-—Thoom...
After a string of fights, at last—
-...Guuooh.
The monster called an Ougar of Great Strength
began to topple to the floor.
A sound leaked from the mouth of the dying beast.
Ordinarily, a voice like that should be packed with sheer agony.
But somehow—
“Relief?”
More than pain, yeah.
I even got the sense it was... glad
that death had finally come for it.
“...No way. I’m imagining things.”
It startled me once in the middle there,
but it wasn’t an enemy our unit couldn’t subjugate.
That wasn’t the problem.
“...Let me check something.”
Maybe the unit’s healers also sensed something off.
They approached the fallen monster’s corpse with care.
“Yes. We were right.”
After a long inspection, they nodded,
then spoke in a heavy tone.
“This thing was already half dead to begin with.”
“...”
“Cause of death looks like this miasma. Its viscera had all rotted out. They’d stopped functioning.”
I nodded at that.
I’d had one particular doubt,
and their words answered it.
“Ingredient Appraisal didn’t list any resistance to the miasma.”
From the start, this thing
wasn’t a type of monster that could remain alive inside this mine’s miasma.
“It’s not a zombie... right?”
“No, rather—”
A monster that should’ve been officially pronounced dead long ago.
The reason a thing like that could keep moving—
“Nrgh...!”
—was the grotesque machine device that had burrowed through its body.
A few medics latched onto the device
and began to tug with difficulty.
Rip!
At last,
the machine tore free.
“Huff, huff...!”
“Th-this is the cause.”
Blood spattered.
Flesh still clung in clumps.
At the far end—
at the part that had been driven into meat—
there was something like a very finely crafted, tentacle-shaped implement.
“These units were embedded in all its vital organs.”
“We’re not engineers, so we can’t identify the device exactly, but it’s probably a kind of life-support... a machine that makes the body move normally even after death.”
The medics with the job [Healer]
stared at the device, cold sweat beading.
“Whatever the tech level... it’s incredible.”
“I’m asking because I’m curious. Any chance it’s just normal medical equipment?”
“No. Definitely not.”
“How can you be sure?”
“We’ve got some time in grade too, you know.”
They looked at the places where the machine had been plugged into the corpse.
“Units were lodged in every key part of the motor nervous system. This monster... wasn’t moving because it wanted to. It was moving as ordered by the machine.”
“...”
“Every bodily function was collapsed to a degree that death would’ve been normal, and yet only the regions necessary for movement were forcibly kept ‘alive.’”
The medic speaking that far
grimaced and continued.
“And I think the senses were left intact, probably to register external stimuli.”
“...”
“It had no resistance to the miasma, so it would’ve kept receiving pain from the miasma. I’d bet... it thought countless times that it’d rather just die. This one.”
I recalled the line that appeared when I [appraised] the miasma in this dungeon.
[Corpse Miasma of Those Who Could Not Properly Die]
[For reasons unknown, those who could not properly die repeated endless decay and resentment.]
The monsters in there... even in death, they could not properly die,
and while in endless pain,
they were forced to move under orders from the machines keeping them alive.
That they moved after death was zombie-like,
but I felt there was a more fitting word for what these beings were.
[Ingredient Appraisal (Enhanced)]
[Dwe Morzan Slave Restraint]
“Slave...”
[Possessing excellent technological prowess but inferior physical capability, the Dwarven.]
[This was the great invention they created to make up for their deficiencies.]
[Having succeeded in placing an entire world beneath their feet, the Dwarven thought to themselves:]
[‘Let everyone else do the hard work!’]
[This great invention not only controls other lifeforms, it even includes a function that forcibly sustains life to prevent waste of precious labor.]
[Even after a dominated subject reaches death, by forcibly preserving its reason and senses, permanent and efficient labor became possible—labor that even death could not stop.]
[There was one round of criticism that the pain felt by a slave at the verge of death was somewhat severe... but really, who cares about a slave’s pain!]
[Thanks to this revolutionary invention, the Dwarven were freed from all the grueling labor that had plagued them,]
[and they could devote themselves with peace of mind to the development of magi-engineering.]
A system message surfaced.
Reading it, I could only be aghast.
“...”
That world called Dwe Morzan—yeah, it had supposedly been annihilated.
We too were on the verge of annihilation.
Like us,
their world also showed no traces of any god’s intervention,
so I’d felt a strange fellow-feeling for them.
“...I regret that a little.”
Because clearly,
“These bastards deserved annihilation.”
“Yes. I’ve never seen anything this cruel.”
They ruled the world, so
I’d pictured something like living in harmony with other races like Dasmur’s people.
I was wrong.
They dug up mana stones by mining this place,
used the tech developed from that to conquer the world,
and—
“treated every other race as slaves.”
Not just slaves.
Even in a state where you should rightfully die, they made you move by force.
“And on top of that... leaving reason and senses intact while seizing only control of the body.”
If your reason endures even as you reach death,
then the pain that arrives at the moment of dying continues without end.
Suffering like that...
slaves who can never be freed.
Me too—
I’ve struggled to avoid death,
but this—
this is nothing like the “way to avoid death” I want.
No.
It’s the exact opposite.
Clench.
“Horrific.”
Monsters that couldn’t die intact.
Which is to say,
“it’s like they’re... stuck re-experiencing the process of dying.”
If they could just die, everything would end.
But never reaching that conclusion,
they keep experiencing death right before the end.
To me...
it was behavior that provoked not just disgust, but hatred.
“Sergeant Shin. According to the system message, those things called Dwarven are all extinct.”
“Yeah. Everyone in this Gate is probably like this.”
Chances were,
every living thing remaining in this underground mine was a slave like this one.
Even though their masters who exploited them were gone,
they were still being ruled by those machines
and forced to fight intruders who entered the mine.
Tch.
“I’d planned to put this off if the operation seemed too hard.”
That thought...
changed a little.
Every life in this mine was surely suffering in the same way.
I didn’t personally know them,
and I had no responsibility to them.
“Add one more objective.”
“Yes.”
“Inside this mine, the monsters—as fast as possible—”
But this was, ultimately,
my personal take.
“—it just pisses me off.”
Having decided,
I looked back at the soldiers and spoke.
“We’re going to kill them. All of them.”
“...”
It could ❀ Nоvеlігht ❀ (Don’t copy, read here) sound cruel as an order,
but the soldiers regarded me with a strange look,
then—
“Yes.”
“We’ll follow the Legion Commander’s order.”
—nodded and readied their respective weapons.
****
After that,
we continued the assault.
—Kkiieeeeeee!
Deeper in, monsters of a type similar to the “Ougar” kept appearing.
Similar didn’t mean their monster traits were identical, but anyway—
“They sure had a variety of beasts to use as slaves.”
“No kidding.”
At this rate,
it wouldn’t be strange if they’d enslaved every kind of lifeform but themselves.
Along the way,
we also found something a little curious.
“Sergeant Shin?”
“Mm?”
“There’s... some kind of room here.”
As we continued down the spiral corridor,
there was a space cut into the smooth wall.
“...Let’s go in.”
Fortunately, there didn’t seem to be any kind of lock.
We were able to enter easily.
Inside,
what spread before us was—
“...Dwarves?”
They looked like desiccated corpses,
dead a long time.
The difference from the other beings we’d found in this mine:
unlike the monsters that attacked us,
there were no machine devices visible on these ones.
[Ingredient Appraisal (Enhanced)]
Just in case, I went closer
and examined them carefully.
“...Ah. Thought so.”
“D-did you figure something out?”
“These guys.”
“Sir?”
[Primates — Smallfolk — Dwarven]
[Freshness: Lowest]
“They’re the owners of that civilization that got wiped out.”
“Ah...!”
Well...
they’d ended up as corpses like this now.
When the soldiers set up lights,
the surroundings came into clearer view.
“Hm. I can’t be certain, but—”
“Feels like... a research lab.”
Just as they said.
Around the dwarven corpses stood bookshelves packed with volumes written in an unknown script,
and clusters of machines whose uses I couldn’t guess.
“Why are they all dead in here like this...?”
“Hm. Hard to say.”
I did have
a rough guess.
“They were researching the mana stones pulled from here.”
There were probably those living ordinary lives outside,
but some of them
must have been conducting research inside the mine.
Those who’d been living well like that, one day—
they provoked something too deep in the mine,
and “the ones inside the mine... died like this without even escaping.”
That kind of story, maybe.
Meanwhile,
outside there’d been a seal, as if to block the aftermath of that something.
“So the ones outside didn’t die immediately...?”
Given that they were annihilated in the end,
that seal probably didn’t help.
“Anyway, hmm.”
If that guess was true,
then the books shelved here would be related to the tech they’d been studying.
The problem—
“Well, I can’t read a word.”
“Well... it’s not just a foreign language; it’s another-world language.”
The machines that had controlled those monsters, too—
these people’s tech looked weirdly advanced.
If we could only read those books...
it might help us tremendously.
“Ah. That reminds me.”
“Sir? Why the sudden—?”
“Something’s bugging me.”
Looking closely at the decayed corpses,
I noticed they had quite a few human-like features.
“Also explains why they’re categorized under [Primates], with no added butchering method.”
A lifeform very similar to humans.
These materials here—
they’d certainly be of great value, but we had no one capable of reading them.
Right.
“No ‘person’ could.”
‘Hey.’
—Geh... M-my Lord...?
I casually addressed the monster in the shadows.
Even though I hadn’t said what I wanted,
it flinched.
“You know what I’m about to ask.”
—L-Lord...
In the past,
by drinking human blood, she’d roughly grasped human language and civilization,
and after feeding on the Green Manes’ blood,
she’d come to understand their unique tongue as well—
—T-this looks like... all rotten blood, though...?
“So what.”
—Ugh.
A monster that can read memories and language through blood:
Ariella.
“Don’t tell me you can’t extract memories from blood like this... right?”
—Th-that’s not it. The mana in the blood hasn’t evaporated. If I drink it, the information in that mana... I can obtain it.
“But?”
—This kind tastes awful and... it’s bad for my health...
Even before we met, she’d had a refined palate.
She obsessed over things like the freshness of blood.
A noble of no small standing.
Eating rotten blood is something she really, really hates.
As a vassal, she can’t bring herself to lie.
“Don’t worry about that part.”
—Pardon?
“I’ll cook it into something edible somehow.”
—...Even if you say you’ll cook with spoiled ingredients—
This brat.
Still doesn’t trust my cooking?
“I’m taking the corpses and the books.”
“Yes, sir.”
And so,
the dwarven bodies and the volumes went into my shadow.
Aside from that,
the operation proceeded smoothly.
We kept drilling down the spiral corridor,
heading deeper underground, when—
“...Ghk?”
A soldier at the very front
halted mid-step.
Snap!
Sensing something wrong, I grabbed the soldier by the nape
and flung him behind me.
“Kh—kgh...”
“Private Park! Are you okay?”
“I-I’m fine. It’s not serious... the miasma seeped a little through the protective suit...”
The reason he stopped—
was simple, in truth.
“This is as far as we go...”
“Yes. Seems that way.”
The protective suits crafted by the Production Triad—
their performance was excellent,
but there were limits.
“As expected... the deeper we go, the stronger the miasma.”
We’d pushed ever downward,
and we’d reached a zone where even these suits couldn’t fully block the miasma.
The protective suits would still blunt it to a degree.
Judging from how the soldier only coughed for a bit despite how severe the miasma clearly was,
that much was clear.
“If I use my cuisine, going deeper would be possible.”
But—
if we went deeper that way and the dish’s effect cut off,
“on the way back to here, we’d be exposed to miasma that even the suits couldn’t stop.”
In the end,
I sighed and spoke to the soldiers.
“...We’re withdrawing.”
“Yes, sir!”
Climbing back up the corridor with the unit,
I looked into the hole bored all the way down below and thought:
“How deep is it?”
Just how deep did this shaft go?
And at the very deepest point—
how strong would the miasma waiting for us be?
I couldn’t even guess.
“Do I give up?”
Ordinarily,
at the point we’d tried this far and failed, we would’ve had no choice but to back off.
We’d used most of the means at our disposal and still failed,
and it wasn’t a location so urgent it needed to be taken right this minute.
But—
—Kkiieeeek...
That grotesque cry
echoed from below.
When I’d tried to grasp this place by myself,
I heard that sound and quietly withdrew...
“Now it’s the opposite.”
Those who could not properly die—
their screams of pain...
wouldn’t let me abandon this operation.
