Chương 32

The entire group was speechless. And Alice just looked at the gun, rotated a few cylinders on it, then holstered it back and looked at us pretty smugly.

"Well, that was nice. I was very calm," she said nonchalantly, as I couldn't believe what I had just witnessed. I was about to make my way to the boss to make sure he was actually dead when I heard: Congratulations! You have completed the Dungeon of Enigma and defeated Boss Vainglory. Go to the nearest Haven to collect your Dungeon rewards. I slowly stepped forward and looked at the damage on the boss's face. I hadn't even seen Alice take the gun out of her holster. I looked at the corpse, and then I looked at her.

"Why are you looking at me like that? The heart worked," she nodded.

"I'm feeling very calm. I don't feel any fear, any… Well, uh, there is something like fear. I'm still afraid of dying — and I'm thinking of dying now a lot," she said, turning to Tina. I looked back at the boss and said, "Yeah, but that was really fucking crazy. How did you headshot that thing? Tina's blow didn't even…"

"I can adjust the settings on my guns. This was less power — fifty percent less — and more speed." Alice smiled.

"As for the aim, well, I told you. I won four gold medals."

"Yeah, but this is still…" I looked at the vampire.

"This was a moving target." And Alice now looked a little smug.

"John, I am an Olympian. When I'm not afraid, I'm one of the best shooters in the world. I don't think you understand — four gold medals in my categories, both in air pistol and the twenty-five-meter pistol, are essentially unheard of. And I was on track to break that record and win two more gold medals. I also train my endurance, my cardio, my mental fitness. I am just extremely good at what I do."

"Yeah, don't let it go to your fucking head. You were a coward until five minutes ago," Lucas said sourly, which made Alice darken.

"Lucas, it's… Come on," I said. But I agreed with him a little. I didn't like this smugness now. She nodded, though, and said, "Sorry. I just— I wanted all of you to know that I'm, I'm very good at what I do. I'm very competent. I will not let you down anymore."

"Thank fucking God, then," I muttered, looking at the vampire. This thing had been moving like a demon. It was way too fast. This could have gotten really ugly. I didn't know how I was gonna face someone like this in melee combat. Like, how the hell am I supposed to become this fast? If Alice and I are both S rankers, why do I feel like I'm not that good of an S ranker? Then, still talking to myself, I said, "Well, you did have everybody charge your guns, I guess.

If I could just spam my best attack, I, I guess I would be pretty terrifying as well. And you're an Olympian," I added when I saw Alice frown, "which, you know — top of the human food pyramid or whatever. And nerds, I guess."

"Nerds?" Alice's voice, for the first time since I'd known her, went high-pitched.

"What do you mean, nerds?"

"Well, I mean, Olympians are great, but you guys are pretty much nerds, right? Like, you train so much it becomes crazy. Olympians are great, and I even know from my corporate experience that it's, like, everybody's dream to hire an Olympian, because of the discipline and whatever. Well — an ex-Olympian, I meant. But at the same time, you guys are a little nuts, which makes sense. Like, you need to be a little nuts to train so much.

I had friends trying to break into national swimming teams who woke up at, like, five in the morning for training, and went swimming before school, and then after school, and then in the evening. I don't know what the hell they were doing. But just keep that in mind, you know? It's, uh — great power comes with a little autism, I guess." Everybody looked at me weirdly.

"Listen, guys, I'm feeling very emasculated right now. She just one-shotted the scary boss, okay? Let this slide for once, please." On the other side of the dungeon, we found a stone corridor. It was weird, because when we turned, we saw the entrance to the crypt. It was as if the dungeon had been sort of like an interstitial dimensional space between the crypt and this corridor — and now that we had cleared it, it was completely gone, as if it had never actually existed.

"That's freaky," Marcus commented, looking back.

"It is, isn't it?"

"So, we have to blow up the place," I muttered.

"And this looks like an underground passage that brings us through to the stronghold. So we should follow it, and hope that us clearing the dungeon didn't alert them or anything." While we walked down the corridor, I took some time to stop the recording of what had happened inside of the dungeon and start another one. I saw the first recording appear in the streaming tab, and that was very, very interesting. This was going to really help during the upcoming shit show that was gonna go down at the Haven.

I was sure that we had just ruined somebody's plans. The fact that the vampire was so fast was clearly, absolutely going to be a problem for us. When I said I didn't know how we would have won, what I meant without saying it out loud was that there was a good chance that, to put it in gaming terms, we would have wiped here. Nothing, and I repeat nothing, would have been able to stop that thing other than a very lucky blow from me.

If I had marked the vampire and maybe taken some damage from it to gain enough time to spear it and make it explode, maybe I would have won. But clearly that would have been a problem, because I would have been hurt. And I wasn't sure what a vampire could do if it bit you in this dungeon. I didn't think I was going to turn if I was bitten, but it was still going to be a problem going forward. This was just the entrance to the undead stronghold.

And it had become extremely clear, by the way, that it was going to be some kind of struggle going forward — that this was only the first boss we would have to face. I glanced at Alice as we walked forward. She was now more relaxed, but she also had an almost dangerous aura about her. Now that she didn't carry that nervous, always-on-edge energy, she was clearly someone with a massive presence. As we advanced, we went through several sets of stairs, and we started meeting zombies. Stolen novel; please report.

Alice raised her pistol, and I said, "Wait, don't waste this. Guys, I'll take care of this." I used my new spear, the Horned Impaler — made out of Gnollish Hardwood and a horned zebra's horn — and cut down several level-eight zombies like they were nothing. They were faster than the others, just like a human. And they still looked eerily human, but… I have to say that after emptying my guts in the second dungeon room, I was now completely desensitized to undead in general.

After you see so many bloated corpses, these undead here smelled like car freshener to me. And so I was at the head of the group, mowing down one group of undead after another without breaking much of a sweat. I really wondered what the System had in store for us. And I really wondered about this whole tutorial dungeon, because this was supposed to be nine floors. Nine floors of this, however, was insane.

It was my understanding that we were already blowing past the levels we should have been at for the first floor. We were all about level seventeen after we killed the vampire — after Alice killed the vampire boss. And now, the real question was, how could every single floor be like this? Which pretty much answered itself with: it couldn't. If this was a dungeon meant for training and not a tutorial dungeon meant to kill us all, then this was insanity. And it meant that someone had meddled with this.

I had a skill that I still didn't fully understand — it kept showing me things, and I had to really sit down and write it all down — because the Sphere of Intuition was clearly an even better resource than I had made it out to be. And I had started keeping it active at all times now, to check on my allies, to check the room, to check walls, anything that could give me a hint of any sort. And right when I was thinking that, I said, "Guys, wait a second. There was a fake wall."

I stopped in front of the wall, and they looked at me.

"What is it?" Marcus said.

"Uh, this is a fake wall," I explained. And then I rapped with my knuckles on the stone, which made a very hollow sound for supposedly solid stone. I pushed and felt the wall start to give in. Then I thought that I didn't want stone to fall on my head, so I took a step back and kicked as hard as I could. All my strength came out, and the wall was blown away. There was clearly some System fuckery at play, since it crumbled to dust, which I was pretty sure I was still not strong enough to do naturally.

On the other side of the wall, there was a scroll laid down on a nightstand. I kept looking with the Sphere of Intuition for traps or anything, and then I picked up the scroll and read from it.

"Slave Undead Incantation. Piece one of four. Description: this incantation is being used to turn the living into undead without consuming mana. It is an area-of-effect spell that has been engineered by the liches of this stronghold to turn the tutorial creatures into undead." I read that out loud for everybody.

"Why does that matter?" Alice frowned.

"Is that a problem, that they're turning monsters into undead? We still have to kill them."

"If they can make the undead bloated with mana, they can probably also make them stronger, right?" I said.

"So, this probably means that if we let this stronghold keep capturing monsters, turning them into undead, and making them stronger, there are two possible dangers here. First, they use these monsters on this floor — maybe by tomorrow — to kill as many humans as possible. And that's already bad. Which is worrying, because I think that this is the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario," I said, "is: what if they're growing another army, and these monsters come to the second floor?

I think Bluemont explained this to me — not only the cities, but sometimes dungeons and bosses shift from one floor to the other. And actually, some bosses, for example, will grow in level. Like, their levels are suppressed on one floor, and then the level gets synchronized to their new cap on the next floor. If the undead here supposedly have a higher level that is being capped right now, and we let them go to the second floor with these monsters, then…" I saw their faces put two and two together.

Alice suddenly asked me, "John, I did not ask you before, but what did you do before coming here? Were you some sort of logical genius? I saw your entrance test. You were in an office, though."

"Hey, what are you implying?" Lucas frowned.

"That people working in offices are stupid?"

"No, I didn't say that. But this level of deduction, even if it's assuming so many things at once — I did not even think about it." I had an interesting theory that the Sphere of Intuition was, to an extent, responsible for what had just come out of my mouth. But since I was still keeping the skill to myself, I just said, "I don't know. I think that the tutorial made me paranoid, and the paranoia has made me, you know, a little smarter." I tapped my head comically.

They gave me weird stares, and then I said, "Well, anyway, we should look for the others." I saw the scroll suddenly glow golden in my vision, and a line of golden light, faint but still pretty clear, appeared on the ground before me and disappeared at the edge of the Sphere's range. Thank God for broken fucking skills that are overpowered, I said internally. We were now in the basement of the castle.

We could tell because there were several stairs going up, and through the Sphere of Intuition, I could see a sea of undead creatures on the upper floor, in a courtyard or in other halls, feasting on corpses or just being molded by some liches. I told everybody that they had to keep their mouths shut. Then I added Alice to the team chat, and we spoke only through that.

"So, my little perception skill told me that there are a lot of monsters upstairs. I don't know exactly how strong, but I don't think we should start going up. In fact, let's backtrack for a second." We had been following the golden line that I thought would bring us to the other scrolls. But I went back to the first room instead, which took us about a fifteen-minute detour — thankfully a rather easy one, with the Sphere of Intuition helping me navigate this maze.

Then, when we got back to the room, they asked, "Why are we here?" I looked up and said, "There is a wall here, above us. And we should probably do this." I took out one brick of C4 and felt it was pretty sticky. I looked up and I said, "Guys. Step back."

"John?" Marcus said.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm not sure how fragile this is. But this is magical, so it should be pretty resistant to, like, a natural explosion, right? Like, it's not gonna explode just because it falls or hits something hard. It's stone. It's not gonna make a spark or anything." Then, before they could protest or stop me, I squatted and jumped high toward the ceiling.

Now, I had clearly not grown accustomed to the kind of strength that my body wielded, and I went headfirst into the stone, bruising my head so bad that I needed Hailey to heal me right after. They kept asking what I was doing. But then I calibrated a few more jumps and stuck the brick of C4 to the ceiling. They looked at me and said, "Oh." And so we made our way forward. I made a very simple and uneducated guess. I said there were four scrolls that we had to find to break the spell.

That was thirty bricks of C4 between four locations. And I guessed that it would mean that I had to put roughly nine bricks of C4 between each location. If there were four scrolls hidden around the castle, that meant three stretches. We had started with the first scroll, right under a big wall. So, one brick there. And then a few more bricks where the Sphere of Intuition started giving me this — well, sorry for repeating myself, but this intuition about putting another brick up.

And so I started trusting my intuition more and more. Someone might have called me a crazy crystal guy at this point, the way I was just going with the flow of everything and sort of trusting the stars in my head. I wasn't getting a precise location from the Sphere. Nothing was lighting up exactly. But now I got, like, a little tingling. Maybe the tingling, though, is copyrighted, so we will call it a sensation.

I was getting a kind of a sensation every time we were around a particular corner or anything, and I just let that sensation guide me to put the brick on the wall, on the ground, or the ceiling, based on the spot. And I would do the same for the three segments. I was still on my seventh brick when the golden line started getting much thicker, and I saw that there was another fake wall in front of us. That's also when I found three giant undead waiting for us after the next turn.

I stopped and raised a hand, immediately typing in chat: "Wait." They all stopped and looked at me. I closed my eyes and, focusing on the Sphere of Intuition's field, I saw that on the other side of the turn, about ten feet from the corner, there were three armored undead. [Alpha Apprentice Death Knight - Level 15] [Alpha Apprentice Death Knight - Level 16] [Alpha Apprentice Death Knight - Level 17]