The Witch's Hideout
Of all the dungeons in World of Phantasm, the Witch's Hideout ranked among the easier ones.
"Relatively" was the operative word, though — for gamers playing World of Phantasm for the very first time, it loomed like a massive wall. Plenty of players had failed to clear it and simply given up on the game entirely, wandering off to different game labyrinths altogether.
But that was all before a proper strategy had been established. After Linpel set her record, the place was treated as little more than a tutorial dungeon. Ryu Hwi had cleared it countless times in simulation himself.
Then, out of nowhere, its difficulty had skyrocketed, and for three months not a single gamer had managed a clear.
Gamers kept throwing themselves at it, but no one had even figured out why the difficulty had risen — much less developed a strategy. Rumor had it the difficulty was still climbing even now. Just recently, even a gamer holding the title of Phantasma was said to have failed.
And it was in that very place that Ryu Hwi had thrown down the gauntlet — a time attack to break the record of Linpel, ranked number one in the world.
"Looks about the same on the surface."
He pressed deeper into the cave. Monsters had kept appearing ever since the Giant Bat, but he'd never once been in genuine danger. They might threaten low-level gamers, but they were nothing to the man who had crushed the Knight of Chaos and Darkness.
Ryu Hwi recalled the posts written by the gamers who had failed this dungeon. According to the information they'd shared, every last one of them had died without ever understanding why — game over, no explanation given.
Most likely, the dungeon's mechanics had changed. He walked on carefully.
It had already been three hours since he'd entered the dungeon. The cave's interior branched and wound together in an endlessly tangled maze.
According to the official lore, this cave had never been especially large — but the witch's magic had warped space itself. Which meant this incomprehensibly convoluted network of paths was entirely the witch's doing.
More than that, the maze demanded one exact correct sequence; take a single wrong turn, and you wandered it forever. Linpel's party, too, had bled considerable time here on their first attempt at the Witch's Hideout. Only after they developed a strategy of their own did they manage to slash their clear time dramatically.
Ryu Hwi, on the other hand...
"Shut it. Quiet."
Ryu Hwi snapped at YggON, irritation bleeding into his voice.
"I'm not lost. I'm preparing to find the way."
"Quit mashing your keyboard, you goddamn vacuum."
Ryu Hwi ground his teeth audibly.
"I'll say it one more time — I'm not lost. Normally, breaking through this section requires a party member with the Magic skill."
You had to use magic to sift through the countless routes and identify the 'true' one. Linpel had indeed brought a magic-spec member into her party to clear this stretch.
"But I've got no Magic skill and no party members, so I have no choice but to do it another way."
That look down from on high was deeply unpleasant.
Scowling, making no effort to hide his annoyance, Ryu Hwi kept moving — and YggON trailed after him as he strode forward without a shred of hesitation.
"I memorized it."
[...?]
"All 121 shift patterns of this section — every single one, memorized. The aimless wandering at the start was to figure out which pattern we'd landed in."
The shifts differed from one another in the tiniest of ways. Ryu Hwi had memorized every last difference. Back when he worked for the Linzea Guild, he had catalogued every pattern of this section based on the data the guild's gamers had gathered. Because a Magic skill solved the whole thing easily, everyone else had dismissed the data as useless — and now, three years later, he was putting it to work.
It may have looked like blind blundering, but Ryu Hwi chose only the precisely 'correct' path at every turn. The proof lay in the scenery around him, which changed little by little the farther he walked.
"I can hear every word, you cursed vacuum."
A little farther, and he'd be out of this section. Unlike Linpel, who had blasted through the maze with magic, he'd paid a heavy toll in clear time. He was at least thirty minutes behind, probably more.
Ryu Hwi wasn't rattled. This much he had predicted, exactly as it had played out.
"End of the maze section."
At the far end of the dizzyingly tangled labyrinth—
Ryu Hwi broke into a run. And then...
The ??? readied itself to reap the invader's life. When the invader let his guard down — and he was letting it down right now — that carelessness would take his life.
The ??? pondered. Why should a way to 'clear' a dungeon exist at all? This place existed, first and foremost, for the sake of hiding itself away. Was it not precisely the kind of place where intruders should be eliminated to the last man?
DEATH.
This hideout was no longer the place it had once been. It was now a hellish trap, built for the sole purpose of killing the clueless invaders who wandered inside.
The invader, barely out of the maze, was at this very moment lifting his foot toward the trap of death — never suspecting that a 'certain, inescapable death trap' lay in wait there.
New material. High-quality material would soon be in its grasp.
Just a little longer. One step closer. Just one more step.
DEATH.
Death opened its jaws.
He was mere steps from escaping the endlessly repeating maze when—
Ryu Hwi stopped dead.
Ryu Hwi couldn't answer. He didn't understand it himself — why his feet had halted. He had no reason. Only a feeling that he absolutely must not take another step.
Maybe it was nothing but nerves. And yet he could not bring himself to move. It was as if something were warning him.
Then it came to him — a certain skill.
SSR — Lv.1
He had left it untouched all this time, knowing nothing about what its effects might be. Could this unidentifiable sensation actually be Intuition at work?
Ryu Hwi immediately pulled a tool from his pack.
A decoy doll — a palm-sized puppet, a tool used chiefly for sniffing out traps.
The instant he threw it, the anomaly struck. Black energy erupted from the ground and swallowed the doll whole in a heartbeat.
Unable to withstand the impact, the decoy doll burned away into nothing, and for one brief moment the word DEATH, traced in black flame, flickered in the empty air before scattering into wisps.
"An instant-death spell?!"
Ryu Hwi understood what it was and sucked in a breath.
"That's a trap that belongs in the Tower. Why in the world is something like that in here?"
A trap that killed you the instant it caught you. It was notorious even within the Tower — unless you geared up with instant-death resistance, game over was guaranteed the moment it triggered.
What on earth was happening to this dungeon? Why had a mechanic that had never existed before suddenly appeared?
An instant-death trap, installed directly on the exit to the next section — there was no way forward at all.
A vicious, deliberate trap, laid to catch you in that first breath of relief after barely escaping the maze. If not for Intuition, Ryu Hwi would have game-overed without ever knowing what killed him.
"So Intuition is a skill that senses danger."
Useful, certainly — but it felt lacking for an SSR rank.
Ryu Hwi had come into this dungeon knowing full well that an unknown element was lurking inside. He had never assumed his very first attempt would end in a clean clear. The plan had always been to identify the 'unknown element' first, prepare a counter-strategy, and only then mount the time attack.
Clear a dungeon that had become impossible to clear — and on top of that, shatter Linpel's record. Done right, he figured he could kill two birds with one stone.
But the unknown element infesting this dungeon was far more vicious than anything he had imagined. This instant-death trap was surely only a fraction of it.
Even if he somehow clawed his way past this one, something even nastier almost certainly waited deeper in.
Unable to hide his frustration, Ryu Hwi clicked his tongue. Looking around changed nothing — all that met his eyes was the tangled maze of the cave. Taking another route to dodge the trap would only leave him circling the same ground forever.
Hm?
As he swept his gaze across his surroundings, Ryu Hwi noticed something.
"This is..."
The word DEATH surfaced and vanished on all sides, over and over without end. Death licked its lips, as if savoring its regret over the prey that had slipped away.
For the first time, the ??? felt anxiety.
This intruder was lucky. To dodge death with a single step left to fall — who could have imagined it? Countless intruders before him had met the fate called death.
But it didn't matter. That place was an endlessly repeating maze of death. No path through it escaped the curse of death.
The intruder had begun wandering the maze once more. The sight of him flailing helplessly through a maze with no exit was laughable beyond words. It was far too late to think of escaping now. The curse of death already had the intruder by the ankle—
[?]
The moment he stepped into a fork in the path, the intruder vanished. Without leaving so much as a trace. Completely.
The ??? located the intruder at once.
[...?]
Finding his position proved easy enough.
The Central Hall. The very heart of this dungeon — and a place far, far removed from the maze of death.
Why had the intruder appeared there, of all places? The ??? was briefly thrown by the sudden development, but quickly recovered. How the intruder had traveled to the Central Hall in a single bound, it could not say.
But that was no great problem.
The Central Hall held a trap that could never be avoided. Once you set foot inside, it was over.
DEATH. DEATH.
The characters symbolizing death surfaced without number. The death of the Central Hall reached out for the intruder—
[?!]
The intruder vanished once more. The power of death that had swallowed the Central Hall whole dissipated into nothing, accomplishing absolutely nothing.
The ??? searched again — and again found the intruder's position with ease.
The old laboratory. A distance that should have taken hours upon hours of walking from the Central Hall. No route connected the two in a single step.
Refusing to panic, the ??? resolved to kill the invader beyond any doubt this time — the old laboratory was stuffed to the brim with every trap imaginable, all built to protect its precious records.
Before he could slip away somewhere else, the ??? triggered every last trap in the laboratory. With a deafening roar, the entire room was engulfed in searing flame.
Surely he was dead this time.
[?!?!]
The intruder's signal appeared once more.
This time, in the storage zone beneath the caves.
The ??? — which had somehow clung to its composure until now — was gravely shaken.
This dungeon was supposed to lie under the ???'s dominion, yet the intruder trampled through it as though that dominion meant nothing at all, going wherever he pleased.
It made no sense. What on earth was happening?
The ??? triggered the storage traps, but the intruder strolled calmly out of that zone too, appearing next in yet another area entirely.
"Do NOT defile my domain with those filthy feet of yours!"
In the end, the ??? exploded with rage.
DEATH. DEATH.
DEATH. DEATH.
Characters of death filled every corner of the dungeon to bursting. The ??? triggered every trap in existence within the dungeon, all at once.
Running anywhere was useless. Wherever he fled, he would die. The hideout itself would be destroyed, but it would be restored soon enough — no problem there.
In that single moment, death ruled the dungeon.
"Hah... ha. Heheh... ha."
The intruder's presence vanished. The ??? curled its mouth into a grin. The DEATH characters floating in every direction faded away. The dungeon, so raucous with the intruder's presence, sank back into stillness.
That is — until it heard this voice.
"Oh, the boss room."
[?!?!?!]
For the first time, the ??? was so utterly astonished it nearly choked. Why? How? Nothing made sense.
Faced with the stunned ???, the intruder simply scratched his head. For some reason, he was wearing a rather peculiar expression.
"Well, whatever — details can wait. For now..."
The intruder drew his weapon.
"Let's just settle this. I'm wasting time. The boss of the Witch's Hideout — the Witch... no. Maybe I should be calling you something else?"
The intruder's entire presence shifted in an instant.