Chapter 49: The Secrets of the Tower

Crash! Squelch!

[Dorethes’s core has been destroyed. Dorethes is paralyzed.]

Dorethes, who was about to lunge at me, let out a pained shriek as its eyes glowed a frantic red. The giant cheese block was completely flattened in the middle by the fallen pillar. The moment I saw that, my feet moved before Sephiroth could even say a word. I raised my swords high and began hacking away at the cheese.

Slice, squelch, hack!

“I guess indirect attacks work just fine,” Sephiroth remarked, giving a satisfied thumbs-up.

I looked at him and let out a dry laugh. In that chaotic situation, how many people would have noticed that a stray piece of marble hitting the boss’s foot dealt damage and then immediately acted on it? He really was unnervingly good at this game.

After that, Dorethes’s patterns were simpler than expected. It would sprout needle-like fur to deal area damage, but we could mitigate most of it by hiding behind the remaining pillars. It also cycled through random patterns from the first and second phases. The most troublesome one involved spewing toxic fur while standing on an AoE floor trap. I barely managed to survive that part by using the high-level Sephiroth as a literal meat shield.

“You owe me one, Bly.”

“We’re both trying to clear this, so could you stop acting like it’s such a chore?”

Of course, Sephiroth made sure to show exactly how much it wounded his pride to have his health bar chipped away.

Once he figured out the “indirect attack” mechanic, Sephiroth stopped trying to debuff the rat directly and instead spent his time smashing pillars. He looked like a crazed lumberjack. Dorethes went into a frenzy, but it couldn’t escape my twin blades or the falling debris from Sephiroth’s demolition work.

Kreeeee!

Finally, its health hit zero, and Dorethes collapsed into a grey corpse.

[You have defeated Dorethes the Rat King, Child of Ignas.] [Floor 1 cleared.]

With the notification, the door on the far side slid open. As expected, there was a staircase behind it. Beyond the stone steps leading upward, darkness gaped like an open mouth, waiting for us.

I took a step forward but stopped. Sephiroth, who usually would have been the first to move, was standing perfectly still.

“Aren’t you coming?”

“I am.”

“Is something bothering you?”

Sephiroth nodded. “What was the name of the quest you received?”

“Me? Children of Ignas.”

“Same here.”

“So what?”

“I don’t see any connection between Ignas and this rat.”

I looked down at the rat’s corpse. It was massive, but it was still unmistakably a rat. Considering the Ignas we met was a mermaid, the connection did seem weak, just as Sephiroth said.

“True. Mermaids live in the water, rats live on land.”

“My, my, pretty boy. That is a very… simple-minded approach.”

“Ah…”

I couldn’t decide whether to be angry at being called “pretty boy” or “simple-minded,” so I just let out a short sigh and shook my head. Sephiroth let out a faint, airy chuckle before continuing.

“Well, as our ‘Bly’ said, they live in different habitats, so they shouldn’t overlap. I’ve never seen rats in the Doltec-related storylines before. Ignas doesn’t usually play a central role, so I can’t be 100% sure, but still.”

“I get it, but can you drop the ‘our Bly’ part?”

“You hate it every time I say it. Makes me want to do it more.”

“…Are you a pervert?”

“I think you’re the only person who’s ever called me that.”

His low laughter followed. It sounded so similar to the laughter I’d occasionally heard from Na Eun-hyeok. Once I started overlapping him with Na Eun-hyeok, the thought kept intruding at the most random times. The human brain is remarkably stubborn.

“So, your point is that it’s weird for a rat to appear in a quest called Children of Ignas?”

“Exactly. Especially in a tower.”

“What’s special about the tower?”

“Towers have a limited pool of enemies. Usually, the bosses are directly related to the quest lore.”

“Hmm…”

“Since this is a new map, there’s a chance it’s just different, but… I don’t know. I feel like there’s a deeper secret hidden in this quest.”

As always, when it came to the game, he was strangely logical. Though I had been half-listening at first, by the end of his explanation, I found myself nodding in agreement.

A mermaid and a rat. On the surface, there was zero overlap.

“And this is just my personal gut feeling, but the fact that this room is entirely marble bothers me too.”

“The marble?”

“Every tower I’ve been to was made of stone walls. And the stone wasn’t white; it was always dark, like black or grey. Even the ‘bright’ ones were just ochre stone.”

“Now that you mention it, the tutorial room was stone, too.”

“Well, it’s just a feeling for now.”

Despite his words, Sephiroth seemed genuinely uneasy. And because he was uneasy, I started feeling uneasy too.

The tower had three floors in total. As we climbed through the second and third, our sense of unease only grew.

The enemy on the second floor was a giant snake named Sacasert. Like the rat on the first floor, it had blood-red eyes and a pitch-black body. Sacasert was as thick as a sturdy tree; when it reared up, its head touched the white marble ceiling.

Sacasert slithered rapidly, leaving trails of venom on the marble. Since the venom seeped from its own body, we couldn’t step on the snake itself or any part of the floor where the liquid hadn’t dried. If Sephiroth and I got too close to each other, it would lunge like lightning to coil around us, so we kept our distance while staying on guard.

In Phase 2, Sacasert gained an ‘Egg-laying’ skill. It would whip its tail and launch large white eggs. Since they looked like they’d deal massive damage, we dodged them, but when they hit the wall and shattered, two baby snakes would crawl out. To make matters worse, these babies were invincible. Attacking them only stopped them for a moment before they resumed their aggressive swarming.

Two or four babies were manageable, but any more than that would have turned the room into a living hell. To stop them from breeding, I had to strike the specific patterns etched onto the white eggs to destroy them. Since it required precise movements rather than raw power, the egg-duty fell to me.

Meanwhile, Sephiroth began systematically destroying the pillars again. Just as with Dorethes, he broke the pillars into shards to deal indirect damage. It was negligible damage to Sacasert, but it was incredibly effective at momentarily paralyzing the baby snakes. Our strategy became: I deal damage to Sacasert while the babies are stunned.

[You have defeated Sacasert the Snake King, Child of Ignas.] [Floor 2 cleared.]

Finally, as I drew a long gash through Sacasert’s body with my sword, we were faced with that fundamental doubt once again.

“So… what’s the connection between a snake and a mermaid?”

At my question, Sephiroth, who had been poking the corpse with his axe, turned his head.

“Doesn’t seem to be one this time either, right?”

“Yeah. Is there some lore we’re missing?”

“Sea snakes?”

“Don’t give me that ‘sea snake’ crap.”

“My heart breaks when you don’t accept my jokes kindly, Bly.”

“My heart breaks every time you call me Bly, okay?”

“Well, since it’s not my heart, I wouldn’t know.”

“Hey!”

I punched Sephiroth’s shoulder. He let out a snicker. I looked at him, but because of the helmet, I couldn’t see his expression.

Come to think of it, this was getting annoying.

They say the eyes are the window to the soul. Facing someone is a huge part of understanding them. The tiny movements of facial muscles, the twitch of a lip, the habit of scrunching a nose—there’s an infinite amount of information passed through those signals.

But Sephiroth’s face was hidden by that helmet. Naturally, all signals other than his words were blocked. All I knew was that his voice sounded like Na Eun-hyeok’s and his manner of speaking was somewhat similar. But Sephiroth and Na Eun-hyeok were different people; it was foolish to guess his emotions based on my knowledge of someone else.

“By the way, why do you always wear that helmet?”

I asked the question as it came to mind. I wanted to make eye contact, but all I could see was the darkness inside the black visor.

“I don’t like showing my face.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I don’t like crowds. It’s inconvenient if people recognize me.”

“Did you not customize your appearance?”

Sephiroth let out a low laugh. “I didn’t want to customize myself to be ugly.”

“You could have made yourself handsome.”

“That would be impossible.”

“What do you mean, impossible? Are you that handsome? Don’t talk nonsense. No human face is better than computer graphics.”