Chapter 202: Reality (3)
TL: SHW
“And?”
“Huh?”
“And?”
“Uh... huh?”
Hope blinked.
He looked flustered. If anything, that only left me more bewildered.
I’d wondered why he was taking so long to get to the point, but was this really all he’d wanted to tell us? All the tension went out of me.
“That’s it?”
“Uh...?”
Hope hurriedly looked at Hong Seok-young. From the way his mouth opened and closed, he seemed about ready to start going on about Hong Seok-young’s strange son again.
But Hong Seok-young was staring back at Hope with an equally unimpressed expression. Left speechless, Hope called out to Gamble instead. Why were they so surprised by our reaction?
“Why, why aren’t you surprised?!”
Even Gamble was starting to panic.
Seriously, why...?
“An alien species is invading Earth!”
Gamble went from flustered to angry. Hope was one thing, but I could never get a handle on this woman’s personality either. She seemed timid, yet somehow raised her voice over the strangest things.
Then again, someone like that was probably exactly the sort of person who could get involved in something like this with Hope. I still couldn’t get the phrase she’d used when introducing herself out of my head. External Humanity. Anyone who could casually come up with a term like that couldn’t possibly be entirely sane.
“Shouldn’t you be more... I don’t know, shocked?!”
“Why?”
“This is real! It’s not some movie plot!!”
Come to think of it, Gamble had looked at the wrecked pension and started babbling about how it was giving her ideas.
Had she started liking that kind of thing because she already knew the story Hope had just told us? Or had she gotten tangled up with Hope in the first place because she liked apocalypse settings...?
I looked at Gamble with pity. If she hadn’t merely scraped by with an Awakening but had actually been strong enough to enter Dungeons properly, she probably wouldn’t have grown so fond of such ridiculous fantasies.
There were an unusually high number of Hunters with bizarre personalities. Han Tae-kyung stood out even among them, but taken as a whole, he was only a little more eccentric than average. At least Han Tae-kyung didn’t kill civilians. He just dragged them into court.
Park Seo-hyun and Oh Hyun-wook had been treated like eccentrics and called a witch and a pig respectively, but by Hunter standards, even they were on the well-behaved side. Neither of them got into courtroom battles with civilians. Oh Hyun-wook was a Guild Master, so he was guaranteed to possess at least a certain level of social skills, and even the notoriously uncooperative Park Seo-hyun would at least pretend to listen if someone spoke to her directly.
All right. Think about it.
Why had Hunters ended up like that?
“Where do you think those movie plots came from?”
“What?”
“Well... I suppose civilians who’ve never entered a Dungeon do tend to treat that sort of thing as entertainment.”
Surprisingly, that was still true even in an era when Dungeon Breaks happened as routinely as meals.
Was it because Dungeon Breaks were sensational? Or maybe because they happened so often that people had become numb to them.
Or perhaps it was because casualties rarely climbed into the triple digits unless an S-rank Dungeon like the Myeong-dong Dungeon broke. No matter how tragic something was, people tended to grow desensitized when they were exposed to it often enough.
“Why, I distinctly remember something like that. The world gets destroyed by monsters that came out of Dungeons, and the few humans who survived struggle to keep going....”
I remembered seeing it at the research institute. Or had it been a TV series rather than a movie? Either way, it had been unpleasant. After the last time I watched it, I’d deliberately shoved it out of my mind.
Not that a person could completely delete a memory like a computer could.
And since I was a person rather than a machine, the moment I mentioned it, scenes I’d watched long ago resurfaced in my mind.
“Wasn’t it a TV series? Apocalypse in Dungeon?”
“Ah, yes. That one.”
It was a fairly old series. An American show from the seventies.
Despite its crude special effects, the series had been well received. Supposedly, it portrayed humanity’s survival and struggle, love and despair under brutal conditions with striking realism.
After the college entrance exam, I happened to remember it and watched it again. What had seemed provocative and philosophical to an ignorant child came across as sickeningly oppressive to a Hunter who had actually cleared Dungeons.
Wasn’t it obvious?
A world destroyed by monsters that emerged from Dungeons?
To a Hunter whose job was to deal with those Dungeons, it felt as though the show were screaming at the top of its lungs, “This is what happens if you fail.”
And I actually knew that the world really would end that way. No, that had nothing to do with what we were discussing now. Moving on.
Why did Hunters, regardless of nationality, all seem to have something wrong with them?
Some entered Dungeons out of simple curiosity. Some out of youthful recklessness. Some chased money and fame. Others talked about revenge. And though they were rare, some were driven by a heroic desire to save people.
Whatever their reasons, Hunters who entered Dungeons and hunted monsters eventually arrived at the same thoughts, sooner or later.
One day, the monsters that emerged from a Dungeon Break might still be alive after three months.
One day, there might be more Dungeons than the Hunters could possibly handle.
One day, one day, one day....
Countless one days trailed behind them like a tail.
The Dungeon phenomenon defied explanation. No matter how thoroughly humanity prepared, there was always the possibility that something impossible to defend against would happen.
Things no one dared put into words for fear they might become reality were always circling somewhere in the back of their minds.
There was no way anyone could stay sane.
“People had already imagined this in the seventies, enough to make a ten-season TV series about it. Do you really think Hunters never imagined the same thing?”
I could guess why Hope had never considered it from that angle. He had probably started from the invaders’ point of view. To his kind, it had simply been a brutal surprise attack. They had no idea what the people on the receiving end were thinking as they struggled to hold out.
“Dungeons are already humanity’s enemy. Every Hunter knows that. At least, any Hunter with a decent amount of experience does.”
“Ah....”
“It’s just... what you told us a moment ago doesn’t amount to much more than confirming something we already knew. Escape Pods or whatever they are, humanity is already fighting desperately to survive this incomprehensible disaster called Dungeons.”
That was reality.
Even if Dungeons really were an alien invasion, unfortunately, nothing changed.
Neither did the fact that the aliens would win twenty years from now.
***
Sandra Gamble sank into thought.
Something I’d said must have struck a nerve, because she sat curled up in the corner of the sofa, chewing endlessly on her fingernails.
With her face set so rigidly, she finally looked like the Sandra Gamble of Pharos that I knew, rather than some timid engineer from California.
Hope had fallen into thought as well.
Though he was a little more restless about it than Gamble.
“I see. Then I get why the captain and vice-captain got annoyed with me too. I guess I was taking things too lightly.”
“Too lightly?”
“Dungeons are the place I know best, so I used to joke around about them and stuff.... Now I suddenly feel kind of bad.”
No matter how I looked at it, Hope wasn’t nearly as ignorant about humans or as empty-headed as he appeared. He only acted like that because Gamble took care of everything for him. Hadn’t he actually learned plenty about human society and already finished adapting to it?
When I gave him a suspicious look, Hope raised his head. The smug grin on his face, almost as if he’d read my mind, was irritating.
“So, is that everything you have to tell us?”
Hong Seok-young’s face remained completely expressionless. Somehow, that worked better than anger. He looked intimidating enough even when he was just sitting there.
Faced with Hong Seok-young’s sharp gaze, Hope hunched his shoulders. He looked to Gamble for help, but she was too preoccupied with her own thoughts.
“If that’s all, may I ask some questions?”
“Uh, um.... No, there’s more, but....”
Hope blinked.
“What do you want to know?”
“Can Dungeons communicate with each other?”
“No.”
“What about you? Can you communicate with those inside a Dungeon?”
Hope immediately shook his head.
“No. If I want to talk to anyone inside a Dungeon, I have to go into that Dungeon myself.”
Hope added an explanation.
“If that were possible, there wouldn’t be any need for Noah.”
“I see.”
“Noah is the Agent. The King told Noah to find a way for us to get outside, and Noah has been working toward that. That’s how Noah found out about me.... Thinking back, I really shouldn’t have given myself away back then.”
“Given yourself away?”
“One of the spells Noah uses is the King’s magic. I asked Noah how they knew that spell, and... well, that gave me away.”
Hope frowned, clearly displeased. I slipped into the conversation and asked him a question.
“When you say ‘the King’?”
“The King? The King is the King.”
“Do all monsters obey this King?”
“No. The King is the king of our species. Among everyone who boarded the Escape Pods and made it here alive, the King is the strongest and has the highest status, so the other species respect him too.”
Hope flashed another unpleasant grin.
“Not that respect or any of that crap means much when none of them can get out of their Dungeons anyway. Besides, there aren’t many species that can even talk to humans, you know?”
“And Fairies like you are one of those species?”
“I keep telling you, I’m human now! But... yeah. Though ‘Fairy’ is just the name humans gave us. Our kind are the most numerous.”
“If even your king fled, that tells me plenty.”
“......”
Hope narrowed his eyes.
“For some reason, that annoys me. What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You said you’re human now. If you’re human, you shouldn’t have any reason to be offended.”
“That’s true, but somehow that makes it even more annoying....”
Hong Seok-young ignored Hope’s muttering.
“You don’t know the exact number? Even just for your own species?”
“The King might know, but... I don’t. They’re called Escape Pods for a reason. We don’t even know how many successfully escaped.”
“Hmm.”
“Besides, some of the things put into the Cradles were beasts. Low intelligence, strong instincts. You know, the ones you find in lower-ranked Dungeons. Things were so desperate that sometimes they ended up in Cradles that weren’t meant for them. Even I have no way of knowing what’s inside a Dungeon until I enter it.”
“Things were desperate enough that you had to flee, and you still brought creatures like that with you?”
“We still had to eat after reaching another world.”
So they had been provisions. That made sense.
“That’s also why there are ecosystems inside the Cradles....”
“Then what about Dungeon Cores?”
“They’re the power source.”
“So once they run out of power, they stop functioning.”
“The intelligent ones know they’ll die if they leave the Dungeon. That’s why they stay inside.”
“Is there a way to get out from the inside?”
“They’re Escape Pods. What good would they be if there were no way to open the door? Are we supposed to starve to death?”
“A Dungeon Break.”
𝒻𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝘯𝘰𝑣ℯ𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝘮
Hope nodded.
“The power doesn’t last forever. When it runs low, the Cradle collapses. If there’s a being capable of controlling the system, they can decide whether to keep the door shut or not.... But beasts can’t do that, can they? Bang!”
Hope opened his mouth wide and made the ridiculous sound.
“And then the door opens and they come pouring out. Actually, once a Dungeon Break happens, it means there isn’t enough power left to maintain the Dungeon, so there’s no need to go to the trouble of destroying the core. The Dungeon closes on its own before long.”
This was more useful to us than simply learning that Dungeons were Escape Pods.
I listened closely to Hope, then decided to ask the most important question.
“Then which Dungeon is that King in?”
“...You’re not planning to go in there, are you?”
“I’m not that stupid.”
Hope pouted before finally answering.
“France.”
“France?”
“In France... Mont Saint-Michel.”
***
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