Chapter 27 - Rupture (1)

People grow.

Everyone does it differently. By reading, reflecting on their past, having their first honest conversation with a friend, or finding a dream they truly want to pursue.

Or by envying someone else's good fortune, witnessing another person's misfortune, or realizing anew the power of desire.

Every insight born of experience helps us grow.

Today, I was no different.

Though mental growth would only account for a tiny part of it.

"One shortbow, one pair of plate greaves, three low-grade potions, a dozen ordinary torches... What's this, a portrait? Their family? Anyway, this goes in the trash..."

All together, this would easily fetch over 800,000 Stone.

I chuckled as I sorted through the blond's party's backpacks.

Come to think of it, this was how it always went for me.

Going through some fucked-up shit didn't always lead to growth.

But...

"This should buy me three more pieces of armor."

Every time I grew stronger, some fucked-up shit came with it.

Goddammit. I was starting to see what I needed to do.

* * *

I'm walking through a cave with Aynar.

"Bjorn, where are we going now?"

"South, where the Gnomes appear."

After eight hours of rest in total, four hours each, Aynar had recovered some of her spirits.

Though compared to her usual self, she was still practically lifeless.

"Bjorn, we can move faster. You need not worry about me."

"Why are you in such a hurry?"

"I... want to get stronger as soon as I can."

"I see."

It looked like I didn't need to worry about Aynar anymore. Now that she had a clearer goal, those dark emotions would nourish her rather than poison her.

Hmm. I supposed the same went for me.

"I feel the same way."

Throughout my watch, I'd reflected on everything I'd done so far.

The coming-of-age ceremony, entering the Labyrinth, being overnight companions with Hans, Erwin, Goblin Forest, the four-on-two fight against the crossbow party, and so on.

Even looking back now, I hadn't made any major mistakes. I'd found the best options available to me in each situation.

But...

Put another way, all I'd done was scramble to get through one moment after another.

"Why have you stopped all of a sudden?"

"It's nothing. Let's keep moving."

There were mitigating circumstances.

There'd been no tutorial fairy, no system prompts. The moment I opened my eyes, someone's head had been chopped off, and one event divorced from reality had followed another.

I'd had no choice but to remain as passive as possible and put safety first.

But where had that gotten me?

"Bjorn...? You look troubled."

"Don't worry about it."

I'd always chosen the best option?

Bullshit.

All I'd done was react. How good could even the best option be when you were only cleaning up after the shit had already hit the fan?

If I really wanted to survive, I needed to be more proactive from now on.

That would change the options available to me.

Hadn't my uncle, who spent every day gambling, told me this?

Rather than play along at someone else's table, roll the dice at a table of your own making.

All right. Change of plans.

"Aynar, do you truly want to grow stronger?"

I suddenly stopped to ask, and Aynar gave me a deeply suspicious look.

"... What do you mean?"

"I'm asking how committed you are. There's a sure way to get stronger. But it comes with risks. What will you do?"

High risk, high return.

What answer would she give to that proposal?

I watched for a moment. Aynar swallowed, then her eyes lit up.

"Of course I'll do it. If we don't get stronger, we're all going to die anyway!"

Right. Of course.

That was the kind of world this game was set in.

Having accepted, Aynar went on to declare,

"I am a warrior!"

Didn't you say you weren't earlier?

I chuckled.

Watching this barbarian's attitude, so inefficient and yet sometimes more efficient than anyone else's, brought a fresh realization.

"So, what is this way to get stronger?"

The easy road was the slow road.

And fucked-up shit was a natural disaster. No matter which road you took, it struck without warning.

With my rotten luck, it struck far more often.

Which was why...

"We're going into a rupture."

The first strike wins.

This time, I'd go looking for the fucked-up shit myself.

As someone famous once said, pain that didn't kill me would make me stronger.

* * *

"Oh! I see!"

Aynar exclaimed in admiration at my plan.

Then she cautiously asked,

"... But what is a rupture?"

How did a native know less than I did?

I wished she'd at least read a book or something.

Oh... right. She still couldn't read properly.

"A rupture is... in short, a Labyrinth within the Labyrinth."

I skipped the detailed explanation.

She wouldn't understand it anyway.

"A Labyrinth within the Labyrinth?"

"Yes."

You could call it one of the few things about [Dungeon and Stone] that resembled modern games.

If I were explaining it to someone else from the modern world, I'd have called it an "instance dungeon."

"Sometimes, a portal opens at a random location on a floor. Go inside, and you'll find an entirely new space, not the second or third floor."

"Ah! You mean the Frost Lord's Palace!"

So she had heard of one, at least.

The Frost Lord's Palace was accessible through an eighth-floor rupture.

The sheer hell I'd gone through trying to get a single Frost Lord Essence...

"But can we manage it with just the two of us? I heard the chieftain nearly died there in his youth."

"It's fine. We're on the first floor."

Four types of ruptures could open on the first floor. Whichever we got, it would be incomparably easier than a rupture on another floor.

Though for us, it would rate about seven stars.

On a five-star scale, of course.

"But how can we enter somewhere that appears at random?"

"Don't worry. There's a way."

I was a nine-year veteran, after all. One who'd personally discovered hundreds of hidden pieces in this unforgiving game.

"Bjorn, I'm counting on you!"

I turned east from our southward course.

Originally, I'd planned to hunt Gnomes, kobolds, and Stone Golems in the Dark Rocky Mountains, the second-floor area along the southern route. The Stone Golem's Suppression was a pain, but with advance preparation, there were ways around it.

But if I kept playing it safe and making progress in tiny increments, there was no telling how many years it would take to reach the eighth floor.

"Two barbarians, eh? Looking for an overnight companion? If three of us sleep together, we can each get more—"

"Fuck off."

"Hey, I was only asking—"

"In three seconds, I'll burst your skull."

As we crossed the first floor, a few people approached us along with the monsters, but Aynar dealt with all of them before I had to step in.

... Couldn't she just say no?

"I hate humans more than the pointy-ears."

It seemed Aynar had evolved beyond distrusting humans into outright hating them.

THUD! THUD! CRUNCH!

After nearly twenty hours of travel, smashing every monster that blocked our way, we finally neared our destination.

It was around four in the morning.

Once again, the sheer size of the first floor struck me. Even with its ant-tunnel layout that made getting lost inevitable, taking over a day just to travel from the western edge to the center was ridiculous.

"Bjorn, isn't this the first floor's entrance area?"

Strictly speaking, calling it the entrance area was misleading. Most starting points were skewed toward one side, whether north or south.

More importantly, there wasn't any light here.

FWOOSH!

Burning the ordinary torches we'd taken from the blond's party, we ventured into the Dark Region.

How much more time passed?

「You have slain a Gnome. EXP +1」

「You have slain a razor mane wolf. EXP +1」

After finishing our eighth battle, Aynar exclaimed in wonder.

"All four kinds of monsters appear here! I had no idea there was a place like this in the center of the first floor."

Most explorers would consider that common knowledge, but this wasn't a place people normally visited.

You could compare it to where a cold ocean current met a warm one.

Here, razor mane wolves from the east, ghouls from the west, Gnomes from the south, and goblins from the north all appeared.

However...

"There are strangely few people here."

This area wasn't popular with explorers.

The reason was simple. Having all four types of monsters appear only made fighting them more troublesome.

There were fewer monsters overall, too.

'Plus, having to burn through torches makes it poor value for money—a fatal drawback.'

Essentially, no one had a reason to come here unless they were cutting through to save travel time.

But veterans loved places like this.

It was suspicious, wasn't it? And the perfect place for the developers to hide something.

"But why have we come here?"

"Just be patient. We'll find it soon."

After an hour of wandering through the darkness, changing directions again and again, I finally reached the place I'd been looking for.

"Here we are."

A cavern roughly thirty meters in radius.

In the middle of that wide-open space, a rarity in the first floor's antlike tunnels, stood a stone monument.

"... What in the world is that?"

"A monument honoring the person who first discovered this Labyrinth."

I approached the monument carefully and read the inscription at its base.

[In honor of that great first step, taken by the last Great Sage, Diphlon Graundell Gabrilius]

For starters, the inscription was identical to the game's.

Which meant it was reasonable to assume the hidden piece I'd discovered was likely the same, too.

"Aynar, everything that happens from this point on is a secret. Understood?"

"Understood."

"I need more than your word. I need an oath. If this gets out, we could both be in danger."

"... I swear on my honor as a warrior."

"Thank you."

I slowly untied the pouch at my waist.

Goblin, Gnome, ghoul, razor mane wolf.

Magic crystals from the four types of monsters found on the first floor, plus a crystal from a deathfiend, a rank-8 monster.

And the Great Sage's monument before me.

"Let's get started."

I had everything I needed to force open a rupture.

* * *

The instance dungeons in [Dungeon and Stone]—in other words, ruptures—had a cooldown.

On the first floor, for example, at least two cycles had to pass before another rupture could open. Two months in city time.

Of course, they rarely opened as soon as those two months were up. Most ruptures opened randomly between the fourth and fifth cycles.

Was the maximum eight cycles? I thought so.

"..."

For the record, I'd figured all of this out on my own, too.

While grinding for the Frost Lord's Essence, I'd needed to learn more about ruptures. Wandering around the floors every time, waiting endlessly for one to appear, wasn't efficient.

"Is something wrong?"

"No."

After that brief trip down memory lane, I placed the deathfiend's magic crystal in my hand before the monument.

If the last rupture had opened within the past two cycles, meaning it was still on cooldown, nothing would happen...

RUMBLE!

Before long, the crystal I'd set down glowed and vanished, and tremors spread out from the monument.

So it really did work.

WHOOOSH!

The tremors intensified, and a pitch-black portal opened.

"Let's hurry inside."

"O-oh. All right!"

I hurriedly threw myself through it with Aynar.

After all, it would fill up in ten seconds.

「Your character has entered a first-floor rupture.」

Leaving Aynar to land on her rear as usual, I checked our surroundings first.

A red sky that made it look as though the world could end at any moment. Flocks of crows flying across it, and a black castle in the distance.

I needed no further confirmation. This was the Blood-Tinted Castle, one of the four first-floor rupture types.

Which was only natural, since the rank-8 crystal I'd offered as a sacrifice had come from a deathfiend.

WHOOOSH!

After a brief wait, a crack opened in midair and spat out a person.

This was the decisive reason I'd put off coming here, even though I knew not only how to guarantee a rupture would open, but every detail of how to clear it.

Explorers scared me more than monsters.

"Hahaha! Finally made it in!"

It would have been different if I'd assembled a five-person team I could trust to keep the secret.

Entering this way meant clearing the rupture with random explorers admitted on a first-come, first-served basis.

In gaming terms, I had to use matchmaking.

Tense, I examined our first teammate.

"Oh! Two barbarians! That's reassuring! Glad to be working with you! My name's Hikurod Murad! As you can see, I'm a dwarf! Hahahaha!"

One dwarf who seemed awfully talkative, for starters.

I didn't know how skilled he was, but this wasn't bad.

If only the rest could be no worse than him...

I chuckled.

Of course, that was too much for someone like me to hope for, wasn't it?