Chapter 27
#27 Newbie Adventurer Bern (25) - Dungeon
Among the adventurers who took part in the lich subjugation, there were quite a few who were rather arrogant.
Once you reached Grade 3, you were among the elite of adventurers, and by Grade 4 you became a talent coveted even outside the guild.
The nobles of the Kingdom of Birka were especially rotten, but ordinarily someone like that would be treated as a quasi-knight by most powers, and the adventurers themselves knew their worth. So how could they not be stiff-necked?
But at this moment.
Before the middle-aged man who appeared at the front of the square, even those proud adventurers kept silent and showed due respect.
Guild Master Tarbon.
The representative who led the Kingdom of Birka’s Adventurer Guild, the guild’s only Grade 5 expert, and an adventurer who had completed countless quests.
In rank, experience, and ability alike, he was more than fit to command them, so even the rough adventurers showed him respect in their own way.
“There’s no stupidity greater than babbling with the enemy right in front of us, so I’ll keep this brief.”
His tone was so dry, almost bleak rather than the kind of speech you’d expect from someone important, that the adventurers perked up their ears.
“Even if we cram a lot of people into a narrow dungeon, we can’t really take advantage of sheer numbers. Therefore, we split into teams.”
Agents from guild headquarters, wearing black armbands, stepped forward with a list and a bulging leather pouch.
They began handing out bands the adventurers could tie around their upper arms, and they were divided by color—not all the same, but red, blue, and yellow.
“Those who received red and blue bands are the assault teams. Split into two groups, they’ll alternate between rest and combat as they clear the dungeon. Those who received yellow bands will secure the rear here and rescue the assault teams if anything unexpected happens.”
The ones who got red and blue bands cheered, while those who got yellow bands looked miserable or openly disgruntled.
A large-scale request that had drawn on the full strength of the guild, something that might not happen again for decades.
If they made a name for themselves here, they might become legends in the adventuring world, so of course they couldn’t be content waiting in the rear.
If the Guild Master himself hadn’t given the order personally, complaints would have surely poured out.
Luckily, or perhaps not, Bern and his companions received blue bands.
When the roughly eighty people from the red and blue teams entered the dungeon, the space felt cramped despite the dungeon not being all that small.
“Red team, move ahead first. Blue team, follow at a distance where you can still keep the red team in sight.”
At the Guild Master’s command, the red team, with red bands on their forearms, quickened their pace, while the blue team slowed down and widened the distance between them.
A little later.
“Undead!!”
“Prepare for battle!!”
At the voices coming from the red team, some of the blue team hurried forward, but the Guild Master stopped them.
“We can’t all fight at the same time anyway. You’ll be at the front next, so conserve your stamina until then.”
The blue-team adventurers looked disgruntled for a moment, but Bern nodded.
Splitting your forces into multiple groups and sending them in was usually considered foolish, but it depended on the time and place.
They didn’t know how deep the dungeon was or exactly how strong the enemies were.
Rather than blindly sending in every available fighter and wasting their stamina and energy, it was far more rational to divide into combat and rest teams and preserve their strength as much as possible.
As the Guild Master had said, the space was too cramped for all the adventurers to fight at once anyway.
Still, as they watched the fight, ready to step in if things went badly, the red team crushed the undead horde without much trouble.
“Ha! So this is supposed to be a lich’s dungeon? It’s not all that different.”
“It’s more that we’re strong. Honestly, with this force we could wipe out the regular army of most territories in no time. We’ve got several people at knight level here alone.”
Their clothes were dirty and they’d picked up a few minor cuts here and there, but that was all.
There were no adventurers with serious injuries, nor any on the verge of collapse from exhaustion.
In fact, they looked relaxed enough to be chatting casually with one another.
The Guild Master signaled the red team to switch out.
“Good work! The blue team will take the lead next, so the rest of you follow behind.”
The red and blue teams swapped positions, and this time the blue team showed its might against the undead blocking their path.
Blanca’s performance in particular was truly overwhelming.
-Fwoosh!
Each time the intermediate fire spell, 『Stone-Burning Magic』, shot forth, the undead blocking the way burned up like firewood.
It wasn’t the sword-mage style she had practiced with Bern, but a standard mage’s way of fighting, and even so Blanca alone was sweeping away more than half of the enemies.
The other adventurers seeing Blanca fight for the first time, especially the mages, all looked dumbfounded.
“No way, she’s spamming intermediate spells like they’re low-tier ones.”
“Just how much mana does she have?”
Since they were at least Grade 3, and some parties even included Grade 4 mages, it wasn’t as if there were no mages capable of Blanca-level firepower.
But while most of them were controlling their mana consumption as they fought in preparation for the battle with the lich, Blanca was throwing spells around like water, so in terms of actual firepower there was no comparison.
That stood out enough that the Guild Master, who was managing the members of both teams, came over to Blanca and spoke to her directly.
“You seem to be pushing yourself too hard from the start. Are you all right?”
Blanca nodded.
“No problem.”
“Then how long can you keep this up?”
“If it’s a fight like the one just now, I can do it more than ten times.”
Honestly, it felt like she could do it a hundred times, not just ten, but Blanca deliberately kept that to herself.
She needed to keep the ‘Ring of Mana Absorption,’ which could absorb mana during battle, hidden from others, and Bern had also advised her not to reveal her true strength just in case.
The Guild Master fell into thought for a moment, then opened his mouth.
“Blue team will keep the lead without rotating with the red team. Does anyone want to rest?”
The blue-team adventurers shook their heads.
Since the enemies burned away before they could even swing their blades a few times, they still had plenty of strength left.
-grrrrrr.......
BOOM!
Bolstered by Blanca’s overwhelming firepower, the party pressed on through the dungeon with swift, decisive momentum.
A while later.
“A fork in the road.”
Three paths: left, center, and right.
Blanca narrowed her eyes at the layout, which somehow felt familiar, or perhaps fated.
“I’ll be back, big brother.”
Renya and several other adventurers with scouting skills split up cautiously to investigate the fork.
Fortunately, before long all the scouts returned safely and reported what they had seen.
“If you go left, you’ll find a large open area. The problem is that it’s crawling with undead and all sorts of monsters.”
“There was a huge door in the center! It didn’t have a handle or keyhole or anything, so it looks like the kind that opens with magic or some mechanism somewhere!”
“Oh, on the right there was something like a cage packed with civilians! And, uh, the pattern drawn on the floor of the room we were in is glowing, so it feels like something could happen any second now!”
Everyone’s gaze turned at once to the scout who had returned from the right.
Compared to the other two scouts’ reports, this one clearly sounded urgent, so that was only natural.
The Guild Master frowned.
“Civilians and a suspicious pattern. Anything else? What about the ones guarding them?”
“There were about ten people with their faces hidden under robes! They were surrounding us and chanting something like a spell, but I couldn’t make out the details!”
“We have to go rescue them right away!”
Someone from the blue team shouted toward the Guild Master.
Alseus Bertrea.
A Grade 4 adventurer from the Eastern Branch and Bern’s senior, he spoke passionately with a grave expression.
“They’re innocent civilians. If they’re already dead, that’s one thing, but if they’re alive, we have to rescue them no matter what!”
“You do realize our objective is to subjugate the lich, right?”
“If the ritual is completed safely, who knows what kind of power the lich will gain! Morally speaking and practically speaking, the victims have to be rescued!”
As if in agreement with Alseus’s forceful argument, similar voices began rising among the other adventurers.
“We don’t have time to hesitate! If those bastards complete the ritual while we’re dithering, it’s all over!”
“Those trash nobles can do what they want, but we can’t abandon people too!”
Just as the Guild Master fell into thought, Bern stepped forward.
“I’ll go.”
The Guild Master’s eyes settled on Bern.
“Your spirit is admirable, but I can’t allow you to act on your own.”
“If you stop me, I’ll go anyway. Please understand that asking for permission like this is the bare minimum of courtesy.”
“Hmm.”
When the Guild Master showed hesitation, Alseus’s eyes shook violently.
He shouted urgently.
“No! There are multiple enemies—how can you send only Bern in there!”
“Then will you go with him yourself?”
At the Guild Master’s indifferent retort, Alseus clenched his teeth.
After exchanging glances with his companions for a moment, he shouted as if he had no choice.
“Understood! Our party will go with him!”
“Then it’s decided. In that case, Bern’s party and Alseus’s party will go together—”
“No, I can handle this alone.”
Bern and the Guild Master met eyes.
Before the Guild Master could say anything, Bern dashed straight down the right path, and Alseus’s party hurriedly ran after him.
At the end of the fork was the very scene Renya had described.
People caged up like animals, and robed figures surrounding them while chanting suspicious spells.
Slash!
Someone in a robe collapsed without even managing a scream, cut down by Bern’s sword.
However, even after a companion had fallen, the robed figures did not stop chanting.
Worse, even the victims inside the cages showed no reaction to Bern’s arrival, simply staring blankly into space.
Bern examined the one he had just cut down.
What had been beneath the robe was not a mage, but an undead that was already cold as ice.
The next moment, Bern’s vision warped violently and his body was shifted elsewhere.
A forced teleport trap.
Someone swung a blade at him the moment he was teleported into darkness so thick he couldn’t see an inch ahead.
A sudden change of location, blocked vision, and an unexpected ambush on top of that.
Even an exceptional expert would have no choice but to show an opening in that situation, but Bern calmly took the attack and then regained his stance.
In the darkness, someone clicked their tongue and pulled back again.
Their nimble, decisive movement made it clear they possessed some means of seeing through the darkness.
Facing the quietly encroaching killing intent, Bern spoke.
“What a strange feeling. I had predicted this situation, and yet I still hoped, if possible, that my prediction would turn out wrong.”
There was no reply.
But Bern did not miss the fact that the opponent in the darkness—or rather, the opponents—had been shaken.
“Isn’t it about time you opened your mouths? Grade 4 adventurer of the Eastern Branch. No, the lich’s disciple. ──Alseus Bertrea and his companions.”
After a brief silence, an irritated reply came back.
“…That damned idiot. I suspected as much, but so you really spilled everything after all.”
Though his figure was hidden, the voice and manner of speech were unmistakably Alseus’s.
He asked Bern,
“Since when did you figure it out?”
“I wasn’t certain. But after hearing how you handled things in Francia, I did find it a little odd.”
Bern continued calmly.
“I can let slide the possibility that you might not know about sleep magic unless you’re a mage, but there are also methods in this world that use drugs to forcibly put someone to sleep. Yet you didn’t investigate along those lines at all.”
“The same goes for that joint night watch you supposedly proposed and failed. If you were going to gather people and set a night watch in the first place, you shouldn’t have assigned it to just one person—you should have assigned several people to the same shift so they could watch one another. But you deliberately created a gap, and thanks to that, distrust spread through the city, making it even harder to deal with the culprit.”
“You said you gave up on the request because if incompetent people kept holding onto it, more people would be harmed, but in truth you dragged others in to fool the guild, didn’t you? By claiming you wanted to help catch the culprit while obstructing the investigation or steering it toward the wrong answer, you could make new adventurers keep wasting their time, and in the end the guild would give up on the request altogether.”
In response to Bern’s explanation, Alseus answered in a weary voice.
“Ha, yeah. So you saw right through everything from the very start. And yet you acted all innocent, like you didn’t know a thing, right in front of me?”
“Not compared to a piece of trash like you, who shook hands with a lich behind everyone’s backs and sold people out, while acting like a nice guy and a good senior to everyone’s face.”
“…….”
The killing intent felt from the darkness thickened even more.
“You obnoxious bastard. That smug face of yours, like you knew and predicted everything—it disgusted me from the moment I first saw it. But your arrogance went too far.”
Alseus bared a vicious grin.
“You probably knew the hostages were a trap, but thought you could get out anytime you wanted, so you jumped in anyway, right? Thanks to that, the trap that was supposed to grind up a whole group of adventurers got wasted on just you… But on the other hand, you’ve ended up alone in a trap meant to kill dozens of adventurers.”
Footsteps, thud.
A beast’s growl.
Even the clatter of bones.
“I’ll kill you horribly. And I’ll display your head before your companions. Well, maybe the other disciples have already taken care of the rest, so we might not even need to lift a finger.”
Bern did not answer.
Thinking he had finally robbed Bern of his composure, Alseus’s smile deepened.
WHAM!
The next moment, a hand seized the back of his head and slammed his face into the ground.
“@%)($!?”
Confusion, dismay, shock.
As his mind became utterly chaotic, Bern spoke into his ear.
“─Ah, sorry. Using violence in the middle of a conversation is barbaric, but I did it on impulse.”
Not his usual polite tone, but a voice that was extremely arrogant and authoritative.
“As an apology, I’ll keep you alive as a special exception until I’ve dealt with the others. No matter what you do, you won’t die, so please, come at me with everything you’ve got.”
However, Bern added,
“When you’re the one left alive at the end, I hope you’ll answer my questions politely, accurately, and promptly. Otherwise, what I’m about to do to your friends will happen to you just the same.”