Chapter 77: A Return to Reality

Ah, now I finally realize just how much my world has changed in what felt like such a short time.

Because it was the place I originally lived. Everything I had achieved in my life existed in that world, so I tried my best to forget about the others.

But forming attachments, and being drawn to people, had nothing to do with how much time we’d actually spent together.

The other dimension, where I could feel all of that, was far better.

Without realizing it, my steps took me a little closer to them.

“Hey, Dana! Hurry up, we’ve got to go take down the boss!”

At that moment, I heard the voice of a member of the Dawn Guild calling me.

When I turned my head, they were waving their hands, urging me to come quickly.

My feet, frozen in place, didn’t know what to do, and I just kept shifting my direction back and forth.

Then the Dawn Guild members came over to me.

As the distance closed, the expressions of the guild members who saw the Four Heavenly Kings and Yeon Ha-yeon all turned blank at once.

They were completely captivated by their outstanding looks.

“Um, which guild are you all from?”

“Wow, that hair color is really unusual.”

“Are they celebrities?”

Behind the guild member who stepped forward to ask, I could hear everyone whispering to each other as they checked out my friends.

“Four Heavenly Kings.”

“Yes.”

Ban Eun-hyeol’s concise answer left the guild member looking utterly dumbfounded.

He glanced back at his fellow guild members, as if to ask if he’d really heard what he thought he heard, lips twitching uncertainly, not sure if he was supposed to take it as a joke or how to respond.

“Pfft. Ahaha!”

Watching his reaction, I couldn’t help but burst out laughing.

When I first possessed this body, I probably made the exact same face. Seeing them react the same way brought back memories from that time.

“Hey, what the? I think that’s the first time I’ve ever seen her laugh like that.”

“No wonder people call her the Ice Beauty. But she actually knows how to laugh like that?”

The Dawn Guild members, who’d never really seen me laugh, whispered in surprise, but I didn’t care and just laughed even harder.

Before I even had time to think about what would happen after the gate closed, the boss monster appeared.

We all took it down together.

With so many high-ranked Awakened gathered, it took much less time than usual, and we were able to finish it off quickly.

Once the boss monster was gone, that’s when my head finally started to feel confused.

“So… what happens to them now?”

I didn’t know whether the gate would open to the dimension I originally lived in, or to the other world.

If it opened to my original world, would my friends all cross over together?

Or would we, and those guys, all leave separately, each to our own dimensions?

I couldn’t figure it out at all.

That’s when it happened.

A chilling sensation shot through my whole body.

Time, which had always seemed to flow strangely fast, now felt like it was moving in slow motion.

“Butterfly?”

This wasn’t the lush field I’d passed through when I returned to my original dimension, but a Dungeon with a desert backdrop.

Of course, there could be butterflies in a desert, but for some reason, that pale butterfly kept catching my attention.

The butterfly seemed to be flying in slow motion.

Why isn’t the gate closing?

Now that I thought about it, the gate wasn’t closing.

Normally, the gate would have closed by now and the scenery would have changed, but nothing was happening.

“Hey guys, didn’t we defeat the boss? Why isn’t the gate closing?”

At my question, Ban Eun-hyeol, who’d been standing quietly, spoke up.

“It’ll close when you make your choice.”

“What…”

Ban Eun-hyeol, muttering something I couldn’t understand, suddenly reached out his hand.

“Come.”

Following him, Yeon Ha-yeon, Han Ji-bin, Ji Gang-han, and Eun Ba-da all held out their hands to me.

Without realizing it, I was about to reach for them.

“What are you doing over there? Don’t you have an interview scheduled after clearing the Dungeon?”

“Hurry up, let’s go.”

The Dawn Guild members waved at me to hurry up.

I was confused.

If I chose my friends, could I return to that other world instead of my original dimension?

“But how do they know that?”

At that moment, it felt as if my whole body was being constricted, and a wave of pain crashed over me.

My vision blurred.

The figures of my friends, whose hands I’d almost reached, grew hazy, as did the Dawn Guild members waving for me to come.

It felt like the ground beneath my feet was collapsing.

In a panic, feeling like I was falling somewhere alone, I reached out desperately for my friends.

The guild members also reached out for me, but my hands were already holding Ban Eun-hyeol’s and Yeon Ha-yeon’s.

In that instant, my tightly shut eyes snapped open.

It felt like I’d been sucked into a deep abyss, only to be pulled back out by a powerful force. It was as if my lost consciousness had returned all at once.

I quickly looked around.

My body was tightly wrapped in thick vines, and from a flower at the end of the vine, a white powder was wafting out, making my head spin.

I quickly held my breath and surrounded myself with a shield.

Once I’d made sure the white powder couldn’t affect me, I hurriedly used the most recently unlocked skill.

[Skill, ‘Black Mist’ has been activated.]

Because of the black mist that shrouded the area in darkness, the strength of the vine began to weaken.

The deadly poison mixed within the black mist would quickly destroy this thing from the inside out.

[Stone.]

[Yes, my lord.]

So the monster wouldn’t hear, I hurriedly called for Stone.

The monster, unable to see anything, wouldn’t even know Stone had appeared.

Maybe from the pain caused by the poison, or the strength of the vine, my body was squeezed so tightly I could barely breathe.

Having just suffered from a hallucination and now being strangled like this, it was hard to keep my mind clear.

[Crush it.]

At my urgent command, Stone raised both fists high and slammed them down on the core of the monster.

The monster, pinned under the heavy boulder, twitched, and the vine’s grip loosened.

Once I’d freed myself from the monster, I looked around. I was in the cave I’d found in the grade gate, which I’d entered thinking it was a level-5 gate.

“So there was a hallucination-type monster here…”

Monsters that attacked using hallucinations didn’t appear often, so I’d let my guard down. I had no idea when I’d gotten caught by it.

To make sure the monster, now flattened by Stone, was truly dead, I pulled an axe from my inventory.

I didn’t use the axe unless I had to, but it had been a long time since I’d felt its heavy grip.

Just as I was about to strike what looked like the monster’s core, the vines in the cave started getting rapidly absorbed.

I tried to destroy it before it could absorb more, but my attacks weren’t landing properly.

Then, as if there was an earthquake, the ground shook violently.

From the cave walls, which I’d thought were just rock, countless vines shot out, raising their tips and flying at me.

The cave was too narrow for Red and Bishap’s power to be used properly.

At my command, the two dragons flew out of the cave and prepared to attack the boss monster from outside.

“Shahin!”

I called for Shahin, and then quickly summoned other undead with relatively small bodies.

“So the cave itself is the boss monster!”

It was a bizarrely shaped monster, impossible to tell what it really looked like.

I couldn’t figure out where its core was, or where I needed to strike to kill it.

Swinging my axe to hack away the vines, I quickly moved through the cave.

The more I ran, the more the walls seemed to ripple, and my feet kept sinking in, making it hard to move.

It was clearly trying to hinder my movement on purpose.

‘Don’t tell me this cave is actually the inside of the monster’s body?’

I slammed the axe into the cave wall with all my strength.

That spot rippled even more than the others, and the wall moved to cover the wound, as if trying to heal itself.

If this wasn’t a cave, but the monster’s body, then it must have been damaged by the Black Mist.

The increasingly violent ripples seemed to be proof of that.

The summoned undead and Shahin were diligently cutting down the vines that burst from the cave walls, rotting the ends, each fulfilling their role.

I kept going deeper inside.

Then I stopped short at a gruesome sight that made me frown.

“Ugh, what is that.”

The white flower that had been releasing the hallucination-inducing powder reappeared.

The problem was, there were just too many of them.

The walls were completely covered with those flowers, and their petal-like shapes were sharpened like animal fangs.

Just the sight of them made me sure that getting stabbed by one would be seriously dangerous.

I focused on maintaining my shield and darted my eyes around quickly.

Meanwhile, I could feel the cave shaking violently, and the temperature kept alternating between hot and cold, like plunging into an ice bath and then a hot spring—probably thanks to Red and Bishap doing their jobs outside.

Just as the fang-like petals flew at me all at once, one of the petals fell, revealing a spot on the cave wall that was a slightly different color from the rest.

Without hesitation, I hurled my axe at that spot.

“Argh!”

The cave shook so violently I could barely stand. I rushed over, grabbed the axe embedded below the cave wall, and activated Black Cloud Rain.

Black Cloud Rain melted the petals, the cave’s surface, and the differently colored area as well.

That’s when the cave began to collapse.

The dragons must have done their job well outside.

As I’d expected, the differently colored spot was the monster’s weak point.

Focusing all my attacks there, I was able to finally defeat the boss monster just before the cave completely collapsed.

“I’m completely out of it…”

I could barely remember how I’d fought. Between the hallucination and all the exertion, I just wanted to hurry home and rest.

Outside the cave, I looked at the collapsing body of the boss monster.