The impact was not a gentle landing.
It felt like being slammed into a concrete wall at highway speeds. My body bounced off the jagged, unyielding ground, the breath exploding from my lungs in a violent cough. The world spun in a dizzying mosaic of pitch black and blinding stars.
[SYSTEM ALERT]
[Fall Damage taken. HP: 10/10 ➔ 9/10]
[Status: Minor Internal Bruising. Pain Receptors Active.]
"Guh... ah..." I gasped, rolling onto my side. My ribs screamed in protest. The air down here was thick, heavy, and tasted metallic, like old blood and crushed coal.
As I forced myself onto my hands and knees, my mind—now unburdened by the Goddess's illusion—began to race at a terrifying speed. The absolute darkness of the abyss should have left me blind, but the faint purple glow of my true eyes cut through the gloom.
"System," I whispered, my voice hoarse. "Location data. Now."
The blue translucent screen materialized in front of me, its cold light illuminating the blood dripping from a scrape on my cheek.
[LOCATION DATA]
Zone: The Outland (Unmapped Territory).
Depth: Floor 100 (Deepest Layer).
Classification: SSS-Class Danger Zone. Domain of the Demon Lord.
Current Era: Industrial Year 404.
The Outland. The Demon Lord's domain. My mind instantly processed the coordinates and lore Kamiya had briefly flashed earlier. This was an island in the middle of the treacherous ocean, a place where no holy light or human technology had ever penetrated. I wasn't just cast out; I was dropped into the ultimate endgame dungeon at Level 1.
[CRITICAL WARNING]
[Hostile Entity Detected. Evasion required immediately to prevent instant death.]
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. A chill that had nothing to do with the cavern's temperature seeped into my bones.
Duck. My [INT: ∞] didn't just make me smart; it calculated trajectories, atmospheric pressure changes, and the exact displacement of air behind me. I threw my body flat against the jagged rock.
SWOOSH.
A blade of pure, compressed darkness—a scythe massive enough to cleave a carriage in half—sliced through the exact space my neck had occupied a fraction of a second prior. The sheer wind pressure from the swing tore a gash in my school uniform jacket.
I scrambled forward, rolling to my feet and activating my only useful skill. "Night Vision."
[Skill Active: Night Vision (Level C). MP decreasing by 1 per minute.]
The pitch-black cavern was instantly painted in a monochromatic, eerie green-and-violet hue. And what I saw behind me made my blood freeze.
Hovering a foot off the ground was a nightmare draped in tattered, shadow-woven robes. It had no face—only a smooth, bone-white mask with three hollow eye sockets. In its skeletal hands, it wielded a scythe dripping with necrotic energy.
[Target Identified: Abyssal Reaper]
[Rank: A | Level: 185]
[HP: 4,500 | MP: 4,500 | SP: 1590 ]
[STR: 800 | AGI: 650]
HP over four thousand. Agility six hundred and fifty. My Agility was 10. My HP was 9.
If that scythe even grazed me, I would explode into a mist of blood. I couldn't fight. I couldn't block. I could only run.
I bolted. Adrenaline flooded my system, pushing my pathetic, Level-1 physical stats to their absolute breaking point. Behind me, the Reaper let out a sound like grinding metal and floated forward in pursuit. It didn't run; it glided, closing the distance with terrifying, effortless speed.
As I sprinted through the sprawling underground cavern, the [Night Vision] revealed the true horror of Floor 100. Massive, grotesque shadows moved in the distance. I saw a serpentine creature with twenty arms tearing apart a beast that looked like a rhino made of magma. This was an ecosystem of pure apex predators. Everything here was Rank B or higher.
Think, Kyouya. Think! My breath came in ragged gasps. My stamina was rapidly draining. Even with infinite intelligence, my brain was trapped inside a frail, 16-year-old mortal shell. Intelligence couldn't outrun a scythe. But intelligence could weaponize the environment.
My violet eyes darted across the cavern walls, processing chemical compositions and geological formations at supercomputer speeds.
Black sedimentary rock. Brittle texture. Combustible. Coal.
Red, glowing crystalline structures embedded in the veins. Fire Crystals.
Metallic, brass-yellow minerals scattered on the ground. Pyrite.
Sharp, iron-rich metamorphic rocks. Slack.
The equation formed in my head instantly. The air down here was stagnant and thick with coal dust. Fire Crystals contained highly compressed mana. If I could create a spark with the pyrite and slack, the coal dust would ignite, triggering a chain reaction with the crystals.
It wouldn't kill a Rank A monster. But it would blind it.
I veered hard to the left, sprinting toward a narrow gorge lined with thick veins of unmined coal.
The Abyssal Reaper raised its scythe, the necrotic energy flaring. It was preparing to throw a ranged slash.
Now!
I dove forward, sliding on my knees across the rough stone. As I slid, my right hand snatched a chunk of Pyrite from the dirt, while my left hand grabbed a jagged piece of iron slack. The Reaper swung its scythe. The blade of darkness tore through the stalagmites above me, showering me in rocky debris.
I ignored the cuts on my face. I scrambled up, standing directly in front of the thickest cluster of Fire Crystals. The Reaper closed in, raising its weapon for the executioner's stroke.
I slammed the Pyrite against the iron slack with all my remaining strength.
CLACK.
A shower of brilliant, golden sparks erupted from the stones. They hung in the air for a microsecond before hitting the cloud of disturbed coal dust floating around the Fire Crystals.
I didn't wait to watch. I threw myself backward into a small, narrow fissure in the cavern wall.
BOOM!
The explosion was deafening. A massive shockwave of fire and concussive force ripped through the gorge. The cave shook violently as the Fire Crystals detonated, filling the entire area with a blinding, roaring inferno and a suffocating cloud of thick black smoke.
I huddled in the tiny crevice, covering my ears as debris rained down outside.
[System Check: Target 'Abyssal Reaper' unharmed. Aggro lost due to visual and sensory disruption.]
I let out a shaky, pathetic laugh, coughing up soot. It worked. I had outsmarted a Rank A calamity with rocks and basic Earth chemistry. I leaned my head back against the damp wall of the small cave, closing my eyes. I just needed thirty seconds to catch my breath. Just thirty seconds to let my heart stop hammering—
[CRITICAL DANGER: PROXIMITY ALERT!]
The warning didn't come from outside the cave. It came from inside.
Before my eyes could even snap open, before my infinite intelligence could send the signal to my muscles to move, something dropped from the ceiling of the dark crevice.
There was no sound. Only a wet, tearing sensation.
Then, the pain hit.
It was a blinding, white-hot agony that completely short-circuited my brain. It was a pain so absolute, so overwhelming, that my vision literally flashed white. A horrific, guttural scream ripped from my throat—a sound I didn't even know I was capable of making.
[HP: 9/10 ➔ 6/10]
[Severe Trauma Detected. Left appendage lost. Blood loss critical.]
I stumbled backward, falling out of the fissure and into the smoky gorge. I clutched my left arm.
There was nothing below the mid-forearm. It was just gone. A jagged, spraying stump of bone and torn muscle pulsed in the dim light, painting the rocks beneath me in a heavy coat of crimson.
Through the haze of shock and agonizing pain, I looked back at the fissure. Crawling out of the shadows was a creature the size of a carriage. It had eight hairy, multi-jointed legs, but its front two limbs weren't pedipalps—they were long, jagged, bone-white scythes dripping with my blood.
[Target Identified: Scythe-limb Weaver (Spider)]
[Rank: B | Level: 110]
"Damn it... damn it!" I screamed, the sophisticated, cold mastermind persona entirely dissolving into the frantic terror of a dying boy.
The spider hissed, its mandibles clicking as it tasted the blood on its bladed arm. It prepared to lunge.
I didn't think. I just ran. I scrambled through the thick, obscuring smoke of the coal explosion, clutching my severed stump to my chest. Every heartbeat pumped more of my life onto the floor. The pain was making me nauseous, blurring my vision, but I forced my legs to move.
I squeezed through a narrow crack in the rocks, dragging myself into a small, enclosed pocket of stone just wide enough to fit my body. I collapsed against the wall, sliding down into the dirt.
The spider didn't follow. It was too large to fit through the crack, and the lingering smoke from the explosion was masking my scent. For now, there were no monsters in this tiny pocket.
But I was dying.
I bit down on my lip so hard it bled, forcing myself to stay conscious. With my one remaining, trembling right hand, I bit into the fabric of my long school uniform jacket. I tore a long, thick strip of the tough polyester free.
Gritting my teeth, I wrapped the fabric tightly around my left bicep, just above the severed stump. I pulled it with my teeth and my right hand, tying a brutal, agonizing tourniquet to cut off the blood flow.
I screamed into the dark as the pressure crushed my nerves, but the heavy spurting of blood slowly reduced to an oozing drip.
[Status: Bleeding mitigated. MP: 4/10. Night Vision deactivating in 4 minutes.]
I slumped back against the cold stone, my chest heaving, my body drenched in cold sweat. My left arm throbbed with a phantom pain that made my vision swim.
I looked up at the rocky ceiling of the dark pocket. My breathing was ragged, shallow.
I'm going to die here, I thought. The cold, brutal reality crashed over me.
My [INT: ∞] was a joke. It didn't matter how fast my brain could process information. It didn't matter if I knew the exact chemical composition of the dirt, or the precise velocity of a monster's attack. Down here, in the deepest abyss of Cascadia, intelligence could not bridge the gap of raw, terrifying power.
Kamiya was right. My classmates were right. I was a fragile, pathetic mortal shell. I couldn't cast magic. I couldn't swing a sword. I was Level 1.
As my MP slowly ticked down and the edges of my vision began to darken, the silence of the cave was broken only by the sound of my own ragged breathing. I had wanted a fantasy adventure. Instead, I had found a slaughterhouse.
And I was the meat.
✦✦✦