Lost World-Chapter 53: Hidden Quest

The following days before Yamamoto’s team called for any meeting, Yamamoto decided to dedicate some time to check out the hidden dungeon he had been postponing. It was something he had been planning to do since he came to Mashlow, but after registering with Iron Vanguard and being introduced to Master Greaves, hadn’t had the time to.

This time, the dungeon was rather simple—for someone who knew their way around that is.

But first, he needed to address something that was still yet to be addressed, and that was his stats. He quickly pulled up his stat window to take a look.

...

[Status]

Character: Yamamoto Odinson

Race: Human

Title: Hired Assassin (Hidden)

Class: Swordsman

Level: 12

HP: 800/800

MP: 550/550

Strength: 18

Agility: 18

Endurance: 12

Intelligence: 5

Vitality: 8

Free Stat Points: 18

[Weapon Mastery]

One-Handed Sword Mastery: Adept Rank – 10%

Two-Handed Sword Mastery: Adept Rank – 10%

Free Mastery Points: 10

...

The distribution was straightforward. He needed balanced growth across his stats, having enough strength for damage, enough agility for speed and precision, enough endurance for survival, and at least some investment in intelligence and vitality for resource management and regeneration.

...

HP: 950/950

MP: 800/800

Strength: 20

Agility: 22

Endurance: 15

Intelligence: 10

Vitality: 10

...

Once all that was sorted, Yamamoto made some light preparations, then left is room to get something to eat before leaving.

On reaching the meal hall, Yamamoto only noticed a few people there who had also come to get something to eat. He grabbed some bread and cheese, ate quickly, and once he was done, headed for the exit.

Following standard procedure, he’d filed a solo expedition notice with the guild registrar the day before. Solo work wasn’t banned, just discouraged. As long as he logged his destination and expected return time, the guild wouldn’t interfere. They still needed to keep tabs on their members.

Once he left the city, he made his way to the mountains, which were decently far from the city. Planning ahead, he had hired a horse the day before, so the journey went quicker than it would have on foot.

Even then, after reaching a certain point, he had to abandon the horse, tying it someplace safe before making the rest of the journey by foot.

The dungeon he was going to was called the Abandoned Armory, and its exact location within those mountains was harsh enough to discourage casual exploration. The terrain only grew steeper, while the covering grew thicker. Twice he had to backtrack to find another passable route because the original path he mean to take was not doable.

Finally, after a few hours, he reached the entrance he had been searching for.

It was a cliff face that looked rather normal and unremarkable, except for one section where the rock seemed to... shimmer, like heat haze, but localized to about a ten-foot-wide patch of wall. If one wasn’t looking for it, they’d never notice. Even looking directly at it, the effect was subtle enough to dismiss as a trick of light.

Yamamoto approached carefully, remembering the game mechanics. In the game, this had been a literal glitch—a collision detection error that let players walk through what should have been solid rock. The developers had never patched it. Outside the fact that the game received so little patches, who could say? Right?

Players always had a theory that the developers knew the game was just too good and were lazy about things like that. Because of this, when people discovered such places, especially if it was not a onetime thing, they’d treat it as a legitimate secret.

Well, that aside, this was real life and a real world. Yamamoto could only imagine what this glitch meant, and the backstory behind it. Last time he walked through solid wall, he arrived at the secret base of a mid-game boss... who was to say what he would meet this time?

Well, he had thought of all this, so he didn’t need to contemplate it now that he was before the dungeon.

He reached out his hand, watching as it passed through apparently solid stone. The sensation was so strange, like pushing through thick syrup. At the same time, cold prickled his skin, but taking a breath, he stepped through.

As soon as he stepped through fully, he felt as if the world inverted itself.

For a disorienting moment, he existed in a space that was neither inside nor outside, neither real nor unreal. Then gravity reasserted itself, and he stumbled forward into the dungeon proper.

’Doesn’t get old, does it?’ He thought to himself, feeling as the sensation gradually lifted from him.

Looking around now, he was sure to be in the right place.

The entrance chamber was massive—fifty feet high, at least a hundred feet across. The walls were made of stone, carved with intricate patterns that looked ancient even in a world as this, their meanings lost to time. In contrast to that, the floor was polished marble, cracked and dusty but still showing traces of original grandeur.

Perhaps, the weirdest of it all was the fact that light came from nowhere and everywhere simultaneously, creating a sourceless illumination that defied physics and all logic.

’Yeah, this is the right place for sure.’ Yamamoto thought to himself sarcastically.

Along the walls, in orderly rows, there were empty weapon racks... Hundreds of them, perhaps even thousands, all extending into corridors that branched off in multiple directions.

Yamamoto walked deeper into the chamber, his footsteps echoing. In the game, this had been a minor curiosity—a dungeon with interesting lore but limited gameplay value. All there was to it really was just navigating the maze, avoid the traps, and claim the reward.

Standing there now, however, and seeing the scale of it, he couldn’t help but wonder, ’just what kind of kingdom needed an armory this vast?’

He would have thought that it was some kind of giant civilization, but seeing how normal sized the weapon racks were, he had no reason to cook up any strange ideas.

He thought of the game’s lore, the fragments of story that had been scattered throughout Lost World Online... Ancient kingdoms that had risen and fallen long before the current era, wars between gods and demons... Cataclysms that had reshaped continents.

Back then it was just a bunch of sweet and interesting weakly interconnected stories and folklore even within the game world, and even flavor text, but now...

’Oh boy.’