“I’ll be right back.”
“‘Be right back,’ my—... Please return alive, sir!”
As I headed into the dense miasma,
hands grabbed at me from behind.
“Ghh—!”
“S-stop! If you keep going, we’ll all die!”
Someone even tried to push through this miasma,
a soldier who started after me only to be overrun by it,
and the shouts of those grabbing him held me up for a moment.
‘You idiots... Worried or not, trying to follow me this far?’
I had no plans to praise reckless behavior,
but it did make me think, again, that I’d trained them well.
When a senior says he’s going somewhere deadly, few juniors truly try to follow.
Honestly, it made me a little proud.
‘Sorry, since you’re that worried about me.’
Those guys probably think
what I’m doing right now is straight-up suicide.
But—
“Why would I kill myself like a lunatic?”
I had zero intention of dying.
Like Seohwan said,
no matter what I do about the miasma,
it’ll be hard to beat the things down there alone.
“Start coming out.”
Of course,
that’s only if I’m alone.
—Fwooh.
At my call,
a vampire emerged from the shadow.
“Hm. It’s a little better than in the bright zone, but... this space is still unpleasant.”
Vampires, fundamentally, are monsters.
Not only do they have more innate resistance to miasma than humans,
but as the number of personnel we could send underground increased, every spare protective suit went into the shadows with them.
That didn’t mean they had no limit.
“As expected, even you lot can’t help being invaded by miasma at this level.”
“Yes. Would you like to see?”
Ariella swept aside her protective suit and briefly bared her wrist.
There—
Fssssss...
Invaded by the miasma,
her skin decayed with a burning sound.
The fortunate part was—
Fssssss...
Sllrk...
“It heals as much as it’s damaged. Other than the fact it stings like hell, there’s no real harm.”
They aren’t human.
Of every monster I’ve met, they have the best regeneration.
Her arm
was repeating a cycle of miasma-rot and regeneration without end.
The damage from the miasma was considerable,
but most of it was erased quickly by their inborn regeneration.
‘Broken-ass race.’
And
the dark is exactly their battlefield—
the battlefield of vampires.
“You know, right? I’ve been running assaults on repeat—I’m dead on my feet.”
“Hehe. Of course you are.”
Shapes popped out of the shadows one by one.
Watching them, I gave a simple order.
“Handle it.”
“As the Master commands.”
She nodded and, soon—
—We obey... the Master of our Master!
Beings that had once been all kinds of monsters
began sprinting downward.
****
—Kwoooooo-ork!
The deeper we went, the more grotesque the restraints on the monsters became.
At first, it was just something lodged near the spine,
but now the monsters we met had devices glued along the entire back, moving like marionettes on strings.
Some of them even—
Wiiiiiiiing...
had a saw-like thing of unknown design spinning at insane speed from one arm,
ratatatatatat—!
while the other arm poured out heavier fire than the “excavation-type” ones had shot at us.
‘What is this, a sci-fi movie!?’
They were absurdly strong,
for an easy reason.
The monsters we’d fought through on the way down were wearing, at most,
[Slave Restraint for Mine Excavation].
But the monsters still left at this depth were fitted with—
[Dwe Morzan Combat Slave Restraint]
[Dwarven, the ruling race of Dwe Morzan, developed a combat slave restraint to safeguard themselves.]
[As mining pushed deeper, unidentified monsters, seemingly affected by the mine’s mana, would often burst out. For that reason, combat slaves always accompanied the excavation operations at the deepest sites.]
They were wearing combat restraints.
The saw-like weapon mounted on that restraint
scythed toward the vampires, ready to slice anything it touched—
“Screeeeeeee!”
[Mist Form]
[Temporarily transforms the body into mist. Neutralizes most physical attacks.]
A vampire in Mist Form
simply passed through the weapon,
and—
[Blood-Shadow Blade]
[A power granted only to the most exceptional among the bloodline’s knights. Interweave your blood and shadow to forge a razor-keen blade.]
With its “Mist Form” still active, a vampire slipped behind the monster; a graceful blade budded from the back of its hand,
and it rammed that blade into the thing’s spine.
KRKKKKKKKK!
The [Restraint] was extremely tough,
but luckily the anatomical structures of the dominated monsters weren’t nearly so hard.
When the spine into which the restraint was anchored shattered completely,
the device shut down—
—Gwooooooh...
The monster closed its eyes with a peaceful expression.
Watching it, I thought:
[Lee Beomjae]
[Lv.25 Intermediate Elite Vampire Knight]
‘Good thing I brought the vampires.’
[Traits]
[Mist Form]
[Intermediate Vampirism]
[Affinity with Darkness]
[Dark Vision]
[Skills]
[Blood-Shadow Blade]
[Blood Spear Throw]
[Blood Pool]
My troops were strong, sure,
but against monsters under restraint control, the vampires had a natural advantage.
Beam weapons or saws fired by machine fixtures could be avoided with Mist Form;
and the spine—normally protected by the mechanism—
could be forced open via “Mist Form” and stabbed from within.
Among them, those performing especially well were
the [Elite Vampire Knights] Ariella could now form after earning the rank of Viscount.
‘They say making elite knights isn’t easy, so the headcount is low, but—’
each one fought at the level of a squad leader.
—Master?
“I see it too.”
As we kept boring down,
I noticed the scenery changing bit by bit.
Until just a moment ago,
an unidentified mineral had smoothly paneled the walls—
[Ritual Orichalcum]—
but now
it no longer appeared.
I stepped to the wall
and touched a heap of soil there.
‘Ordinary dirt... is it?’
By feel, yes,
but the aura was entirely different.
No wonder—
embedded between the grains were countless self-luminous minerals.
[Mana Stone of Very High Purity]
“I see.”
Ore that radiated overwhelming mana.
Even to a non-mage like me, its purity made a cold sweat bead.
That told me something:
if you peeled away the Orichalcum from the higher walls, you’d also expose Mana Stones.
Yet those sections had been sealed off smooth, like there was nothing left worth mining.
Even though there were more Mana Stones to dig, they’d chosen to leave it.
‘Because they were mining stuff like this. Ordinary Mana Stones didn’t meet their standards.’
Up above, no matter how many more Mana Stones turned up,
from the Dwarven perspective, that site had already been “finished.”
But
from here down, it was different.
‘This zone was where they were actively excavating.’
So the walls weren’t finished,
and precious Mana Stones were lying around as if they were nothing.
Which meant—
‘We’re really close to the thing they poked.’
With that thought,
I was about to go a little deeper when—
—Master. This way.
“...?”
There was a side passage.
If it was like what we’d seen so far—
“Was there a research facility here too...?”
Meaning the same kind of lab
I’d been strip-mining for documents to hand over to Production.
The difference was that, unlike the other facilities,
this one had simple holes torn in the walls,
with no clean finishing anywhere.
‘Well... if it gives Production more to work with, it’s a win.’
I stepped in without much thought.
The inside looked a bit different from the other labs—
more like...
“A conference room?”
A very low but broad table,
and just a few books piled nearby.
It didn’t look like those books alone would help much, but
Ariella lifted one and murmured:
“[Third Minutes on the Proposal to Halt the ‘Sacred Mountain, Morzan Excavation Project’]... it says.”
“What?”
“Let’s see. There are more. Looks like a fourth set of minutes too.”
At that,
I widened my eyes and asked Ariella:
“They tried to stop excavating the mine?”
“Yes. One moment.”
She opened a book
and began reading what was written there.
—As I said at the last meeting, given the exploding demand for Mana Stones, we cannot accept the excavation team’s proposal to halt work.
They were labeled as meeting minutes,
a record of a conversation.
****
—As you know, the deeper the Mana Stones from Morzan, the higher the purity. If we go deeper, we can obtain mana of a purity incomparable to before.
—But... I still believe the excavation should stop here.
—Present objective grounds, Expedition Chief.
—Aren’t you brothers even the least bit curious?
Dwarven civilization began with this mountain,
Morzan.
They had borne that name so long
that even why it was called that had been forgotten—an ancient range present from their earliest civilization.
And so
there was one “obvious” fact they’d always accepted:
—A mine that yields Mana Stones this rich... makes no sense in magi-engineering terms. Something is wrong.
The range produced
Mana Stones of eerily high purity.
—Please. Our forefathers worked this mine ten thousand years ago; what is there to be curious about!
—What’s not curious is what’s strange! There isn’t a single other mine in the world with mana like this. Not even a quarter of this—no, not even one percent!
—Which is why we call it the Sacred Mountain. This range is proof that the heavens granted us Dwarven the right to rule the world.
The right to rule is sacred.
They cited this mine—whose existence could only be seen as a gift from the heavens—as proof they’d been granted the right
to rule other races.
But
Dwarven were a people who had built up lofty magi-engineering knowledge through long study.
—...The first step of rational judgment is to grasp cause and effect. If the “effect” is this Sacred Mountain, Morzan, then there must be a “cause” that imbued it with such mana. Without knowing that cause, further excavation must be halted.
At the time, the expedition chief’s view didn’t carry much weight,
but it won the support of the empire’s erudite magi-engineers.
The Mana Stone excavation project—originally slated to reach a depth of twenty thousand kilounits—
was put on hold.
When the digging stopped and the miners withdrew,
priests came to take their place.
‘A place with mana like this cannot be ordinary.’
‘The one who granted our Dwarven the right to rule the world... it must be the blessing of God!’
Those who regarded the range as “a gift of God”
made a temple of the emptied underground mine and nurtured their own religion.
Excavation only resumed
after a long time had passed.
—The imperial research corps has succeeded in proving the existence of other worlds.
—Hmm.
—The reasons our empire achieved such glory were the enslavement of other races and our immense supply of Mana Stones.
From the moment they could no longer drive Morzan deeper,
additional mining continued in other Mana Stone sites,
but they could no longer spend mana like water.
Then,
the existence of other worlds was proven.
—If we succeed in conquering another world, we can replenish both slaves and mana there.
—A second golden age for our empire.
They began developing the technology to invade other worlds,
and this time,
the demand for Mana Stones was unlike anything before.
So much that other mines couldn’t cover it.
So—
the most sacred mountain,
Mana Stones quarried only from the deepest Morzan,
with purity thousands or tens of thousands of times greater than others,
were needed again.
In the end—
—If we do this... divine punishment will fall!
—This is the royal command. Stand aside.
The expedition chief who had once halted the dig had long since died.
Even the warnings of the empire’s savants couldn’t crush the royal will.
A fourth conference to halt excavation convened.
The priestly faction that had made Morzan their temple chose, at that meeting, to respect the royal view.
God had never revealed a will.
The only trace He’d left was this range of impossible mana—
Morzan.
Therefore,
the royal house that settled first upon this range...
was practically entrusted with dominion by God.
Which meant their doctrine
could not forbid the royals from mining into the mountain.
—There is a condition, then.
—Name it.
—To dig too deeply into a mountain graced with favor may incur God’s wrath... While excavation is underway, seal the entrance.
—Seal it? Why?
—So that even if God’s wrath descends, it falls only upon those doing the digging.
What the priests could do,
at best, was to ask for a last line of defense
so the wrath would not reach them.
—...We will accept.
Respecting the priests’ opinion, the empire
imposed a seal so thick that no beast, however mighty,
not even a drop of water or the slightest breath of air could pass, and—
—Result of deliberations:
—Excavation resumes after roughly 1,200 years.
resumed mining.
And—
“There are no records after that.”
“...”
Closing the last of several sets of minutes, Ariella spoke.
The mining had resumed—
there were no records,
but we knew the result.
‘They were annihilated.’
That expedition chief had been right.
‘How could a mine like this exist?’
It was a point I myself hadn’t considered until just now.
I’d simply thought there happened to be a Mana Stone mine,
and something dangerous slept beneath it.
But if I think along the expedition chief’s line—
“The order is reversed.”
Something dangerous was asleep down there,
and under its influence...
this Mana Stone mine came into being.
“What will you do?”
Ariella asked.
“If what’s written here is true, it doesn’t seem strictly necessary to go any deeper.”
“...Hmm.”
“It sounds like even the outer zones weren’t fully excavated. Even the Mana Stones right around here are incredible.”
Now that our protective suits had massively improved,
instead of forcing our way deeper here,
we could crack open the upper walls and dig sideways to harvest Mana Stones.
“That alone would be a huge amount... Isn’t that good enough?”
Strictly speaking, she was right.
If we only wanted mana from this place,
we’d just proven we didn’t need to go any deeper.
‘Coldly, it’s profit.’
Now we also knew the zones where we must not dig deeper.
If we bored lateral tunnels and collected Mana Stones,
there was a good chance we could stock enough mana to run Vimana within a year.
We’d also gained piles of Dwe Morzan technical manuals,
so Production’s tech would rocket forward over time.
Most objectives were achieved.
Achieved, except—
“I still feel filthy.”
“Pardon?”
Just one objective
hadn’t been met.
I had three reasons for pushing down here:
to secure mana,
because Engineering demanded the manuals,
and—
‘Because seeing monsters moaning in pain, unable to truly die... made me feel filthy.’
Ariella asked, puzzled:
“I get that, but... aren’t the mine’s monsters already cleared? My vassals and I have already taken care of those nearby...”
“No. There’s still one left.”
I
pointed downward with a finger.
“Down there. One more.”
“...!”
At that,
Ariella’s face went pale.
A small, fragile race—Dwarven.
A mountain with power strong enough to let them build a civilization that could rule the world.
Not only did something create such a range,
it also—
‘single-handedly annihilated that civilization.’
[The Pain, Grief, and Resentment of One Who Could Not Properly Die]
That thing, still in agony even now—
it’s still down there.
“Wh-what are you...!”
Ariella recoiled at my words.
Regardless,
I looked into the depths.
‘Monstrous miasma.’
If I go down there,
I probably won’t be able to withstand it either.
But—
that’s fine.
In the past—
I remember basic training.
The CBRN drill every recruit endured, tense and shaking.
I had the rotten luck
to be issued a defective gas mask and had to inhale the CS gas raw.
I thought I’d die.
I even considered bolting out, it hurt so bad.
But—
even that vicious CBRN drill...
‘I somehow endured it.’
Enduring—
I’m pretty used to it.
