Chapter 66

“Yeah! I was thinking just the same thing,” said Pearl with a nod. She had a cookie in her mouth. Namely, a Puffball Cookie, which she’d received in the Puffball Village. Eating it caused your chance of encountering monsters to go down…for some reason. That would allow them to focus on actually exploring the labyrinth. “We only just happened to think of washing the Zombie Puffballs in the waterfall. I feel like you could walk right by a hidden event and never know it! I hope our ‘human wave’ tactics can get us through this…” They currently had six separate teams working on the complete clear: Fay and his three companions. Captain Ashlan’s Team Blaze, with twenty people. Camilla and her Archangel team from Mal-ra, nine people. In addition, they had found two groups of lost apostles and one of the other rescue teams wandering the maze, and they’d recruited them to join the exploration effort. “Hoh! Master Fay, I think this is it.” They were in the hallway north of the Execution Grounds, and Nel was pointing at an otherwise unremarkable wall. They’d always passed by without paying it any special mind, but now it had a gaping hole in it. “This is the hidden passageway Camilla’s group found by crafting the Cheating Compass. They said it goes to some new area.” “I see. A tunnel you can’t find without a special item.” They ducked through the hole and found themselves no longer surrounded by eerily pulsating walls, but in a forest that spread out as far as they could see. A massive jungle that looked like a tropical rainforest. “Are we…still inside the maze?” Pearl said. “I don’t think we can assume anything anymore,” Fay replied. “Hey, this area isn’t in Mausoleum Mode, is it? Look at those bright, healthy leaves.” There were rich, green trees everywhere. Birds were singing, flowers were blooming, and butterflies rested on their petals. It had been so long since they’d seen such a pleasant and relaxing scene that they had almost forgotten what it felt like. “Ahh, this is so nice. Fragrant flowers, and trees with ripe, bright red fruit just hanging from the… Just hanging from…” Pearl froze in place. She was as immobile as a still life painting, except for a single bead of sweat that trickled down her cheek. Bright red fruit? In this labyrinth, Killer Apples were synonymous with brutal ambush, and branches heaving with them now hung over the party’s heads. “A whole forest of Killer Apples?!” Pearl cried. “Watch out! Pearl, retreat!” Fay cried. He and the others jumped back, but Pearl, at the head of the group, said, “I will not!” She clenched her fists and glowered up at the apples hanging over their heads. “In fact, this is perfect. I’ve been taken by surprise from my blind spot before—but with this many apples right over my head, I’ll never be silly enough to let my guard down. As long as I’m completely alert, I’ll be able to dodge anything with my teleportation!” “Wow, great call!” “Plus, if our other experiences are anything to go by, out of all these thousands of apples, only about ten percent of them will actually try to attack me. I just have to be ready for them!” Pearl strode bravely into the jungle. She pointed at the bright red fruit bobbing in the wind. “Come at me anytime. What are you planning? Two at a time? Three? Ha! Make it five, I don’t care! I have my teleportation!” Pearl’s Teleport ability worked within a range of thirty meters. Even if apples came flying at her from every direction, she could simply zip thirty meters away and escape. “Huh! No takers? I figured as much. You only know how to fight dirty.” Pearl smiled triumphantly. Fwwwshhh. Just then, a great gust of wind blew through the forest of Killer Apple trees. The fruit began to bob eagerly. Not just one or two of them—the whole forest full of ripe apples, all at once. “Huh…?” Boom! The sound was like the roar of a cannon, but the pace was like that of a machine gun. All the Killer Apples in the forest came down simultaneously. They covered the thirty-meter radius of Teleport easily. In fact, if Pearl could have warped herself a hundred meters, it wouldn’t have helped. Countless apples piled in. “Pearl! This is because you antagonized them!” “It’s not my fauuuuuult!” Fay and the others had entered a hidden area, the Forest of Red Fruit. And now, they ran right back out again as fast as they could. Same time, different place. Right about when Fay and the others were entering the forest of Killer Apples, a combined force consisting of Ashlan’s Blaze and Camilla’s Archangel—twenty-one people total—was exploring the dungeon together. They’d backtracked from the Execution Grounds to where the hallway split off. They had opened the locked door using a craftable item called the Small Mithril Key, and beyond the door, they had found a long, straight hallway. This went beyond something you could cover in a hundred-meter dash—it was so long, it felt like you could have run a marathon down it. “Is this it? Is this what that Angel, Pizaprin, was talking about?” Ashlan asked. “Yeah. When we wished for him to tell us about any area bosses we hadn’t fought yet, this hallway is what he revealed to us,” Camilla said with a nod. Angel Pizaprin, who had unlocked the Treasure Hall door for Fay’s group, was willing to grant one wish to each team. So Camilla had asked him for information. “Dumb angel… When I asked him to resurrect the final boss for us, he was like, ‘That wish is beyond even my abilities.’ He flat out said no!” “Come on. Did you think it would be that easy? Anyway, stay focused. There’s something weird about this hallway!” Camilla turned around, sliding her glasses up the bridge of her nose and looking troubled. “We came here because there was supposed to be an area boss around, but how many kilometers have we walked? How far do we have to go here?” “Actually, Camilla…I think we’re almost there.” They could see a dead end. The wall was perfectly white, and the hallway simply terminated there. After walking kilometer after kilometer, they hadn’t seen any boss—they’d just come to the end of the hallway. “Aw, what’s the deal?! There’s something extra weird about this dead end… Huh?” Camilla frowned. Was she seeing things? The wall, which had looked so far away a moment ago, seemed closer. Almost as if it was coming toward them… “Captain, the wall is moving!” one of Ashlan’s people shouted at the top of their lungs. “That white wall is the boss!” “You’re kidding!” It was an enormous eraser. It filled the entire hallway from floor to ceiling, forming an oncoming wall rampaging toward them down the hallway. “No way! That’s the area boss?!” Ashlan pulled out a crafted item, the Encyclopedia Specs, and put them on. They revealed information about the monster: Area Boss: King Eraser A powerful enemy that neutralizes all materials and all attacks. If it touches you, you’ll be erased… So you’d better run! “Frostbite!” Camilla cried, unleashing a burst of magic. Boosh! The moment it struck the King Eraser, her spell was neutralized—erased. “Okay, this boss is dangerous as hell! Everybody beat feet!” Ashlan shouted. “It’s got a dumb name and it looks silly—where does it get off being so strong?!” Camilla added. Everyone did an about-face and raced away as fast as they could. From behind, they could hear a deep rumble as the King Eraser advanced toward them, eliminating the walls and ceiling and everything in its path. “This is terrifying! It’s, like, a hundred times scarier than some silly horror thing!” “How are we supposed to beat that monster?!” Then the party was wiped out. They respawned, tried again, then tried again… “Captain Camilla. Doesn’t it look like it’s getting smaller as it chases us?” “Wha…?” “It’s an eraser, you know? Erasing the floors and walls and stuff must naturally wear it down. That’s what I thought the first time we fought it…” “Then why did you wait until we’d been annihilated four times to bring it up?! Hrk!” Some two hours later, Ashlan and Camilla’s combined team succeeded in running until the enemy had completely worn itself away, and so they passed that particular trial with flying colors. 3 The unlock percentage would “unlock” the god from its tomb. But just how many gimmicks were there to find in this sprawling labyrinth? There were brutal area bosses and extraordinarily cruel raid bosses. Among the items, which numbered in the thousands, there were rare objects that could only be found through crafting—and hidden tunnels that couldn’t be discovered unless you had those rare items. How long has it been? How much time has passed in the real world? Fay wondered. Including him and his group, they had six teams with about fifty people working on the problem, everybody exploring the dungeon as fast and as hard as they could. Finally, they had cleared every area. Collected every item. Destroyed every boss monster. Their unlock percentage was 99.9 percent. “So…so tired… I can’t move another inch,” Captain Ashlan said. “I’m at the end of my rope… What…what could possibly be left?” asked Camilla. They lay exhausted in the Execution Grounds. All around them, their teammates likewise slumped on the ground, pale and burned out. It was then that Pearl came rushing in, short of breath. “Fay! We found the last gimmick!” “You mean it?!” “This way! We found it by chance when Leshea started smashing every dead end in the dungeon!” “Just decided to brute-force it, huh?” Fay let Pearl lead him into the depths of the maze. They came to where Nel and Leshea were standing. “Right here, Fay!” Leshea said. “It’s this shrine,” Nel said. “It’s a weird place—apparently it’s for worshipping dice or something?” Beyond the smashed dungeon wall was a cramped space with what appeared to be an altar. There was a shrine there, just a pile of mossy rocks. The object of veneration seemed to be a large stone tray and six stone dice. The dice, however, weren’t the familiar six-sided kind, but had twenty-four faces, each carved with a number from 1 to 24. “Six twenty-four-sided dice,” Fay observed. “The fact that they aren’t just normal six-sided dice seems like an obvious clue.” “Fay—I found a stone stele over here!” Leshea said, beckoning to him from behind the shrine. About a meter in diameter, it bore a single, seemingly simple task. ALL FOR ONE: MAKE THEM ALL ONE. So the last test of all was one of luck. There were six twenty-four-sided dice, and they were to make all of them show 1. “Wait, what are the chances of that?!” Nel said as she looked down at the mossy stone dice. “These are twenty-four-sided dice, here! That means there’s about a four percent chance any given number will show up. Multiply that by six, and you get, uh…” “About 0.0000004096 percent?” Leshea said immediately. “By a rough calculation, you’d need to roll the dice about two hundred thousand times to get that to happen. If it takes five seconds to roll them, that’d be ten million seconds.” “Leshea…? How much time is ten million seconds?” Pearl asked. “Thirty-two years.” “That’s the timescale we’re talking about?! And that’s before you include time to sleep or anything… Wait, why am I even thinking about that? The entire idea is insane!” “Oh, go for it, Pearl. Just give it a try!” “I couldn’t!” She looked down at the dice and gulped. She didn’t move. “I don’t really want to touch dice with all this gross moss… Oh, fine! Yah!” She grabbed the dice and flung them as hard as she could. They clattered around the stone plate and came up 8, 19, 3, 23, 24, 15. “Not even close. I thought maybe we could get at least five of the six to show 1.” “You’re nuts!” “No, we can do it,” Leshea said. She took the six dice in her hands, five of them in her left, just one in her right. Then she flung the one in her right hand onto the plate. 1. The second and the third each came up 1, too. “Huh? H-how are you doing that?!” “I’m just rolling for what I want, obviously. It’s just a way of rolling the dice.” Dice control: a game player as passionate and experienced as Leshea could get even a twenty-four-sided die to show the specific face she wanted. The 1’s piled up: 1, 1, 1, 1, 1. “Y-you make it look easy, Leshea!” Pearl said. “One more to go,” she replied. The sixth die tumbled across the platter and landed on 1—but then something strange happened. It should have come to rest there, but instead it tipped and rolled another half-turn. It stopped on, of all things, 4. 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 4. The very last die showed the wrong number, and they failed the challenge. “N-no! Why?! It was obviously stopping on 1! Your dice control was perfect, Leshea!” said Pearl. “A little too perfect,” Leshea said, chuckling dryly. “Deliberately manipulating the rolls is against the rules. The message seems to be, Trust the dice.” “Then it’s completely down to luck, isn’t it?!” “If that’s the case, maybe we’re allowed to change dice.” Fay reached into his item bag. There were more than a thousand craftable items in the dungeon, about the upper 10 percent of which were considered “rare,” and the purpose of some of them remained unexplained. “There was an item, the Cheater’s Dice. I thought it was strange—none of the other tricks and traps involve pure luck. But maybe it would make sense to use them here at this shrine? Besides, the stele doesn’t say we have to use the stone dice.” They could just change out the stone dice with a set created specifically to cheat. It was against the rules for the players to control the outcome of the rolls, but if it was the dice themselves doing it, there was a good chance that would be acceptable. “Th-that’s it, Fay! Trade them all out for the Cheater’s Dice, and then they’ll all roll 1!” Pearl said. “It’d take a while,” Fay replied. “Sorry?” “The components of the Cheater’s Dice include Game Equipment Blueprints 1 and Orihalcon. And Orihalcon is a very rare drop—you hardly ever see it. What we had, we got from Captain Ashlan.” The area boss King Eraser dropped one Orihalcon when it was defeated. Sometimes, it was also dropped by the rare monster Dancing Scimitar… “But those only show up about once every eighteen hours. And the drop rate on Orihalcon from them is about five percent, so we could be looking at two weeks just to get one piece.” Ten weeks to collect five Orihalcon. In other words, if they wanted to make five more Cheater’s Dice, they would spend the next two months and more just collecting the components. “We’ll never last that long!” “That’s why I want to do this with what we’ve got on hand right now.” Six mossy, stone dice with twenty-four sides. First, they could trade out one of them with the Cheater’s Dice they had. That would mean they only had to roll 1’s on five dice. “Realistically, I’d like… Let’s see. Three Cheater’s Dice, I guess. Then only three of the dice would have to come up 1 by luck. That would be a rate of about 0.0064 percent, which is manageable. I guess we can leave it to Captain Ashlan to collect the Orihalcon.” Division of labor—that was what they needed. They would let another team handle gathering the components for the Cheater’s Dice. Meanwhile, they would keep rolling. Even though they knew, of course, that the chances of success were infinitesimally small. “Okay, I’ll start,” Fay said. They would trade off, one person rolling for two hours. Fay went first, but it wasn’t as if he expected to get six 1’s. And he didn’t. “Man, this is tough. Okay, Leshea, your turn.” “Just leave it to me!” Next came Leshea, but even with the powerful good fortune of a former god on their side, it was all they could do to roll four 1’s at once. “Aw, we’re just getting started,” Leshea opined. “You’re up next, Nel!” “I’ve never been very good at contests of luck—but I’ll do what I can!” Nel threw herself into the task, but after two solid hours, she hadn’t gotten anywhere near a successful roll. “I’ve never been very good at contests of luck—I leave it in your hands, Pearl.” “My hands are ready!” In the end, though, the four of them rolled for eight hours with no success at all. “I can’t believe 5,760 rolls didn’t get us anywhere!” Pearl bawled and flung the dice down. She was breathing hard from rolling dice nonstop, and her right shoulder was so tired she could barely raise her arm more than ten centimeters off the ground. Her muscles ached. This was going to be even rougher than they’d thought. At least, so they believed until they heard a great whoop from behind them. “At last I’ve found you—Fay!” There was a clatter of footsteps, and a young man in a black coat emerged from the passageway. He had dull silver hair and a sharp gaze that communicated sheer force of will. Fay knew him well. “Dax?! You’re here, too?!” “Mm! I knew destiny would always draw us to each other!” Dax Gear Scimitar. An apostle from Mal-ra, his breezy good looks and powerful gameplay bestowed upon him such charisma that he was sometimes called the Prince of Games. “This reunion was fated. Fay! From the moment I set foot in this divine labyrinth, I foresaw this future!” “Not that destiny kept him from getting plenty lost on the way,” muttered a tanned girl just behind him: Kelritch. As his partner, she accompanied him every day, and she didn’t sound very impressed. Now she said, “I must apologize for Dax.” “Fay! I see you seek to completely clear this labyrinth. I’d expect no less from my destined rival. However!” Dax spared a glance at the shrine behind them. When he saw the six twenty-four-sided dice on the stone platter, the Mal-ra apostle grunted, almost as if he was surprised. “Fay… Don’t tell me a man of your abilities is stymied by such a simple test.” “I guess you could call it simple. But the percentages are just too low!” “Then allow me to enlighten you!” “Are you listening?!” “What is luck? Is it a matter of percentages? Is it fortune given from the heavens? I tell you, no! Luck is the power of destiny that a person draws to themselves with their own hand. As the ultimate fighter, this is my moment!” “Um…you wanna try rolling them?” “Perhaps I shall. But first!” Dax swept up the six dice. Fay thought he was going to fling them straight back down, but instead, for some reason, he took out a brand-new handkerchief. Then he began to polish each of the mossy dice. “Dax… What are you doing?” Kelritch asked. “Behold, Kelritch. You must understand this act.” “I don’t. That’s why I’m asking.” “I despise this moss and filth. Dice that I am to roll must shine!” Squeak, squeak. He worked away at the old dice with his handkerchief. Fay and the rest of them watched him for a few minutes. Finally, he said, “It is done. Behold the shine!” Wow! Everyone around him exclaimed with amazement. His careful work had polished the dice from moss-covered until they gleamed like beautiful pearls. This was the true form of the dice, those symbols of luck, that were venerated here at this shrine. “The moment has come! Show me your power!” Dax howled. He clutched the glimmering dice and raised his hand high. “O gathered messengers of destiny! The time is nigh! Bring forth a new age; open now the door of glory! I dub thee—Dax Dice!” “That’s your big, impressive name?!” The dice flew through the air. Six glimmering, twenty-four-sided objects danced across the stone platter. And they came to rest at the same moment, in beautiful harmony. 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1. “No way!” Fay and his teammates exclaimed in unison. But Kelritch, sounding almost philosophical, said, “That’s Dax for you.” And these were Dax Dice! Was it because of Dax’s uniquely bountiful luck? Had the dice responded with gratitude to the human player who had polished them? Or had they been inspired by his bold proclamation? Whatever it was, the instant all six dice came to rest with 1’s showing, the stone plate beneath them began to glow. It was no longer stone, but an item in its own right, a mirror that shone with sacred light. The Bright Mirror of Dawn: Automatically activates when an attack would kill you in one hit. Allows the party to escape destruction one time. And that wasn’t all. The light from the mirror extended to the ceiling and to every wall, and every surface of the labyrinth it touched was returned to normal. Mausoleum Mode had been deactivated. The sickly pattern disappeared, and the walls, floor, and ceiling once again returned to beautiful, polished stone.