Chapter 12: Do Not Subscribe Yet (Patreon)

Over the next two hours, he ran into three fights.

The second was a coordinated attack by two rat-type monsters, one striking from the front and one from the side, trying to catch him in a pincer. That kind of coordination was rare among the low-intelligence monsters of the Dungeon, which suggested the pair likely shared a nest and had developed some degree of hunting synergy over time. The one in front was meant to draw his attention, while the one at the side used the rat-type's talent for squeezing through narrow gaps to circle around through a crack in the rock.

He fell back on the auditory judgment he'd honed during blindfold training. Without a clear line of sight to cover his flank, he picked up the faint scrape of claws against stone before the side attacker closed in, judged its angle of approach, and cut down both monsters with a single pivoting slash. The blade split the front one's jaw upward, while the flanking one ran straight into the extended arc of the cut.

The third fight was against a monster with ranged capability, one that could fire hard spines from its tail.

The spine-launching mechanism worked something like a compressed spring — there was a visible contraction of the tail just before it fired, then the spine shot out at tremendous speed. When the first spine grazed past his shoulder, he read the pattern of its trajectory: the spines flew in a straight line, with no guidance, and couldn't change direction once launched.

He used shuttle-run movement to burn through the creature's ammunition. Spine-type monsters typically carried a limited number of spines and needed time to regenerate after firing four to six in a row. After the fifth spine flew out, he heard a hollow, empty sound from its tail — the signal that it had run dry — and closed the distance to finish it before it could bring another weapon to bear.

The fourth encounter was the hardest.

It was a completely unfamiliar monster form, one he'd never seen even on the Upper Floors.

Its body wasn't large, about the height of a medium-sized dog, but its skin was semi-transparent, and inside he could faintly make out some kind of glowing liquid flowing — like fireflies' essence poured into a living vessel. It made no sound at all; even its breathing seemed suppressed to almost nothing by some internal mechanism. It appeared as if out of nowhere, barely two steps behind him.

Then, with startling speed, it extended a long, slender tentacle.

The tip of the tentacle carried a barb, which caught the magic-stone lamp's light with a dull, dark-red metallic gleam.

Artorias only avoided it at the last instant by sensing the shift in air against his skin. The tentacle came through the air trailing an unnatural chill, like someone had breathed cold air on the back of his neck. His body reacted faster than his mind — the fruit of Zald's relentless drilling, muscle memory overriding conscious thought.

The barb tore through the outer robe on his left shoulder and left a shallow red line on the skin beneath. The wound wasn't deep, but it carried a faint, stinging burn, like being brushed by nettles.

This time he didn't try to end the fight quickly. Instead he kept his distance and observed for nearly three minutes.

In those three minutes, the monster launched four more tentacle strikes, each one extending between three and three and a half meters, fast but following a single, unvaried trajectory — no feints.

He caught a key detail: once the tentacle reached its full extension, there was a half-second pause before it began to retract. That half second was the only window he'd get.

He used that gap to sever the tentacle in one stroke. The severed piece convulsed on the ground for a few seconds, spraying a glowing liquid that ate into the stone floor. Stripped of its primary weapon, the monster tried to flee, but its ground speed was nowhere near the speed of its tentacle strikes. He closed the distance in two steps and ended the fight.

The whole encounter took longer than the previous ones, but in exchange he'd gained a rough understanding of this type of monster.

On the tunnel wall, he used the short dagger he carried to scratch a simple mark into the rock: a circle with a line through it, representing the semi-transparent tentacle type. The blade against stone produced a sharp, grating sound that echoed back and forth through the passage several times before fading.

He began leaving marks like this at every important junction, every usable hiding spot.

Not to navigate by, but so that if he was ever forced to backtrack, he'd have something to follow. It was a concept Zald had drilled into him again and again during training. In unfamiliar territory, information was survival, and the medium carrying that information had to be durable and identifiable. Chalk washed away in water, cloth strips got torn off by monsters — marks carved into rock were the most reliable record.

Time didn't visibly pass down here, but Artorias's internal clock told him roughly five hours had gone by since he'd entered the middle floors. His body clock wasn't precise — the margin of error might be half an hour either way — but for someone exploring the Dungeon without a timepiece, it was the only reference he had.

He needed a temporary camp.

He stopped at a natural hollow enclosed by rock on three sides. The hollow was deep enough for him to curl up inside, positioned above and to the side of a main passage, reachable only by climbing about two meters of rock face — large monsters couldn't get in. The entrance was narrow, barely wide enough for him to slip through sideways, the stone brushing against his robe on both shoulders. But the interior space was surprisingly wide, roughly the size of a small room, the ground dry, the air circulating, and it was high enough that the smells from the passage below wouldn't drift up.

He crawled inside, settled his body into a position that was comfortable but let him rise instantly if needed, back against the rock wall, facing the entrance. Knees slightly bent, feet braced against the opposite wall, Tensa Zangetsu laid across his knees with the hilt toward his right hand.

He leaned against the rock and closed his eyes.

Not to sleep — to organize his thoughts.

Within three days he needed to accomplish two things: walk out of the middle floors alive, and find a reliable channel to relay the warning.

On the first point, he already had a basic plan. Follow the most heavily traveled main routes; at forks, pick the direction with the most wear. Avoid direct confrontation with monsters beyond his ability, favoring detours or terrain when possible. Leave markers at regular intervals. These were all basic principles Zald had taught him — simple, but effective.

On the second point, his thinking was far less clear.

Adi could serve as a channel — she and the others knew him, and they had good enough judgment to weigh the credibility of such a message. But the problem was that even if they believed him, given their current rank and their limited social connections, whether they could get this information into the hands of someone actually capable of responding within three days was a huge unknown.

Orario had its own protective forces — the Hephaestus Familia among other major Familias. But each of them had its own interests to weigh, and a piece of information of unknown origin, passed along by two low-level adventurers, had almost no chance of being taken seriously. Unless someone with real weight vouched for it, the best fate this information could hope for was to be filed away in some corner and never read again.

Artorias opened his eyes and looked up at the rough stone overhead.

Members of the great gods' Familias.

He didn't have much of an impression of Hera and Zeus — two major Familias the anime he remembered had barely touched on. Judging purely from their names, though, neither Familia seemed like the type to play villain. Zeus was the god of the sky, Hera the goddess of marriage; going by the nature of their divinity, both seemed logically at odds with the idea of 'destroying Orario.'

So what was this attack they claimed to be planning, then?

A pure smokescreen, or was there something behind it he didn't know?

Information really is overwhelmingly insufficient, isn't it.

He wished now that he'd caught up on more of the source material back when he'd had the free time. Artorias thought this to himself, and closed his eyes again.

The fact that they'd told him this and sent him to relay it was itself a choice. If they truly meant to attack Orario, they wouldn't need to warn anyone in advance, let alone engineer an opportunity for Artorias to escape and pass along the information. The whole point of a surprise attack was informational asymmetry — deliberately leaking your intentions meant giving up that advantage.

There was something about the whole situation he couldn't see through.

Maybe their interest in him wasn't just a training exercise. Maybe relaying the information was the actual core purpose of the trial, not some incidental side task. Send a trusted carrier back to Orario with a message, watch how the recipients react, gauge how fast their defenses mobilize — that kind of information would be worth more to a real assault than any scouting mission.

He set the line of thought aside for now.

Because no matter the logic behind it, what he could actually do was fixed: get out alive, then deliver the message. Second-guessing and overanalyzing would only drain his limited energy, energy he needed to save for more urgent problems.

So Artorias brought his focus back to the present.

He still hadn't figured out exactly how deep he was, and he needed more information. Finding a passage that led upward was tomorrow's most important goal. Upward passages usually had a few telltale features: the ground sloping upward, air currents flowing from below to above, and magic concentration gradually decreasing.

He carved that day's record of movement into the rock wall, then adjusted his body into the most energy-efficient position and forced himself into a half-sleep state. Zald had said in training that a true warrior needed to be able to rest effectively in any environment, without depending on a bed, without depending on a sense of safety — relying only on continuous awareness of his surroundings. Half-sleep was a state between waking and deep sleep, the body relaxed while hearing and touch remained sharp, so that any unusual sound or vibration could pull his mind back to full alertness within two seconds.

But what Artorias was doing now wasn't purely about resting.

He wanted to see, if only once, the face of his own god — the one who only ever appeared to him in dreams.

He couldn't quite remember when he'd last seen her. Time grew hazy down in the Dungeon; the line between day and night was erased by stone and the glow of magic-stone lamps, leaving only his body's internal clock to weakly keep the rhythm. But he remembered the face from that dream clearly — every detail of it.

Artorias passed the first night on the middle floors in a state of light alertness.

As it turned out, though, the young man swaying slightly against the wall wasn't met with the familiar face he expected, but with unfamiliar, pure darkness. Not even a dream took shape — his consciousness simply drifted in the dark for a while before some outside stimulus yanked him back to reality.

No response, huh.

He woke to the sound of footsteps — something walking past the passage outside the hollow.

The footfalls were heavy and steady, the tread of a fairly sizeable monster patrolling slowly through the passage. There was a searching quality to that patrol, not a simple passing-through but something looking for a target. Artorias stayed perfectly still for nearly twenty minutes, keeping his breathing as shallow as possible, pressing his body flush against the rock inside the hollow to minimize his heat signature. Only once the footsteps had faded entirely into the depths of the passage, until even the last echo was swallowed by the dark, did he climb out of the hollow.

Then he set off again.

The second day's luck was a little worse than the first's.

He got lost at a six-way junction for nearly forty minutes. Three of the six paths showed nearly identical wear, making it impossible to tell them apart by the usual standard. He tried three of the paths before finding the one with the heaviest wear. The first led fifty meters in before running into a cave-in, rubble completely blocking the passage, forcing him to turn back. The second sloped downward after about ten minutes, the grade steadily increasing — meaning it led toward the deep floors, and he turned back immediately. Downward was a dead end, at least for his current goal. Upward was the way out.

The third path had fresh footprints on the ground — human boot prints, pointing upward. Someone had walked this path before, and in the direction he needed.

He followed that path onward.

The second day's most important discovery came in the afternoon.

In a spacious stone chamber, he found an abandoned adventurer's camp. The ceiling of the chamber was high, at least six meters, and at the center stood a simple hearth built from piled stones, its ashes long since gone cold — dry and powdery to the touch.

Several broken torches were wedged into cracks in the rock wall, the wood at their broken ends soft and moldy, threaded with fine strands of mold. Black scorch marks covered the ground from long, repeated fires, larger in area than what a small campfire would normally leave — a sign this camp had been used again and again. In a corner lay a few ruined backpacks, their leather hardened and cracked, the metal buckles corroded into reddish-brown lumps.

And a crumpled sheet of parchment, soaked through with water.

The parchment had been tucked inside a metal canteen, its cap screwed on tight, but the body of the canteen had rusted through in a small hole, and water had seeped in through that hole and soaked most of the sheet. He carefully unfolded it — the paper had grown so brittle that its edges crumbled at the slightest touch.

There was a map drawn on the parchment.

Most of it had been blurred by water damage, the ink lines smeared into faint gray blotches, utterly illegible. But one corner, folded inward and shielded from direct contact with the moisture, had survived relatively intact. That portion faintly showed the direction of a few passages and a position marked with a special symbol.

He recognized that symbol.

It was the standard adventurer mark for the direction of a surface exit, something every adventurer entering the Dungeon learned during beginner training. A triangle with an arrow on top, the arrow pointing upward, meaning 'this route leads to the Upper Floors.' Kaguya had taught him this kind of symbolic knowledge back when they had idle time, and at the time he'd thought such symbology was completely useless. Now, it seemed, no knowledge was ever truly wasted.

He committed the usable part of the map firmly to memory — the angle of every line, the relative position of every marking — then set off again.

With the map giving him a directional reference, his pace picked up noticeably. He no longer needed to stop and carefully compare ground wear at every fork; he just needed to confirm that the passage's general direction matched what he remembered from the map. Only when he hit a fork not marked on the map did he fall back on his original method of judgment.

By the end of the second day, he estimated he'd reached the edge of the upper-middle floors. Drawing on the instincts he still carried from his time as a monster, the magic concentration in the passages kept dropping, the earthy smell in the air growing fainter, replaced by something drier, closer to the surface. The monsters were shrinking in size too, their aggression easing — the large, two-to-three-meter monsters he'd been fighting no longer appeared, replaced by smaller, mid-sized species closer to ordinary animals.

That was how it was supposed to go.

The passage ahead suddenly widened.

Artorias stopped in his tracks.

At the far edge of his vision, something was quietly rising into view. It rose slowly out of the shadows of the passage, its outline sharpening from blur to clarity — like a tree growing upside down, its branches driven down into the ground and its crown spreading upward. But it wasn't a tree; no tree's surface would carry that sheen, that metallic gleam still discernible even in the darkness.

The presence radiating off it eclipsed every monster he'd encountered over the past two days.

It wasn't the pressure of its size. It was something more fundamental — as if the air had suddenly gained an extra dimension, forcing his senses into overdrive just to process the excess information.

A trial monster?

Artorias's brow furrowed.

Toward that thing at the far edge of his vision, rising with such overwhelming presence—