"Creeeak—"
Loulan gently pushed open the ancient door, and the light radiating from his body shone through the gap.
The narrow opening was just wide enough for an adult's arm. Although Loulan might possess enough strength to sweep through this entire region of the dungeon, he still had no intention of lowering his guard. He knew full well what happened to people who got carried away.
"WHOOSH—"
Sure enough, the instant the door opened, a sharp arrow tore through the air and shot toward the gap where sound and light mingled.
"SHNK〜"
Blood sprayed. The tetanus-rusted blade on the arrow cut across the back of Loulan's hand and severed a blood vessel, causing blood to gush out without stopping.
This was extremely serious. Even Loulan, who felt no pain at all, showed fear.
He had no idea whether his current Constitution could withstand a tetanus-ridden blade that had been rusting for hundreds or thousands of years, or how many of the pathogens coating it his body's internal system could automatically eliminate.
Everything was unknown!
He was still too young. Although he had been cautious, he lacked the hard-earned experience of a veteran and assumed that if he slowly pulled the door open by hand, he wouldn't have to worry about a sudden attack like this.
His heart was also filled with arrogance born from suddenly acquiring power. He had assumed all the pathetic weaklings in this dungeon were enemies he could kill with one slash.
At most, he thought, he merely needed to watch out for surprise attacks.
But he had forgotten that the truly dangerous things might not be the enormous creatures before his eyes. After all, even an elephant could be pierced by a tiny bullet or killed with a sufficient dose of poison.
Within a Darkest Dungeon, the greatest dangers to the powerful weren't monsters at all, but inconspicuous things capable of striking a series of fatal blows against the delver himself: poisons, curses, traps, and more!
"Haa... Calm down. Kill everything in here first!"
Loulan forced himself to calm down. With no physical interference, the process was astonishingly quick.
"THUD!"
With tremendous violence, Loulan kicked the partially opened door wide. Dust scattered, its fine particles starkly visible beneath the light and making his surroundings look breathtakingly beautiful.
His opponents seemed to fit this darkly romantic scene as well. Over a dozen monster girls, some cute, some seductive, some tiny, and some towering, turned in unison to look at the intruder in their room.
They spread their arms. With their claws bared, they looked as though they were inviting Loulan, the refined gentleman, onto the dance floor to join them.
That was how the scene appeared to Loulan.
In reality?
A group of monsters terrifying enough to make a grown adult wet his trousers stood together and stared at him with empty gazes. The few with a hint of life and actual eyeballs had crimson or dark red, luminescent eyes that looked thoroughly horrifying in the darkness.
"ROAR!"
The moment a familiar werewolf girl roared, the horde of monsters surged madly toward Loulan.
The archer was a spider-bodied, human-torsoed girl. Four arms grew from her abdomen, which was haphazardly wrapped in spider silk, and they held two dilapidated bows. She nocked two matching tetanus-rusted arrows and fired at Loulan!
As for Loulan, his body and head acted separately. He turned his head slightly and looked toward the wall beside the kicked-open doorway, where he indeed discovered an arrow that had missed its target.
It wasn't that Loulan had been careless. His current state was like running a script in League of Legends. In a low-level match like this, a bottom-tier novice like him knew better than to fight the script for control!
His body, meanwhile, whirled the katana in his hands and deflected the incoming arrows with two swift sweeps of its blade.
"SHNK〜 SHNK〜"
With perfect accuracy, the two deflected arrows struck two monster girls attempting to ambush him from the flanks.
Looking more closely, they resembled the zombies from Western films whose bodies moved erratically. Compared with the transformed fungus-infected rotting corpse girl that first attacked him, their bodies were somewhat fleshier, but they were clearly the same type of creature.
The deflected arrows had merely pierced the fleshiest parts of their bodies and pinned them to the moderately solid floor. Though temporarily unable to move, they continued struggling to get back up and attack.
They kept at it even after the arrows had torn away most of their flesh!
Through Loulan's filter, however, the scene looked entirely different. The two monster girls abruptly sat on the floor with their legs folded back on either side. Tears streamed from their hollow eyes as their hands repeatedly patted the ground in an effort to rise.
Yes, once the filter was raised to its maximum setting, even the monsters' behavior was transformed into something cuter and more wholesome!
It was considerate, but without sufficient combat instinct, it would guarantee his death!
"SWISH—SWISH—SWISH—"
The blade repeatedly tore through the air with savage cries. Every slash separated another monster's head from its body.
Some targets the "script" determined couldn't be killed by severing their limbs were even split in half!
Soon, once his body had cut down all the charging monsters, Loulan began advancing on the three remaining ranged monster girls in the distance.
As if they had no concept of fear, those monster girls met Loulan's charge and abandoned their ranged attacks outright.
There were three spider girls in all.
The one with the bows discarded them and instead grabbed four tetanus-rusted arrows.
Unlike that spider girl, the other two had completely human bodies, except for the miniature spider abdomens resembling tails behind them. Spider-silk clothing still wrapped their bodies.
They had originally thrown balls of webbing. Now, however, their four arms transformed into blade-like claws, with pink edges and red blades that looked rather cute.
"SWISH, SWISH, SWISH"
Three slashes disposed of them. No matter how cute they were, they were ultimately minor monsters. The invincible "script" didn't need a second strike to kill any of them.
Combined with the relic's absurd sharpness, a single slash was enough to kill these creatures!
"It's oozing pus?"
Once he had killed the monsters and his body no longer signaled an urge to move, Loulan finally had a chance to inspect the wound the tetanus-rusted arrow had cut.
The situation looked bad. His Constitution wasn't high enough to resist a tetanus-ridden blade contaminated with countless varieties of ancient bacteria. Pus mixed with blood began pouring from the wound, and tiny white pustules even swelled on parts of his arm.
He had contracted a disease!
"I need to get out as quickly as possible. I should change my strategy. Why am I still creeping around cautiously when I have a script? If even this body can't react to danger in time, don't I think far too highly of myself?"
Loulan began to reflect.
Perhaps he should have acted openly from the very beginning. If he had allowed his body to react, it might have cut the arrow apart instead of being dragged down by him and getting hit.
Once he became sufficiently powerful, he really did need to place one hundred percent of his trust in his cheat!