Chapter 384 - Side Story: Chapter 4 – Iddy (4)
The head burst with the sound of a fruit popping.
Blood and brain fluid spewed out of the head, and bone fragments and brains could be found in the crushed debris.
It was a strangely reassuring sight.
It wasn’t the crazy sound that calmed my mind at the grotesque sight.
At least, it was nice to see that these eyeless monsters are normal creatures.
These monsters were bizarre.
They were in appearance, but even more so with their physical ability.
Certainly, they seemed scrawny, thin arms and lacking muscle mass, but the force that came out of their arms surpassed the level of a skeleton soldier as well as a skeleton knight on the 6th floor.
If thirty of these guys were released on the day of the dialogue agreement, most of the challengers would probably be wiped out without being able to resist properly.
But that wasn’t the only reason these guys made me feel terrible.
It isn’t their physical ability, but it’s creepy to hear those babbling words.
[It’s exciting?]
[It’s exciting.]
They were talking.
These guys who didn’t even make a scream or cheer at first ran into me while talking.
[Exciting!]
[It’s exciting?]
They were imitating the words I muttered unconsciously.
As if there was only one word, ‘excitement’ as a language in this world.
It didn’t hurt me directly, but I felt uncomfortable.
Truly.
[Exciting!]
The monsters even looked excited.
Oh crazy.
Rolling around with fresh skeletons that seemed to have just crawled out of the grave, I thought that there would be no other enemies more disgusting and unpleasant.
I was mistaken.
I only went up one floor, but I encountered things that were twice as eerie as the skeletons.
[Exciting...!]
Cried a monster who had been kicked in the side by me.
[...Excite! Excite! Excite!!]
The monster in a mounting position cried out every time my fist hit its face.
Oh crazy.
It screamed ‘excite, excite’ every time it was hit, so it’s more like a freaky pervert bastard than a bad feeling.
Obviously, I’m beating them, but why do they make me feel bad every time I hit them.
At that time, a monster climbed behind my back.
As if the monster would not let me go, it squeezed my neck with both arms.
The disgusting smell of the monster’s breath came out.
And with a voice almost sobbing.
[Excite... ... .]
“Stop it! These crazy eyeless idiots!”
I shouted, holding back the creepy sensations.
[Talaria’s Wings]
I used Talaria’s Wings.
Huge wings appeared behind my back, and the monster hanging on my back bounced off with sharp wings stabbed through its chest.
Its heart was pierced, and the monster fell on the floor and could not stand up again.
One of the monsters died in vain, but the other monsters weren’t a wink saddened by it.
The monsters were mad at the new words they heard.
[Eyeless idiots! Excite! Stop!]
[Stop! Excite! Crazy eyeless idiots!]
[Eyeless idiots! Exciting!]
[Exciting eyeless idiots! Crazy! stop!]
... Wah, this is driving me crazy.
* * *
They were monsters that hit the spot.
From appearance to behavior, they were nasty monsters that felt unpleasant from the beginning to the end.
They were monsters that showed me how displeasure can make a person go mad.
As I struck down the monsters without hesitation, there was only one body left: the mother’s.
The mothers body was still shining its green eyes.
[Excite.]
Unlike the other monsters, the mother wasn’t an eyesore.
But it had the same speech impairment.
[Eyeless idiot... ]
As the mother body said so, it looked at its monster kin who had fallen at its feet.
Those green eyes look strangely faint.
Its voice is also low.
As if talking to a fallen fellow.
What bullshit is this?
[Crazy eyeless idiot. Exciting.]
The mother body raised its hand and touched its chest.
Like introducing itself.
Then moved its hand again and said, pointing towards me.
[This crazy eyeless idiot stop?]
... What is it saying now?
The mother body didn’t try to resist, and I could easily burst its head to kill it.
After killing the mothers body, my stiff right arm began to move again.
[The 7th floor gateway begins.]
Description: The Trial on the 7th floor consists of three stages.
Each level contains 2, 3 and 9 rooms.
Each room can be traversed through a magic circle engraved on the wall.
Each room contains a number of Izaaku’s Disaster Dombas and one of their mother bodies.
You have cleared stage 7-1.
Some information on the 7th floor stage will be released.
The Izaaku Dungeon is made up of hundreds of cavities connected by short-range portals.
The Izaaku Dungeon, which is complicatedly structured like a maze, has been attacked a long time ago, and a safe route has been revealed.
However, somewhere in the Izaaku Dungeon there is an unknown cavity that no one has ever been to.
Among those unknown cavities, there was also a pit inhabited by a group of Dombas.
Izaaku’s Disaster Dombas are foreign entities.
Some claim that they are new creatures created through experimentation by a madly obsessed warlock, while others say they may be demons summoned from Hell.
Their origin is not exactly known.
Early Dombas are characterized by imitating the words spoken by the other party.
The mother body can stiffen their opponent’s limbs through their eyes.
Clear the second trial to learn more about the 7th floor gateway.
Clear all rooms and defeat all enemies
Clear stage 7-1. [Complete]
Clear stage 7-2.
?
I learned a little about the origins and backgrounds of the monsters, but I wasn’t happy at all.
What good would it be to know that these monsters existed?
It only adds to the discomfort.
I know a little about the stage mission with question marks on it.
That fourth goal would be to clear stage 7-3 anyway.
It was a worrisome stage in many ways, but clearing it was easy.
If the difficulty remained the same, it seemed that stage 7-2 and stage 7-3 could be cleared soon.
It didn’t seem like a stage like the 6th floor that took months to clear.
The newly acquired Soul Exploitation Skill was very satisfying.
Small recovery every time you use the wide-area debuff and kill an enemy.
It looked good just by reading the skill description, but when I used it in practice, it was better than that.
The monsters affected by the debuff were noticeably unnatural in movement, and the amount of recovery was more than expected.
If I had acquired this skill earlier and applied it to the 6th floor skeleton soldiers as well.
It would have been much easier to clear the 6th floor.
A portal appeared on the floor.
A portal appeared from the floor, not from the wall.
I climbed on the portal.
After a while, I was moved to another cavity.
[You have entered stage 7-2.]
I was moved.
The newly entered cavity was about three or four times wider than the previous one.
And there were three or four times as many monsters.
I held my breath reflexively.
Again, the monsters did not notice my position.
It wasn’t because vision does not exist for the monsters named Dombas.
The monsters were engrossed in something.
The monsters were facing their mother’s body, squatting in the middle of the cavity.
Just as when a celebrity appeared on the streets of Myeongdong, all the monsters faced the mother body.
As if they wanted to be close at least a little, they stuck together.
The monsters at the end seemed to try to look at the mother body by getting on the shoulders of other monsters.
No, what’s it for, for creatures who don’t have vision?
There were dozens of monsters crowding, but no noise was heard.
The mother body, who was getting everyone’s attention, narrowed its green eyes and was scratching the floor with a piece of stone in its hand.
Scratch, scratch.
I could only hear the mother body scrawling something on the floor.
I wondered what the hell it was doing, so I watched them quietly.
After a while, the mother body’s voice rang out in a quiet cavity.
[Excite.]
The mother body pointed to the figure she drew on the floor and speared it.
And.
[Excite.]
[Excite.]
[Excite.]
[Excite.]
[Excite.]
All the monsters followed the word.
Those crazy things are doing that here too.
Stages 7-1 and 7-2 are clearly separate stages, but the words the monsters heard and remembered seemed to be the same.
[Eyeless idiot.]
The mother body pointed to the figure next to it and speared it again.
[Eyeless idiot.]
[Eyeless idiot.]
[Eyeless idiot.]
[Eyeless idiot.]
[Eyeless idiot.]
Again, the monsters imitated their mother body’s words.
Only then could I see what the monsters were doing.
I got goosebumps momentarily.
Language.
Those monsters were now building a language among themselves.
[Stop... .]
The mother body who was trying to spear the figure again suddenly stopped speaking.
Then it lifted its green eyes off the floor and looked at me.
Following that gaze, the faces of the monsters turned towards me.
* * *
As the mother body’s eyes turned to me, my right leg stiffened.
I was holding a sword earlier, but this time it’s my right leg.
What are the laws here?
I didn’t know.
[Crazy eyeless idiot!]
[This eyeless idiot!]
I think my guess is correct that these monsters were studying language.
In the first stage, the monsters who spoke randomly combined words came to me with a somewhat unified vocabulary.
[Soul Exploitation]
As soon as I used Soul Exploitation, the movement of the monsters was disrupted.
The more I used it, the better it was.
Wide area debuff.
Their words stop, and suddenly their body gets tired and loses energy in the battle for no reason.
It will be embarrassing to the person who is on the other end.
If they don’t know that it’s a skill, they might be afraid of the unknown power.
It was effective enough against monsters, but it seemed more intimidating when used against intelligent enemies.
One leg hit the ground and bounced.
I swung my sword towards the monster that was running at the forefront.
[Eyeless idiot exci... !]
The body of the black monster was cut in half.
[Talaria’s Wings]
There is also a minor buff effect, but it has a glide effect on Talaria’s Wings.
If the body is in the air even a little, it is applied unconditionally.
It was only about 30 centimeters, but there was a monster flying towards me like a bullet.
I swung my sword again.
The sword slit the monster’s neck.
The head was cut off, but the torso flew away and collided with me.
[Blink]
I had no intention of falling and getting tangled up with the corpse.
Blink was a highly valuable skill in mobility itself, but it was a highly utilized skill in that it removes the kinetic energy currently applied and moves it to a stationary state at the target point.
I grabbed the monster’s head right in front where I moved with Blink.
The heads of the monsters were a little smaller than that of a normal adult human.
Like playing with children’s basketballs.
It was just that size.
I put the head down on the floor, like dropping it into the hoop.
The monster’s head broke and blood splattered.
It was enough to reach the bodies and faces of the monsters right in front of me.
[Crazy!]
[Stop! Crazy!]
Indeed, the use of the monster’s vocabulary was appropriate.
Did they give it meaning according to the situation when they spoke?
After the battle began, there were several things I learned.
The monsters on the 7-1 floor and the monsters on the 7-2 floor were the same but different.
They shared what they heard from me and the external features were the same.
The behavior was subtly different.
First of all, the monsters were wearing pieces of raw leather.
The mother body who can see over there wore a decent piece of clothes on its shoulder like a muffler.
I wondered if it was a by-product of adventurers appearing.
The other difference was that unlike the monsters on the 7-1 floor, who were talking without knowing any meaning, the monsters on the 7-2 floor seemed to think and spit out the meaning of words properly.
They just seemed a little higher in intelligence itself.
Finally, there was a difference in the aggressiveness of the monsters.
The monsters on the 7-1 floor ran wildly like beasts who knew no pain.
However, the monsters here were relatively less active.
[Stop. Stop.]
[Eyeless idiot. Stop.]
The evidence was the monsters crept out of their places and hid themselves.
Several monsters attacked aggressively, but it was limited to a small number of individuals.
After picking and killing the worst ones, the monsters quickly lost their fighting spirit.
I was sure.
These monsters learned fear.