Chapter 33
Chaeho lightly brushed the red powder off his fingertips.
The mana crystals that had formed along the wall crumbled apart and scattered into the air.
“The deeper we go, the heavier the air gets.”
After finishing their short break, Chaeho stood up and rolled his neck from side to side. The sound of his bones cracking echoed through the silent mine tunnel.
“We’re on the path leading into the deeper section. It’ll probably be on a completely different level from the area we just passed through.”
Seo Taekyung nodded as he tightened his grip on the handle of his massive shield. There was a tension on his face that he couldn’t hide.
Yoon Jia and Kim Dohyun, standing behind him, also swallowed dryly and gripped their staffs tightly.
Unlike the middle section, which they had managed to clear relatively comfortably, the density of the mana touching their skin was completely different here.
Every breath made the inside of their lungs sting.
Chaeho calmly stared ahead.
Beyond the pitch-black passageway, an ominous red glow flickered.
“Let’s go. If we stand around too long, our bodies will only get stiff.”
His dry, emotionless voice actually helped loosen the tension in the other party members’ shoulders.
Seo Taekyung took a deep breath before taking the lead.
Chaeho followed closely behind him.
The deeper they went, the stranger the passage became.
Jagged rocks covered the walls on every side, while sticky mana fluid had pooled across the floor, making every step unpleasantly wet.
How long had they been walking?
Seo Taekyung suddenly stopped.
The narrow mine tunnel split into two paths ahead of them.
“The path splits here. Let me check the map…”
Seo Taekyung was just about to pull out his tablet.
Rrrrk.
Chaeho’s ears caught an extremely faint vibration.
It wasn’t coming up through the soles of his feet.
The walls on both sides were trembling slightly.
“Seo Taekyung. Raise your shield.”
At Chaeho’s low voice, Seo Taekyung instinctively shoved the tablet away and raised his shield.
The next moment—
RUMBLE!
The red stone walls on both sides began shaking violently.
It wasn’t a simple earthquake.
Dust poured down like a waterfall as huge cracks tore open across the walls.
“W-What the hell is this?!”
Kim Dohyun shouted in shock as he stumbled backward.
Chaeho’s gaze immediately turned toward the right passage.
The dirt on the ground rose like a wave.
Then a swarm of creatures with glowing red eyes burst out from beneath it.
Kiaaaak!
They were Armored Moles, their entire bodies covered in gear-like shells.
The monsters tore through the ground with their sharp claws and immediately charged madly toward the party.
There weren’t just one or two.
More than ten of them came rushing forward, filling the cramped tunnel.
“They’re coming from the right!”
Seo Taekyung shouted as he turned his shield toward the right.
But the danger wasn’t limited to that side.
Kiiiiik!
This time, a shrill mechanical screech erupted from the left passage.
Dozens of razor-sharp legs crawled along the walls.
A swarm of Ironclad Centipedes, their bodies shining with a cold blue metallic glow, covered both the walls and ceiling as they rushed forward.
Acidic venom dripped from their mouths, melting the stone floor and sending deadly fumes into the air.
“Seo Taekyung! They’re coming from the left too!”
Yoon Jia shouted urgently, her face going pale.
Seo Taekyung’s expression hardened.
They had been ambushed from both directions right in the middle of a narrow fork.
His massive shield could completely block one passage.
But physically, there was no way for him to stop the centipedes pouring in from behind them at the same time.
“Damn it! Yoon Jia, magic! Do something about the left side with magic!”
Seo Taekyung shouted urgently while smashing his shield into the moles charging from the right.
BANG!
A heavy impact rang out.
Seo Taekyung’s body was pushed backward.
Yoon Jia hurriedly raised her staff and gathered mana.
However, the flame forming at the end of her staff trembled violently.
“W-Where am I supposed to shoot?! The centipedes are spread all over the ceiling and walls. I’d have to use an area spell…”
Her voice began to tremble, almost as though she were about to cry.
Using a powerful area-of-effect spell inside such an old, narrow tunnel would inevitably catch her party members in the blast.
Worse, there was a high chance the ceiling would collapse and bury all of them alive.
While she hesitated, the centipedes crawling along the walls suddenly launched themselves forward.
On the right, the Armored Moles swarmed around Seo Taekyung’s shield as if they were about to chew straight through it.
Their formation was collapsing.
It was a desperate situation where total annihilation seemed only moments away.
Chaeho quietly lowered his gaze.
There was no reason to hesitate.
[Time Slow].
Every sound in the world suddenly became distant, as if submerged underwater.
The desperate expressions of his party members.
The dust floating through the air.
The sharp legs of the centipedes leaping forward.
Even the jawbone of a mole deforming against Seo Taekyung’s shield.
Everything stretched out sluggishly as though someone had pressed the pause button.
Chaeho’s cold gaze swept across the battlefield.
His eyes weren’t merely searching for weaknesses in the monsters.
The narrow tunnel.
The fork in the path.
The positions of his allies.
The flow of mana.
The entire battlefield unfolded inside his mind like a massive three-dimensional map.
The Armored Moles on the right are fast, but they’re charging in a straight line.
Seo Taekyung’s shield can hold them off for approximately seven seconds.
His gaze immediately shifted toward the left.
The Ironclad Centipedes are spreading across the walls and ceiling.
Approximately five seconds until they reach us.
Chaeho’s eyes quickly followed the centipedes’ movement paths.
Then his gaze stopped on the upper section of the left tunnel where they were crawling.
There was one spot where the red glow had gathered in an unusually distorted way.
Because of the earlier shaking, deep cracks had already spread through it.
It was a structural weak point.
I don’t need an area spell.
A single concentrated strike is enough.
Chaeho instantly calculated the slight difference between the arrival times of the monsters on both sides, as well as the weak point in the ceiling.
The entire process took only 0.1 seconds.
The moment he released the skill, the frozen world rushed back into motion at insane speed.
Kiaaaak!
“Taekyung! Hold the right side!”
Chaeho’s commanding voice tore through the tunnel.
The certainty in his tone made Seo Taekyung, who had been panicking only moments before, instinctively plant his feet and lock his shield firmly in place.
Chaeho immediately turned toward Yoon Jia and pointed at the upper-left section of the wall.
“Jia, Fire Lance at the crack at eleven o’clock!”
Chaeho’s precise instruction cut straight through Yoon Jia’s fear of using an area spell.
There was no time to think.
She instinctively aimed her staff toward the crack he had pointed out.
“Fire Lance!”
A compressed spear of flame shot forward like a cannon shell.
BOOM!
The Fire Lance struck the exact center of the crack and exploded.
At that moment, the barely stable structure of the left tunnel’s ceiling gave way.
RUMBLE—CRASH!
Dozens of tons of rock and red ore poured down like a waterfall.
It was the exact path the Ironclad Centipede swarm had been about to turn into.
Squish! Crunch!
Disgusting sounds of bodies being crushed rang out.
A large portion of the centipede swarm was flattened beneath the massive rocks.
The fallen rubble completely blocked the left passage, forming a solid stone wall.
In a single instant, one side of the two-pronged ambush had been completely disabled.
But not every centipede had been crushed.
Just before the rocks fell, two Ironclad Centipedes had launched themselves into a blind spot and were now flying toward the rear of the party.
Seo Taekyung couldn’t move because he was holding off the moles on the right.
And at that exact opening—
Chaeho kicked off the ground.
Slash.
His sword cut through the air with a cold metallic sound.
The head of one Ironclad Centipede flying toward them was cleanly split in two before its body crashed to the floor.
Chaeho didn’t stop moving.
Lowering his body, he slipped beside Seo Taekyung’s shield.
An Armored Mole that had forced its way through a gap opened its jaws, aiming for Chaeho’s ankle.
Chaeho pulled his foot back with the smallest possible movement before driving the tip of his sword directly into the monster’s mouth.
Puk!
Instead of attacking its thick outer shell, he pierced through the inside of its mouth, where it had no armor at all.
The monster died instantly.
Using the momentum of pulling his sword free, Chaeho spun backward.
The final Ironclad Centipede had crawled out from between the fallen rocks and was targeting Yoon Jia’s leg.
Chaeho’s shoe came down on the centipede’s head.
Crunch.
Its hard shell caved inward.
Keeping it pinned beneath his foot, Chaeho drove his sword vertically through its body.
The creature stopped moving.
Only a few minutes had passed since the battle began.
The cries of the monsters that had filled the tunnel disappeared like a receding tide.
An eerie silence settled over the mine.
“Haa… Haa…”
Seo Taekyung, who had been locked in a struggle against the mole swarm in the right passage, finally lowered his shield to the ground and breathed heavily.
Because Chaeho had cut down every monster that managed to slip through the gaps, the defensive line on the right had never collapsed.
The floor was covered with monster corpses leaking green bodily fluid.
An ambush from both directions.
It had been a hopeless situation where they should have prepared themselves for total annihilation.
And yet—
Not a single party member had suffered even a minor scratch.
Seo Taekyung stared blankly between the corpses on the ground and the huge pile of rocks blocking the left passage like a massive wall.
“Hunter Lee Chaeho… just now… what exactly did you…?”
Seo Taekyung’s voice trembled badly.
What he had witnessed wasn’t simply a master swordsman.
The speed of the monsters approaching from both directions.
The structural weakness of the mine.
The mage’s firepower.
The limitations of the shield warrior.
Chaeho had analyzed every complicated and deadly variable within seconds, then moved his allies like pieces on a chessboard and precisely reconstructed the entire battlefield.
“I noticed there were cracks in the left wall, so I figured collapsing it with magic would block the passage.”
Chaeho casually answered while shaking the monster fluid from his blade.
“You can’t give an order like that just because you saw a few cracks. If she had hit even slightly higher, the ceiling above our heads could have collapsed too.”
Seo Taekyung shook his head.
From behind his shield, he had seen Chaeho’s eyes.
It had looked as though Chaeho had even calculated the exact angle at which the rocks would collapse.
A chill ran down Seo Taekyung’s spine when he thought about the judgment Chaeho had shown in controlling such a suffocating crisis.
Yoon Jia was also sitting on the ground, clutching her staff with trembling hands.
If Chaeho hadn’t pointed out that exact location, she would have remained frozen until the end.
Then both she and the rest of the party would have become food for the centipedes.
“Seriously… thank you, Hunter. You saved our lives.”
Yoon Jia lowered her head, her voice trembling with emotion.
Kim Dohyun simply stared at Chaeho’s back with a completely dazed expression.
The label attached to Chaeho from his old days as a porter?
Something like that had never meant anything in the first place.
The man standing before him was undeniably a hunter who had already surpassed the limits of C-rank.
“All I did was take care of the few monsters that slipped through the gaps. We survived because Seo Taekyung held them off properly with his shield and Yoon Jia landed her spell exactly where she needed to.”
Chaeho spoke calmly as he sheathed his sword.
There was no arrogance or exaggeration in his voice.
It sounded completely ordinary.
As if he had merely handled the job he had been given in the most efficient way possible.
But that indifferent attitude made him seem even more dependable to the rest of the party.
Seo Taekyung picked up his shield again and let out a deep sigh.
That sigh carried not only relief, but complete trust in Chaeho.
“Hunter Lee Chaeho accepting our party’s designated request might be the luckiest thing that’s happened to me in my entire career as a hunter.”
“You’re giving me too much credit. The dungeon isn’t over yet.”
Chaeho gestured with his chin toward the right passage, where the mole swarm had emerged from, instead of the now-blocked left passage.
Dense mana was flowing from that direction.
“Looks like the path continues this way. Judging from the mana concentration, we should be getting close to the deepest section.”
At Chaeho’s words, Seo Taekyung nodded and hardened his expression.
They had survived the crisis.
But it wasn’t over.
At the end of this dreadful concentration of mana, the boss of the Red Iron Mine would be waiting for them.
“Everyone, check your equipment again. We’re moving out immediately.”
Strength returned to Seo Taekyung’s voice.
The hesitation had also vanished from Yoon Jia and Kim Dohyun’s movements.
They had witnessed Chaeho’s unbelievable ability to deal with a deadly crisis right before their eyes.
Simply knowing that he was guarding the front line beside them was enough to make the fear pressing down on the party melt away like snow.
Chaeho quietly stepped toward the right passage, where the darkness grew deeper.
The hunters’ shadows quickly disappeared into the red-lit mine tunnel.
