CHAPTER 156: THE WORLD IS WATCHING [I]

It had been two whole days since the crew had been saved by Lucius, and the entire country was in chaos.

The beach near where the incident happened was locked down, surrounded by S-Ranks and security forces trying to break into the dungeon gate without destroying it or killing Lucius in the process.

...If he was still alive.

Vanessa wanted to be there with them, wanted to try and help, but only the S-Ranks had been permitted access.

Everyone else was left behind.

"Do you think Luna’s going to be okay?" Emilia asked softly from the couch.

Her voice was trembling but she was calm.

She wasn’t only worried about Lucius... she was worried about Luna too... and Elara... Elara was in the training room... they could hear distant explosions as the awakener calmed herself with punching anything she saw.

Vanessa couldn’t even say anything, she wanted to hit something too.

The girl had been crying in the basement nonstop ever since the stream ended.

Vanessa gave a quiet nod.

Her hands rested on her lap as she stared blankly at the floor.

’Would any of this have happened if I’d gone with him?’ she thought bitterly.

The last anyone saw of Lucius was him bleeding on camera, and according to Luna’s report, he had been low on mana and blinded.

How was he supposed to survive a foreign dungeon with all that?

Villy sat in the corner, polishing a hammer just to keep her hands busy.

She hadn’t said a word since Luna returned.

Her face was pale and her shoulders were slumped, and though she looked calmer than Luna, Vanessa knew the dwarf woman was seconds away from breaking.

Then, suddenly... Luna burst out from the basement, her eyes were red and swollen but her lips curved into a trembling, victorious smile.

She was holding a small black remote in her hand.

"I finally did it..." she breathed. "I established connection with P40."

She rushed over and sat down next to Emilia, her fingers shaking slightly as she set the remote on the table.

Vanessa’s eyes widened in disbelief.

"P40 was still in the cave," Luna explained quickly, her voice wobbling between excitement and fear. "Its main lens is destroyed, but... I placed a mini-drone inside it before the mission. Once I press this button, the mini-drone will deploy... and we can see inside the dungeon again."

The room fell silent.

It should’ve been good news. But none of them knew what they might see once the stream connected.

Would Lucius still be alive? Struggling? Would his body be there devoured by monsters?

The thought made Luna’s throat tighten, but she pressed the button anyway.

The television flickered.

[Stream Has Started]

The mini-drone shot out from the P40’s half-buried shell.

Its pod rotated in the storming air before stabilizing and rising upward.

The first thing it showed was a view of the cave... completely buried under snow.

[Your Stream has gained the #1 Tag]

Luna swallowed.

The drone pushed through the snow and flew outside into the roaring blizzard.

Its camera flickered from static to focus. The endless white stretched in every direction.

She had built a mana sensor into the drone, and the light on its core began to glow. It picked up a familiar mana... Lucius’s mana signature and then shot forward through the frozen winds, weaving through the snow.

The screen showed flashes of what the dungeon had become: wolves prowling across frozen plains, frost wyverns gliding through the air like shards of ice, and strange dragonfly creatures the size of dogs buzzing across the storm.

The drone avoided them all with delicate precision, zipping past trees encased in crystal frost and over shattered ruins that barely peeked out from under layers of snow.

Then, finally, the signal grew stronger.

The drone hovered to a stop over a wide hill.

The snow was thinner there and far calmer.

At the center of the clearing lay the massive corpse of a white centipede monster. Its body was coiled several times over itself, each segment plated with thick bone scales, and its head... was gone.

It had been blown clean off.

The camera zoomed in.

There, sitting lazily on the monster’s spine with one leg over the other, was a man with silver hair.

His head was tilted back and his chest was rising and falling softly as he snored.

It was Lucius... and he was alive...

The blindfold he’d been wearing was gone.

There was no trace of blood on his face.

His hair shone under the light of the snow, and somehow... he looked even more handsome than before.

The drone’s amplified mic picked up a small sound.

He was snoring.

...

Luna’s jaw dropped.

She almost crushed the remote in her hand.

"Useless fucker," she muttered under her breath, her cheeks puffing out angrily as she pouted.

She had spent two days crying herself sick, thinking he was dead... and here he was, snoring like a baby on top of a monster corpse. "Why are men so wicked..."

Emilia burst out laughing in disbelief, and even Vanessa couldn’t help but smile.

Villy wiped at her eyes, caught somewhere between crying and laughing too.

The tension in the room had finally dissolved and it wasn’t only them that were surprised... All the viewers were.

...

Inside the dungeon, Lucius’s lips curved faintly.

’Oh... so Luna planted a mini-drone,’ he thought with a small smile. ’That girl’s too smart for her own good.’

He kept his eyes closed, feigning sleep for a few seconds longer.

It was nice to know they were watching. He liked the attention... it made him feel alive again.

’That’s nice... now I can get to clearing the dungeon.’

He stretched his arms with a quiet groan and his joints cracked.

He stood up slowly, brushing the snow off his shoulders as he rolled his neck from side to side.

The centipede’s spine creaked beneath him.

Lucius had spent the last two days spreading his senses through every corner of the dungeon.

He’d studied the flow of mana, learned the movement of every monster that wandered the icy plains and also practiced using his Eyes Of Space.

There were two main power signatures left in the dungeon.

One belonged to the massive centipede he’d already slain.

The other belonged to another B-Rank beast deeper within the snowlands.

He had a hunch.

If he killed that one, the doorway to the true boss might appear.

There were no floors or gates here... so he just had to make an assumption.

"Anything could happen in a dungeon," he muttered under his breath, stepping down from the centipede’s back.

His boots crunched in the snow. "Let’s go..."

He snapped his fingers once. The air rippled faintly around him. The force of space pulsed out, slicing through the dead centipede’s body.

Flesh and bone collapsed in on themselves, leaving behind a clean, empty skeleton and then he shot into the air like a rocket.