Chapter 272

Chapter 272: Chapter 272

The passage opened into a broad natural chamber that looked as though a small army had been fighting there for days.

Broken supply wagons, shattered shields, monster bones, and chunks of Dungeon stone had been stacked together into two crude barricades.

Blood darkened the floor behind them, where injured adventurers lay packed into whatever protected space remained.

Several of them could no longer stand.

Those who still could were exhausted enough that simply keeping their weapons raised had become an effort.

Raul Nord stood in the center of it all.

One side of his face was covered in dried blood, his armor had split near the ribs, and his left arm trembled every time he lifted his shield, yet his voice still carried across the chamber as clearly as if he had only just entered the Dungeon.

"Don’t chase anything past the barricade! Make them come through the gap one at a time, and if the left side breaks again, fall back to the wagon instead of trying to be heroic!"

Three monsters were already hammering against the front line.

Anakitty Autumn vaulted over the broken side of a wagon and slammed her small shield across the nearest creature’s face.

Before it could recover, her sword entered beneath the jaw and tore out through the side of its neck.

A second Enhanced Species lunged at her blind side.

Raul saw it before she did.

"Aki, behind you!"

Anakitty turned, but the injured leg slowing her movement cost her the fraction of a second she needed.

Ais crossed the chamber before the monster reached her.

Gonryōmaru passed through its neck in a clean stroke, and Ais released only a narrow pulse of lightning through the blade as it crossed the core.

The magic stone shattered before the creature could begin draining the attack.

Anakitty stared after the dissolving body.

"Ais-san?"

The surprise had barely left her mouth when Tsubaki entered from the opposite side.

"Snap, Tobiume!"

She deliberately sent the fireball into the floor just ahead of the next monster.

The explosion lifted the creature over the barricade instead of striking it directly, denying it a clean opportunity to absorb Tobiume’s spiritual pressure.

Ardi was already waiting.

Nejibana swept upward, and a concentrated surge of water caught the airborne monster around the torso and slammed it against the ceiling hard enough to crack the stone.

Rayleigh killed the third with Benihime before it could retreat.

The sudden arrival of seven fresh fighters changed the entire chamber within seconds.

For the first time in hours, no monster stood in front of the barricade.

Raul simply stared at them while the tension that had been holding him upright began to leak from his body.

Relief won out over dignity.

"You took your damn time! I’ve spent eighteen hours trying to keep this place together with broken ribs, half a shield, and people who apparently believe passing out counts as resting!"

Rayleigh looked over the blood covering him.

"You’re still yelling, so you can’t be doing that badly."

Raul’s expression suggested he was reconsidering whether being rescued was worth the humiliation.

"I’m choosing to interpret that as concern, because if I interpret it any other way, I’m going to try punching my rescuer and embarrass both of us."

Anakitty laughed once as she leaned against the barricade to take weight off her wounded leg.

"Don’t encourage him. He spent most of the night insisting he was perfectly functional while coughing blood into his sleeve."

Raul gave her a wounded look.

"I was keeping morale up."

"You told a supporter with a fractured wrist that your ribs were ’barely inconvenient.’"

"And he stopped complaining."

"That was because he thought you were delirious."

Rayleigh decided they had enough energy to survive another minute and turned toward Asfi before the exchange could continue.

She had already moved among the wounded.

The humor left her face as she counted.

"How many survived?"

Raul sobered immediately.

"Fourteen are here. Six supporters made it back through the upper route after the cave-in, three people died before we reached this chamber, and we lost another two during the first night."

Asfi did the count once in her head.

Twenty-five accounted for.

Two missing.

She already knew one of the names.

"Lulune?"

Raul looked toward the dark passage behind the barricade.

"Taken."

Asfi said nothing.

That silence carried more anger than shouting would have.

Tsubaki’s visible eye narrowed.

"And our smith?"

"With her."

The half-dwarf’s usual easy expression disappeared completely.

Raul dragged himself toward a piece of broken stone and sat before his legs made the decision for him.

"The monsters changed after the first few attacks. At the beginning, they behaved like ordinary Enhanced Species—dangerous, clever enough to pick targets, but still monsters. If they caught somebody, they killed them."

Anakitty lowered herself beside the barricade.

"Then they stopped finishing the wounded."

Ardi frowned.

"They started taking people alive?"

Anakitty nodded.

"The first time it happened, we assumed they were dragging bodies away to eat later. Then one of the injured adventurers came back."

The chamber became quieter.

Rayleigh looked between them.

"Alive?"

"Barely. They’d taken his weapon and spent hours attacking him one at a time. Every monster used the same movements he’d already shown during earlier fights, only each attempt was slightly better than the last."

Raul rubbed one hand over his face.

"That was when we realized they weren’t simply feeding on magic stones or copying whatever happened in front of them. They were using us to improve."

He gestured toward the ruined barricades.

"The first sword-user we encountered looked ridiculous. It held the weapon too tightly, swung from the shoulders, and nearly lost its balance whenever someone parried. Six or seven hours later, another one showed up with an actual guard, proper foot placement, and enough patience to stop throwing itself into obvious counters."

Anakitty pointed toward several long cuts carved into the front barricade.

"Then they started feinting."

Her gaze moved toward the lower passage.

"One of them eventually stopped attacking altogether. It stayed outside our reach for nearly an hour and watched every exchange from the darkness."

Rayleigh immediately understood why that bothered her.

"Who was it watching?"

"Mostly us."

Anakitty indicated herself and Raul.

"Every time Raul changed his guard, the creature adjusted. Whenever I changed the way I approached the barricade, it shifted its stance to match what I had shown in previous fights."

Raul’s mouth tightened.

"I tested it a few times because I wanted to make sure we weren’t imagining the pattern. By the sixth change, there wasn’t much left to doubt. The bastard was memorizing everything."

Anakitty gave him a tired stare.

"You could mention that you demonstrated six different guards before deciding the monster might actually be learning them."

"In my defense, I had been awake for most of a day and thought gathering information was better than waiting to be eaten."

"The information you gathered was that teaching a monster six guards makes it know six guards."

Raul looked toward Rayleigh as if hoping for support.

Rayleigh shook his head.

"That one is difficult to defend."

Raul sighed and leaned back against the stone.

"Fine. When we survive this, I’ll add ’stop personally educating Enhanced Species’ to the expedition manual."

The joke died naturally when Asfi returned from checking one of the injured Hermes adventurers.

"Tell me exactly what happened to Lulune."

Raul’s expression tightened again.

"A monster broke through the rear passage during the second large attack and grabbed one of the supporters. Lulune used one of her concealment items and followed it before anyone could stop her."

Asfi closed her eyes for a moment.

"That sounds painfully like something she would do."

"She came back once."

That got everyone’s attention.

Raul continued.

"She found another chamber below this one. According to her, the monsters had been collecting weapons there along with piles of stolen magic stones. She also saw several of them repeating combat movements against the walls."

Rayleigh glanced toward the damaged weapons they had passed earlier.

"So that trail was leading toward their training area."

"Probably."

Raul’s expression became bitter.

"Lulune wanted to go back after resting because she thought there might be other captured adventurers down there. I refused. She waited until the next attack distracted us and slipped out anyway."

Asfi’s fingers tightened around the strap of one of her equipment pouches.

"Of course she did."

Anakitty looked toward Tsubaki.

"Your smith realized she hadn’t returned and went after her. Neither made it back."

Tsubaki released a slow breath through her nose.

"My people see one stupidly dangerous problem and immediately decide they’ll be the one to fix it. I’d complain more if I hadn’t built my entire career on the same disease."

No one answered.

Metal scraped against stone somewhere in the lower passage.

Every survivor in the chamber reacted immediately.

Those unable to fight dragged themselves farther from the barricade.

Raul forced himself back onto his feet.

"Positions! It’s the one I warned you about. Don’t assume anything you saw it do before is still all it knows!"

Rayleigh looked toward the passage.

"The one that watched you?"

Raul raised his shield.

"We started calling it the student."

The creature entered the chamber at a walking pace.

It had the general outline of a man, though its proportions made the resemblance disturbing rather than convincing.

Both arms were too long, its spine curved forward beneath layered Dungeon armor, and patches of grey-black flesh remained visible between the plates.

An adventurer’s spear rested in its right hand.

A broken longsword occupied the left.

The Enhanced Species stopped roughly twenty meters from the barricade and raised the spear.

Rayleigh’s attention immediately went to the stance.

Its feet were properly separated.

The front shoulder remained angled rather than squared.

The spear point hovered just outside immediate striking distance, leaving room to thrust without unnecessarily exposing the body.

There was nothing instinctive about the posture.

Someone had shown it how to fight.

The monster moved.

Anakitty intercepted before anyone else.

Her sword struck the spear shaft, but instead of simply meeting force with force, the Enhanced Species rotated the weapon and guided her blade along the wood.

Her eyes widened.

The deflection pulled her balance slightly forward.

She twisted away before the spear point could reach her chest, although the edge still tore through the armor over one shoulder.

"That technique wasn’t there yesterday!"

Raul swore.

"It learned it after the last attack!"

The creature did not give Anakitty time to recover.

Its broken sword came from the opposite side.

She blocked.

Raul attacked the monster’s blind side.

Before his sword reached it, the Enhanced Species stepped back exactly far enough to leave the strike short.

Raul stopped.

Recognition replaced frustration.

"That movement was mine."

Rayleigh watched the creature reposition the spear while keeping Anakitty inside the sword’s range.

It had studied them separately.

Now it was putting those lessons together.

Ais started forward.

Rayleigh raised one arm.

"Give them a moment."

Ais looked at him, but he continued before she had to ask.

"It knows how Raul and Anakitty normally fight because it spent hours studying them. That means those two also know exactly what information it’s relying on. If they deliberately stop behaving the way it expects, we can see how well it actually understands what it copied."

Raul overheard him.

His expression became distinctly unhappy.

"You could have phrased that without making me sound like bait, but I understand the idea. It predicts the reactions we’ve shown it before, so we give it reactions nobody sensible would use."

Anakitty raised her shield again.

A tired smile appeared despite her injuries.

"For you, that shouldn’t require much acting."

Raul gave her one long look.

"I am choosing to remember that you are injured and therefore temporarily allowed to be insufferable."

The monster attacked again.

Raul raised the same defensive guard he had used near the barricade for hours.

The Enhanced Species recognized it instantly.

Its spear angle shifted before reaching him, already aiming for the opening beside his shield where Raul’s usual counter would leave space.

Raul dropped his sword and the monster hesitated.

That fraction of confusion was enough.

Raul abandoned the proper defensive response entirely and grabbed the spear shaft with both hands.

"Now!"