Disciplinary Action (4)
The four of us stared down at the detector in silence for a good long while.
"..."
"..."
But the screen displayed nothing at all.
Naturally, every gaze converged on Shin Byung-cheol, and I lifted the fist-mike to my mouth.
"Care to say your piece?"
"No, no, this doesn't prove anything yet! It could still show up deeper in, y'know?"
And still he dug in his heels.
When you thought it through, he wasn't entirely wrong. The detector only sensed whether a Dark Oublek was within a certain range — meaning even if the thing was somewhere inside the dungeon, too great a distance could keep it off the screen entirely.
Song Cheon-hye seemed to arrive at much the same conclusion, because she took point and started walking.
"Let's move out."
No doubt she planned to try the detector again once we'd covered some ground. Without a murmur, we fell in behind her.
Every so often we crossed paths with lightning spirits, ice spirits, and their ilk, but—
- Kzzk-kzzzt!
—for Song Cheon-hye, the human lightning bolt, they hardly qualified as opponents. Most were settled with nothing more than a casual Hummingbird.
Her Hummingbird's hit C-rank, huh.
Hummingbird was a superb control skill in its own right, and covetable, but it couldn't hold a candle to the B-rank Ice Wall — so I resolved to hold back.
We would reach a target hill, activate the Oublek detector, walk on toward the next hill, activate it again — and repeat.
- Beeep—
Yet the screen stayed stubbornly dark.
At last, Song Cheon-hye delivered her verdict.
"I don't think it's here."
"Yeah, that's how it looks."
"Let's head out."
With that, she drew a single Emergency Escape Scroll from her inventory and tore it cleanly in two.
- Rrrrumble…….
The air split apart as though being wrenched open by force, revealing an exit a size smaller than your standard teleport portal.
The moment we stepped outside, Song Cheon-hye deleted No. 870 from the list. Meanwhile, I was fixing Shin Byung-cheol with a meaningful look.
"It didn't show up, did it?"
"...So it seems."
"And you'll be going in last from now on, won't you?"
"N-now hold on, that just makes it one-to-one, don't it? We gotta keep going in to find out."
The sample size was still too small to prove the hypothesis that Shin Byung-cheol was the living icon of bad luck. There was logic to it, so I nodded.
"Fine, it's a contest. Loser buys the meals?"
"Deal."
Song Cheon-hye pulled an exasperated face at the two of us.
"You're wagering over that?"
As if we'd never quarreled a day in our lives, Shin Byung-cheol and I rounded on her in perfect unison, dead serious.
"...It's that serious?"
"Nothing in this world is more important."
"Take a man's pride away and all that's left is a corpse."
Outmatched by our combined assault, Song Cheon-hye gave up on the conversation. Han So-mi, by contrast, beamed the entire time, delighted by who knew what.
"Somebody just win already!"
Of course, in the next dungeon and the one after that, the battle of pride came back to me as the victor. A Dark Oublek was hardly going to show up that often.
"Dinner... I suppose I'm buying, huh?"
"No, no, it's not over yet. Not over yet."
Shin Byung-cheol's face grew darker by the minute, but for a while yet, the dungeon-sweeping stayed peaceful. We skirted the dangerous spots and the strong monsters as best we could, sweeping each dungeon in a full loop, pausing here and there to run the detector — and whenever nothing turned up, out we went via escape scroll, only to start all over again.
And so the numbers dwindled — 860, 850, 840... — until we came to a halt before the next dungeon.
[No. 833] [Trident Lake]
Song Cheon-hye was moving to step through the portal as nonchalantly as ever when I tossed out a question.
"Do you know the strategy for this one?"
"...Not well. I do have the guidebook."
With that, she produced a thick bundle of documents for us to see. Better than knowing nothing at all — but it meant she hadn't yet committed it to memory.
So I made a proposal.
"I'd like us to run this one on my orders."
"And you know the strategy, do you?"
"I'm saying it because I do."
"..."
Song Cheon-hye silently exchanged a glance with Han So-mi. Han So-mi, for her part, could be surprisingly earnest in her signals when it mattered, and at her nod, it seemed they were willing to hand me the reins this once.
Shin Byung-cheol chimed in on top of that.
"This guy's the real deal when it comes to strategies. Give him a shot."
Song Cheon-hye looked like she wouldn't trust Shin Byung-cheol's endorsement as far as she could throw it, but she seemed to agree that I was worth a try. After all, it was by following my orders back at the midterms that the Blood Explosion Pill ogres had been held off with minimal damage.
"Understood. We'll go with your orders."
"Good. Let's head in, then."
We piled through the portal in a rush.
The next moment, we were standing on a dock built of wooden planks. Several small wooden boats were moored at its end — none of them very large, so two to a boat looked to be the limit. And sweeping my gaze around, I found a lake of considerable breadth stretching away to the far shore.
What we were meant to do couldn't have been more obvious.
Take the boats and go. Got it.
But for all this dungeon's peaceful air, charging in blind was an excellent recipe for a world of pain — which was exactly why I'd taken command before we entered.
"Song Cheon-hye."
"Yes."
"Hand me the guidebook."
She passed it over without hesitation, and I rifled quickly through to the map section and spread it open.
"Here, take a look."
"..."
The lake, which had run straight ahead from the dock, split into three branches partway across.
Like a trident.
"We'll split up to match it."
"Is that really necessary?"
"It is. Otherwise the dungeon won't progress."
The structure demanded that the three teams each fulfill their role at their own post before the way forward would open and the dungeon could be cleared.
This time it was Shin Byung-cheol who asked.
"Sounds like a hassle just hearing about it. Can we bail partway through?"
"Not possible. We need the detector, remember? It's a straight-line dungeon, so we have to sweep it end to end."
In a small dungeon, you could hit the detector once at each key point and simply leave if nothing registered. This one, though, was both large and linear — to use the detector, like it or not, we had no choice but to go all the way through.
Song Cheon-hye let out a small sigh, then asked again.
"So how do we split up?"
"By the book, a six-person party divides into three pairs. We can't manage that."
Which meant, unavoidably, a 2-1-1 split — one more reason the difficulty had just climbed another notch.
I turned to Shin Byung-cheol.
"You like puzzles?"
"I can't stand using my head."
"Then do you like monsters?"
"...Puzzles sound great."
An about-face executed in the space of a heartbeat.
I pointed to each of the lake's three branches in turn as I continued.
"Put simply: the right branch is puzzles, the left is a monster swarm, and the middle is the boss fight."
"Yeah, puzzles are definitely the way to go."
Shin Byung-cheol nodded with even deeper conviction. Compared to the rest of the party, his combat ability was hopeless, so this was the best call — and even if he had no faith in his own brain, he could get by well enough with a page of the guidebook in hand.
I looked between Song Cheon-hye and Han So-mi.
"I'm going center no matter what, and I need one more. Any takers?"
"Me!"
Han So-mi's hand shot straight up. Song Cheon-hye, who had been half-raising her own hand on the strength of that momentum, froze — then quietly lowered it.
"...I'll take the left."
"Okay. So the lineup's settled..."
I walked Song Cheon-hye and Shin Byung-cheol through a few key points. Then Song Cheon-hye distributed communicators, detectors, and escape scrolls to everyone. That would let us keep in contact to a reasonable degree, run our detectors continuously, and escape in an emergency — not that we'd likely need the scrolls, since by the time we reached the end of this dungeon, the guide run would be wrapping up anyway.
"Time to set off."
With every preparation made, we boarded the wooden boats. Song Cheon-hye and Shin Byung-cheol each took one, and Han So-mi and I sat facing each other in the last. As the mooring lines came loose, the boats began drifting along the lake of their own accord. Oars were mounted on either side, but even left unused, they made passable speed.
"Ooh~"
Even so, Han So-mi was merrily testing her oar this way and that, as if the whole thing were a novelty. Shin Byung-cheol, meanwhile, was visibly squirming at the crawling pace. Before long he opened his inventory, fished something out, and mounted it at the stern of his boat.
- Vrrrooom—
A boat motor.
I asked, dumbfounded.
"Why on earth are you carrying a motor around?"
"Figured something like this might come up. Life runs on gear."
"Give us one too."
"I've only got the one!"
- Vrrrooom—
Shin Byung-cheol's boat gathered speed and began pulling ahead — hurling a taunt our way as it went.
"Goin' on ahead~! Y'all take your sweeeet time!"
I looked at Han So-mi, my expression set like stone.
"Losing this one is not an option."
"A race?"
"A race. Let's show him the power of the human body."
"Yeah!"
Minds made up, the two of us — and Han So-mi promptly began rowing at a terrifying pace.
- Splashsplashsplashsplash!
Her first strokes were a touch clumsy, but a physical-class fighter was a physical-class fighter: she found the rhythm almost at once and turned into a veteran boatwoman. And when I layered Wind Force on top to shove us along, the little wooden boat went shooting across the water at a frankly unbelievable speed.
Song Cheon-hye stared at the two boats racing off with an expression of pure disbelief.
"Was that really necessary...?"
It absolutely was. A man's pride was on the line.
Song Cheon-hye dropped out of sight in an instant, and then we ran Shin Byung-cheol down and blew past him too. Now it was his turn to be stunned.
"Why are you wasting a skill on that?"
"Life runs on skills."
"Goin' on ahead~!"
We served his own words right back at him, almost word for word.
- Splashsplashsplashsplash!
Before long, his motorboat, too, dwindled to a speck and vanished from view. Only then did we ease off.
"We won. High-five."
"High-five!"
- Smack!
Han So-mi smacked my palm hard enough to leave it stinging. Then she cocked her head and asked,
"What now?"
"Take it easy for a bit. There's nothing out here anyway."
The real run wouldn't begin until the lake split into three. Until then, a little leisure did no harm. So for a while we simply drifted along, letting our eyes wander over the scenery.
Then, mid-drift, Han So-mi's hand shot up again.
"I've got a question!"
"Go right ahead."
"What were you and Cheon-hye talking about earlier!"
"Important secret stuff."
"Tell me!"
Beams of pure curiosity were blasting from Han So-mi's eyes in every direction. But I shook my head, firm and final.
"Nope. It wouldn't be fair to her."
"Aww. Really, really no?"
"Really, really no."
Truthfully, whether or not the Major Wish Ticket came to light made little difference to me. For Song Cheon-hye, though, it meant I was holding an enormous weakness over her — she'd want it kept quiet no matter who was asking, Han So-mi included. I'd refused with exactly that in mind.
At that, Han So-mi's expression shifted by degrees into something serious, and she opened her mouth with studied casualness.
"I've got something too, y'know. Important secret stuff."
"..."
Perhaps she'd just been testing how tight my lips were.
So I gave Han So-mi the answer she was hoping for.
"Let's hear it, then. In exchange, it stays between us."
— Next — 268. The Support Ate It All —