Chapter 24

A ninth-grade mana stone is equivalent to a rock-bread.

Meaning, each one is valued at about twenty stones.

Then what about an eighth-grade mana stone?

Unfortunately, one deathfiend is worth only five goblins.

“What? You mean only a hundred stones?!”

“… Including the summoned ghouls, it can drop up to 300 stones.”

Of course, even considering that, there was no denying that the amount was low.

Because we’d just had to risk our lives.

“Bjorn… How much was that bread we ate at the inn?”

“… I remember it was about 300 stones.”

“Then… Still, it means you can taste that sweetness once every time you catch a deathfiend!”

Apparently, the cream pie she’d eaten earlier had now established itself as the new unit of currency for Ainar.

Of course, if you divided it 8:2, you’d only get 0.2 units of sweetness per hunt, but…

I decided to not mention that out loud.

“Bjorn! We don’t have the time to waste! Let’s keep hunting!”

Although she’d been disappointed for a bit at the paltry reward –

I smiled as I looked at Ainar who’d regained her enthusiasm.

In this respect, it wasn’t a bad choice to team up with a barbarian.

I’d liked Erwen, my former teammate, but her downside was that she was too passive about everything.

My current colleague was much better when it came to motivation.

“Okay, let’s go!”

After that, we continued to hunt around the neighbourhood for deathfiends.

With one hunt taking more than 20 minutes, we should’ve been at a loss even at 300 stones, but…

Turned out, our first attempt had been an outlier.

“Coooooooooo!”

“Behel-raaaaaaaaah!”

Each time we met a deathfiend, we rushed at it together, crying out the name of our ancestor.

Then we grabbed one leg each, lifted, and threw the creature to the floor.

Let’s call it, a double barbarian tackle.

Thud!

A fallen deathfiend was just easy prey.

As we kept making chitchat, it ineffectually tried to reach us with its arms, and quickly dissolved into motes of light.

It took about three minutes each time.

The moment one fell to the floor, it’d feel a sense of crisis and summon ghouls, so it was difficult to shorten it further.

“Oooh!”

As the hunts continued, our mana stone pouches got filled up quicker and quicker, but we were not satisfied with the speed and accelerated even further.

Because hunting deathfiends would become impossible from the third day.

If I hadn’t reached the second floor faster than anyone else using the bug, I wouldn’t have even dared to fight these guys.

Because they wouldn’t be travelling alone anymore.

No matter how much could be done with a party of two, facing a group of three or four of them would be difficult to say the least.

[14:27].

I checked the time and decided to take a short break.

There’s a saying about rowing hard when the tide is high, but accidents always happen when you are impatient.

“Bjorn, thirsty.”

“Drink sparingly. The corpse flowers will bloom only from tomorrow.”

“Corpse flowers?”

They’re the only means of replenishing moisture in the Deadlands. When the time comes, flowers bloom on the vines covering the rubbles of stone buildings, and you can open them to find water within.

Ainar became a bit unsettled at my explanation.

“Bjorn, isn’t that unsanitary?”

It surely was.

I’d heard that it was okay to drink, but I still felt bad.

However, this wasn’t an appropriate response from somebody who shared a room with four other people and never washed.

“Then do you have any other way?”

“None! I will drink!”

After resting for about twenty minutes to replenish our stamina, we again resumed our hunt.

And until we were on the brink of collapsing from exhaustion, we managed to hunt a total of seventy deathfiends.

Meaning, we’d earned more than 20,000 stones in a single day.

‘Isn’t this better than hunting only level nine monsters?’

But the essence I’d been hoping for never dropped.

Even the word ‘atrocious’ isn’t enough to describe how rare essence drops are.

So in the early game, tweaking your playstyle according to the essence drop you actually get is the basics…

The results depend on your skill as the player.

In that sense, I’d been looking forward to this.

Deathfiend essence is one of the top items you can get in the early game.

‘The problem is that there’s no sign of it dropping.’

The active skill ‘call of the dead’ that summons the ghouls is frankly a bit esoteric, but the passive skill ‘preservation of the flesh’ is good enough to make up for that.

Of course, eating the essence doesn’t mean you’ll regenerate as fast as those bastards…

But it has a good synergy with the undying imprint, which also increases your regeneration factor.

[02: 57].

I checked the time while listening to Ainar’s snores.

One day had passed, and the second day started.

From now on, we’d have to fight two deathfiends at once, but there was another aspect that made me feel a bit more relaxed.

At least it won’t look weird when we ran into other adventurers.

Again, I feared our fellow adventurers the most.

“Ainar, get up.”

“… I, I didn’t eat it!”

“It’s your shift.”

Three hours each.

After resting for a total of six hours, we unceasingly kept hunting deathfiends the second day as well.

“Coooooooo!”

Even though they came in pairs.

Even with twenty ghouls summoned by their active skills, it was still worth the effort.

Because we’d learned all their tricks by hunting them again and again on the first day.

Coo–!

I fearlessly charged in to smash one of them to the floor.

The other one was also knocked down at the same time.

Even the smallest hitch in the whole process meant the whole operation would be a bust, but …

Whenever that happened, we simply ran away without looking back.

“Ainar, let’s bounce!”

“Yeah!”

The deathfends moved pretty lumberingly, and they by habit didn’t pursue if one escaped their territory, so we hadn’t faced any danger thus far.

Swaaaaaa–!

Each battle took about ten minutes.

Although about three attempts out of ten resulted in failure, since we were hunting a pair at a time, our profits were pretty similar to the first day.

Groups had been fairly rare at first.

However, as the afternoon passed, groups of three began to appear occasionally, and the frequency of such encounters kept increasing with time.

“We’ll have to leave this place soon.”

“A wise warrior knows when to retreat.”

It was the end of the second day.

I left the deathfiends’ territory, leaving my regrets behind me. We returned to the area with the soggy mud, and found a suitable campsite inside a pathway.

That was then –

“…!”

It was our first time encountering another group of adventurers.

It was a group of three humans, prowling in the dark, relying on a torch like us…

We saw each other only after we’d approached within 10m of each other.

“What’re you looking at? If you don’t have any business, go away.”

“Hmm, excuse me.”

Ainar spat out coldly, and the other group passed us by, disappearing back into the darkness.

It was a little strange.

Step, step.

They were only about twenty steps or so away, and the sound of their footsteps was still faintly audible.

But their torchlight was no longer visible.

I’d heard that most of the stairs in the labyrinth devour light, this must’ve been what that meant.

The bright light of a torch became almost impossible to see with the naked eye even from just 10m away…

While I was pondering over this phenomenon for a while –

“Bjorn, we have to move.”

Ainar spoke up with a note of stubbornness in her voice.

“They know where we are. The walls here are convenient, but it’d still be safer to find a new campsite.”

That was certainly true.

I was indeed going to do that.

But, something here didn’t fit.

What the heck, as soon as she saw another group of adventurers, she growled at them to fuck off…

What a sudden shift in character.

“Bjorn, humans can’t be trusted.”

“… I agree.”

I see, we had one more thing in common other than both of us being barbarians.

Our distrust in the race called ‘humans’.

Looked like something’d happened to her during her first time in the labyrinth.

I’d have to ask her later.

“Then let’s go.”

We packed our bags and moved on.

But finding another campsite with as good a location as before turned out to be difficult. Perhaps a compromise was in order, with just one wall protecting our backs?

While I was busy thinking –

“Stop it…”

I could hear a moan, coming from somewhere nearby.

“Kahk! Huuk!”

It was no banshee.

It wasn’t even a woman’s voice in the first place…

“… Wa-, wait!”

The words were clearly discernible.

“Live, please let me –”

Damn it.

Why couldn’t I have just sat down and slept anywhere?

“…”

As the screams stopped, silence reigned again.

Ainar whispered.

“It wasn’t a monster attack.”

I knew that. I, too, had working ears.

It’s unlikely for a person to beg for their life in front of a monster.

The situation was clear. Somebody killed somebody else.

Fuck, what kind of dogshit situation was this?

I wasn’t some kid detective.

Since I had no intention of getting involved, I just grabbed Ainar’s wrist and slowly started backing away.

But did they sense our footsteps?

“Who’s there?”

It was a cold, subdued voice.

It sounded rough, but it was a woman’s.

We held our breaths and didn’t move, not giving any response.

But at that moment –

Whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiish! Popopopop!

Something like a flare shot into the sky, softly illuminating an area about 50m in radius.

As a result, I was also able to meet the eyes of the owner of the voice.

We were less than 15m apart.

… Erwen would’ve been able to notice her presence from afar and avoid her, had she been here.

“Hmm, rookies, is it?”

The nameless woman looked at us and made a quick judgment.

I was doing the same.

A dagger dripping with blood.

Four scattered corpses.

“… Pillager.”

The woman asked calmly.

“First time seeing one?”

“So-so.”

My first time seeing somebody as professional as this chick, at least.

“I see.”

Although some witnesses to her murder scene had just popped up, the woman who was meaningfully nodding her head still looked very calm.

Somehow, I could guess the reason.

Pillagers.

Those who professionally hunt their fellow adventurers, instead of monsters, are called that.

They earn good money by looting equipment off adventurers, instead of farming mana stones from monsters.

Of course, if you get caught, you should be sentenced to death the moment you get back to the city…

Except there’s nothing like that.

Just like I’d killed six adventurers in self-defence, and yet wasn’t investigated at all.

There’s no way to know what happens inside the labyrinth from the outside.

Unless someone tells you otherwise.

“… You aren’t wearing a mask.”

This was the most absurd aspect of the current situation.

This psychopathic bitch was blatantly showing off her face.

A little over 170 cm tall, with a skinny figure.

Tattoos running from under the eyes to her shoulders, and the back of her right ear cut in half.

With this much information, identification wouldn’t even be difficult.

In the modern age, it’d be possible to collect evidence from this place itself…

But this was a fantasy world.

There were ways to distinguish truth from falsehood even without physical evidence.

“… Were they your colleagues?”

“Well.”

The woman looked at the scattered corpses and shrugged.

“They might’ve thought so.”

That’s why her face was bare.

While asking questions that I could reasonably expect to be answered, I quickly organized the information that could be seen with the naked eye.

There were four bodies in total.

Due to their equipment level and the fact that one looked to be a wizard, I could tell that they were adventurers who were active on at least the fifth floor.

And there were no traces of traumatic injury on three of the corpses.

But since traces of vomiting up blood and gastric juice remained on their lips…

‘Were they all poisoned? The man who was dealt with at the end had some tolerance, so he managed to endure for a little while?’

I hoped my guess was correct.

The situation would be even more bleak if she was a talent who could kill four mid-level adventurers alone without receiving a single wound.

Slowly, bit by bit.

The woman squatted down and started skilfully removing the equipment from the corpses.

And put them one by one in her bag.

It might’ve been a magic tool or something, because even the bulkier items fit in without any problem.

Making me feel fear before envy could arrive.

Just having such a thing made the difference between us desperately clear.

“Barbarian.”

The woman called out to us.

I didn’t respond.

Ainar asked me quietly.

“We going to fight?”

She really was great.

Erwen would’ve become terrified by now.

No matter how big the gap might be, did a warrior’s pride lie in never giving up or something?

I answered briefly.

“I’m thinking.”

To be honest, I wanted to avoid the option of fighting.

Our difference was obvious just from the equipment.

And, if her skills matched her equipment, well… Even 2:1, our odds weren’t anything to write home about.

Whooooosh–!

As its life expired, the light in the sky winked out, bringing back the darkness.

I immediately made my decision.

“Run. Full speed.”

Pride won’t save your life.

Editor’s Notes:

None for this chapter.