Chapter 111: Hermes Boots
In the center of the chamber, floating gently in midair, sat a small, square-shaped gate, no larger than the size of an average human head.
Leon approached it slowly, his earlier caution returning despite the empty stillness of the chamber around him.
He circled it once, studying it carefully from every angle, but found nothing else in the room worth his attention. Just the small, glowing gate hovering silently at the heart of the dungeon.
He reached out and pressed his hand directly against its rippling surface.
[Do you want to claim the dungeon’s treasure?] [Note: Doing so means the dungeon will get destroyed after a few hours.] [Yes / No]
"Yes," he muttered, his voice echoing faintly against the smooth curved walls of the chamber.
The instant the word left his mouth, the small gate reacted immediately, its rippling surface surging forward and closing tightly around his entire forearm, swallowing his hand and wrist whole in a wash of warm, pink light.
He felt no pain, only a strange, pulling sensation, like something reaching deep into the gate’s core and drawing something back out through the length of his arm.
A few seconds later, the gate released him, its glowing form flickering once before disappearing entirely, collapsing into nothing as though it had never been there at all.
In its place, hovering gently where the gate had floated only moments before, sat a plain, ordinary pair of black leather boots.
Their surfaces scuffed and worn, looking for all the world like something a common traveler might have picked up at any market stall.
[Leather Boots (Common)]
Leon stared at the boots for a long moment, his earlier anticipation draining out of him almost instantly.
He let out a heavy sigh, running a hand down his face.
"It’s not a sword," he muttered, unable to keep the disappointment out of his voice.
He reached out anyway and grabbed them out of the air, turning them over briefly in his hands, inspecting the stitching and craftsmanship with a critical eye.
[Would you like to extract legendary item from this treasure?]
[Yes / No]
"Yes," he muttered, his voice echoing softly against the smooth curved walls of the chamber.
The instant the word left his mouth, two fresh notifications flared into existence in front of his eyes.
[Talent Activated!]
[Extracting Legendary Draw...]
The plain black leather boots resting in his palm began to tremble almost immediately, the same way the feathered mask had trembled only a short while earlier.
Thin cracks of golden light split across their surface, spreading outward in jagged lines until the entire shape of the boots seemed to dissolve into shifting motes of light.
Leon watched, transfixed, as the light gathered and reshaped itself in the air just above his open hand.
The plain, ordinary leather melted away entirely, replaced by something far smaller and far more delicate, until what remained hovering there was a pair of beautiful, small golden wings.
He stared at them for a long moment, genuinely caught off guard by the sight.
The wings were shaped unmistakably like a bird’s, each individual feather rendered in fine, gleaming detail, the gold catching the chamber’s soft pink glow and throwing faint, shimmering light across the walls around him.
They looked almost too delicate to be real, more like an ornament crafted by some master artisan than an actual item pulled from the depths of a cleared dungeon.
He turned his hand slowly, letting the wings drift and catch the light from different angles, still processing exactly what he was looking at.
He had never once come across anything shaped quite like this. It didn’t resemble a weapon. It didn’t resemble armor. It barely resembled anything practical at all.
The confusion only deepened the longer he studied them. If this was meant to be some kind of accessory, its purpose wasn’t obvious in the slightest, and the sheer strangeness of its appearance left him more puzzled than impressed, at least for the moment.
He turned the pair over carefully between his fingers, noting just how small they actually were, barely the length of his palm from base to tip. That detail alone made him doubt his first instinctive assumption.
Wings, by nature, suggested flight, but a pair this small seemed far too delicate and undersized to actually lift a grown man off the ground, let alone carry him any real distance through the air.
’What exactly are these things for, then?’ he thought, frowning slightly as he turned the golden pair over once more, searching for some hidden detail he might have missed. Nothing about their design offered any obvious clue.
Before he could puzzle over it any further, another notification flickered into view, hovering steadily in the air just beside the wings themselves.
[Legendary Draw: Hermes’ Boots]
Leon’s eyebrows shot up the instant he read the name.
Whatever he had expected the reward to be called, boots hadn’t factored into it at all, not with a pair of wings sitting plainly in his hand and absolutely nothing resembling footwear anywhere in sight.
He looked back and forth between the notification and the golden wings several times, half expecting the boots themselves to materialize somewhere nearby, perhaps hidden just out of view.
They didn’t. All he could see, no matter how carefully he searched, was the same small, delicate pair of wings resting in his palm, gleaming faintly under the chamber’s dim light.
His first instinct, the moment the wings had first taken shape, had leaned toward flight, some kind of item meant to let its wearer soar through the air the way a bird might.
That thought only grew stronger now that the item’s official name had been revealed, boots or not. But the size still didn’t add up.
No matter how he looked at them, he couldn’t picture wings this small generating anywhere near enough lift to carry a grown man’s full weight off the ground.
Yet the notification clearly stated boots, not wings, which meant somewhere in the gap between what he was seeing and what the system was actually calling the item, there had to be some detail he wasn’t fully grasping yet.
’Hermes...’ he thought, turning the unfamiliar name over slowly in his mind, the same way he’d turned over Medusa’s name back in that strange, quiet field. ’That’s another one I know nothing about.’
First Arthur, then Athena, then Medusa, and now Hermes, each name attached to some legendary item passing through his hands, each one apparently carrying weight and history he had absolutely no context for.
He made a quiet, mental note to actually look into it properly the next time he had a real moment to breathe, assuming that moment ever actually came.
[Name: Hermes’ Boots]
[Grade: Legendary]
[Description: A pair of winged boots once worn by Hermes, herald and messenger of the gods, capable of carrying its wearer across any distance faster than thought itself. Woven from divine feathers blessed with the god’s own swiftness, the boots respond only to those bold enough to chase what lies beyond their reach.] [When equipped, AGL: +10000, END: +2000]
[Skills: Fleeting Step (A-rank), Hermes’ Dash (S-rank), Herald’s Sprint (SS-rank), Godspeed Vanish (SS-rank), Godly Traverse (SSS-rank)]
[Note: Hermes has fully accepted you. All effects and skills are unlocked at full power.]
Leon read through the entire display carefully, his eyes lingering on that last line the longest.
Unlike all the other legendary items he had gotten up till now, which made it clear that he wasn’t accepted and couldn’t access their full power, this one was very different.
Hermes’ Boots, apparently, didn’t care about acknowledgment or approval.
Leon stared at the notification hovering in front of him again, reading the numbers over and over, half convinced he’d misread something.
Ten thousand agility!
He’d seen plenty of impressive stat boosts over the course of the day already, Excalibur alone had given boosts in the thousands across multiple attributes.
However this was different. This wasn’t spread across five separate categories, diluted and balanced the way Excalibur’s stats had been.
This was a single, staggering number, concentrated entirely into one attribute, dwarfing anything else he currently had access to by an almost absurd margin.
And beneath it, sitting quietly among the listed skills, was something that made his breath catch even further.
An SSS-rank skill.
He hadn’t even unlocked any of his legendary item SSS abilities, still needing to complete their necessary requirements before he could do so.
Yet here, in a legendary item he’d pulled from nothing more than a common-grade pair of leather boots, sat an SSS-rank skill already fully unlocked, waiting for him to use without any conditions attached whatsoever.
’Equip,’ he thought, unable to hold back his curiosity any longer.
The moment the thought crossed his mind, the small golden wings resting in his palm shimmered brightly, dissolving into streaks of soft, glowing light.
The light split cleanly in two, each half drifting down toward his legs before settling directly against his ankles.
A second later, the wings reformed there instead, each one now anchored just above his heels, folded neatly against the sides of his calves.