Dungeon Training (3)
“Hey—hey! Yu Haneul!”
I shot past Lee Hayun’s startled shout and charged straight into the middle of the beast pack, where the creatures were resonating with one another and feeding their flames higher and higher.
Bang—! Ba-bang—!
Shots loaded with pure mana, no skill layered on top. Under normal circumstances the wavering fire would have swallowed the bullets without leaving a scratch. Not now. Not while I carried the Ice Dragon’s cold.
Crack-crack-crack—
The mana rounds punched between the beasts, frosting the cave floor and walls with a skin of ice and drinking the heat out of the air. The temperature dropped by degrees. Every last scrap of aggro swung toward me.
According to the original novel, the flame beasts of this lava cave prioritized ice-attribute enemies above all else. So of course the girl currently spitting cold became target number one.
The pack closed to point-blank range. Still fine. Unless dozens or hundreds of them piled together into white-flame heat, they could not punch through the Ice Dragon’s chill.
Hissssss—
Flames licked my body and only steam roared up; the fire never scorched skin or cloth. I dove into their midst, tearing through bodies already weakened by the cold.
Bang—!
I pressed the muzzle to a beast’s core and fired a round heavy with frost. The core froze solid and shattered; the creature simply crumbled away. Bang—! Ba-bang—! Bang—! A few more repetitions and the remaining beasts lost their blue flames, turning ordinary red. Even those vanished under the continuing gunfire.
“Haa….”
The sigh that left me was thick with cold thanks to the Ice Dragon’s Scale still resting on my tongue. When I glanced back, Lee Hayun and Han Yeoreum were sprinting toward me, faces full of worry. Farther behind them lay Kang Hyun, one arm severed, blood running from his mouth, sprawled on the ground.
“Why…. Why….”
Unable to go berserk because of the Anchor Potion, Kang Hyun muttered the words like a man wronged—then Baek Woohyun’s sword punched through his heart and the light left his eyes. Woohyun’s face showed no more disturbance than if he had snuffed a candle; killing was clearly nothing new to him.
While I caught my breath watching that, Han Yeoreum fretted over my body.
“Are you okay?!”
“Mm-mm, ahm ah-ahm.”
The scale made clear speech impossible.
“…What?”
“I think she’s saying she’s fine.”
Lee Hayun frowned at the mashed syllables; Han Yeoreum somehow understood. I nodded at Yeoreum to confirm she had it right.
“Haa….”
Even after hearing me, Yeoreum checked me over with her own hands until she was satisfied nothing was wrong, then turned a complicated look toward Baek Woohyun. Of course she was shaken. I understood that feeling, but—
“Yuh-ee-uh ee-uh-go ee-eu ae-ah ah-ee-yah.”
“…Can you do something about that speech?”
Lee Hayun asked, but there was no help for it. Smooth dungeon progress required the scale in my mouth. Spitting it out and putting it back over and over would just feel gross.
“…You’re saying this isn’t the time to stand around?”
Thankfully Yeoreum’s talent for translation kept communication flowing. I nodded and continued.
“Ae-ae-ah ah-ee ah-eu oh-oh ah-ee-ae-yah-ae.”
Lee Hayun stared hard at Yeoreum.
“…I think she means we have to check on the other teams as fast as possible.”
“…!”
I bobbed my head rapidly at Yeoreum. Right on cue, Baek Woohyun approached from farther back. Yeoreum flinched at the blood on his blade but did not otherwise react. After Kang Hyun’s sudden ambush and the necromancy that had turned on his own teammates, she seemed to grasp how serious things had become.
“Ah-eu oh-eh-oh ah-yuh-ah-eu oh-eu ee-eu-ee oh-ah.”
“…There might be more like Kang Hyun in the other teams?”
Nod-nod.
“For now we should wait for the instructors—”
“No one has come even after things reached this state. Do you still not understand? We cannot expect support from the academy.”
Baek Woohyun cut Lee Hayun off.
“…Then what? We don’t even know where the other teams are, but say we somehow meet them. Then what? There could be terrorists among you too, so if we suggest sticking together, you think they’ll just say ‘sure’? They’re not going to believe us that easily.”
Lee Hayun scowled as she spoke. I shot my hand up.
“Eu-uh ah-yuh-ah-yuh ah-ah-eh oh-eu eu-yuh-ee ee-uh!”
“…She says she has a good idea about that.”
With Han Yeoreum’s interpreting, I laid out my plan.
Chae Yujeong’s stress only climbed as she and her party pushed deeper into the dungeon.
“Yujeong, can’t we just use a cold-attribute potion?”
“…I already told you I didn’t bring any.”
“Come on~ Do we really have to suffer like this?”
Her party members kept demanding potions as if she were their personal supply depot.
“Yeah, Yujeong. It’s not just for us. Good scores help everyone.”
It wasn’t even one person—every teammate except her was on board. The headache throbbed. She felt like the two-eyed person in a village of one-eyed people.
“…I don’t think potion-chugging will get us a good grade.”
“Nah, no way~ Potions are part of advance prep. Why wouldn’t they count? When we hit real dungeons later, are we not supposed to prepare?”
“Exactly. They’d probably give extra points for thorough preparation.”
Who the hell burns high-grade potions on a low-rank dungeon clear? You’d just end up in the red. The retort rose to Yujeong’s throat, but she swallowed it. Not because she wanted to avoid conflict—she had already said the same thing several times and they simply refused to listen, so she had given up.
“So—”
Just as she opened her mouth to refuse once more—
Thud-thud-thud-thud—
A faint vibration. Thud-thud-thud-thud— Growing louder. Not only Yujeong; the rest of the party finally shut their endless chatter and felt the wrongness. By the time everyone finished combat prep, something rounded the corner ahead.
“Wh-what is that?”
A whole crowd of students came stampeding toward them. Inside the pack Yujeong instantly spotted familiar faces: Yu Haneul, Han Yeoreum, Lee Hayun, Baek Woohyun, and more. Easily over ten cadets were barreling straight at her team.
“…?”
What in the world—Yujeong’s brow furrowed—
Whoooosh——!!
Behind the running students, a massive wall of fire billowed, and a horde of flame beasts poured after them.
“…!”
Yujeong and her teammates froze solid.
“What are you standing there for like idiots! If you want to live, run!!”
Lee Hayun’s shout as she closed the distance snapped them awake. Yujeong’s group mixed into the fleeing students and sprinted for their lives. White flames roared at their backs; cadets clattered and crashed in panicked flight. No one noticed Yu Haneul flinging a potion bottle to the floor, purple motes rising from the shatter.
I had already memorized the dungeon’s overall layout and every team’s movement routes from the original novel. Meeting the other groups while looping through the place was therefore easy; all we had to worry about was how to persuade and protect them.
Kang Hyun was dead and Yeon Hajin had surely achieved results of his own, so the cult would piece the situation together soon. We had to link up with the remaining teams as fast as possible if we wanted to keep casualties down. But even if we found another team and explained, they would not believe us easily and cooperation would be poor—time would bleed away. The plan I proposed to solve that was simple.
Yu Haneul’s Persuasion Operation, Stage One.
Bang—!
Pull every beast’s aggro with frost-laden mana rounds.
Yu Haneul’s Persuasion Operation, Stage Two.
Whoosh—
Do not kill the pulled beasts. Keep them on our tail and grow the swarm larger and larger while we run.
Yu Haneul’s Persuasion Operation, Stage Three.
“If you want to live, run!!”
When we finally slammed into another team while leading a gigantic monster train… no complicated explanations or persuasion were required. Every cadet simply ran after us with everything they had.
“Shit, what the hell is this!”
Between the frantic runners I tossed Anchor Potions at intervals, shutting down any possible berserk detonations in advance. Perfect. Before long we had absorbed every team except the very last one.
“Haa…. Haa….”
Bang—!
I triggered healing on a student gasping with exhaustion while I calculated the final team’s position. That last team was the one containing Yeon Hajin and Yoon Chaea. The problem was that Hajin would have headed for the secret passage zone to stop the cult’s backdoor, and because that passage sat on the dungeon’s outer edge, the team would be deep in a corner. By now Hajin had almost certainly slipped out, leaving only Chaea and the remaining three.
While I ran the routes in my head—
“Hey, hey! What are you doing! Are you crazy—”
Commotion erupted behind us.
“Hey! Stop them!”
I looked back. Amid the fleeing students, several had begun thrashing and flinging attacks at everyone around them. At the same moment, messages flooded my vision.
You have entered a dungeon!
The system window announcing that this place was no longer a fake training dungeon but the real thing.
Lockdown initiated!
Entry and exit from the dungeon are now restricted!
…It had begun.
The indiscriminate suicide-bombing terror.