Ch.246[Chapter 246] Greedy Things

“That’s the place where we can escape from here.”

Aaaa looked up and pointed somewhere.

Sir Dominic and Unryu Hime gazed at where Aaaa was pointing, and at the end of a spiral stepping stone path made of small rocks, they could see a small twinkling light.

“…It looks like a star.”

Hime said, looking at the small light twinkling in the void.

“Yes. It’s a star-like thing.”

But Aaaa sighed deeply with a bitter expression.

“Actually, this used to be Area 1, Stage 7. It was a section of hardship that verified whether you had the desperation to enter Gacha Land.”

“A verification section?”

“Yes. A verification section. Originally, this stage was called the Tower of Hardship, and basically climbing these stepping stones… which were stairs back then, was the only clear condition.”

“It was still manageable back then…” Aaaa’s voice trailed off.

“This was Area 1, Stage 7…?”

Sir Dominic looked with disbelieving eyes at the stepping stones placed in this empty void.

Though he hadn’t counted precisely, there appeared to be tens or hundreds of thousands of rocks, and roughly estimating the height, it seemed to be several hundred meters.

Climbing such a place would be arduous enough, but that wasn’t the only thing hindering those who tried to ascend.

In the center of the spiral of ascending rocks, void-corrupted monkeys were throwing something from within the void, but in the black space of the void, it was impossible to properly distinguish what they were throwing.

To avoid what they were throwing, one would have to either watch the void monkeys’ movements as they prepared to throw something, or sense and dodge objects already in flight by intuition.

Above all, Sir Dominic was concerned about the hissing sounds of snakes and the clanking of traps that he had been hearing since arriving here.

The sounds were very faint, but the void space was quiet enough for even those subtle sounds to be transmitted clearly.

“Has anyone actually cleared Area 1, Stage 7?”

Sir Dominic clicked his tongue at the almost cruel difficulty.

Sir Dominic tried jumping in place for a moment.

As a tank in the system, Sir Dominic didn’t get much of a bonus for jumping or running, but being 3-star, he could jump quite high with the help of his stats.

Sir Dominic continued to hop up and down, gauging whether he could cross between the stepping stones, and concluded that he could cross them with some room to spare.

“…In other words, if someone had slightly lower stats, they wouldn’t have been able to escape.”

“Pardon?”

“Ah, nothing. Just talking to myself.”

As Sir Dominic recalled, Area 1 was where one learned the basic systems of Gacha Land.

And there was a stage so difficult that even 3-star Sir Dominic would struggle?

Even though Sir Dominic had slightly higher stats compared to other 3-stars, he could barely jump from rock to rock.

People who first arrived at Gacha Land and tried to clear stages would find it impossible.

That’s what Sir Dominic thought, and indeed, it wasn’t a difficulty that a Newbie could possibly overcome.

Perhaps Sir Dominic’s thoughts showed on his face, as Aaaa began to explain in more detail.

“It wasn’t this difficult from the beginning. The rocks were wider, the gaps weren’t this far apart, and the height wasn’t this tall.”

“Then why did it become like this?”

“Because of a bug.”

Aaaa gave a clear answer to Sir Dominic’s question.

“Since this place was created in the early days of Gacha Land, they forgot to set the resolution. I don’t know if you’re aware, but the resolution in early Gacha Land was… a mess.”

Aaaa shuddered briefly, recalling the past.

“Many people say those were the good days, but I prefer now. Higher freedom means more diverse speedrun routes. Focusing on just one… might drive me insane.”

“That was a long tangent,” Aaaa said, and continued.

“Anyway, when the resolution was expanded, a bug occurred in Area 1, Stage 7. The existing objects remained the same, but only the resolution increased, causing problems. The distance between objects began to widen according to the ratio between the old resolution and the expanded resolution.”

Aaaa recalled Area 1, Stage 7, which had been full of hardships.

You could earn an extra star by clearing it within 12 minutes and 30 seconds, but by the time Aaaa challenged Stage 7, the stage was already uncontrollably distorted.

“Well, fortunately the coders noticed. Eventually, they removed Stage 7 from Area 1 and consolidated the remaining parts into 5 stages. I watched this while eating popcorn. It was quite a spectacle.”

“Have you ever seen eight coders carrying an entire space on their shoulders? When I asked why they didn’t use other equipment to move it, they said this was more cost-effective,” Aaaa chuckled briefly.

“Anyway, that’s why this is the place to escape from Glitchburg. Despite being distorted by bugs, the essential part remains. Namely, the fact that clearing the stage takes you to the Story Mode lobby.”

“Ah.”

Sir Dominic’s question about why they had come here was clearly answered by Aaaa’s explanation.

“Now let’s climb up.”

Aaaa took another deep breath and was the first to cross the stepping stone.

“If you fall here, you’ll have to start from the beginning, so concentrate as much as possible.”

After saying that, Aaaa skillfully moved between rocks and began climbing upward.

Sir Dominic and Hime blankly watched Aaaa’s movements, which would make any observer marvel.

“What are you doing? Hurry up!”

Aaaa shouted while jumping to avoid something thrown by a void monkey.

Snapping out of their daze, Sir Dominic and Hime looked at each other without either taking the initiative.

“…Let’s go.”

“Yes.”

Sir Dominic gestured for Hime to go first.

Though Sir Dominic had quite high stats, he wasn’t as agile as Hime, so he thought he might block her path if he went first.

Hime realized this was Sir Dominic’s consideration.

Hime nodded slightly to Sir Dominic, indicating she would go first, and instantly began traversing the rocks.

Truly nimble movements befitting a kunoichi.

Sir Dominic watched Hime briefly as she quickly created a safe distance, then finally jumped toward the rock in front of him.

In contrast to the almost silent landings of the two ahead of him, Sir Dominic’s landing made quite a loud noise.

“…This might be more difficult than I thought.”

Sir Dominic barely maintained his balance on the rock, which wobbled slightly up and down from the impact of his landing.

When he leaped toward the second rock, he misjudged the distance and almost slipped at the edge.

The void was dark and endless, making it difficult to gauge distances, and the fact that Sir Dominic had only one eye, making him weak with three-dimensional perception, also played a part.

However, Sir Dominic overcame these adversities and continued climbing the rocks one by one.

The journey was still long, but he proceeded with the mindset that he would eventually reach the destination.

…

The slime wriggled forward through the dark space.

In truth, the slime wasn’t moving with any firm purpose.

It was simply moving as its instincts dictated, as its instincts led.

“?”

How far had it traveled?

The slime continued to devour broken things nearby as it moved.

From backgrounds with broken graphics due to errors, to objects stuck or buried somewhere due to bugs, to core files misidentified as viruses due to errors, and even documents whose contents had become jumbled during transfer—the slime devoured everything indiscriminately.

Objects that entered the slime’s body stayed inside for varying periods before being expelled, and somehow, they appeared to be fixed when they came out.

The slime grew larger each time it ate something riddled with bugs and errors. Its body, which was already larger than a spider tank when it met Sir Dominic, had now swollen to a size that could fill a soccer field.

Yet it still seemed hungry, continuing to swallow and expel objects repeatedly.

How much more time passed?

The slime suddenly stopped advancing at a certain location.

The now-massive slime surged forward due to inertia before returning to its original state. While this might have looked cute when it was small, now that it had grown so large, it looked like a giant monster about to attack.

As its movement ceased, the slime carefully examined what was in front of it.

It was a triangular pillar-shaped structure covered with inscriptions and geometric shapes. Looking closely, each side of the triangle appeared to be at least 10 meters long, and the height of the pillar extended from the floor to the ceiling of Glitchburg.

This strange triangular pillar featured inverted pentagrams, hexagrams, and regular 13-sided polyhedra that could be seen even at a glance. About half were comprehensible shapes, but the other half were filled with shapes that couldn’t exist in reality.

The slime stared intently at these shapes, then suddenly lunged forward and swallowed the pillar into its body.

Black energy burst from the triangular pillar in resistance, but escaping from the already enormous slime was a remote possibility.

Eventually, the black energy attached to the triangular pillar seemed to give up everything and dissolved into the slime’s mucus, disappearing.

The slime no longer moved, but in a strange state of having swallowed or embraced the pillar, it continued to grow larger and larger.