The Dungeon (2)
Twelve hours had passed since the expedition began.
We had scoured a sizable stretch of territory, yet all that met our eyes was an unbroken sea of dense primeval forest. Not a single monster showed itself anywhere.
And so our days settled into an endless rhythm of gathering and resting, gathering and resting.
"Heave-ho!"
Thud!
Lena dumped another armful of harvested materials onto the cart. The already-heavy load grew heavier still, and the wooden wheels bit a little deeper into the soil.
I let out a small sigh.
"...Honestly, I can't tell if I'm an adventurer or a pack mule at this point."
"Well, we can't just leave it all behind, can we? This stuff is money."
"Fair enough..."
The haul had grown so voluminous that well before now we'd felled some nearby trees and built a cart from scratch. For an ordinary person, crafting a cart out in the wilds would've been a hopeless chore—but with Noah's magic lending a hand, we'd somehow managed to cobble together something of a primitively passable one.
Magic is the best!
Creeeak... creeeeak...
I hauled the hulking cart along myself, dragging it forward step by step. A forest this close to true primeval wilderness offered nothing resembling a flat road, so pulling the thing was no small feat either. Just keeping the contents from getting bruised and jostled was, I'd say, its own kind of training.
Had a fight broken out unexpectedly, we'd have been in a bind—but Noah and Lena were walking point, keeping watch over the monsters, so I figured we'd be fine.
Lena, trudging along at the front, suddenly looked up at the sky and spoke.
"Guess there's no nighttime here, huh..."
"Every dungeon's different, apparently. This one seems to have none."
At her words, I lifted my head and studied the ceiling(?) above. Through the gaps in the densely packed leaves, all I could see was a bright, featureless sky—not so much as a sun anywhere.
Where was this light even coming from?
In any case, despite all the hours that had passed, the amount of light falling on us hadn't changed in the slightest.
"It's not a normal space, sir. You really shouldn't try to understand it by real-world rules."
"I just can't get used to it."
"We've come quite a distance—perhaps we should set up camp soon? Ah, though I suppose 'camp' isn't quite the right word either. It isn't night, after all."
Noah suggested we take a proper break. It was true we hadn't done anything but gather materials, but keeping up constant vigilance in a thick forest with no clear sightlines had worn on me more than a little. Lena, encased in her full plate armor, was looking pretty worn out herself now that I looked at her. The armor supposedly had convenience-enhancing magic woven into it, but that couldn't erase fatigue entirely.
I scanned our surroundings briefly.
"Hmm... Ideally there'd be a cave or something. Oh well. Let's just rest here."
Resting in open ground on all sides wasn't ideal, but we had no alternatives. We'd roamed for a good few dozen kilometers and the scenery had been identical the whole way. Even so, Noah ranged around and used magic to raise earthen walls between the trees, screening us from view. It didn't block visibility completely—which I was a bit wary of—but the monsters whose existence we doubted couldn't see us any better, so it wasn't a bad arrangement.
"Ignis."
Whoomph—
At Noah's incantation, a small ball of flame leapt onto the firewood we'd laid out in advance. That, too, was a separately purchased item—firewood specially treated to burn without smoke. An essential item for dungeon exploration, you might say.
"Ahh... now I feel alive..."
Clank, clank—
Thud!
Lena groaned as she shed her armor. Ordinarily, a suit of full plate like that couldn't be removed without a squire's help, but the armor bore self-assembly and disassembly enchantments that opened up an exit for the wearer on their own.
Lena wriggled free of the armor like an insect shedding its shell. The heat trapped inside her armor escaped as a hiss of steam.
...
Crackle, crackle...
The campfire had burned down to a bed of ember-like coals, radiating a steady warmth. If it had been a dark night, the scene would've been rather atmospheric—but sitting there under what felt like broad daylight, it only struck me as faintly absurd.
Lena, of course, couldn't have cared less about atmosphere. She demolished her share of the meat with gusto.
Chomp chomp
"Mmm... shoo good!"
"There's plenty, so eat as much as you want. Actually, the more you eat, the less we have to carry—so it's a win-win."
"But what if we run low on rations later?"
"It's fine. At this pace, we should reach the core in about ten more hours."
Noah answered Lena's worries about the food supply with a glance at her compass. That girl—probably because she'd grown up half-starved—had an appetite like you wouldn't believe. It was a wonder she wasn't growing any taller. Had her growth plates really sealed shut already?
As I watched her stuff food into her puffed-out hamster cheeks in a daze, Noah brought up a different topic.
"Something occurred to me just now... it's possible this forest has very few monsters, or only immobile types."
"What makes you say that?"
"The sheer volume of materials we've gathered is the evidence. These materials sell for money because they're saturated with mana—and monsters covet them just as much as we do."
"Ahh. So in a normal dungeon, we'd never have been able to harvest this much?"
"Precisely."
"Hmm... I don't know about anything else, but when it comes to monsters, more is better."
"Why's that?"
Lena asked, struggling to force down a slice of rye bread piled high with cheese.
"The way the guild grades dungeons... it uses a figure calculated by taking the total measured mana of a dungeon and dividing it by the average number of monsters found in dungeons of similar mana."
"...I don't get it??"
"Clearly someone needs to study more math."
"Ugh..."
"Simply put—even if the guild can measure the mana sealed inside a dungeon precisely... it has no way of knowing how many monsters are actually in there. So it just estimates based on the statistical monster counts gathered so far."
Now, what would happen if the dungeon actually contained only a single monster? It would mean the vast majority of all that measured mana was concentrated in that one creature.
Lena went pale.
"That would be a disaster!"
"Exactly. That's why, just in case, people pick dungeons rated lower than their own rank."
The upper limit on the strength of a monster that could appear in a Rank 8 dungeon was Rank 6—the same tier as the Ice Golem we'd faced in the Battle of Pioneer Village. I had no idea what traits the thing would have, but at that level, I figured we could manage somehow.
That said, apparently cases with this few monsters were exceedingly rare.
"According to the literature, statistically it's one percent. Granted, that figure is derived purely from the testimony of people who've cleared dungeons."
"So we hit a one-in-a-hundred shot. Honestly, I figured *something* was going to happen... I just don't know why my luck keeps—"
"Waaaah! They say if you say it out loud, it gets WORSE!"
"Fine, fine. I'll stop. Though I suspect the damage is already done."
Truth be told, if you looked at the luck angle, we'd been quite fortunate. Who else earns a fortune in gold coins off just a handful of requests? This dungeon trip alone would net us a tidy sum, so long as we got the harvested materials safely outside.
'If anything, I'd say it's our bad luck that's exceptional. Hardly any of our jobs have ever wrapped up smoothly.'
I smiled wryly and slurped down my share of soup. As it slid down my throat and into my stomach, a wave of warmth spread through my whole body. I used that heat as a partner to soothe the unease churning in my gut.
I hadn't let it show in front of Lena, but the fact that we were sealed inside a closed dungeon—and the possibility of an unknown Rank 6 monster appearing—had me anxious all the same. I'd chosen a low-grade dungeon to minimize the risk... but who could say what strange thing might happen next?
"We've eaten, so let's get some shut-eye. For the watch..."
"I'll handle it myself. Just sleep, sir."
"But Unni, you need sleep too— ah, right. You don't."
Despite having witnessed the whole head-detachment spectacle, Lena still occasionally forgot what Noah really was. Which was, in a way, proof that she thought of her as just another person—and every time I saw it, it warmed my heart.
Noah smiled faintly, pulled a sleeping bag from her pack, and spread it out.
"I'll wake you in six hours. Rest well."
"Got it."
"Okayyy."
Lena and I wriggled into our sleeping bags. Combined with the forest's mild climate, it was a touch warm—but the drowsiness that crashed over me soon made me forget all about it.
...
Twenty-eight hours after the expedition began, we finally encountered monsters.
Except...
"Kyeee..."
"Why are they so weak?"
Crack!
I put my weight into my foot, and the neck of the monster pinned beneath it snapped—ending its life on the spot. The moment it died, it crumbled to powder and scattered, just like the goblins back at the laboratory. Dungeon monsters, it seemed, vanished cleanly like this, leaving nothing behind but a magic stone.
What exactly separated them from the monsters outside?
"That was really easy."
"I'm glad to finally see some monsters, but... this weak, come on."
"Even if these things gathered in huge numbers, they'd be nothing compared to the dungeon's total mana, wouldn't they?"
"Probably."
The monsters we'd run into were small monkey-like creatures with grayish skin. Fortunately, we'd spotted them first and struck first—but who knew where they'd been hiding, because an alarming number of monkeys came swarming out of nowhere.
Hanging off thick trees, the things hurled stones at us or, too excited to contain themselves, charged in directly. Their sheer numbers had me tense at first, but I quickly saw through them—their strength was pathetic.
Thwip-thwip—!
Every time Noah loosed an arrow from her newly purchased bow, one more monkey dropped dead. They shrieked—kyaa, kyaa—and flew into frenzies, flinging rocks with all their might... but the speed was hardly threatening. Slow enough that even an ordinary person could dodge them, you might say. When the chance presented itself, I caught the incoming stones and returned them to sender.
Tuk-tuk-TUNK!
Thwack!
As for Lena, she simply marched right in among the trees where the monkeys clustered and stood there, still as a statue. Even without activating her Provocation skill, the overexcited monkeys prioritized attacking whoever was nearest. Stones came flying big enough to bury a person—but Lena's armor and shield were masterworks that could hold up against even sword-qi without any reinforcement effects. No pebble was going to punch through them. Every rock the monkeys threw with everything they had merely bounced off with a dull thunk.
"A pointless abundance of numbers—that's all they are. What a nuisance. And now they won't even come down from the trees."
"I'll use magic, then."
They were pathetically weak monsters, barely Rank 10—but weak or not, we couldn't just leave them be and go on exploring. And so Noah, the only one of us capable of wide-area attacks, cast her spell.
"Signa, exploda."
A incantation a little different from her usual. Naturally, I expected her to launch a fireball or the like—instead, Noah loosed one of the arrows nocked on her bow.
Had she enchanted the arrowhead?
The shot flew dead-center into the upper reaches of the great tree where the monkeys hung in droves.
Fweeeeeee...... KWA-KWA-KOOM!
"Oooh."
The arrow, whistling like a firework in flight, produced a magnificent explosion. There was no heat to be felt—only a shockwave—so it seemed she'd used the arrowhead itself as a grenade.
Some of the monkeys were killed by the shattered shrapnel; most were knocked unconscious by the blast and came raining down from the tree.
Crunch! Crunch!
The monkeys that fell from the great tree escaped with nothing worse than broken bones, thanks to the weeds carpeting the ground like a cushion—but the unlucky ones that landed on the conspicuously solid Lena died on impact. Lena and I moved swiftly, putting down the ones still twitching on the ground.
Small black magic stones rolled about everywhere.
Just as we were methodically working through the simple, repetitive task, one of the monkeys let out a long, drawn-out cry.
"KeeeeeeEEE—!"
It was a call with a different tenor than the ordinary screams and shrieks we'd been hearing all along. At the sound of it, the surviving monkeys suddenly bolted, fleeing in some direction or other.
What a pain in the neck.