Either way, I had to recover my condition before moving on.
As I rested for a moment, I organized the information I’d gathered so far.
First, just as I’d expected, monsters existed in this dungeon.
Which meant the clear conditions were “find the door + kill every monster,”
and while I could probably find the door if I searched for it...
The problem was the part about killing every monster.
While exploring the cliff up until now, aside from this time, I hadn’t encountered a single monster.
Strange, right?
Because Abraxas was a flying monster.
It wouldn’t have been strange at all for an Abraxas to attack me while I was climbing the cliff.
Rather, that would have been the natural flow of things.
Except when I went looking for them first, they had never attacked me first.
Putting all that together, the way to kill all the monsters here was fixed.
‘I have to go find them myself and kill them.’
That was the only way.
But,
of course, that didn’t mean I was going to do it, haha.
That’s for the Hero’s party to handle.
All I had to write down were the locations where the monsters were hiding and the location of the door.
Just those two things.
That was the extent of my role.
Oh, just in case, the monster locations are just a bonus.
Kind of like an optional quest.
After all, to find the door, I had to search every cave one by one,
and if I did that, I’d naturally find out where the monsters were too.
Since I’d know anyway, it’d be nice to mark them down as well.
I wasn’t saying I was going to go around searching specifically to figure that out.
‘They should have search magic, so there’s no need for me to bust my ass.’
No matter how much mercenaries were treated like Chunsik, consumables, meat shields, and so on, no employer would inefficiently order mercenaries to handle even this when they had a mage.
You might ask what if they didn’t have a mage, but there was no such thing as a raid party without one.
There could be monsters that could only be killed with magic, or monsters with high physical resistance...
Anyway, magic was convenient, praise be, so you could assume every raid party always had at least one mage.
Of course, mages were fairly precious, but both the mage and the employer would probably just use magic, no?
Hiring new mercenaries cost money too, and when you factored in the time it took to clear the dungeon and all the rest, casting one spell was cheaper and more profitable in many ways.
Ah, but that didn’t mean search magic was omnipotent.
If it were, there’d be no reason for mercenaries to shove their bodies forward to scout.
Search magic could only detect the location of living beings within a certain range.
Meaning it couldn’t determine the location of the door, the dungeon’s terrain, or its structure.
Outside, barring certain circumstances, search magic could figure all of that out,
but it seemed to be a characteristic of a space called a dungeon.
Well, anyway.
‘All right, then. Shall we start again?’
With my earplugs in, I moved to the next cave.
***
I think I’m seriously fucked.
I couldn’t even remember how many forms I’d used by now.
‘No, I didn’t know it would be this bad!!!!!!’
The first time I met an Abraxas was after going through seven caves,
so naturally, rather than thinking I’d been lucky, I assumed the chance of encountering a monster was about 15%.
But now, it felt like they were appearing at around... 40%.
‘Once it’s intermediate-grade, I guess this level of difficulty makes sense.’
It was just that I’d gotten through the first layer way too easily.
They said that in upper-grade dungeons, scouting a single layer could take as long as a week.
‘At this pace, it’ll take about two days...?’
Or if I was unlucky, I might end up clearing this layer instead of the Hero’s party.
If the Abraxas moved around in flocks, that would obviously be impossible,
but right now, defeating them individually was well within reach.
Even if I fought, it was one-on-one, and I had enough time to recover in between.
‘There’s still about 80% left.’
I was working my way up from the very bottom,
and when I looked up, to be honest, it really was a hassle.
‘Should I just go back and forth between places where the door seems likely to be?’
I was tempted,
but this wasn’t a game played from a third-person perspective.
Skipping caves I could enter and moving around here and there was physically exhausting, and remembering which caves I had already visited would be extremely tricky.
Of course, I might end up finding the door faster that way.
But that was far too much of a gamble.
What would I do if I didn’t find it?
What if, in the worldline where I slowly investigated from the bottom, I would have discovered the door in the third cave after this one?
Then I’d just become Mr. Wasted Effort.
‘Let’s do it by the book. By the book.’
If I tried to get cute with half-baked tricks, I’d end up dead.
“Hoo... hoo...”
And so, I slowly cleared the caves one by one.
***
By the time I felt like I’d investigated about half of them, night had arrived in the dungeon before I knew it.
I moved toward the last cave of the day.
If I had my way, I wanted to finish it today, but my stamina and aura weren’t quite able to support that yet.
‘I hope the last one ends easily...’
Unfortunately, my wish for either the door to be there or for nothing to be there at all did not come true.
Because one Abraxas was staring at me.
But this individual looked a little different from the other Abraxas.
A little more... how should I put it?
Facing off against the Abraxas, I began to examine it closely.
First, the color of its feathers was a little different.
If the other Abraxas had red feathers as their base with blue feathers as accents, this one had yellow feathers scattered here and there.
And the thing like a comb on an ordinary chicken was shaped more like a crown.
‘Is it a unique monster?’
To put it simply, it was either a monster slightly stronger than other individuals, a key monster that served as the axis for breaking a gimmick,
or a monster that triggered a gimmick. Those were called unique monsters.
Normally, you had to get hit by a unique monster to know which of the three types it belonged to,
but whether I was lucky or not, this time I could roughly guess what type this one was without having to suffer it directly.
“Fuck.”
And I could also guess the situation that was about to come crashing down on me.
Something shaped like a nest behind the Abraxas, and behind that, the door leading to the next layer.
There were as many as two things it had to protect.
Then... fuck, of course it had to protect them.
“Kweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
The son of a b— no, the bird bastard began to cry out in a pattern different from the other Abraxas.
Like an alarm ringing during a fire.
“Kweeeek!”
“Kweeeeeeeek!”
The cries of other Abraxas came from outside the cave.
The reason I’d been able to gain the upper hand against the Abraxas until now, as I’d said before, was because I fought them one-on-one, and because I could rest sufficiently after killing one.
But now that I’d met this bastard, a situation completely different from the battles so far began to unfold.
The caves that had originally been separated individually clustered together as if gathering here, gradually increasing the size of the cave.
The size it expanded to was
large enough that roughly two hundred Abraxas could fly through the air, run across the ground, and do all kinds of bullshit with room to spare.
Dead Zones.
One of the gimmicks created by a dungeon that didn’t like being scouted for free.
A space that appeared when certain conditions were met, and its defining trait was that you could not avoid battle with monsters.
The reason this place was called a Dead Zone was obvious from the name alone: every mercenary who entered died before coming out.
It was already late.
The sun had been gone for a long time, and along with it, my aura was not in peak condition.
I didn’t know exactly how much I had left.
But at the very least, I didn’t have enough remaining to beat all of them to death with forms.
But that didn’t matter.
Because I had promised I would return.
To the mercenaries belonging to the Torch of Dawn, and to Bell.
Countless promises were probably vanishing even at this moment without being kept, but I didn’t want mine to be one of them.
Here in this Dead Zone, I intended to become the first mercenary to survive.
““Kweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek!!!!!!””
“Get your shitty faces out of my sight, you bastards!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
They charged.
Dragging bodies roughly three meters tall, as many as two hundred monsters came toward me to kill me alone.
—Clench.
I gripped my sword with all my strength, and when that wasn’t enough, I used a cord to tie the sword to my wrist so it wouldn’t fall away.
Then I lowered it as if dragging the blade along.
—Fwoosh.
Like fire spreading over oil, dark-red flames instantly wrapped around my sword.
—Sssshk!
I spun once around myself, drawing a large circle.
—Whoosh!
Flames rose along the circle as if granted life, creating a makeshift curtain.
Resolving to cut down and kill every enemy that entered this space,
“Kweeeek!”
one of them came inside the curtain.
I knocked aside its talons with my sword and lunged for its neck.
“Uaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”
I roared and swung my sword.
—Kkng!
Because it was not a form but just a simple swing, the blade only cut about thirty percent through its neck before lodging there.
“Kweeeeeek!!!”
After cutting it down, I should have immediately dealt with the next bastard,
but already, I had given them the timing.
“Kghk!”
—Thud! Thud! Th-thud!
A headbutt from another Abraxas that appeared from the side sent my body bouncing out of the curtain like a ball.
—Fwooo...
The curtain, having lost its master, quickly withered and vanished.
“Ugh...”
But how badly I was hurt, or whether the curtain had disappeared or remained,
none of that mattered at all.
What mattered was whether “the sword was still in my hand” and whether “I could still move even a little.”
—Thump.
Using my knee as a support, I barely managed to raise myself up.
Then I immediately revised my plan and,
“Sucheon Seonghwa Sword (守天聖火劍), First Form, Sinjo Gaehwa (申朝開火).”
—Slash!
I cleanly cut down the one charging at me from my left.
Originally, I’d planned to conserve my forms as much as possible.
I intended to deal with them as much as I could using basic swordsmanship and aura, then handle only the ones I absolutely couldn’t manage with forms,
but after swinging once just now, I realized that if I did that, I wouldn’t last three minutes before dying.
‘I’ll pour out everything I have.’
Having realized that I couldn’t survive by doing things halfway,
I began to dance a sword dance as if burning myself away.
—Fwoosh! Fwoosh! Fwoooosh!!
I did not stop unleashing forms for even a single moment.
“Kweeeek!”
“Kwek!!!!”
“Kieeeek!!!!”
Sunlight spreading horizontally continued to burn the surroundings, eliminating the monsters one by one.
My body temperature kept rising.
My heartbeat grew uncontrollably fast.
The amount of breath demanded by each form became incomparably greater.
During that time,
I erased the self called “me” from this world.
Survive.
Kill, solely for that purpose.
In this space now, only two wills remained, filling the world.
I thought such a moment... would last forever.
I wished it had.
—Thud.
No more strength would enter my body.
Scratches and wounds that had multiplied without my noticing were hindering my movements.
‘Did I... lose too much blood?’
If I drank a potion, I might get a little better,
but not only did I have no time for that, my bag had long since been set down far away before the battle began.
‘So this is as far as I go.’
I hadn’t fallen yet, but even so, I could feel it.
They say that when death approaches, you vaguely come to know when you’ll die.
For me, that seemed to be now.
My life flashed before my eyes.
The comrades I worked with in the mercenary corps.
The requests and stories I’d shared with them until now.
And... lastly,
the days I’d spent with Bell, brief but intense.
—Srrr...
The Abraxas, who had been flinching in fear at the sight of me like an evil spirit slaughtering their kin, saw the aura gradually disappearing from my sword,
“Kweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek!!!!!”
and as if seeking revenge, they cried out and began flying at me again.
Slowly,
over a very long time, very slowly,
filled with the regret that I did not want to close my eyes like this,
I closed them.
...
.......
.................
“You can’t give up yet, Evan.”
At that moment,
I heard a woman’s voice in front of me.
—Kwaaaaaaaaaaaaaang!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Even with my eyes closed, I could tell.
A light as bright as midday had filled this space and wrapped around it.
“Myeongse Cheon-gwang Sword (明世天光劍), Third Form, Cheokma Naegwang (斥魔來光).”
Someone’s infinitely warm aura was here.
‘It’s gentle... like the warm morning sunlight.’
—Thud.
With that thought as my last, I lost consciousness and collapsed.