Chapter 40 – Buffalo Dungeon (4)

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Translated by Jinmu

Read only at Novelbyu.com & Utoon.net

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“What the hell!”

Shock spread all over the checkpoint employee’s face as he swept his eyes over the carnage. Blood splashed thick enough to look like mist was rising from it. A mountain of monster corpses towering like a wall in a corridor at least fifty meters wide.

The employee opened and closed his mouth several times, then forced his unfocused pupils back under control. Only a beat late, his awakened mind began to slowly grasp the severity of the situation.

“Th-this is fucked. If this goes wrong, I’m screwed.”

With a pale face, the employee bit at his nails. At the fear filling him up, the bones in his entire body shook.

Something had gone wrong. That thought alone filled his head. They had just been little brats he thought of as mere cadets.

His trembling eyelids lifted a little, and his worry deepened. In just a few minutes, the nasolabial folds on his froglike face had deepened even more.

“I’m fucked.”

Making his boast to the female instructor look ridiculous, the dozens of buffaloes he had driven berserk with the mana stone had all been wiped out.

Ten years of experience as an employee at Buffalo Dungeon. There could not be anyone more familiar with this place than he was. That was why he had been certain, and yet….

The employee twisted his face viciously and clutched his head. He put so much force into it that a clump of hair came out in his hand.

“Fuuuuck!”

His hereditary hair loss was already progressing, and with excessive stress piled on top of it, the line of his forehead and the crown of his head were on the verge of meeting.

Debts of two billion won built up from handling cards at Cheorwon Land, the largest casino in Korea.

He had long since lost all his assets, and there were even creditors who came to his house at every opportunity and threatened to kill him.

Then, while he was wallowing in that bottomless abyss of debt, a woman calling herself an instructor at Hoakin Academy came to him with an offer.

If you just grant me one favor, I’ll pay off your debts.

A woman with dark navy hair and legs like a model. Just meeting the faded purple eyes that held a hint of dryness was enough to make the backs of his knees go weak.

Instinctively, he knew that if he went against her, his neck would no longer remain where it belonged. Besides, the proposal she made was suspicious to no end.

She handed him a mana stone from who knew where and told him to drive the buffaloes berserk. Then tame them, and when a cadet named Kang Geom-ma came by, release them all at once.

The other thing was to use that mana stone to open the tightly sealed stone gate deep in the dungeon.

It was practically a contract killing request, but for a man crawling along rock bottom, there had been no other choice.

The condition was that if he finished the job properly, then along with clearing his debt of two billion won, he could keep the mana stone too. If he put it up at a black-market auction, he would probably be able to bring in a tidy amount of cash. It was that rare and valuable.

“…Then… I can take one more big shot, hehe.”

The situation was still one he could gamble on. Deep worry was still carved into the employee’s vile face, but in an attempt to deny reality, he began forcing out a sneer.

Bloody footprints stamped across the floor like seals. From a certain point onward, they stretched toward the stone gate in a line, as though something had been dragged along.

“You little bastards, I’ll make sure to finish you off properly.”

The employee spat into both hands, then ran them over his hair. A few strands that could not bear the weight of his cold sweat slid down with droplets clinging to them.

Then, gripping his single-bladed axe-type anti-personnel weapon tight, he staggered toward the center of the dungeon. There was a crooked sort of desperation at the root of each step.

* * *

I should’ve known things were going too smoothly.

‘…Fuck.’

To think the place we were dragged to by that raging current of mana was inside the hidden dungeon. At this point, rather than being surprised, it was enough to piss me off.

No, more than that, why was the stone gate to the dungeon, which by the setting was supposed to remain tightly shut, open in the first place, and why was it gaping open as if it had been waiting for us?

And as soon as my party members and I crossed the threshold, the stone gate shut behind us as if it had been waiting for that too.

Before we entered the dungeon, I had felt a bit uneasy because of the suspicious look in the checkpoint employee’s eyes, but who could’ve expected things to turn out like this? It’s not as though I’m a god.

‘That employee bastard….’

Even if I didn’t know for sure, the sidelong glances he kept throwing at me had given me a rough idea. The completely different temperament of the buffaloes from how they’d been during the game as well. It had to be that bastard who opened the gate to this cursed hidden dungeon too.

But suddenly, a question welled up.

The stone gate to this hidden dungeon should only have been possible to open with the Quest Reward Mana Stone from the middle of the story, the Gigant Mana Stone.

It was the first mana stone dropped from the player’s perspective in Miracle’s Blessing M.

It was a mineral item that dropped when you defeated the final monster of the Gigant Dungeon, which served as the branching point where the story shifted from the early game into the middle portion.

But the sense of achievement players felt upon entering the middle of the story was only momentary. Those who obtained the Gigant Mana Stone were soon thrown into an absurd situation.

Because it was a seven-star item, the second highest among the seven rarity tiers, yet the info window gave practically no explanation at all, users who had not read a guide post had ended up grinding it up as enhancement material.

But later, users realized that seemingly useless mana stone had actually been the key to the hidden dungeon.

To make matters worse, the Gigant Mana Stone was one of the rare one-time-only drops, so the backs of players’ heads must have throbbed quite badly.

And if the hidden dungeon had at least contained some mediocre reward, maybe people would’ve been less bitter, but the reward here was none other than the unique blessing, the Blessing of Transference.

A blessing that transferred one of the owner’s blessings onto a weapon or object and imbued it there. By itself, it was almost performance-less as a single blessing, but its synergy was enormous.

If you used the Blessing of Transference and imbued it into Balmung, the weapon that would later become Leon’s, depending on the situation, you could quite literally carve enemies apart.

It was also the means to control Balmung’s coexistence of yin and yang natures, and without the Blessing of Transference, amplifying the power sleeping inside that sword was no easy task.

And yet they had hidden such an important blessing deep inside a hidden dungeon, so even without seeing it, I could vividly imagine how furious the users who had ground up the Gigant Mana Stone as enhancement material had been.

Naturally, the devs of our Miracle’s Blessing M remained consistent in ignoring them. They took the lead in setting an example of the kind of grand K-management that swells your chest with awe.

Luckily enough, I had been busy with work at the time, so I had just shoved it into my inventory and forgotten about it, which allowed me to avoid that particular disaster.

“Hah.”

When I let out a hollow sigh, white breath rose from my mouth.

Since this was a cave-type dungeon, I could understand the temperature being low, but the air here was especially cold, enough to ache into the bones.

The atmosphere was heavy too. And not just emotionally, physically. The demonic energy pricking my entire body like needles made my skin sting.

I hurriedly turned my head and checked my surroundings. My party members, each with a hand pressed to their forehead as they tried to settle their nauseated stomachs, slowly got back to their feet one by one.

Fortunately, it seemed none of them had been seriously hurt while being dragged all the way here.

Only Saki Ryozo’s school skirt had been scraped against the ground, ripping the side all the way up to around her thigh as if the skirt had split open. It seemed to be because the skirt was fairly long.

With a displeased expression, she brushed the dirt off her skirt.

In appearance, it rather resembled a qipao from the neighboring country. Her straight bare leg showed through the torn gap. Looking more closely, only the skirt had torn, and she had no scratches.

‘Lucky.’

After confirming that my party members were in good condition, I assessed the current situation.

A dome-shaped hemispherical ceiling that had to be at least thirty meters high. A cavernous chamber as wide as the academy’s training grounds. Torches lined the walls like bands, flickering low.

At the same time, the very center of the chamber was cloaked in darkness. I sharpened my eyes and looked that way. Maybe it was because of the Blessing of the Sword God, but at some point my night vision had improved.

When I narrowed my eyes slightly, the shape wrapped in darkness slowly began to surface in my sight.

A massive body seated on a great rock as though it were a throne, upper body hunched forward.

The hidden boss of Buffalo Dungeon. An A-rank monster, Minotauros.

Among the users, it was a monster familiarly nicknamed the Cow King, borrowing the name from that neighboring game.

Separate from the familiar nickname, the real thing was not all that familiar-looking.

Its head was the same as a buffalo monster’s, but below the shoulders it had a body much like that of a human. In one hand it held a long double-bladed axe, leaning on it like a staff.

Because Minotauros was a hidden boss, unlike the worthless field trash monsters, its individual martial strength was said to be on par with that of a demon.

Practically speaking, it was simply unable to use magic. Otherwise it was an extremely powerful monster treated as a demon within the story.

And on either side of it, like ministers attending their king, I could also see a pair of twin monsters that looked like inferior versions of Minotauros.

They were B-rank monsters that, back during the game, people on the forums had nicknamed Left Ox Minister and Right Ox Minister.

The twin monsters in particular were not all that threatening individually, but once their forces were combined, they were terribly troublesome.

‘Facing all three of them alone is impossible.’

Even though their eyes were closed, the pressure soaking into the floor made me swallow dryly.

“…Geom-ma, just what is that?”

Chloe came up beside me, tugged on my sleeve, and spoke in a low voice.

It seemed even she, with her specialized presence detection, had noticed. I pressed my index finger to Chloe’s lips, telling her to be quiet. She nodded soundlessly as if she understood.

Weapon and Saki were still blinking as though their eyes had not yet fully adjusted to the darkness, but they also kept their mouths shut when they saw me silently heighten my vigilance.

I turned my head to look behind us at the stone gate. It was so hard that no ordinary blade could probably leave so much as a scratch on it.

A single red diagonal line carved into the tightly shut stone door. It was clearly the Line of ??? shown in the status window.

‘Let’s get out quietly.’

The forty seconds of Blessing of Painlessness had all been used up killing the buffaloes. That meant there was no way for me to deal with Minotauros.

The materials from that thing would certainly make strengthening my weapons easier, but my life was more precious.

If I manifested the Blessing of the Sword God while holding a Daiso sashimi knife, instead of cutting through the door I would probably just end up screaming my lungs out. Still, if I used Murasame, it would hurt enough to kill me, but I could probably endure it.

After a brief moment of thought, I bit down on one Daiso sashimi knife. It was not to be used as a weapon, but as a gag to endure the pain.

Then I drew out the Murasame I had been carefully keeping hidden in my clothes. At that moment, I felt a creepy sensation from behind me. Reflexively, my gaze snapped that way.

One of Minotauros’s ears twitched. Then the two eyes that had been tightly shut seemed to slowly open, only to fly wide a moment later. And then it slowly began lifting itself off the rock it had been sitting on.

Boom.

Minotauros slammed the butt of its double-bladed axe against the ground.

The monsters standing beside it also roared with savage ferocity, as though paying homage to the Cow King.

“Moooooooooooooooooo!”

“What is that?!”

Weapon, who had been desperately keeping his mouth shut, gasped.

Boom.

When Minotauros struck the floor once more, the flickering of the torches grew violent. Soon the flames blazed up and illuminated the entire chamber.

Only then did the party members properly take in Minotauros and the two monsters beside it. The three of them were merely standing there holding brutal double-bladed axes, yet cold sweat beaded down their backs.

Now that the thing had woken up, there was no longer any hope of escaping with all our limbs intact.

Even if I cut through the door and got outside, I could not guarantee the lived of all my party members.

‘In the end.’

Grinding my teeth, I changed direction. My chilled reason and sharpened senses immediately began searching for a solution.

This was different from the midterm. Back then, I had known nothing about the mermaid demon, but I had fought Minotauros before.

If I were in peak condition, I could handle all three of them alone. But right now, that was impossible once I exceeded the time limit of Blessing of Painlessness.

Which meant I had to make use of everything available. Even if that meant coming close to a gamble. I spat out the Daiso sashimi knife clenched in my teeth and moved my dry lips.

“Weapon, can you put a pain-reduction-type buff on me?”

“Uh, yeah. I can.”

Weapon’s face had turned deathly pale when he looked at me, but now some color was returning to it.

Meanwhile, Minotauros slowly advanced toward us. Keeping all urgency off my face, I spoke one line at a time.

“How many minutes can you keep it up?”

“At most, around two minutes.”

“That’s enough. But while I fight that thing, don’t stop for even a second. If you lose focus for one second, then I probably….”

I made a motion of cutting across my throat with the edge of my hand. Weapon’s lips twitched in alarm. I gave him a faint smile to ease his tension.

“Shit. Fine. If it’s you saying it, Kang Geom-ma.”

“Saki and Chloe, I’m counting on you to handle the side mobs.”

With tension obvious on her face, Saki nodded. The fingers gripping her bow tightly were trembling faintly.

“Don’t be too tense.”

I gave a faint smile and then started walking toward the approaching Minotauros.

Saki only blinked as she watched me. The fierce emotions filling her face melted away in an instant.

I swept my eyes over each of my party members. They looked back at me and gave small nods. Resolve had settled into their eyes.

“Let’s do it just like before.”