Echoes of the Nightwalker
"Ciel. Can you hear that too?"
"Huh? Hear what?"
From Ciel's reaction, the voice seemed to be ringing only inside Do-yun's head.
He swept his gaze around, but nothing unusual stood out.
For a moment he wondered if some monster was projecting auditory hallucinations, yet that didn't feel right either.
"Ciel. Keep an eye on the surroundings for me, will you?"
"Ah, got it!"
After setting Ciel on watch, Do-yun focused on the voice echoing from within.
It wasn't severe enough to erode his sense of self. If he had to put it into words, it felt similar to recalling a scene from a video he had once watched.
Why all of a sudden?
He couldn't understand why this phenomenon was occurring now after nothing had happened until this point.
Tracing his memories back to the first time he met Grham, Do-yun suddenly hit upon one possibility.
…Grham's moniker was Nightwalker, wasn't it.
Literally, one who walks the night.
And right now, the surroundings were filled with a darkness that admitted not a single speck of light.
Linking the moniker to the present situation produced a simple conclusion.
"So the 11th floor's setting was Grham's world."
The abrupt surfacing of Grham's memories also seemed to be a phenomenon caused by this place being his homeland.
Do-yun had never expected the man he thought he would never meet again to start exerting influence this late in the game.
Still, the change wasn't necessarily a bad thing.
— The appearance of a Shade means there's a fairly large village nearby.
— The corpses of slash-and-burn farmers living hidden in the mountains rot away before they can even become Shades.
Grham's voice was reciting information about the 11th floor that no one had ever managed to uncover.
It didn't seem like he was deliberately trying to help Do-yun even after death. Rather, it felt as though pre-recorded voice logs were surfacing in Do-yun's mind the moment the right conditions were met.
"A village, huh."
In truth, Do-yun had been walking at random with no clear destination. The moment he stepped even ten meters beyond the lantern's light, pitch-black darkness blocked his path. Characteristic buildings or landmarks were out of the question; even the road beneath his feet was little more than a faint outline. Under circumstances like these, fixing a proper destination was impossible.
The returnees all reached the first village at completely different times, too.
Even with a lantern, the thick darkness was perfect for destroying one's sense of direction. You might believe you were advancing in a straight line, yet from a distance you could be circling the same useless spot. That was why the returnees' arrival times had varied so wildly.
Do-yun himself had simply been trudging forward for lack of any better method—until Grham's voice appeared at just the right moment and pointed him in a direction.
"The monster earlier came from this way, didn't it."
Of course the returnees had considered following the monsters that appeared out of the dark. Every attempt had failed. A Shade fully merged with the darkness was virtually undetectable until the instant it struck.
But I have Absolute Sight.
He had already pinpointed the Shade's location before it even lunged. Do-yun angled his body half a step to the right and started walking.
"Kyaaaaah!"
Before he had taken more than a few steps, another monster burst from the darkness. Once again Do-yun calmly swung his sword and cleaved the Shade's body in half.
"Looks like this direction is right."
A high number of monsters meant something important had to be nearby. He flicked the residue from his blade and was about to resume walking when a black silhouette shot out from his blind spot behind him.
"Kh!"
Thanks to Absolute Sight he managed to cut it down before the lantern could be damaged, yet the hurried slash simply sent the Shade flying back the way it had come.
Thud.
He moved to finish the flung Shade for good—only to freeze after a few steps as killing intent flared at his back. Dealing with the immediate threat behind him took priority over chasing a wounded straggler.
It appeared way too suddenly.
A strange doubt rose in his mind even as he stopped. According to Absolute Sight, the only Shade in that direction had been the one he had just cut down.
"Kyaaaaah!"
Doubt or no doubt, his body moved on instinct. The moment the black shadow entered his vision, his sword flashed like lightning.
Slash.
The black clay, sliced cleanly in two, slapped onto the ground and began to smolder away.
"What the hell is going on."
Do-yun looked back and forth with a growing sense of unease. Had another Shade been added in that brief interval?
That doesn't make sense time-wise.
"I still have to keep moving forward."
He felt as though he was missing something, but he couldn't very well sit here all day. Shaking off the anxiety, he pressed on—only to confront the same phenomenon again before long.
Strictly speaking, it wasn't entirely the same. This time the Shades that appeared behind him numbered two instead of one.
"Shit!"
He had been paying full attention to his rear this time, so his reaction wasn't late, yet the steadily increasing enemy count left him with no choice but to question it.
"Don't tell me this is the problem?"
After successfully cutting down every Shade that attacked, Do-yun stared down at the remains scattered across the ground with a puzzled expression. The debris was slowly evaporating where the light touched it—a sight that reeked of something suspicious.
Thrust.
He reversed his grip on the sword and speared a piece of Shade remains as if it were a skewer.
"Ciel. Bring the lantern down for a second."
He set the lantern that had been resting on his head onto the ground, then carried the speared remains to the very edge of its light. Only the skewered fragment did he gently push into the darkness.
It felt like tossing a chunk of meat into a fire pit.
Gurgle.
The Shade remains, however, changed far faster than any chunk of meat. The instant they brushed the darkness they swelled madly, their bulk ballooning in size.
"What the hell is this?!"
Startled, Do-yun swung his sword in a frantic series of cuts, yet the Shade submerged in darkness simply regenerated as though nothing had happened no matter how many times he minced it. By the time he scrambled back for the lantern, the Shade had already vanished.
"It recovers damage while submerged in darkness, huh."
Do-yun muttered under his breath as he stared at the spot where the Shade had disappeared. Only now did he understand why the assaults had felt endless. He had been fighting only two Shades the entire time. Because he hadn't finished them off properly, they had simply kept regenerating.
"How am I supposed to deal with this."
He gazed at the single remaining fragment and sank into thought. Seeing how it slowly burned away under the light, it would eventually turn to dust—yet he had no idea how small it needed to become before regeneration became impossible.
"Couldn't you just use Scorching Sword?"
"And what if it regenerates after that?"
The skill had been the first thing to pop into Do-yun's mind as well, yet he felt no certainty that searing the remains would stop them from coming back. Wasn't this basically immortality?
I never heard any of the returnees mention that Shades had a trait like this.
Once neutralized, that had been the end of them. The idea that they regenerated if left in darkness was completely new. Was the darkness inside the Tower of Ascension somehow special?
And Grham hasn't said another word since earlier.
Grham's voice had fallen silent ever since their first encounter with the Shades. Do-yun expected it would return once he met a new monster or reached a new location, but that was of little help right now.
"No choice. I'll just have to carry them with me."
His solution was to keep the remains on his person. After all, they didn't regenerate while exposed to light.
Scorching Sword (C)
He ignited flames along his blade, compressed the Shade remains down to the size of a fingernail, and dropped the shriveled fragment into the lantern oil. Since there was no chance he would ever extinguish the lantern on the 11th floor, this ought to prevent regeneration.
Clomp. Clomp.
Having constructed a perfect prison for the Shades, Do-yun set off once more. Along the way he ran into the other Shade he had previously let slip away; he immediately cut it down, performed the same treatment, and dropped it into the lantern as well.
I can definitely feel the ambushes thinning out.
Monsters still targeted the light, but the situation was vastly better than the one-attack-per-minute tempo of earlier.
"Do-yun-nim! I think we've arrived!"
Continuing to carve through monsters as he advanced, Do-yun soon spotted a wooden palisade standing like a wall.
"Oh."
Finding it this quickly counted as excellent time. Bad luck could have left someone walking for hours without discovering so much as a trace.
"It's in better shape than I expected!"
"You're right."
Just as Ciel said, the palisade was remarkably clean. A little weathered by the passage of time, yet still fully functional as a village defense—so intact that no gap wide enough for an outsider like Do-yun was visible anywhere.
"What should we do?"
"What do you mean, what should we do."
Ordinarily he would have had to circle the fence for ages hunting for a gate. Naturally, Do-yun had no intention of wasting time on anything so bothersome.
Bash (F)
KRAAAASH!
The palisade that had stood firm through the long years exploded into splinters. Through the bursting fragments and swirling dust, Do-yun strode forward without the slightest hesitation.