Instant Dungeon (3)
"You're amazing, Yeon-i hyung!"
Ko Sung-yoon gushed with unrestrained excitement. Barely three minutes earlier he had been staring up at Choi Yeon with a face full of fear—yet now he was thrusting both thumbs skyward as if that terrified version of himself had never existed.
"The orcs couldn't find you at all, and you just kept taking them out… It was seriously so cool!"
Choi Yeon let out a quiet snort of laughter at the transformation. It was for the best, really. If this had been a one-time meeting, it wouldn't have mattered—but they were going to keep running into each other. Better that Sung-yoon admire him than fear him. If the kid flinched every time they crossed paths on the street, other people might get the wrong idea.
"I was genuinely moved, you know?"
"Moved is a bit much…"
Choi Yeon's mouth twisted in embarrassment. It was a mercy they were alone out here. If other hunters had been around, they would have thought Sung-yoon was making a ridiculous fuss. What was so impressive about a C-class hunter taking down C-rank orcs, after all?
Choi Yeon decided to change the subject. Praise was fine once or twice, but several straight minutes of it just made his face burn.
"…Ah—over there!"
He had been racking his brain for a diversion when the need vanished on its own. At the tip of Ko Sung-yoon's outstretched finger, a path cut through the trees. At its heart lay a wide clearing, ringed by orcs as if they themselves were the fence.
Wanting a proper look at whatever bizarre performance they were putting on, Choi Yeon drew a crossbow scope from his holster.
"What the hell are they doing?"
He muttered in pure bewilderment. The orcs surrounding the clearing were slamming their heads forward and back, looking for all the world like drunks bashing their skulls into a wall late at night. They weren't driving their heads into empty air. They were pouring stupid, brute force into battering down a wall they couldn't even see.
The orcs' massive bodies blocked any view of the child, but the fact that they kept at it suggested she was still unharmed.
"Huh…"
Choi Yeon breathed out a note of wonder. He had half-doubted it, but—
"There's actually a barrier."
He spoke the word he had swallowed when Sung-yoon first told him. The invisible wall holding the orcs at bay really was a barrier. Sung-yoon hadn't been hallucinating after watching a child die.
That was a relief. A relief—and yet, why on earth was there a barrier inside a dungeon?
"Wait—that was a barrier?"
"Yeah. I saw one once when I went out as dungeon-break support. It held monsters back exactly like that."
"Ohh, I see… Huh? Hang on. Why is there a barrier in a dungeon?"
Now that he understood what the transparent wall was, Sung-yoon turned the question on Choi Yeon. There was no answer to give. Choi Yeon had asked himself the exact same thing the moment he laid eyes on it.
When no reply came, Sung-yoon's gaze drifted back to the barrier.
"Did a mage come in with us? No… There was nobody except me and Chae-eun. And even if there had been someone, why would they…"
The questions kept circling with no one to answer them. Choi Yeon's mind was in much the same state—thoughts rising and sinking in endless rotation. The difference was that where Sung-yoon sank into the mystery, Choi Yeon simply didn't care that much.
Why it was there didn't matter. It was there, and it was protecting the child. What Choi Yeon needed to worry about was getting her out safely before a barrier of unknown duration decided to vanish.
He lifted the crossbow scope again and swept the forest, wanting a little more information before he decided how to move. Fortunately, the barrier showed no sign of collapsing anytime soon—no shimmering, no telltale premonition of failure.
"Hmm…"
Choi Yeon realized the orcs in the woods fell into three groups: the ones ramming their heads into the barrier, the ones standing still behind them, and the ones quietly slipping away from the forest.
"…That's strange."
The scope's lens held one of the motionless orcs. Sung-yoon, who had been muttering to himself, glanced over.
"What is, hyung?"
"It looks like every orc in this dungeon is gathered in that forest."
"Huh? They're monsters—isn't that normal?"
Monsters were beings that showed hostility toward humans. Of course they would flock to a forest where a human was hiding. Sung-yoon answered from common sense—but there was a gap in that reasoning, and Choi Yeon pointed it out.
"Not really. There's even an orc centurion here."
"An orc centurion…?"
"A centurion—the orc commander. Probably this dungeon's boss monster."
"You mean that orc that's bigger than the others?"
"That's the one. That bastard is… wait. Sung-yoon-ssi, you can see him?"
"Huh? Yeah. I can see him."
Sung-yoon tilted his head. Watching those rabbit ears droop as he asked the question back, Choi Yeon let out a hollow laugh. The idea that the kid could pick out a target hundreds of meters away while wearing a mascot head was absurd.
"You've got incredible eyesight."
"Hehehe."
"…Anyway. Dungeon bosses almost never leave their own territory."
Choi Yeon steered back to the point.
"So a boss that abandons its territory to come out to the forest—that's weird."
"Now that you mention it, yeah, that is weird."
"And the orcs don't look healthy either. Kind of like sick chickens… The ones I saw out on the wasteland weren't like that."
"Ah! That's probably because of the forest."
"The forest?"
Choi Yeon looked at him. This was the same Sung-yoon who had known nothing about barriers, orc centurions, or boss territories—and yet he spoke as if he understood why the orcs were in bad shape. Curious.
Sung-yoon answered at once.
"I told you I couldn't get through the barrier, right? When it happened, I actually bounced off it. I thought, I'm caught for sure. But no matter how long I waited, the orcs never grabbed me. I opened my eyes wondering what was going on—and they were all standing outside the forest."
"Outside…? You're saying the ones chasing you never came in?"
"Exactly!"
"……?"
"That's how I got to rest a little in the woods. That's when I learned Chae-eun's name, too. If it hadn't been for that, I would've run out of stamina long before I found you."
"Hmm…"
Choi Yeon looked at the forest packed with dozens of orcs. A forest you could enter but preferred not to. A forest that pressed a psychological weight down on you. That didn't make sense either. Orcs usually appeared on plains or wastelands, but they showed up in forests sometimes too—and whenever they did, they had wandered through without the slightest hesitation. He had never once seen them avoid or shrink from the trees.
Still bewildered, Choi Yeon kept turning the pieces over carefully. A forest the orcs shunned. A barrier inside it. A little girl within that barrier.
Right. The child was what mattered. Everything else was just noise.
He had looked long enough. Time to decide.
"Sung-yoon-ssi. Left or right?"
"Huh…?"
"Pick one. Which side?"
"Uh, um… I don't know why you're asking all of a sudden, but if I have to choose… the right?"
"Yeah? Then we go right."
Choi Yeon started walking. Had he really just been asking for a direction? He set off along the right-hand side of the path into the woods.
THUD. THUUUD…!
The sound of something bursting rang out with bone-deep force—orcs smashing their heads into the transparent wall. Even when skulls split and blood ran and bruises blackened their faces, they did not stop. Anything living that took that kind of headbutt in succession would have had its skull shattered to powder and died without anyone batting an eye.
If it had been a living thing, that is.
The barrier was untouched. Not so much as a hairline crack. The only things cracking were the clenched teeth of the orcs, forced by orders to keep going.
The orcs—centurion included—knew perfectly well that none of this would bring the barrier down. They kept at it for one reason only: to plant fear in the human girl inside.
And yet—
"……."
The girl sat perfectly still. There was not a trace of fear on her. She looked as certain as stone that the orcs would never make it through.
How could she sit like that in front of great warriors like us?
Provoked by her composure, one orc threw everything he had into ramming the barrier.
BOOM!
He didn't break it—but he achieved a little of what he'd wanted. The girl's small head turned their way.
"……!"
Her eyes went round. Thinking at last that she was afraid, the orcs crowed in triumph and slammed their heads and fists even harder—thud, thud—until a rough snarl cut them short.
"Chwik—shut up and stop!"
It didn't last. The orc centurion had given the halt order. A moment ago he'd been telling them to keep ramming, and now he wanted silence because it was too loud? Dissatisfaction flickered in a few orcs' eyes, then died the instant they looked back.
It wasn't because the centurion was about to split their skulls with his great axe the way he usually did. It was because they had seen the light rising in the sky, burning a deep red.
The orc centurion barked a question at his subordinates.
"Anyone—chwik!—seen that before?"
"……."
No answer came. The centurion nodded as if he had expected as much. He was the oldest warrior here and he had never seen it; there was no chance his idiot underlings had.
He did the only thing he could do in the moment: send subordinates to check.
"Chwik! You lot over there—go take a look!"
"Chwiiik!"
Five orcs answered with something like enthusiasm and headed out. Ramming their heads into an invisible wall had never sat well with them—it didn't look like warriors' work; it looked like the work of fools. The five left under the envious stares of the rest, and they did not return even after the centurion had folded all ten of his thick fingers and opened them again.
In their place, a new light rose into the sky. It burned red.
"Chwik? Chwik…!"
The orc centurion sent more. Not five this time—fifteen, counted off on three small fingers. This time it would be fine. This time they would check and come back.
"……."
But his subordinates did not return even after he had closed and opened his ten fingers again. Not the first five. Not the next fifteen. Not a single one.
That was when the orc centurion's curiosity finally caught fire. What was out there where that light kept rising?
And then—
FWOOSH!
A third light bloomed. The orcs turned anxious faces toward their centurion—not worried for the comrades who had failed to come back, but terrified of being next into the woods.
"Chwiiik!"
The orc centurion snorted hard through his nose. Contrary to his idiotic subordinates' fears, he had no intention of sending anyone else. Two failures had taught him that underlings weren't enough. Anyone he sent now would simply fail to return. Better to raise morale instead—by going himself.
"I'll go! Chwik—you lot hold this place!"
Leaving his admiring subordinates behind, the orc centurion strode into the forest with his head high. Before long he found a trail of trampled grass that had not risen again—clearly the path his subordinates had taken ahead of him. He followed it. One finger. Two. He folded them at steady intervals as time passed. When four fingers were down and only one remained—
Huff…
A coppery stench stabbed his nose. He tightened his grip on the axe haft resting across his shoulder. He didn't need to think about why a familiar smell was hanging in the air.
His subordinates were dead. Every last one of them, without exception.
Not long after he folded the final finger, the orc centurion found them—bodies scattered in pieces. How had they ended up like that? The moment the question formed, a nauseating smell rolled over him. The same reek of terror he had worked so hard to plant in the human child inside the barrier.
"Chwik…!"
He snorted hard, trying to shove the smell away. But then he understood. The smell wasn't rolling in from outside. It was rising from inside his own nose. The terror was climbing up from somewhere deep in his own body.
WHOOSH!
Unable to accept the truth, the orc centurion swung his axe. The horizontal cut bit into nothing but an innocent tree and a subordinate's severed head.
And in that exact instant—
Shunk.
A foreign sensation bloomed in his side for no reason he could name. The foreign thing was a dagger, and the one who had driven it into his flank was a human—somehow standing there with his eyes closed.
"Ch-chwik…?"
A hollow sound slipped from the orc centurion's mouth. From the moment his subordinates had failed to return until now, he had never dropped his guard. Not for a second. He was sure of it. And yet—how had this human simply appeared and put a blade in his side?
He couldn't understand it. With that massive head of his, there was only one thing he could grasp.
The smell. That nauseating smell of fear.