『You have entered the Dungeon, Occupied Margrave’s Fortress.』
『This Dungeon has one rule.』
『Upon entry, entrants randomly lose one of their five senses.』
『This effect persists until the Dungeon is cleared.』
***
A B-Rank Dungeon.
Occupied Margrave’s Fortress.
This was why the Dungeon ranked eleventh on the Hunter communities’ list of the worst Dungeons.
The existence of a rule.
Such rules became increasingly common in higher-ranked Dungeons, and methods of avoiding them did exist.
But they were uncommon in B-Rank Dungeons.
More importantly, Hunters who entered Dungeons of this level had no way to evade their rules.
They had to endure the rule with nothing but their own bodies and fight regardless.
That was why Kim Han-yul prayed with all her heart.
‘Please, please, please...... Taste or smell—no, even touch is fine. Please, not hearing. No, anything but sight!’
Had her desperate wish been heard?
Immediately after the now-familiar sensation of something pulling her into the Dungeon, Kim Han-yul opened her eyes and shouted without realizing it.
“Yes!”
She could see.
She could also hear the word she had just shouted.
Touch?
She felt it the moment she clenched her fist.
Then what had disappeared?
The answer came quickly.
‘I can’t smell anything.’
It was no different from hitting the jackpot.
Occupied Margrave’s Fortress.
The primary monsters in this Dungeon were Orcs.
The starting point was usually inside an underground prison.
Smell was actually one of the more unpleasant things here.
Losing one’s sense of smell made the ordeal easier to endure, making it the stroke of luck that Dungeon entrants wished for most.
Kim Han-yul had seized that luck on her very first entry.
‘They do say the first winning hand is a dog’s hand.’
So what?
Joo Do-gyeom did not seem like the type to grind the same Dungeon over and over, and good luck was still good luck.
She turned her head to the side and spoke.
“I lost my sense of smell. What about you, Team Leader......!?”
The question caught in her throat.
Her Team Leader stood right beside her.
A faint haze seemed to have settled over Joo Do-gyeom’s pitch-black eyes.
Her mouth fell open before she knew it.
“Don’t tell me......”
Joo Do-gyeom nodded and calmly answered.
“I lost my sight.”
The color drained from Kim Han-yul’s face in an instant.
***
The world had turned completely black.
Joo Do-gyeom was not flustered.
In this era, few Dungeons involved rules, so people called a place as trivial as Occupied Margrave’s Fortress one of the worst Dungeons.
But in the future, most Dungeons would be governed by rules.
Even the calamity-class monsters he had fought until the very end were monsters that each carried several such rules around themselves like domains.
And this place had only one rule?
It did not distort all his senses. It merely deprived him of sight.
It was hardly worth laughing at.
Of course, that was only from Joo Do-gyeom’s perspective as a regressor.
Kim Han-yul, on the other hand—
“We’re fed. Team Leader, we’re seriously fed. If you lose your sight...... no. This really won’t work. I’ve got a Party Emergency Return Scroll I was saving, okay? Let’s use it for now. Using it and entering again later would be much smarter.”
An Emergency Return Scroll.
It was a single-use magic item that allowed someone to return to Earth without completing a Dungeon’s clear conditions.
A personal one cost hundreds of millions of won.
One that applied to an entire Party could easily cost more than a billion.
That might no longer be a significant sum to Joo Do-gyeom, but it was unquestionably an expensive item.
It was also rarely available for sale.
Regardless of all that, there was no need to use it now.
Having reached that conclusion, Joo Do-gyeom answered.
“Calm down, Kim Han-yul. There is no problem.”
“How is there no problem?! I might be called a super rookie, but I’m not on your level! The most important person on our team just went blind, so how am I supposed to calm......?!”
Ignoring Kim Han-yul’s noisy voice, Joo Do-gyeom moved forward.
The world was black, but that was no problem.
No.
It was actually better this way.
Was there not a saying?
When a person lost one of their five senses, the others developed to the extreme in compensation.
It was true.
And it was immensely helpful when training certain martial arts.
『Skill, Ripple Perception Qigong, advances to 3-Star.』
A martial art that used sound to survey one’s surroundings.
The instant he activated Ripple Perception Qigong, he read everything around him—the surrounding terrain and objects, and even Kim Han-yul stamping her feet as she continued to babble.
The iron bars imprisoning them were no exception.
Joo Do-gyeom grabbed the bars and pulled them wide apart.
They were not reinforced by any special magic or power, so it was not difficult.
Without another word, he stepped outside and walked through the mold-reeking underground passage toward the stairs.
Kim Han-yul followed him and spoke.
“Wait. What is this, Team Leader? Can you see? You’re moving like someone who can see......”
“I can’t. This is simply enough.”
“What does that even mean?”
Joo Do-gyeom did not answer.
He merely continued walking forward while sharpening his senses more and more.
『Skill, Five-Senses Qi Circulation Art, advances to 4-Star.』
‘This is far better than training with a blindfold.’
There was indeed a world of difference between choosing not to use something one could use and being completely unable to use it.
As he climbed the stairs with that thought, Kim Han-yul eventually fell quiet.
More precisely, she began organizing her thoughts while muttering under her breath.
“A Special Skill? One that doesn’t require sight? What kind of Skill would do that? Team Leader is still only D-Rank, though. No, but if he had something like that, he could’ve just said so from the start. Seriously......”
“Stop muttering. Even if I had told you, you would still have insisted we leave.”
“......”
Kim Han-yul’s eyes widened sharply before she nodded.
“Fair. Honestly, I still want to tell you we should just leave......”
“Don’t worry, Kim Han-yul. There will be no problem.”
“......I’ll trust you.”
Kim Han-yul was not normally the type to make such a fuss.
If anything, she was rather fond of challenges.
Why else would she have challenged the Corpse Giant when all her seniors told her not to?
Even by her standards, however, Joo Do-gyeom was simply too much.
‘A Hunter at D-Rank with that level of combat power and even a detection-type Skill like this?’
She had never even heard of such a person.
And what about the item that had made her eyes spin?
What in the world was Eve’s Gift?
‘Where did he even find something like that?’
It was likewise something she had never heard of—a treasure beyond price to summoning-type Hunters.
‘Seriously...... Every time I think I’m beginning to understand him......’
He became completely incomprehensible again.
Joo Do-gyeom.
His eyes were clouded as though mist had settled over them because he had lost his sight, yet when she looked closely, his characteristic calmness remained unchanged within those black pupils.
She had been staring openly at them for quite some time when he spoke.
“This is rather uncomfortable. Is there a reason you need to stare that hard?”
“......!! You can see that too...... no, you can feel it?”
“Even without trying, anyone would notice when you stare that openly......”
Joo Do-gyeom closed his mouth.
Kim Han-yul naturally stopped speaking as well.
Not far away,
“Snort-!”
came the distinctive nasal grunt of an Orc.
It came from the closed wooden door at the top of the stairs.
Joo Do-gyeom took out the Great Axe.
Kim Han-yul asked with her eyes, ‘Isn’t this place too narrow to swing that?’
The answer came immediately.
Joo Do-gyeom stepped closer to the exit and drove the one-handed axe deep into the wall as though burying it there.
WHOOSH—!
Then he cleaved through the stacked-stone wall, the closed wooden door, and even the torsos of the two Orcs standing beyond them in one long, perfectly straight line.
There was no tremendous roar or violent trace of destruction.
It happened far too naturally.
As though he were slicing tofu.
The only noise came a moment later.
THUD—!
The severed wooden door and the dead Orcs collapsed to the floor.
Countless question marks filled Kim Han-yul’s mind at the impossible sight.
Joo Do-gyeom gave a slight nod and thought,
‘I can use the Sure-Kill Eye even without sight.’
That was probably because the ability belonged more to the realm of perception than literal seeing.
Thanks to that, his first experiment—connecting a point on the wall to another beyond it and drawing a line between them—appeared to have gone well.
Satisfied, Joo Do-gyeom started walking forward again.
Kim Han-yul followed him and could not help asking,
“Team Leader...... are you seriously a monster?”
“Do I look like one?”
“......A joke. It was a joke. Don’t look at me so frighteningly.”
“I wasn’t looking at you frighteningly. And at the moment, I can’t look at anything.”
“Ah, right......”
“Hmm......”
He had asked the question and let out a thoughtful hum, but it was actually something he was used to hearing.
Even in the distant future, quite a few people had called Joo Do-gyeom a monster.
‘I’ll have to get used to it.’
Joo Do-gyeom calmly nodded.
***
Escaping the underground prison was a kind of tutorial.
In other words, it was meant to help entrants adapt to the missing sense.
Only five Orcs could be encountered on the way out.
If the disturbance grew and the battle dragged on, reinforcements would arrive, but that normally did not happen.
Was this another consideration from the System?
There was no way to know.
In any case, the two escaped the underground prison without difficulty.
‘More precisely, Team Leader sliced everything apart by himself on the way out.’
It had been shocking the first time.
But even after seeing it a second and third time, Kim Han-yul still could not believe it.
His axe technique made the restrictions of the narrow space laughable, slicing through the surroundings wholesale as though they were tofu.
No, could that even be called axe technique?
‘It’s not as though he’s using Condensed Qi......’
Strictly speaking, Condensed Qi was effectively a secret technique of close-combat Classes, and most of one’s Stats had to reach at least S+ Rank before it could be used.
How could Joo Do-gyeom, who was only around D-Rank, possibly use something like that?
‘......Which makes it even stranger.’
While she was lost in thought, they completely emerged from the underground prison.
Joo Do-gyeom did not head outside.
Instead, he continued climbing the stairs connected to a pillar in the outer wall that had also been built to serve as a watchtower, eventually reaching the top.
Kim Han-yul naturally followed behind him.
What they found there was a horde of Orcs, easily numbering in the hundreds, enjoying a savage feast as they ate and drank among burning and collapsed buildings.
It was the literal image of an occupied fortress.
Kim Han-yul felt dizzy without realizing it.
“So we have to get through all of that, reach the inner castle, and defeat the Orc Great Warrior to clear this Dungeon, right?”
“Yes.”
“......Together with a Team Leader who’s lost his sight.”
“Correct.”
There was no problem.
Still, she could not help feeling the weight of it anew.
Eleventh on the Hunter communities’ list of the worst Dungeons.
‘That ranking wasn’t for nothing.’
The rule that robbed them of one of their five senses was terrifying enough.
But they also had to break through that many Orcs, reach the inner castle, fight even stronger Orc Warriors and Shamans, and then slit the Orc Great Warrior’s throat?
Was this really a B-Rank Dungeon?
Was it not effectively a place meant for Hunters of at least B+ Rank—no, A-Rank?
It was completely different from Zombie Burst, where all one had to do was cut down large numbers of enemies.
Zombies were relatively easy to kill with simple attacks.
Orcs only looked easy because Joo Do-gyeom cut them down so effortlessly. Even the weakest Orc could slaughter dozens of Zombies without difficulty, and they possessed intelligence on top of that.
Zombie Burst could also be cleared without defeating the Corpse Giant, but Occupied Margrave’s Fortress absolutely required them to kill the Orc Great Warrior.
‘......And unlike Zombie Burst, this isn’t an open-world Dungeon. It’s an instanced Dungeon, so the two of us have to handle everything ourselves.’
The thought came to her naturally.
‘God, I really want to use that Emergency Return Scroll.’
However, she did not say it aloud.
They had already come this far, and she felt she had complained more than enough.
Now it was time to hear the plan.
“So, what are we going to do? Don’t tell me you plan to just break through all of them and slit the Orc Great Warrior’s throat......”
Joo Do-gyeom’s hazy eyes turned toward Kim Han-yul.
Kim Han-yul slowly opened her mouth, her expression aghast.
“D-Don’t tell me......?”
Joo Do-gyeom snorted with amusement and spoke.
“Of course not. It was a joke.”
“......Team Leader. If you weren’t my Team Leader, I would’ve shot you just now. You know that?”
“Ha ha-!”
“Don’t laugh!”
She shouted, but the thought struck her anew.
‘So he can laugh like that.’
Why did he always pretend to be so stiff?
It was absurd.
Now genuinely annoyed, Kim Han-yul folded her arms and asked, “So what’s the plan?”