Chapter 98

I continue to pant uncontrollably for a good while. How long has it been since I had to run like that? Remembering the time I fought the direwolf, it had been a while.

Other than the thought on my mind, being what the hell is with this dungeon, another thought came up, I’m… lost, aren’t I? Damn…

Regaining my stamina for a bit, I stood back up unsteadily and examined the room I was in.

There were two passageways that connected to this room, one behind me, where I came from, and another to my right.

I might not be able to come back to Clare by the end of the day because I’m completely lost in this trap-ridden dungeon.

Rubbing my cheek that was stinging a bit and bleeding, I took out a health potion to splash a couple of drops on it. Then I checked over my body for any other injuries I might not have noticed, in which I saw I suffered some cuts and scratches.

I poured a bit of my health potions on my injuries, just enough for them to heal. I then took out a general-use antidote potion. I don’t really feel like I got poisoned or something like that, but given the traps, I’m not taking the chance that some of them were. Grimacing as I drank roughly a quarter of it because it tasted nasty, I saved the rest for when I was actually poisoned, since I only brought two antidote potions with me.

After doing all that and resting for a couple of minutes, I stepped out of the room using my sheath as a pointing stick to trigger any traps ahead.

I don’t really know how I set off the chain of traps that led to a boulder trying to run me over, but I call BS on that because that is just unfair.

After getting your guard down from the relatively easy section, only to be immediately hit by a series of death traps at the start of the next section, is just not fair.

Is this what Athrun meant by dangerous? I guess so. I internally cursed at him for dragging me into this.

Coming up to the turn that took me toward the safe area, the thought of how I was going to remember where I was going came up because I only remember the last few turns I made, as I was running for my life from that boulder.

Pausing to think and feeling my damp, blood-stained clothes, I guess that this could work.

Reminding myself, when I get out of here, because I am seriously, seriously underprepared for this, that I should buy some markers or paint for this instead of using my own blood to mark where I was going, and a bunch of other stuff as well, like some map-making stuff, or maybe buy one of those dungeon compasses that could find the direction of the exit.

Carefully, I dragged my hands along the walls—across the side that led toward the safe area and a bit on the side that led away from it, and finished it up by pressing my palm against the stone wall to leave a clear imprint to show which direction the safe area was.

Making the turn, I remember what traps to expect. It was a pitfall trap where the ground suddenly collapsed beneath me, forcing me to use my magic to run on the walls for a bit to escape so I wouldn’t fall into a bed of extremely pointy spikes.

However, upon examining the pitfall I thought was there, it was not present. Where the heck did it go?

Prodding my sheath some more at the passageway with the pitfall trap for any mechanism that could activate it, just to see if I could just set it off, but… I found nothing; nothing happened.

Strange? Why didn’t it trigger?

Many theories came to mind, but I need more information to make any conclusions.

Marking the walls with my blood like the previous turn I made, I continued using my sheath to probe things, and the same result happened: none of the traps activated.

Hmm… did the traps not activate because they had already been set off?

Continuing with the next couple of turns, from what I remember, I concluded that it might be the case.

Eventually, I reached an intersection that I couldn’t remember where I had run through. Okay, let's test out my theory.

Rubbing my hand over my blood-soaked clothes before doing anything, I suddenly realized that the blood on my clothes had dried up.

Realizing that, I sigh because I needed fresh blood to mark down where I was going, or to mark down the wrong direction, since I had nothing else to use.

Pressing my thumb against the blade of my sword, I made a shallow cut, just enough to draw blood, and used it to mark the path I was taking.

After doing that, I chose the passageway I thought I’d gone through, which I guess was the one to my right.

Even more vigilant about my surroundings and poking with my sheath much more than usual, I went through the right passage, and I stopped roughly a third of the way through it.

There, I saw something that I nearly missed and was about to step past; it was a thread so thin you had to squint just to see it, and even then it was barely visible.

Carefully getting my face up close, making sure my hair and clothes don’t touch it, I spotted a nearly invisible line of string, thin as spider silk, I think. I guess I was lucky to see it; it was swaying ever so slightly, probably from the faint breeze I made while creeping forward, causing it to be visible to me.

So, is this one of the mechanisms that sets a trap? Geez, if it is, that is just unfair. Like, how am I supposed to see that? Shouldn’t it be a normal piece of wire or rope that triggers it?

Goddamnit, why did I agree… No, I should be saying, Goddamnit, Athrun, why did you send me to a place like this? I am completely out of my element over here. I was expecting to fight some monsters, but not this, lost in a freaking maze that is filled to the brim with traps. And if that nearly invisible line of string was an example, what the heck are the rest of them going to be?!!!

Wait… ignoring all the complaints in my mind, I realized something… how am I supposed to disarm it? I have no idea or experience with how to disable one.

Stunned into silence in my mind, because who knows how big the rest of the maze is? How am I going to finish this maze?

I felt dread realizing that I might have to brute force my way through this place, which is one of the things I absolutely hate the most about dungeon crawling: having to explore when you have no idea of where you’re going and getting completely lost. Especially in those dungeons where everything looked the same, with no map or tool to automatically track where you’d been going or had gone, which was my situation right now.

What’s worse is that I am going to have to deal with all these goddamn annoying traps in a freaking maze filled with them, with no monsters I can fight, which makes it even worse. There is just nothing fun about this.

Backing away from it, I let out a disgruntled groan. The next time I see Athrun, I’m going to beat the hell out of him, and we’ll see what kind of expression he makes, other than that smile of his, for making me deal with that… and… also… making Clare worried for me since I am, in all likelihood, not coming back in time.

Taking out my phone to see the time, while making an X mark with my blood to show that this wasn’t the way. Since we left for Alice early in the morning, it was now 11:43 a.m.—just shy of noon.

Huh… hang on… Why am I getting signal strength in here? This is a dungeon, so I would expect that there would be no signal at all.

Either this place is actually controlled by whatever organization Athrun belongs to, or this phone, for whatever reason, can work in here. Both seem equally likely. On one hand, if this dungeon really is under their control, then the signal reaching me makes sense, and I might be monitored. But on the other hand, this might just be a feature of the phone—things like not needing to be recharged, having access to a global positioning system, being able to make calls, and other functions still working even though I’m in a fantasy world. So it's working in a dungeon, maybe makes some sense, probably.

Screw it. I’m calling him. I opened the phone app, tapped Athrun’s number, and hoped the call would go through.

I waited as it rang several times till Athrun finally picked up the phone.

“Rita, hi there, so what is this call for?”

Hearing that obnoxious voice, I put all the emotions I was feeling into my voice, though in the end it still came out flat and emotionless.

“What the hell did you send me to?”

“Whatever do you mean?”

Hearing him play dumb, which seemed like he was not hiding it at all, I knew it; it all but confirms that this dungeon was explored after all.

“You’re really going to play dumb?” Sighing because there was no point in humoring him, I continued and said.

“Does that bartender, that Phil guy, or whatever have a similar communication artifact to what we have?”

“Yes, of course he has one.”

“Then, can you give me his contact information and tell him to send a message to Clare that I don’t think I can come back today or maybe tomorrow?”

“Oh, sure. One second, let me text you his information, and then I’ll call him.”

Waiting for a second, I got a text notification, in which Athrun then proceeded to tell me what to do next, though I already knew how to do that.

“Okay, you see the notification that just showed up; go to the text app, and do you see the symbols there that just showed up?”

“Yeah.”

“Good, remember those symbols and go to the phone app, to the part where you see my contact information, and do you see a cross-shaped thing that looks like an addition symbol?”

I said “yeah,” and Athrun instructed me to type the phone number on the keypad and press Done. When I finished, he congratulated me on a job well done—just as I reached the end of my patience from listening to his irritating and grating voice.

Ending the call after I’d had enough of his voice, I took a long, deep breath to think positively. At least I wouldn’t make Clare worry this time—unlike that stretch of a few days I went missing in the Dradevow dungeon.

Back at the intersection, I chose the next passageway to go to, the one straight ahead from the direction that led to the safe area.

Slowly but steadily, I prodded through it, hoping that it might be the way I came from. And when I reached the end, where there was a passage that branched out to my right, I sighed in relief that nothing happened and took a step back to—

Click

Instantly, I felt that the ground I was standing on had suddenly shifted beneath my feet like something had given out, followed by a sense of weightlessness.

Time slowed down as I realized I was falling, and I immediately used my left hand, which was holding my sheath, to push off the wall of the strange square hole I fell into, toward a corner. There, I turned my eyes blue, and my hair glowed black, and I sent mana toward my legs.

I slammed the heels of my feet against each corner, using the friction to slow and stop my descent, while I used my hands, still gripping my sword and scabbard, to keep me balanced.

Looking down, I saw a pitch-black hole, and I didn’t want to know where it led to. So glancing back up, I saw what had made the ground beneath me vanish so suddenly.

There I saw… is that a trapdoor? It appeared to open downward, its surface almost perfectly camouflaged with the ground I was standing on.

Seeing what had gotten me, I tried to figure out how to get out of here—until I heard some gears turning.

That didn’t sound good. Glancing at the trapdoor, I saw it slowly closing. I had to get out of here. Sheathing my sword, I held it in my mouth to free my hands, then braced against the corner and climbed as fast as I could.

Barely making it out, I drew a long, deep breath, trying to steady myself as I got up. Grumbling a bit, that trap and others were just not fair. How the heck am I supposed to notice that?

I had no idea where to even begin figuring out the trapdoor’s trigger. The worst part was that it had caught me completely off guard; I hadn’t had a chance to react to it at all.

“Man, that is just not fair…”

I sigh, another sigh, which I am going to assume I would make more of, saying that

“I guess I just got unlucky with that one—”

Hearing the twang of the bowstring being fired and arrows whistling into the air, which I was getting all too used to, I snapped my body around and began cutting down all of the arrows coming at me.

As I did that, I heard the twang of more bows firing in a different direction, opposite to the arrows I was already dodging. But the way these arrows were shot felt different… somehow much more powerful.

Making a quick decision right there and now, and turning my body, letting myself get hit by the arrows, since my cloak is made mostly out of direwolf fur, which can take it. Plus, in combination with enhancing my body by sending my mana toward my back, it further reduces the damage I took.

I endured the pain and saw that a wall had partly opened up. As the world seemed to slow, I was stunned to see what it was.

“Oh—Gahh!!!”

Seeing a bunch of crossbows aimed in my general direction, the thing that concerned me so much was the arrow that had been fired.

They were blackish grey in color, meaning that they were made out of metal, and not just any metal, but one that could pierce through my cloak.

Hit in the shoulder, I was sent tumbling backward, but thankfully, the arrows raining down behind me had stopped, and because of the fall, most of the metal arrows from the crossbows missed me while I was lying flat on the ground, on my back.

However, I saw two arrows flying in the air, which were definitely going to hit me.

Seeing those two, I immediately swung my sword at the first arrow aimed at my stomach area while simultaneously rolling out of the way from the second arrow aimed at my leg.

However, in doing so, the arrow lodged in my shoulder jostled around, sending spikes of pain through my whole arm and body, and continued as I got up after seeing that no more traps were going off.

I grimace a bit, feeling with my hand where I got hit on my shoulder. I then took out a health potion and was about to prepare to take it out when I heard something rumbling nearby, which I knew exactly what it was.

“You've got to be kidding me. This goddamn dungeon.”

Seeing a boulder coming from a passageway, fortunately not from the one that led to the safe area, I made a run for it, following the markings on the walls I had made out of my own blood back to the safe room while gritting my teeth, enduring each step I took as a spike of pain was sent through my shoulder with the arrowhead moving in me.

Reaching there, where the boulder stopped following me and rolled off in another direction, I leaned back against the wall, gasping for breath. And when my racing heart finally calmed down, I stared back at my shoulder that had an arrow embedded in it for a bit too long.

Still holding a health potion as I ran, I uncorked it and set it on the ground. I then untied the string of my cloak so I could pull it off and pour the potion onto the wound the moment I yanked the arrow out.

So, placing my right hand on the arrow, I exhaled and immediately pulled it out.

“Gah! — God… that hurts.”

Quickly taking off my cloak, I splash the health potion on it, and then I grimace and drink the rest.

“But I guess it’s not as bad tasting as that nasty health potion.”

More focus on how bad the health potion tasted than on how much it hurts to pull out that arrow. I wonder if there is a health potion that doesn’t taste nasty. Maybe I should ask Maria about it, that book of hers, the one she got from Mila’s shop. I wonder if there is a way to make them not taste terrible.

Letting my wounds heal, I also let myself rest up as I was beginning to sort out my thoughts.

Even so, I was not about to let my guard down for a bit, in which I had my sword in hand for anything that might come, because, even though this might be a safe area, it’s strange that the boulder avoids this place. The first time, maybe a coincidence, but the second time was not.

With that thought in mind, it led me to decide to examine this place thoroughly, even though I had no idea what I was looking for.

The size of the safe area was roughly that of a normal-sized room, and the ground was relatively flat and covered almost entirely with moss.

Poking around with the tip of my sheath, I found nothing of note and ended up wasting a lot of time.

I wasn’t sure whether to feel dejected or relieved, but I walked to a corner and pulled out my phone to check the time.

It was 1 pm already, so, estimating when I entered, it has been 3 hours already.

Damn, this was going to take a long time. Once again, I thought, getting out of here was going to be really annoying.