Volume 2 Chapter 6 Dungeon Floor ①
Edited by: Kanaa-senpai
A hallway stretched out beyond the door.
At first glance, it looked like an ordinary corridor, but no normal school would ever have one this wide or this tall. It was about the same size as the dungeon inside Risa-san’s house, which meant this passage was probably the base design for the whole labyrinth.
Unlike the dungeon at Risa-san’s place, where the path ran straight ahead and the only goal was to defeat the apparitions waiting along the way, this simulated dungeon was built for exploration. The passages were meant to split, twist, and confuse anyone walking through them.
Here, the path kept branching, turning the place into a true maze. We would have to get past traps and other gimmicks, clear out apparitions, and slowly work our way toward the deepest floor.
Convenient game features like auto-mapping did not exist here. To be more exact, auto-mapping items did exist in this world, but we could not use them yet. They were rare, impossible to mass-produce, and absurdly expensive. Even if I had one right now, using it in a simulated dungeon would feel like a waste, so we had no choice but to rely on memory as we moved forward.
If things got bad, we could use a return slip to warp back to the entrance. Unlike the wildly expensive escape balls, return slips could be bought for a fairly low price. The problem was that each party could only bring one set per dungeon attempt, and because of that limit, it was rare1 for anyone to explore several floors in a single delve.
Yurina-san and Risa-san advanced down the hallway.
The two of them had a long history of dungeon diving. They had already built up plenty of success in low-threat dungeons, the kind with no traps and nothing but bottom-tier apparitions.
Before we entered this simulated dungeon, I had planned to teach them the real dangers of normal dungeons in detail. If they went in with careless ideas, that would be a problem. Still, their past success was not a bad thing. Confidence backed by real skill mattered, and unless something went terribly wrong, the two of them should be able to handle combat on the first floor of a simulated dungeon without much trouble. We had already made our plan before coming in, and the basic policy was to let them take the lead in battle.
After we walked for a short while, a door appeared along the corridor.
It was a sliding door, one size smaller than the door we had used to move from the entrance room into the hallway. It looked exactly like a classroom door at school, except it had been scaled up to twice its usual height and width.
”What’s the play?” Risa-san asked, breaking the silence as she peered at the entrance.
”We go in,” I answered at once.
Dungeons were made of corridors and rooms. Everyone knew that the stairs leading to the next floor were almost always hidden inside rooms you had to pass through.
”I’ll take point,” Yurina-san said, her tone businesslike as she tightened her grip on her weapon.
”Be careful…” Risa-san murmured while checking her firearms.
Yurina-san and Risa-san cautiously threw the door open.
Apparitions existed inside dungeons to kill any sorcery-users who entered. They usually appeared in one of two ways: some patrolled the paths, while others stayed shut inside rooms. As a rule, stepping into a new room meant meeting an apparition. On top of that, the room-bound type only appeared after every member of the party had entered.
Following textbook protocol, we stepped inside and spread out so we could see the whole room. Dark shadows surged up from the center of the floor, then shifted and hardened into two wood golems.
(I’ve seen these before in Risa-san’s dungeon!)
Risa-san and Yurina-san each took one target. Risa-san fired in a hard burst, shattering her golem’s legs before it could close in, and when it crashed down, she poured more shots into it. Meanwhile, Yurina-san rushed her own target and sliced off its limbs with her blade. Just like Risa-san, she dropped the enemy to the floor before driving her sword straight through its head.
They already knew the head was the weak point, so both of them won easily and without danger. The apparitions dissolved into plumes of smoke and vanished.
”Whew…” Risa-san sighed as she lowered her gun.
”Looks like we can manage this,” Yurina-san said, smoothly sheathing her blade.
Chifumi-san and I had only stood back and watched, ready to provide support at any moment. The two who fought competition-level threats every day did not seem shaken at all. I supposed the first battle was bound to be simple.
We left through another door on the far side of the room and found the corridor splitting left and right. Trusting my gut, I led the way down the left passage. After a short walk, we reached another door, which meant another room.
(Ah, so that is how this dungeon is laid out.)
Risa-san glanced back at me, asking for confirmation with her eyes, and I nodded. Just like before, she and Yurina-san opened the door and entered first.
We passed through three more rooms after that. Every enemy that appeared was a wood golem. At most, three spawned at once, and the other three members of the party handled them without my help. At this rate, we might actually reach the second floor before the day was over, and I felt myself relax a little.
As it turned out, Risa-san and Yurina-san were not the only ones being lulled into a false sense of safety by the dungeon training. I was guilty of it too, and the very next encounter forced us to realize that.
After we left the fourth room and continued down the hallway, a strange sound caught our attention. Something was just beyond a sharp ninety-degree bend in the corridor. We focused on the corner, and an anatomical model stepped out from around it.
It looked exactly like the ones found in elementary school science labs. Standing about one and a half meters tall, it had a creepy plastic gloss over its fake body. It walked toward us with a smooth, natural gait, and every step made a sharp clattering sound.
”Creepy,” Risa-san muttered, wrinkling her nose in disgust.
I could not agree more. It was deeply unsettling. I knew it was a doll, and I knew it was an apparition. If it had moved with the stiff, fake motions of the wood golems, it would not have been so bad. The worst part was that it walked like a tired person, while the fake organs in its open belly rattled with each step. Its face stayed completely blank, and that lifeless stare made the whole thing even worse.
(Was this what they called the uncanny valley?)
As we stood our ground, the model stopped about fifteen meters away. The moment a question formed in my mind, it burst into motion.
It sprinted straight toward Risa-san. Seeing that thing run like a professional track athlete was absolutely sickening.
”Eliminate it!” I shouted, warning the front line.
Yurina-san immediately moved to support Risa-san, and Risa-san fired her magic pistol. She scattered her shots in a suppressing volley to stop its advance, but the thing dodged them.
With the earlier wood golems, a few shots to the legs had been enough to cripple their movement. Risa-san was clearly trying to do the same here, but the model slipped past the bullets with an incredibly smooth sidestep. Its speed was on a completely different level from the golems.
After closing the distance, the model lunged low and threw a punch straight at Risa-san. Yurina-san intercepted it from the side, swinging her sword into the incoming fist.
”Ghh…!” Yurina-san groaned softly under the force of the impact.
She deflected the first strike, but the model did not stop. It pressed forward with a storm of punches, forcing Yurina-san into close combat. Since she had a blade, she should have had the clear advantage, but the model’s body was so dense that even her sword, strengthened by severing sorcery, could not cut through it. That thing was a weapon in human form.
If it landed a clean hit on Yurina-san, it looked strong enough to break her bones. To be safe, I narrowed the effective range of my group skill to Yurina-san and Risa-san alone, then raised the reinforcement multiplier as high as I could manage. I also made sure I was ready to step in at the slightest opening.
Risa-san pulled back to create space and quickly switched weapons. She swapped the submachine-gun-style firearm for the shotgun-style magic pistol mounted on her right thigh.
”Yurina-san!” Risa-san yelled.
At Risa-san’s shout, Yurina-san poured all her strength into a huge upward slash. She knocked the model’s arms aside, clearing Risa-san’s line of fire as she slipped out of the way. The model lost its balance, and a blast from Risa-san’s magic pistol slammed squarely into its torso.
Its synthetic soles scraped harshly against the floor as it slid back nearly a meter without losing its stance. The attack had definitely hurt it, but the entity was not destroyed, nor was it blown away. Just a few moments earlier, that same weapon had blasted a golem into kindling at close range. Even after allowing for the slightly greater distance, the fact that this thing endured a direct hit meant it was far tougher and harder than the golems, on top of being much faster.
”Tch!” Risa-san clicked her tongue and fired several shots in quick succession.
Bang! Bang! Bang! She advanced while firing a three-round burst, and the heavy impacts forced the model back. This focused barrage finally left clear damage. Deep cracks spread across its entire frame, with the worst damage around its abdomen, where the fake organs were stored. Parts of the casing split open, and several plastic organs spilled onto the floor.
Risa-san fired two more shots straight into the broken cavity, but then her gunfire stopped.
”Reloading!” Risa-san called out as she took a quick step back.
As Risa-san announced her empty magazine and retreated, Yurina-san stepped in to cover her, closing on the model to buy time while Risa-san chambered more mana. At that exact moment, the model’s face changed. Its once-blank features twisted, its eyes bulging wide as its mouth stretched into a hideous, mocking grin.
”Chifumi-san, shield!” I barked.
Right after my command, the discarded organs on the floor detonated. Thick white smoke burst outward with a deafening explosion, and just as Yurina-san vanished inside the cloud, the sharp ring of a heavy impact echoed through the corridor.
I conjured a gust of sorcery-driven wind to blow the smoke away. A wall of solid ice had appeared in front of Yurina-san, and the model’s fist was buried deep inside it. It had aimed straight for her head. Without Chifumi-san’s quick defense, that strike could have killed her.
Yurina-san hurried backward while the model began hammering at the ice wall like a rabid berserker. Whenever cracks spread through the barrier, Chifumi-san repaired them at once with more mana. In contrast, the model’s fists began to split apart under its own attacks.
Then I noticed frost creeping over its hands. The barrier Chifumi-san had used was a defensive spell that punished attackers by dealing severe cold damage on contact.
With a loud snap, the model’s right arm shattered. Its left arm broke immediately after, yet it still did not stop moving. Like a mindless zealot, the model threw its head back and tore its mouth wide open.
My instincts screamed that it was preparing some kind of devastating attack. There was no reason to play along with its script.
”Chifumi-san, drop the wall on my mark,” I ordered.
”Gotcha~” Chifumi-san replied in a smooth sing-song voice, readying herself to release the spell.
I gathered shock sorcery in my right hand. To make sure I could exorcise it in one strike, I drew on the power of one of my subjugated apparitions. Then I raised my hand like a handgun and compressed the shock sorcery into a dense sphere instead of forming a normal magic bullet. My target was that wide-open mouth.
Before the model could unleash its technique, my sorcery shot through the brief gap Chifumi-san opened in her barrier. It detonated inside the model’s throat, blowing its entire upper torso into scattered fragments.
Clatter! The remaining waist and legs collapsed toward the floor, or so I thought. Instead, the lower half kept charging forward on pure momentum. Risa-san, who had finished reloading, fired a rapid blast from her shotgun. The model’s lower body blew apart completely and crumbled into dust.
The scattered fragments dissolved into black mist, confirming that the apparition had been exorcised.
When the battle ended, we stayed where we were and checked our condition.
”Yurina-san, Risa-san, are either of you hurt?” I asked, keeping my eyes sharp for injuries.
”I am perfectly unharmed,” Yurina-san reported as she adjusted her uniform.
”Same here. No issues,” Risa-san added, breathing out heavily.
Their answers finally let me sigh in relief. Even so, the fight had been a shock.
”A patrol-type apparition was that strong?” Risa-san said quickly, almost to herself, as she reholstered her weapon. “The level gap between it and the room spawns is insane. And this is only the first floor! Are you telling me the depths are crawling with things even stronger than that?”
Her reaction matched my own almost perfectly.
”Dealing with just one was highly troublesome,” Yurina-san said, a faint tremor passing through her shoulders as she stared at the empty space. “If we were swarmed by a pack of apparitions at that caliber…”
If Chifumi-san had not covered her, Yurina-san might have lost her head. It seemed the harsh reality of a dungeon’s lethality had finally hit both of them.
”That was quite the formidable foe~” Chifumi-san said in her usual airy tone, though her eyes were serious as she looked at me. She had clearly noticed it too.
I turned to the group and told them the truth. “That was almost certainly a unique variant.”
”A unique variant… You mean those rare, high-threat entities that sometimes appear among normal apparitions?” Risa-san asked, leaning against the wall.
Compared to normal spawns on the same floor, unique variants had one trait pushed far beyond ordinary limits. In general, that made them overwhelmingly dangerous. Because their strengths were pushed so far past normal, these things were said to cause half of all sorcery-user deaths.
During the instructor’s briefing, we had been told that unique variants would also be copied inside this simulated dungeon. I simply had not expected us to draw the short straw and run into one during our very first patrol encounter.
Risa-san and Yurina-san both looked discouraged, so I offered what reassurance I could.
”The difficulty of a simulated dungeon is automatically adjusted to a level the party can realistically clear. More precisely, the baseline is set a little below the party’s average combat rating.”
”Right,” Risa-san said with a slow nod.
”Understood,” Yurina-san echoed.
”The apparitions that appeared in the rooms are the intended difficulty for this floor,” I continued. “That model’s strength was clearly outside the norm. Remember what the instructor said? Unique variants are adjusted to a strength level where the party leader can defeat them one-on-one.”
”Yeah…” Risa-san murmured.
”If it is balanced around Minoru being able to win alone, then that means the matchup is still too much for Risa-san and Yurina-san to handle by yourselves. Unique variants do not spawn in groups. If another one shows up, Chifumi-san or I will handle it, so there will not be an issue.”
My words made their expressions fall slightly.
”So the gap in power between us and you two is really that big… Is our training still not enough?” Risa-san muttered, her brow furrowing.
”It’s not that your training is lacking. Your shots were dealing real damage.”
”…Though it cost me a huge amount of mana,” Risa-san countered as she checked her reserves.
Risa-san had a naturally smaller mana pool, so letting one fight against a single enemy drain that much energy would badly hurt her stamina in later battles. If we wanted to keep exploring for a long time, it was clearly better for me to handle enemies like that.
”Even so, it was remarkably resilient,” Yurina-san said, a sharp, almost combative light entering her eyes. “If we encounter another, I find myself wanting to test my limits against it in a true one-on-one. I believe it would serve as excellent cultivation.”
She spoke with the dead-serious look of a total battle maniac. If she burned through all her reserves in one fight, the rest of us would have to deal with the problems afterward. I could allow it if we were right about to end the delve and head home, but things rarely lined up that neatly.
As I wondered how to talk her down, I looked more closely and realized Yurina-san’s mana depletion was not nearly as bad as Risa-san’s. Unlike Risa-san, who had kept up a rapid-fire barrage, Yurina-san relied on severing sorcery and physical reinforcement, which consumed mana in a very different way.
If her skill actually matched that enthusiasm, especially if her severing sorcery reached the point where she could cleanly cut through a model that dense, she would become an incredible asset. Right now, though, she could barely scratch it on her own, so I could not approve her request in good conscience.
Seen from another angle, this encounter made it very clear how we needed to plan Yurina-san’s future growth.
”Unique variants do not just spawn back-to-back. The rest of this floor should be safe, so let’s focus on finding the stairs to the next level.”
”Roger that~” Chifumi-san chimed in as she stepped back into formation.
With that, we resumed our exploration.
Two hours after we began the delve, our scheduled alarm rang. It was time to leave the dungeon for now.
By then, we had cleared more than ten rooms and encountered patrolling apparitions four times in the corridors. Those patrols turned out to be floating books and chemical flasks, which Risa-san and Yurina-san handled completely on their own. I was deeply relieved that the anatomical model really had been a lone unique variant. If those things had been wandering around as common trash mobs, fully clearing this dungeon would have been a massive headache.
After we exorcised the apparitions in the current room, I looked around. Aside from the door we had used to enter, there were no other exits. It was a dead end, which made the timing perfect for withdrawal.
”Time’s up. We’re using the slips to head back. Everyone, gather close to me.”
”Oka~y,” Chifumi-san replied, gliding over at once.
I channeled mana into the slip, and the scenery around us warped and twisted violently before snapping back to normal a few seconds later. In front of us stood the rippling black wall that marked the dungeon’s exit.
Three people stood beside me. After confirming that everyone had returned safely, we stepped through the threshold and out of the dungeon.
—
Summary:
Moving deeper into the simulated labyrinth, Minoru’s team easily coordinates their efforts to eradicate wood golem formations inside early test chambers. An unexpected threat emerges along a sharp corridor turn in the shape of an agile anatomical science model unique variant. The lethal encounter forces the vanguard to deplete substantial reserves before Minoru coordinates a multi-layered destructive counterattack, exposing an abrupt performance disparity that leaves the party’s future tactical synergy unresolved.
—
Trivia:
Unique variants account for nearly fifty percent of all recorded fatalities among active sorcery-users in standard dungeons.
A strict limitation prevents groups from bringing more than one functional set of return slips into a dungeon per single attempt.
The physical size parameters of the simulated training layout identically mirror the exact baseline corridor width observed at Risa’s residential dungeon facility.
Chifumi’s defensive technique applies immediate retaliatory freezing frost effects straight to any striking appendage that makes direct kinetic contact with her conjured barriers.
—
Translation Notes:
Notes:
• Risa – A sharp-tongued, long-haired gyaru student and skilled dungeon combatant wielding dual magic pistols. Known for her Western cooking and provocative banter, she has transitioned from a prideful, hostile fighter into a submissively devoted follower of Minoru. She balances common-sense pragmatism with enthusiastic participation in brainwashing roleplay, acting out resistance to her master.
• Yurina – A beautiful, black-haired swordswoman and disciplined vanguard in Minoru’s group. A skilled user of severing sorcery, she balances a proud, serious combat demeanor with a timid, easily embarrassed nature. Though devoted to Minoru and supported by Chifumi and Risa, she struggles internally with her forced submissive role, constantly battling emotional turmoil beneath her stubborn facade.
• Yuri – A cheerful and energetic first-year student at Higashi High who is a classmate of Shibuya and an acquaintance of Kibe Yurina from their middle school days. A girl known for being aggressive toward Hayato and displaying overt favoritism.
• Chifumi – Minoru’s 15-year-old childhood friend and classmate is a scrawny, long-haired frost/water mage and devoted Majo. Energetic and cat-like, this Takino family member serves as Minoru’s primary Witch and secretary. She balances playful charm and fierce battlefield support with administrative duties, while acting as an affectionate, proactive participant in his harem and a skilled, sharp-tongued mediator.
• Minoru – Reincarnated from a powerful lineage, this stoic, shock-wielding Majin navigates a world of reversed beauty standards as a calculated high schooler and dungeon administrator. As leader of his exploration squad, he maintains a pragmatic, dominant approach to safety and development, exercising rigid control over his subordinates—including trainee Yurina—through strategic mastery contracts and command-based criteria.
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Edited by Kanaa-senpai.
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