Lee Pyeonghwa regained consciousness to the sound of quiet, murmured voices near her ear.
“Hahaha. This is seriously messed up, isn’t it?”
“If
you
think it’s messed up, then it really is.”
Banter?
The conversation sounded oddly friendly. Her awareness slowly began to surface.
“This isn’t something we can laugh off. An incident like this during basic training is really bad.”
“It’s fine. Things like this have been happening a lot lately.”
“You’re not exactly in a position to say that, considering you get dragged into every one of those incidents. Anyway, something like this happening in the military is a huge problem. It’s supposedly a completely closed-off organization.”
“Which makes it easy to cover up, doesn’t it?”
“That’s true too, but the current situation is… haah. I don’t know. We’ll have to think about it after we get back.”
Listening to the conversation through her hazy consciousness, Lee Pyeonghwa finally realized who the voices belonged to. Jeong Daon, her fellow trainee who had been living in the same barracks for three weeks now, and Han Jaeyeong, one of the strongest mages in South Korea.
But… why am I hearing their voices?
Something about the situation felt very wrong.
Did I fall asleep with the news on or something— Wait!
Lee Pyeonghwa jolted upright in shock, memories from just before she passed out rushing back, and then— “Ow!”
“Oh dear, you shouldn’t move so suddenly.”
Han Jaeyeong’s warning came too late. Her entire body throbbed with pain, as if she’d been beaten all over. It hurt even more than when she’d been roughed up by a particularly nasty coach while preparing for a match.
“What the hell is…?”
She was fighting back tears from the pain when Han Jaeyeong approached and handed her a potion. “Drink this, at least. It’s a painkiller potion.”
“Th–thank you.”
“Don’t drink too much. Save it.”
Following that advice, Lee Pyeonghwa took a small sip. The effect was immediate. The dull, crushing pain that had been assaulting her body eased considerably.
Only then did she feel clear-headed enough to speak. “What exactly happened?” She truly had no idea what kind of situation this was. “Why is it just the three of us here?”
At her question, Han Jaeyeong and Jeong Daon exchanged glances, as if trying to push an awkward answer onto the other.
While the two of them continued their silent stare-down, Lee Pyeonghwa looked around.
The surroundings looked no different from the wasteland she’d seen before losing consciousness. The only changes were that Han Jaeyeong and Jeong Daon had cleared the ground, lit a small campfire, and laid her down in a sleeping bag.
“Are we…still inside the dungeon? I definitely saw the system message about being able to exit.”
It seemed Han Jaeyeong had won the silent battle. Jeong Daon was the one who spoke. “…Okay. Don’t panic when you hear this.”
Lee Pyeonghwa met her black eyes, glassy and reflective. For once, there was a hint of unease in them.
“You remember Lee Seunghui going into mana runaway, right?”
Jeong Daon’s explanation went like this…
Earth and dungeons exist in fundamentally different dimensions, which makes the connection between them extremely unstable. Whether entering a dungeon or returning from one, there was always the risk of an accident.
“Even airplanes are most dangerous during takeoff and landing, right? It’s like that.”
In this case, however, the problem was the mana runaway that occurred while the system was pulling the users back. Because of Lee Seunghui’s mana runaway, the connection was severed in the middle of the system’s recall process.
Under normal circumstances, the system would have protected the users and returned them safely to Earth. But being caught up in the runaway mana caused an error. The burst of mana struck the dimensional barrier, and when a hole opened in that barrier, the system failed to retrieve certain users in time.
It was like an airplane’s wing exploding and forcing it off its flight path.
“By ‘certain users’… you mean?”
“The system recalls the weakest users first.” Han Jaeyeong gave a bitter smile. “That means the strongest individuals in the group were left behind. That would be the three of us.”
“Th–then what do we do?”
“For now, there’s no clear solution.” Han Jaeyeong shrugged. “This dungeon is currently outside the system’s jurisdiction. Clearing it won’t make the system come get us.”
In other words, the three of them had been abandoned in a dimension with no remaining connection to Earth.
“Th… then are we just… stuck here?”
“It’s not completely hopeless. The system operates on the fundamental principle of protecting its users, so it should be searching for those of us who were lost along the way. And our bodies and souls naturally tend to return to the dimension they originated from.”
“…The problem is how long it’ll take before the system finds us.”
“That’s true. Cases like this happen more often than you’d think. You’ve heard of dimensional castaways, right?”
“Uh…” Lee Pyeonghwa dredged up the term from a hazy memory. “You mean Hunters who disappear inside dungeons without a trace and then suddenly reappear back on Earth?”
“Yes. Those are dimensional castaways. Sometimes they return after several years, but the important thing is that they do eventually make it back to the place they were born and raised.”
“Hey.” Jeong Daon jabbed Han Jaeyeong in the side with her elbow. “Try to make it sound positive.”
“Well, I know someone who took six years to get back to Earth, and in the meantime they even had a beautiful child in another dimension—”
“Do you not understand what ‘positive’ means?”
“…So you’re saying we
can
get back, but it might take six years.”
Saying it out loud made the exhaustion hit even harder.
Lee Pyeonghwa had known from the moment she awakened—no, from the moment she suspected she might be an awakened—that this was a dangerous path. Still, she had never imagined that only a few months after awakening, she’d end up in a nightmare like this during basic training.
“Don’t worry too much. That’s really the worst-case scenario, and it won’t take that long.” Jeong Daon spoke with a flat expression, as if she didn’t fully grasp how serious the situation was.
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because the mana runaway wasn’t that large in scale. If the deviation from the original path wasn’t severe, we shouldn’t be too far from the dimension we entered from.”
“That sounds a little
too
optimistic.”
“No, wait a second.” Because Han Jaeyeong, a veteran, and Jeong Daon, who for some reason seemed unfazed by the situation, were explaining things so calmly, Lee Pyeonghwa had accepted it at face value. But a doubt suddenly surfaced. “Even if it was mana runaway, Seunghui wasn’t that strong of a Hunter. How could she have had enough mana to affect something like a dimensional barrier?”
At that question, Jeong Daon and Han Jaeyeong looked at each other.
“Sharp. A swordsman’s intuition?”
“You explain it.”
“It’s better coming from someone her age.”
Jeong Daon stared at Han Jaeyeong for a moment, then let out a long sigh and spoke. “…You’re right, Lee Pyeonghwa. Under normal circumstances, this should never have happened.”
“Then…”
Jeong Daon continued slowly, “Which means this wasn’t an accident; it was an incident.”
“An incident? What do you mean…?”
“Mana runaway can happen among novice mages, but this time there was artificial, external interference.”
“To put it plainly, Lee Seunghui touched something she never should have.”
Han Jaeyeong pulled something that looked like a leaf out of thin air, probably from their inventory. Despite its ordinary, leaflike appearance, the item gave off a strange scent.
“This is an herb Hunters call an awakening stimulant. When ingested, it temporarily boosts mana. If properly refined, it becomes a mana potion, but—”
“If you use an illegal potion that hasn’t been properly refined,” Jeong Daon cut in, “the unfiltered impurities accumulate in your mana circuits.”
“In other words,” Han Jaeyeong continued, “if someone takes large amounts of this and then uses magic, the mana circuits clogged with impurities are bound to explode.”
Confronted with this shocking information, Lee Pyeonghwa found herself stammering. “Th–then Seunghui…?”
“Yes. An autopsy showed clear signs that she had ingested large quantities of this substance.”
The words were delivered far too casually. Lee Pyeonghwa doubted her own ears.
“Wh-what did you just say?”
An autopsy.
A body.
For a moment, she couldn’t even process what she was hearing, what those words actually meant.
“Are you saying…Seunghui is dead?!”
"Yes." Han Jaeyeong nodded heavily. “At the moment the system malfunctioned, Recruit Lee Seunghui died after her body ruptured from mana overload. I managed to recover some of the remains, but… there’s nothing that could realistically be returned to her family.”
Lee Pyeonghwa felt her mind go blank.
Dead?
Lee Seunghui?
As if the situation weren’t already overwhelming, now there was talk of illegal drugs, and on top of that, Lee Seunghui was dead.
She hadn’t known her for long, but they’d endured the same grueling training together, and Lee Pyeonghwa herself had looked after her more than a little. That timid girl, who couldn’t even drop out early because of her strict father…was dead?
Just like that?
“So, about that.” Han Jaeyeong spoke to Lee Pyeonghwa, who was still clearly in shock. “Did she spend a lot of time with anyone in particular, Recruit Lee Pyeonghwa?”
“Huh?”
“From what I can tell, she must have been taking large amounts of illegal potions within the past week. If that’s the case, there has to be someone among her fellow trainees who supplied them.”
“What are you—”
“You were in the same barracks, Hunter Lee Pyeonghwa. Don’t you have any guesses? I already asked this one,” they added, glancing at Jeong Daon, “and she didn’t know a thing.”
“How unfortunate,” Jeong Daon replied blandly.
She didn’t look sorry in the slightest.
Panicking, Lee Pyeonghwa asked, “Wait. Are you saying someone deliberately gave Seunghui those drugs?”
“Of course. This isn’t something a rookie Hunter could casually get their hands on. Someone definitely encouraged her or pushed her into it.”
Oh no.
There was too much information flooding in all at once. It was hard to process any of it. Not only was Lee Seunghui dead, but her death wasn’t an accident; it was murder.
It didn’t make sense.
Which meant that right now, Han Jaeyeong believed the culprit was among their fellow barracks mates.
Dazed and shaken, Lee Pyeonghwa spoke haltingly. “Seunghui…made a lot of mistakes. Honestly, she wasn’t that close to many people.”
The stress of failing to cast spells properly had weighed heavily on her. Because of that, Lee Seunghui struggled even with standard training. Her frequent mistakes during drills slowed everyone down, and sometimes the whole group was punished because of her. To be honest, that had made her someone others avoided. If Lee Pyeonghwa hadn’t looked out for her, she might have ended up completely isolated.
Of course, that didn’t matter anymore.
“So the people she was closest to were…me, and Choi Jisu.”
As she said it, Lee Pyeonghwa felt a wave of self-loathing. Choi Jisu, the one who had taken care of Lee Seunghui as her battle buddy, helping her because she couldn’t keep up. And now she had to name her as a possible suspect. Nothing about this felt right.
Han Jaeyeong studied Lee Pyeonghwa’s expression and nodded. “I see. For now, that’s enough. Our priority is getting back, so we’ll talk about this again later.”
“Then…what do we do now?”
“First, we examine this dungeon. The good news is that we have two extremely capable mages here.”
At that, Lee Pyeonghwa instinctively looked at Jeong Daon.
Despite receiving such high praise from one of the greatest mages in South Korea, Jeong Daon replied with the same indifferent expression as ever, “Two? I’d say one.”