Chapter 37
Roughly... looks like it's asleep in the left corner.
Are you sure? Or what?
Ha... your face.
Right in front of the area where the mid-boss was, I used Han Dohui's ability to check where it was.
It would have been fine to have Suri go inside and check, but if we somehow provoked it into a vigilant state, the whole point of the surprise attack would be lost. Better to play it safe.
For now, the five front-liners including the robot friend will go in later, so let's have the mage and the archer strike first.
Do we have to? Wouldn't it be better to just rush in together and take it down quickly?
I'm telling you, if we wake it up, it'll get annoying.
I don't really know, but an extremely professional-sounding conversation is going back and forth. This is my first time in a raid-party gate, but it's not as hard as I expected, and it's fun. Maybe because we picked one with a suitable difficulty.
The two middle-aged men whose names I can't quite remember and the one woman aren't really fighting; they're trimming the monster carcasses we caught and pulling out only the expensive parts. Or maybe they're doing the porter job I'd only heard about.
They bicker periodically, but it doesn't really seem like they're seriously fighting. I heard people working dangerous jobs get that way because their nerves are frayed, but... they're probably just teasing each other, right?
“If you're going to talk without thinking, then just don't talk.”
“You're really laying into me over a comment I just made.”
“I'm saying, don't just blurt stuff out—think before you speak.”
“If someone heard that, they'd think I told you to go die. Why do you talk like that?”
“Hey, enough.”
As the tank and the mage kept arguing, the others stepped in to mediate from the side.
“Why stop? He's the one talking weird.”
“Because you're spouting useless nonsense that's breaking everyone's concentration. It's annoying.”
“Youngjun, stop it.”
“Then shut Kim Minkyung up. She's irritating me.”
My head started spinning as the atmosphere got increasingly nasty. Chaea unnie, who had been holding my hand beside me, covered both my ears with her palms, but that still wasn't enough to completely block out their voices.
“Hey, Son Youngjun!”
* * * * *
Ryu Minho, who had been watching the two fight from a distance, let out a deep sigh. They already bickered often, and since it was a common enough occurrence, I figured it was just another one of those usual spats.
“Uu...”
As their voices gradually got louder, Eve, who had been resting on a rock farther away, began looking visibly worse and worse in real time. She kept rolling her eyes around anxiously, and before long, tears even began to well up slightly.
As their voices kept rising, Ryu Minho cut between them and quickly mediated the fight. Ryu Minho was one of only three B-rank hunters in this raid party, Dohui included.
“You both need to cut it out. There's a kid here.”
“..Right.”
“Sorry.”
“Hey, you're making Eve cry. What are you two going to do about it? Do you not want healing?”
“Make up already.”
Kim Chaea and Han Dohui's sharp rebuke. The two, who had been arguing in a snappish tone just moments ago, looked at Eve with an "oh, crap" expression. She wasn't used to them yet, since they were strangers, and on top of that they'd let her see them fighting.
Embarrassed, the two exchanged glances and then approached the teary-eyed Eve.
“Um... Eve. We weren't fighting, we were having a discussion. Okay?”
“Yeah, we were discussing things.”
“It looked like a fight though...”
“N-no! Really!”
“Then can you shake hands..?”
“Shake hands? We... can shake hands, right...?”
The two, cautiously watching Eve's reaction, roughly grabbed each other's hands and shook.
“Wow, you shook hands. So you weren't fighting.”
“Right. We even shook hands, didn't we, Eve?”
“Mm... yes....”
Kim Chaea and Han Dohui, standing behind Eve, also did their best to soothe her with the occasional agreement. When her expression still showed no sign of improving, Son Youngjun and Kim Minkyung even threw their arms around each other's shoulders.
“See? Look at this. We're close.”
“Is this for real..?”
“Haha, I'm telling you it is.”
“Okay...”
Thanks to Dohui and Chaea calming Eve down afterward, the crying finally stopped. As a bonus, the two who had raised their voices ended up getting a ton of side-eye from the other party members.
“Come on, let's not raise our voices, okay? Got it?”
“Exactly. You bastards. What are you showing Eve?”
“Then you guys should go get windmilled too.”
“That's a bit much.”
“Still, they're not as bad as Minho.”
“I can't believe this...”
* * * * *
I used my super princess intimidation to settle the raid party's quarrel. Honestly, what are they going to do if I'm not around?
“So basically, if you go and hit the third eye here on its forehead properly, it's easy.”
“Right.”
“But the power required is pretty high, so it might not be easy. And if we touch this, it'll wake up immediately.”
The mid-boss of the ruins dungeon, the colossal snake 'Nagaraja,' has an organ on its forehead called the third eye. Supposedly it's an eye that can see things ordinary human eyes can't.
If you break just that while Nagaraja is asleep before the fight, the battle gets a lot easier.
“I'm kind of running low on mana too.”
“Ah, don't act cute.”
“You keep saying you're going.”
“You sound Chinese.”
“Your face.”
But the ranged attackers are a little tight on mana right now, and if we send in the melee fighters, Nagaraja might wake up first.
On top of that, a massive shockwave comes out when the third eye breaks, so we can't use melee even for that reason.
“Hm? Suri, can you do this?”
ㅡ키잇
“Really? Want to give it a try?”
Suri, who had been listening to the explanation beside me, came forward to the raid party as if to say it could handle it, and flapped its wings hard.
Everyone here already knew Suri's combat power well from what we'd seen so far. When the giant metal eagle swooped down from the sky and pecked with a bang, even a huge rock would split right open.
“Hmm, will it be okay?”
“Eve, but our eagle friend could be in danger.”
Like I said before, when the third eye breaks, it emits a shockwave. No matter how big it is, Suri is still a bird, so its weight is pretty light at around 6 kilograms.
They say it might get blown clear over there.
“Then, Suri, once I break it, I'll use my skill right away to bring you back like this. Okay?”
ㅡ키잇
“Wow, then Eve saves the day again this time?”
“That's amazing!”
“That's seriously badass.”
“Hey, don't say weird stuff in front of the kid.”
“Hehe... it's okay...”
I know that kind of joke too. I might've been on the internet the longest here. Or maybe not.
“Alright then, let's go in. We'll just stay put, and as soon as our eagle friend wakes the eye, we charge.”
“Okay.”
I'm the most nervous one here. Somehow Suri doesn't seem nervous at all...
“Suri..! You can do it..!”
ㅡ끄덕끄덕
With Suri's nod, the door opened with a low rumbling sound.
ㅡ쿠구구구궁….
When we pushed aside the stone wall made of huge rocks, it split apart to both sides with a mechanical sound, revealing a vast cavern.
The ceiling was high enough for Suri to fly freely, and the space was so vast that the sound of the door opening echoed throughout.
Not long after Suri's wingbeats quietly echoed through the silence, its form appeared in one corner of the dark cavern.
'Holy crap, it's huge.'
A super-giant snake, about the size of our house, was coiled up asleep like a giant doodled turd. On its forehead, just as we'd been told, there was a strangely vertically stretched eye socket; maybe because it was asleep, its hard, scale-covered eyelids were shut tight over it.
I thought an eye was just something you could stab and be done with. But if it's blocked by scales this hard, it might be difficult even for Suri...
'Will it be okay..?'
In the raid party's silence, Suri slowly flew toward Nagaraja. You could even hear the sound of someone swallowing hard beside me.
Before long, Suri arrived directly above the boss, which was curled up asleep in the left corner.
"Gasp..!"
Suri flew as high as the ceiling allowed, then made a super-fast dive with its beak precisely aimed at the creature's forehead.
ㅡ콰직!
"Come back, Suri—!!"
The instant the beak touched its forehead, I pulled Suri back with my skill. After that, Nagaraja, with its eye smashed, howled while flinging its head up and down as if it had been flicked painfully hard on the forehead..
ㅡ우르릉..!!
콰광 ㅡ !!
A shockwave like a bolt of lightning burst from its mouth. It was loud enough to make my ears ring in pain. Because the room was enclosed on all sides, it sounded even louder.
"Ugh.."
"Hey, it worked! It's broken!"
"Let's go!"
"Eve, this way!"
I was tucked under Chaea unnie's arm as we pulled back far behind them, and the melee fighters and tanks—and the mages, archers, and everyone else—rushed in at incredible speed and began ganging up on Nagaraja.
After getting hit once with a huge ice spell right in the center of its coiled-up poop-like body, Nagaraja, perhaps because of that, couldn't even uncoil properly and was just getting beaten to a pulp.
Watching from afar, I felt the pathos of a mammoth that, in long-ago times, couldn't shake off humans swarming it like flies and met a tragic end.
But since Minyumi was also busily attacking from the side, maybe I'm an accomplice too.
"Mm, they're fighting well."
ㅡ삐빗!! 삐빗!!
Daengdaengi is cheering enthusiastically on the side, shaking its butt like crazy. Come to think of it, Daengdaengi seems to be moving the most.
"Ah, that got cut off."
ㅡ쿵!
The super-huge scaly tail, used like Nagaraja's weapon, was cleanly severed by Minyumi's sword strike and thudded to the floor. In fact, it wasn't the kind of thing that should be cut off by a sword, so the fact that it fell meant the naga was preparing to flee.
Since it had cut off the heaviest part it used as a weapon on its own, it was fair to say it had lost the will to fight.
Of course, that didn't mean our ruthless humans were going to stop. Nagaraja's enormous head kept rolling across the floor until it finally came to a stop.
"The 'don't go out' one is pitiful."
"Nagaraja?"
"Ah, yes."
* * * * *
"Raid successful!"
"Waaah."
"We weren't even planning to take down the mid-boss, but we did it thanks to Eve, seriously."
"We didn't even go over three hours."
"Exactly. Eve is the best, seriously."
"Hehe..."
This is all thanks to the ultra-powerful princess's power, you know. There's a sense of accomplishment when we all haul a mountain of loot out of the gate together that's hard to put into words.
"Whew, good work everyone. Did you call the recovery crew?"
"We did, but it looks like we need one more truck."
When a gate is cleared, they call professional crews to recover the loot. 'Professional' doesn't mean they have anything fancy; usually a common blue porter truck just rumbles over and takes it away. Splitting up the money left after selling it is the easiest part.
"But don't you need mana stones, Eve?"
"Really? What do you use them for?"
Thanks to Han Dohui bringing it up first during the settlement, I could tell them that what I needed was actual mana stones rather than money.
"Um, I use them when making golems."
"Really? Then don't sell it—hmm, how about this one?"
What the uncle handed over was a 300-gram mid-grade mana stone obtained from defeating Nagaraja. Just this one was worth about half of all the other mana stones that came out of today's gate.
If you count only mana stones, it's practically like I got a third of the total settlement.
"C-can I really take this..?"
"Of course, naturally."
"Wow... thank you..."
Beside me, Minyumi did 500 joyous somersaults on my behalf. The recovery crew came, loaded up everything—including scales and the naga tail—into the porter, and set off.
It was obviously overloaded.
ㅡ펑!
"Hey, that one burst."
"That's way too much. I told you to just call two trucks."
"Who'd pay for it?"
"Minho."
"What.."