Chapter 21 – Floor 4. Playing Hero

After leaving the altar, I couldn’t help but marvel at the very fragrant and fucking terrible smell that I had become so accustomed to that I hadn’t noticed it—a stench that made me want to twist my nose off.

I’d lived in a place like this for a week?

I’d be lucky if I didn’t develop respiratory issues when I got out.

“Ugh… ugh..! When I get back, I’ll squeeze out not just your life but medical expenses too..!”

Having charged up my driving force to move forward by piling on yet another grudge against that anonymous bastard, my steps became more powerful.

Floor 4 was narrower than the floors I’d traversed so far.

Partly because the altar area took up space, but also because the base scale of the generated floor was the smallest.

The placement of exits was somewhat fixed—straight ahead from the stairs descending from Floor 3.

Located on the opposite side of the map, in most runs, you could just hold down the forward key and proceed straight ahead, and the exit would be there.

Blocking the stairs to Floor 5 was the Wanderer, a crazed lunatic who had been there since who knows when.

‘Well, technically it’s not blocking…’

Actually, it’s not blocking the path but just standing in the middle of the corridor where the stairs to Floor 5 are located, so you could simply avoid it by going around and not have to fight.

As long as you don’t enter the Wanderer’s attack range, it remains neutral, which is why many experienced players like myself would use outlandish tricks to toy with it, but once it recognizes an enemy, it never returns to a neutral state, so I couldn’t pull such pranks now.

“But it’s too clean for them to have passed through here.”

Although some time had passed, there were no enemy corpses in the corridors of Floor 4, nor any signs of doors being opened or investigated.

And they supposedly had a large group of about 20 people.

Perhaps that criminal called Dave had lied to escape danger?

‘I’ll know everything when I meet them anyway… let’s focus on finding what I need to find first.’

That was why I veered off to the side instead of taking the path straight ahead, even though I knew the Wanderer was there.

The Wanderer, the mini-boss of Floor 4, consists of two phases.

More precisely, after defeating it once with a specific item, that item is consumed, and the Wanderer is resurrected, immediately starting phase two.

Each phase was a harsh consecutive battle befitting the name of a mini-boss, but just as with the Giant Slime, to obtain the silver chest filled with rewards, I had to deal with the Wanderer in this way.

And naturally, I intended to claim the Wanderer’s silver chest too.

“Considering Severa, if mini-boss-level creatures can be made into onaholes, turning the Wanderer into an onahole would make the King of the Sewers a piece of cake.”

Thinking about the leather bag that would have to face both a player and a mini-boss, plus an onahole with a spoonful of holy essence added, I felt almost tearful with pity.

The dirty water that had been wetting my ankles up until now was absent on Floor 4.

This was thanks to the structure being different from the upper floors.

There was a water channel in the middle of the corridor for water to flow through, while the edges of the corridor were dry stone floors for comfortable walking.

The exploration difficulty was noticeably lower than the previous floors.

However…

Splash!

“KYEEEEEEEEK!!! Flying piranha!”

A fish with gleaming sharp teeth leaped out of the flowing water, flying at me to bite me.

SWOOSH—!

With a sound of air being sliced, the black-bladed axe swung down, vertically cutting through the body of the flying fish.

Blood with a fishy smell splattered in the air, and scattered entrails plopped down onto the floor, dirtying the corridor.

“Phew… that startled me.”

The stress was immense thanks to these ugly fish that would occasionally attack at unexpected timings.

“Fuck’s sake. These bastards look like you’d die from madness rather than parasites if you ate them as sashimi, but they sure are vicious.”

The fish, with its fins curled in strange directions, bulging eyes, and hideous teeth sprouting all over, was utterly repulsive.

The visual was so revolting that I’d probably never be able to eat sashimi again even after returning.

『Twisted Meat』Level: 03

Health: 0/18 □□□□□□□□□□

【A fish that has become grotesque for some reason. Its flesh is a delicacy, but eating it is not recommended.】​

It was like a sunfish that dies with just one hit, but since it ambushes like this, occasionally getting hit when caught off guard was unavoidable.

One might ask if I couldn’t just avoid being caught off guard, but I was confident I could make anyone who asked such a question unable to ask ever again.

“At least I found it. Ugh, fishy smell.”

Having sliced up about thirty Twisted Meat on the way here, my arm and shoulder felt numb from swinging the heavy axe.

“There’s no point in washing up. It’s not permanent, right?”

I tried lifting my arm and pretending to sniff my scent, but my nose was already numb from the terrible smell, so I couldn’t detect anything.

Creak—

The pitiful wail of aging wood approaching the end of its life, twisting under weight, echoed in the room.

Yes, wood.

Since the only wood that could be seen in these underground sewers was the firewood set used for bonfires, the old wooden planks making up this room were strikingly out of place.

This room, filled with the musty smell of rotting wood and a thick layer of dust, contained a table cluttered with some kind of apparatus, a bookshelf with a few books, and a jar filled with rotten water, filled who knows when.

It was clearly an old laboratory where someone had been conducting research, but not the kind of facility one would expect in underground sewers.

“So what is this place?”

“You haven’t seen this place before either, it seems.”

A mysterious laboratory that even Severa, who had passed through these underground sewers as a hero in the past, didn’t know about.

I found a piece of parchment on the verge of disintegration on the table and handed it to Severa, who was looking around the laboratory with an indifferent expression.

“It’s a laboratory made by those fools who worshipped the doom you’re so fond of.”

A human anatomical diagram, beetles, the sun, and tentacles—all mixed into a bizarre symbol.

That’s what was drawn on the parchment.

***

Rustle- Thud! Rustle-

I was pulling out books from the bookshelf one by one or rearranging them to find where the mechanism was.

The item that could be found in this laboratory would only appear if the gimmick was triggered.

While I was busy doing this, Severa silently glared at the parchment with the symbol that I had placed on the table.

She was probably curious about the truth.

“Want me to tell you?”

“…Do you know something about this facility?”

Seeing Severa’s eagerness to hear, I stopped pulling books in and out of the bookshelf and leaned back against it.

It wouldn’t collapse, right?

Though old, it was still heavy, so it should hold.

‘No wait. What if termites have eaten through it!’

What happens to wood devoured by termites—those non-ant, human-unfriendly insects despite being called white ants—was obvious.

If the bookshelf couldn’t support my weight and toppled over, I would fall embarrassingly, look like an idiot, and injure my back, making it impossible to demonstrate my extraordinary hip strength to Severa as I had before.

It took only 0.7 seconds to calculate and simulate all these potential futures!

Trembling with fear, I meekly moved away from the bookshelf.

Severa looked at me strangely, but she should understand. She couldn’t possibly comprehend my deep thoughts and love.

“Sigh… Is this what loneliness feels like?”

“What on earth…”

The Heretic’s Laboratory.

A story object for the Wanderer that can be seen on Floor 4, and also a story object closely related to the final boss.

“I don’t know the details either. Just briefly, an ancient demon worshipper who was branded a heretic crawled into the town’s underground sewers, built this laboratory, and continued researching demons.”

Interestingly, if you investigate the bookshelf in this laboratory, a list of several books appears, and selecting one provides brief text summaries of the book’s contents.

Since there were nearly fifty books, not many people investigated them all, but “not many” means that there were still some who did.

The collective intelligence of the gallery displayed its prowess once again here.

They organized the contents, hidden passages, speculations about erased text, and connections with other story objects for each book, anticipating the secrets of this laboratory.

A piece of firewood that had burned as gallery bait for a full month.

“And it’s also the reason why these underground sewers became a magical realm.”

“…”

Severa couldn’t close her mouth, as if in shock.

“So the animals that turned into monsters in these sewers…”

“This laboratory is the source.”

“And the reason why portals opened leading to other places, from which those damnable demons poured out…”

“That too.”

Severa’s red eye-light, which had been invisible until now, began to flare up again, fueled by lingering hatred.

Unlike the malice directed at me, which was close to irritation, this deep anger, as if she would follow all the way to hell to tear them apart, was so sharp it made my skin tingle.

Perhaps she truly was a hero at heart who loved people, even though she had fallen to become a mere specter after succumbing to great evil.

“The demon worshipper who created this laboratory wanted to reach the essence of demons to gain greater power.”

I picked up one of the seemingly intact magical apparatus among those that had deteriorated with time, examined it briefly, then carelessly threw it to the floor.

With a thud, the device split in half. After kicking it aside, I continued.

“During that process, he actually managed to make contact with a demon. Whether it was a real demon or not, I couldn’t tell, but since he created such a thing, I guess it must be real, right?”

“Could that demon be the doom?”

“Probably.”

Severa countered with a face that said it couldn’t be.

“Impossible! No human can maintain their sanity while witnessing that being!”

“That’s why he created this.”

I kicked the bookshelf behind me with all my might.

CRASH!!!

Books flew from the recoil, and with a loud noise, several wooden pieces broke as the bookshelf collapsed.

White dust rose and wooden fragments scattered.

“Cough! Cough! Ugh… would it kill you to clean up once in a while? No wonder you’re just obsessing over some eyeball monster.”

It wasn’t something to say about a place where no one had lived for a long time, but whatever.

If you’re offended, don’t die and live long.

There was a hidden space beneath the collapsed bookshelf.

And something carefully preserved.

A bizarrely glowing black jewel in the shape of an irregular triangular pyramid with edges treated in red lines.

“The Radiant Asymmetric Polyhedron.”

When I picked it up in my hand, I could feel the immense magical power sleeping inside, even with my minimal mental stat.

No, “sleeping” wasn’t quite the right word.

After all, it was the cause that turned an ordinary underground sewer into this kind of magical realm just by the magic leaking from it.

As soon as Severa saw the Radiant Asymmetric Polyhedron, she gradually dimmed her flaring eye-light as if understanding everything.

“It would take time, but if we could just destroy this…! No… what’s your reason for showing this to me?”

Severa, who had been beaming with joy at the thought that White Chamber could finally be free from the clutches of the evil demon, suddenly became calm as if turning off her emotions and asked me.

I chose my answer to that question.

To be honest, there wasn’t much of a reason.

Neither “searching for it to eat the Wanderer’s reward” nor “to survive in a dungeon I was sent to without reason” would be answers she’d hope for.

Since it came to this, should I play along?

Although I had treated her as an onahole for sexual relief, her power was essential for my future exploration.

“You called me a hero, didn’t you?”

“What…”

Anyway, my only path to survival was to cut down the enemies blocking my way, break the head of the tentacle-eyed monster called “doom,” and then throw ㅇㅇ(112.311) into the waters off Incheon.

If the direction is the same, what’s wrong with taking on the title of hero as a side job?

“Let’s play hero for a bit!”