Dungeon (5)
"Uuungh!"
The joy of discovering the key to conquering the dungeon lasted only a moment. The closer I got to the tree, the more its pulling force increased exponentially.
I'd somehow managed to reach the base of the trunk, but now it felt like my very soul was being sucked out of me.
It was like having a vacuum cleaner pressed against the crown of my head.
I made it this far... but what am I supposed to do about that?
I craned my neck and glared up at the reddish-brown knot sitting far above me.
From experience, the tree's defenses weren't particularly high, so all I needed to do was poke at that knot with my blade wrapped in sword aura.
The problem was that the bark was so impossibly smooth that climbing it looked utterly hopeless.
Wall-walking... but with my aura draining away like this...
A memory surfaced from back when Noah was still called Arwen, learning wall-walking as she darted across the research institute's ceiling.
I'd picked it up because she insisted it would come in handy someday, but with my aura bleeding out of me nonstop, basic body reinforcement was hard enough—forget about wall-walking.
Was I going to have to climb it barehanded?
I was still steeling myself, staring down at the sword in my hand, when Noah's voice reached me from a distance.
"Jun!"
"Noah! Are you okay over there!?"
"Yes! Right now! I'm going to try severing this attack, so please get ready!"
Thankfully, Noah, who'd been farther away, was perfectly fine.
The Tree of Longing's absorption power had increased, but it seemed the effective range had shrunk in inverse proportion to the distance.
Well, if a technique like that covered a huge radius too, it would be downright broken.
I had no idea what she was planning, but I trusted Noah and readied myself to control my aura.
A moment later, I heard the twang of an arrow being loosed.
...
Shuuuu...
The arrow flew.
Straight toward the tree's mouth.
But how was one little arrow supposed to fix this situation—wait, something small, like a pouch, was dangling from the shaft.
Shuuuuuk!
Thwack!
Just as the first arrow neared the mouth, a second one came screaming in at even greater speed and pierced dead-center through the pouch hanging from the first.
Unlike a gun, a bow let you adjust its draw tension, so it wasn't technically impossible—but it was marksmanship I could scarcely believe even watching it with my own eyes.
Shara-rak...
Red powder burst from the pierced leather pouch in a fine cloud.
Because the pouch had burst at such an exquisitely calculated position, the powder drifted straight down into the mouth without needing any pull at all.
Hold on—that powder... it's what Noah bought the other day, saying she'd cook for us...
Gul-lock!!
Before I could react, the mouth, having gulped down every last grain, began to make the motions of a cough.
The tree whipped its tentacles every which way, like a person desperately fighting back a sneeze.
It struggled to the very end to maintain its mana-drain technique—but finally, it couldn't hold it any longer and was forced to expel its breath in a violent heave.
Ke-hek!!
The long, long inhale came to an end, and the flow of my aura returned to normal.
I had been ready and waiting, so without a moment's hesitation I planted my foot against the tree's pillar.
Wall-walking was a technique I'd long since mastered, way back in the day.
I sprinted up the ninety-degree vertical surface as if it were flat ground!
Ta-ta-tat!
Gul-reuk... graaaah!
By my count, less than half a second had passed before the tree got its coughing under control and came back to its senses.
It shook its massive body violently, trying to throw me off.
But my restored aura now gripped the surface with iron-tight adhesion, refusing to let my feet part from the tree no matter what.
Five meters to the weak point.
Pa-ba-ba-bak!
Apparently deciding this wouldn't do, the tree split its single thick tentacle back into a dozen-odd branches and lashed out at me.
It was essentially whipping itself, but the creature had clearly resolved to accept the damage.
Too late.
Whoosh!
The principle of wall-walking was a change in the properties of one's aura.
Which meant that, in theory, I could stick to the surface using any part of my body, not just my feet.
Fwoom...
I flipped over a branch that came flying at my ankles.
It was an acrobatic feat I could never have pulled off on flat ground, let alone a vertical face—but the aura concentrated in my hands gave me just enough grip to momentarily overcome gravity.
That closed another two meters.
Shwak!
Branches attacked head-on, striking at my upper and lower body at the same time.
I stretched my sword aura out long and cut them both down in a single stroke.
One step forward, one meter remaining.
Almost there—
Kkwagak!
New branches suddenly sprouted from the bark under my feet.
Thankfully, the branches held so I didn't fall downward, but the ones shooting outward put distance between me and the trunk in the blink of an eye.
I ran along the writhing branches, making for the tree's main body once more.
Shashak!
"Ugh..."
The branch I'd stepped on bucked like a roller coaster, while the others around me all took aim at me.
Even with Beast's Senses, it looked like a brutal difficulty spike I'd struggle to break through.
Time to use the Sensory Impartation I'd been saving.
Every last stored charge, all at once.
Sensory Impartation — Dizziness × 3
I had no way of knowing what senses this thing even possessed, so I imparted a sensation that would work on almost anything.
Thankfully, it proved remarkably effective.
Guaaa...
The tree twisted its branches about as if drunk.
For an instant, it was left completely defenseless.
But with a body that size, I could already see the skill about to wear off in less than a second.
That's plenty of time!
Kkwuk-deuk!
Aura flooding down from my thighs finely reinforced every muscle in my lower body.
Explosive power, like a wild stallion unbroken, surged up from the soles of my feet.
And then—Liberation.
Tuwoong!
I covered more than four meters in a single stride, and the erratically writhing branches were instantly shoved behind me, out of sight.
I sprinted straight up the one extended branch—and leapt, like going up for a dunk!
Thoomp!
I drove my sword aura, stretched to its maximum length, deep into the reddish-brown knot.
At the tip of the aura, I felt something hard shatter.
Did I get it?
Kkiiiiiik!!
The tree shuddered from head to root as if struck by lightning.
Then every last one of its branches went limp and sagged to the ground.
Got it.
...
"Whoa! Mister, what are you, some kind of acrobat troupe!?"
"You okay?"
"I'm out of strength, but... nothing hurts."
I climbed down beneath the tree and checked Lena over.
Her body wouldn't respond properly, and she lay slumped where she'd fallen, crushed under the weight of her own armor and shield, unable even to sit up.
I was in the middle of plucking the whole reason for it—Lena herself—out of her armor and laying her down somewhere comfortable when Noah came over, waving.
"That was a magnificent fight. Are you hurt anywhere?"
"No. Aside from being tired, I'm fine. By the way—what was that powder?"
"A spice I bought a while back. Something very spicy... essentially a type of chili powder."
Noah held out the remaining red powder from her pouch to show me.
Even from a distance, my eyes stung for no reason at all.
Just how hot is this stuff?
"Why would you—oh, right."
She'd probably bought it after I complained about being sick of the food we'd been eating, saying she'd try making something spicy.
...I am never eating anything made with that powder.
If even a monster suffered from it, it might just keep me awake all night too.
"To think that would actually work... So monsters have a sense of taste too, apparently. I suppose that was in one of your books?"
"There was something along those lines. It said to add all manner of pungent spices to the prey. A tree that ingests it cannot regain its senses properly. Apparently, non-awakened people use this method."
"How on earth did anyone even discover that...?"
"Hard to say. The Tree of Longing is such a popular monster that... I imagine ordinary people discovered it while twisting themselves into knots trying to catch one by any means necessary."
"Popular? Why on earth is this thing popular?"
I stared at the dead tree.
Its sheer bulk meant that so far only the tips of its branches had crumbled to dust, and most of the main body still remained.
Already withered and twisted, with no dignity even in death—it only looked more grotesque for it.
Outside the dungeon, the corpse would have been left behind, but even then there didn't seem to be any byproducts worth harvesting from it.
Noah smiled faintly.
"There's loot, you see. Hmm... normally you find it by digging under the roots..."
"Find what?"
"Let's leave that as a mystery to be enjoyed. Ah—there's an odd discoloration here. Now, let's see..."
Thwack, thwack.
Noah circled around near the tree, spotted something, and crouched down to start digging into the earth.
Her considerable strength meant the ground gave way quickly, exposing the soft soil beneath.
Before long, a pit deep enough for me to climb into had been dug.
Noah looked up from below and said,
"Found it. Take a look."
"What is it..."
I lowered myself into the pit.
At the very bottom lay the tree's exposed, snow-white roots—and attached to them, something like an enormous bead.
A white orb roughly the size of an infant's head.
Looks just like a tumor.
Tok.
When the corpse's dissolution finally reached the roots, the orb, which had been clinging precariously to them, dropped free with a soft plop.
The fact that it remained behind instead of turning to powder meant it wasn't counted as part of the corpse.
I gave the swollen orb (?) a gentle poke.
A strange sensation sloshed back through my fingertips, as though it were filled to the brim with liquid.
Sap?
"You can collect the liquid inside into these."
Having apparently fetched our packs at some point, Noah handed down several canteens from the rim of the pit.
When I shook them, nothing rattled inside—so she must have dumped the water out.
"What is this stuff? Is it expensive?"
"It's called Desert Honey. The raw liquid itself has the properties of an elixir, so... naturally, it would be expensive, wouldn't it? It's the very reason this monster is so sought after."
"Ooh..."
I carefully pierced the squishy orb—soft enough that a fingernail could have broken it—with my knife to make a hole.
The internal pressure sent the liquid seeping out—not in a violent pskhhhh! spray, but in a thick, unhurried trickle, true to its name of Desert Honey.
I jabbed a finger into the liquid running down the orb's surface, and it clung to my skin, sticky as glue.
"Nmm... it's incredibly sweet."
I touched the liquid on my fingertip to the tip of my tongue, and an explosive sweetness flooded my mouth.
It tasted at least ten times sweeter than ordinary honey. If I made a dessert out of this, it would be something extraordinary.
Sweet ingredients were truly rare and precious... couldn't I just keep this stashed away and dab a taste now and then?
"In that case, I'll search the rest of the area."
"Huh? There's more of this?"
"I don't know. But ordinarily, a single tree only yields about half of that orb's volume... and this one was both unusually strong and absurdly large."
"Ah... so this was the bigger version. Makes sense—no ordinary person could ever kill something like this."
For one thing, the weak point was located absurdly high up... and a monster of this size probably wouldn't so much as flinch at the average dose of spice.
Case in point: hadn't this thing shaken off the effects of Noah's red powder in less than a second?
God forbid the creature actually used its mana-drain technique on someone—an ordinary person would be mummified on the spot.
Glug, glug...
Eep.
While I was off on pointless tangents, the canteen was filling up with honey.
I hastily swapped to one of the prepared containers to catch the overflowing flow.
Minutes ago we'd been in a fight for our lives, and now here I was, bottling honey like some beekeeper...
Maybe this surreal whiplash was the very essence of the adventurer's life.
...
Several hours later.
"...Isn't this way too much?"
"I expected a fair amount, but I confess even I didn't anticipate this."
Noah and I had resorted to pressing makeshift containers, hastily fashioned from the tree itself, into service just to harvest all the Desert Honey.
The honey, so prized precisely because it normally came in such pitiful quantities, kept revealing itself with every shovelful of earth—utterly unbefitting its illustrious reputation.
Nearly twenty orbs filled with honey, all told.
It got so bad that Noah had to trek far off midway through just to fell a perfectly healthy tree for containers.
"How much is all of this worth?"
"Hard to say. The Tree of Longing is a monster found only in the western deserts, to begin with, so I don't know the exact market rate. But rare is rare, never scarce... I'd estimate no less than two platinum coins."
"Whoa!"
I gaped at the honey-filled containers stacked neatly in the corner.
This alone was worth more than every single material we'd harvested in the dungeon, combined.
Our first dungeon commission was a resounding success!
"It was that dangerous, though."
"...Fair point. Honestly, if we'd been any ordinary Rank 6 party instead of ours, we probably would've been wiped out."
Unless you had an internal mana organ like my Inner Heart, or a companion like Noah with monster knowledge memorized down to the letter, clearing this dungeon would have been extremely difficult.
Worse, even if a party somehow managed to fell the tree, they might have assumed there was nothing worth harvesting and smashed the core right away.
"Call it good luck, I suppose?"
"In the end, yes."
The income from a typical 8th-rank dungeon, artifacts from the core aside, topped out at ten gold coins at most.
That was already a windfall compared to the average commission, where you'd be lucky to pocket a coin or two—but set against two platinum coins, it was a firefly blinking before the sun.
The fruit of surviving an unforeseen trial was, quite literally, sweet as honey.