Early TNG Vol. 23 Chapter 3 Part 2

Full title: THE NEW GATE

Note: If you found any typos/mistakes, pls write them in the comment. Thanks.

Translator: Canon

____________________________________________

“This platform won’t fall. And if it comes to it, I’ll grab you and jump, Tiera.”

It wasn’t that there were no traps that collapsed footholds.

However, nothing like the total cave-in they’d just seen, only sections would give way, much like pitfall traps in ordinary dungeons.

With aerial jump skills, they could keep advancing even if a foothold crumbled.

“Right. Shin, jump—ah, s-sorry! I got startled—!?”

Now that she’d calmed down, Tiera realized exactly what she’d been doing. She quickly released her arms from Shin and retreated an exaggerated distance.

But the roulette wheel beneath them wasn’t a familiar, flat surface—it had uneven grooves—and she was wearing high heels. She lost her balance.

Shin moved instantly. Even with his stats limited, only the excess was capped; he was still at maxed values.

Catching her before she toppled was child’s play.

“You’re overreacting. I don’t mind, just breathe.”

Tiera’s sudden hug had surprised him, but Schnee had done the same mere moments before, so Shin wasn’t rattled.

“…Okay. Thanks.”

After setting Tiera back on her feet, Shin walked toward Schnee and the others. Retoneka was still clinging to Yuzuha.

“You could at least… react a little.”

Her sulky mutter reached his ears. At that distance, of course he could hear. Whether she realized that or not, Shin couldn’t very well respond in front of Schnee.

“Schnee and Tiera both… the outfits and the debuffs are syncing beautifully, huh.”

Milt finally chimed in, grinning as she sidled up to Shin.

“Pipe down. It’s not like I’m aiming for this.”

“But you don’t hate it, do you? Want me to try it too?”

She leaned forward teasingly. The difference in build and eye level, combined with that bunny outfit, made for considerable firepower.

Annoyed at the teasing yet suddenly aware Milt felt closer than usual, Shin took a step back.

“Hey, no need to pull away. I’m joking.”

“It’s the distance. Feels off.”

“Eeh—feels the same to me. The only thing that changed is your body, right? Is it that different?”

Shin was nearly the same height as Milt now. Behaviors and distances that never bothered him before felt oddly close from this eye level.

“Maybe because we’re eye to eye. It feels very close.”

“Ahh, eye level. True enough, our faces are closer. Personally, I like it better this way.”

Closing the gap again, Milt spoke frankly.

“I kind of regret not changing my height. I want to talk to you at this distance, Shin.”

Shin expected another joke, but Milt’s expression wasn’t her usual smirk—it looked a little lonely.

“It’s not that different, is it?”

“It is. When we’re together, I’m the only one who looks like a kid.”

Shin’s support characters tended to be tall. Aside from Sety, most were on the taller side, which naturally made the party’s average height higher. Milt’s “like a kid” wasn’t entirely unfair.

“That’s just how it looks. Besides, you’re the only one I can mess around with like this.”

A familiarity born of being former players—proof, in a way, that he trusted Milt.

“I know… but that’s a little different from what I want.”

“Cut me some slack for now. I’m not pretending to be dense. If we were stuck here forever, I might as well brazen it out… but that’s not us.”

Milt was slated to return to the real world with Shin.

Which meant their relationship had to be defined by that world’s terms.

Answering Milt’s feelings would be hard there. With Schnee already in the picture, he couldn’t promise the same place to both.

“Mmm… fine. I’ll back off for today.”

“That’s what I’d prefer.”

“That’s impossible. At least, for now.”

Milt knew there wasn’t a neat solution. Even so, her unwillingness to give up radiated from her words and her posture alike.

“…Got it. Either way, this isn’t the place to hash it out.”

Clearing the dungeon came first. And if they were going to talk, somewhere calmer would be better.

Judging by the piercing look from Tiera, others had heard enough already.

“Alright. Heads back in the game, move out.”

Before the conversation drifted further, Shin urged them onward. Their current foothold might yet drop on a delay.

“Focus on trap detection, but keep an eye on the perimeter. Things can fly in from off the path.”

Tiera reacted to the warning.

“Fly in?”

“Fallen debris, other casino props—stuff gets flung at you. Like boulder traps in dungeons, but… reskinned. Everything’s trying to slow you down.”

“So the platform can still collapse?”

“It can.”

Staring at the roulette wheel beneath them, Tiera asked. Shin answered plainly; he’d seen players fail that way.

“Let’s move. I’ve got a bad feeling.”

“Agreed. Pick up the pace a little.”

They crossed the roulette wheel and pushed through a zone lined with giant slot machines. Those were almost flat, easy going. The first real checkpoint waited beyond.

“If we land on that, it’ll either punch through… or drop us.”

“Yeah. I’ve seen that variant.”

Ahead lay a field of floating cards and coins forming the path. They’d chosen a route of connected objects, but not everything was truly continuous. There was no way to tell earlier, and now they had to deal with it.

Shin knew some tiles in these “tiled” sections weren’t functional footholds at all.

“How do we proceed?”

“Schnee and I will lead. Retoneka and Tiera, follow each of us. Yuzuha and Kagerou, support your sides.”

“What about me?”

“You’re the rear guard, Milt. No monsters yet, but that can change.”

“Roger.”

There were patterns where a giant monster chased you while smashing the platforms.

Shin exchanged a glance with Schnee and poured focus into his trap-detection skills.

Some footholds in view glowed red.

Those had traps. Yet a faint red sheen also spread across the entire field. Likely, additional mechanisms separate from the tiles themselves.

“Looks like we’re sensing the same things.”

“Yes. Same route?”

Shin shook his head.

“No. Keep some distance and take a different line. This isn’t just ‘step aside and you’re fine.’ If there’s a gimmick, bunching up wastes time on the clear.”

Some traps bagged you all at once if you clustered. Especially when the entire route gave off a faint trap response like this, pinpointing danger was impossible. In such cases, splitting the party was rule number one.

“Move.”

Shin took the left-leaning route with Tiera and Kagerou behind.

Schnee took the right with Retoneka and Yuzuha.

Milt followed Shin’s line with a short delay.

(Better to keep some slack.)

They avoided tiles that looked liable to drop and chose the widest footholds.

Many spots weren’t truly contiguous. Tiera could easily clear the gaps with her stats, but tension pinched her features.

Distance could make fear freeze your legs; a misjudged jump could come up short.

Speed wasn’t essential yet, so Shin prioritized safety in his picks.

“Schnee’s side is steady too.”

With Retoneka in tow, Schnee likewise chose conservative steps.

But as they advanced, footholds thinned while traps grew numerous. Avoiding trapped tiles also widened the gaps between safe ones.

On a long shot, Shin used 【Farsight】 to check ahead. It helped a little; he could make out the end of the choose-your-tiles zone.

“Almost there. Easy does it, one sure step at a time.”

Tiera nodded slowly and sprang to the next platform.

In that instant, every foothold pinged on trap detection—and coins and cards flashed gold for a heartbeat.

“Eh!?”

Even without detection, if the whole field lit up, something had triggered.

Tiera faltered mid-air, and unlike Shin, she didn’t have the skills to adjust her trajectory aloft.

Bracing to react, Shin felt the tile under him tilt sharply.

“Us too!?”

He glanced down; his foothold was slanting toward him.

He kicked off at once.

He’d been on a coin-type tile. From what he saw while airborne, it wasn’t falling.

Once he left it, the tilted coin began returning to level. Its center alone seemed fixed; shift the center of mass and the tile canted with it.

“So it doesn’t drop, but each tile has its own gimmick. That’s why the whole field was pinging.”

He angled toward Tiera, just in case.

Her target tile was a playing card stamped with the Queen of Spades. She wobbled on landing, shaken by the flash, but didn’t tumble off and quickly regained her stance.

Wondering if nothing would happen on his side, Shin landed beside her.

The footing matched the card’s “material”; some were hard like lacquered board, others soft like layered cardstock. The card beneath him sank slightly, and just as a bad feeling pricked his mind, there was a sharp rip.

The playing card split from both edges, and everyone standing on it dropped. Unlike the coins, the card itself didn’t remain; it fell with them.

“No way!?”

The suddenness left Tiera unable to react.

Shin signaled Kagerou—who was about to burst from the shadows—to hold, then activated the aerial movement skill 【Flying Shadow】.

Cradling Tiera, he bounded through the air to a coin platform.

He’d just experienced how its center acted like an axis; after landing, he shifted with the coin’s tilt and held a spot where the platform wouldn’t move.

“W-What just happened?”

“Each tile’s got a different gimmick. The coins want you to balance. The cards probably have a headcount or weight limit.”

When only Tiera and Kagerou were on it, the card hadn’t torn. Shin’s addition had clearly tripped the condition.

“You don’t know either? You’ve been here before, right?”

“The gimmicks are random. I don’t know everything. This variant’s new to me.”

It had been a limited-time event, and merely getting a shot at the dungeon involved luck; there were plenty of mechanics even Shin had never seen.

Just then, Milt’s 【Mind Chat】 chimed in.

“(Shin. We should hurry.)”

“(What’s up?)”

“(The platforms behind us are starting to drop. And I think they’ll fall faster and faster.)”

Milt seemed to recognize the pattern. Balancing atop a coin, she watched their backtrail.

“(Any read on how the tiles change?)”

“(You’ve felt the coin already. Cards have a weight limit, including gear, so be mindful of it. If you must use cards, pick higher numbers; the suit and face change the max load. As for chips, the more money you’re carrying, the harder the tile slings upward, so you should avoid them, Shin. Cross the upper or lower bounds, and it flags you as disqualified.)”

Shin relayed the intel to Schnee; her side had been thrown off by shifting tiles too.

Like him, Schnee was balancing on a coin with Retoneka in her arms, Yuzuha perched on her shoulder.

“Then slow and steady’s a bad idea; we push through fast. We’ve got a clear read on the traps now. Good to keep going?”

“Y-Yes. Please.”

Tiera’s cheeks were flushed. Shin currently held her in what you’d call a princess carry; paired with the bunny outfit, it was mortifying.

Milt eyed her with open envy.

“Lucky…”

“You can handle yourself solo,” Shin shot back.

He could jump while holding two people, but with more unknown traps ahead, he wouldn’t risk it.

Failures cost nothing here, true, but the feeling of plummeting into darkness could still become a trauma. This wasn’t the game era anymore. For now, Milt would have to endure.

Shin leveraged his skills to travel while touching as few platforms as possible. One leap covered a long stretch; they cleared the unstable tile field in short order.

He’d had Tiera and the others advance under their own power so they could experience things within a safe margin of support. When necessary, though, speed was an option.

“This dungeon is killer on the nerves.”

“Agreed.”

Tiera and Retoneka exhaled in relief at the stairs descending to the next layer. Just having solid ground underfoot was comforting enough.

“That’s about it for the first floor.”

“Yeah, basically a warm-up.”

Shin and Milt were utterly unfazed.

Tiera and Retoneka could only stare at them like they were incomprehensible.

Even so, back in the game era, people said clearing the first layer was a given unless it was your very first run. The debuffs weren’t fatal here either, so their calm wasn’t exactly surprising.

Once Tiera and Retoneka had settled, the party moved on. There was no time limit here; no need to rush.

“Alright, time for the debuff slots.”

A golden slot machine appeared before them as they headed for the next floor.

You couldn’t proceed unless you spun twice: once for clearing the floor, once for entering the next.

Praying for something harmless, Shin pulled the lever.

The reels stopped on a lightning icon with a cross-out mark, and another showing a helm, arms, torso, and legs; gear on each part split clean in two.

One sealed lightning-element magic skills. The other was among the most reviled debuffs of all.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Cloth tearing and metal shattering echoed from Shin’s entire body.

The debuff: total equipment loss. Everything from what he was wearing to what he had stored in his item box—every piece of equipment—was destroyed and unusable.

His outward outfit looked unchanged, but stat-wise, Shin was effectively unequipped.

Reading his expression, Tiera spoke up.

“Did you draw something… bad?”

“You could say that. I’ll explain after. First, everyone spin.”

He decided the explanation could wait and watched the results roll in, worse than expected.

“This has to be a joke.”

Shin didn’t bother to hide his irritation.

“I doubt we can call this a coincidence,” Schnee said flatly.

“One or two, sure, but everyone? They definitely tweaked the odds,” Milt added.

Debuff varieties numbered far beyond ten or twenty. The chance that five people and two beasts all pulled the same one at once? Astronomical.

Worse, everyone had hit “total equipment loss” on the first spin. Calling that “a coincidence” was a stretch past breaking, like saying it wasn’t zero, merely practically zero.

“We could ask Full Vegas what’s going on, but we can’t contact her from our side. If she’s meddling this much, she might show up, but that’s out of our hands. For now, we keep going. We’ll sort gear at the next floor’s entrance.”

“‘Sort gear’? But our equipment’s broken—wait, you can fix it?” Tiera asked.

Shin was a blacksmith. She’d guessed he might repair what was merely broken.

“No. Gear destroyed by the slot is unrepairable. We can’t use it in this dungeon.”

“Then how are we ‘sorting’ equipment?”

Shin flashed a grin at her puzzled frown.

“Completed equipment is unusable, but we can make new ones. The debuff targets finished gear. Materials are still fair game. As long as your production skills aren’t sealed, you can craft fresh equipment.”

“Doesn’t that make the debuff pointless?”

“Not really. Most gear uses rare materials. Hardly anyone keeps enough spare materials in their item box to make a second set on the spot. After this dungeon launched, more people started stockpiling, but not many.”

Shin himself had begun carrying a material stash once he’d heard about Full Vegas’s dungeon.

“Just in case monsters do spawn, everyone take one of these.”

He distributed shards of 『Drop of Erathem』 from his item box.

Each was about sixty cemels long; roughly twenty cemels of slim grip and forty cemels of a blade-like, sharpened section. The hilt and blade were a single piece, shaped like a short dagger.

There were five in total, nearly identical, too uniform to be natural.

“Are these… weapons? But didn’t the debuff destroy our gear?”

“These count as materials. Drops of Erathem can be carved directly into weapons, but if you stop one step before it’s a finished weapon, the debuff doesn’t apply.”

They looked like weapons, but their category was material; no different from a metal ingot or a length of timber you could swing in a pinch.

“Since they aren’t complete weapons, their performance tops out at about Legend-grade sharpness, but that’s still better than nothing.”

“Legend-grade is not a ‘better than nothing’ rating,” Tiera retorted, Retoneka nodding silently beside her.

“I know. But depending on the generated floors, some monsters won’t even be affected by Legend-grade gear.”

“I didn’t check earlier—what with the outfits and that Full Vegas person stealing the show—but… what tier of monsters appear here? From what you’re saying, this place sounds extremely dangerous.”

If Legend-grade couldn’t make a dent, that meant foes that, in this world, only Chosen Ones could hope to face. For that to be standard here, this dungeon’s difficulty was no joke.

“It really just comes down to luck. Like any other dungeon, the stronger monsters tend to appear deeper down. But if the lower layers are spawning monsters over level 800, then even the upper layers will treat level 600-class enemies as run-of-the-mill spawns. For reference, the lowest level I ever saw for the final boss was around 300, and the highest was well over 900.”

“That’s way too wide of a range! At the high end, there’s practically no chance of winning.”

Hearing “over 900” left Tiera completely aghast. For her, that number was so far beyond reach that even with every precaution, victory was essentially impossible. At that level, depending on the debuffs in play, the only sensible strategy was to run.

“Well, they don’t call it the Gambling Dungeon for nothing. The swings are that severe. Still, if you set aside winning or losing, this place is actually a godsend for production classes like me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Everything you bring in here is just a ‘recreation.’ So no matter how much you use, once you leave, it all resets. Well, technically, it’s not really used at all, so maybe that’s not quite the right way to put it. Anyway, what it means is that as long as you’ve got the materials, you can do trial runs with rare items that you’d never dare waste outside. Even just testing out planned item builds works fine.”

The one whose expression shifted at those words was Retoneka. Rare materials were too valuable to use frivolously, and every decision about how to spend them had to be made with the utmost caution. But here, those worries didn’t exist. You could fail as many times as you wanted.

“For the record, the results of a prototype here will match what happens outside too.”

“Really!?”

“Yeah. That’s why some people would dive in carrying rare materials, ignoring the actual dungeon run. Honestly, I was one of them.”

That particular mechanic had stirred enough uproar that players debated whether it was a bug. But, once the event period with its high encounter rate ended, deliberately targeting Full Vegas’s dungeon became nearly impossible, and people resigned themselves. Wandering in search of her dungeon while loaded with rare materials was far less efficient than grinding skills at a safe base or burning through stockpiles on controlled experiments.

“Shin, looks like it’s time to go.”

“Oh, so that feature’s still in place.”

Prompted by Milt, Shin looked back at the slot machine he’d just spun. Its frame was flashing brilliantly.

This was a safe zone, devoid of monsters, but loiter here too long and the slot machine would explode as if to tell you to move on. The explosion was said to be powerful enough to blast even top-tier players to powder. That wasn’t public knowledge through official channels either; it had been confirmed when daredevil players deliberately ate the blast just to see if they could tank it, then reported their findings online.

𑁋

Next→