Chapter 25
#25. Trap
“Get down!”
At the lead scout’s shout, a massive hunk of metal flew in from the left.
It was aimed squarely at me, standing all the way on the far left. I could dodge it, but then someone else would take the hit.
-KWAANG!
I pulled out my shield and lowered my stance a little to block it. The thing weighed so much that even after stopping it, my arm went numb.
“Shit……”
How many times had this happened already? Inside this dungeon, it wasn’t monsters but traps that were swarming everywhere.
The open community had said this place was just where lizardmen roamed, but since it was a first discovery, there were way too many differences.
If we break through this dungeon like this, will the lizardmen come in later and settle down here?
“Tch, what a pain.”
I knocked the metal chunk aside and rolled my shoulder. It stung a bit, but my HP had barely budged.
“Are you all right? Nothing broken?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Good to hear. You’re incredibly strong, aren’t you?”
Windsor said it with obvious admiration, and the other NPCs said nothing as they moved ahead and disarmed the trap.
The expedition through the ruins had been going on like this since earlier.
The expedition members could read the characters in the ruins and knew how to operate its various mechanisms.
So they moved at roughly the same pace as I did, locating traps in advance and dismantling them to open the way.
Of course, there were far more traps I ended up triggering than traps they dismantled, so I was constantly being put through the wringer.
There were traps that launched chunks of metal or boulders, traps that fired blades or arrows, and even one that made the floor collapse.
Still, I could handle them somehow with my own strength. They were probably designed for challengers on the third floor to begin with.
And strangely enough, this barrage of traps wasn’t bad for sharpening my skills.
I was getting faster and faster at responding to traps that sprang out of nowhere. I guess I was starting to get a feel for the timing.
[Intuition Lv.1]
Maybe this [Intuition] skill was actually working. If I kept dodging traps by instinct, maybe the skill level would rise.
“That’s enough, just hurry up and go.”
But whether that was true or not, irritating was irritating.
Come to think of it, I’d been talking informally from somewhere in the middle.
**
Even apart from the traps, the speed of our dungeon exploration had no choice but to be painfully slow.
“Goodness, this section is rather complicated, isn’t it? This is already the third time.”
We had already gone around the same place three times. This dungeon wasn’t a simple maze.
A moving maze where the layout changed as various mechanisms activated in real time.
According to Windsor’s explanation, only by moving through specific rooms in a specific order would the correct path open.
The expedition members were trying to infer the sequence by reading the characters on the walls, but even that wasn’t going smoothly.
It took several rounds of trial and error to find the right path, and if they failed along the way, we got a merciless barrage of traps.
“Are we even going the right way?”
“Ahem, I’m doing my best.”
I wasn’t good with mazes or riddles either, so all I could do was complain at the expedition members.
[3rd Floor Ruins Dungeon Map (Complete)]
The complete map posted on the community was useless in a dungeon that was changing in real time.
I figured I’d probably have to clear the dungeon all the way through and disable the mechanism that was changing the terrain.
-Thwip, thwip.
I heard the sound of two arrows being fired from somewhere. I quietly raised my shield.
Keeping my senses sharpened so I could react to traps in time had made me capable of things like this.
-Ting!
The arrows bounced off, and the expedition members who noticed it late jumped in surprise.
“W-What was that!”
The arrows had flown so eerily quietly that all the expedition members’ faces turned pale in an instant.
I was the one who almost got hit, so I didn’t know why these guys were freaking out like this.
Besides, Windsor and the other expedition members had never actually come close to getting hit by a trap.
Most of the traps seemed to activate as if drawn to me, who was standing in the unlucky spot, and the big traps were ones those guys noticed and easily avoided.
Even so, seeing them jump that badly, maybe they were just easily spooked or something.
For a bunch of people who had crawled into a place swarming with lizardmen to hunt for treasure, they seemed awfully timid.
Of course, since they were all just NPCs, there was no point in complaining about it anyway.
**
Several hours later, we arrived at a huge chamber.
Compared to the other sections we’d passed through so far, this was a much larger space, and the elaborate characters and murals carved into the walls were striking.
This place, which looked almost like a giant temple, was a location I’d seen in an open-community walkthrough.
The midpoint of the ruins dungeon, one of the few safe zones.
Given the way the dungeon kept changing its layout, calling it a midpoint didn’t quite fit, but it was definitely a safe zone.
“Ohh, this looks… like some kind of myth.”
Windsor brushed away the dust on the wall with his palm and read the writing there with a serious expression.
I was interested in my own way too, so I slowly examined the mural that had been painted there.
I couldn’t read the letters, but I could at least make out the rough meaning from the pictures.
“Lizardmen?”
And from what I could tell, most of the figures in this mural were lizardmen.
If you drew a lizard walking on two legs and holding a weapon, of course it would be a lizardman.
So the ruins weren’t in the lizardmen’s territory—it was this entire ruin that belonged to them?
Well, since they were a race that formed their own society, it wouldn’t be strange for them to have at least one cultural relic like this.
But if that was the case, wouldn’t we be tomb raiders? Any treasure sleeping here would obviously be a lizardman relic.
Though it probably wouldn’t matter much for me to worry about that when I went around killing lizardmen on sight.
“Hmm… I see. This ruin seems to be the place where the lizardmen sealed away something called ‘Thunderbolt.’”
Windsor, having deciphered the text, said as much. I’d already guessed as much from the mural too.
There were lizardmen with weapons, and in front of them a white lizardman holding a strangely shaped sword.
And above the white lizardman’s image was a drawing that seemed to depict lightning.
That weird sword was probably the relic that controlled lightning. Did they take it from the white lizardman and seal it here?
“So it’s a unique weapon.”
The final reward for this quest was probably that thing.
I had barely even used the weapon I’d gotten from clearing the second-floor boss fight, and I might already be switching weapons again.
**
Windsor and the expedition members wrestled with the mural for a while, then seemed to come to some conclusion.
“For now, it’s getting late today, so how about we rest here for the night? You must be tired too, right?”
“I’m fine.”
“We’ve found where the treasure is, but it’ll take a long time to get there. Are you really all right?”
I nodded. No matter how long it took, how much time could it really take? I could easily climb over a mountain right now.
“Hmm… to be perfectly honest, you might be fine, but the rest of us aren’t.”
Windsor scratched his head awkwardly as he said that. If that was the case, I had no intention of forcing my way through.
After all, without these guys, there was a good chance the quest couldn’t progress.
“You should’ve said that from the beginning.”
Soon, a simple camp was set up in the chamber. They lit a campfire, pitched tents, and the members even started cooking.
-Bubble, bubble.
A pale meat soup was simmering in a huge cauldron pulled out from who-knows-where. So they were making something like pork soup, huh.
I left the expedition members gathered around, sharing the meat soup, and took a White Roll out of my inventory to eat by myself.
“What are you doing by yourself over there? Come here and have a bowl too! You worked hard, so you need to eat well and keep your strength up!”
“I’m fine.”
“Don’t be like that. How are you supposed to fill yourself up with such a tiny bread roll? Don’t refuse!”
Windsor couldn’t bear to watch me like that, so he forcibly pushed a bowl of meat soup at me.
“If you’re short on energy, that’s trouble for us too, isn’t it? I’m going to keep pestering you until you finish that bowl.”
Seeing that he really did plan to keep insisting, I had no choice but to accept the bowl.
“There we go, good thinking! Eat it while it’s still hot. A person ought to stay warm, inside and out, anyway!”
Ignoring Windsor’s chatty voice, I slurped down the meat soup.
It looked the part, and it really tasted a lot like pork soup.
After living off nothing but sweet White Rolls for a while, the salted broth tasted wonderfully stimulating.
The harmony of saltiness and the rich savor of fat melting out of the small bits of meat was no joke.
“Phew……”
Before I knew it, the bowl in my hands was completely empty.
Man, this is seriously good.
Had I been living on White Rolls all this time? I never expected meat soup to taste this delicious.
If I’d eaten something like the cheese tonkatsu lunch box from the first floor, I’d have gone crazy.
“Haha, would you like another?”
I accepted Windsor’s second bowl without refusing.
**
Maybe because I’d eaten warm food for the first time in a while, but after finishing the meat soup, drowsiness came crashing over me.
“You acted like you weren’t, but you must have been pretty tired. We’ll handle the watch, so go ahead and get some sleep.”
I didn’t refuse Windsor’s kindness this time. I took a simple tent out of my inventory, set it up, and lay down right away.
Just laying a blanket on the stone floor somehow felt cozier than the bed at any decent inn.
Before I could even find that strange, I fell asleep at astonishing speed.
-Shunk!
And a moment later, I opened my eyes as a blade pierced my neck.