The most closely guarded secret never becomes a legend, for no one ever learns of it.
“Huff... Huff.....”
“Gasp.....”
At the lowest level of the dungeon, the deaths of these two would be buried as well.
“Hmm.”
Hess watched the two of them die with an impassive expression. He would be the sole witness and survivor here.
“It is over.”
Hess decided never to speak of this again.
“I did it.....”
Lloyd’s final words. His bloodstained face was filled with joy.
In contrast, Nightmare’s expression was so twisted that it looked ready to tear apart at any moment.
“Hess...! Pick up the Orb...! Bring it to me!”
“Hmph. Did you think I would continue meekly serving beneath you forever?”
“W-What?!”
“Now I am free at last.”
Hess looked down at the dying Nightmare as though he were an insect.
He was no longer Nightmare’s lackey.
“Damn it...!”
The bastard spat out a few curses as he died. Hess thought those were his final words.
But Nightmare had something else he wanted to say. He simply ran out of breath after babbling a few curses.
“......”
And just like that, the hearts of Lloyd and Nightmare, who had fought over the position at the pinnacle of the world, stopped.
The fisherman’s gain. The throne they had left vacant now belonged to Hess, who had been the third most powerful figure.
“Lloyd.....”
Lloyd, whose breath had gone out, was still smiling. The final tear he shed just before death washed away the blood staining his face.
“A forbidden skill.”
The trump card Lloyd had used by burning his own life. The one move Nightmare had no way to prepare for.
“Life is fleeting.”
The two men’s ends came to Hess as a kind of realization.
Roll....
That was when the Orb moved.
“So you had a will of your own.”
The world’s most valuable treasure, coveted by Nightmare, rolled to a stop at Hess’s feet.
Hess stared down at the Orb for a moment, then said with a sigh,
“I have no need for it.”
With that, he turned away.
Roll....
The Orb rolled a little farther, as though drawn after Hess, but he did not spare it a glance.
For a little over a month, Hess made his way toward the dungeon’s exit along the path he had entered by.
Roll....
When Hess reached the exit, he paused and surveyed the scenery visible beyond the dungeon.
It was not that he hesitated to leave. It was simply strange to see a peaceful world where nothing had changed.
Trudge, trudge.
When Hess stepped outside the dungeon and looked back, the dungeon was no longer there.
Having swallowed the bodies of two great figures and the most secret of treasures, the legend once more sank into a history unknown to all.
***
‘What a shitty ending.’
Click.
He stretched out a foot and roughly switched off the computer tower.
The monitor that had displayed the web novel could not turn itself off, its power LED blinking.
‘I didn’t spend months reading this just to see an ending like this.’
A medieval fantasy that ended in mutual destruction. And why didn’t Hess pick up the Orb?
Though he was neither the protagonist nor anything but a villain, Hess was my favorite character.
‘His brutal ruthlessness, stopping at nothing to achieve his goals!’
The moment it was revealed that good-natured Henrik was actually Hess, the mastermind behind it all, had been a truly mind-blowing scene.
In truth, ever since Lloyd learned the Forbidden Skill, I’d suspected it would end with the protagonist’s death.
So I was ready to accept an ending where Lloyd died, as long as Hess at least ended his life as Nightmare’s underling and claimed the Orb.
‘But what was that? “Life is fleeting”? And what did the Orb even do in the end? Was it a MacGuffin?’
Kim In-ho vented every bit of frustration he had before rolling over.
‘Ah, I don’t like any of this. What a waste of time. I might as well sleep.’
As he did so, he failed to notice the computer turning itself back on and displaying the web novel once more.
‘Still, was it a happy ending for Hess?’
He let his imagination take flight, picturing what Hess, now the strongest, might do.
‘It’d be far more interesting than my stifling life. What would it feel like... if I had that kind of power?’
As he dwelled on it, his mood gradually lifted for no particular reason.
‘The strongest in the world... If I were Hess, I’d have picked up the Orb too.’
As though he truly were Hess.
Shhhh...
Soon, the light streaming from the monitor engulfed the entire room.