WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: DereKimchi

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◈ The Protagonist Doesn't Want to Leave the First Floor ◈

Chapter 45: 045

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‘Is it about to start?’

When he spotted them from afar, they were not about to do anything immediately.

Seo Hajin settled somewhere suitable and spent the time properly organizing the resources in his Subspace, which was still only partially sorted.

Companion No. 1 and No. 2, along with Black, helped out, but until then, it had been less organizing and more desperately trying to put everything in order.

The countless items had been sorted by size and type, at least. But they were still piled into heaps.

As he looked through them himself and started sorting them again, time passed surprisingly quickly, like during a major cleanup or while assembling a computer.

The problem was the reduced stay time.

The storage section of the Subspace, unlike the Rest Area, reduced his available stay time, so he could not remain there too long.

He had to watch from the Rest Area for a while, hurry over to sort things out, then return to the Rest Area. He repeated that process again and again.

The scene, which had looked like rows of vendor stalls at Dongmyo Market, gradually began to resemble a supply warehouse. The display shelves he had finished crafting were placed in their proper spots, making it look even better.

Several hours passed like that.

He had not finished organizing every item, but he woke Juggernaut, who had been sleeping in the Subspace Rest Area.

His aerial viewpoint remained outside anyway, so there was no need to leave an Avatar behind.

After resting well, Juggernaut headed out.

Though the field had no significant changes in elevation, there was a small hill-like rise nearby. Juggernaut placed a chair near the top and sat down, watching the distant area ahead.

His own sight and his aerial viewpoint.

Between the two, he could see roughly twenty people.

Their appearance and the quality of the weapons in their hands made it clear that they had not started in this harsh Wasteland field.

‘They either bought those at the marketplace, or they really are an Expedition Force.’

They seemed well prepared.

Their morale was high, and their movements showed no trace of fatigue, as though they had rested well.

Then they began moving.

They spread out from a distance, encircling the boss mob. It showed how much research they had put into this.

‘Is this their first attempt? They’re being a little too eager.’

High morale and recklessness were different things. At first, they had seemed closer to the former, but the longer he watched, the more it felt different.

‘They’re too confident.’

Three large shield bearers led the charge, closing the distance. People carrying spears and axes stayed close behind them.

The formation looked convincing enough.

But theory and practice were different. How would they fare?

Boom.

‘It reacts from that far away.’

Before the Wild Boars traveling with it could react, the boss boar exhaled smoke-like breath and stomped the ground with its front hoof.

The pressure exuded by its enormous body was no joke. Only then did the shield bearers, who had been approaching so confidently, visibly slow down.

When the boss moved, its subordinates moved as well.

The dozens of guard boars it had brought with it raised their snouts and made all sorts of noises.

“Take the initiative! Fire!”

A man wearing a rather flashy cape, following slightly behind the others, shouted.

‘Is he the leader?’

As Seo Hajin shifted his attention toward him, those around the apparent leader began sending arrows, daggers, axes, and all kinds of weapons flying.

‘They even have magic.’

Someone fired a long, sharp object that seemed to distort the air slightly.

If someone was a mage, he thought a hooded robe would be standard. But the person who had fired it wore a short-sleeved T-shirt.

‘A hooded robe would be hot.’

Thinking that, he shifted his aerial viewpoint.

He watched to see how much damage the various attacks had done. It was a little underwhelming.

None of them had even hit the boss properly.

It was a problem that they could not hit something that huge, but after seeing the follow-up attacks, he realized they had done it intentionally.

‘They’re trying to deal with the lesser mobs first.’

That was working well enough. A double-digit number of Wild Boars were dropping in no time.

Squeeeal!

The Wild Boars charged all at once.

Beyond them, the boss watched with burning eyes.

‘Wow.’

Dust rose from the dry Wasteland, unlike the frozen northern lands. Before long, Juggernaut could no longer see the scene clearly with his own eyes.

But the aerial viewpoint had no such problem.

From above, he could clearly see what was happening there.

“Block them! Hold the line!”

“Argh!”

Shouts reached him from afar.

Sounds that could have been screams or battle cries.

The shield bearers gritted their teeth and planted their feet, but there were too many charging enemies.

They managed to stop a few, but one shield finally cracked from the accumulated impacts.

A Wild Boar slipped through that opening.

Its tusk, sharp and protruding like a horn, pierced straight through the thigh of someone who had been trying to pull out a new shield.

“Argh!”

That was definitely a scream.

Similar scenes unfolded everywhere.

The Expedition Force’s formation fell apart in an instant.

When the shield bearers were breached, the damage dealers behind them tried to hold the line by swinging spears and axes, but it was not easy.

Their opening attack, meant to seize the initiative, had reduced the boars’ numbers significantly. But it had not even cut the total in half.

More boars were still alive than dead, and there were more of them than the entire Expedition Force.

There was even worse news for them.

Watching from the sky, Seo Hajin clicked his tongue inwardly.

‘They’re respawning.’

The dead guard Wild Boars were reappearing.

And naturally, every one of them charged straight at the Expedition Force.

‘Huh?’

Then something happened that even Seo Hajin had not expected.

A Flame Boar was among the newly spawned boars.

‘They can just spawn normally?’

He had seen for himself that Wild Boars had to eat the hot minerals underground and survive to evolve. He had not known they could simply spawn that way.

‘Is it because they’re the boss mob’s subordinates?’

Naturally, that one mixed in with the others and charged toward the Expedition Force.

Compared to its appearance, its combat ability was not that different from the others, so killing it was not particularly difficult.

The problem came afterward.

The Expedition Force seemed to know that as well. From the moment the battle began, they had been shouting information back and forth to each other.

Boom!

An explosion erupted shortly afterward.

They had gathered information beforehand, so the damage was not severe. Still, several people who had already been injured failed to escape the blast radius in time.

The Expedition Force shrank, while the boars increased.

The longer this went on, the worse it would become for them.

‘They haven’t even touched the boss.’

The raid had already failed.

Seo Hajin made Juggernaut nod, then continued watching from the sky as he worked out a plan.

‘Even for me, fighting it head-on would be difficult.’

The Wild Boars were not a problem.

The Flame Boars’ explosions were fine, too, since he had a place to escape to.

But the boss boar, still watching solemnly from afar, was another matter. Its size alone, closer to an elephant than a boar, made him shake his head.

‘Would two evolved Sanguns be enough to handle it?’

Common sense said they should be.

But for some reason, he had an uneasy feeling that the obvious answer would not hold true in reality.

“I can’t handle this! Run!”

“Help me!”

“Watch out for the thornbushes!”

“Another one’s about to explode here!”

All kinds of shouts continued.

Even then, Seo Hajin’s attention was not on the collapsing Expedition Force. It was on the boss boar and the ground around it.

‘Well, if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.’

He decided to put the idea he had just formed into action.

He opened the Subspace and called out the rabbits.

‘Leave the ordinary rabbits alone. Only the Large Rabbits... Three won’t be enough.’

He used some of his precious Keys to evolve two more rabbits, then fed them experience.

That made five Large Rabbits.

Shovel No. 1 through No. 5.

Seo Hajin gave them an instruction that was simple, but might have been complicated for them. If they did not seem to understand it, he had not planned to begin in the first place.

But judging by their eyes, they seemed to understand properly.

“Alright. Go.”

Squeak!

Squeak!

The rabbits, still unable to speak, answered in their own ways and burrowed into the ground.

Watching from above, Seo Hajin could tell that they had understood his instructions properly.

‘That’s a relief for now.’

The preparations would take quite a while.

If anything unexpected happened, he might have to stop.

Thump! Thump!

Sure enough, something unexpected happened.

The boss boar, which had been watching quietly until now, began to move.

‘Fortunately, it isn’t heading toward our kids.’

Were ten people even left now?

The boss boar thundered toward the Expedition Force, which could not even maintain a proper formation anymore. With its enormous body, it ruthlessly rammed into them and trampled them.

‘Ouch.’

It was a terrible sight, too horrifying to watch.

As though the battle before this had been nothing more than a child throwing a tantrum, the giant boar killed users one after another, like a mad elephant on a rampage.

It took less than ten minutes for the Expedition Force of over twenty people to be completely destroyed.

Even those ten minutes had probably only been possible because the boss had watched quietly until then.

‘Its hide looks much tougher than an ordinary Wild Boar’s. Sangun’s claws might not work on it.’

After watching it for a moment, Seo Hajin turned his attention back to the rabbits digging underground.

‘There isn’t one here, right? Or is there?’

The unknown monster underground.

He did not know whether that thing, which had killed the rabbits so quickly, existed here as well.

He was not even sure whether there was one or several. But he could at least guess that there probably was not one near the boss mob.

‘It would be nice if I could use it if there is one, but for now, I hope there isn’t.’

He shook his head and summoned Companion No. 1, who had been waiting after finishing the Subspace organization.

Then he quietly sent the wolf to the battlefield.

“Don’t fight. Just pick up the items.”

“Yes.”

The battlefield was littered with the Expedition Force’s belongings, along with the drops from everything they had hunted before dying.

He had not planned it this way, but the spectator ended up profiting.

‘It’s not like I can leave them there.’

He was not a saint.

And of course, returning what he picked up to its owners was not an option either.

‘No survivors.’

He did not know if anyone would restart nearby, but it would not be now. They would probably wait until the situation was over and the aggro had cleared before returning.

So nobody would see No. 1 running through the monsters like it was home, picking up items.

Even if someone did see it, nothing would change.

‘Hmm.’

Then Seo Hajin saw the boss boar, having killed every human, turn around and return to its original location.

‘Is there something there?’

It was even more obvious from above.

The creature stubbornly held to one specific spot, as though obsessed with it. The surroundings did not look particularly different.

‘Underground?’

That was the only place he could not check.

If he raided the boss, he wanted to make sure he did not forget to inspect that spot, so he marked the location on the system map.

“Good work.”

“It was nothing.”

After No. 1 finished collecting the items and returned to the Subspace to organize them, Seo Hajin brought Juggernaut into the Rest Area as well, just in case, and watched the empty battlefield.

How much time passed?

One or two users appeared here and there. They repeatedly confirmed from a distance that nobody was there, then turned away.

Some came closer to look over the battlefield, then kicked the ground after finding nothing left behind.

‘My condolences.’

Your Personal Effects will be put to good use.

He felt no guilt or pangs of conscience.

It was not as though the Expedition Force had been filled with people driven by some grand sense of duty.

Besides, he had seen quite a few posts on the community board saying that they had terrorized people in the Area as well.

‘They might not have been the same people.’

Putting that aside, if they had truly been serious about the raid, they would not have charged in with that number of people.

‘They would have gathered more people through the community board.’

A force in the twenties.

If they thought that was enough, they lacked judgment. If they thought a small elite group would mean fewer people to share the rewards with, then they had been too greedy.

‘It was obviously not normal.’

The boss boar was still perfectly fine.

Seo Hajin himself might not have been entirely sane for trying to hunt it alone. But the difference was that he had the Subspace to escape to if things went wrong.

‘Still, I need to prepare enough beforehand. It’s convenient that it stays in one place.’

The five Large Rabbits were still diligently digging.

After a while, Seo Hajin called out Black, gave the leopard a brief instruction, and sent it into the tunnel entrance.

A long stretch of work followed.

The boss remained where it was. The Expedition Force had apparently gathered again somewhere and returned, but neither their numbers nor their equipment had recovered to their former level.

They seemed to have argued as well. They split into separate groups and headed off in different directions.

Only then did several posts appear on the community board, revealing more details about their situation. But they did not draw much interest.

The issue drawing attention in the community now was the war in the eastern Logging Forest.

Ordinary users who had escaped or been rescued, users belonging to the Logger Clan, and the former Villains whose base had been destroyed by Juggernaut’s group.

After the Logger Clan Master announced that they would no longer stand by and would respond actively, they did exactly that.

A fight with the Villains, who had been trying to rebuild their forces, was inevitable. But the Villains, who had already died at least once, could no longer deal with ordinary users as easily as before.

Even so, the ordinary users still seemed to be at a slight disadvantage in numbers. But as time passed, they appeared to be gradually gaining the upper hand.

Their foundation, the Logger Clan, remained intact. Supplies and support continued arriving from the rear, so the Villains, who did not even have a base, seemed unable to respond properly.

‘And they have no justification.’

Even in a world where laws and morality no longer existed, not many people defended what they had done.

Even those who did defend them only did so on the community board. Nobody actually came forward to support them.

‘It’ll probably be settled well enough.’

Thinking the Logger Clan had made a good decision, Seo Hajin closed the community window and looked below.

It was still ordinary ground.

But beneath it, there was a construction site that had progressed quite far.

‘It should be roughly ready by tomorrow morning.’

His guess had been right.

Perhaps because the boss mob was nearby, there were no other monsters underground.

So he had used the Large Rabbits to hollow it out.

It would withstand most things, but collapse if something above a certain weight rampaged over it.

‘Even the boss boar should be fine if it just walks across it. It needs to be fine until it walks onto it... then collapse when it rolls on the ground.’

He did not know its exact weight, so he could only make a rough estimate.

If it did not work as planned, that would just be unfortunate.

“Well, even if I can’t hunt the boss like this, there’s plenty underground, so it’s still good.”

From thornbush roots to the Heat-Generating Minerals, the rabbits could dig freely without fear of dying. A considerable amount was piling up in the Subspace.

He briefly considered releasing a large number of basic level 10 rabbits again, but decided against it because they would be too difficult to manage.

“Hmm.”

Then another thought occurred to him.

They had already gone fairly deep underground. What if they dug a tunnel from there toward where the boss was currently located?

“I keep thinking there’s something underground over there. It lies down flat on its stomach.”

It looked similar to a cat in a loaf position.

Seeing it sprawled out with its belly pressed to the ground, there seemed to be something beneath it.

He could not tell the boss to move aside and inspect the spot.

But he could dig toward it from where he was underground.

‘Let’s check. If things go well, I might be able to use it to lure it into the trap.’

He called out Shovel No. 4 and No. 5 separately and began extending the tunnel toward the boss mob.

The tunnel was too narrow for Avatars like Juggernaut to enter, so he could not help directly.

But the rabbits also received the effect of Soul Resonance, so they shared some of the Avatars’ health and stamina, the traits of other pets, the Heavy Attack skill, and more.

Thanks to that, they dug so quickly that their names seemed inadequate.

Removing the dirt generated in the process became a job in itself.

‘I need to take it out regularly.’

He removed the dirt from the Large Rabbits’ Inventories and put it into the Subspace. In the Subspace, he used what was needed and discarded the rest.

Discarding it meant pouring it into the Arc Recycler.

Even dirt contained traces of mana, so there was no reason to throw it outside.

‘There’s no residue after the extraction process, so I don’t need to worry about it mixing with the shake powder.’

But the dirt accumulated faster than the recycler could process it, so he had no choice but to dispose of some outside from time to time.

‘There are lots of rocks, too.’

Thanks to Black being inside, they could pick up things the rabbits missed.

Stones and rocks of all sizes continued to come in.

How much farther did they dig?

At some point, he saw that Shovel No. 4 and No. 5 had stopped. He put an item they had agreed on beforehand into Black’s Inventory.

Then the Subspace entrance opened from their side.

Stone, who had been waiting, quickly slipped through. But the space was so narrow that Stone had to lie flat on the ground.

“Ugh. There’s barely any air circulation...”

Fortunately, connecting it to the Subspace, especially the Rest Area, seemed to let air in from outside.

His tight breathing eased a little.

Seo Hajin moved Stone.

First, Stone widened the surrounding space and set up prepared wooden pillars as supports.

Once the space was wider, he sent Vulcan in to help as well. Before long, it resembled the inside of an old abandoned mine.

“Shall we go now?”

Then he broke through the earthen wall the rabbits could not advance past and moved further inside.

The rabbits had not stopped because the wall was hard.

There was definitely something beyond it.

Even the heat he could feel immediately was unusual.

Just in case, he brought Shovel No. 4, Shovel No. 5, and Black into the Subspace. He prepared to escape at any time, then continued working.

Several minutes later.

Beyond the crumbling earthen wall, accompanied by a dry cracking sound, he found a fairly large space.

‘An underground cavern?’

He had not expected something like that.

At most, he had thought there might be a larger Heat-Generating Mineral.

That was not it.

The space underground looked like an artificial structure no matter how he looked at it. A hemispherical cavern about fifty meters in diameter lay before him.

At its center stood a stone structure that was probably an altar, or something similar.

And on top of it was the Heat-Generating Mineral he had expected to find.

“No. It’s a little different.”

It gave off heat in a similar way, but the temperature was vastly different. The mineral itself looked different too.

He approached slowly, then stopped around ten meters away.

Despite dulling his senses, the heat was intense enough to make his skin burn.

‘It might not even be a mineral.’

The surface was covered with something like clumps of dirt or dried concrete. But exposed portions of it shone with a dark crimson light, like a gemstone.

In some ways, it resembled an uncut gemstone.

But it was so large that it clearly exceeded one Subspace Block.

‘Would it fit in about two Blocks?’

What was that?

A dragon heart from a movie or novel?

Or perhaps the inner core of some spiritual creature?

He did not know.

But one thing was certain.

He needed to take it before anyone else did.

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