Chapter 33
Chapter 33. The Key
Everything unfolded in a split second, far faster than my reflexes could handle.
Without warning, the Dragon Bone Sword had started siphoning massive surges of energy directly out of the Sword Wraiths. The violent aura pulsing along the steel swelled so rapidly that my grip proved utterly useless against it.
In an instant, the weapon wrenched itself free from my fingers, cutting a sharp path through the empty air straight toward the monument standing at the heart of the chamber.
“Scatter, now!”
“What is going on?!”
“What kind of madness—!”
My panicked roar pulled the gaze of every single hunter straight toward me.
It was almost certainly the first time any of them had witnessed such a bizarre sight: a blade abandoning its master’s hands to propel itself through open air under its own volition.
Hunters threw themselves flat or scrambled out of the path of the flying Dragon Bone Sword, while Taeseong began chanting an incantation to brace for whatever disaster might follow.
Yet before his spell could take shape, the speeding weapon slammed directly into the base of the massive effigy. A deafening metallic ring echoed through the cavern, and the blade sank deep into the stone, fitting into place with eerie perfection.
The entire sequence had played out in merely three or four seconds.
Confronted with an event that shattered every rule of logic, my mind ground to an absolute halt.
What had compelled the weapon to dart off like that?
How was I supposed to survive combat without my primary arm?
Should I sprint across the clearing toward Taeseong while the rest of the squad provided covering fire?
Then again, the blade had anchored itself right beside him, so closing the distance might put me in even greater danger.
A swarm of frantic questions collided in my head, threatening to paralyze my thoughts completely.
Then an even more baffling sight unfolded: the second the blade sank into the stone figure, every single one of the endless Sword Wraiths froze in unison, as if a collective pulse had been cut off across their shared network.
“…!”
Confused murmurs broke out among the hunters as the anomaly deepened.
The relentless monsters that had been tearing into our perimeter just seconds before were now turned completely rigid, silenced the instant the steel buried itself into the stone.
The spectacle, however, was only beginning.
Without a sound, each and every Sword Wraith began lifting into the sky, hovering above the ground.
“Just… what are we watching?”
“Unbelievable.”
“What is about to take place…?”
Torn between awe and dread, every fighter in the area—myself included—ceased their strikes, staring upward toward the ceiling as if under a spell.
Gates were already renowned for generating supernatural phenomena that defied human comprehension, yet nothing in known records matched what was happening before our eyes.
Then, breaking the stunned silence, a hunter blurted out an astonished curse.
“Sweet heavens…!”
The Sword Wraiths, which had cloaked the cavern in a suffocating shroud of murky black mist, suddenly shifted their radiance.
Their pitch-dark bodies flared outward, shifting into dazzling, multicolored bands of prismatic light.
“This can’t be real…”
Several party members immediately fumbled for their smartphones to capture footage of the spectacle. I swiftly adjusted the angle of the personal drone Sia had gifted me, positioning its lens to record the radiant display with full clarity.
Moments later, the floating Sword Wraiths erupted in a blazing burst of brilliance reminiscent of an exploding star, evaporating into nothingness without leaving so much as a stray ember behind.
“…”
With the phantoms erased in an instant, every gaze dropped back to the dirt below.
For hours, the Sword Wraiths had swarmed us in such endless waves that the sight of them had grown sickening, yet now the entire landscape lay completely deserted.
“Taeseong hyung, the clock hasn’t run out, has it?”
“No. We’re still missing roughly half an hour before the three-hour mark is reached…”
Taeseong pressed a palm against his temple as he answered the anxious query.
The dungeon’s creatures had vanished into thin air long before the raid’s time condition could be satisfied.
“I can’t make any sense of this either…”
While the rest of the team stood frozen in bewilderment, Taeseong swung his gaze back toward the effigy.
“Speaking of which, Minjun… that blade of yours…”
He gestured toward the Dragon Bone Sword resting deep inside the masonry.
“What caused that to happen?”
“I… honestly can’t tell you. I was swinging it as usual, and it just broke away and launched itself.”
Deep down, I suspected the ancient power of the dragon had something to do with it, but the precise mechanism remained a mystery to me as well.
Hoping to uncover some answers, I crossed the open ground toward the monument where the weapon remained stuck.
Stepping close, I observed that the blade had driven itself so far inside that virtually nothing remained visible except the grip.
What struck me as even more unnatural, however, was the total absence of fractures along the surface.
A heavy weapon crafted from genuine dragon bone had slammed into the rock at speeds easily surpassing one hundred kilometers an hour.
No matter how durable the mineral might be, how could an impact of that magnitude fail to leave behind a single crack?
While that thought occupied my mind, the surrounding hunters formed small circles around the embedded weapon to get a better look.
“Incredible.”
“How did a blade slide into solid stone so cleanly?”
“No kidding. It doesn’t make any sense.”
While whispers and camera shutters filled the air, Taeseong spoke up with a realization.
“There was a pre-existing channel right here.”
“You’re saying this groove was here all along?”
“Yes. I noticed it during my initial raid here roughly twelve months ago. An indentation was hollowed out precisely along this section.”
Taeseong pointed directly toward the seam where my weapon rested.
Our squad had been too busy surviving the onslaught earlier to inspect the sculpture up close, which explained why the detail had escaped my attention.
Pulling out his device, Taeseong scrolled through his gallery until he located an older image to show me.
“Right here. Take a look.”
Precisely as he noted, a hollow had existed at the center of the monument long before today, carved to dimensions that nearly matched the width of a broadsword blade.
Taeseong proceeded to explain how his prior team had reacted to the discovery.
“We assumed it was natural erosion at first, but upon inspecting it thoroughly, the lines were far too precise.”
In his judgment, the opening had been deliberately sculpted into the figure when it was originally formed.
Back then, Taeseong and the guild strike force running the Dungeon had debated the purpose of the aperture, yet they failed to unearth any hidden mechanisms.
Some members had even attempted to wedge various tools and objects inside, but nothing ever responded, prompting them to dismiss the mystery and move on.
“Seeing this unfold brings back all those old questions. Why did your sword suddenly tear away on its own, and how did it slot so flawlessly into that very indentation?”
Juwon, standing quietly alongside Taeseong, casually voiced his own theory.
“Thinking about it, maybe this cavity was designed specifically to house a sword from the very start. The measurements match too well.”
Taeseong instantly dismissed the thought. “Why would anyone construct an entire effigy just to serve as a scabbard for a random blade?”
“I mean, maybe… but the alignment really is uncanny…”
Juwon scratched the back of his neck awkwardly, slightly embarrassed that his casual observation had been challenged so bluntly.
“I ought to report this to Team Leader Jeong without delay. The guild will likely need to dispatch a formal survey squad here.”
Taeseong spoke the thought under his breath, then parted from the cluster of hunters to face me.
“Before anything else, we ought to pull your weapon out of there.”
“Ah, of course.”
With so many surreal incidents occurring one after another, retrieving my own weapon had slipped my mind entirely.
I grasped the handle and hauled backward.
To my relief, the metal glided out smoothly without meeting any resistance whatsoever.
The moment the steel parted from the stone, however, the floor below violently shook.
RUMBLE…!
“Wah!”
“What is happening now?!”
Shouts erupted across the cavern as people scrambled backward the instant the ground began to roll.
Having just endured two impossible occurrences—a self-guided weapon and the spontaneous obliteration of the entire horde—nobody had anticipated yet another anomaly.
One hunter who had bolted the farthest from the monument pointed back toward the center with a shaking finger.
“Why… why is the quake only happening over there?”
Just as he noted, the tremors were confined strictly to the zone surrounding the monument, while the outer terrain remained completely undisturbed.
Before we could piece together a reason, the ground around the sculpture split wide open.
As the stone split apart, a long flight of stairs descended down into the dark depths beneath the earth.
“I don’t think I have any surprises left in me.”
“…Incredible.”
The companion standing beside me captured the mood flawlessly; extraordinary events kept cascading over us without a single moment of respite.
“I’m done trying to make sense of anything inside this place.”
“Same here. My head is starting to throb.”
While the party voiced their exasperation, I looked down into the underground staircase, its distant bottom lost in complete darkness.
The title Garden of Dragon Swords, the Dragon Bone Sword ripping out of my fingers to wedge itself into the monument, the simultaneous disappearance of every Sword Wraith, and now an ancient subterranean passageway unearthed for the first time.
Could all these distinct occurrences truly be mere accidents?
‘Not a chance.’
Weighing the entire sequence, the likelihood was overwhelming that these anomalies had been triggered directly by my presence.
That left me with only a single sensible path.
Regardless of the obstacles, I had to walk down those stairs and discover the truth behind these so-called coincidences.
The only hurdle was securing the agreement of the others.
Realistically, I wasn’t leading this expedition, nor was I even affiliated with their guild; I was merely an attached outsider.
They had no obligation to follow my lead.
If they chose to retreat and hand the site over to an official survey division later on, my chance to explore this Dungeon ever again might vanish entirely.
Just as I was weighing how to pitch the idea to the squad, a floating system prompt materialized in my field of vision.
[The Dungeon’s rank and clear conditions are undergoing modification.]
Evidently, the exact same alert flashed before every hunter present, because an uproar instantly shattered the quiet.
[Rank: D -> EX
Clear Condition: Arrive at the lowest level of ***’s Tomb, and thereafter ***]
“…This can’t be real!”
“An EX-rank?!”
“How in the world are we supposed to escape?!”
“Taeseong oppa, what are we supposed to do?”
Utter panic gripped the squad as they attempted to comprehend what the unprecedented classification and the censored clear condition implied.
While I had hoped to explore the lower chambers and unravel the site’s mysteries, this kind of extreme shift was far from what I had wished for.
An EX rating was assigned exclusively when an anomaly could not be categorized within the standard scale from F up to SSS.
That implied the clearance requirements had either become laughably trivial or, conversely, nearly impossible to survive.
‘The latter scenario is almost certainly the case.’
That grim reality was precisely what had reduced the surrounding hunters to frantic panic.
To make matters worse, the objective itself remained partially obscured by question marks.
How could any party fulfill an objective when the target wasn’t even fully stated?
Amidst the spreading distress, one hunter suddenly lunged forward and grabbed me by the collar.
“Isn’t this entirely your doing?! None of this catastrophe would be happening if not for that sword of yours!”
I could comprehend the source of his outburst.
He was being crushed by the terror of failing the raid and meeting his end trapped inside this cavern, which naturally clouded his rational judgment.
Even so, that was no excuse for laying hands on me.
“Take your hands off me.”
I slapped his grip away from my chest just as Taeseong and several squad members rushed in to pull him back.
“Seongmin, snap out of it! Pull yourself together!”
“Kim Seongmin, what has gotten into you?!”
“Do you think Minjun wanted to trap us in here on purpose? If the exit closes, he’s stranded right alongside us!”
Only after his companions physically dragged him backward did the hunter named Seongmin regain his composure and offer a muted apology.
“…Forgive me. I realize this isn’t truly your fault, but…”
“It’s fine. I understand the pressure.”
Once the brief commotion settled, I extended an arm toward the dark opening.
“It seems our only available path is to head down there.”
Taeseong gave a solemn nod. “We don’t have any other card to play.”
Releasing a heavy breath, Taeseong tapped into his dimensional inventory.
“We have no way of knowing what dangers lurk down below, so we will halt here briefly and gear up before making the descent.”
At his directive, several companions swallowed dryly and accessed their own spatial pockets while others adjusted their backup gear.
Following the close call during our previous Gate, Sia had worried constantly about my safety and overhauled nearly every piece of equipment I carried.
Even so, facing an EX-rank zone meant holding back nothing in reserve.
I strapped on every protective artifact in my possession and stocked several Elixirs, widely acknowledged as the pinnacle of modern restorative draughts.
Once my preparations were complete and before we set foot onto the underground staircase, I turned toward the lens of the drone Sia had provided, which had maintained an uninterrupted recording since our arrival in the Dungeon.
Though Sia was unable to monitor the transmission in real time, looking into the glass made me feel as if her gaze was resting on me anyway.
‘I swear I’ll make it back safely.’
I longed to have Sia at my side, yet having her drone hovering nearby provided an odd sense of comfort nonetheless.
‘All right. Let’s move.’
The moment had arrived to uncover whatever secrets lay dormant within this ancient tomb.
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