Surviving in a Frozen Dark Fantasy as a Genius Mage - Chapter 38

WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Mordor

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ Surviving the Frozen Dark Fantasy as a Genius Mage ◈

Chapter 38: Turning Crisis into Opportunity

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The shimmering portal in the fishy-smelling underwater cave gave off a light unlike any we had seen before.

“Green...”

Careful not to let the fishfolk notice us, I quietly spoke. I knew exactly what kind of portal it was.

“This is a portal to the first floor.”

Starting from the second floor, there were more types of portals.

There were portals to the next floor, other areas, or the city, as well as guaranteed return portals. There were even portals that led back to the previous floor.

“If it’s the first floor, we can make it through in half a day! It’s narrower than the second floor, so we’re more likely to run into other Expedition Party members too! We should take it!”

Gimlius spoke urgently, his eyes trembling.

Yeah. Anyone would think we should take it.

“The reason you’re hesitating... Ah!”

Hans cut himself off as if he had realized why I was hesitating.

“We need to be careful. The first floor might be going through a Contraction Period right now.”

The so-called respawn time.

Whenever the Labyrinth changed its structure, it was dangerous, whether on the lower floors or the upper ones.

“It’s only the first floor! I’ve experienced a Contraction Period inside the Labyrinth before! It was nothing!”

“The issue isn’t whether it’s the first floor. The problem is taking that portal at this exact time.”

The odds were low, but if things went wrong, the worst-case scenario I had in mind could happen.

“So we’re supposed to stay here and wander around looking for another portal that might not even appear? While fighting off those monsters and hunger? We only have enough food left for two meals!”

Gimlius had a point too.

What was right, and what was wrong?

The Labyrinth always tested Expedition Party members like this.

Once again, we had reached a moment of choice.

As the party leader, I had to take responsibility.

“Then let’s vote.”

Democratically.

“Don’t look to me. Say what you think.”

Gimlius voted for the first floor.

Hans wanted to go to the first floor as well.

Elena and Daisy hesitated.

“What are you going to do, Ian?”

“...”

Honestly, the problem was that I didn’t know the right answer either.

All I could do was think of how to deal with the worst-case scenario.

“I’ll follow your decision.”

Elena chose to follow me.

“I trust your judgment too, Ian.”

Daisy felt the same way.

“Fuck... Then what’s the point of voting? You bastards! If you want to die...”

Gimlius, who had suddenly exploded, abruptly shut his mouth.

“Let’s go to the first floor.”

“...What?”

I had looked like I would choose to stay on the second floor, yet I chose the first.

‘It’s better to choose one side than let the party split apart.’

‘Even if that room appears, I’ve already made preparations.’

There was a reason behind my decision.

“Grrk!?”

The dwarf’s booming voice drew the fishfolk’s attention.

“Go!”

Hans grabbed Gimlius’s hand, and the three of us took hold of Hans’s in turn. Then the party plunged into the portal.

* * *

Eyes darting around nervously.

Nostrils flaring nervously.

A man who looked somewhat clumsy wandered around inside the Expedition Party guild.

“Hey! Over here!”

A rough-looking bearded man with his party members waved.

The man flinched, then approached the bearded man and bowed.

“Hello, sir!”

“Yeah, yeah. You know the deal, right? You get ten percent and do all the odd jobs.”

“Of course.”

“Good. If you’ve got all your gear, let’s go.”

The five headed toward the Frozen Tower in the heart of the city.

A woman carrying a spear, one of the party members, asked the awkward-looking man, “Why are you trying so hard to enter the Labyrinth?”

“Pardon?”

“I mean, why are you forcing your way into a party and accepting such a low share just to enter the Labyrinth? You won’t earn much on the first floor.”

“Ah...”

The dazed look on the man’s face disappeared in an instant.

He clenched his fist and spoke with a bitter smile.

“Because I want to become stronger.”

“Stronger?”

“Yes. I want to get stronger so I won’t hold my friends back.”

“...You’re cooler than I thought.”

The woman with the spear patted his back as if encouraging him.

Dize gripped his sword tightly and walked forward with renewed energy.

The entrance portal to the Labyrinth, which should have been open, had vanished, and guards blocked the way.

“Entry is forbidden during the Contraction Period! It’s dangerous!”

“What? It still hasn’t opened? This one’s taking a while.”

The bearded party leader scratched his head, and Dize asked, “What’s a Contraction Period?”

“It’s when the Labyrinth repairs itself after Expedition Party members damage it. Monsters reappear, the terrain changes. It’s like an event that happens every so often.”

“Hmm, it’s lasting longer than usual today. I hope nothing happened inside.”

Newcomers, veteran Expedition Party members, mid-rank and high-rank explorers, and even Deep Floors explorers all avoided the Labyrinth during a Contraction Period. They wanted to avoid as many variables as possible in a Labyrinth that was already treacherous enough.

* * *

My vision flipped amid darkness.

Rumble!

Something strange was happening beneath the dim torchlight.

Stone structures and fragments of rock around us were moving on their own, like a giant stacking toys.

A Contraction Period.

The Labyrinth was moving with a will of its own to repair itself.

“If we get caught up in it, we’re finished! Everyone, gather up!”

We huddled together, praying for the disaster to end as we drifted like a wrecked ship through a storm.

Rumble!

Screeeech!

The grinding of stone left my ears ringing.

The impacts jolted our bodies, and we coughed in the clouds of dust for what felt like forever.

When it finally began to die down...

“Cough! Cough! Ha... Hahaha! See?! We made it here safely!”

Gimlius sprang to his feet amid the falling dust.

“Ugh... That was scary...”

“My nose is blocked...”

“This is... the Ruined Prison, First Floor.”

Hans looked around, then glared at Gimlius, who had exploded earlier.

“Gimlius. Don’t you know there are things you should say to your companions and things you shouldn’t? There were fishfolk nearby, yet you shouted that loudly.”

“Hahaha! That was my fault! But look! We reached the first floor safely! Now we just need to get out!”

The cheerful dwarf and Hans, who seemed willing to let it slide because things had turned out fine, both froze.

“...What is this room?”

There was no exit in sight.

“What?”

At Hans’s words, the other three flinched and looked around with their torches.

The space, roughly seven hundred square feet in size, was sealed off by stone on every side. We were the only ones inside.

Step. Step.

There was no way out through the ceiling, between the walls, or even through the floor.

We were trapped in a completely sealed space.

“We’re trapped?”

“What... I’ve never seen anything like this! This has never happened before!”

[Gimlius has panicked.]

[Elena is flustered.]

[Daisy is flustered.]

[Hans is flustered.]

“What do you mean...?”

“I’ve heard of it... A phenomenon with an extremely low chance of occurring during a Contraction Period. Expedition Party members call it the Room of Death and Starvation...” Hans said grimly.

He said the bodies of Expedition Party members who had been trapped like this and eventually starved to death were sometimes found. There were even horrifying records claiming they had stabbed each other and resorted to cannibalism.

“What’s the survival rate...?”

“I believe it’s under five percent...”

“Ian! Is that true?!”

“Yeah.”

I nodded.

There were only two ways to get out of here.

One was for another Expedition Party member outside to operate a special mechanism and open it, or...

‘That ritual.’

This was why I had told them to be careful.

The chance of this room appearing increased during a Contraction Period.

“Bullshit! A wall like this!”

Gimlius spat on the ground and swung his axe at the wall.

The thick wall was merely scratched. Gimlius’s axe chipped, and the recoil threw him back.

Clang!

“...”

Elena and Hans’s gazes sharpened.

“Ian was right in the end. If we had stayed on the second floor, we might have found an opportunity. Now we’re stuck here, waiting to starve to death.”

“Gimlius.”

“L-let’s wait for now! Someone might find us, right?!”

Gimlius clung to his last hope.

“What are we going to do, Ian?”

“Let’s wait for now.”

After thinking it over, I nodded.

Before using that method, I needed to make the hotheaded dwarf feel guilty.

‘I need to keep that dwarf under control.’

In the darkness and stale air, only the crackling of the torches echoed. The smell of melting resin spread through the room.

Sizzle!

Whenever one torch went out, we lit another.

As we crouched inside this stone tomb, we heard no sign of other Expedition Party members.

Not even faint footsteps.

We ate from our remaining food while we waited.

Yet we ate only enough to stave off starvation, so our bellies felt glued to our backs.

Grrrr.

Elena’s stomach growled.

“Fuck, look what that dwarf bastard got us into.”

Elena snapped.

Gimlius, who normally would have sat there and taken it, glared back sharply.

“Yeah, that was my fault! But weren’t you the ones who agreed to come to the first floor with me?!”

That response only made Elena lash out harder.

“You drew all the aggro, and now you’re saying that? You drunken bastard!”

“What?!”

Gimlius drew his axe.

His fierce eyes and tightly pressed lips made him look as though he were facing an enemy.

“You tiny dwarf bastard. I haven’t liked you for a while.”

Elena sprang to her feet as well, gripping her sword and shield.

“Elena! Mr. Gimlius! What are you both doing right now?!”

“Please restrain yourselves! If we fight among ourselves in a situation like this...”

Hans and Daisy tried to stop them, but neither listened.

“If you hadn’t been guzzling booze from the start, we wouldn’t have lost the food bag, and this wouldn’t have happened either!”

“How can you say that for certain? Are you trying to pin everything on me?!”

“I’m not pinning it on you. I’m telling the truth.”

The worsening situation and the malice of the Labyrinth had drawn out the anger inside them both.

‘Selfishness that blooms under extreme conditions.’

This was another thing to watch out for when exploring the Labyrinth.

...

In a situation like this, people spilled everything they had kept inside.

Other than his drinking problem, Gimlius didn’t seem to have much he was hiding.

Figuring that was enough, I stood after watching them for a while and stopped them.

“Everyone, stop.”

“Don’t stop me, Ian! That troll dwarf bastard! I’m going to chop him into pieces!”

Was it because of the Bracelet of Wrath?

Elena, who normally listened to me, was fiercer than usual.

“Elena.”

“...Tch. You always pick on me.”

Still, when I called her again, Elena pouted and lowered her weapon.

“Gimlius, put your weapon down too.”

“Bullshit! You expect me to disarm so you can kill me?! You’re trying to turn me into dwarf jerky!”

Gimlius seemed to be in worse condition from the added stress.

I shook my head and spoke to my companions.

“Stop it. There’s a way out of here.”

“What?”

“Is that true?!”

Was that all?

We could even turn this crisis into an opportunity.

“Turn this crisis into an opportunity...?”

“Have you ever heard of a secret portal?”

I smirked.

“I’m going to open a portal to a Secret Dungeon.”

The difficulty was fucking high, but Secret Dungeons came with tremendous rewards.

“What is that...?”

Unlike the other three, who looked bewildered as if they had never heard of it before...

“A Secret Dungeon? Do you mean a Dimensional Rift?”

Hans flinched and asked as though he knew something.

The Room of Death and Starvation we had fallen into.

To enter this room, one had to wait on a floor undergoing a Contraction Period and, by a slim chance, get caught in a rearranged area. Or, as we had, take a transfer portal from an upper floor to a lower one.

Among Expedition Party members, this secret room was known as a place that led directly to death the moment you entered it.

But this room actually held a hidden secret.

That was...

A special portal to a Secret Dungeon could be opened here.

“What?! Ian! If you knew about that, why didn’t you do it sooner? I was scared for nothing!”

Once I found a solution, Elena cackled.

“As expected of Ian!”

Daisy clasped her hands together in delight.

“I’ve never heard of such a thing... It can’t be done by ordinary means...”

I nodded at the worried Hans.

“Right. It needs some preparation.”

Opening a secret portal required many materials and a lot of knowledge.

But I was a veteran of this world.

I had prepared in advance for a situation like this, just in case.

‘One Mana Stone I found in the Ruined Prison, First Floor and kept instead of selling.’

‘An old key for treasure chests.’

‘A lump of flesh, a fitting sacrifice for a room of starvation and suffering.’

I had all the materials.

I also had all the knowledge needed to make it happen.

I was a genius mage, after all!

“I-I see!”

Hans, accustomed to my pace by now, understood at once.

I drew a simple magic circle in chalk to serve as an altar and scattered crushed Mana Stone powder into the grooves between its lines. Then I placed the flesh and key in the center, lightly sliced my palm, and poured my blood over them.

‘Agh! It hurts like hell!’

“...”

Was it because of the bizarre sight, or the mysterious sense of awe?

My companions watched without even breathing.

The moment I finished the ritual...

Wooooo.

An ominous vibration rose, and light flashed from the magic circle.

The next moment, a portal of light that looked like it would fuck us over the instant we entered opened before us.

“This is...”

There. The Demon-Invocation Ritual. No, the Nationwide Transmutation Circle was complete.

* * *

Knowledge from the game matched reality exactly.

My choice hadn’t been wrong after all.

I pretended to be calm, but I had been scared shitless inside. I let out a breath of relief.

‘As expected, I really am a genius.’

‘Don’t doubt yourself.’

‘Don’t doubt someone as outstanding as you.’

“C-can we really go in there?”

“It feels suspicious...”

My companions hesitated for a different reason than I had.

The portal, filled with white mist and blackness, gave off a different feeling from every one we had entered before.

Hah.

They were getting picky now.

“If we clear the Secret Dungeon, we can return for certain. It’s also much shorter than the other floors of the Labyrinth. The enormous rewards, including permanent grace, are just a bonus.”

We could either starve to death or fight our way through and return in glory.

This was our only option.

And more importantly...

“We need to enter before it closes.”

The Labyrinth was vast, there were many Expedition Party members, and plenty of people knew how to open a Secret Dungeon.

It was what you would call an entry limit.

“Sounds good. It’s far better than starving to death in a place like this.”

Elena smiled and tightly grasped my hand.

Daisy watched Elena’s reaction, then belatedly took my hand as well.

Their hands were warm in mine.

“I...”

Gimlius hesitated.