[Blue-Yellow]
Since the two challengers had chosen different colors, the punishment struck. Reborn into an F-rank body, I could barely withstand even a minor penalty like this. In that case, before the damage piled up any further, should I stop worrying about what the other person chose and just stick with Yellow from now on?
‘Huh?’
But even that thought proved meaningless. The sight of the next room opening before me was etched deep into the memories of my soul.
‘There are no pillars.’
A corridor where the faint sound of wind could be heard.
‘From what little I could make out back then, the entire space was even under teleportation magic...’
This was the final room of the gate.
‘Should I heal myself first?’
Since the trap existed merely to measure its subjects rather than torment them, the dungeon was naturally quite short. With that in mind, I healed my battered body just enough to stagger onward.
There was no point wasting mana to restore myself completely.
From here on, the condition of my body would hardly matter anyway.
Tak.
Before me yawned an unfamiliar space, its mouth spread wide as though waiting for some living creature to step inside.
I entered.
As if it had been waiting for me, the dungeon’s final room immediately flooded with brilliant light. Unlike in other dungeons, however, this glow was not the prelude to teleportation.
[Complete]
“Hmm?”
It was nothing particularly important, so I had completely forgotten about it until now, but there was actually a message left by the Gisimche at the very end of this gate.
[In this world, there are soil, stones, wind, and countless other things, but in the end, there is only one greatest resource.]
Who would have thought the presentation would be exactly the same?
True to a race so fond of flashy effects, the EX-rank gate concluded with yet another rather pointless ceremony. Even someone deaf could have sensed it: a beam of letters, engraved into the dungeon during its construction, suddenly appeared directly before the challenger’s eyes.
[A curious beast full of thoughts but with an empty heart.]
Sentences appeared and vanished repeatedly in the air.
[Even so, people are love.]
Well, since the Gisimche had arranged all of this in the first place, there was probably no profound sincerity behind it. Most likely, they had simply taken some saying that existed on their planet and awkwardly stitched it together to suit the situation.
[Rain and gusts.
Heatstroke and cold.
Beneath all of these, the driving force that preserves people for a long time is, in truth, a few incomprehensible sacrifices — honorable wounds.]
[Therefore, I judge the sacrifices made here by their value, and regard the one who suffered the greatest loss as the ultimate victor, granting them a reward related to life itself...]
The message came to an end.
Another flash of light swept over the glowing letters and erased them, and at last I reached the true exit point of the gate.
Now that I thought about it, this was something I had never managed to figure out even in my previous life.
Why did the Gisimche always accompany spatial teleportation magic with light or shadow?
As many scholars had speculated, was it simply a matter of personal taste?
“!”
!
...
A little later.
When I opened my eyes again, my familiar nemesis was standing before me.
It was the moment Korea’s third and fourth S-ranks came face to face.
Unlike the path we had followed until now, the room we stood in was enormous—so vast that it was difficult to make out where it ended.
‘Huh?’
It was just as I realized that the final area was circular.
The awakener on the opposite side suddenly moved.
He broke into a fierce sprint, so fast that an F-rank’s eyesight could barely follow him. If an S-rank charging at that speed were to ram someone head-on with his bare body, a weakling at the very bottom of the pyramid would probably collapse instantly with ruptured organs.
But before Kang Changho’s shadow had even fully vanished, something rose to stop him.
Swoosh!
A thin strand of light suddenly shot up from the floor.
Unlike the ordinary iron chains used on Earth, this was a magical restraint of an entirely different kind. At first glance, it looked like nothing more than a simple white thread, but up close, its fibers resembled the texture of human muscle.
What exactly was this brilliantly glowing binding?
‘It’s similar to [Binding].’
It was a suppression spell designed to completely restrict movement.
And judging by its tremendous thickness, its power was on an entirely different level from the bindings used by Earth’s sorcerers.
Kang Changho was mercilessly caught in the dungeon’s trap, unable to free himself.
Crack.
Would things have been any easier if people simply lived decent lives from the beginning?
Before long, Kang Changho’s arms, legs, abdomen, and neck were all entangled in binding magic.
The restraints around his upper body were especially short, as though they had been designed for some six-legged beast forced to crawl along the ground. To keep his neck from being torn apart, he had no choice but to drop abruptly to his knees.
“Oh my.”
Tuk.
The sight was unfamiliar in more ways than one.
It felt like the first time I had ever seen Kang Changho lower himself like this, so the words slipped out before I could stop them.
At that, Kang Changho raised his gaze from a height strangely unsuited to his massive frame and spoke first.
“...No matter how many times I asked outside, you kept pretending you knew nothing. And now you’re finally showing your true colors?”
True colors?
I rolled my eyes for a moment before finally realizing what he meant.
Come to think of it, the timing of this EX-rank gate really was suspiciously convenient.
‘Aha.’
This had unintentionally made me look far more suspicious.
From Kang Changho’s perspective, didn’t it seem as if I were completely in league with the Gisimche?
A sacrifice of ambition who had been captured and confined suddenly escaped thanks to the gate’s unique spatial teleportation. Even though Kang Changho had made what appeared to be perfectly rational choices, the dungeon had ultimately judged him the loser.
Under those circumstances, it was hardly surprising that his suspicions had grown this sharp.
‘Still, from the perspective of an Alphauri like me, being mistaken for a Gisimche ally—or worse, one of their kind—is seriously offensive no matter how I look at it.’
Even so, I was relieved that things had gone better than expected.
If something had gone wrong, the appearance of this EX-rank gate could have inflicted serious harm on innocent people.
Since this dungeon always selected an even number of participants, if its range had been even slightly different, some unrelated person might have been forced to clear it with us.
It was entirely possible that Kang Changho and some third party—or even this body of mine and a complete stranger—could have been selected as challengers.
‘Trying to lure in the Gisimche through pain without even knowing how the dungeon worked... no matter how I dress it up, it was still a gamble.’
Speaking as someone who had analyzed this gate in my previous life as an Alphauri, this feeding box had several serious flaws.
Most importantly, once the observation process ended, it returned the challengers directly to the place where they had originally been about to be devoured.
Kidnapper.
Victim.
If the two of us had not {N•o•v•e•l•i•g•h•t} been selected as such a perfectly matched pair, there was a very real possibility that the entire clearing process would have ended with every disadvantage falling on the alien.
It was then.
Paat.
While I was turning those thoughts over in my head, the “reward” mentioned in the latter half of the dungeon’s message finally appeared.
A ring of light formed around my arm, its texture like a bundle of tightly wound threads. Visually, it looked almost identical to the band that had pierced the S-class Hunter earlier.
It was a bracelet granted to the person who had suffered the greatest loss inside the EX-rank gate.
And at the same time, it served as proof of victory.
“Are you wondering what this is?”
I extended the arm wrapped in the ring of light and showed it to Kang Changho.
“Do you really still think that way after seeing me like this?”
Ssshk.
But I had not stretched out my arm to show off the victor’s bracelet.
I was simply exposing more of my upper body.
Because of the [Blue-Yellow] situation, damage had accumulated across my body until I barely looked human anymore.
Seriously, what was so great about these damn victor privileges anyway?
At this point, the skin on my neck and arms had been burned so black that it was almost impossible to distinguish from the black T-shirt I was wearing.
So I used my condition to argue my case.
Thanks to this damned dungeon, I had ended up like this.
Did I really still look like someone on the monsters’ side?
“Oh...”
But that bastard Kang Changho responded to my question with exactly that kind of reaction.
“That’s a bit unexpected.”
Apparently, he had assumed that since I was one of the Gate Creator’s compatriots, the penalties would not affect me at all.
“I was wondering what kind of serious injury you had. Turns out it was a fire-attribute trap.”
“It was worse than that. If I hadn’t had any healing-type skills, I would’ve died instantly halfway through!”
“Oh.”
Was that really the right thing to say while standing in front of a compatriot whose body had been burned half to death?
‘As expected, this guy is hopeless.’
The longer the conversation continued, the firmer my resolve became.
Still wearing the band of light created by the dungeon, I turned my head.
What I saw was the inscription on the wall that would play the most important role in creating the dungeon’s exit.
[A white bracelet is required to make this choice]
[*Last question:
If you safely send the fellow challenger who came with you back to their hometown and open the exit through your own sacrifice, then ‘Blue.’
On the other hand, if you want to open the exit of this area without taking damage by sacrificing the opposing challenger, ‘Yellow’]
I am only explaining this now because we have finally reached the question, but the original EX-class gate discovered on Alphauri was a trap with a survival rate of only 52%.
52%.
Roughly one out of every two challengers died.
It was a deadly trap.
And the reason only half of the intelligent beings caught inside it survived was because, as you can see, a terrifying mechanism awaited them at the very end.
‘This dungeon requires a sacrifice to open the exit.’
The moment I understood the true nature of the dungeon, I decided that I could kill Kang Changho.
‘As expected, it’s no different from my past life.’
The loser, tightly restrained by the higher-level spell [Binding] and unable to move even a finger, would soon have their fate decided by this final question.
‘Strangely enough, if you choose Blue, Kang Changho dies and the exit opens.’
The inability to protect my own life made me look like a criminal with a knife pressed to my throat.
But this was only natural.
Any hunter with enough experience clearing dungeons would have understood the theme by now.
The theme of this gate was the recognition of good deeds, like something out of an old-fashioned fairy tale.
Therefore, it was only natural that the fool who had never once chosen ‘Yellow’—the option that could harm the other challenger—would eventually be rewarded.
“Have you seen this writing, Hunter Kang Changho?”
Thud.
The S-rank trapped inside the magical frame attempted to rise.
Even that slight movement tore open the skin on Kang Changho’s arms, but I felt nothing at the sight of mammalian blood and continued speaking.
“This place is similar to that gate called [Iron Maiden]. From the wording of the question, it looks like one of the two challengers has to be sacrificed for the exit to appear...”
My tone gradually changed.
“But don’t worry. Of course I’ll choose Blue.”
“....!”
Blue.
At first glance, simply reading the dungeon’s inscription made it seem as though the winner would die and the loser would escape.
But there was a very deliberate reason I said it that way.
‘This dungeon is designed so that only the result of the final question is reversed!’
This gate, with its 52% survival rate, had once been a demon of Alphauri that devoured as many as thirty top-ranked mages.
Back when I was preparing for an all-out conflict with the Gisimche in my previous life, I had been forced to work on eliminating this deadly trap as well.
Even after the Gisimche caused the [Descent] phenomenon, they continued scattering feeding traps everywhere without end, and this retributive trap would kill any mage unfortunate enough to step within its range.
At the time, I had already been exhausted from dealing with the descendents, so dismantling traps had felt like nothing more than an irritating waste of time.
‘Looks like painstakingly going through those blueprints one by one finally paid off.’
But that was all in the past now.
I smiled to myself and spoke again.
“Why are you so surprised?”
“Blue?”
“I’m choosing Blue and sacrificing myself. Of course, after everything you’ve done to me up until now, I can’t exactly say I have warm feelings toward you, Hunter.”
“....”
“Ha, but there’s nothing I can do about it now.”
Someone hearing that might think it sounded completely different from what an alien was actually thinking.
And they would be right.
“If only one person can leave this dungeon alive, then... considering that my body’s already wrecked and half-crippled, of course we should save the S-rank who’s still in one piece.”
I was giving Kang Changho a very thorough lesson right now.
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