When an eyeball the size of a human head burst and viscous fluid came sluicing down onto the floor, one of the team members couldn't help muttering.
“I'm actually going to puke.”
The monsters in this dungeon were, admittedly, revolting and horrific across the board.
The regular ones had only eyes or only mouths, but the boss the raid team now faced had both, and the eyes and mouths blooming in patches across its slick, slimy skin were hideous enough to make even hunters long since inured to monsters wince.
“Damn thing. How many eyes and mouths does it have?”
But the situation wasn't good enough to spare time for complaints.
As a tentacle-like tongue shot out of a newly opening mouth, the hunters tensed. One wrong brush against that tongue, studded all over with bumpy protrusions, and you'd lose an arm or a leg.
So far no more than two tongues had come out at once, but nobody knew what would happen next. It wasn't rare at all for a monster that had seemed to follow a pattern to suddenly break into something no one expected.
On top of that, the sticky secretion oozing from the monster's skin seemed to act as a barrier, because Dojun was the only one capable of wounding it.
“Team Leader, what do we do?”
An attack came flying in before Dojun could answer.
He threw himself clear of the tongue curving down at him and answered while deflecting the attacks that poured in after it.
“Taking them out one by one is inefficient, so...”
Thud.
Tilting his head lightly to dodge an attack sweeping overhead, Dojun shoved the rookie, who'd been caught in the same range, well out of the way, and finished.
“Let's provoke it into giving everything it's got.”
“How?”
Dojun looked head-on at the tongue flying at him yet again and replied.
“By getting on its nerves.”
Whoosh!
The studded tongue shot forward with a harsh whistle of split air. At the same time, two pairs of eyeballs spotted Dojun standing his ground and curved into round crescents, anticipating the bloodbath to come.
But the tongue, drooling as it looked forward to shredding its target, was abruptly severed without warning, and the eyeballs that had been smiling burst one after another.
Splat. Two heavy, wet lumps hit the floor, and a brief silence hung in the air.
Only for a moment, though. Having lost two tongues and four eyeballs in an instant, the boss monster flung its closed mouths wide and screamed.
Enraged by the counterattack from prey it had assumed it could finish off, the monster stamped wildly.
Dojun let out a faint laugh at that.
“It's worked up. Everyone fall back.”
Dozens of pairs of eyes rolled around searching for the culprit who'd struck it, but Dojun and his team had already darted out of reach.
Provoked well past its limit, the boss monster opened a dozen or more mouths wide and brought out its tongues, as though it meant to attack everything around it.
And that choice decided the fight.
“Idiot.”
Dojun's power, which had cut through skin thicker and tougher than those tongues, split the menacing tongues in a single stroke, drove into the gaping mouths, and shredded the soft interior.
Kheeeek!
Just as he'd guessed, unlike its hide, the monster's internal defenses were pathetic.
Lifted into the air by Dojun's power, the monster thrashed with everything it had. But the harder it struggled, the faster its insides were ruined beyond any hope of recovery.
Thoom.
A moment later, Dojun withdrew his power and looked down at the body that had crashed to the floor.
As purple fluid spread sludgily out from the monster's body, now half its original volume, the team members approached it one by one.
Watching the motionless monster, one of them murmured.
“...Is it over?”
“Not yet.”
Even with the boss monster dead, the most important part was still to come.
Sure enough, the fluid leaking from its body gathered into a single path and began to move.
The hunters held their breath and watched where the fluid, writhing like a living thing, was headed.
Those standing in its path let out sighs of relief each time it slid past them.
But those sighs turned into cheers the instant the fluid flowed into a bag sitting on the floor.
“Whoo!”
The hunters, who hadn't let their guard down even after the boss died, finally poured out their joy without reservation.
The thing to watch out for most in a dungeon was the monsters, and the next was the dungeon aftereffect you had a set chance of catching.
Fortunately nobody had caught one this time, and there was one more piece of news even better than that.
The hunter who opened the bag the monster's last trace had flowed into shouted in excitement.
“Team Leader, we hit the item jackpot!”
Dojun, who'd been keeping watch on the boss monster's corpse in case of anything unexpected, recalled his power.
Whish.
The power that had overwhelmed the boss monster swept back to Dojun like a light breeze.
The hem of his clothes and his hair fluttered and then settled, and the hunters gathered around him, chattering.
“Good work today, as always.”
“You blocked our ears with wind at the end, didn't you? It looked like it was shrieking its head off, but I couldn't hear a thing.”
“I said we got items! Look!”
Dojun, whose power let him command the wind, smoothed his mussed hair and checked the contents of the bag.
Sure enough, some of the objects inside gave off an energy that could only be felt from monsters or awakened.
Objects with special power. Items.
“Five of them.”
“Looks like one's high grade?”
The hunters craned their necks to peer into the bag.
Items were a dungeon's reward, appearing at roughly the same rate as aftereffects. Each held a special power of its own, and they traded at extremely high prices.
If it were nothing but danger, nobody would do hunter work.
Items were a hunter's main source of income, and the financial gain matched the risk of aftereffects they took on.
“It's wild how a hair's difference makes one thing a curse and another an item.”
“It's the boss monster's last burst of power. Goes into a person, it's a curse. Goes into an object, it's an item.”
“They used to call items the dungeon's blessing, remember? Then people got loud about how dare anyone use a word like blessing, so they officially agreed on calling them items.”
The conversation, started by the rookie who'd only recently become a hunter, stretched on.
The raid was finished and they'd come away with plenty of items, so the senior hunters were in high spirits, and the rookie brightened right along with them and asked.
“So that's why the dungeon's curse got changed to dungeon aftereffect too, right? Blessing this, curse that. They didn't want people making it sound so grand.”
“True, but unlike blessing, the dungeon's curse is still a phrase people use all the time.”
“Curse is the one that ought to be changed. Every now and then you get symptoms you can't really call a curse.”
“Right. Sometimes aftereffects cancel each other out and you come away ahead, and some symptoms are pure benefit from the start.”
Just as they said, dungeon aftereffects did, very occasionally, help a hunter.
You might gain a faint new ability, or an old injury might heal, or a new aftereffect might run counter to an existing one and erase the earlier problem.
But those were very rare cases. Far more often, they left you with inconveniences large and small.
“You'd have to collect about thirty bad ones before a good one might show up.”
“It's like how not every item ends up being useful to us either.”
At the seniors' explanations, the rookie hunter asked his next question, eyes full of curiosity.
“Is it true that aftereffects come from something tied to the boss monster's traits?”
“It is. With items too, the power settles into whichever of the things we brought in best matches the boss monster's traits.”
“That's why we haul around all this stuff. Before we go in, we don't know what traits the boss will have.”
The senior hunter showed the rookie the inside of the bag once more and laughed cheerfully.
“Anyway, your luck is seriously good. It's rare to land items the moment you start coming into dungeons like this.”
“One high grade, two mid, two low. You'll look at your bank account and figure you don't need to eat for a week.”
At the teasing tone, the rookie hunter looked at Dojun expectantly.
Meeting that youthful face, barely past coming of age, Dojun smiled faintly.
“That's right. Once the company finishes appraising the items, we'll pay out the performance bonus.”
When he told him roughly how much he'd be getting this time, the rookie's eyes went round.
“I get to take that much? But you're the one who killed the boss monster, Team Leader.”
Dojun's smile deepened at the fresh-faced response.
“I'll be the one getting help down the line, so it's fine.”
Following Dojun's lead, the seniors ruffled the rookie's hair roughly.
“Listen, kid, in a dungeon we help each other. That's how it works.”
“Next time you might be the one helping the team leader.”
It wasn't wrong.
Dojun's ability had worked well in this dungeon, but the next one might turn up a monster wind couldn't touch.
More than that, capable colleagues clearing dungeon after dungeon raised Seonmyeong's value, which in turn raised Dojun's odds of obtaining that item.
The one that nullified dungeon aftereffects.
As hard as it is to come by, we need to keep every possibility open.
Best of all would be for Seonmyeong Guild to obtain it directly in the middle of a raid, but even short of that, the bigger the guild grew, the faster the news would reach Dojun's ears if the item they wanted ever truly surfaced in the world.
Making Hanul's aftereffect public had also been about letting the people who traded items in secret know how desperately they wanted one.
There were no results worth mentioning yet, but...
“Me, help you, Team Leader?”
The rookie glanced back at the fallen boss monster with an awkward expression, then looked up at Dojun and answered reluctantly.
“I, uh, I'll do my best to try.”
Is trying really going to be enough for me to help you?
At the question written plainly across the rookie's face, Dojun laughed out loud and declared the dungeon cleared.
And so Seonmyeong Guild's Dungeon Raid Team 1 wrapped up a successful raid and left the dungeon.
“Raid Team 1, all members returned.”
“Good work out there.”
“Is anyone hurt? Any aftereffects?”
“Oh! Did you get items?”
After handing the items over to the guild staff waiting outside the dungeon, Dojun turned toward the owner of the gaze that kept landing persistently on his cheek.
Hanul waved at him and smiled as though he were delighted to see him.
Dojun parted from the raid team and walked over.
They belonged to the same guild, and there wasn't a person in it unaware of their relationship, so nobody paid the two of them much attention.
“Why are you here?”
At Dojun's puzzled question, Hanul smiled, the corners of his eyes curving long.
Reading something suspicious in that smile, Dojun issued a warning before the answer could arrive.
“‘Because I missed you’ is banned.”
But Hanul paid his words no mind whatsoever.
“Dojun, I missed you.”
Dojun's brows crumpled in irritation.
Here we go again.
