BOOM—!
A bolt of lightning crashed down onto the goblin's head.
True to form for a 1-Cost skill, it wasn't all that powerful.
Still, it was more than enough to mess up a Level 1 Goblin.
"Gegegegek!"
The goblin stiffened like a log and toppled straight over.
It wasn't an instant kill, just incapacitation from "electrocution."
Since the status ailment had landed cleanly, it would stay flat on its back for a few seconds.
'A second shot is out of the question.'
With my current stats, I couldn't even cast a 1-Cost skill twice in a row.
I tried just in case, and sure enough, it didn't work.
I felt the mana gather partway, fail to take form, and scatter again.
So I immediately snatched up my shield and spear and charged forward.
"Kyaaaok!"
The other goblin charged straight at me in return.
It was completely different from a puny "Cave Goblin."
A regular "Goblin" stood 1.2 meters tall—about the size of a child—yet packed the muscle of a grown man, with hard, razor-sharp claws and teeth as deadly as any weapon.
'Dumb as a rock, though.'
That was true of most monsters on the first floor.
Their physical specs outclassed the average beginner's, but they had zero strategy or technique.
As long as you knew their mechanics inside and out, they weren't hard to deal with.
A Goblin's attack pattern was dead simple.
Always a head-on charge.
Followed by a leaping pounce from a set distance.
THUD!
I slammed my shield hard into the leaping creature to knock it back, then thrust my spear straight into it as it flew through the air.
SHUNK!
The tip pierced clean through the back of its neck in one strike.
The goblin twitched for a moment before breathing its last.
The fight wasn't over yet, though.
"Mr. Yuta! Watch out!"
You don't need to tell me.
My body was already moving before the elf even called out.
Just as the first goblin shook off the electrocution and tried to scramble up, SHUNK!—the shaft of my spear sank deep into its chest.
"Kerek..."
Another one-hit kill.
"I-Incredible."
"Mr. Yuta... were you a knight before this?"
"Human! You are a mighty warrior!"
As I yanked my spear free and flicked off the blood, my party members stared wide-eyed and showered me with praise.
Yet the person most surprised of all was someone else entirely—
'...What the fuck?'
Why am I this good at fighting?
Even I have no idea what the hell is going on here.
***
Once a battle ended, rest was mandatory.
First, dismantling the corpses took time, and second, you had to recover your stamina and mana.
"We'll rest for ten minutes and then move out."
Since I'd barely exerted myself, my stamina was fine, but with more than half my mana gone, I had to call for a break too.
Well, resting up would only give me enough mana to fire off a single shot of [Surprise Lightning] like earlier, but that single shot was often the difference between life and death.
In the labyrinth, even the most thorough preparation was never enough, and doing everything you possibly could wasn't a choice—it was a survival requirement.
"Should we put the wall back up, then?"
"We'll do it together. You two block off the rear."
"Got it!"
Splitting into pairs, we threw up simple barricades across both ends of the cave passage.
In the meantime, the [Butcher's Knife] quickly finished dressing the goblin corpses.
"There is quite a pile this time."
"Because they're Goblins."
The byproduct you harvested from Goblins was bone.
Since you could sell every bone in their bodies, the yield was great, and the price was high for a Stage 1 material—making them a real moneymaker for beginners.
The downside was that hauling all those bones around was a pain, though now wasn't the time to worry about that.
"How much will they go for?"
"For two of them, around fifteen gold."
Roughly seven or eight thousand won per goblin.
"Oooh...!"
Hearing a byproduct price several times higher than the measly two thousand won of a Cave Goblin, the elf's and the orc's eyes went wide as if they'd struck a gold mine.
"From now on, let us kill only these ones!"
"They're too dangerous for you."
"Do not look down on me! Puny monsters like these are nothing!"
"For 'nothing,' you couldn't even react earlier."
"T-That was only because those cowards ambushed us!"
I'd teased him, sure, but Goblins really were tough opponents for beginners who didn't have their attack patterns down cold.
For their small frames, they were strong and agile.
I'd made it look easy, but for these guys, they'd be a serious handful.
'More importantly, how did I end up like this?'
Looking back on the life of twenty-nine-year-old Kim Yu-seong, an upstanding young citizen of the Republic of Korea, I had a pretty good head on my shoulders.
And I was a lunatic obsessed with [Dungeon Log].
And... hm, that was it.
Yeah, that was all there was to me.
'So how the hell am I fighting like this?'
Was I secretly a martial arts master all along?
Here I thought I was just a hardcore gaming shut-in, and it turns out I'm a combat prodigy?
'No way in hell.'
My complete lack of athletic talent had been thoroughly proven back in my school days.
Fighting went without saying.
Then what had changed?
The answer was actually simple.
'Yuta.'
My body changed, didn't it?
If "Yuta" was originally someone who knew how to handle himself in a fight.
And if I'm simply using the muscle memory ingrained in this body as is.
Then it makes sense.
'Was he a former knight?'
People who gave up the strength they'd cultivated on the continent to challenge the labyrinth.
They weren't common, but I couldn't rule out the possibility.
The spear and shield felt like natural extensions of my limbs, after all.
As if I'd trained with them for well over a decade.
'This body might have a backstory to it.'
On the continent outside the labyrinth city, knights and mages lost the ability to use their powers the moment they set foot inside the city.
Furthermore, to become Explorers, they had to shatter the core of their own power with their own hands.
Otherwise, they couldn't accept the powers of the labyrinth, like "Runes" or "Records."
Needless to say, that was no easy choice, which was why characters like that in the game always had at least a little backstory attached to them.
'Well, nothing I need to worry about right now.'
I could think about all that after we made it back to the city.
All that mattered right now was that thanks to this body's original owner—
I was reaping some very sweet benefits from "Yuta."
'At this rate, I can keep my build options much wider.'
Originally, I'd been dead set on going pure mage no matter what.
I had the gaming mechanics in my head, not the physical body to pull off close combat.
Factoring in how mages were treated in parties and their survival rate, I'd basically had no other choice.
If my body could keep up, though, there was no need to stubbornly stick to that path.
Just like when I played the game, I could keep plenty of options open and adapt on the fly.
'Then should I tackle the [Divination] event first?'
On the first floor, there was an event you could only use before your build was locked in.
Having settled on our destination, I passed the directions along to our party's guide, the dwarf.
"Is there a spot marked like a stream of water on the map?"
"It is a fair ways off, but yes, there is one."
"How far?"
"Hrm... Taking the shortest route, about twenty-five miles?"
[Dungeon Log] overlapped with the real world in quite a few ways.
Units of measurement, in particular, tended to follow real-world ones directly.
Wait a second, is this dwarf bastard... out of his mind?
"Mi...les?"
I cannot work with someone this lacking in common sense.
If this is how it's going to be, I'm replacing this teammate on the spot—
"...Around forty kilometers."
Right, now we're speaking the same language.
***
SHUNK!
The tip of my spear pierced unerringly through a goblin's throat.
At the same instant, I slammed my shield—THUD!—into another one lunging in from the side.
Pulling my spear back in the same motion, I launched a swift counterattack.
SLASH!
The belly of the goblin leaping at me with arms flung wide split neatly open.
Spilling blood and guts across the floor, the creature naturally didn't last long before the life drained from its eyes.
'I don't even get nervous anymore.'
Was it simply because Goblins were easy prey?
Had my personality just changed overnight?
Or was it because "Yuta" was a fearless guy by nature?
I couldn't say for sure which one it was.
Either way, after living my whole life without ever throwing a punch, I was now fighting battles like second nature.
It felt a little surreal even to me, sure, but since it beat freezing up in terror, I decided to look on the bright side.
'Looks like they're just about done over there, too.'
Four Goblins in total had just rushed us.
I'd just finished off two of them, and my party members were working together to fend off the remaining pair.
"Hyaaaah!"
"Mr. Urka! Stop panicking!"
"I-I am not scared at all!"
"Then keep your eyes open when you swing!"
The orc and the elf took on one—
"Hraah!"
While the dwarf handled the other.
CRUNCH!
Surprisingly enough, though, the dwarf's side finished first.
A swing of his mace snapped the goblin's arm in a single blow, and his follow-up strike crushed its ribs, pulping its heart and lungs.
Even though his technique wasn't anything special, he was putting out overwhelmingly better performance than the other two.
'Dwarves really are strong at this stage.'
Everyone had the exact same base stats, so the difference came down to racial traits.
A Dwarf's racial trait was [Born Artisan], which amplified the primary performance of any crafted gear they used.
Since all they had to do was equip gear to trigger it, being able to make full use of it right from the very beginning was a huge advantage.
A Human's racial trait, for reference, was [Inquiry].
It applied proficiency to Rune skills and amplified their effects in proportion to that proficiency.
If I could view a status window, a proficiency percentage would be displayed right next to my Rune skill.
"Hraaaah!!"
While I was briefly lost in thought, the battle wrapped up without a hitch.
CHOP—!
Right after the elf slashed the goblin's leg to pin it in place, the orc's axe came down into its neck.
With its neck only partway severed and its head dangling loosely, the goblin crumpled limply to the floor.
Maybe because we'd been running into nothing but Goblins on the way here, they were managing just fine without my help now.
"Urooooooh!!"
Raising his axe high overhead, the orc let out a roar of victory.
This wasn't even our first win, so I wondered why he was making such a fuss all of a sudden—
"I have finally severed an enemy's windpipe! I killed it myself!!"
Apparently, having me or the elf take every last hit up until now had really been eating at him.
In [Dungeon Log], experience was distributed based on contribution anyway, so landing the final blow didn't even matter.
Still, that was beside the point—
"Keep it down. You'll draw more monsters."
"G-Got it! Uroooooh..."
That was when it happened.
With the fight over, I was just pulling out the [Butcher's Knife] to start the cleanup work when—
"Mr. Yuta!"
The elf called out to me.
"What is it?"
"Something strange came out of this one."
"Something strange?"
"It looks like... paper."
At the word "paper," I immediately got to my feet and hurried over.
And lying right where the elf was pointing was the exact item I'd been hoping for—
A sheet of white paper packed densely with unreadable lettering.
"A Record Sheet."
"Is it something good?"
The elf asked, and the other two looked at me as if wondering the exact same thing.
"..."
I badly wanted to ask, 'Are you people completely out of your minds, marching into the labyrinth without even knowing what a Record is?', but I forced the words rising up my throat back down.
This wasn't the first or second time, and I couldn't keep blowing my top over every little thing, could I?
It was time to humbly accept that I was this party's carry machine, bus driver, and resident lore explainer all rolled into one.
Calming myself down, I gave them a "very kind" answer.
"If you tear a Record Sheet, you absorb the monster's Record."
"And what does that change?"
Where should I even start explaining?
There's way too much lore and mechanics packed into this one system...
Hm, I'll keep it as simple as possible.
"Your capabilities go up."
To put it in game terms, it raises your stats.