D-Genesis: Three Years after the Dungeons Appeared Volume 7 (eBook)

Kono tsuranori (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024
250 Seiten
J-Novel Club (Verlag)
978-1-7183-5152-3 (ISBN)

Infos

What's mine is yours, and what's yours is...miner? Keigo and Miyoshi rack their brains over what to make of the stunning revelations they've received about the dungeons' origins, but before they have everything ironed out, a new wrinkle appears: someone else has obtained a Mining orb, and there may not be enough time to sanction its use before all mineral drops in Yoyogi Dungeon are set to useless ores! Gathering Mishiro and gemology maniac Komugi, D-Powers dive into the dungeon in a race against the clock. They're aided by a second batch of fluffy familiars. Meanwhile, another one of D-Powers' experiments bears...fruit?

Textauszug

Chapter 9: Miner

January 20, 2019 (Sunday)

Sakuragicho, Yokohama

“Looking at the aftermath, even I’d believe nothing happened.” Miyoshi pushed open the door to Shinshinan, our first-floor laboratory, while holding an ion chamber survey meter.

The room was exactly as we’d left it—slightly untidy from the commotion with our cleaner and slime experiments.

Exactly as we’d left it...save for the absence of one of those cleaners in the acrylic tank. Apparently it had already been gone by the time Naruse came around to check last night, peeking in from the front door.

“It really did fly the coop,” Miyoshi confirmed.

“Doesn’t seem like it’s been hiding out multiplying. What’s the reading on the meter?”

“Nada.”

Miyoshi’s survey meter was sensitive enough to pick up radiation levels as low as one microsievert per hour. As long as we weren’t on an international flight basking in cosmic radiation, it would sit at zero at basically all times. We only had to watch out if the meter started fluctuating.

“You’d never guess a nuclear explosion just happened two floors below,” she added.

“Yeah,” I replied. “But still, better play it safe until we know what’s going on.”

We were outside the dungeon, and even within one, each floor was thought to be its own separate subspace. Radio waves and electronic signals couldn’t cross them, so radiation probably couldn’t either. That said, even though we’d heard that the immediate postincident investigation hadn’t shown anything abnormal, we’d still wanted to check it out ourselves.

“Naruse did say it was all okay...” Miyoshi commented.

“Yeah, but I don’t want to die on someone else’s safety report. Trust, but verify.”

“You sure do like making work for yourself,” Miyoshi responded with a grin, sitting down at the PC she’d set up to record the cleaner. “Looks like this baby’s been running the whole time. We can play it back and try to figure out what happened to Wiggly.”

“Running the whole time?” I responded. “It’s been more than a full day. Can it store all that footage?”

“Modern HDDs can hold more than ten terabytes.”

If the speed ran at four Mbps, that would be one megabyte every two seconds. Which would be 1.8 gigabytes per hour, and only 90 gigabytes after fifty whole hours. You could run eight separate feeds and still not reach one terabyte in two days.

“Okay,” I responded. “The blast would have been a little before 6:15. Anything?”

“Let’s see...” Miyoshi called up the 6:15 time stamp, then began scrubbing backward. Suddenly, she stopped. “Kei...”

On exactly the sixteenth frame after 6:13:57, rather than dispersing into a cloud of black light like we’d expected, the cleaner simply vanished. There one moment, gone the next.

“It looks like a jump cut,” Miyoshi observed. She moved back and forth between the fifteenth and sixteenth frames. The cleaner disappeared and returned over and over again—gone without a trace. “I wonder if this is what happened to all the cleaners on the second floor.”

“Seems likely,” I responded.

“The world is full of mysteries!” she said, beaming.

“As if the dungeons alone weren’t mystery enough.”

The more mysteries we—no, humanity—encountered, the more our sense of the mysterious itself dulled.

“Speaking of mysteries,” I commented, “the bomb was supposed to go off at a quarter past. It detonated more than a full minute early. Strangely haphazard for a sensitive military operation.”

“You’re not suggesting someone was trying to eliminate the JSDF’s Dungeon Attack Group and make it look like an accident, are you?”

“N-No. I’m not saying that...”

The person who had set up the bomb had claimed to be a Falcon employee. But even if he were some sort of American government operative, there would be no reason to want to take out Team I.

“Well either way.” Miyoshi leaned back. “At least we can tick off one box. We know what happened to the cleaner.”

That truly was a relief. At least now we didn’t have to worry about a rogue cleaner escaping from our laboratory and causing Yokohama Part 2.

“Now, speaking of mysteries...” Miyoshi cast her eyes toward the staircase to the second floor.

“You’re not seriously thinking about...”

Going all the way down the staircase would take you directly to Yokohama Dungeon’s eighth floor—equivalent to the 160th in an ordinary dungeon.

If you could directly access the eighth floor from the stairs, and clear both it and the ninth floor beyond it, you might be able to get to whatever lay on the other side. It might be the shortest route to the end of a dungeon in the world.

“The monsters on the first and second floor are said to be about eight times as strong as the equivalents in Yoyogi. If it’s a linear relationship, the eighth floor and ninth floors would be comparable to Yoyogi’s sixty-fourth and seventy-second,” Miyoshi observed.

“But they’re bosses. Don’t expect linearity. Plus we don’t really know if that scale holds up even on the early floors.”

“C’mon, Kei. Aren’t you curious?”

“You know all the doors in the stairwell open to the outside, right?”

If something burst out, that would be one crucial second less to react than if the doors opened inward. Of course it also meant we could block them with simple doorstops, but who knew if those would hold?

“Don’t you think it’s weird?” Miyoshi asked.

“Think what’s weird?”

“As easy as it is to wander straight down to the eighth floor of Yokohama, they haven’t designated it an off-limits area like on the eighteenth floor of Yoyogi.”

“Personal responsibility? No, in that case, they wouldn’t mark the Batian Peak off-limits either...” I racked my brain. Yokohama was already off-limits to all those but B-Rank explorers and above, but that was just due to the skill thought necessary to tackle the second-floor boss monsters. It wasn’t a way of deterring people from heading down to the lower floors.

“All you have to do is walk down the stairs,” Miyoshi emphasized. “You really think no one’s tried it?”

The JSDF had famously brought in equipment including armored vehicles and been turned back at the third floor. It seemed hard to believe they wouldn’t have tried the inner staircase at that time. The same went for other curious explorers. All you had to do to get a peek at the lower floors was walk down the stairs. There was no way someone hadn’t tried.

Tenko, for example, seemed like he would have rushed straight down.

“So does that mean people have gone down the staircase before, but no one’s come back up?” I asked fearfully.

No, wait. You had to enter the dungeon through a JDA checkpoint. It was basically impossible to go in and out undetected. We were the only ones who could do that now, since we’d purchased the floor and the JDA reception had moved. If someone had entered and never returned, the JDA would know.

Which meant...

“Hold on. It’s safe to go up and down the stairs? Then why don’t we have info on the lower floors?”

Maybe there was just nothing to see. But even that much wasn’t recorded anywhere!

“I’m going to go find out,” Miyoshi proclaimed. “Come on, it’ll be an adventure!”

“I prefer adventuring where I’m safe.”

A true explorer knew his limits.

“Don’t be like that,” Miyoshi pleaded. “What if we’re standing on the brink of some massive dungeon secret with no effort at all? Why, we could be the ones to lead the world into a bold, new era—”

“Hoooold on. Don’t get ahead of yourself. Save the big moves for the heroes. This is the territory of frontline explorers—people like Simon.”

“Not to wish ill on him, but who’s the world going to turn to if Simon bites it?”

“Why would they turn to me?!”

“Obviously because you’ll run away before there’s ever a risk of biting it! Hope springs eternal so long as the hero lives.”

No one was better at running away than her former office mentor, she added with a smug look. Speaking strictly in terms of AGI, I couldn’t argue, but still...

“Maybe,” I admitted, “but I’ll say it again—I’m no hero.”

Even if we were just centimeters from our goal, if the going got rough, I’d get going. Nothing said “goner” like “just a little farther...” I had a healthy fear of falling prey to ironic foreshadowing tropes.

“Come on,” Miyoshi pleaded. “Just a peek.”

“You’re talking about finding something important, but the most important thing to me is my life, and it’s right here. That said...” If Miyoshi’s curiosity got the better of her and she went down alone, I’d never forgive myself if anything happened. Maybe it actually would be better to tag along. “Okay. But it’s just a walk down the stairs. We’re not trying to get in any fights. Okay? Promise?”

“You don’t need to hide your true yearning for...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 24.10.2024
• Reihe/Serie: D-Genesis: Three Years after the Dungeons Appeared
• Illustrationen: Kono tsuranori
• Übersetzer: Kono tsuranori
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Fantasy / Science Fiction ► Fantasy
• Schlagworte: adult protagonists • Dungeons • Light Novel • Military • Science Fiction • Slice of Life
• ISBN-10: 1-7183-5152-6 / 1718351526
• ISBN-13: 978-1-7183-5152-3 / 9781718351523