The Demon in the Basement (1)
'I will become king, Theo.'
A voice drifted up from a hazy memory.
'I will grow strong by any means necessary, earn the heavens' choice, and claim a name of my own.'
The one who spoke those words was a man who looked just like him.
The man met his gaze straight on as he spoke.
'I will become king, and ■■■ ■■■ ■■.'
His hand reached out instinctively, stretching far into the distance.
But there was not even a hint that it would ever reach.
Back then, he had been a weak, feeble creature.
'Brother….'
The words he wanted to say caught in his throat and never came out.
'Brother!'
Only after repeating that suffocating sensation over and over did the senses that had been drowned in slumber come flooding back, all at once.
"Cough! Cough!"
He coughed violently, again and again, as he rose from the bed.
"That dream again…."
Lately, it seemed to be coming to him more and more often.
Was it because the Great Advent was drawing near?
"…."
The mirror before him reflected the face of a man.
He resembled the man from his dream, but unlike him, his hair was black as ink and his skin was cold to the point of pallor.
Behind him stretched countless bookshelves.
They were packed tight with tomes written in every manner of gore.
"…I've slept too long."
He had perhaps overexerted himself recently, but with the times as they were, he could not afford to move slowly.
"You coughed, Your Highness."
Servants attended him as he changed his clothes.
A day in the Dark Palace was always the same.
"Any interesting news of late?"
He checked whether anything new had arrived overnight, or in the days since.
Leo, one of the two princes, smiled benignly.
"Anything will do. Don't weigh how important it is — just tell me."
"Yes, Your Highness."
The servant bowed his head low and dared to speak.
"It seems a new member has recently joined the 2nd Division of the Black Moon Knights."
"Joining outside the recruitment trial period… then it must be a special exception."
Leo searched his memory.
The 2nd Division was, if he recalled correctly, the one led by a knight named Lunan.
Her skill was one thing, but he remembered her as someone with a remarkably keen eye for gauging the strong.
"If she's the one who brought them in, then they must be no ordinary existence."
"…Shall I summon them to the Dark Palace?"
Leo shook his head.
"No need. If the child truly lives up to expectations, they'll come to see me of their own accord before long."
He smiled in satisfaction and gazed out beyond the Dark Palace.
The shadow cast by the castle stretched long, dyeing the Shadow Garden black.
"…."
Leo's eyes darkened.
The sensation of the dream he'd had only moments ago was still vivid upon his soul.
'Brother.'
The words that had choked him back then, he murmured now, as if gnawing on them at last.
"I will stop your plan, Brother. Without fail…."
"You only just got here, and now you're leaving… it's a shame."
"I've been here a whole week, you know."
Lunan looked at me with eyes full of reluctant parting.
"Just knock out that little request of yours and come right back. Got it?"
"Understood."
A week had passed since the induction ceremony.
The request I'd received had been officially approved.
All that remained was to go there and carry it out.
'They did say the requests the Knights take on are high-caliber.'
Maybe that was why the level of hospitality was in a league of its own.
They'd gone so far as to provide a top-grade carriage and a full escort detail, all for little old me.
'I feel like a visiting head of state.'
I'd had similar experiences back on Earth, too.
Though those were usually my bodyguard-shift colleagues hauling me off on the days I'd caused an incident.
"The Sloth family's territory isn't far from here. We should arrive in a few hours."
"Sloth… Sloth, huh…."
"What is it?"
"Nothing. It just feels like I've heard it somewhere before."
Ever since I'd accepted the request, the name had been oddly familiar.
Like a word I'd heard recently.
"Hmm, you probably have heard of them. The Sloth family is famous even in the kingdom."
"Are they?"
"Yeah. They're called the Holy Spear House — a family that's wielded the spear for generations. They supposedly even have a secret spear art."
A family of spearmanship, with a secret spear technique on top of that.
"Oh."
Only then did it come to me.
The Royal Class cadet at Etrun who'd brandished a spear at me and gotten flattened.
I couldn't remember the name, but his family name had definitely been Sloth something. Or was it Slithen?
'Well, doesn't matter.'
It wasn't as if it would affect the request.
"Anyway, safe travels!"
With Lunan seeing me off, I boarded the carriage.
"Sir Knight Lee Tae-hyun, I presume?"
"Yes, that's me."
"Identity confirmed. We will escort you to the Sloth family's territory with the utmost comfort."
A man who appeared to be a servant bowed his head respectfully.
Before long, the carriage wheels began to turn.
Rumble, rumble!
The scenery of the Shadow Garden and the silhouette of the Dark Palace shrank away behind us.
I closed my eyes for a moment, then slowly lifted my eyelids again.
'So then.'
Objective: Face the ???? hidden beneath the Sloth family's basement
🎁 Reward: ???
What would it throw at me this time?
Just as Lunan had said, the Sloth family's territory wasn't far.
The estate was quite beautiful, befitting a distinguished house — but I wasn't given so much as a moment to admire it.
"A pleasure. I am Robert Sloth, head of the Sloth family."
Because the instant I arrived, I was hauled straight into the lord's chamber to meet the man himself.
Which also meant this request was a matter of considerable importance to them.
"I'm Lee Tae-hyun, of the Black Moon Knights' 2nd Division."
"Hmm…."
His eyes swept over me from head to toe.
Judging by his build and the conditioning of his body, the lord was a warrior himself.
He seemed to be trying to size up my combat capability.
"That kind of stare is a little burdensome, sir."
"Ah! My apologies. Forgive me if I was rude."
"Not at all. More to the point, I'd like to hear about the request itself, and quickly."
The Sloth family was tight-lipped about the details of the job.
Unlike most requests, which spell everything out on the commission, theirs carried nothing but a single terse line: 'Close the dungeon.'
With a briefing that unhelpful and a difficulty to match, no wonder only a handful of people ever took it.
"Before that, there is something I must say first."
Robert spoke with resolute eyes.
"Once you hear what I am about to tell you, you must see this request through to the end. If you are not prepared, then I ask that you withdraw with my compliments."
"…Is it something that serious?"
"It concerns the honor of the Holy Spear House."
'You must complete the request' was another way of saying—
'Either close the dungeon, or die.'
No one had ever made it out of there alive, so naturally no one had ever been around to leak the details either.
"Hm."
I pretended to deliberate for a moment, then gave a small nod.
"Understood."
"You're certain?"
"I've already steeled myself for far worse."
My answer seemed to put him at ease; his face visibly relaxed.
"Then I shall tell you."
We were the only two people in the lord's chamber.
Robert clenched the fist resting on his knee and forced his lips apart.
"There is a demon in our family's basement."
"A… demon, you say?"
"I know what you'd like to say. Weren't all demons killed or sealed away 300 years ago?"
Not exactly, as it happened.
I'd already killed one unsealed demon myself, after all.
Still, the fact that this request involved a demon did catch me slightly off guard.
"Recently, entrances leading underground began appearing all over the family's territory. Beyond each entrance lay a seemingly bottomless pit — in other words, a dungeon."
For reference, dungeons in this world behaved much like the 'Gates' of Earth.
They connected to a separate space, teemed with monsters, and would never disappear until their boss was ultimately slain.
'The difference, though…'
was that dungeons here didn't connect to another world.
A physical space quite literally sprang into existence right where you stood.
In a way, that made them far nastier than Gates.
'And there's also the fact that you can turn back and leave mid-dive.'
Getting a chance to give up was a mercy Gates didn't offer.
"A dungeon forming beneath our own land was headache enough, but the worst part is that its core is a demon."
In this world, the boss was called the 'core' of the dungeon — 'core' for short.
Until the core was destroyed, the dungeon would never vanish.
"What makes you certain the core is a demon?"
"The dungeon itself told us so. It declared that it was an unsealed demon — and demanded we retreat at once and flee to the surface!"
"Other than speaking to you, were there any unusual phenomena?"
"Thankfully, as long as we withdrew after hearing the demon's words, nothing came of it. No curses, no sickness."
The problem was that anyone who entered the dungeon in order to destroy it had never come back alive.
"If word got out that a demon's den had sprouted beneath the Sloth family — the house they call the Holy Spear — it would deal a fatal blow to our standing. Of that there is no doubt."
Now I understood why he'd said what he did earlier.
He simply couldn't afford to have rumors spreading that a demon lived under his family's estate.
"And yet we cannot abandon land our family has cultivated for hundreds of years and move elsewhere. Hence this request."
"I understand. You can't very well burn down your entire house because you're afraid of a bug."
"I knew you would understand."
Left untreated, a dungeon kept multiplying its entrances.
There were already more than seven of them across this territory alone.
Any more, and this secret would be dragged out into the open for the whole world to see.
"I'll need to handle this quickly, then."
"Yes, so—"
"Before that."
Only then did I reach for the shy little feeling I'd been keeping tucked away.
My lips curved into a crescent, painting on a bright smile.
"Let's talk about my compensation, shall we?"
"C-Compensation? That's to be paid through the Knights—"
"Aww, but then the Knights take their cut, don't they? I'm doing this job all by myself. Doesn't that seem a little unfair?"
"If it's a matter of the amount, I'd gladly pay any sum…."
"Ah, money's fine."
It wasn't as if I could spend it out there anyway.
"Then what in the world…?"
"Nothing major."
They'd said it themselves — Holy Spear House, a family renowned for spearmanship. A pretty famous name, no?
Then their storage vaults must be… pretty big, right?
Gulp.
I swallowed the saliva pooling in my mouth and spoke.
"Artifacts. Just throw in a few good ones."
"This is one of the entrances."
After a highly successful round of negotiations—
I was escorted to one of the many entrances that had formed across the territory.
Whooooosh!
A whirlpool of mana, similar to a Gate but smaller in size.
This, I was told, was the very first dungeon entrance to appear here.
"Well then, off I go."
"Come back safe."
I hurled myself into the entrance, and a sensation much like a Gate washed over my body.
When I opened my eyes, a landscape like a vast subterranean ruin unfolded before me.
Plip. Drip.
Water droplets struck the floor, and the smell of dust and mold brushed past my nose.
'So this is the dungeon where the demon lives.'
Had this demon, too, come from Halheim, like Balrok?
If so, there would be quite a bit worth squeezing out of it.
If it happened to be a demon noble with a rank higher than Balrok's, it might hold valuable information even Balrok had never known.
"Which is exactly why this request—"
Clatter.
An ominous rattle of bones sounded behind me.
"—is mine to see through, no matter what."
I turned my head, pinpointing the source of the sound.
Three sword-wielding skeletons were charging straight at me.
"Let's go, Rir."
Ripples spread across the dark shadow at my feet.