A Scented Mystery and the Feeding Ritual
"What the hell was that?"
"Ugh... this is completely messed up. Like I got absolutely wrecked."
"Can you try to say it a little more tastefully?"
"What, isn't this level of wrecking exactly what you called it?"
Ray grumbled while digging through the rubble of the smashed windmill.
She hoped maybe there were survivors or some important item left behind, so she kept sifting through the piles of debris, but all she got was a big fat zero.
After cleaning out the windmill's management staff and pulling out every usable thing, it looked like the structure had simply collapsed on itself.
"Still, following the trail should be easy enough."
"Really?"
"We left behind tons of traces. Scent, footprints, the works."
"It doesn't look that obvious."
Curious if Leaf had caught on, Ray glanced over at him.
Leaf, who had caught the unspoken meaning in her look, immediately shook his head.
His long hair, bright as ever thanks to the hood-less state they were in when they were just the three of us, swayed gently and let out a fresh, almost forest-like scent that was strangely addictive.
It was subtly addictive, that was for sure.
Like it had this cool, refreshing vibe.
"Leaf, stop shaking your head. The scent's getting mixed in."
"Ah, r-right? Do I smell that much?"
Ray's words made Leaf scramble to grab a fistful of his hair and slam it right in front of his nose, wrinkling it up.
"It's a nice smell, sure, but it's way too thick. Who was that again, Number Seven? Other elves don't smell like that."
Seven.
Elowen Starweaver was the only pure elf in our entire cohort.
Leaf, who was already a little wary of Elowen, let out a nervous, "Ah, ahaha..."
"Speaking of which, you don't smell nearly as bad when you wear a hood, do you? That's some kind of artifact, right?"
"Yep. It erases tracks, keeps the temperature and humidity stable, nothing fancy."
"How cool is that?" Leaf said, grabbing his hood-robed robe and waving it around like it was some big deal.
"So you've been wearing this thing all day long. Even better than the others who don't have it."
Ray poked Leaf in the side with a sharp little jab, muttering how unfair it was.
Leaf let out some weird, half-pain half-tickle laugh as he darted behind her to escape the lion's mana.
"Ray, ease up. We need to track them."
"Hmph. Yeah, I know."
No bodies.
That meant the people who were here had probably been taken somewhere else.
It was the exact moment the search-and-rescue mission turned into a simple meet-and-greet.
Ray took point, her easygoing walk the only thing between us and trouble.
Every so often she would crouch down to check the ground or flick her nose like a bloodhound, trying to catch the faintest scent.
"Ray."
When I called out, the lion beastman who was inspecting the floor gave me the universal signal to keep talking.
"You think you can figure out who the attackers were?"
Ray stood back up and answered without missing a beat.
"Rough guess? Probably some kind of bugbears."
"Bugbears?"
Leaf asked, sounding just as confused as I felt.
Bugbears sat right in the middle of the food chain on the first floor. Goblin-level monsters that were basically their bigger, smarter cousins.
They had this whole family-tree connection to goblins, and on looks and raw power they were way closer to orcs than anything else.
Since orcs counted as an intelligent race here, maybe bugbears had basically replaced them as the go-to monster for that slot.
They were solid mid-tier predators on the first floor, but the real position of a bugbear pack was a step or two higher because of how they operated.
Ten, twenty, sometimes even dozens of them working together. That pack advantage turned them into serious threats, the kind that could take down senior hunters on the first floor.
That was why bugbears were the most common kill on the first floor, the ones every single novice or brand-new regular explorer ended up fighting.
Still, for a proper regular explorer who could handle themselves, a swarm of bugbears wasn't an automatic death sentence.
They'd be hard-pressed in a straight fight, sure, but running away with your life was still pretty simple.
"A bugbear pack managed to take down a team leader?"
"I know, it's weird. No other traces besides that."
We kept following the clues, curiosity eating at us, and soon the open plains gave way to a dense forest.
"A forest..."
Ray's guard went up another notch as she scanned the surroundings carefully.
Forests were surprisingly rare in the first floor of the Abyss, which was made of hard rock.
And more importantly, forests on the first floor were often giant traps on their own.
"This can't be..."
She was thinking about the living forest that ate humans whole—the carnivorous symbiotic forest.
"If it is that kind of forest, I won't be surprised."
Those trees weren't just growing together; they were all tied into one single root system. A symbiotic forest that developed carnivorous traits just to steal enough nutrients. It had absorbed the Abyss's secrets and turned into a monster.
Even a regular explorer who walked in there would be killed without a chance.
It was one of the top predators on the first floor, the kind a senior explorer couldn't even guarantee survival against.
Considering it was on the Chromatic Hand level, getting taken down by bugbears wasn't that hard to explain.
"You think they were lured in by bugbear tricks?"
"Close enough. The tracks we saw look more like someone walking than running away."
We shared a look, me and Ray, and the two of us stood there seriously debating whether the forest in front of us was really the carnivorous symbiotic forest or not.
In the split second I wasn't looking, Leaf—the last one out of the three of us—walked straight past us and reached out to touch a tree at the edge of the forest.
"Hey, hey, Leaf!"
Ray shouted, startled, but Leaf just calmly pulled his hood back over his head and stepped right into the woods.
"It's fine. It's just a forest. But we should hurry. I heard something weird is happening inside it."
With that, Leaf started walking faster, like he already knew exactly where he was going better than Ray did.
We both stood there staring, completely frozen for a second, then looked at each other and took off after him.
"Wait, hold on! I'm the one who should be leading!"
"Come on, Leaf, let's go together."
§
Jay, the official explorer assigned to the team leader position for this test and the one who had handled the windmill at the edge of the world, stared at the chaos unfolding right in front of him and seriously wondered if he was still dreaming.
But the burning pain from the wounds pierced straight through his body by the arrows, along with the everywhere-burning throb, made it crystal clear he was still very much awake.
"What... is that?"
Thinking back on it, the whole situation had been hard to believe from the start.
Jay's explorer rank was senior.
There was no way a senior should be caught out on the first floor like this.
Even seniors could slip if they'd been out of the field for a long time, but Jay wasn't that kind of guy.
Even though he was almost forty, he was still chasing his dream as a full-time explorer and grinding every day.
This year he had even joined an expedition to the fourth floor as part of his push toward expert.
Getting knocked down by something like this would have been a miracle in itself.
But looking at the scene playing out right in front of him, Jay could almost understand why he was the one who got taken.
Even when his life was on the line, Jay's curiosity hadn't died.
Whether hope existed or not didn't matter.
The unknown layers of the Abyss were being peeled away right in front of his eyes.
As an explorer, someone who had chased adventure as his whole life, he had a duty to watch.
Jay forced himself to stay in the present.
Eyes wide open, he refused to miss a single detail, forcing his paralyzed brain to wake up and shove every last thing he saw into his memory.
Where Jay had been dragged to: the bugbear lair nestled deep inside the forest.
It was the central point of a decent-sized pack of maybe twenty bugbears.
The rare shaman among them was chanting his incantations while the bugbears all crouched and lowered their heads in perfect unison.
It was worship.
Whatever the thing on the altar was, it was the one receiving the bugbears' devotion.
Jay, a senior explorer, had been subdued by that very thing, and now it had changed into something completely different—only leaving behind faint traces of its six-fingered, six-toed bugbear form.
Without the slimy bugbear tail, who would have guessed it was even a bugbear?
The average bugbear stood around 170 centimeters, just a bit smaller than a human.
This thing was closer to two meters, built like a wall of muscle compressed to the point of explosion.
Even covered in fur, that raw power showed through.
Its skeleton was completely different too.
The bigger frame had turned it more human-like than the quadrupedal bugbear it had once been.
Evolution.
A grotesque, explosive evolution that only happened once in a generation.
The being who might one day become the king of all the bugbears ruling the first floor was showing Jay the monumental birth and growth of its kind right now.
Jay could feel the worship ceremony had reached its climax.
He had no choice but to accept it.
The bugbears that had been bowing their heads all at once lifted them, and those glowing eyes locked onto him with pure malice.
Was he about to be torn apart as a sacrificial offering?
Maybe he would be eaten alive.
The other captured subordinates were already half-frozen with terror, either passed out or squeezing their eyes shut.
Jay was the only one who met the approaching death head-on.
"A proper explorer's death, huh."
Jay accepted his fate.
At the moment his abilities had been sealed by the bugbear shaman while he was held captive, escape had been as close to impossible as zero.
With that thought in mind—the first person in the world to witness the Abyss's mysteries—he braced his heart for his final moments of composure.
"SPLASH—BOOOOOOM!!"
High-pressure water from somewhere outside crashed in and instantly demolished the entire bugbear lair.
Red blood droplets mixed into the transparent streams, creating an eerie new color.
Jay forced his eyes open and squeezed out a voice over his numb throat.
"Rescue team? Already? If they're moving this fast, at least expert level..."
Jay's shock was cut short by a sudden, emotionless voice that appeared out of nowhere—no warning, no nothing.
"No."
And he said his real goal without hesitation.
"I've come to pick up my verification papers."