Chapter 21

Chapter 21

The elf incident had happened, but nothing had changed between Deioden and Zeon.

They had never been that affectionate to begin with, so the distant atmosphere did not feel unfamiliar.

Deioden walked ahead, and Zeon followed behind him.

At times, they did not say a single word all day.

Now, Deioden no longer gave Zeon advice.

It meant he had done enough, so Zeon should figure things out on his own.

Zeon did not ask Deioden either.

He studied things on his own and thought about how he could make better use of his ability.

He thought of countless ways to use sand and tested them against the monsters that occasionally attacked.

Now, lower-ranked monsters were no match for Zeon.

BOOM! BOOM!

The heads of lower-ranked monsters burst one after another from the Sand Missiles Zeon fired.

Brain matter and blood fell onto the sand.

Zeon looked at the monsters’ corpses for a moment, then began walking again.

Deioden was walking far ahead.

Even though he knew Zeon was fighting monsters, he did not even glance back.

Now Deioden knew as well.

Zeon would not die to something like lower-ranked monsters.

Now, Zeon never let his guard down under any circumstances.

It was thanks to how brutally Deioden had trained him.

That was when it happened.

Deioden, who had been walking far ahead, suddenly stopped.

Zeon looked at him with a puzzled expression.

They had been together for quite some time, but this was the first time Deioden had stopped even though the sun had not yet set.

Deioden muttered,

“I’m certain it was around here.”

After looking around for a moment, he took something from his clothes.

It was a compass the size of a child’s palm.

It was not an ordinary compass.

It was an item created through a combination of Neo Seoul’s science and Magic, and it served as a kind of location recorder.

Its method was to store places one had visited before and remember them.

He had visited this place several decades ago. It had been so long that even his memory was vague.

The compass needle spun around several times, then pointed in one direction.

Deioden walked in the direction the needle indicated.

After walking for a long while, Deioden finally stopped.

“This is the place.”

SNAP!

He closed the compass and put it back into his clothes.

Zeon approached his side.

“What is here?”

No matter how much he looked around, all he could see was the same sandy desert.

It was the same scenery as everything they had passed until now.

Deioden said with a pathetic expression,

“Do you not feel it?”

“Feel what?”

“You still have far to go.”

At that instant, anger surged up from deep inside Zeon’s chest. But he soon suppressed it and calmly looked around.

If Deioden said that much, then there had to be something nearby. But no matter how much he looked around, nothing in particular caught his eye.

‘Could it be inside the sand?’

Zeon raised his control and resonated with the sand.

He felt nothing within ten meters, then twenty meters.

Even so, Zeon did not give up and examined the sand with his control.

At seventy meters, eighty meters, and then when he reached one hundred meters, he finally felt something.

“What is this?”

There was definitely something foreign inside the sand.

Deioden asked,

“Did you find it?”

“Yes!”

“How deep?”

“About one hundred meters underground.”

“Deeper than I expected. It seems more sand has piled up since then.”

When he had found this place before, it had not been that deep. It was clear that more sand had piled up over the long years.

“Dig.”

“Understood.”

Zeon answered and moved the sand.

SSSSHHH!

The mountain-like pile of sand flowed down to the left and right.

Zeon pushed the falling sand far away.

Large beads of sweat gathered on his face.

That was how severe the mana consumption was.

Calling it one hundred meters underground sounded simple, but if all the sand covering it was dug out, it would form an enormous mountain.

Naturally, digging it all out at once was impossible.

Zeon dug out the sand slowly, little by little.

Deioden did not urge Zeon.

He too knew how difficult this work was.

Sand had no cohesion, so even if one dug it out, the surrounding sand collapsed and filled it again.

Zeon only made this much progress because he had the ability to handle sand. If an ordinary person had tried to dig through the sand, it would have been impossible even after a hundred years.

There was no chance Deioden would help.

He sat some distance away and waited for Zeon’s work to end.

The work of digging out the sand continued for almost three days.

When his mana ran out, he rested, and when it recovered, he dug again.

After pushing himself to the limit like that, Zeon was finally able to reach a point one hundred meters underground.

“What is this?”

Zeon furrowed his brow.

What existed one hundred meters underground was a stone structure that did not suit the desert.

More precisely, it was a door made of stone.

It was strange enough for such a large stone to be deep in the desert, but on top of that, it had the shape of a door.

Deioden came down beside Zeon.

“You found it.”

“What...... is this?”

“A dungeon.”

“A dungeon? Then this door connects to a dungeon?”

“That is what I suspect.”

“Suspect? So you do not know for certain?”

“I found this place by chance several decades ago. Before I could enter, it vanished into the sand.”

“Is there a reason you went out of your way to find it again?”

“Because I have to become stronger.”

“You mean you are going to become even stronger than you already are?”

Zeon looked dumbfounded.

This was Deioden, who tore even Grade B monsters apart like sheets of paper.

His estimated ability stats were already above Grade S.

He was already that strong, yet he had come to find a dungeon he had discovered long ago because he wanted to become even stronger.

At this point, it was as if he had no conscience at all.

With Zeon’s common sense, he could not understand Deioden’s actions.

No, he gave up on understanding them.

That was because he knew Deioden was not someone he could judge anyway.

Deioden stroked the stone door for a moment.

The surface of the door was covered in characters whose meanings he could not understand.

They were characters Zeon had seen somewhere before.

Zeon thought of the elves’ book he had stored in his subspace.

He did not know their meaning, but the characters were the same as the ones written in the book.

‘Is this connected to the elves?’

Then Deioden stroked the stone door. At that moment, bright light suddenly poured from the stone door, and it opened wide.

Deioden entered the stone door without telling Zeon to come in. But he also did not tell him not to.

It meant the choice was entirely Zeon’s.

‘Fine! Can I die twice if I die once?’

Even Deioden, who was already strong enough, had entered an unidentified dungeon to become stronger.

Zeon, who had made up his mind to become stronger, had no reason to hesitate.

Before the door closed, Zeon hurried inside.

THUD!

Immediately after he entered, the stone door closed again.

The moment he entered the dungeon, Zeon felt as though he had dropped straight out of the air.

But because he had experienced entering a dungeon once before at the Mana Stone Mine, he was soon able to adapt.

Zeon quickly came to his senses and looked around.

Gigantic stone pillars supported a ceiling that was impossibly high.

On the stone walls, along with the same characters he had seen on the stone door, there were images that seemed to praise a god.

“Is this...... some kind of temple?”

Judging by the atmosphere and size inside, it was clearly a temple serving some god.

He had never heard of a dungeon made from a stone structure existing. But there was nothing strange about it.

After all, a dungeon itself was a place human common sense could not understand.

Zeon suddenly realized that Deioden was nowhere to be seen.

“Did Deioden fall somewhere else?”

Just because there was only one dungeon entrance did not mean everyone entered the same place.

Occasionally, there were cases like this, where people started in completely different places.

“I’ll have to reach the boss to meet him.”

This, too, was something Deioden had told him.

To meet Deioden, he had to hurry to the place where the boss was.

The problem was which passage to choose.

There were four passages in the great hall where he stood.

He could not know which of them led to the place where the boss was.

“Tch!”

Zeon clicked his tongue.

There was no information and no signpost.

There was not a single basis for making a cold judgment.

It was the situation Zeon hated most. But he could not keep hesitating here forever.

Even at this very moment, Deioden was probably advancing toward the boss.

There was no time to hesitate.

“I’ll take the smallest passage.”

What Zeon chose was the one with the smallest entrance among the four passages.

There was a reason he had chosen it.

“The larger the passage, the higher the chance a large monster will appear.”

It was true that larger monsters were stronger.

Monsters that big needed space suited to their size. That was why he chose the small passage.

If the passage was small, then the monsters that appeared would also be small.

Zeon entered the small passage without hesitation.

The inside of the passage was very dark.

There was not even a small light, let alone a lamp.

Zeon had to walk through the pitch-black passage relying only on his senses.

“Phew!”

Even when he had entered the underground section of the Mana Stone Mine, it had not been this dark.

It was as if the temple itself had a will and was rejecting outside light.

In a situation like this, his eyes were no help at all.

Even after he focused mana into his eyes, he could see nothing.

“I’ll give up on sight.”

Zeon abandoned his lingering attachment and focused only on hearing, smell, and touch.

WHOOOSH!

He felt a faint wind.

Air in a completely sealed space did not move.

The fact that wind was blowing meant there was a connected space somewhere.

Zeon moved toward the direction the wind was coming from and thought,

‘A temple-shaped dungeon? Why in the world does a dungeon like this form?’

It had been quite some time since he became an Awakened, but he knew nothing about the principle or origin behind the creation of dungeons.

He had once asked Deioden, but Deioden had pressed his lips shut and said nothing.

Judging from Deioden’s mood, he definitely seemed to know something.

‘Could the creation of dungeons be connected to the reason Earth was destroyed like this?’

He could only guess, and for now, there was nothing certain.

That was when it happened.

THUD! THUD!

A dull sound suddenly reached him.

It was clearly the sound of something heavy moving.

Zeon stopped and listened carefully.

THUD! THUD! THUD!

The heavy sound continued.

“What is it?”

In truth, the conclusion was already obvious.

In a temple-shaped dungeon, the only things that would move were monsters.

Zeon raised his control and prepared for battle.

“What the hell?”

After moving his mana for a while, a look of dismay appeared on Zeon’s face.

That was because he could not feel any sand nearby.

He was a Sandmancer.

All his authority came from sand.

Without sand, he was only half an Awakened.

“There really isn’t a single grain of sand?”

Within the range of his control, he could not feel even one grain of sand.

It was his first time experiencing such a situation, so even Zeon had no choice but to panic.

“Insane!”

THUD! THUD! THUD!

Even at that moment, the heavy footsteps came closer.

Then countless eyes appeared in the darkness.

Zeon slowly retreated.

But eyes appeared in the passage he had come through as well.

Their silhouettes were revealed by the soft eye-glow lighting the darkness.

The owners of the eyes had forms exactly like humans.

The only difference was that their bodies were made of stone.

They were similar to Zeon in height, but they were much larger and rougher.

There was only one kind of monster like this.

“Golems?”

And they were stone Golems, no less.

Even if he used sand normally, they were the worst possible opponents, against whom he could not be confident of victory.

Dozens of such Golems were surrounding Zeon.

“Damn it!”