Chapter 334 - The Scheming God’s Apostle V

The trents were slow to leave the village. They spent a solid three hours lumbering about its ruins before packing up and heading down the road. Despite Claire’s prediction, the burning wagons refused to disperse. They lined up in single file and followed the only road.

The brigade stalked the trees for nearly two hours before deviating from the beaten path. Cresting a hill, they turned into the forest and wheeled their way through the dense wood. It was so thick with greenery that the sentient vehicles had to meander around the natural barriers, moving back and forth and to and fro before finally stopping in front of a fallen log.

For a moment, it looked like they had reached an impasse, but one by one, they climbed into the trunk, or more specifically, an otherwise inconspicuous hole hidden beneath a pile of moss. The pit looked no larger than something dug by a ferret or a squirrel, but the wagons had no trouble squeezing their way inside.

It shouldn’t have made any sense, but everything clicked the moment the phenomenon was observed. The hole was a door into another plane of existence—a dungeon. Without any more data, it was impossible to say if the flaming trents were plain old dungeon monsters or if they carried a pestilence that mind-controlled the domestic variants, but in either case, their advent was one for which the locals were awfully unprepared.

In all likelihood, the subspace was either freshly changed or freshly created. Established villages rarely fell under any other circumstances, as the inhabitants would have already adapted or long passed away.

“How curious. It is rather rare to find a dungeon in an area so devoid of mana,” said Arciel. “Perhaps it would be best to report this location to the local authorities so that they may incorporate its management into their plans.”

“Mmmnnn… so are we not gonna try raiding it?” asked Sylvia. Her voice grew quieter with each word, albeit not because of the volume at which she spoke.

“There is no purpose. The local authorities are unlikely to consider it a threat should we clear it out, and it would likely take a fair amount of time to explo—Claire!?”

The lyrkress was already gone by the time her name was called. Likewise, her hat had been spirited away without a moment of warning.

Log Entry 850142
You have entered the Den of Flames. The monsters that lurk within this dungeon pose no threat to your person.

Claire frowned. It was her first time discovering a trial that the system summarily dismissed. She spun around and immediately prepared to leave the way she came, only to change her mind again as a shiver sparked through her ears. It was a familiar sensation. She had felt it when Arciel had first attacked her, when Durham actually did his job, and whenever she appeared in public.

She was being watched. Scrutinized. Beheld.

It wasn't the trents. The trees hadn’t noticed her in spite of her lack of concealment. Her observer, or perhaps observers, were much further away, but she was unable to pinpoint their locations by the time the sensation upped and vanished. She was, however, at least capable of taking in the artificial environment.

The world was another whose owner she struggled to identify. Though made of browns and greens, it lacked the sandy soil and vibrant greenery that polluted its unfortunate exterior. But even with the forest gone, the scenery was just as sylvan. The ground, the walls, and the ceiling came together to form a singular wooden shaft with large patches of algae growing all over. The verdant sheets were almost as frequent as the lanky mushrooms that brought the dungeon its light. The fungi themselves were not too bright, but the rays produced by their bioluminescent gills bounced off the walls and enveloped the subspace in a gentle glow.

For something that felt so much like the inside of a tree, the dungeon’s cylindrical corridors were surprisingly wide. There were roughly ten meters between the two walls and a similar amount of distance between the floor and the ceiling. A clinging dampness filled the whole space. The air was awfully humid, and the water that dripped constantly from above formed a series of puddles and ponds throughout the musty halls. Some even had lilypads growing within them, with frogs and dragonflies and snails and fish. Though the miscellaneous creatures appeared to be scaled appropriately at first, Claire suspected that it was only because they had joined her in shrinking. The mushrooms were massive, the algae had long, hairy fibres, and the individual lines in the wood were thick enough that they couldn’t be missed. Considering how large the individual droplets were, she may as well have been an insect within a hollowed tree.

Venturing through the corridor confirmed the plant-like structure. The root in which she started soon opened into a wider tunnel which further led into a massive, vertical shaft. Branches extended from the walls, reaching inside of the trunk to provide places for the many monsters living within it.

The flaming monkeys were the first to catch the lyrkress’ eye. The dungeon’s fuzzy primates differed from the non-monstrous counterparts not only in the fiery nature of their fur but also the flaps that connected their wrists to their hips. They served as gliders when opened and allowed the simians to maintain their height as they vaulted from branch to branch. The monkeys’ number was second only to the slimes that floated throughout the space, though they were much more conspicuous given the other species’ translucence. Living alongside them were oversized mosquitoes, burning sloths, and sooty raccoons, just to name a few.

Claire killed one member of each species as she made her way up the tree. The only duplicates she slew were those unfortunate enough to come across her as she rapidly ascended its length. Upon reaching the top, she literally punched her way through the boss monster—a large, pre-fried chicken—and moved to the next floor. So on and so forth. The process repeated itself three-and-a-half times before she finally felt the eyes on her again.

The gaze stopped her roughly two-thirds of the way up the tree, boring into the side of her head like a naked dagger. The beholder was no longer so far that she was unable to place it. Making no obvious movements with her eyes, she thrust her hand towards the source and reached beyond the branch that shielded it from view.

“What the!? Hey! What gives!? Let go of me!”

When she finally moved her eyes, she found an awfully angry raccoon trapped between her talons. The furry creature flailed, clawed, and screamed as it tried its best to break free, but despite its best efforts, the beast had no such luck. Like all the others she had found of its species, the trash panda did not truly possess a coat of black fur. Rather, its colouration stemmed from the ash strewn about its environment.

“Wait a second. Did that raccoon just talk? ” asked Sylvia. “What the heck!? That’s super creepy!”

Blinking exactly three times, the lyrkress lowered her eyes from one furball to the other and narrowed them into an icy glare. “Why were you watching me?”

“Tell you what, kiddo, I’ll cut you a super good deal and tell you if you let me down and pay me off.” It was still struggling, but the creature’s mouth started rattling off like that of an experienced salesman.

“I’ll consider letting you down after you tell me.”

“Come on, that isn’t much of a deal, is it?” said the furball. “You’re literally strangling me here. Cut me some slack.”

“No.”

“I’ll tell you way more if you just let me down. Come on, think of all the benefits!”

“Just give up,” said Sylvia. “Claire doesn’t really like listening.”

The moose’s talons tightened as if to prove her claim. 

“Advance payment only huh? I’m not really into that, but I guess I don’t have much of a choice,” choked the ring-tailed squirrel. “Look, I was just trying to warn you about a group of Cadrian assassins.”

The lyrkress’ amused face went cold. Tightening her grip on the rat, to make sure that it couldn’t move a muscle, she lifted it to her face and stared into its eyes. “Who are you?”

“I’m an insider,” he choked. “A secret agent. On your side.”

“I said who. Not what.”

“I’m nobody important,” he said.

“And why, exactly, would nobody important know about a group of Cadrian assassins.”

“Look I’m telling the truth here,” he wheezed. “I’m just a nobody with a grudge against your father. The heartless bastard turned my whole family against me.”

She stared at him for a solid three seconds. It sounded like a blatant lie. There was no reason for a dungeon monster she met in the Morosian wilderness to be in the circumstances he claimed. The chances were far too slim for it to be anything but a part of an elaborate scheme, a means of deception of some sort or other, but his eyes told a completely different story. They were calm as the words he had squeezed from his lungs and cold as a midwinter’s day. It was not the fiery hatred born of a recent grudge that burned within them, but the undying smolders of a deep-seated hatred. There was almost something familiar about the curious demeanour, something that called to the darkness still seeded within her heart.

Eventually, she released him. She returned him to his branch and allowed him to catch his breath.

She had no intention of trusting him—

“Tell me everything you know.”

—but at the very least, she would hear what he had to say.

“I would if I had the time, but you need to turn around. The assassins they sent are in the boss room up ahead,” he said. “There’s another group attacking your companions. You’ll need to regroup before they realize you’ve caught o—hey! Wait! That’s the wrong way!”

Claire started floating upwards as the man laid down his knowledge. He was still ranting about something or other, but she had long stopped caring.

The timing was perfect.

She was in need of experience-rich prey, and there were no better pickings than that which her father had so earnestly raised by hand.

___

Krail was the first to notice that there was something amiss. Slowly raising his gaze from the boiling pot in front of him—they had decided to set up a camp and have lunch in light of Claire’s absence—he looked towards the forest with both eyes alight. They were not green, as they would have been had he been evaluating an individual’s strength, but a deep floral purple. When combined with the two bright rings that had formed within his pupils, the shift was a telltale sign of Hawkeye’s activation. The ability was a keystone skill that most archery-based classes unlocked upon entering the three-digit range. Everything that the man saw was put through a filter. Enemies and allies alike were outlined in bright and vibrant colours so that they could be picked out and never mistaken, and enemy projectiles were likewise highlighted so they could easily be dodged.

Though outwardly manifesting the same effects, the old elf’s variant was not quite identical. Stemming from a rarer class, it took the concept a step further and allowed him to see through any obstacles in his path. The layers of visual clutter were quickly stripped away, leaving only the designated targets behind.

Given the circumstances, the man had filtered for individuals over level one hundred. And surely enough, he saw them, even clearer than he had before. Their shapes and sizes varied, with some standing shorter than his knees and others three times his height, but their identical uniforms revealed that they belonged to the same organisation.

For the most part, the outfit was grey. A layer of thin, bandage-like cloths ran the length of their bodies, covering everything from head to toe. It was only the eyes and other key organs that remained exposed. Of course, that was not all that they wore. There was another layer of ambiguous black garments on top. The robes were loose and the bottom halves were expressed as skirts to obscure the movement and number of legs possessed by any given individual.

If their clothing was not evident enough of their potential hostility, then their movements clearly gave it away. They made a beeline for the camp, stopping only around the one-hundred-meter mark to fan out and encircle the base.

“It appears that we’re under attack,” said the elf. Gripping his staff, he slowly pushed himself to his feet and pointed his weapon towards the forest. “There are seventeen enemies inbound, and while I would have liked to say that there is nothing to concern ourselves with given the low-level area, our foes don’t quite seem to be local. They’re approaching from the north, and I believe their average level is in the level five to six-hundred range. Be on your guard.”

“Enemies?” Lana, who happened to be sitting right beside him, was the first to perk up. She took a moment to sniff at the air before moving her hand to her axe. “You’re right.”

“Five to six-hundred? In Moros?” Matthias raised a scythe to his mandibles and cocked his head. “That would have to mean they’re our friends from the nor—”

A thousand-pound missile shot out of the forest and collided with him mid-sentence. The force of the impact alone was enough to kill a man outright; the four-meter tall ogress had been moving at such a speed that she was inaudible to anyone stuck in her path. It wasn’t until half a second later that the sound caught up with its maker and completely blew the campsite away.

“Well, that was rude.” And yet, the mantis was fine. He stood exactly where he had before, with his scythe held up to block the dagger thrust towards his neck.

Eyeing her knight’s thoraen foe, Arciel covered her face with the usual object and heaved a sigh. “How awfully timed.” She glanced briefly towards the dungeon’s entrance before snapping her fan shut and pointing it at the man closing in on her side. The movement was followed by a surge of blades; three jagged spikes erupted from her shadow and ran the assassin through. “Claire shall no doubt be furious when she learns of the meal she missed.”