Behind Rein, a swarm of Academy zombies shambled forward—still in student uniforms, still nauseatingly familiar. The stench of rot hung thick in the air, sharp enough to make his stomach turn. He lifted the back of his hand to cover his nose.

  But what truly annoyed him wasn’t the smell.

  It was the red number pulsing at the edge of his vision.

  [25:00… 24:59…]

  Like a heartbeat that refused to calm.

  He stood at a dead end—blocked by a stone wall that rose nearly twenty feet high, sealing the passage completely. Rein let out a long sigh, then turned to face the zombies dragging their feet toward him.

  Their groans echoed down the narrow corridor, crawling under the skin.

  [LIZ: Because you insisted on exploring, we just burned another three minutes and thirty seconds.]

  “At least… the time I wasted—hell, it had more value than fighting that walking tin can.” Rein muttered. He planted his hands on his hips and tilted his head, staring up at the arched stone ceiling as if revisiting an old lecture.

  “Feynman once said—if you can’t explain something to a middle schooler… you don’t actually understand it.”

  He started walking toward the zombie pack.

  Then his heel came down on emptiness—and a small magic ring flared to life under his foot.

  It was compression.

  Air crushed into a rigid platform beneath his foot.

  “Levitate, version 1.0.”

  He stepped upward, onto invisible stairs, one rung at a time. The last step carried him into the air—hovering about three feet above their heads.

  Rein walked forward in calm silence.

  Below him, the zombies lifted their rotting faces, their eyes ruined, their mouths slack. Some reached up for his legs—too slow, too short, trapped beneath a plane they couldn’t touch.

  “So… what do you think a dungeon really is, LIZ?”

  [LIZ: By standard definitions… a dungeon is a closed underground system—usually hostile, usually self-contained. Many contain a ‘boss level’ powerful enough to require multiple parties cooperating to defeat it.]

  “Is that so.” Rein stepped neatly away from one zombie’s flailing hand—not because he feared being dragged down, but because he wasn’t in the mood to find a shoe-cleaning service in this place.

  “I’ve read the beginner texts. They say besides mana crystals, dungeons usually contain rewards too—items, relics, things like that.”

  [LIZ: Correct. They’re a major source of wealth that drives the economies of many nations.]

  “Alright, LIZ. First—I’ve never come ‘for a stroll’ in a dungeon before. This is genuinely my first time.”

  He kept walking on empty air like it was a paved road. The zombie pack below shuffled after his shadow with mindless hunger. They couldn’t reach so much as the edge of his doormat, yet their idiotic persistence still managed to turn the corridor into chaos.

  “And you know what?” Rein jerked a thumb over his shoulder, face twisted in pure irritation. “This place is designed around absolute… nonsense.”

  He let the words hang, then kept going, as if the dungeon itself had personally offended him.

  “Why would you build a corridor nearly two hundred meters long—just to end it in a dead end?“

  Rein paused.

  “Think about the amount of stone and labor it takes to carve something like this. If there’s no military purpose—no reason for anyone to actually live here… then it’s either pointless, or it’s being done out of sheer spite.”

  He reached up and brushed the curved stone ceiling—close enough to touch. Cold moss and slick mana slime clung to the cracks, seeping into his skin with a damp, unpleasant chill.

  A single Flare floated ahead, lighting the way. Its brightness reflected off wet stone and acted like a perfect lure—drawing dozens of zombies behind him like moths to a flame.

  Rein deliberately used it instead of activating Mana Vision. He didn’t want to waste resources looking at filth that wasn’t complicated.

  He scratched his head, sweeping his gaze around with the weary expression of someone auditing a bad blueprint.

  “And those left turns and right turns earlier? That just confirms it. The layout here is irrational.”

  He exhaled hard—more annoyed than afraid.

  “Why do any of that? To hide a relic? Please. If security mattered, just invent central banking. Done. Why turn terrible planning into a structural mess?”

  He stopped.

  The stone path ended.

  And the corridor broke open into a yawning abyss.

  Below, nothing but black.

  “So the idiot who built this finally did something right,” he murmured. “A dead-end corridor that leads straight to a garbage chute.”

  Icy air surged up from below, heavy with the implication of vast, empty space.

  Rein crouched above it. Two overlapping Levitate rings glowed beneath his feet.

  A moment later, the zombies—still craning their heads toward the Flare and his silhouette—began stepping forward blindly.

  One after another, they missed the edge.

  Rotting bodies plunged into the dark.

  Thud after distant thud echoed from far below—then nothing.

  “Thanks for the built-in auto-follow,” Rein muttered, flicking his hand like he’d just finished an annoying chore. “At least I don’t have to clean blood off my shoes.”

  He stood at the edge again, rolling his neck once to loosen the stiffness, then peered into the darkness that had just eaten an entire horde.

  “See, LIZ? A simple solution—even a middle schooler can understand. Let gravity do the work.”

  [LIZ: Two minutes and forty seconds to clear the dead weight. Efficient. A worthwhile investment. The path ahead is much cleaner now.]

  “That’s just a side effect,” Rein said, running his fingers over the damp wall beside him.

  Then, without warning, his tone shifted—softer, almost like he was telling a bedtime story to an AI who didn’t need sleep.

  “When I was a kid—back when I was still Rhys—I used to play tabletop games with my friends. Role-playing games. And there was this one guy… Tony. He loved being the Dungeon Master.”

  He resumed walking down the now-empty corridor at an unhurried pace.

  His calm stride clashed violently with the red timer blinking lower and lower, a heartbeat that kept tightening the noose.

  [22:20… 22:19…]

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  “I remember asking Tony—in the middle of a session—why do we have to go down into some stupid underground tomb? And why does the tomb have traps every five meters? If the goal is to bury corpses, none of this makes sense. And those monsters—what do they eat if no adventurers wander in? Where do they even… relieve themselves? And finally—what’s the dungeon even for?”

  [LIZ: I can already guess. When you were a kid… your friends probably didn’t like you very much.]

  Rein chuckled quietly. For a heartbeat, his eyes looked almost warm—almost happy—at the memory.

  “Yeah. They hated my guts. Eventually one kid snapped and yelled, ‘It’s here so we can have fun, you idiot Rhys! And if you keep asking dumb questions like that, we’ll never even start playing!’”

  He smiled faintly, then stopped—his fingers resting on a crack in the stone.

  [LIZ: So you’re saying… this dungeon—no, every dungeon—was created purely for someone’s ‘fun’?]

  Rein shrugged, lightly. But his eyes didn’t.

  They cooled. Hardened.

  “Maybe not just fun. Maybe an experiment. But one thing’s certain—there’s a DM running this place. And besides the poor plotting…”

  He let the contempt curl at the corner of his mouth.

  “The thing that pisses me off the most is the designer. Whoever built this… has worse taste than Tony did at ten years old.”

  [LIZ: Perhaps your questions are things no one in Arath has ever thought to doubt… or were never ‘programmed’ to ask.]

  Rein’s mouth twitched—half a smile, half a blade.

  “If that’s the case…” he said, voice quiet, lethal in its simplicity, “then instead of running around randomly looking for an exit on a timer, the easier solution is to find the DM.”

  His gaze sharpened.

  “And whoever that is… he probably has no idea he’s dealing with a ‘character’ using magic that isn’t on this world’s character sheet.”

  He stopped in the middle of the silent corridor.

  His blue eyes ignited in the darkness.

  Then he spoke—flat, controlled, and absolute.

  “LIZ, activate MiDAR protocol. Full sweep—mana point-cloud.”

  The moment Rein gave the command, three rings of pure white magic snapped into existence above the stone floor—stacked like halos in perfect alignment.

  Nodes along their edges flared in sequence. Lines of light shot between them, weaving into a cylinder that locked around his body. The top and bottom circles began to spin in opposite directions, accelerating until the light twisted into a tight, mechanical helix—like interlocking gears screaming up to speed.

  A faint, high-pitched whine cut through the dark.

  Rein changed the act of casting into something else entirely.

  Calibration.

  Instead of casting a spell, he was turning the surrounding space into a transmitter.

  Dust on the ground froze midair for a split second, caught in the pulse of the calibration, and then a vibration expanded outward—flattening into a perfect plane as it spread.

  Then the wave hit.

  A high-frequency mana burst detonated from Rein’s body—too fast to see. It shivered through stone, shadow, and air, rattling every particle the dungeon had to offer.

  In Rein’s vision, darkness tore like cloth.

  In its place came a neon-blue world of data.

  Millions of pinprick lights—voxels—claimed every surface, carpeting walls and floor and ceiling, until a full three-dimensional model of the labyrinth assembled itself in front of him through LIZ’s HUD—millimeter precision, cold and exact.

  Solid stone became translucent wireframe.

  Hidden gears. Dimensional mechanisms. Hairline fractures and sealed seams behind the masonry—everything revealed, everything diagrammed.

  For Rein, the dungeon was no longer mysterious.

  It was a high-resolution digital map.

  [LIZ: Got it. Anomalies in mass distribution—and biological signals.]

  Her message popped up alongside a blinking red marker—locked on a point far away, beyond multiple layers of stone.

  …

  …

  No matter how many times they turned or which corridor they chose, Boris and Dana found themselves circling back to the same, haunting stretch of stone.

  At the edge of their vision, a pale white fog clung to the shadows, never rushing, but always there. It followed them with a terrifying patience, like a predator that understood it had no need to hurry.

  More than once, Boris caught sight of a crack on a corner wall so familiar it made his stomach drop. In the end, he couldn’t stand it anymore. He cast Eye of the Beholder, sending the spell-eye forward to scout and confirm the one conclusion he was terrified to admit.

  The image that returned to his mind was merciless.

  They’d looped back onto the same route. Again.

  For the third time.

  Boris’s face tightened until veins stood out beneath pale skin. He forced down the rising panic and dragged Dana into another turn—clinging to a thread of hope that somewhere ahead there would be an exit, or at least someone still alive.

  He’d never been in a real dungeon before.

  As a first-year, all he’d heard were older students’ stories—how dangerous the practical dungeons could be in field training.

  But there was no test here. Just a trap.

  Dana stood nearby, breathing hard. Her eyes flicked around in maximum alertness, and the Flare in her shaking hand wobbled, its light trembling with her.

  “We… we’re lost, aren’t we?” she whispered.

  “Probably… yeah,” Boris answered. His voice came out dry, brittle with worry.

  After unloading a barrage of spells into that fog earlier, he’d begun to feel something worse than the maze itself.

  Mana recovery here was wrong.

  Painfully slow.

  It felt like the air was draining mana out of him instead of giving it back.

  This place was too dry. Too dead.

  Not normal Arath.

  He was still caught in that thought when Dana let out a thin, sharp yelp.

  Boris snapped around—just as the toe of her boot clipped something on the ground with a metallic scrape.

  The dim Flare light swept across a scatter of bones tucked into the corners… and what made Boris’s blood turn to ice was the fabric still clinging to them.

  Academy uniforms.

  DVM cloaks—mixed with other departments—faded and chewed by time until the colors were almost gone.

  “What the hell…?” Boris breathed.

  Dana clamped both hands over her mouth. Her eyes were wide, shaking, as the truth slammed into place.

  “We’re… not the first group that got pulled in here.”

  Fear gnawed at him, but Boris forced himself back into motion. He swallowed hard and spoke quickly—like if he kept talking, his mind wouldn’t shatter.

  “Wait, Dana. We didn’t see these bodies before. That means this corridor isn’t the same loop we were stuck in.”

  “Then… this could be the way out?” Dana asked, hope cracking through her voice with a sob underneath.

  “I’m not sure. But it’s better than walking in circles while that fog herds us.”

  Boris tightened his grip and moved forward. The spell-eye from Eye of the Beholder floated ahead at thirty feet, feeding him a view of an empty corridor.

  It looked clear. No movement.

  For a moment—just a moment—he let himself breathe.

  And then Dana slipped.

  “Ow—!”

  “Dana!” Boris whirled—And his heart nearly stopped.

  The floor had opened into a gap, and inside it a skeleton in an Academy mage uniform was climbing out. One dry-boned hand snapped around Dana’s ankle like iron jaws, yanking her backward toward the darkness below.

  Boris didn’t hesitate.

  “Magic Missile!”

  A mana bolt punched through the skeleton’s eye socket and exploded its skull at point-blank range. Boris lunged in, grabbed Dana’s hand, and hauled her free—

  Behind them, the scattered bones along the wall began to stir.

  Joints scraped against stone with a slow, wet grind. Ribs clicked into place like locks turning.

  One by one they rose—then two—then a dozen—silent except for the creak of old cartilage.

  Dull green light flickered to life in hollow sockets. The air turned cold and thick with the sour reek of rot, coating the tongue.

  Boris gritted his teeth and fired again and again into the advancing skeletons.

  Bones shattered under impact—arms breaking, skulls cracking—

  But nothing stopped.

  Every shot he fired deepened the hollow inside him. His mana reserves felt like a pit he couldn’t fill.

  And the army in front of him looked endless.

  “Run—now!”

  Boris made the call. He yanked Dana up and sprinted forward at full speed.

  But fate wasn’t with them.

  Less than two hundred feet ahead, the pale, freezing fog was already pouring out of the tunnel—surging like floodwater, fast and merciless, ready to swallow anything in its path.

  …

  …

  “Marten… how are you here?” Mira asked, her voice shaking.

  She crouched to inspect the wound on her ankle—raw, torn, scraped open by the chain until it looked brutal—then tried to push herself upright.

  Marten caught her in time, steadying her before her legs gave out.

  “Honestly?” he said, eyes scanning the room as if expecting the walls to bite. “I’m confused too. One second I’m trying to find a way out—the next… I wake up in this chamber. Then I found that narrow gap… and a hand just shot out. That scared the hell out of me.”

  “But when I heard you yelling… I recognized your voice. So I grabbed you.”

  Mira stared at him—relief and fear tangled together in her chest. Then she forced herself to look around.

  This wasn’t like the tight corridor where she’d fled with Kellen from the Chain Reaper.

  The room was a perfect square—about sixty feet across, with a ceiling twenty feet high.

  And the real problem revealed itself the moment the Flare light touched all four walls.

  There was no exit.

  Nothing—except the narrow gap she’d just been pulled out of.

  “This is… a cell,” Mira murmured, her face drained of color.

  “Yeah,” Marten admitted through clenched teeth. His body shook in uneven pulses. “When I found that gap, I thought it might be a shortcut to another section. But this dungeon…” He swallowed.

  “It doesn’t want us leaving. Not easily.”

  These entries expand the lore and mechanics introduced in this chapter.

  Completely optional—read only if you enjoy diving deeper into the system.

  Magic & Spell Techniques

  Full Term: Mana Imaging Detection and Ranging

  Classification: Magical-Scientific Hybrid System

  Origin: Rein’s adaptation, inspired by LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) technology from Earth.

  Function: Emits high-frequency mana bursts in a 360° radial sweep to map the surrounding environment. The returned data is processed into a voxel-based 3D model of the dungeon, highlighting terrain, hidden structures, mass anomalies, and biological signals.

  Casting Description:

  – Forms three stacked magic rings around the caster.

  – These spin in opposite directions, generating a helix-shaped scanning field.

  – The result is a precise “point-cloud” visual model visible in LIZ’s HUD.

  Scientific Basis / Reference: Inspired by LiDAR, a terrestrial remote sensing method that uses laser pulses to measure distances and build accurate topographical maps. MiDAR replaces light with mana, allowing penetration through magical structures.

  Definition: A 3D visual data field composed of mana-echo voxels. Each point reflects a single detection return—similar to pixels, but spatial.

  Use: Allows real-time spatial analysis of the environment. Used in dungeon mapping, hazard detection, and combat planning.

  Note: Requires MiDAR or a comparable system.

  Expansion: Rein uses Levitate in a tactical way, creating horizontal planes to walk above enemies.

  Modular Spellcasting: Rein refers to the spell as “version 1.0,” hinting at custom iterations.

  Contextual Usage: Borrowed from tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons. Refers to the controller or creator of a dungeon scenario.

  Line: “Feynman once said—if you can’t explain something to a middle schooler, you don’t actually understand it.”

  Who: Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize-winning physicist and educator.

  Context: Rein uses this quote to rationalize simplifying complex concepts—even in high-risk environments.

  Definition: The remains of former students trapped and killed in the dungeon. Still wearing decomposed mage uniforms.

  Function: Visual confirmation that this is not the first trap instance. Adds horror and raises stakes.