Chapter 61
Chapter 61
Iris held out her hand to the agent.
"Do you have any intermediate detectors left?"
"Yes. One remains."
"Would you use it once for me?"
"Understood."
The agent took an artifact that looked like a compass out of his pocket.
And the moment he poured mana into it.
Beep-beep-beeeeeep—!
"……!"
A warning screech, as if it would rip the quiet forest apart, burst out.
The needle spun madly before locking onto the enormous old tree ahead of them.
"……It's being detected very blatantly."
The agent also looked visibly flustered.
"Could it be detecting it because we're inside the phase-interference barrier?"
"No."
Iris shook her head decisively.
She raised her staff and condensed mana, spreading it broadly through the surrounding space.
Fzzzt!!
After spreading her mana around, Iris said.
"The phase-interference barrier isn't functioning here right now."
"……Are you certain?"
"Yes. It's not just that the door is open—it's more like the door itself has been ripped off."
Iris swallowed a dry laugh.
One thing was certain.
Since her disciple had come through here yesterday,
this dungeon had fundamentally changed somewhere deep down.
'He said he had released the phase interference.'
Usually, when someone says release, it means picking a lock with a key.
But Cassian's method seemed to be different.
He hadn't picked the lock; he'd simply torn down the wall the door was attached to.
So the mana trapped inside was pouring out like a burst dam.
"Haah... seriously."
Though she was exasperated by her disciple's brute-force solution, a strange thrill also rose in her.
Iris pushed up her glasses and said to the agent.
"It's dangerous, so I'll go in alone."
"Huh? But without an escort..."
"If I don't come out within an hour, evacuate everyone as quickly as possible. Don't look back."
"Will you be all right?"
At the agent's worried question, Iris let out a small snort.
Her eyes shone with confidence bordering on arrogance.
"If I can't handle it, then it's a dungeon that wouldn't be solved even if you assigned several people to support me. In that case, it's better to run away quickly."
"……Understood."
The agent bowed without another word and stepped back.
Iris moved toward the black maw of the giant old tree's knothole.
* * *
The moment she stepped into the knothole of the old tree.
Vwoooong—
"Hrk……."
Her breath caught.
The density of mana dissolved in the air crushed her entire body, as if she had leaped naked into the deepest part of the sea.
Iris reflexively planted her staff and cast a defensive spell.
Fwoosh—!
A transparent barrier wrapped around her entire body.
Only then did the pressure, which had been crushing her like water pressure, ease up considerably.
"Haah."
As she caught her breath and looked around, her eyes slowly widened.
"What on earth is this...?"
A normal dungeon entrance should have twisted space or a maze-like, complex structure.
An organic structure formed as mana naturally condensed.
That is the basic grammar of a dungeon.
But the passage spread out before her was a straight line.
It stretched endlessly straight, as if someone had bored a tunnel through a mountain.
Iris carefully placed her hand against the wall.
"……Smooth."
As expected. It wasn't a natural cave.
A grotesque trace, as if some tremendous force had forcibly pried open space itself and ironed it flat.
The dimensional grain that should have been rough and uneven had been forcibly flattened.
"So the phase-interference barrier really was lifted..."
She muttered as she read the mana traces on the wall with the tip of her staff, and immediately understood what had happened here.
"It wasn't a release."
Red eyes trembled behind her glasses.
He hadn't picked the lock, and he hadn't even ripped the door off.
After realizing the door and the house were a single unit, he'd collapsed the house itself, and the door got torn away with it.
"Ha……."
Iris let out a short sigh.
The farther in she walked, the more that hypothesis turned into certainty.
There was an area so bizarrely flat it looked as though it had been ironed.
On the other hand, the area right next to it was a complete mess, shattered and scattered like broken glass.
The fragments drifted through the air, giving off tiny points of light.
The independent dimension known as a dungeon was collapsing from within.
"So……."
Iris readjusted her grip on her staff and continued muttering to herself.
It was a habit.
She used to mutter like this whenever she solved a difficult problem in the lab.
"He forced power in from outside and cracked the entire dimension."
Cold sweat ran down her spine.
Theoretically, it was impossible.
A dungeon is an independent world.
To break that world from the outside, you'd need energy greater than the total existential force of that dimension.
"What on earth did my disciple do?"
Step, step.
She went deeper.
And then soon enough.
"……."
Iris's steps halted at the horrific scene.
There were monsters.
But not a single one of them was alive.
What lined the floor were not monster corpses, but the remains of things that had once been monsters.
Some were flattened as if they had been crushed beneath a giant press.
Beside them were traces of bodies blown apart beyond recognition by a powerful shockwave.
For a battle scene, it was far too one-sided.
A battle, at the very least, requires an exchange of offense and defense.
There wasn't a single trace of resistance here.
They had merely been swept up by a passing force.
Iris murmured quietly.
"They were just stepped on."
Like ants crushed beneath the sole of a shoe while someone was walking.
In other words, the shockwave from squeezing the dimension from outside had propagated inward and dealt with every living thing inside all at once.
"Phew..."
A deep sigh escaped her.
Leaning on her staff, she moved farther in.
The end of the passage came into view.
*
Iris stopped in front of the gaping space.
"……Boss room."
Rattle…….
Debris was raining down from the ceiling.
A huge, circular dome-shaped space.
In a normal dungeon, this would be where the boss reigned, the final stage for facing intruders.
However, like every living thing in this dungeon, the boss was dead too.
Iris frowned as she looked up at the ceiling.
"……Spider Queen."
The creature's upper body had been ripped out by the roots and shoved upside down into the ceiling.
Its lower body lay sprawled on the floor, and bodily fluids had pooled thickly where it had been separated from the upper body.
'So it was a Spider Queen's nest.'
Iris's gaze moved to the end of the lower body.
The core.
The core, the heart of this dungeon, was resting against the Spider Queen's remains.
"……."
Iris carefully traced the cracks in the core with the tip of her staff.
The core, riddled with hundreds of fractures, had shattered from within like a glass bead struck by a hammer.
From the entrance to the boss room.
That meant the shockwave had engulfed the entire space, from the shallowest part of the dungeon to its deepest.
"Ha……."
Another sigh slipped out on its own.
She looked up at the collapsed ceiling and murmured.
"I'm really relieved."
When she had heard Wilhelm's full account before coming here, several things had seemed incomprehensible.
How had it been possible, and why was he still alive?
Fortunately, she had the answer.
The size of the dungeon's interior, the number of monsters, and the dead Spider Queen's body size.
And the residual energy left in the cracked core.
When Iris put all those factors together,
'Low-grade.'
This was definitely a low-grade dungeon.
The sticky, thick mana was only the aftershock created when all the monsters died at once and the dungeon's core blew apart.
"Since it was low-grade... the dimension's total existential force was low. So when it was squeezed from outside, it didn't have the strength to hold out. Cassian's output was abnormal too, but because the opponent was low-grade, it barely worked."
Barely.
Truly barely.
'If this had been intermediate?'
Iris bit her lip slightly, uneasy.
"Cassian would've tried to break it the same way. And instead of the dimension breaking, the backlash would have gone straight back to the caster..."
She swallowed the rest.
She didn't want to imagine it.
"I should warn him."
Iris thought she now understood a little better why her mentor had always emphasized caution and warned her every time.
Because if a danger she could predict from experience led to her disciple getting hurt or going through something irreversible, it would be unbearably painful.
Iris decided to lecture her disciple until he was sick of hearing it, then turned around.
Step, step.
Her footsteps retraced the straight passage.
* * *
Much later.
"Phew."
The moment the forest air filled her lungs, Iris finally relaxed.
Right after she emerged from inside the old tree.
The masked agent waiting behind the tree approached her.
"Professor. Are you all right?"
"Yes. The dungeon was low-grade."
"Low-grade...?"
"Yes. Its core has already lost its function, and it will naturally vanish soon. There's no need to dispatch any more personnel."
Relief settled into the agent's eyes.
"Then that means Sir Cassian single-handedly conquered the dungeon..."
"More like blowing it up than conquering it, but anyway, I suppose that still counts as a conquest. I've also confirmed there's no risk of regeneration."
Iris gave a bitter smile and pushed up her glasses.
"In any case, please report to Professor Wilhelm. I need to go check on my disciple."
"Understood."
The agent leaped into the tree and vanished.
.
.
.
.
.
An empty dungeon boss room.
The cracked core began to emit a faint light.
Ziiiii...
Light leaked out through the cracks.
And then letters appeared on the surface of the core.
[Plausibility cleanup (restore the dungeon's grade and secure a witness) complete.]
[To erase traces of direct intervention in causality (artificial manipulation of the dungeon's grade), the dungeon will be completely erased.]
[Approved.]
[Proceed with disposal.]
Kuuuuung—
The moment the letters disappeared, a tremor rolled through the entire dungeon.
The ceiling began to collapse.
The walls split open.
The straight corridor Cassian had flattened began collapsing from the inside, one section after another.
Like a sandcastle washed away by the waves.
The Spider Queen's remains, the cracked core, and even the traces of the letters that had floated above it.
Everything began to be swallowed by darkness.
And a moment later.
Kwaaaang!
With a tremendous explosion as the dimension collapsed, the dungeon vanished from the world.