“Guh—...!”
“Byungmin!”
“Don’t break formation—stay calm! Byungmin falls back, Mincheol fills his spot!”
After the name of the miasma changed.
From that point on, the monsters that appeared started getting absurdly strong.
—Thoom....
We did manage to win the fight, somehow, but...
“I’m sorry, Sergeant Shin. My Protective Suit tore.”
“...No. You’ve got nothing to apologize for.”
This underground assault only works when the Protective Suit can block the miasma.
Any soldier who took a hit strong enough to tear the suit had to evacuate at once.
‘Good thing my cooking lets them return even if the suit tears.’
The anti-miasma dish I made.
The reason I’d kept people from eating it casually was for moments like this.
Even if the suit’s resistance got pierced, even if the suit tore and the miasma invaded—
If they ate my dish,
They could at least secure enough resistance to make it back.
Private Lee Byungmin sprinted up the passage at incredible speed.
After watching his back recede,
My soldiers and I
Looked down at the corpse of that terrifyingly powerful monster.
“...Even the equipment’s different.”
“Sure is.”
The slave monsters we met on the outer rim—
Those guys were strong enough, but
Even one of our ordinary squads could barely manage to deal with them.
With only elites gathered now, they hardly counted as enemies at all.
But—
The monsters we faced here were different.
[Slave Restraint for Mine Excavation]
The monsters getting stronger by themselves was a problem,
But the real problem was that restraint right there.
‘At first I thought it was just a machine that let them control their slaves at will...’
When you think about it—
They’re beings with ridiculous technology to begin with.
And that technology...
There’s no reason it couldn’t be used for combat.
BZZZZZTZZZTZZZT!!!
“Damn it.”
“Another weird attack...!”
A blinding torrent of radiance blasted out from the restraint.
Everything that light touched turned to dust and scattered.
The monsters we met deeper in weren’t just being puppeted.
Like that—
The device embedded in their spines spewed attacks by some unknown tech.
That wasn’t the only thing that made my skin crawl.
‘And that isn’t even for combat!?’
If what I saw was true,
Then that restraint unleashing such insane combat capability wasn’t for combat at all...
[Slave Restraint for Mine Excavation]
[This is a slave restraint fitted with special gear that can destroy everything except Mana Stones to proceed with excavation.]
[It is designed to operate indefinitely without exhausting power under certain conditions; for this, it requires an environment saturated with the wearer’s pain and mana—]
“How does that make any sense!?”
It was nothing more than gear to dig this mine downward.
‘Laborer slaves on the outer rim... excavation slaves in the deep.’
It made sense that this mine was being excavated in a way unlike anything human.
If they were using that kind of absurd equipment,
Then carving mountain-sized holes tens of kilometers across would absolutely be possible.
“Haa... hah.”
“I guess it’s a blessing these didn’t show up early on.”
When we hit the outer zones, even low-level soldiers and Awakened from Production were mixed in.
If things like this had shown up from the start,
We might have had quite a few casualties among the weaker troops back then.
‘Gives me chills, honestly.’
These are called restraints for mine excavation now, but—
If there were ones fitted with real combat modules, how strong would those be...?
Thankfully, this mine was said to sit in the capital of their race,
And the Dwarven people were said to have successfully brought their world wholly under control.
It didn’t look like they bothered to deploy a large number of combat weapons here.
If they had, even we wouldn’t have broken through so easily.
Even so—
I figured stronger enemies might appear regardless.
When I opened this Gate in the first place, I expected my share of pain.
And yet—
The reason this Gate disgusted me
Lay elsewhere.
—Goooooooo... gooooo....
FWABABABANG!
[Wise Entilor]
[Freshness — Lowest]
It looked like a gigantic tree.
It swung root-like fists at us.
Its speed wasn’t that fast, but the power behind each blow was monstrous.
Even a graze would be a fatal wound—no doubt about it.
On top of those massive punches, the tentacle-like restraint still spat menacing beams.
And yet, despite how viciously it attacked,
I couldn’t feel a shred of killing intent from the monster’s eyes.
Forget killing intent...
Drip...
From those eyes,
Tears of blood born of pain were flowing.
Reason alone remained; it had already lost every bodily function needed to live.
That machine not only puppeted a dead monster by force,
It had even left only the sensory organs intact to make it easier to control.
A body at the cusp of death would be agony in itself.
A body moved under a machine’s command.
On top of that, it had to suffer constant torment from miasma far worse than the outer rim.
-!@%!@^^^!
The monster
Lashed out at us and uttered something.
—Master.
‘Hm?’
But when that voice reached the vampire in the shadows,
Ariella spoke.
—Just now, that one spoke Dwarven.
‘What?’
She had absorbed Dwarven blood and learned their tongue.
If so, it wasn’t a lie.
That thing was probably of a slave race.
And it spoke Dwarven?
‘Even as a slave of another race... if it’s tasked with excavating a deep mine, some would have learned the language.’
Even among slaves you’d need slaves to manage other slaves.
It wasn’t strange that some slaves were taught the language.
What mattered was what it said in this situation.
In truth...
It was obvious.
‘What did it say?’
—It’s asking us to kill it.
“...”
Monsters that were monstrously strong,
And enemies with machines made by Dwarven tech grafted on.
Normally,
Even for us elites, getting pushed to the brink would be the natural course.
—It also says this machine isn’t meant for combat, so there are gaps—please aim for those.
The reason we didn’t end up that way
Was precisely this.
Whooom!
‘!?’
A massive blow came down at me.
If I failed to dodge, I’d obviously take heavy damage—
—Goh... goooooooh...!
Its speed faltered for a beat.
As if something had grabbed it.
The reason was easy to guess.
‘It resisted...!’
These monsters—
Weren’t our enemies.
If anything, you could call them allies.
‘They not only told us their weak points, they even helped at critical moments.’
Even though we were enemies come to kill them,
They didn’t fear us.
Far from fearing us...
‘They were welcoming us.’
A slavery that had gone on without end.
People who could put an end to it.
The thought that someone had come who could bring them a proper death—
These creatures helped us with everything they had.
Even though the enemy monsters grew stronger the deeper we went,
The only reason the fights still worked at all was this.
The higher the original rank of the monster,
The longer it could resist that [restraint].
And that tilted our fights that much more in our favor.
It wasn’t a bad situation by any means, but—
“This feels... filthy.”
One of the reasons I swore to clear this Gate
Was exactly this.
This underground mine...
Was grotesque, cruel, and foul beyond words.
If I had to lie down to sleep knowing such suffering monsters were beneath our fortress,
I don’t think I’d sleep at all.
Snik—
In the end,
A monster that not only told us its weak points but even chose to halt its attacks—
When I took its head,
-!@$$!!......
—It says thank you.
Only then did the monster
Fall with a peaceful expression.
“...This one.”
“...Looks like it wanted to die.”
The ordinary soldiers couldn’t know what the monster’s words meant,
But from that expression and the air of it, they seemed to grasp roughly what had happened.
“Keep moving.”
Leaving those soldiers behind,
I stepped deeper and said,
“Sergeant Shin...”
“I told you, we’re going to kill every last monster in here.”
“...”
“It’s no different from what we’ve been doing.”
“...Yes, Sergeant!”
“Agreed. You’re right, Sergeant Shin.”
However—
Regardless of how much I wanted to go deeper,
After we descended only a few more meters,
A reaction ran through the ranks.
“...Hff.”
“Sergeant Shin. I think this is as far as we can go.”
“...Yeah.”
We’d already hit a zone where the Protective Suit couldn’t keep the miasma at bay.
We retraced our steps again,
And shifted our bodies toward the surface.
****
“You’re back!”
“Yeah.”
Once we made it back topside,
The Production soldiers greeted us.
“So, the technical manuals from this expedition...”
“Here.”
“Oooh...!”
As soon as we obtained manuals underground, we handed them to Ariella and the vampires for translation.
When I passed over the notebooks with the translations finished, Production got happy like always.
“Ah, but... you came back a bit early this time. We almost failed to hand you Mark 9.”
“Hm? Yeah?”
“Yes. The original plan was to finish in time for the assault team’s return window. Everyone’s fired up, so while it finished a bit early, I think you came back sooner than expected this time?”
A Production soldier asked with a puzzled look.
“For you to have gone as deep as we forecast, you should’ve needed much more time than this... Were the monsters you met along the way a bit weak?”
“No. Opposite.”
“Sir?”
“The monsters actually got stronger. The reason we could return quickly was something else.”
I explained to Production what we learned underground.
There’s a section where the nature of the miasma changes completely midway,
And from that section on, the speed at which the miasma intensifies gets much, much faster.
“So we had no choice but to return much sooner than we’d planned.”
“...I see.”
The Production soldiers who heard me—
Their expressions turned a shade more serious.
“...Sergeant Shin.”
“Yeah?”
“Saying this... hurts our pride, and it’s impolite to you as well.”
In the faces of the soldiers who continued,
There was a trace of apology.
“If that’s true, then with our current Protective Suits we won’t reach the target depth.”
“What? We’re still bringing you manuals. If you leverage that tech...”
“In fact, that’s exactly what we’ve been murmuring among ourselves.”
“Murmuring?”
“We’re... hitting the limit.”
Engineer Corporal Lee Gongu, representing the engineers, stepped forward.
“The manuals you’ve been bringing us have absolutely helped. Our technological development has been beyond imagination.”
“Right. So if we just keep bringing you manuals—”
“That’s what we thought at first, too. But at some point, the manuals started covering overlapping content more and more.”
He scratched the back of his head, looking sheepish even to himself.
“No matter how great the info is... the change is most dramatic when you first get it.”
“That’s true.”
“Thanks to the first batch, we achieved dramatic growth... but with later info, we had to sort the wheat from the chaff. Of course, even just that let us learn a ton in other fields. Frankly, if you told us to make ➤ NоvеⅠight ➤ (Read more on our source) war machines now, we could build something twice as good as before.”
“But not for miasma.”
What the Dwarven people studied was magi-tech.
Not medicine or toxicology.
They’d already succeeded in conquering their entire world.
They wouldn’t have bothered doing research into resisting miasma.
That’s the sort of thing Earth would’ve progressed—lobbing biochemical weapons at each other through wars.
“Our ability to develop weapons and armor has skyrocketed, but resistance to miasma... that research we’ve been doing by ourselves, only referencing ideas we saw in other research. Those ideas were brilliant enough to bring us this far... but we’re reaching the limit.”
With that,
Corporal Lee Gongu brought out Prototype Mark 9.
No—
“...Hoo.”
[Legion Protective Suit Completed Model No.1]
“So this is a finished product.”
“Yes. This is the best we can build at the present moment.”
He handed me
The first completed model.
