Chương 20: 08-1:Dungeon, Ruins, and Adventurers

When the obsidian walls split along their silver veins, the first ones to lose their composure weren't us. It was the Ravens.

"Stop! Don't push any further in!" Someone screamed through the chaos of clashing footsteps and rising monster-tide, their voice cracking under the strain of pure desperation—the sound of a professional trying very hard not to sound like they were about to die.

"Watch out! This is an Unmapped Labyrinth——!" I had already lifted my foot to charge through the cracked doorway after Matthews. Those words made me freeze mid-step.

"... Unmapped Labyrinth?" The name alone sounded like bad news wearing a funeral shroud. The problem was, it wasn't just the name. In my experience, the truly lethal things in this world had deceptively simple titles—the shorter the name, the longer the list of ways it could kill you. I pulled Erina back toward the fractured entrance and shot a look at Lucas.

"What does that mean, exactly?" Lucas Ponti looked like someone had siphoned off half his remaining life force. His face had gone the color of expensive parchment—bleached white and slightly translucent. But he was still running, still keeping pace, apparently the kind of person whose fear response manifested as compulsive academic explanation. His voice shook. His lecture did not stop.

"It—it means exactly what it sounds like!" He grabbed at his glasses as they slid down his nose.

"Any ruin or dungeon that hasn't been formally registered with the Guild, hasn't had its exploration records completed—those get classified as Unmapped Labyrinths. The worst part isn't the monsters. It's that nobody knows the rules yet!"

"Simpler version."

"Simpler is—there are no safe zones established!" I frowned.

"Safe zones?" Lucas threw me the look of a man who had just discovered that the person he was relying on for survival had never read the relevant survival manuals—a look of profound educational despair.

"In properly mapped dungeons," he said, adopting the tone of someone reciting emergency procedures while the emergency was actively occurring, "the Guild establishes checkpoints on each floor as exploration progresses. Recovery points. Shelter rooms. At minimum, designated retreat zones with temporary safety guarantees. Those places have supply caches, route records—some even have pre-confirmed escape sigils."

"Which means—" He was already nodding frantically.

"Which means an Unmapped Labyrinth has none of that. No verified maps. No Guild-marked escape routes. No guaranteed breathing room anywhere. The upside is that everything inside—treasures, materials, relics—is completely first-contact. Whoever reaches it first keeps it." One shaky breath.

"The downside is—""When you actually need to run for your life, you might not know where to run to." That wasn't Lucas. That was Jessi. She had materialized at my other side without any sound—which, given our current circumstances, should have been my first warning. Her eyes were bright. Not the brightness of someone processing danger. The brightness of someone doing rapid profit calculations, the way a starving person looks when they suddenly discover a wall embedded floor-to-ceiling with gold coins.

More concerning: she wasn't afraid. She was budgeting.

"An unregistered dungeon..." She narrowed her eyes at the crystalline formations pulsing with faint blue-white eldritch luminescence in the wall's recessed channels. Her voice dropped to something almost dreamlike.

"First-contact gemstones. First-contact relics. First-contact raw materials. Whoever touches it first, keeps it." A slow, satisfied exhale.

"This isn't danger, little young master. This is called getting rich."

"Factor in staying alive before you start counting profits."

"Relax, little young master." She turned that smile on me—the sweet one, the dangerous one, the one that had never once in its existence been accompanied by good judgment.

"Dead people can't spend money. But living people can. And I intend to be the wealthiest living person in this corridor."

"Right now you look more villainous than any of the Ravens do."

"That's because you don't understand economics." I was two seconds from telling her she resembled a particularly well-dressed plague when the floor shuddered. The first Frostbound Immortal Sentinel collided with the obsidian pillar at the entrance. The impact rolled through the entire passage like a struck bell—deep, resonant, and fundamentally wrong.

Ice-blue eye-fires ignited one after another in the darkness beyond the fractured doorway, casting the cracked threshold in light that looked uncomfortably like the inside of a corpse's throat. And the Ravens had finally reached the door. Honestly, I expected them to break. Most people, confronted with that particular combination of eldritch luminescence and awakening armored dead, would have made the entirely reasonable decision to reconsider their life choices. They didn't.

They were, if anything, calmer than I expected. A dozen figures in black-feathered short cloaks dispersed with mechanical efficiency—front rank raising shields, middle rank leveling crossbows, rear rank drawing long weapons traced with the pale scars of active enchantments. Someone issued clipped commands. Restraining spikes and cold-iron chains hit the ground in practiced patterns.

The entire formation snapped into place with the fluid competence of people who had been making their living in high-danger ruins long enough to have developed strong opinions about it. Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

"Hold the front line!"

"Don't let the Sentinels break through!"

"Left flank—incendiary flasks, take out their legs!"

"Maintain formation—nobody panics!" Boom. A Frostbound Immortal Sentinel drove itself headlong into the Raven shield wall. The entire line slid back half a step, steel screaming against stone, sparks bursting from the impact—but it held. In the same instant, two enchanted heavy spears drove in from oblique angles, finding the knee joints with surgical precision. The crossbow volley that followed stitched black bolts into armor seams with the calm efficiency of craftsmen disassembling expensive machinery.

My eye twitched.

"... Are these people not slightly too competent at this?"

"I told you they weren't ordinary pursuit." Matthews's voice came from the deepest shadow near the interior doorway, low and flat. His bow remained raised. His expression had passed beyond 'grim' into something that suggested he had already calculated the odds and found them wanting.

"The Ravens don't survive if all they can do is chase women and stab people in back alleys. Most of them are high-tier adventurers. Veteran mercenaries. Some built their entire careers on exploration and extermination contracts."

"So this is worse than I thought."

"Yes." Entirely without inflection.

"Which is why we move deeper while they're still occupied." Perfectly sound tactical reasoning. It really was. It would have remained perfectly sound, if Jessi had not chosen this precise moment to reach into her cloak and produce a slender copper tube, examining it with the serene expression of someone who had absolutely no idea why anyone might find this concerning. My eyelid developed a violent tic.

"... What is that." Jessi blinked. The portrait of innocence—framed and hung in a gallery dedicated to the concept, with a small brass plaque underneath reading this is what innocence looks like.

"Monster lure incense." Half a second of absolute silence. Even Lucas missed a step—the stumble of a man whose brain had received information it was not prepared to process.

"I'm sorry," I said, one word at a time.

"You said what."

"Mon-ster. Lure. In-cense." She helpfully divided it into syllables, with the patient enunciation of someone who suspected my aristocratic education had left practical gaps in my vocabulary.

"Black market item. Extremely useful. Light it, and it releases a specific scent that attracts nearby monsters sensitive to that stimulus—draws them from considerable distances. Normally used for baiting ambushes, stealing kills, or generating chaos to cover escapes." The cold settled into my bones in a way that had nothing to do with dungeon air.

"When," I said very carefully, "did you light it."

"Just now~""Just now as in when specifically—""While you were getting the dungeon tutorial from Lucas." She spread her hands with complete reasonableness and utter lack of repentance.

"I figured—since we're dealing with high-tier adventurers and veteran mercenaries—normal surprises probably wouldn't rattle them. If you're going to do something, do it properly." There was a sound in my skull. A high, sustained tone. The kind that precedes very important realizations. And then I understood why the Sentinel eye-fires scattered across the passage were now multiplying. Floor by floor. Corridor by corridor.

A cascade of ice-blue ignitions spreading through the darkness like plague through an undefended city. Not bad luck. Not coincidence. This woman had decided everyone in the vicinity wasn't dying fast enough and had personally rung the dinner bell for the entire dungeon.

"You—""Don't scold me yet, little young master. Look." She pointed outward, eyes carrying the radiant satisfaction of a child watching festival fireworks.

"The results are excellent." I looked where she pointed. And I learned that excellent results and the world ending were sometimes the same event described from different perspectives. What had been a dozen Frostbound Immortal Sentinels engaging the Ravens at the entrance was now something else entirely. The distant reaches of the corridor were waking up. New armored silhouettes stirring at the far end of the left colonnade. The shriek of metal dragging across stone rising from the right-side stairwell.

From behind the fractured remains of collapsed architecture overhead, shapes that were not quite human in proportion but carried the same cold luminescence and grinding sound of armored plates in motion. Not a unit. Not a wave. The entire floor had been disturbed. Even the Ravens—who had been demonstrating professional composure earned from years of surviving things that killed other people—went pale.

"Wait—the numbers are wrong!"

"More coming from behind?!"

"Who lit a monster lure in here?!"

"Fall back! Pull back to entrance—this floor's in full riot!" Too late. They held—I'll give them that. They genuinely, impressively held. High-tier adventurers and veteran mercenaries weren't titles earned cheaply. The first wave broke against their formation, leaving nothing but shattered ice-plate and broken spear hafts. The second wave cost them more, but they absorbed it, ground it down, refused to collapse. Even I found myself thinking: these people earned the right to be arrogant. Then the third wave arrived.

And it stopped being a battle. What it became was a breaking dam. When the lure incense dragged every dormant creature across the entire floor awake simultaneously, the numbers crossed a threshold that skill and experience simply could not address. The dungeon itself had turned over—upended every shadow it had been keeping, pouring them all out at once. Ice-blue eye-fires lit in cyclopean rows. Tower shields demolished the Ravens' anchor points.

Armored shapes dropped from broken architecture above, driving rear-rank crossbowmen directly into the flagstones—the sound of that impact carrying the particular finality of something that would not be getting back up. A Raven with a greatsword took a Sentinel's head clean off—and was immediately collected by the next in line, sent airborne with a sound of fracturing bone that rang through the abyssal corridor with horrible clarity.

The Raven commander—who had been issuing orders in calm, precise tones—heard his own voice break for the first time.

"Fall back! Get to entrance—don't bunch near the door! Find whoever lit that—" He didn't finish. The awakened tide came from both flanks and front simultaneously, swallowing him and his people whole—consumed into steel and frost, leaving nothing but the eldritch echo of a battle that had lasted slightly longer than it had any right to. I stepped back half a pace. Not from sympathy. The image was simply too direct.

All that high-tier confidence, professional experience, disciplined formation—and it had bought them, against that volume of awakened dead, perhaps three additional breaths. Then nothing. Jessi, standing beside me, watched this catastrophe for approximately two seconds. Said: "Oh." Turned around. And crouched down to start prying gemstones from the wall. I came genuinely close to losing consciousness from pure, concentrated outrage.

"What are you doing?!"

"Harvesting." She said it like breathing—as though the activity required no justification.

"After a wipeout like that, if I don't grab first-contact materials before the Guild seals everything, what was the point?"

"This is not the time for wall mining!"

"It's exactly the time. Look—no competition." The vein in my temple introduced itself with authority.

"Jessi." I kept my voice level.

"Last question."

"Mm?"

"Did you extinguish the incense." Her hands went still. Then, with ceremonial slowness, she turned to look at me. I saw the precise expression I had least wanted to see in this or any other dungeon. Not guilt. Not embarrassment. The specific, delicate blankness of someone who had genuinely, completely, structurally forgotten something. My stomach dropped through the floor.

"... Tell me you turned it off."

"I was going to wait until I finished this stone, and then—" She didn't finish. Because the last Raven was pulled under the tide outside—scream cutting off with blasphemous finality—and the entire corridor went quiet. Not the quiet of emptiness. The quiet of things that have finished with one set of prey and are now, with patient and unfathomable attention, reassessing the situation. One by one. Slowly. Deliberately.