We set the watches. I had the last watch.
Baldik would take the first, then me, Corwin, and lastly Drek. But Drek volunteered for the middle, so I naturally ended up taking the last watch.
That night, I thought the pain from my wounds would make it hard to sleep, but contrary to my expectations, it took me less than five minutes to drift off.
***
‘Where is this?’
When I came to my senses, I was here.
It was a space filled entirely with darkness, one that brought outer space to mind.
[You have reached a stage. Please select a perk.]
A voice rang out, as if it had been driven directly into my ears.
‘A stage? A perk?’
Paaang—
With a holy sound effect, something appeared before my eyes.
────────────
[Increase Max Mana]
[Increase Max Health]
[Blue Magic: Condensation]
────────────
Three enormous cards were floating in midair.
Each card had an illustration and a short description written on it.
‘This is totally a game, isn’t it?’
It felt familiar.
No matter how you looked at it, this was no different from a reward selection screen in a game.
‘So I wasn’t thrown in here completely empty-handed after all?’
I’d thought I’d been dumped into this place without any special abilities, but was I only now being given something called a perk?
A belated benefit was welcome, but at the same time, it left a bad taste in my mouth.
What drew my attention most of all was the color of the cards.
[Increase Max Mana] and [Increase Max Health] were plain white, but [Blue Magic: Condensation] held a faint green glow.
‘Is it something like a rarity system?’
From the perspective of someone who had played a fair number of games, there was a high chance the color difference had something to do with rarity.
Common abilities were colorless, while special abilities were given color.
First, I examined the first two cards.
The descriptions written below them were concise.
[Your max mana increases slightly.]
[Your max health increases slightly.]
They meant exactly what they said. Though I didn’t know how much the actual numbers would increase.
If I wanted to use more magic, I should increase mana; if I wanted to endure longer, I should increase health.
Maybe it was something like an investment for the future.
But for me, who couldn’t use mana right now, [Increase Max Mana] was useless.
That said, it didn’t feel quite right for a mage to choose [Increase Max Health] either.
Then there was only one option left.
“[Blue Magic: Condensation], huh…”
The short description beneath the card caught my eye.
[Consumes mana to condense moisture.]
It was a simple sentence, but its meaning was clear.
Magic related to water.
I probably wouldn’t be able to use it properly right now, but at the very least, if I was going to walk the path of a mage, this would be better.
I didn’t agonize over it for long.
I reached out toward the [Blue Magic: Condensation] card.
Then the card scattered into motes of light and seeped into my fingertips.
After that, the remaining cards vanished without a trace as well.
Was that the end of it? My body grew heavier and heavier.
My eyelids slowly sank, and my consciousness faded.
As my mind descended, a single thought surfaced.
Please, let this not be a dream.
If it is a dream—
Then let all of this be a dream…
***
When I opened my eyes, I saw a sly face.
It was Corwin.
“Is it time already?”
“Yes. The torch burned out.”
I let out a short breath, folded up my blanket, and rose from my spot.
Surprisingly, my body felt much lighter.
The wound that had throbbed until yesterday now barely hurt at all.
Just in case, I lifted my shirt slightly.
There—
A scab had already formed.
‘Already?’
It was too fast.
It hadn’t been a simple scrape, but a proper wound.
Had Baldik treated it that well, or was there something else going on?
It wasn’t a situation where I could be certain yet.
‘Right, recovering is a good thing. What does the reason matter?’
There was nothing urgent for the moment, so I decided to take it positively.
That aside,
‘That was a vivid dream.’
I remembered the dream far too clearly.
I had definitely chosen a perk in that dream. Was it real?
If it was real, how was I supposed to use it?
On the off chance, I tried shouting “Condensation” in my head.
Then, along with a strange sensation of something draining out of my hand—
Ssssst—
Drops of water gathered above my palm and slowly grew larger.
By the time the water filled my palm—
Stagger.
I stumbled at the sudden pain in my heart.
At the obvious abnormal symptom, I immediately tried to stop the magic.
‘But how do I stop it?’
I realized that while I knew how to use it, I didn’t know how to stop.
As something continued to drain helplessly out of me, the agony in my heart intensified.
“Guh—!”
After a struggle, I succeeded in stopping whatever had been flowing out of my body.
Plop.
Splash—
Along with a sense of exhaustion, water streamed down between my fingers.
Don’t tell me I’d already used up all my mana.
I had never seen another mage before, but I was certain this amount of mana wasn’t normal.
‘To think I used up all my mana just to fill a cup with water.’
It seemed the contents of the diary had been true.
Liv had no talent.
The problem was that this just had to be my body.
“Has your mana returned?”
“!!”
When did he wake up?
Before I knew it, Drek had come up behind me and was looking down at my wet hand as he spoke in a low voice.
“Why already?”
“I heard a sound.”
“Ah.”
It hadn’t been that loud. Probably.
‘Was he on guard the whole time?’
We were a team right now, but in the end, this was nothing more than a gathering of criminals.
Normally, being on guard was only natural.
The strange one was Baldik over there, snoring in his sleep.
…But what did he mean?
“Returned?”
“Our lives are on the line right now. Even if you’re a mage, this isn’t a situation where you can afford to act stubborn.”
“…”
“But you didn’t use magic? Then it’s one of two things.”
“Either your mana was sealed for some reason… or you never knew how to use magic in the first place.”
For a moment, my heart sank, but I barely managed to maintain my composure.
“Judging from what I just saw, it seems it was the former after all.”
“…”
Had he noticed during the fight with the kobolds?
He certainly wasn’t an easy person to fool.
Drek looked at the small puddle on the floor.
“It’s definitely blue.”
“…How much do you know about blue?”
“Blue? Aren’t you the one who should know more about that?”
Drek looked puzzled.
“I’m just curious.”
“Hmm. Right, I suppose you have your circumstances, being here and all.”
As if he understood, Drek nodded.
“To answer your question, it handles water and cold, roughly speaking.”
“It handles cold too?”
“You didn’t know? Of course, water came first, but I heard it later split into two schools.”
So the Blue Magic Tower wasn’t just one thing?
Since this wasn’t the only thing I didn’t know, I decided it was about time I shamelessly pushed through.
“Do you happen to know where the Blue Magic Tower is?”
“The Blue Magic Tower is, if I remember correctly…”
Drek stroked his beard and pondered for a moment.
“I heard it’s in the Rahazakh Desert.”
A desert?
The Blue Magic Tower was in a desert?
Finding it strange, I asked again.
“That question is stranger. Where do you think water is needed most?”
“Well… Ah.”
When people think of a region that lacks water, they usually think of a desert.
“In a way, you could say it developed for survival.”
The Rahazakh Desert… I’d have to remember that.
“For someone from a Magic Tower, there’s far too much you don’t know.”
“…”
“If you get outside, you’d best hide that. There are many people who target wandering mages.”
A wandering mage? Was that different from a Magic Tower mage?
“And you should change the way you speak too.”
“Yes?”
“If you talk like that, you’ll only look weak. In places like this, you need to speak a little more roughly.”
He had a point. Compared to the others, I did sound that way, but didn’t I need something to back me up if I wanted to act tough?
If I spoke like that, I was sure a fist would fly at me immediately.
***
Before I knew it, I could tell that all the torch flames that signaled wake-up time had gone out.
After waking the others, I sank briefly into deep thought.
In this place, where darkness stretched in every direction, there was no way to tell whether it was day or night.
What time was it outside right now?
Unable to sense the passage of time, the anxiety and fatigue swelling inside me seemed to grow stronger and stronger.
Some of the group must have already woken, because I heard quiet conversation from behind me.
“Damn it, so coming here wasn’t a dream.”
“You slept just fine. Now you’re spouting nonsense.”
After a simple breakfast, we began preparing to set out.
Breakfast was the bread that had been in the backpacks.
At the sight of food for the first time in nearly two days, my mouth naturally watered.
I lifted the bread and was about to put it in my mouth and chew.
Crack.
I couldn’t chew it. This wasn’t bread. It was stone.
When I looked around in bewilderment, I belatedly realized that everyone was soaking the bread in water to soften it before eating.
Perhaps because I was hungry, the bread soaked in water tasted decent enough.
After finishing the brief meal, we passed through the kobold room and advanced into the passage behind it.
While passing through the corridor, we found a corpse along the way.
The corpse had died with an arrow lodged in its side.
“A trap?”
Not long after seeing the corpse, we all stopped at the signal from the mercenary walking ahead.
“There’s a trap up ahead.”
“A trap?”
At Drek’s words, I stared forward, but I couldn’t see anything that looked like a trap.
“You have to look down.”
“Down? Ah.”
When I looked closely below, I confirmed that a thin thread was stretched at about ankle height.
“If you touch it, arrows shoot out from the wall?”
“That’s damned vicious.”
Drek disarmed the trap.
He seemed used to this sort of thing.
It was about time I said it.
“I’ll use the detection stone.”
“What? Having a change of heart this late?”
“…”
It must have seemed strange.
But I couldn’t very well say I had only now become able to use mana.
Based on my earlier experience, I moved the mana inside my body.
Twitch, twitch.
Perhaps because it was my first time, it didn’t follow my will right away, but
after I focused for a moment, the mana began to slowly move.
When I guided the mana into the hole in the detection stone,
Woong—
A small light appeared in the round detection stone.
The light moved about frantically before stopping in one direction.
‘Is it like a compass?’
After moving my body this way and that to check,
it really did seem to be something similar to a compass.
“Hmm, so we just have to go in that direction?”
“You wasted your strength for nothing.”
Since the location was on the opposite side from where we had come, we had to retrace our steps.
On the way back, we found two monster rooms, but perhaps they had been dealt with by those who came before us, because only rotting corpses remained.
What was harder than the monsters were the traps. We encountered traps three times.
The first two were noticed and disarmed in advance, but the third trap sent a chill down my spine.
Maybe someone stepped on a trigger on the floor, because spears suddenly dropped from above. Fortunately, thanks to Baldik’s short stature, he was unharmed.
After walking for quite some time, we finally arrived in front of the place the detection stone had guided us to.
“Is that it?”
It was a door.
It was smaller than the one at the dungeon entrance, but its form was similar.
“Looks like the second floor is the end. Should we call that lucky?”
“Once this is over…”
Judging from their reactions, this floor seemed to be the last one after all.
“There’ll be a gravekeeper. Stay alert.”
“Those gravekeeper bastards can’t be compared to kobolds.”
Gravekeeper.
From what I heard, it seemed to be slang for the boss monster in the dungeon’s final room.
Everyone stared intently at Drek’s hand gripping the doorknob, their expressions tense.
At last, he opened the door.
Drrrrrk—
The revealed space wasn’t much different in size from the kobold room.
This room was also fairly spacious, but in terms of scale, there was no particularly noticeable difference.
However, there was one difference that stood out: the structures.
Unlike the empty kobold room, various stone structures were scattered here.
Several stone blocks arranged like altars across the room bore traces suggesting they had been used to support or secure something.
Atop the stone altar in the very center sat an ornate chest.
The chest was as clean as an ancient relic, without a speck of dust on it.
“…Is that it?”
“Why is there no one here?”
The air in this room was far too still.
For a boss room, there was nothing to be seen except the structures.
“Don’t tell me the people who came before us killed it first?”
“No way!”
The tension still hung in the air, but everyone cautiously approached the chest.
That single chest was the only thing in the room.
It was firmly locked.
Everyone’s gaze naturally turned to Kowin.
“Ah, am I supposed to do it?”
Kowin hesitated for a moment, but in the end, he passively stepped forward and began undoing the lock.
His fingertips turned the lock, and at last, there came a click.
The lock was finally open.
Looking slightly excited, Kowin removed the lock and opened the chest.
When the chest opened, inside it was—
A mass of unnaturally rotten red flesh, packed full of grotesque, razor-sharp teeth.
“What the—”
Crunch—
The chest suddenly sprang up and swallowed Kowin’s head whole.
““Huh?””
Everyone froze for a moment at the shocking sight.
“—Damn it! Run!!”
“Aaaargh!”
At Drek’s shout, we instinctively bolted into the passage.
Kowin’s screams grew more and more distant, while the mimic’s bizarre cries behind us grew louder and louder.
“What the hell is that thing?!”
“It’s a Parasitic Mimic.”
A Parasitic Mimic?
As if proving those words true, we could hear the sound of the legless mimic charging after us from behind.
Thud! Thud! Thud!
I glanced back.
Kowin was running toward us with the mimic covering his head.
The thudding sound was the mimic’s main body striking the floor.
Unable to bear the mimic’s weight, Kowin’s upper body had bent into a sharp, inverted V, causing it to slam against the floor as he came.
The sight of Kowin staggering forward with his joints twisted was unbearably grotesque.
“Ugh—”
I shouldn’t have looked. Corpses were still hard for me to handle.
But there was a more important problem than that: the mimic was faster than expected.
“Damn it, if it’s a mimic, shouldn’t we be able to fight it?”
At Baldik’s words, Drek gave him a pathetic look.
“Hah… Parasitic Mimics grow stronger for every person they parasitize.”
“Hah… hah, what…?”
“It’s been ten days since the dungeon opened. If it’s still alive…”
At those words, Baldik seemed to completely lose the will to fight and put more strength into his legs.
I had no idea how frantically we ran, but before I knew it, the stairs to the first floor came into view in the distance.
“We’re almost there.”
“First, let’s get to the first floor and come up with a plan—”
“What’s that?”
Drek’s words were cut off by something visible on the stairs.
Something was coming down them.
As it drew closer, we realized that it was a person.
A person wearing a red robe embroidered with elaborate patterns.
“What’s this? There are living ones?”
The person in the red robe spoke first. From the voice, it was definitely a woman.
“A mage…”
“Damn it, a mage?”
Was there some special trait that gave it away? Drek’s voice was filled with certainty.
“I don’t have time. I need to deal with this before the prohibition order.”
“…”
She ignored us and pondered to herself.
After thinking for a moment, she muttered under her breath, then suddenly began forming spheres of fire above both hands.
No matter how I looked at it, she didn’t seem to be making them because she was cold.
“No. It’d be better to just kill them all.”
With an indifferent expression, she uttered words brimming with killing intent.
At that, everyone gripped their weapons with tense expressions.
“Damn it…”
The very moment she made a hand motion to launch her magic—
Thud! Thud! Thud! Thud!
In the distance, we saw the mimic charging toward us with enough force to smash through the passage.
“Damn it, run for the entrance!”
At Drek’s shout, we started running without a moment’s hesitation.
Of course, there was no way she would just let us approach.
“How dare you!”
Whoosh—
Fwoooosh—
She threw the fireball in her left hand at us as we charged forward.
The fireball cut through the air and flew straight toward us, its scorching heat brushing past our skin.
Boom! Fwoosh—
A powerful explosion erupted, flames scattering with a sound like even the air itself was being torn apart.
For a moment, everyone flinched at the searing heat that washed over our bodies.
“Aaagh!”
“Guh!”
Luckily, we avoided a direct hit, but because of the narrow passage, we couldn’t fully evade the aftermath of the explosion and were thrown across the corridor.
Unable to control our bodies from the intense heat and impact, we curled up for a moment.
Perhaps the mage needed to conserve her strength to deal with the mimic coming up behind us, because no follow-up attack came.
“Damn it, get up!”
“You’ll die if you sit there!!”
Hearing Drek’s voice, I came to my senses and forced myself up.
But the passage was still hot, and we had to flee through the flames.
“Uuugh.”
Baldik, who belatedly regained his senses, got to his feet.
Without hesitation, we started running again toward the entrance by the mage.
Dodging through the flames, we desperately ran toward the stairs, and finally reached the bottom of them.
The mage stood in front of the stairs, glaring at us.
She still held a fireball in her right hand, and the tension lingered as if she might throw it at any moment.
However, she merely clicked her tongue and left us behind, as if giving up on us.
Dragging our exhausted bodies, we climbed the stairs and barely managed to reach the entrance.
The entrance was open, but there was still a barricade set up in front of it.
Boom! Boom!
From below, explosions rang out, as if a battle was in full swing.
I was supposed to be the same kind of mage as things like that?
We collapsed in front of the entrance and caught our breath.
“Hah—huff… hah… I thought I was going to die.”
“Hek… hek…!”
The sound of our ragged breathing mixed together, and the urgency still made it feel as if my heart was pounding out of control.
After lying there for a long while and catching my breath, the only thing that came to mind was worry.
“What do we do now?”
“We get out.”
“If we go out like this, things won’t end well for us.”
It was obvious that leaving without any results would be bad.
But it wasn’t as if we had any other way.
All I could do was survive the situation in front of me as best I could.
Step, step—
Footsteps?
Footsteps came from beyond the stairs.
“Don’t tell me she already killed the mimic?”
“Damn it, the mage is a problem too.”
The footsteps grew closer, as if whatever it was had climbed all the way up.
And what emerged from between the stairs was…
The mimic’s head.
“What?”
The mimic climbed fully up the stairs.
Its lower body had changed into that of a woman.
Ah. So the mage lost.
Seeing the mimic come up in that form, the situation was worse than expected.
Not only had the mage been defeated, it was proof that this mimic had grown to a certain extent.
The mimic seemed to discover us and raised its head.
Thud! Thud! Thud! Thud!
Then it charged at us like a mad thing.
“Open the door!”
“Aaaaaaargh!”
Our escape was not over.