Dungeon (Part 1)
A week's journey by carriage rented from the Guild.
By some stroke of luck, we never ran into a single cultist along the way, and we reached our destination without incident.
"We finally made it."
"Does it have to be like this every single time we take a job? A whole week is a bit much. And it's another week on the way back, isn't it?"
To spend a week that, in a novel, would amount to a single sentence, we had to wring ourselves out pretty thoroughly. Resting and sleeping the entire week away would have simply been a waste.
So Lena and I trained in a dozen different ways—hopping down from the carriage to sprint alongside it and build up our endurance, or practicing our balance on the swaying roof of the moving coach.
Noah, of course, had no use for such exercises, so she spent the time studying the commands behind magic, probing for new spells to explore.
It felt like a fairly productive week, all things considered—and yet compared to proper, deliberate training, I couldn't quite shake the feeling that it had come up short.
As Lena and I stretched out our stiff, aching bodies in every direction, Noah offered a brief remark.
"There are ways around that, you know."
"Oh?"
"It's only what I've heard, but I'm told higher-ranked adventurers keep all sorts of means of travel. Modified carriages, tamed aerial monsters, or artifacts attuned to movement."
"Now that sounds enviable. Bet they cost an obscene amount, though."
Still, if the chance ever came, I wanted one. Dungeons might be lucrative, but hauling ourselves around like this every time was just plain tedious. Not to mention inefficient.
Caw! Kraaak—!
A cry rang out—something like a bird, but unmistakably a monster.
The coordinates the Guild had marked for our Dungeon lay in a stretch of uninhabited mountains, deep enough that no carriage could follow.
At the foot of the mountain, the driver who had hauled us all this way saw us off.
"I'll wait for you here."
"Are you sure you'll be all right? There's nothing out here—and what if a monster shows up?"
"Ah, I've got a concealment magic tool, so it's no trouble. This isn't exactly my first rodeo."
The driver shrugged off my concern. Fair enough—he'd pulled a carriage for a week straight without showing a hint of boredom. His job, I supposed, was old hat to him by now.
"How long can you wait for us?"
"For a Rank 8 dungeon... by regulation, a week. Though that's purely for the worst-case scenario—clearing the dungeon itself should only take a day or two."
"A week should be plenty, then."
"Best of luck to you."
Shrrr...
The driver fiddled with a small box-like device resting on the driver's bench. At once, the carriage and the man himself seemed to melt into the surrounding landscape, as though smeared with some optical camouflage.
It wasn't perfect invisibility—the rough edges still caught the eye here and there—but you'd never spot them unless you were looking very carefully indeed.
So that kind of thing exists too, huh...
"Let's go."
"Ugh... this is so heavy."
"Can't be helped. We don't know what the dungeon's interior will be like, so we have to prepare for everything."
Each of us shouldered a pack taller than we were. Inside were camping gear like sleeping bags, a stock of rations and water, and a pile of magic tools purchased against every environment we could imagine.
Behind every romantic adventure, this sort of unglamorous reality lay waiting. That was simply how it went.
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"Let's see... big boulders on either side, a dead tree behind them... yes, this is the spot."
Following a crude map that did little more than describe nearby landmarks turned out to be its own small ordeal. After getting lost several times over, we finally found the Guild-marked dungeon in a bare clearing partway up the mountainside.
"Fascinating. It's like the space itself has shattered."
The dungeon we'd struggled so hard to find had the same appearance as the one that had swallowed Alta all that time ago. The air hung cracked and fractured in every direction, like a video botched by careless CGI rendering. Indescribable colors shimmered through the gaps between transparent fissures—and yet it was small enough that you'd never see it unless you came within arm's reach.
Without a dedicated tracking device, spotting a dungeon with the naked eye would be a nearly hopeless task.
"Um... how do we get in?"
"Just walk up close to it."
"...It's kind of scary, though."
"Honestly? Me too."
We knew nothing about the interior beyond its average grade. And once you stepped inside, there was no leaving until it was cleared. Any sane person would be afraid. Still, having come all this way, backing out wasn't an option.
"Mister, Unni—hold my hand. Both of you."
"...Good thinking. We might get separated on the way through."
Noah and I each took one of Lena's hands. We were already wearing our gauntlets, so no warm human skin touched palm to palm, but somehow it steadied my heart all the same.
Gripping one another's hands, we edged carefully toward the dungeon's entrance.
One deliberate step... then another...
"Huh."
A strange sensation brushed the tips of my toes—like stepping into a pool of thick, viscous sludge. An inescapable pull seized me and dragged me forward.
"...!"
Aura flared up on reflex, magnifying every reflex nerve in my body. As if I'd entered combat, the world slowed to a crawl—but the dungeon's pull transcended even that slowed world without effort. Given not the slimmest margin to resist, we were sucked through like water down a drain, drawn straight into the dungeon's depths.
Aaaaaaah—!
A scream—whose, I couldn't tell—howled through my skull.
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Dizzy. Everything swam so badly I could barely tell my hands from my feet—a full-blown sensory scramble. All I could see was pitch darkness.
My hearing, at least, seemed intact, because Noah's flat, level voice reached me clearly.
"It appears we've arrived."
"I can't see anything!"
"Me neither!"
"...You have to open your eyes."
Only at Noah's remark did it dawn on me that my eyes were shut. But my body refused to obey, and even opening my eyelids was a struggle.
"There's no danger nearby. Take your time."
"To think just entering a dungeon would do this... is it because it's my first time?"
"Quite possibly. It amounts to crossing through space, after all."
As I passed the time in calm conversation with Noah, my bodily sensations returned one by one. Once I'd roughly regained control of myself, I carefully opened my eyes.
Light stabbed into them.
"Whoa..."
A verdant forest spread out before us. I'd seen plenty of woods near Pioneer Village and around Bolston—but the forest in front of us was a different breed entirely from those ordinary groves. Colossal trunks that would take several grown men linking arms to encircle, an unidentifiable grass carpeting the ground like a velvet rug, and the occasional patch of rich, fertile soil all whispered of a vitality this forest held in abundance.
"It's like an ancient primeval forest..."
Shaaah—
A wind from who-knows-where brushed past us, and the emerald leaves rippled and rustled, each with a voice of its own.
This is a dungeon?
"Ah! There we go! Huh? It's a forest."
Lena's senses finally caught up with the rest of us. She turned this way and that, marveling at her surroundings—then quickly noticed something odd.
"There's no snow, unlike outside! And it's warm, too..."
Lena was right—the dungeon's climate was mild. Sweat had already begun prickling out beneath our thickly layered clothes.
I stuffed my heavy outer coat carelessly into my pack as I answered.
"Dungeons are completely separate spaces, that's why. I hear they have nothing to do with the real world at all."
"Ooh."
"From what I've read, they're spaces generated at random from a base of mana—which is apparently why they're full of strange materials."
Besides, luck had been on our side: this was a forest-type dungeon. According to the Dungeon Encyclopedia, forest dungeons, with their abundant vegetation, yielded all manner of rare and valuable byproducts.
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Two hours into the exploration, we found ourselves hauling a load far heavier than the one we'd set out with.
"Those would be Scream Mushrooms."
"Are they expensive?"
"One silver for three."
"Whoa~!"
Barely any time had passed since we entered the forest, and already we were learning firsthand that the book hadn't exaggerated. Without overstating it, we picked up profitable material once every twenty steps or so.
I couldn't speak for other adventurers, but for us—thanks to Noah, who had quite literally memorized the Dungeon Encyclopedia cover to cover—the sense of it hit all the harder.
"Hmm-hm~"
Humming a little tune, Lena carefully harvested one of the bizarre fungi. Scream Mushrooms were named for the pattern on their caps, which curled into shapes resembling a human mid-shriek. Ordinarily I'd have hesitated to touch the thing—but framed as money lying on the ground, my hand moved all on its own.
"Whew... that's the lot of them."
"Can we even carry all this, though?"
I lifted one of the leather sacks, now stuffed with rare materials of every kind. Even without any metal-heavy items, the weight had real heft to it. And this was before we'd properly started exploring. A little longer, and we'd be forced to dump perfectly good supplies.
"It is a problem. A load this heavy will get in the way if we have to fight."
"...Come to think of it, not a single monster has shown up."
We'd been moving for two hours at least, and no monster had so much as poked its head out. I'd heard dungeons usually had a decent population of them. This was strange.
I sharpened my senses just in case, but nowhere could I detect so much as a trace of monsters, or that distinctive feral musk—nothing.
Lena fingered her armor, still gleaming thanks to the auto-cleaning spell, and let out a complaint that was nearly a whine.
"Kind of a letdown, isn't it? After I went and bought this armor and everything."
"Hmm... earning money is nice, but we need magic stones too. We're not gatherers, after all..."
"Shall we lure them out with magic?"
A bold proposal from Noah—specifically, to hurl a roaring flare of flame into the air and see what came running. It was tempting. It was also far too dangerous.
"...Let's just keep moving for now. It's our first exploration, so caution is best. If we head toward the Core, something's bound to react eventually."
"Huh? But how do we know where the Core is?"
"Remember that donation Harrington gave us? One of the things he sent was a magic tool that detects Cores."
I drew out the compass hanging from my belt on a chain. It was nothing like the ordinary kind that read Earth's magnetism to point north and south. The tip of its red-decorated needle indicated the location of the dungeon's Core—and it even gave a rough estimate of the distance.
"Strictly speaking, it finds wherever mana is densest."
"Then it might not actually be pointing at the Core?"
"Right. I've heard of parties following the compass straight into a powerful monster. Doesn't matter much, though—there's always a Core beside a monster like that anyway."
Unlike their wild counterparts, dungeon monsters carried an instinct to protect the Core. Presumably, at a level buried deep in instinct, they understood that if the Core broke, their own existence would vanish with it. Either way, it meant that following this compass would lead us to the Core sooner or later. Before this thing was invented, people had apparently had to tear dungeons apart combing for one.
"So don't worry about getting stuck in here. We've got food to spare."
"Gotcha."
"Oh, there—another expensive material. Twisted Apples."
Mid-ramble, Noah had already spotted another rarity. I followed her finger to a fruit hanging from a branch—looking nothing whatsoever like an apple—and it was dangling there not one, not two, but a full ten of them.
"...Fruit's heavy, though. And it takes up space."
"They're used in elixirs, so they fetch a comparatively high price. Five silver apiece."
"Can't pass that up."