Dungeon Odyssey [EN]: Chapter 176

Dungeon Journal – Episode 177

# 177

Dungeon Journal

Episode 177

Lee Jun-young was inexperienced when it came to managing a labyrinth. If she had been left to manage the 9th floor on her own, she wouldn’t have lasted long without Kim Jin-woo’s help.

Fortunately, the Blood Lion’s Labyrinth was neither on the surface nor underground, and it was protected by the Party Hall and the Mandragora Labyrinth.

The owners of those two labyrinths were specialists in labyrinth management, veterans of over a year of war.

She was perfectly protected.

Lee Jun-young quickly realized that she didn’t have to worry about the labyrinth’s defense and began exploring other ways to use her abilities.

As a long-time explorer, she was very knowledgeable about the surface world.

The halted construction resumed.

Various high-tech facilities that Kim Jin-woo hadn’t even considered began to arrive through her connections. Surveillance equipment and surface weapons were quickly installed in Kim Jin-woo’s safehouse in Paju.

“If anyone’s going to be interested in this place, it’ll be the Association’s explorers or other Dungeon Babies [individuals born and raised in dungeons]. And they don’t have tough hides like monsters.”

Lee Jun-young loaded a pistol she had bought at a premium on the black market, her face grim.

As she said, no matter how skilled the explorers were, they could still be killed with a single bullet.

“Hmm.”

Kim Jin-woo made an ambiguous sound, somewhere between admiration and a groan, as he listened to her.

He wondered how long he had agonized over choosing between the underground and the surface when he was forced to make a choice.

In contrast, she seemed to have no hesitation in siding with the underground.

“I can get more if you need them, but to get better performance than this, I’d have to go through the dealers I’ve been trading with, and that would risk exposing my identity.”

Lee Jun-young, noticing his expression, said cautiously, as if she had misunderstood.

“You don’t have to push yourself. The Shadow Magicians can handle most of the riff-raff anyway.”

The Shadow Magicians’ large-scale illusion magic, which was deployed under the safehouse, was so subtle that it had evaded the Moai’s eyes during the year-long war. It would be enough to fool the average person.

If anyone could get into the safehouse without being fooled, Morrigan would take care of it.

The power of Morrigan, who had found her true name as the Black Omen, was so great that even the Dungeon Babies of the Deep Layers were a joke. Perhaps no one in Korea could escape the dirge [a lament or mournful song] she sang.

Having completed the defense of the safehouse, Kim Jin-woo began to look for his father in earnest.

Lee Jun-young gave him some advice on his way of doing things, which had been so reliant on brute force.

Attack the Association’s most vulnerable points first.

In addition to following Down Gem’s [a source of energy and power in the dungeon world] transportation routes, she gave him the locations of several of Song Jong-chul’s businesses.

“Ugh.”

Kim Jin-woo turned away as he watched the men writhing on the floor with twisted limbs.

[Half-destroyed Low-Grade Down Gem. More than half of it has already been destroyed, and the Down Gem, which has lost a significant amount of energy, can no longer be called a Down Gem.]

[Low-Grade Down Gem Powder. These powders of unknown use and efficacy appear to be of no use at all.]

It wasn’t hard to figure out what they were doing, with the colorful powders and destroyed Down Gems scattered among the cluttered experimental equipment.

The monster that had turned even the strong-willed Lee Jun-young into a complete wreck.

They were making drugs.

“You bastards.”

He had been told about it before he came here, but he couldn’t help but feel angry. Song Jong-chul’s duplicity was one thing, but the fact that they were using Down Gems, which were in short supply in the underground, for this purpose was unacceptable.

Angry, Kim Jin-woo gathered the broken Down Gem pieces and powder and pondered how to dispose of them.

“Who is it!”

At that moment, a group of men burst in with a crash.

“You’re here quickly.”

He had attacked so many Association branches, but reinforcements had never arrived this quickly.

“That means it’s an important place.”

Kim Jin-woo grinned as he glared at a few Dungeon Babies who looked to be of high level. Streams of blue light began to flow from his eyes.

“That’s the guy!”

He had been causing so much trouble lately that someone recognized him right away. But Kim Jin-woo didn’t care. They wouldn’t be able to see under the deeply shadowed hood anyway.

“Ugh!”

Kim Jin-woo moved. And a scream erupted. It took only a few minutes for the Association’s reinforcements to end up in the same situation as the men writhing on the floor.

Some of them were Level 8 Dungeon Babies, but even they couldn’t withstand Kim Jin-woo’s attack.

“Cough!”

One of the men who had fallen to the floor grabbed his neck and groaned. He was the first.

The men who had been groaning on the floor, clutching their broken limbs, coughed dryly one by one and grabbed their necks.

Kim Jin-woo, watching them carefully, realized that the Down Gem powder he had gathered to one side had scattered in all directions during the scuffle with the men.

“Ugh. Sa, save me.”

Someone crawled across the floor and grabbed his ankle. Even though one arm was broken and both legs were shattered, the man was desperate.

Apparently, the men were more afraid of being addicted to the monster they had created than of the pain of having their limbs broken.

It was their own fault.

Kim Jin-woo hardened his expression and took a step back. As he shifted his gaze along the man’s hand, which was falling weakly, he saw a hideous face that was turning black with despair.

It wasn’t just the man. Everyone who had been here from the beginning, and everyone who had come to help later, all had the same look, the same face.

They were more afraid of being addicted to Down Gem than of the pain of having their skin torn and their skulls cracked.

But that was only for a moment, and the eyes of those who had been struggling to hold their breath soon became dazed.

“Heehee…”

The men quickly began to giggle, their desperate struggles from just a moment ago rendered meaningless. The faces of the men, consumed by pleasure, were a gruesome sight to behold.

He had no interest in watching such a hideous spectacle.

He stared at them for a moment, then turned and left.

Not long after he disappeared, additional Association troops arrived, and they rushed out of the building as soon as they saw the situation inside.

The men trapped inside the building were rescued, or rather, collected, only after a long time had passed and Association personnel fully equipped with gas masks had arrived.

“These bastards are completely wasted.”

The Association personnel who saw the men being loaded into the car like luggage, still dazed and confused, were disgusted.

“Contact the higher-ups and report.”

“What should I say?”

“What do you mean, what should you say! Tell them exactly what happened! Tell them we didn’t get anything, and that the guys who were guarding it and the guys who went to help are all screwed up!”

“Ugh, I understand.”

A man who seemed to be of considerable rank was horrified, worried about Song Jong-chul, who was already furious.

“Ugh, I don’t want to go in.”

The man who had passed the report on to his subordinate cursed. He was clearly reluctant to face Song Jong-chul, who was furious.

But as it turned out, his ordeal was just beginning, as the same thing happened three more times.

“Hey, it’s Sung-jin, bro…”

「What the hell are you doing! Why are you calling me so late…?」

He had to report the losses suffered at the three businesses, and he was cursed out so badly each time that he was completely drained.

“I’ll get my hands on whoever did this!”

A man named Sung-jin, who had turned pale from the constant scolding, cursed the attacker whose face he didn’t even know.

***

Kim Jin-woo had destroyed four businesses in one day.

The amount of broken Down Gems and powder that came out of those destroyed businesses was so enormous that it would have been enough to upgrade an average labyrinth to an upper-tier labyrinth in one go.

He couldn’t even imagine how many people had been addicted.

At this point, it was almost a miracle that Down Gem-made drugs weren’t a social problem.

“If you control the amount well, it won’t be noticeable on the outside. You can live a normal life to some extent.”

Lee Jun-young said that it was rare for people to become completely ruined like her, and that more people than he thought were hiding their addiction.

She also said that even if the symptoms weren’t obvious, the withdrawal symptoms were all the same, and that the Association would be completely controlling them with Down Gems as an excuse.

Her prediction was closer to a conviction than a guess, and it sounded quite plausible to Kim Jin-woo.

“What are they plotting, really?”

He was talking about the Association’s atrocities with a serious face when he raised his hand to stop the conversation as his cell phone vibrated.

“Who is this?”

「A, are you Kim Jin-woo?」

Kim Jin-woo frowned as he listened to the terrified voice on the other end of the line.

“I asked who this is.”

「It’s Kim Jong-bin…」

The moment he heard the name Kim Jong-bin, he raised a finger to his lips and turned on the speakerphone.

「It’s not that, I just have something to tell you in person…」

After finishing the call, Kim Jin-woo frowned and fell into thought.

“It’s likely to be a trap.”

“There’s no reason for Kim Jong-bin to contact you at this point.”

Dominique and Lee Jun-young said with serious faces, stopping him. They suspected that Kim Jong-bin’s sudden contact was suspicious.

What they said was true. He had shaken up the Association, but it was just a matter of large property losses, and he hadn’t done anything that would make the executives feel threatened.

There was no reason for Kim Jong-bin to call in such a terrified voice as he did now.

“Maybe they think I’m the one who caused this incident.”

Although he had created an alibi by using Espetos, Song Jong-chul and the Association weren’t fools.

With the power to single-handedly destroy dozens of explorers, and the motive to turn against the Association, they would have finished investigating everyone on the list of suspects by now.

And they would have realized.

That among those who existed in Korea, there was no one strong enough to destroy dozens of Dungeon Babies single-handedly without revealing their identity.

Even Kim Jin-woo, the highest level in the country, couldn’t have done such a thing with just the power of a pure Dungeon Baby.

But Song Jong-chul and the Association had never directly seen the true power of a Dungeon Baby born on the 12th floor.

All they could be sure of was that there was no one else besides Kim Jin-woo who could have done it, and the 12-level Dungeon Baby, with everything hidden in a veil, would have been back on the list of suspects in a delusion and forced leap.

“It’s a forced fit, but it’s possible.”

Lee Jun-young also agreed with his opinion after thinking about it.

“I, too, could only imagine what kind of monster a 12-level Dungeon Baby would be before I met you in person.”

She said that she had imagined that a Dungeon Baby born in the Deep Layers would have at least one extraordinary ability.

“So, what was it like when you saw it in person?”

Lee Jun-young answered with a serious face to Kim Jin-woo’s playful question.

“It was exactly as I imagined, no, it was more of a monster than I imagined.”

She said that when he stayed behind to deal with the Hell Spiders that had crawled up to the Upper Layers alone, she really thought he was prepared to die and sacrifice himself, and she expressed a somewhat unfair feeling.

“Yeah, imagination. Even if they set a trap, they don’t know anything about me.”

A playful look filled his face. But his mischievous expression had a somewhat brutal edge to it.

“If they set a trap…”

Blue flashes flickered behind his dark eyes.

“I’ll just smash it with a power they never imagined.”

His face, which had already made a decision, showed no hesitation, despite the brief moment of contemplation.