Red Portal (2)
We were beginning to fray under the stress of it all—a situation none of us had ever faced, the unrelenting tension, the silence, the isolation—when she finally spoke.
"Follow me."
After staring down one of the branching paths for a long while, those were the words Jeong Sowon at last chose to say.
Leaving that single command hanging in the air, she strode forward. As we followed in her wake, the skeletons around us grew steadily more numerous—and we hadn't even reached the fork yet.
Thud. Thud.
Whether it was just my nerves or something else, the footsteps of the party members walking around me seemed to ring louder with every step.
When we finally arrived at the fork, Jeong Sowon stopped. We halted behind her. She turned where she stood, faced us, and opened her mouth. Her toneless voice filled the cave.
A short, dangerous path. A long, safe path.
Hearing it put that way, I couldn't quite picture the format—but it probably meant traps, or monsters. I had no idea how Jeong Sowon knew any of this, but the party's leader had been tacitly decided: it was her. All we had to do was follow her word. Assuming, of course, that doing so wouldn't get us killed.
"Is there any way to know how short the short path is, and how long the long one?"
One of the party members asked Jeong Sowon. Fair enough—you'd need to know the difference in length, and how much safer one really was, before you could decide.
"The short path is one hour."
The short path was one hour?
I'd assumed this was just some ordinary cave or underground passage, but the scale of the place was clearly something else. A cave—or an underground facility—long enough to take an hour on foot. What the hell was this place even for?
Wait. The path that took an hour was the short one. Then what about the long one?
"The long path is two days."
"That's insane!"
Someone's cry, half a scream, spoke for every one of us. Jeong Sowon's words had that little connection to anything resembling reality.
"Believe it or don't. That's up to you. But if you scream like that in there—"
Jeong Sowon cut herself off, but we didn't need to hear the rest.
A cave you'd have to walk for two days...
I'd heard that large-scale caves could be so vast they defied estimation. But two days? And it sounded like the danger was considerable, too. Jeong Sowon, who was always expressionless, was warning us with a tense look on her face.
"I think we should take the long path."
The first to offer an opinion was none other than me. I chose the long path for one reason: safety. It was hard to gauge how far we should trust Jeong Sowon, but the information we had was all we had. Two days versus one hour. A time gap that enormous had to come from an equally enormous difference in difficulty. There was no need to gamble on punching through the danger.
"Ha. Leave it to the dead last."
Jennifer Grave. The scale of her house was a different matter entirely, but like Amelia, she came from a magic family. The reason a girl from a magic house had washed up in the Marksman Department was a lack of talent—or so the rumors claimed, and there were plenty of them. For now, she sat in the lower-middle ranks. I couldn't speak to her actual ability, but her personality was unmistakably foul.
"It's two days versus one hour. Of course we take the short path. You want to spend two whole days just walking?"
Two days versus one hour—that was the problem. A dungeon is a rational space. Even if an Instant Dungeon had produced a Red Portal, a situation beyond anything we'd imagined, the fact that this was a dungeon hadn't changed. Dungeons pursue practicality with a vicious single-mindedness.
One life for one life.
There was even a saying to that effect. Dungeons followed the law of equivalent exchange. Between a two-day gap and a one-hour gap lay a correspondingly enormous risk.
"Park Yeonho is right. We need to take the safe path, even if it's farther."
Alexa Wiel. Like me, she was a commoner unaffiliated with any house. That didn't stop her from sitting in the upper-middle ranks—an elite destined to be scouted the moment she graduated.
"What, covering for him because you're both commoners?"
I didn't know the reason, but it was obvious Jennifer harbored some inferiority complex toward Alexa. If I had to guess, maybe it was looks. Alexa was prettier than Jennifer, sure—but was that really enough to breed resentment?
"I'm saying it because we don't know how dangerous the dangerous path actually is."
Alexa shook her head as she spoke.
"You know what I mean."
For some reason, Alexa leveled a cold look at Jennifer as she said it. Jennifer clicked her tongue and conceded.
"Tsk. Do whatever you want."
It was less a concession than a full withdrawal from the conversation.
"What about you?"
Dang I-yeon. A girl whose name alone told you she was from the Sichuan Tang Clan.
"I think one hour would be better. We have to think about our food situation, don't we?"
She had a point. There were six of us, so supplies were a real concern. If we took the long path and then ran into another stretch that ate up time, we'd be stuck starving in a cave where we had no idea what might come next. We might even starve to death.
"I-I'll go with the long one..."
And last, the girl who'd shouted at the start. The reality that everyone except me was a girl had become familiar enough that I no longer cared. They didn't treat me like a guy anyway.
The lopsided gender ratio in the Marksman Department came down to preference and talent. Most guys gravitated toward the close-combat and mid-range tracks. If you had to call it something, the Marksman Department was a half-measure of a place. Its rear-line firepower lost to the Magic Department. It lost to the vanguard when it came to disrupting a battlefield. Even its stability lost out to the mid-liners. An in-between. And the fact that Jeong Sowon had taken the Academy's salutatorian seat from a department like this was proof enough she was a monster.
Anyway, that settled it. We would take the long path.
"Come to think of it... what's on the short path?"
The timid one asked Jeong Sowon, belatedly. No matter how much of a monster Jeong Sowon was, there was no way she'd know what traps or monsters were waiting on a path she hadn't even walked...
There was.
"A Hydra?!"
And the identity of that monster was dangerous beyond anything we could have imagined.
A Hydra. The name usually conjures the nine-headed serpent from the Twelve Labors of Hercules. This wasn't that kind of creature. A massive, regenerative body bristling with tentacles, acid running in its veins instead of blood. The way those tentacles writhed and spat corrosive fluid was apparently reminiscent enough of the Hydra of myth that the name had stuck. Its threat level was said to rival that legendary stature—which meant if we ran into one, we were finished. All of us. I didn't know what would become of Jeong Sowon, but she'd probably die too, in the end.
A gulp. The sound of someone swallowing echoed through the cave.
"What the hell is this dungeon..."
Someone's muttered voice drifted low through the dark. Nobody thought to shut them up. We were all thinking the same thing.
Crunch. Someone must have stepped on a bone; something snapped underfoot. We startled and scanned our surroundings, but nothing happened. In a passageway so wide even the magically conjured light couldn't illuminate it all, the sound of swallowing carried with naked clarity.
Taking it as a blessing that nothing had come of it, we walked for hours.
"Isn't it about time we took a break?"
The first to tap out was Jennifer. I'd expected the timid one to fold first, but Jennifer? Coming from a magic family, her stamina might have been lacking, but Marksman training wasn't exactly light. And for people who handled mana, physical conditioning wasn't that hard. The reason I wasn't tired had its own circumstances, but still.
"...We can rest."
Jeong Sowon, who had been walking at the front, turned to look back at us. She studied something carefully, then nodded her approval.
"What do you see?"
Alexa, who had been watching her, asked. I was curious too. We were following her on faith, starting with how she'd found the path in the first place. She kept staring at something we couldn't see. Was there something visible only to Jeong Sowon's eyes? Hard to believe, considering this Red Portal had seemed visible only to her and to me. In that case, I should have been seeing something too—but beyond the fact that this was a Red Portal, I couldn't see a thing.
"W-what's chasing us...?"
It was the first time I'd heard Jeong Sowon use the word die. Ah. Come to think of it, we hadn't really met that many times.
"This isn't a safe path at all!"
A Death Reaper. A grim reaper, in the most literal sense. Not the East Asian psychopomp—the Western kind. A skeleton with a black scythe. That one.
"Death Reapers are slow, so we'll be fine."
"...Mom..."
Someone said. I won't specify who, but I related to it deeply. I didn't have a mother, but... there were still people I wanted to see. Kang Areum, who I loved, even if we'd broken up. Amelia, who I'd only been contract-dating for two days and was already missing. And more than anything—
"I want to go home..."
This dungeon was far too dangerous to sit back thinking, I'm fine—I've got a barrier. I'd never once hoped for a day when I'd have to put a House Rosemary barrier spell to the test...