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Chapter 5 - The Goblin Village (1)
I heard the murmur of a crowd of people. It almost sounded like they were crying out in pain, but it also sounded like they were cheering or roaring with joy.
The sky was wrapped in dark smoke.
The stench of blood pricked my nose. Blood had collected instead of water in a flat, wide puddle on the ground.
I was looking down on everything as if I’d become a camera. A familiar flag flapped in the wind on one side of a ruined castle wall.
When I turned my head, I also saw a familiar face in between the fallen people on the ground.
The man was on the brink of death, severely injured to the point where it was surprising he was still alive. Lying with blood splattered all over his body, the man opened his mouth to speak.
“You…shouldn’t…be doing the tower…Why…”
Those were the man’s last words.
* * *
The sound of water flowing out of the sink faucet felt refreshing.
I stared blankly at the mirror as I held my toothbrush. A man in his early twenties brushing his teeth. I still wasn’t used to my appearance reflected in the mirror.
“What kind of dream was that?”
I spit out the toothpaste in my mouth and rinsed it with water. I then boiled water in my coffee pot and brewed a cup of coffee.
It was the coffee that I’d bought last night from a nearby market.
Instead of sitting on a sofa, I settled down on a blanket on the floor and savored the taste and smell of my coffee.
“...What am I doing right now?”
I was overcome with a sense of shame. No, I didn’t think this was right.
The sound of cars passing by could be heard through the window. The first thing I’d do after I earned some money would definitely be moving out.
I drank my coffee and thought about my dream.
The memory was already getting hazier as time passed, and I felt that if I couldn’t remember it now, it would be lost to me forever.
“That face was…”
I was sure that it was Luciel.
That battlefield, that was where he had died.
I remembered everything that had happened up until Luciel’s death. It wasn’t something that I could forget.
‘A tower?’
But I had no memory of hearing anything like that. I put down my empty cup and muttered to myself.
“It’s probably just a stupid dream.”
* * *
The morning sunlight was coming in through the slits in the narrow window. Right now, I was overwhelmed by Kang Han-kyul’s work, too.
I took the subway for about 30 minutes before I arrived at Ujangsan Station.
A girl wearing comfortable clothes and carrying a huge hiking backpack appeared in my field of vision. It was the sole woman Hunter in our chatroom group, Lee Ye-eun.
‘Why does she have so much luggage?’
It was a ridiculous amount to be carrying in any situation short of emigrating from the country. Ujangsan wasn’t that tall of a mountain. There was no need to bring so much luggage to climb up that one mountain.
I nodded my head at Lee Ye-eun, who was fiddling with her phone, and approached her. She slipped her phone into her pocket and slightly raised her head towards me.
“Who are you?”
“Ah, I’m Kang Han-kyul.”
Instead of replying, Lee Ye-eun just made an ‘ah’ sound of understanding and nodded her head.
There was no other response after that.
Soon, Kim Tae-woon and Nam Woon-ik arrived. They arrived almost simultaneously.
Nam Woon-ik got out of a taxi, and Kim Tae-woon showed up in his own car. It wasn’t a supercar like Choi Soo-hyun’s, but it was still a pretty expensive vehicle.
‘Why do I feel like I’m the only one who didn’t pack enough?’
The two of them had brought enough luggage each to rival Lee Ye-eun.
Because it was just a goblin village, I had cheerfully dug up an old hiking backpack that I found stuffed in a forgotten corner and filled it lightly with some weapons, food, and clothes. It was so off the mark from how the others had prepared.
I felt like an embarrassed elementary school kid who had misread the school newsletter and had been the only one to show up unprepared for a field trip.
‘Really, I doubt anything will happen.’
Anyways, I wasn’t in a situation now where I could just say that I was going to go home to grab some more stuff. It had already happened, so it was a much better idea to act like it was a trivial matter.
When we reached the mountainside, two men wearing suits beckoned us towards them with their hands. They were dungeon staff involved with the Association.
“You are the trainee students, correct?”
“Yes, we’re Group 4.”
Our team leader Kim Tae-woon answered in our stead. After they checked our IDs, we followed the men a little further into the mountain.
A path that the general public never went down.
Between the dense thicket of trees, we saw an unidentifiable flickering within a black space. We could verify it with our own two eyes: it was unmistakably the entrance to the dungeon.
I’d ventured into a couple dungeons when I was in Arbelicia, and the appearance of the entrance was the same as it was there. I’d just never imagined that I’d see this kind of gate in the 21st century modern day.
Our prior preparations were complete, and all we had to do was enter the dungeon. I was standing in the back, waiting for the three in front of me to go inside.
‘Why aren’t they going in?’
Before I could even tilt my head in confusion, Lee Ye-eun, who was standing in the very front, came towards me. She placed her backpack, which was as intimidating as a moving box, in front of me.
“There’s a lot of fragile things inside, so please be careful.”
“Oh, my backpack too.”
Nam Woon-ik, who’d had an unfavorable opinion of me since the chatroom, freely shifted his bag towards me. Suddenly, I had to carry the weight of two people’s luggage at once.
Kim Tae-woon saw Lee Ye-eun and Nam Woon-ik enter the dungeon carrying only their weapons without even giving me a chance to speak up, and he came towards me with an awkward smile. Having half-given up, I reached out my hand towards him.
“Your stuff, please.”
Hmph, could a Hunter without an affiliation live such a dejected life?
Kim Tae-woon told me he was sorry, but he still diligently handed his bags over to me.
The three of them had already gone in, and I, who had become one with the luggage, was the last one to finally set foot at the entrance to the dungeon.
At that moment, an unidentifiable tingling sensation passed through my body. I instinctively took a step back as if I was shocked by electricity.
‘Am I just imagining things?’
[...auth…is attem…to enter the dungeon.]
It didn’t seem to be just my imagination. There were words that I couldn’t make out echoing in my ears.
‘They definitely said that it was a low-level dungeon, are those bastards trying to scam us?’
I called over the man standing nearby who was looking at his phone, and I pointed at the dungeon gate. He put his phone down and looked at me with a furrowed brow that seemed to ask me why I hadn’t gone inside yet.
“Is this dungeon really alright?”
“Is there some kind of a problem?”
He just repeated my own question back at me. I could feel the underlying implication to his words: ‘The dungeon is perfectly fine, so just hurry up and go inside’.
I wanted to shorten the amount of time that I was holding onto these bags that were pressing down on my shoulders by even a minute, so I just let out a sigh and turned my body back towards the gate.
“No, I don’t think there’s a problem.”
I ignored the tingling sensation and pushed my body fully into the gate.
[An unauthorized person is attempting to enter the dungeon.]
The voice that I’d heard only faintly before could now be heard quite clearly.
‘An unauthorized person?’
Was it talking about me?
It couldn’t be, right?
I didn’t have time to wonder about it for long.
As soon as I opened my eyes, a status window with a staggering amount of information on the dungeon greeted me.
[Goblin Village]
Grade: D
Terrain: Forest
Party Limit: 5-7 people
Goal: Destroy the goblin village and collect the Goblin Chief’s necklace.
Rewards:
Upon complete clear [Merit Points: 50]Upon clearing within 3 days [Merit Points: 30]Deal the killing blow on the Goblin Chief [Merit Points: 100]
The gently blowing breeze and the smell of fresh grass tickled the tip of my nose.
At the same time, I could see a green meadow and a forest thick with trees at the end of it.
“Oh, this is interesting.”
Immediately after I had entered the dungeon, the dungeon’s objectives and some brief information about the dungeon had appeared in my view. Kang Han-kyul may have already experienced a dungeon once before, but this was my first dungeon here.
Dungeons had also existed in Arbelicia.
However, the dungeons that I had experience with weren’t the type where you went through a gate in this way, and they hadn’t given me anything like missions or a status window.
‘I think I get why people on the Internet kept comparing the current situation to a video game.’
It really felt like I’d stepped into a virtual reality game.
The reason why it felt like an MMORPG wasn’t just because of the dungeon’s status window.
When our team had met up on Friday like we’d agreed to, we’d decided what our respective positions would be. To say we’d decided then was putting it generously; our positions were already decided the second that we’d met each other.
Kim Tae-woon, the one who’d made the chatroom and had taken the role of the team leader, was a DPS.
Choi Min-hyuk was the tank, Nam Woon-ik had the roles of supporting the rear and helping the others. The team’s only woman, Lee Ye-eun, was an archer who took the role of the main DPS.
And then there was me.
“Don’t try to uselessly go off on your own. And if you lose our luggage, I’ll kill you.”
Choi Min-hyuk, who had a set of armor on as well as a huge greatsword strapped to his back, shot me a glare.
As I was the talentless one, the same as being jobless in an RPG game, in this dungeon I was an extra. So that’s why I ended up with the role of pack mule.
With every possible piece of luggage I could carry strapped around me, I wordlessly sighed to myself. I wasn’t the pack mule because I was a pushover.
‘To others, it might look like I’m a pushover, though.’
Anyways, I wasn’t a pushover.
I just wanted to see what would happen.
* * *
As always, there’s a difference between theory and practice.
I fully understood that a dungeon is something that moves you to another space, that there existed objectives that needed to be completed within it, and that each of us had our own positions.
“What I want to see is ‘practice’.”
Anyone can strike an intimidating pose and look cool. I was curious to see how this party who seemed like young people in their early 20s would fight.
In that sense, even if I was making my own excuses in order to not hurt my pride, being a pack mule and a pushover was the most advantageous position.
“Let’s explore, then mark our territory.”
Lee Ye-eun’s main weapon was a bow, and she was also acting in the role of an explorer.
During the meeting with the other members, there was one truth that I’d come to learn.
Despite what it said on the Internet, one’s affiliation didn’t immediately specify one’s class.
I had no doubt that Kang Han-kyul had learned some basic common sense about ‘affiliations’. Unfortunately, when I possessed his body near the end of his position as a trainee, I had none of that relevant information.
Nevertheless, one’s affiliation was only that, an affiliation. It was irrelevant to a Hunter’s class. For Hunters in today’s reality, there were no restrictions that prevented a bow user from suddenly taking up a sword or picking up a staff and using magic.
Even so, the reason why Hunters were still divided up into positions was simple.
To put it simply, humans liked things that they were already used to, and they had a habit of continuing to do things the way that they’d already been doing it.
In the first place, weren’t jobs in reality exactly like that?
From the moment that humans are born, each of them has the potential to become a judge, a prosecutor, a lawyer, a doctor. No one is born marked as a judge since birth.
Unless you were born in some far-off future somewhere.
On the grounds that I knew that there existed countless dimensions, I couldn’t declare with certainty that there was no such dimension where that could happen, but at least I knew that this wasn’t the case here.
Simply put, it was an incorrect assumption.
The notion that if you didn’t have an affiliation then you couldn’t use any skills was also half correct, half incorrect.
If you became affiliated with a specific god, your Merit Points and your abilities as a Hunter determined how you could use the power that you received from them, but that didn't mean you weren't fully able to use your own skills.
It was similar to being a swordsman who was originally able to use the power of fire having that power taken away from him and being forced to use just his sword.
‘That’s why they called me talentless.’
It seemed that the Internet was not a reliable place. Honestly, I didn’t understand this part very well, but for now, I had no choice but to accept this explanation.
Lee Ye-eun, who had taken charge of exploration, signaled with her hand at the entrance of the forest.
‘It’s so goddamn heavy.’
What kind of camping trip was this?
For the stamina of only a week’s worth of exercise, handling this much luggage was beyond my abilities.
When I left this dungeon, I resolved to exercise until I fell over and died.
Lee Ye-eun, who had gone further inside of the forest, pointed her finger to somewhere beyond the thicket.
“She found it so quickly…”
Within the forest was the goblin village. You could see a poorly-made fence made from pieces of wood tied together, as well as about 10 shacks.
At the entrance, there were two goblins with green skin standing there holding stone axes. After I’d snuck a peek at the goblins, I tilted my head in confusion.
‘This is quite different from what I’m familiar with…’
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