiern-Zod had left without doing him the slightest harm, after all.
If some connection or secret pact had existed, Hiern-Zod would have chosen to report him to the Racial Alliance the moment he learned Hwanin’s identity, rather than try to buy him off with money.
“…The warning I received was…….”
Hwanin concealed Hiern-Zod’s identity and simply related the contents of the warning as something he had learned by chance.
Baek Ryeogang and Lesim both let out low hums of thought.
=It was a warning that could easily be misunderstood as a threat to your life…….=
=Hwanin. I swear by the Beast Gods that there is not a single falsehood in the young lady’s words. If there is even the slightest lie, I will offer my life as forfeit.=
Having overheard the conversation, Lesim now understood exactly what discourtesy Baek Ryeogang had committed toward Hwanin and what misunderstanding had arisen from it. He staked his own life to prove her innocence.
At present Lesim was certain that Hwanin would one day become a great figure.
If asked for evidence he would have none; right now Hwanin possessed only extraordinary martial skill.
Yet for some reason, looking at Hwanin kept bringing the great heroes of the past to mind.
He imagined that the great heroes in their unknown days must have been like this—and Hwanin was showing even more than that imagination.
Courteous manners. At the same time, bold decisiveness. The martial prowess of a jobless man who could wipe out eight third- to fourth-class professionals in less time than it took to drink a cup of tea, plus a human charm that easily drew people in.
That was why he had sworn in the name of the Beast Gods. His instinct told him that making an enemy of this man would never end well.
“…….”
Whether the oath had reached him or not, a faint bitter smile spread across Hwanin’s expressionless face. Lesim breathed an inward sigh of relief.
And a short while later—
=……Hah.=
At the secret Hwanin released, Lesim realized that following his instinct had been a divine stroke of genius, and a thrill ran through him.