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Chapter 204: (3/29): The Original Expedition

What was Lavitte doing here? No, that was a stupid question. Still, why was he and the rest of his party lying there in the back of the cave, unconscious? Worse, no one seemed to be tending to him and a large group of the newly-appeared fifty hunters, which are probably the parties that Lavitte left with.

There were only fifty left, which meant that out of the hundred total missing hunters mentioned in the report, sixty were gone—a casualty rate of over fifty percent, and that wasn’t even counting the hunters that were unconscious. Counting those, the casualty rate was closer to hundred percent.

Troubled by the implications, Camilla grabbed a passing hunter that was currently acting as a healer and began questioning him. “Can you explain the situation here? Who are all these people?”

The hunter looked annoyed at being interrupted during his work, but he had just watched Camilla speak on equal terms with Ismelda and Cadaelia, so he kept his complaints to himself and answered, albeit a bit impatiently. “Our mission this time was to locate and rescue the hunters that disappeared, remember? Well, these people are it.”

He sounded like he was talking to an idiot. Camilla couldn’t deny that fact, considering that she really did forget. After learning about the true goal for her presence here via Ismelda, which was to obtain the feather-shaped stone that Victoria was collecting, the rescue mission had become secondary in importance. Initially she wanted to keep an eye out for Lavitte, but in the excitement that followed shortly after entering the dungeon, she forgot.

“Are you done?” the hunter asked, looking anxious to get back to what he was doing.

Camilla wasn’t, so she shook her head and continued. “How did you find them? Where were they? What happened while I was gone with Kagriss?”

“I had no idea you were gone,” the hunter said. “I went the middle path and you must’ve gone in one of the others on the side, so I don’t know what happened to you. However…” He paused to recollect, squinting up at the ceiling. “However… We ended up fighting through a series of stone golems. It wasn’t worth the fighting and we barely got anything out of it. There were a bunch of awakened plants but their parts got ruined in the fighting. The parts we did manage to harvest aren’t enough to go around.” He sighed, moaning in regret. “Those vines…”

“And then?” Camilla prodded.

“I was getting there!” the hunter snapped before his courage faded under Kagriss’s glare. “That took about a few hours in total, and then we got past another gate, and the three paths intersected. We were the second fastest, with Lady Ismelda’s group coming out before us and setting up camp at the intersection. She insisted on waiting for Beitra’s group before we continued…”

Camilla didn’t think the person that Ismelda was waiting for was Beitra. It was likely Camilla, and more accurately, the feather stone. No wonder Ismelda had been so angry when Beitra came out without her and Kagriss, even almost getting into a fight over it. It was almost touching…

“It was suuuch a long wait. Beitra looked kind of annoyed when he came out, and out of nowhere Ismelda started arguing with him…”

And there it was.

“… Cadaelia had to break it up. I should’ve sat closer. You don’t get that kind of gossip everyday.” The hunter sighed.

As the hunter began to idly chat about himself and went into details about how the tension was so thick that he almost suffocated, Camilla’s patient wore thin. “Can you please get to the point? What happened afterwards? How did you all find all these unconscious hunters?” she growled. She let a tiny bit of her mana. Although it was small, the mana was undiluted and contained a hint of the power she had been hiding.

The hunter froze and shook, his legs almost collapsing. “Y-you’re…”

Seeing how scared the hunter was, like he was about to wet himself, Camilla felt a bit guilty. He’d just wanted to share his experiences, and she started the conversation after all. She sighed. “Sorry. Just tell me what I want to know and I’ll leave you alone. Summarize how you saw Lavitte—err, the hunters we came to find. Please?”

Her voice was gentle enough that the hunter calmed down a bit, although his eyes were still as wide as they could get. The shock of meeting something so fundamentally different and not noticing until it was too late wasn’t something that could be gotten over with just a word or two. Still trembling, the hunter nodded, almost stumbling over his words as he spoke. “We met the missing hunters after we continued down the tunnels beyond the intersection. There were a few forks, but ultimately they all led to the same location. Also, we kept running into stone knights coming from behind us despite us checking that there were no enemies in the places we passed. If we leave behind a party to check, sometimes the stone knights would appear between us, cutting the party we left behind off from the main force…”

“Sounds like they appeared out of thin air,” she said.

The hunter nodded in agreement.

“Just like us?” Camilla looked at Kagriss, who nodded. They were both thinking the same thing; the stone knights were probably teleported in from other tunnels hidden in the dungeon; probably from disconnected locations where they were made. That was the only explanation that Camilla could come up with, and it was a pretty convincing theory at that.

The hunter hesitated at her question, and then reluctantly nodded as if he was afraid that his answer might somehow offend her. Camilla had no idea what he was so afraid of. He was surrounded by allies on all sides; even if Camilla wanted to kill him, taking on some hundred hunters at the same time was not her idea of a good idea.

“Continue, please.”

“Y-yes… at the end of the tunnels, with our full force, we found this place. There were already hunters here—the missing hunters. They had been camping here, and according to them, it’s been less than a week since they got here!”

“Less than a week? That’s not possible!” Camilla said, looking shocked. However, although the tidbit had been information she did not expect, she was not surprised. This was probably how Cadaelia felt earlier when Camilla told her that only a few hours had passed for her and Kagriss, yet Cadaelia personally experienced the passage of a day.

With this much evidence, it was undeniable that time flows differently in different parts of the dungeon. The so-called false world that she and Kagriss had been trapped in flowed the slowest, that they know of, while most of the dungeon itself flowed faster than the false world yet was slower than the outside.

If time indeed flowed differently, then that explained why the hunters on the original investigation mission were gone for so long, yet were still alive. At the same time, there were some unpleasant implications, like how much time had passed for the outside while they had been playing in the false world and the dungeon?

Camilla instantly regretted her actions. Even though she told herself that her playing doubled as training, she couldn’t help but feel let down by her past self.

“Milla, it’s okay. You didn’t know.” Kagriss put her hand on Camilla’s slumped shoulders, trying to cheer her up.

“…Okay… I know now.” The past could not be changed no matter what. Fueled by a sudden desire to get back out and see how much time they had spent, Camilla felt a fighting spirit rise up within her. To satisfy it, she had to join the battle.

“Anything else?” Camilla asked, glancing at the unconscious Lavitte and the rest of his party—Eva, the two elves, the vampire, and the orc. “How was the situation at the time?”

“Not too bad. Apparently the stone golems that had been endlessly crashing against the hunters’ defense suddenly stopped coming, but by then, out of the hundred or so hunters that came to investigate, only fifty or so survived. All of those that died in battle had their bodies dragged away by the stone golems, while the wounded had to bite their lips and fight on, holding the line so that their truly helpless comrades in the back would not be sacrificed. The break had been welcome.

Only when Ismelda came to the city did the hunters realize they had not been abandoned, and that golems had not disappeared. They simply shifted their focus with Ismelda’s arrival.

“So in other words, we’re trapped here?” Camilla asked, her expression turning sour. “Why didn’t they try getting out?”

“They couldn’t. Not enough manpower to break through the waves of stone golems that kept on coming. Apparently it started easily enough when the golems came one by one, but a few of them still got picked off from carelessness. However, by the time they realized that the number of golems were increasing, it was too late to turn back, so they retreated until they made a camp here and fortified the position.” The hunter waved around the cavern where the two-hundred-odd hunters were currently fighting off yet another half-dozen of stone knights.

As Camilla looked around, she could almost imagine the fifty survivors from the first expedition, tired and covered with wounds, stagger their way here and make their last stand, not knowing when their hell was ever going to end. Archers like Lavitte and Calaen would eventually have to give up their bows as they ran out of arrows, and fight hand to hand or stay in the back to look after the wounded.

It must have been hard. Unfortunately, Lavitte and the rest of his party fainted from exhaustion some time before reinforcements finally arrived.

“When we found them, there were only around ten people still up, fifteen wounded and resting, and the rest in some kind of strange coma that we can’t wake them from.”

“Coma?”

The hunter jumped at her sharp, questioning tone. “I-I’m not the person to ask! I don’t know about things like this. Just normal wounds dressing…” His voice grew quieter until it faded entirely.

Camilla realized that she wasn’t going to get any more information out of him, so she nodded toward her and waved him off, not bothering to talk to him anymore. If she said another word, he might’ve fainted right there and then.

Although a few of the hunters knew that she was an undead, that information hasn’t spread yet. However, it soon will, and the whole camp will know her secret.

She wasn’t too worried though—a good thing about being in vampire lands was that undead weren’t completely despised, because they were considered beings like stone elementals, only of a much grimmer nature and rarer.

There weren’t any of the “kill on sight” orders like the ones in the human territories.

However, even if one trouble will not manifest, there were already several that had already appeared and will need to be taken care of. For one, there was the strange “coma” that Lavitte and his party had fallen into. Camilla had no idea where to start on it, and she had her doubts that she’d be able to figure anything out even if she tried. Fortunately…

“Kagriss, Kagriss, what do you think?”

Whenever she didn’t know something, there was a pretty good chance that Kagriss knew. Camilla turned to look for Kagriss, who should’ve been standing right behind her, only to find no trace of the lord-class lich.

Hehe…lord-class lich… Camilla smiled at the thought and couldn’t resist feeling proud for Kagriss. That Kagriss finally evolved meant just as much to her as her own evolution…

Oh, she was getting distracted. Where was Kagriss?

Camilla turned in a circle and found her lover kneeling by a vampire’s side with her hand pressed to the vampire’s forehead. The vampire was Eva, a member of Lavitte’s party and Lavitte’s significant other. Camilla remembered that Kagriss had a decent relationship with her and was quite sad when Eva didn’t return.

While it was good that Kagriss managed to see Eva again, it was unfortunate that it had to happen in such circumstances.

Since Kagriss looked so absorbed in whatever she was doing, Camilla made her way over to next to Kagriss, stepping over the unconscious hunters laid out on the ground like uncovered versions of plague victims. “How is she?” Camilla asked, lowering her voice when she noted the slightly pinched brows that Kagriss had, a look of worry.

Kagriss ran a hand through her hair as if frustrated. “I don’t know. It’s very irritating.”

“Not even a little hint?”

“No, I know what’s happening,” Kagriss said. “There’s a spell cast on them using holy magic, but it’s very complex and branded on their foreheads. I’m afraid of touching it because I haven’t managed to unravel the formations. It’s a challenge.”

Only then did Camilla notice that Kagriss wasn’t upset at all. A tiny, almost invisible curve in her lips betrayed her better-than-average mood, and the furrowed brows were a sign of determination more than frustration.

How had she managed to completely misread Kagriss after being together for so long? But thinking more clearly about how Kagriss usually was, there was no way that Kagriss would back down from a challenge, nor would she get upset when progress was slow.

Camilla tried to comfort herself by telling herself that it was definitely because it was Eva that Kagriss had been examining. If Kagriss had been looking at a random hunter neither of them knew, Camilla would definitely not have made that mistake!

After fussing over an unconscious Eva for a while longer, Kagriss straightened up. “I have a theory, but progress would be much faster if I had test subjects. Do you think anyone would mind if I used some of the other hunters?”

“… Yes, they would. Please don’t do that, Kagriss. Progress being slow is fine.”

Normally, the old Kagriss would have simply nodded without any sign of disappointment, but this time, the edges of Kagriss’s lips visibly dropped. She licked her lips and nodded before turning silently back to the unconscious hunters.

Although in both cases, Kagriss said nothing, the simple addition of facial expression added so much weight that Camilla was almost tempted to tell Kagriss that she could, and then help Kagriss cover things up if things went wrong. However, her sanity told her that she mustn’t do that, so Camilla managed to stop herself.

But sticking by this new Kagriss was scary. It was too hard to say no, and Camilla always wanted to go along with whatever Kagriss wanted to do. Kagriss seemed more alive now, and whenever Camilla thought about the violet core buried right next to her heart, her breath stopped.

Taking a moment to calm her thumping heart, Camilla materialized her sword and headed for the frontlines, hoping to take her mind off of Kagriss.