First Exploration

The next day, after bidding Heiter farewell, the three followed a path northwest of the Holy City into the forest. The woods still held the morning chill of early autumn, and the fallen leaves were damp with dew. Spring and autumn were the most comfortable times of the year, with temperatures neither too cold nor too hot. It was hard to imagine that the same place could experience the extremes of summer and winter.

After walking for about half a day, they finally spotted the abandoned chapel marked on the map, deep in the forest. Most of its roof had collapsed, vines covered its gray-white stone walls, and its doors and windows had long since rotted away. A few birds had even built nests there.

By all appearances, it was nothing more than an ordinary ruin that had been forgotten for years.

"Lady Frieren, where is the entrance to the dungeon?"

Fern looked around and asked Frieren.

"Try finding it yourself. Finding the entrance is an important part of exploring a dungeon, after all."

Fern had no choice but to summon her staff and gradually spread her mana out to sense her surroundings.

But the air was filled with all sorts of jumbled reactions from trees, moss, the birds and insects living in the ruins, and so on, making it difficult for her to identify anything truly unusual.

"The area is too large. Don't try to sense the entire chapel at once. Concentrate your mana and slowly check the places where an entrance might be."

Frieren reminded her.

"Yes."

Fern readjusted her perception and eventually sensed something strange beneath the altar.

"Lady Frieren, Lord Lorenzo, there's something beneath the altar. My mana can't enter directly. It should be concealed by some kind of spell."

Fern opened her eyes.

"That's correct."

Frieren nodded.

The people who built dungeons really were strange. To keep outsiders out, they naturally had to set up a sufficiently powerful protective spell at the entrance, but the stronger the spell was, the more obvious its effect on the surrounding mana became, making it easier for mages to notice that something was amiss.

It was like someone putting more than a dozen locks on an ordinary wooden door to keep thieves out of a room. Others might not have known where the valuables were before, but one look at that wall and they would immediately understand.

It was the magical equivalent of putting up a sign saying, "No silver buried here."

After the protective spell was dispelled with ease, a narrow staircase leading underground appeared before the three of them.

"I did it."

Fern looked at the entrance she had opened, a clear hint of delight appearing on her face.

"Well done."

Frieren praised her.

"But once you enter a dungeon, don't let a single success make you drop your guard. Some dungeons have a second trap right behind the entrance, specifically to attack people who get carried away after breaking the seal."

Lorenzo added this as well.

"Some people even set up a powerful protective spell to make others think there must be valuable treasure inside. After the intruders go to enormous trouble to open the entrance, they find nothing but traps and powerful monsters. The entire dungeon was built from the start to lure people inside and kill them."

"R-really?"

After hearing Lorenzo's description, Fern looked even more nervous, as though her view of the world had been shaken.

"Can't be helped. People's hearts are treacherous."

Lorenzo spoke earnestly.

"Don't listen to him."

Frieren glanced at Lorenzo and spoke to Fern.

"There might not even be one dungeon like that in several hundred years. I've only encountered two or three myself so far."

"So there really are dungeons like that?!"

It seemed Fern hadn't been comforted at all by what Frieren had said. An excessive awareness of risks really wasn't suited to educating children.

"All right, from now on, you can just be a little more careful when exploring dungeons. Besides, this dungeon definitely isn't the kind that lures people in to kill them."

Frieren glared at Lorenzo, clearly telling him not to frighten Fern with any more of these scary stories.

"And with Lorenzo and me here, you don't need to worry too much."

This time, Fern finally nodded seriously.

"I understand."

After making a few preparations, the three set foot on the stairs leading down. To test Fern, they deliberately had her take the lead.

Not long after they went underground, the light from above disappeared completely, leaving them in darkness so deep they couldn't see their hands in front of their faces. Fern raised her staff and summoned a bright ball of light.

At the bottom, a corridor paved with gray stone bricks appeared ahead. It looked exactly like the sort of place that would have traps.

Fern was just about to step forward when she suddenly remembered something. She stopped, crouched down, and carefully examined the floor ahead.

A layer of dust covered the corridor, but one stone tile a short distance from the stairs was a little darker than the rest. There was also a faint gap around its edge that the surrounding tiles didn't have.

She moved the ball of light over to the walls. Several rows of tiny holes, concealed by dust, were spread across the walls on both sides.

"There should be a mechanism beneath that floor tile. If we step on it, something will probably shoot out of the walls on both sides."

Fern turned to Lorenzo and Frieren as she spoke.

"That's correct. So what should you do next?"

Frieren asked.

Fern thought for a moment and aimed her staff at the stone tile. An invisible force then descended and slowly pressed down on it. With a faint click, the tile sank a little, and a series of turning gears suddenly sounded from within the walls on both sides.

Dozens of short arrows shot from the holes at once, crisscrossing the corridor. Two of the holes even spewed flames. They clearly intended to "kill the intruders first, then roast them."

"That really was dangerous."

Fern looked at the trap before her and spoke with lingering fear.

After they passed through the trapped corridor, the space ahead gradually grew wider.

Indistinct reliefs began to appear on both sides of the stone walls. They depicted various robed figures who seemed to be conducting some kind of ritual, but after the erosion of countless years, most of the images were no longer recognizable.

Fern brought the ball of light close to the wall and examined it for a while.

"Was this a mage's workshop before?"

"Probably."

Frieren reached out and brushed the dust off the surface of a relief.

"Judging by the images on the walls, it may originally have been an underground facility for researching magic. The chapel was built aboveground later to conceal the real entrance."

"It's also possible that the church took someone else's house back then and didn't inspect it carefully during the forced demolition, so they ended up building a chapel right on top of an underground workshop."

Lorenzo said.

"Maybe that person was a powerful mage who grew tired of fighting and killing and chose to live in seclusion. He built the house with his late wife, but who would have thought that on a dark and stormy night, the church would come knocking? As it turned out, they'd taken a fancy to the scenery here. They knocked the mage unconscious in a sneak attack, and when he woke up, he found that the house, his only remaining reminder of her, had already been turned into a chapel. So he tampered with the altar and lay low here, preparing to wipe out the humiliation, swearing to reclaim everything that once belonged to him..."

"What a cliché plot. I don't think many people would read it even if it were written as a novel."

That was Frieren's assessment.