Free Web NovelA Dungeon Break erupting earlier than expected, in Perth, Australia, and from an S-rank Gate.
'It’s a Dungeon I already know.'
I hadn’t been certain until I got here and checked the Status Window, though.
The Gate’s designated name was A Brilliant Tomb, and its English designation was The Radiant Sepulcher. There was no way I wouldn’t recognize it. It was a Dungeon that got covered in detail once in the original work too.
That said, it wasn’t something dealt with during Kwon Taehan’s “fifth run.” This Dungeon only really comes up after a whole lot more runs have piled up. The reason was simpler than expected.
'Because it gets resolved just fine without him.'
No matter how extreme the situation got, there were still two S-rank Hunters on-site. Chase Holt and Sung Uijae. And even among S-ranks, those two bastards were near the very top if you ranked them...... well, they took the long way around instead of the easy route, but looking at the result alone, they still pulled off a pretty successful clear.
Sure, a few Hunters died and got injured, but with an S-rank Dungeon having gone all the way to a Break, that level of loss was unavoidable anyway.
'If you think about it, wasn’t the damage actually pretty low for the scale of it?'
Anyway, despite those relatively low losses, there was a reason Kwon Taehan dragged his busy ass all the way here once enough runs had piled up.
To take Sung Uijae with him.
As Kwon Taehan kept repeating his lives, he’d struggled like hell to broaden his pathetically narrow human relationships, and Sung Uijae had been part of that little project too.
Not a perfect companion like Joo Seowon, and not an opposing force he still got help from like Im Haekyung, but still, he’d succeeded in developing it into the kind of relationship where if he called Sung Uijae like a cheat key when he needed him, the bastard would show up one out of five times.
He really wasn’t the type with any talent for that kind of thing, so the fact he managed it at all made it clear there probably wasn’t any such thing as an unchanging nature. If you died a few hundred times, I guess you’d pick up a few tricks, learn when to be cold, and all that.
The reason he recruited Sung Uijae, and what happened after, naturally had to do with me, so there was no need to dwell on it.
I kicked aside the fragments strewn across the ground. They looked less like something that had formed naturally and more like traces of a place once artificially arranged for aesthetic beauty, only to be destroyed by time.
From the remains of the buildings in front of me, to the waterway marks left on the ground, to the statues that had probably once had a proper shape.
The sight of light falling from above and shining through the ruined buildings was fairly worth seeing.
And from here on, things started getting properly bizarre.
As the Gate description showed, this place had once been a “flourishing” old city. In other words, it might not have completely lost its function as a ruin, but it was safe to say it no longer functioned as a city.
That didn’t mean these ruins were empty, though. Naturally, they were packed full of dolls.
Those dolls acted as if the debris didn’t bother them at all, as though this city were still thriving. They walked the streets like they were following some preset form, looked around, smiled, moved their mouths as if conversing, and made sounds to match.
“...Ugh.”
At the short groan, I glanced back and saw Joo Seowon with their expression darkened, gaze lowered.
'Hmm....'
Judging by the fact that the covenant still didn’t seem to be producing any notable effect, it didn’t look like they were exactly scared.
'Just disgusted?'
Then Chase blocked the way in front of us and, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, gave an order.
“We’ll search first. It’ll be a little dangerous, but it can’t be helped. Spread out for now, and if anything happens, use the pager.”
Pulling pagers from his pocket, Chase naturally handed them out according to headcount. After tossing one to me, the bastard stared hard at Joo Seowon for a moment before speaking.
“You’ll be moving together, right? Then one should be enough.”
“Yes.”
After taking the pager and turning it over a few times to roughly get the hang of how it worked, I heard him add in a voice tinged with amusement,
“You’ll be focusing on searching from the start, right?”
“.......”
“I’ll be looking forward to it. Try to find... something, at least.”
“That’s enough. We don’t have time to waste.”
At Sung Uijae’s words, Chase slowly nodded and moved off.
'Not like it was bothering me anyway.'
Just as I finished checking my equipment and was about to move away to survey the surroundings, I heard a voice call me from behind.
“Hunter Seo.”
I glanced back at Sung Uijae, and the bastard grabbed my shoulder and stopped me, keeping his voice low.
“I’ll give you one piece of advice.”
“.......”
“In a situation where your life’s on the line like this... don’t provoke people. Especially if the target is me, or Chase Holt.”
It had been a while since I’d seen Sung Uijae angry. He’d started acting pretty close to me at some point despite never having had any real reason to get that friendly, so I hadn’t expected this reaction.
I answered calmly.
“I don’t provoke people.”
“I mean watch your mouth too. That bastard’s been picking a one-sided fight with you since earlier, but no matter how aggressive and impulsive he is, that means there had to be a reason. Even when we first met, you were cursing at Holt.”
“What?”
The one who answered Sung Uijae’s words, oddly enough, was Joo Seowon.
Walking silently beside us, Joo Seowon abruptly widened their eyes and barged straight into the conversation.
“Hey, you never said that to me... what the hell did you do? No wonder that bastard’s attitude was weird!”
Sung Uijae, after glancing at the suddenly enraged Joo Seowon, started adding on too.
“Yeah, and... what the hell were you thinking just now? If people had died outside, that would’ve been because you didn’t say anything too—”
“Calm down.”
I cut Sung Uijae off. I looked once at the two pairs of eyes fixed on me, then asked evenly, freewebnovёl.ƈom
“Is that really what matters right now?”
“...What?”
“.......” ƒrēewebnovel.com
It was unfortunate that they both looked like they had plenty to say back, but that was the truth. I let my gaze rest briefly on Joo Seowon and Sung Uijae, then continued calmly.
“I think Hunter Sung must be out of practice these days, since you hardly ever go into high-rank Gates anymore, but when an S-rank Gate blows up, one or two people dying is ordinary. Do you know what ordinary means? It means common.”
“I understand you just fine, so try attaching some damn manners to the way you talk.”
“Yes. Since we’ve already come into the Dungeon, there’s only one objective. Clear the Dungeon and get out. Which also means getting rid of the Dungeon boss.”
“That’s why we split up and deployed as a search team.”
When I just looked at him silently instead of answering, the bastard understood the situation a beat late.
“...So you already know.”
“It’s more obvious than you’d think.”
“How do you know that?”
At the question that slipped out almost like he was talking to himself, Joo Seowon shot Sung Uijae a sidelong glance.
Ignoring the question I couldn’t answer, I quietly looked at the tower visible far in the distance.
Following my gaze, Sung Uijae turned and asked,
“...The building?”
“The tower. More precisely.”
“Yeah, I can... see that too. My eyesight’s still fine. So what you’re saying is, the Dungeon boss is there?”
“Close enough.”
“.......”
I paused once, then gave the answer outright.
“That tower itself is the Dungeon boss.”
“The tower is....”
Sung Uijae rolled the words around, then slowly nodded. He really was an S-rank Hunter who’d seen a lot of Dungeons, because he seemed to understand the explanation just fine.
“What’s your basis?”
“Well... if you really want one, can’t you tell just by looking at how the mana’s converging toward the tower?”
“.......”
What he was really asking was, How do you know that? But I had no obligation to answer that right now. Besides, the one in the weaker position at the moment was Sung Uijae, which meant he had no choice but to accept what I said anyway.
“The mana’s woven densely together. The roaming dolls are also being influenced by the mana coming from the tower. In other words, unless you destroy the tower itself, there’s no chance in hell the Dungeon [N O V E L I G H T] gets cleared just because you knock down a few dolls.”
“How do you destroy the tower?”
“It has a structural weak point. If that part blows, the whole tower will collapse.”
“What do we need to watch out for?”
Hmm, things to watch out for.
I pulled one corner of my mouth up crookedly and answered,
“There are a few. First, getting close to the tower will be tricky. Those peaceful dolls might turn into Satan’s dolls and come charging at us ready to kill at any moment.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“How impressive. Second... if the tower collapses, the Dungeon will collapse too.”
“But an exit will appear.”
“It will. But if you can’t make it there, that won’t mean much.”
In other words, we could end up literally buried alive inside A Brilliant Tomb, surrounded by the remnants of the past.
“Still, it’ll take time before it fully comes down, so it’s fine.”
Not completely fine, of course.
“How do we make it explode? The tower looks solid.”
“It’ll be sturdier than you’re imagining, Hunter Sung.”
“Then?”
“But there’s a... scientific way.”
With that, I smiled faintly.
In the original work, the way Kwon Taehan brought the tower down was by using himself like a bomb. An S-rank fire-type Hunter was basically the same thing as a walking energy source.
It was a self-destructive method—shoving his own superheated body, one releasing a monstrous amount of mana, into the tower’s core, then having Sung Uijae apply pressure on top of that at exactly the right moment.
'We’ll do the same thing.'
Ah, except for one thing.
“Has Hunter Chase Holt gone far?”
Because a high-mana, fire-type Hunter... wasn’t the only one in the world.
It was unfortunate, but when necessary, you had to sacrifice other people appropriately.
