Chapter 108: Free treasure
’Isn’t that obvious?’ Leon thought, mildly incredulous, glancing back at the pile of dead chickens scattered around him as if the answer were written plainly across the entire street.
He smiled wryly at the old man regardless, keeping his tone light. "Of course," he said simply.
The reaction from the crowd was immediate. A collective gasp rippled through the gathered civilians, several of them exchanging disbelieving glances at one another.
They then turned back to Leon, staring at him now the way someone might stare at a ghost that had just wandered casually into their midst.
For the next few seconds, nothing but silence stretched between them, thick and strange, broken only by the distant, fading sounds of screaming still echoing from further down the street.
It was a young boy standing near the front of the crowd who finally broke it, his voice carrying easily through the quiet.
"Nah, that can’t be right," he said, wrinkling his nose as he looked Leon up and down. "I thought players were supposed to be cool. How could this dirty, stinking guy be a player?"
A vein visibly popped along the side of Leon’s head, his jaw tightening as he fought down the sudden, petty urge to march over and smack the kid upside the head for the comment.
He glanced down at himself again, taking in the sorry state of his sewage-stained clothes and grime-covered skin.
’I really am dirty and stinking, though,’ he admitted internally, unable to argue with the boy’s basic observation even as the delivery irritated him.
Still, irritation aside, something about the crowd’s overall reaction didn’t sit right with him. It wasn’t just the boy’s blunt comment.
Every single person gathered here seemed genuinely, completely unfamiliar with the very concept of a player, staring at him like the word itself belonged to some distant legend rather than an everyday reality.
The old man stepped forward again quickly, bowing his head slightly in apology on the boy’s behalf.
"Forgive them," he said, his voice tinged with quiet embarrassment. "Many of them have never actually seen a player before, not in person."
Leon’s eyes widened sharply at that.
"Never seen a player?" he repeated, genuinely thrown off by the statement. "How’s that even possible?"
Players, whatever their rank, were common enough figures in the world he knew, especially in a city large enough to have its own guild headquarters.
The idea that an entire crowd of people could stand here, having apparently never laid eyes on one before today, didn’t make any sense to him at all.
The old man bit down on his lip slightly, hesitating for a moment before answering.
"Yeah..." he said quietly, his tone carrying a strange, uncomfortable weight to it. "But it’s the truth."
Leon turned away from the old man, his gaze drifting past the wrecked street until it settled on something far more important than the crowd’s questions.
In the distance, hovering above the rooftops, a pink dungeon gate shimmered faintly against the grey afternoon sky, its surface rippling slowly like the surface of disturbed water.
He studied it carefully for a moment, watching for any sign of movement within the swirling portal.
However, no more chickens burst from its surface, no fresh wave of monsters spilled out into the already devastated street.
The gate simply sat there, which could only mean one thing: every last monster that had been sealed inside the dungeon had already swarmed out, leaving nothing left within its depths to guard whatever treasure remained.
’Still...’ Leon thought, his earlier frustration over the lack of drops resurfacing slightly, ’I have to claim the dungeon treasure for myself.’
An empty dungeon, cleared entirely of its monsters, almost always left behind a treasure at its core, untouched and unclaimed, simply waiting for whoever was bold enough to walk in and take it.
Given everything he’d already been through today, he wasn’t about to let an opportunity like that slip past him.
Beside him, the old man cleared his throat gently, drawing Leon’s attention back down to street.
"So..." the man asked, his tone polite and a little hesitant, "what’s your name, sir?"
Leon paused at the question, considering it carefully for a moment before answering.
With his disguise firmly in place thanks to the mask, his real face completely hidden beneath someone else’s features, it made sense to keep his actual identity buried as well.
Besides, the Player Guild Association were actively hunting him, so the fewer people who knew his real name in a place like this, the better.
He cleared his throat. "Adam," he said simply, settling on the first believable name that came to mind.
The old man’s ears perked up slightly at the answer, his eyes flickering as he filed the name away carefully in his memory.
"Thank you, Sir Adam..." the old man said, bowing his head low once more, his voice thick with sincerity this time. "You saved us."
Leon gave a small nod in response, shifting his focus back to the dungeon gate.
Leon studied the swirling crimson surface of the gate for a long moment, his earlier excitement slowly giving way to a more calculated wariness.
A thought settled uneasily in his mind as he replayed the fight he’d just finished.
’I’m not sure the monster boss came out with these ones...’ he thought, turning the idea over carefully.
Every single chicken he had cut down across the ruined street had looked completely identical to the last. Same size. Same four powerful legs. Same crude, mutated features repeated over and over without a single visible difference between them.
Not one had stood out from the rest in size, coloring, or strength, which struck him as odd the more he thought about it.
In his experience, boss monsters almost never blended in with the regular enemies of a dungeon.
They were larger, usually far more grotesque, and carried a strength gap noticeable even at a glance, something that set them clearly apart from the swarm of lesser creatures that typically poured out ahead of them.
If none of the chickens he’d already killed carried any of those telltale signs, that could only mean one thing.
The boss itself likely hadn’t come out at all. It was still somewhere inside the dungeon, waiting, almost certainly guarding whatever treasure sat untouched at its core.
That settled it in his mind. He would still need to step through the gate himself, track the boss down, kill it, and claim the reward directly, rather than simply picking through whatever scraps the fleeing chickens happened to drop along the way.
As he turned his attention back toward the gate’s shimmering surface, a new image slowly began forming within the swirling crimson light, faint at first before sharpening into full clarity.
It was the outline of an enormous chicken head, far larger and more detailed than any of the creatures he’d already fought.
Unlike the others, this one bore not one, but two jagged crowns of feathers rising from the top of its skull, curling backward like twin blades.
Leon’s eyes lit up the instant the image resolved fully.
’That’s it,’ he thought, a sharp, familiar thrill of anticipation cutting cleanly through the exhaustion weighing down his limbs. ’The boss monster.’
He was already shifting his weight forward, ready to move toward the gate, when a sudden, unmistakable presence settled in directly behind him.
It was cold, heavy, and pressed against the back of his neck with enough weight to stop him mid-step.
He spun around sharply, his body tensing on instinct, and found himself staring up at a tall man hovering effortlessly several feet in the air.
A deep, humorless frown was carved into the man’s sharp features as he looked down at Leon, his expression carrying an unmistakable air of quiet disdain.
The stranger’s hair was cut short and pale, a washed-out shade of blonde that caught what little light filtered through the smoke-hazed sky.
His eyes, by contrast, were a flat, unreadable black, fixed directly on Leon without so much as blinking, studying him the way someone might study an insect that had wandered somewhere it clearly didn’t belong.
Before Leon could get a single word out, before he could even ask who the man was or where he’d come from, a long, blazing arrow of pure fire began condensing rapidly in the air just above the stranger’s outstretched hand.
It formed in an instant, crackling and hissing with barely restrained heat, before launching forward with a sharp, violent crack, streaking directly past Leon and straight toward the massive boss monster’s looming image still forming across the surface of the gate.
Leon’s frown deepened instantly as he watched the arrow tear through the air, his earlier caution shifting fast into something sharper, more territorial.
’Don’t think I’ll let you steal my potential drop,’ he thought, punching at the arrow.
Immediately, a powerful shockwave blew out of his hands, hitting the flame arrow and extinguishing it like it was nothing but a candle.