Chapter 380, Beyond the Black Snow

Translator: Barnnn

Editor: Silavin

 

“Are you all right?”

 

“I… I’m okay. Really.”

 

Despite her words, Eunice was clearly at her limit. She hadn’t slept since the day before, having sat watch on a Guild bench with her eyes fixed on Monitor #1. Now, even as she cast <<Medic>> on herself to stave off the overwhelming fatigue, her ears and tail drooped as she nodded off again and again.

 

Camille, who had been talking to Eunice all the while, watched on with concern, but her gaze occasionally turned toward another figure nearby, Amira, standing tense before the Monitor, eyes locked on it in a stewing glare.

 

The members of Absolute Helix had gathered around her, all waiting for Tsutomu to emerge from the Black Gate. That attracted some attention within the Guild, to be sure, but not many still watched Monitor #1 with any real anticipation.

 

After all, nearly twenty-four hours had passed since Tsutomu had entered the Dungeon. By all accounts, his odds of survival were now zero. A few idle Explorers lingered, glancing up occasionally, but the top-ranking teams had long since returned to the Dungeon.

 

Of the spectators left, only Alma of the Scarlet Devil Squad remained near the Black Gate. She looked recently woken, yawning lazily as she leaned against the wall.

 

Over in the Pedestal Market, a rowdier crowd had formed: gamblers who had bet on Tsutomu’s life, rubberneckers eager to watch his demise. The general viewers and Dungeon Maniacs, however, had already moved on. Their attention now was on Stephanie on Monitor #2, whose team had been fighting on the hundredth layer since yesterday, still seeking a way to defeat the Corroded Elder Dragon. On Monitor #3, Lorena’s team could be seen as well.

 

[We have to help him recover from this somehow… But how?]

 

Camille furrowed her brow in thought. She knew Tsutomu well enough to understand his cautious nature. But before she could reach any sort of answer, Eunice suddenly sat upright with a jolt, her fox ears and tail standing on end.

 

“H-he’s moving!!”

 

Her shout rang out just as the God Eye feed zoomed in… not on Tsutomu, but on the undead version of Amy. Her face filled the screen in a disorienting close-up, while far in the distance, Tsutomu himself was barely visible, no more than a speck.

 

“Wh-why is it showing Amy!? Switch it already! She’s in the way!”

 

“…Yeah, sorry about that,” said the real Amy, who had already returned to the Guild. She offered a sheepish apology, though her expression made it clear she did not quite understand the fuss.

 

After a few seconds of the undead Amy mugging for the camera, the viewpoint shifted. Now the screen displayed Tsutomu, bloodied and barely clinging to life. The black snow of death was almost upon him.

 

“He used the Dumpling! Look!” Eunice cried out.

 

The words were nonsense to anyone unfamiliar with her slang, but those who knew Tsutomu understood that she meant he had prepared an <<Overheal>> beforehand, protected inside a <<Barrier>> for when he needed it. The brilliant green energy of life shimmered faintly from beneath his clothes, restoring him.

 

The sight brought a spark of hope back to Eunice’s eyes… only for a tower shield to come hurtling through the air toward him.

 

“Grr…!”

 

Watching the undead version of himself chasing Tsutomu across the screen, Garm grit his teeth. The sound he made was halfway between a growl and a sob. He could barely contain his fury.

 

Tsutomu survived the shield strike, but only barely. A sword whistled through the air and sank into his abdomen, sending him rolling across the ground.

 

As the two undead, Garm and Amy, closed in for the kill, the black mass descended.

 

Monitor #1 went pitch black.

 

Some of the Clan members gasped as they saw Tsutomu, his arm still outstretched, swallowed whole by the encroaching darkness. The screen gave no further hint of what had become of him.

 

Eunice lowered her head, her ears drooping in sorrow. Alma pushed herself off the wall and began walking toward the Black Gate.

 

“Miss Amira…” Daryl said, turning to her.

 

“Yeah, yeah. I’ll give him credit. He showed some spine at the end. I’ll kick his ass, but only just enough to make a point.”

 

Having had some sleep, Amira seemed calmer now, collected enough to respond to Daryl’s words with a grin that bared her fangs. She had expected Tsutomu to die like a coward, especially after reading the morning paper’s recap of his panicked retreat. The fact that he had stood and fought in his final moments was worth acknowledging.

 

Encouraged by Amira’s shift in tone, the rest of Absolute Helix began to prepare for Tsutomu’s return. Amy hugged a change of clothes to her chest, Garm moved with the gatekeepers to take up a guard post, Hannah fidgeted as if mentally rehearsing what to say, and Diniel let down her ponytail, preparing to snap her rubber band.

 

“…Does it always take this long?” Camille muttered.

 

Thirty seconds had passed since the screen had turned black, but there still was no change. Normally, when a whole team died, the Monitors would rotate within seconds, and the screen would show the next active Explorer group. But Monitor #2 continued to display Stephanie’s team, still engaged in battle with the Corroded Elder Dragon.

 

One minute passed… then, slowly, the black mass began to lift.

 

Monitor #1 brightened as though dawn were breaking across the screen. It was a sight no one present had ever seen before. The Guild’s Explorers began to murmur among themselves. Even the staff, used to all manner of Dungeon anomalies, stared wide-eyed and speechless.

 

Through the thinning darkness, the outline of the Ancient Castle began to take shape once more beneath a dreary, overcast sky. Then, in the arena, Tsutomu appeared, lying flat on the ground. He sat up, slowly and groggily, and ran his left hand across his chest to confirm he was still alive.

 

He tucked his staff beneath his right arm and pushed himself to his feet.

 

Garm and Amy, both still undead, watched him in silence. Their indifferent expressions remained unchanged.

 

Even as Tsutomu pulled a vial of Potion from his belt and drank it down, neither of them reacted. Not even the Corroded Elder Dragon, who stood idle in the background, gave any indication of noticing him.

 

“Ah, ah, ahem. Testing, testing. Can anyone see this? Well, since it’s moving, then I guess you can?”

 

As soon as Tsutomu spotted the God Eye, his expression turned oddly cheerful, waving his still-functioning left hand. Eunice, seated in the front row before Monitor #1, could only stare in disbelief at the bizarre scene.

 

“All right! Garm, hey! High five!”

 

“……”

 

“…!”

 

The undead Garm stared at Tsutomu with a look one might reserve for a lunatic drunk on a street corner, but ultimately resigned. After a moment of hesitation, he raised his hand and slapped it against Tsutomu’s.

 

The undead Amy quickly lifted her own hand, not to be left out.

 

“Oh, but before that,” Tsutomu said, turning to her. “Could you pull this out for me? Yeah, this one right here.”

 

“…!!”

 

Amy, perking up, leaned forward and yanked one of her dual blades from where it was still embedded in his torso.

 

“Ah, thanks. Didn’t even hurt, actually. You mind if I borrow this for a bit?”

 

The whole exchange was surreal. The undead Amy handed over her sword with the same casualness as if they were in a post-battle cooldown, and Tsutomu, smiling all the while, planted it into the floor beside him.

 

“Uh… huh?”

 

“What… what is Teach even doing?”

 

“…”

 

“…I daresay, he seems to have made another one of his ridiculous discoveries…”

 

The Absolute Helix crew murmured among themselves, and so did all the onlookers in the Guild. No one could make sense of what they were seeing on the Monitor. Tsutomu, now seemingly on friendly terms with two undead versions of his allies, looked as if he had just recruited them into his party.

 

Then he looked up at the towering Corroded Elder Dragon, the creature large enough to crush him in a single breath, and muttered,

 

“<<Air Blade>>. Well, well, still not turning around, eh? All right, guess I’ll just chip away at you until you’re–”

 

Before he could finish the sentence, the feed on Monitor #1 abruptly cut out. At the same instant, Monitor #2 flickered and went completely black.

 

“Geh!”

 

“……”

 

The Black Gate opened, and Tsutomu came flying out, landing face-first on the Guild floor with a strange, squishy thud. For a moment, the entire venue was dead silent. Only the pitiful groans of the fallen Healer echoed through the stunned crowd.

 

And then came… the rest. Stephanie, Rook, and their party burst out after him in a tangled heap, crashing down right on top of Tsutomu and effectively finishing what the Dungeon had not.

 

▽▽

 

What Tsutomu had done, in the most succinct of terms, was exploit a bug.

 

He had spent nearly two years now in Dungeon City, challenging the depths of God’s Dungeon. During that time, he had confirmed for himself that most of the bugs, glitches, and cheese tactics from Live Dungeon no longer worked in this world. The most glaring example had been the Corrupted Shell, the Boss of the ninetieth layer.

 

In Live Dungeon, avoiding its petrification attack caused an error that froze the monster’s AI entirely. But here, while evading the petrification still worked, the Corrupted Shell’s behavior remained intact. Every exploit he had once catalogued had been stripped away, bound by far more realistic logic.

 

But Tsutomu knew bugs; he had studied hundreds, documenting and testing them extensively. He understood not just what bugs did, but why they occurred… and more importantly, he could see when this world mirrored those same fault lines.

 

So when he encountered the black snow, the dark mass that forcibly removed Explorers from the Dungeon after twenty-four hours, he had known it was something to study.

 

To onlookers, that black mass appeared to be a terrifying unknown that killed Explorers, but to Tsutomu, who had calmed down due to his anger towards God, it was nothing more than a function.

 

This world’s ‘developer’ had added a mechanic that caused those killed by the Corroded Elder Dragon’s blood to rise again as undead. Tsutomu decided to turn that mechanic on its head. If he could become undead, then he could fool the system into recognizing him as a monster rather than a player. And thus, bypass the black mass’s ejection.

 

He had briefly considered using the dumpling <<Raise>>, functionally equivalent to <<Reraise>>, as a safeguard. But <<Raise>> only worked if someone else was present to be resurrected. He was alone.

 

So he hatched another scheme: if death was required to become undead, then he needed to simulate dying without actually doing so, as him dying alone would immediately send him back to the Guild. He relied on a rare but known quirk of the system where, when an Explorer was placed in a situation that should be fatal, the body would emit a glow signaling a death judgment… even if the Explorer was not technically dead.

 

He bet everything on that. To preserve some of his humanity, as turning fully undead also meant death, he wrapped his left side in Holy-elemental gear, doused himself in Holy Water, blessed himself with <<Holy>>, and stacked multiple <<Overheal>> dumplings under <<Barrier>> dumplings. The plan was simple in theory: die just enough to become undead, then let the <<Overheal>> restore his body before a full transformation took hold.

 

In the end, it worked; the black mass descended, devoured everything, and passed over him.

 

To the system, all that remained was a Dungeon with no living Explorers, just monsters. And Tsutomu, looking like a half-decayed ghoul, was accepted by Garm, Amy, and even the Corroded Elder Dragon as one of their own.

 

Unless the Dungeon had a special composition, like the ninety-second layer with the Fenrir at the top of the monster pyramid, monsters rarely turned on one another. They were programmed to hunt Explorers, not fight among themselves. Tsutomu, now counted among their ranks, was free to act.

 

He fully intended to use that time to wear down the Elder Dragon over the next two days, even if it meant going sleepless. But God, it seemed, was not about to allow that.

 

“Huh… I wasn’t dead,” Tsutomu muttered, rubbing his face where it had slammed into the Guild floor.

 

Despite surviving, he had been forcibly ejected from the Dungeon… along with Stephanie’s party, who had been in the middle of their attempt at the hundredth layer at the time. They were, unfortunately, collateral damage.

 

After recovering from the dogpile, Tsutomu sat upright on the floor and tried explaining to those in the Guild how he had exploited the Dungeon’s mechanics to create that situation. At the end of it, he gave a weary sigh and rubbed his eyes.

 

“I know you guys probably have a million questions left, but… do you mind if I sleep first? It’s been a while since I pulled an all-nighter, and I’m seriously wiped.”

 

“I… I stayed up all night too, you know!!” Eunice wailed, stamping her feet. “Now keep talking, and in the Kingdom’s language this time! None of us know what the heck you were even on about!”

 

By now, Tsutomu barely heard her. Though his body was technically fine, his mind was utterly exhausted; he fell asleep on the spot in a visibly half-conscious state.