chapter01 · 008-ep7

Episode 7: Beyond the Wall No One Ever Noticed

For the four days after that, I hit Kanadun every day.

Same routine every time: rent gear, enter Floor 1, hunt for a spot with no people, do the introduction deadpan. That "hunt for a spot with no people" ate far more time than I expected.

Day one took forty minutes, day two thirty. By day three I'd memorized three dead ends and cut it to twenty, but even so, half of every day was just walking.

The King lasts ten minutes, and it takes twenty minutes of walking to get there. Talk about terrible efficiency.

And yet I went every day. Waking up wondering how far I'd get today, pedaling my bike while calculating how many I could take down.

Honestly, I was having a blast. Same place, same goblins, day after day, and it never got old.

All that walking, and my level still climbed properly. Or rather, my raw kill count was in a different league.

A normal explorer downing ten a day is doing well, apparently. Because everyone parties up.

Dungeons spawn a fair number of monsters; charge in alone and you're swarmed in no time. So the shield tanks while the back line whittles them down and the vanguard finishes them, one at a time, safety first. It takes time, but nobody dies. That's obviously the correct way to do it.

And I was ignoring every last bit of that method.

As the King, the world slows, and running and cutting become entirely different activities. Find-to-kill takes seconds, so everything else is just searching. Sprint the passage, cut what you find, sprint again.

Around a corner: two. Cut through the first before it even turned, ducked under the second one's belated falling club, and with that momentum swept its torso on the return stroke. Before its sand finished landing, I was already around the next corner.

That, nonstop, for ten minutes.

No one to cover me, and when it cuts out, I'm base me again. Get swarmed at that moment, it's over. Zero safety margin.

Doing that, I could down forty to fifty a day. The King's power halves the XP, but half XP on four times the count changes the math completely.

By day four, I was Lv 9.

Incidentally, I tried killing exactly one in base form, and it took five minutes.

The one saving grace was my three years of dojo in middle school. I'd started for the most chuunibyou reason imaginable — to become my ideal self, begin with the body — but on this point, and this point only, I want to applaud past me.

Even so, the rental iron sword is heavy.

My opponent: one goblin, met head-on in the middle of a passage. Even with the sword in a two-handed grip, the tip kept drooping on its own.

The goblin raised its club and charged.

Fast. A different thing entirely from what I'd watched as the King. The club that looked slow then now came with the sound of it tearing air.

I caught it on the sword. The club bit into the iron blade with a crack, numbness shooting up to my elbows. The feet I thought I'd braced slid half a step back.

Heavy. For a goblin.

I didn't try to shove back. "Never push-match something stronger than you" was lesson one at the dojo.

I angled the blade and let the club slide off outward; the goblin pitched forward. I struck into it.

Shallow. The hide pressed in under the edge and stopped it a hair deep. The goblin started shrieking and whipping the club around at random.

Back off, dodge the first swing. Dodge the second. The third skimmed my shoulder, one burning line of pain through the cloth. The fourth's tip dragged across my side.

Grazes only. I could still move.

Retreat, catch my breath, strike in again. Retreat. Strike.

Cuts accumulated on the goblin one at a time, its shrieking thinning by degrees.

I was in hardly better shape. My arms shook every time I raised the sword, my gripping fingers slipping slick on the hilt.

At that point, it's a contest of who gasses out first.

It was misery. Absolute misery, and yet somehow I never once wanted to quit.

After I-don't-know-how-many strikes, the goblin's club stopped half-raised. Its arm apparently couldn't go higher.

Mine only made it halfway up too. That was enough.

The last swing, I basically dropped the sword's own weight onto it. The edge went in beside its neck, and the goblin folded from the knees. Sand. Gone.

I leaned on the sword and just breathed there for a while. Both arms jittering; I couldn't have lifted it again if I tried.

The XP did come in full. But full XP for a five-minute punch-up with one goblin, plus bruises on my shoulder and side, is not a trade I'd call fair. For the King it's a seconds-long fight. Five minutes and bruise-mottled — honestly, deeply uncool.

But I liked those five minutes, quite a lot. In the King's one-hit mode it never really feels like I cut anything; this time my arms were still buzzing, and it felt like I'd killed it with my own two arms. The bruises are forgiven too — I think I can do a little better next time.

Day four, afternoon. After my eleventh goblin, a display appeared.

Lv: 9 → Lv: 10

Condition fulfilled.

Unlocking Magic Eye.

【Magic Eye of Truth】 (left eye)

A Magic Eye — THE Magic Eye? I went rigid on the spot.

†The Book of the King† contains a whole catalog of them: five kinds for the right eye, seventy-two for the left, seventy-seven in total.

The single most useless page of my life, written by this-era me on the principle that "more Magic Eyes equals more justice." And in the page margin I'd even written "seventy-two, same number as Solomon's seventy-two pillars." Why was I only ever studious about stuff like that.

And one had actually opened. For real?

I didn't make a sound. Talk right now, and I'd probably start in with "Hm" or "It has come."

My left eye went faintly hot. Not pain — a slow spreading warmth.

†The Book of the King† even has the formal declaration for opening a Magic Eye. Of course it does. There was no option but to try it.

After triple-checking for witnesses, I covered my left eye with my left hand. Probably unnecessary, but this is how Magic Eyes get opened, right?

"—Midnight sun behind the eyelids, scale that weighs lies, corridor that casts no shadow — deceit peels away, reason inverts, the world bares its back. Open, my left eye."

The heat in my left eye surged, and my sight snapped into something new. Letters were floating on the rock wall.

Kanayama Dungeon, Floor 1

Difficulty: F

Recommended Level: 1–20

And letters had surfaced on the rented sword in my hand, too.

Rental iron sword (uses: 1,204)

Blade wear: 68%

• Exceeds recommended replacement count

(...Shouldn't someone at the Guild hear about this?)

I kept that thought to myself. If they asked how I knew and I answered "my left eye told me," the one getting inspected would be me.

So the Magic Eye of Truth apparently shows all hidden information. ...Wait. Isn't that just plain unfair?

One more skill unlocked on the walk home.

Condition fulfilled.

Unlocking skill.

【I Am Not Observed by the World】

• Output limited by Release Rate

• Current: your presence becomes faint

The gap between the name and the contents is brutal. Properly, it's "unobserved by the world" — †The Book of the King† even says "not even the gods can find the King." And the current effect: your presence becomes faint.

"Becomes faint," it says.

Not that I'm complaining. If anything, it's the exact thing I needed most right now.

The next day, I tested it.

This skill needs its chant too. Before erasing my presence, I have to do the full-volume introduction and then declare "Ten thousand eyes observe. Yet I am not observed."

I want to erase my presence, but first I have to be as loud and visible as possible. How does that work. Ninjas who announce themselves before hiding — never heard of those.

The effect was, well, half-baked. Stand me directly in front of someone and they see me fine, but give it a little distance and I seem to drop out of their awareness.

A pair coming the other way passed straight by, three meters to my side.

"Was someone just there?"

"No? You're imagining things."

I am here, though. EXTREMELY here, in point of fact.

The two of them were already onto another topic, and I had to smother my laughter against the wall.

With this, no more trudging to a dead end every single time. Do the introduction once somewhere empty, then walk with my presence faded. Efficiency: through the roof.

That evening, deep on Floor 1 at a dead end, letters surfaced in my left eye and stopped my feet cold.

Hidden passage

Unlock condition: touch three moss-free rock walls on Floor 1 in a row

Undiscovered

Undiscovered? The Kanayama dungeon has been known for decades, with tens of thousands of rookies diving every year. Floor 1 maps are public down to single meters in apps.

And on that Floor 1, a passage nobody has ever found.

What — that's incredible!

And the unlock condition is diabolical. Touch three moss-free rock walls in a row — no one does that by accident.

...So do it on purpose.

A look around: nobody, and my presence was already faded.

"—No door stands closed before me."

There was absolutely no need to say it. But not saying it at a moment like this felt wrong, somehow.

Following what my left eye showed, I touched the first rock. Second. Third.

No sound. The rock wall in front of me rippled like water, and a gap one person wide opened.

Inside was pitch black. Floor 1's rock glows faintly; beyond was total darkness. I turned my left eye that way.

Unregistered Territory

Recommended Level: ???

Recommended Level: a full three question marks.

Current me: Lv 10, carrying a ten-minute King, a presence-thinning skill, and a rental iron sword at 68% wear.

There was no way I should enter. I knew that. I knew, and yet.

Staring into that darkness, I remembered a line I'd written in a notebook in middle school.

'No Door Stands Closed Before the King.'

...Wait, that's basically the same thing I just said out loud. Three years on and I'm saying the exact same stuff. What is going on with me.