Surviving as a Broken Hero

I could feel Lein’s eyebrows raise through my Echo Sight before he spoke.

“And here I was wondering how you were planning to see in here. Mind if I take out a light?”

Ah… I still had to close my eyes to use Echo Sight properly and had completely overlooked the fact that he couldn’t see a thing. He had likely just heard the clanking of the spears. At least it showed that he had some trust in me from the start.

“Ah… Yeah.”

He reached into his item bag and pulled out one of the light stones that I was used to. The insides of my eyelids gained a reddish hue as the light tried to penetrate through them.

“Judging by how the trap was active after a group just left… It’s probably an instance labyrinth?”

That meant that we wouldn’t have to worry about running into others, as a sort of separate space was created for each party that entered the dungeon.

We continued on through the Labyrinth as I used my Echo Sight to detect the trap triggers we needed to avoid along the corridors. I was leading the way and had taken the classic tactic of following the left wall, as my Echo Sight was at a range that allowed me to see farther than Lein’s stone could emit by then—especially in those sound-enhancing corridors.

It felt almost too easy until we reached a point that seemed exactly like a point we had already passed.

I stopped abruptly as I came to that realization.

Lein, stopping with me, spoke up.

“What’s the problem? Another trap ahead?”

“No… I’m not sure… but I think we’re going in circles.”

***

One foot in front of the other, a step turned into twenty turned into two hundred.

Persistence hunting was what made humans strong to begin with, and Koise considered himself one of the strongest hunters there was—save for, of course, the Lion himself.

Whereas Koise pursued his prey relentlessly and doggedly wherever they might run off to, the Lion preferred a hunting method that allowed him to lay in wait, his prey never suspecting a thing until it was already too late and he was at their throats.

One step after the other, he eventually reached an Awakener camp at the end of the valley where a multitude of people had gathered around their campfires and all sorts of scents wafted through the air—the smell of unwashed bodies, cooking meat, magical perfumes, and so on.

He continued through the campgrounds, keeping a wary lookout for anyone who approached him or even spent too long looking at him… which was, unfortunately, everyone he seemed to pass by.

He looked half-dead already, and his hands looked like a zombie’s.

Even still, he continued unbothered all the way until he reached the dungeon entrance itself.

“Hey, you!” A man clad in heavy armor called out to him, obviously the party leader from the way he was silently followed by an orc mage and an archer.

Koise stopped, staring silently at the group as his hands hovered near his item pouch like he was a gunslinger in the wild, ready to pull an arrow from it at a moment’s notice.

“You look half-dead already! Usually I’d just let the dungeon do its work, but I think it would be a bit of a mercy if we just killed you here… Unless you want to strip and hand over your item bag.”

Koise almost wanted to laugh. He could tell at a glance that the so-called hunters were but mere lambs attempting to disguise themselves with the skin of a lame wolf.

The world wouldn’t miss their ilk, and they had likely accosted many an Awakener in a similar manner.

“And if I say no?” Koise asked as his eyes flitted briefly between the three.

The mage, an orc whose staff was not even at the ready, smirking as he likely imagined Koise as easy prey. Mages didn’t need staves to cast, but those that relied on them often resorted to using them as a crutch and didn’t even realize they could go back to casting without them.

The archer, her bow crying from disrepair and neglect, was clearly the type to use a bow until it was about to break and just pull another from her bag—a lazy lamb that had grown complacent with her own abilities and didn’t realize the value of her tools.

The armored man in the lead, standing tall and confident in front of him with a sword and shield sheathed on his back. The man was even so confident as to have his helmet off—stored in his bag maybe? What was the point of walking around in such a heavy suit of armor if you purposely left the most important bit of protection unequipped?

Lambs, the lot of them.

The man in the armor spread his arms to indicate to his two other party members.

“Didn’t I already say we’d do you the mercy of killing you ourselves? Your death will be much more sudden than anything the labyrinth might have, at least.”

‘So it’s a labyrinth dungeon then… probably an instance one, at that.’

His mind lingered on the word “labyrinth” and how it would likely be an instance dungeon because labyrinths would otherwise be too easy to clear if Awakeners could just share information or continue from where they left off.

Dungeons were hunters and Awakeners were prey, that much had become clear to him over his years of experience. Hunters wouldn’t let their prey go so easily.

“Hey! You deaf as well?! It’s a bit late for that act, friend!”

Koise halted his thoughts for a moment.

‘I guess I have to take care of these lambs first…’

* * *

Reaper Scans

[Author – Farlight]

[Proofreader – Harley]

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* * *

“Maybe we should follow the right wall instead…?” Lein tried to offer a helpful suggestion, but I just shook my head in response.

“No… I don’t think that’s the problem. We don’t know enough about how this labyrinth works to begin with. For all we know, the labyrinth even silently changes itself over time or distance.”

“Then wouldn’t that make passing through the labyrinth basically impossible?”

I looked over my shoulder at Lein.

“I guess that would explain why nobody has completed the dungeon yet.”

It was a difficult situation.

‘Should we just leave and come back when the dungeon reconfigures itself into something more straightforward like a boss rush type of scenario?’

No, even if we did that, the boss rush would have been just as seemingly impossible, just in a more direct way. The simplicity of it was really a trap, and a boss rush dungeon would likely be even more impossible. One boss was already hard enough, but who knew how many we would have to face in that case?

“Can you try exploding one of the walls? Just a small area, even?”

I had detected with Echo Sight that the walls weren’t really that thick to begin with. We often passed sections that were nothing more than a single layer of brick thick. Despite that fact, we hadn’t found any sections of the wall that looked decayed in any way.

“Yeah… Stand back for a moment.”

I moved aside and let Lein take up a position near one of the walls in front of me. With how carefully he moved his hands, it almost looked like he could have even been a bomb squad member sweating over which wire to cut when diffusing a bomb.

He stepped back again and stared intently at the wall before speaking.

“If that doesn’t do it, I don’t know what will. We should stand a bit farther back, though, just in case.”

Taking his advice, I took us back to what he judged was a safe distance before we turned back around and looked at the space on the wall.

No matter which sense I used or how I looked at it, it still just looked like a blank wall. There weren’t any signs of wherever he had done to it but moments before that I could detect.

“Here it goes…”

He lifted his hand up and snapped while we watched the wall intently.

“…”

“…”

Nothing happened.

“Well, the explosion idea didn’t work, but I got a System notification from it, at least…”

I perked up at that. That meant we could get some more information, if nothing else.

“What does it say?”

“It says the walls are immune to anything that an Awakener might be able to use against them.”

If the System said it was so, there wasn’t reason to doubt it. After all, it made sense that it wouldn’t be as easy as knocking down a few walls to get to the end of the labyrinth.

We stood there scratching our heads for a moment before an idea came to mind.

***

As the man looked into Koise’s eyes, he must have seen something that he didn’t like, because he began reaching for the weapons he still had sheathed.

‘And the lamb at last recognizes the wolf.’

Before the other two could catch on, Koise plucked an arrow from his item bag and launched through the air with the same smooth underhand motion.

The orc mage clutched his throat and fell to the ground, gurgling on his own blood as the arrow pierced his skin, all the more impressive because orcs were famous for just how tough their skin and muscles were. A strike that might cut through three normal humans wouldn’t even make it all the way through an orc.

With the biggest unknown taken care of, Koise only had the wannabe archer and the overconfident knight left to deal with—both types that he was already well acquainted with.

The archer at least had quick reactions after that, drawing her bowstring and loosing an arrow at him in the blink of an eye as the knight finished grabbing his weapons and charged at him, no doubt confident that Koise would be dead in a close-range fight.

For other archer types, that was usually the case—and indeed, Koise’s archer-type class didn’t come with much in the way of close-range abilities, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t painstakingly trained to be rid of the weakness that plagued other archers.

As the knight activated a skill and suddenly sped forward at three times the speed, his shield aglow, Koise launched an arrow backward and stopped it with a simple skill—«Momentum Halt», which allowed him to temporarily halt the momentum of his projectiles.

In just a brief moment, he had already calculated the end of the battle—the knight and archer didn’t know that they were already dead.