What Sein Dungeon's adventurers had long since grown used to might read as pure nightmare fuel to adventurers from anywhere else. At least visually, most of it genuinely earned that description.
Meanwhile, the Sein-side adventurers, experiencing a proper fight against a genuinely normal elite monster for the first time in what felt like ages, discovered something they hadn't expected — ease. Comfort, even.
Maybe it came down to some quirk in the matching algorithm, but during these random encounters, Sein's own adventurers rarely ran into monsters from Sein's own roster.
Adventurer death rates dropped visibly across the board.
Sein's income might take a modest hit over these two days.
Fine, though. Special circumstances warranted it. Consider it an event benefit — plenty of time to make it back afterward.
Watching Sein's own adventurers fight monsters imported from other dungeons made for admittedly dull viewing. Both process and outcome tended to land almost suspiciously consistent.
Watching adventurers from other dungeons fight Sein's own monsters, though?
Genuinely thrilling.
Inside Unicorn Dungeon — a place drowning in girlish charm and Barbie-pink decor — a Grafted Scion sporting a lobster's head crawled out of a fresh meteor crater and started up a full windmill-swing game with an unsuspecting couple standing nearby.
Inside Glory Dungeon, where endless gladiatorial death-combat counted as an honor, a demi-human Swordmaster and his demi-human Swordsman companion dropped straight into battle. The pair's Recording Stone crackled to life with one of Vergil's genuinely hype battle themes.
Inside Mistwood Dungeon — known widely for cultivating battle pets — everyone gathered nervously around a fresh crater. A slim, blue shape slowly emerged from the mist.
Cold sweat broke across every forehead.
They looked closer.
A cute, entirely adorable Chillet.
How did that end up in here?
Almost certainly one of Wade's finger slips.
"Ha — no combat power on that thing at all. Look at it!"
The next instant, the Chillet's expression shifted to something reading unmistakably as: "You smell delicious, buddy."
It lunged straight for the nearest adventurer. In the same breath, a massive blizzard erupted around it, wiping out any real chance of resistance.
A top-tier Pal — every stat maxed, a full spread of premium traits rolled.
Above every participating dungeon, the meteor shower and its black hole persisted. Any adventurer who stared too long got pulled straight in — only to meet Astel and be greeted with an instant first-encounter kill.
Inside Giant Stone Dungeon, known widely as the world's living mineral museum, the Fallingstar Beast charged headlong toward the adventurers ahead of it. Everywhere its "bull cart" of a body passed, mountains cracked apart, nothing left standing in its wake. Purple lightning sparked across every footfall, gravity itself bending abnormally around it.
Giant Stone Dungeon operated as an open dungeon — no cap on simultaneous exploring numbers. And the Fallingstar Beast, naturally, landed in one of the densest crowds available.
The sudden strike sent blood and flesh scattering in every direction.
"Halt right there!"
A Great Warrior burst from the crowd, slashing fiercely at the beast's skull. Genuinely trying to stop the bull cart outright.
Cheers erupted through the gathered onlookers.
"Look! It's Samida, the Silver-Rank! We're saved!"
The Fallingstar Beast took the blow straight to the head without so much as slowing its pace. One collision later, the Great Warrior had been converted into a distant, twinkling star.
The crowd booed.
Then another roar rang out — a new adventurer stepping in.
"Look! Laskok, Silver-Rank! We're saved!"
Blink, and he too was a star.
Another round of booing.
Then another. And another.
"Look! It's [name]! We're saved!"
(cheers)
"Pfft-BANG!"
(sent flying)
"BOOOOO—!"
The crowd's reaction cycle had, by now, fully calcified into ritual: cheer the hero's entrance → hero becomes a shooting star → collective booing → cheer the next hero's entrance.
Every showoff-inclined adventurer, apparently, had developed exactly two possible outcomes — divine and unstoppable, or thoroughly, embarrassingly unbelievable.
So far, only the second category had shown up.
"Bunch of idiots with zero sense of self-preservation," came a voice from off to the side, distinctly unimpressed.
A middle-aged man, resembling Leon from the strategy group in maybe seventy or eighty percent of his features — though carrying a considerably more cunning cast to his expression — limped away, apparently heading straight for Giant Stone Dungeon's teleportation gate.
Leon's father.
Teppi Bask.
Fleeing?
"Heheh — the God of Fortune really does bless me. I'm the only one who made it out of that first wave alive!"
Just moments before, he'd been one of the unlucky targets caught in the Fallingstar Beast's opening strike. Every teammate had gone down to that bull-shaped nightmare. He'd walked away with nothing worse than one banged-up leg — sheer luck, blending into the crowd, letting the target shift elsewhere.
Incredible luck, genuinely.
And the reason he was now turning back had nothing to do with actually fleeing. A dungeon, after all, only allowed one entry per day. Leaving now would be wasteful in the extreme.
Right now, Giant Stone Dungeon — no, all forty-plus participating dungeons —
Were caught in some kind of unified anomaly.
To Teppi, this obviously represented a once-in-a-century opportunity. Most people, evidently, hadn't caught on yet.
"The wilder the storm, the more valuable the fish. More anomaly means better rewards. Competition's already begun, right now, this instant."
As the man who'd single-handedly hauled the Bask family up from a disgraced, title-stripped noble line into today's prosperous merchant house, Teppi might have had genuine flaws as a father.
But when it came to sniffing out real profit, he'd never once lost to anybody.
The moment he'd spotted the Glory Stele appear inside Glory Dungeon, he'd understood — this was worth genuinely competing over. Top ten, at absolute minimum.
An anomaly at this scale meant the Stele's rewards had to be extraordinary. If he could claim them for himself —
"Heheh. Leon, my beloved son. Daddy's coming back around to beat you up."
Ever since Leon had beaten him publicly, something in Teppi had reawakened. Revenge, without question, was mandatory.
After half a lifetime spent as a merchant, he'd picked the knuckle-dusters of his youth back up. He'd poured a genuinely enormous sum into hiring martial-arts instructors for a brutal training crash-course, dragging himself back to something approaching his old Silver-Rank strength.
Age had capped him there, though — this was his practical ceiling now.
He and Leon's older sister, Megan, had split off, each chasing their own path toward further training. He had no idea where Megan had ended up.
Sein Dungeon, maybe?
Not that Teppi himself had any intention of going anywhere near it.
The reason, obviously, traced straight back to Leon. Sein was where his son had gained his strength.
And, deep down, Teppi carried a genuine streak of stubbornness — he had no interest in walking the same path Leon had walked.
So he'd wandered instead into Giant Stone Dungeon, located in the Warrior Nation. Somewhere steeped in martial tradition, entirely disconnected from Sein.
He'd heard, of course, that Sein Dungeon was a genuinely rare specimen — one capable of continued expansion.
"But there's no way it's expanding all the way out to my property, right?"
Teppi had bought land in the Warrior Nation and built himself a house there. Apparently, the plot had once housed the ruins of some ancient dungeon — long since abandoned, nothing left but a bare teleportation gate.
A few days back, Teppi had bulldozed the whole thing flat, laying his home's foundation right over the spot the gate had once occupied.
"Finally back."
Sitting in the plaza where Giant Stone Dungeon's teleportation gate stood, Teppi found a spot and settled down to tend his wounds.
Once treated, he pushed through the crowd and tossed his tied-off Minior into the Altar.
A red one.
He selected Red Fang Dungeon's reward in exchange — a drop of Red Wyvern Blood, strengthening his body and accelerating his own recovery.
A few onlookers, seeing this, seemed to grasp something all at once — immediately calling friends over, sprinting toward the dungeon's depths.
Teppi watched them go, a flicker of real impatience crossing his brow.
His current position on the Glory Stele sat firmly in third — right behind Roger and Temud.
No idea who the former was. The latter, though, was Warrior Nation royalty, so a high ranking there struck him as entirely expected.
"So this Roger's got to be an adventurer too, then."
Teppi needed to hold his current edge. But he also understood — most adventurers hadn't fully caught on yet. Once they did, the standings on that stele would descend into genuine, brutal competition.
He needed to move fast, capturing as many Miniors as possible while he still had the edge. Which left one clear task ahead of him.
"Hey — young man, yes, you."
Teppi waved down a genuinely green-looking adventurer.
"Haven't claimed your Altar supplies yet, have you? Perfect — I'll cover it. Go grab your package."
Asked which dungeon's supplies he wanted, Teppi didn't hesitate.
"Sein!"
Sure, he'd sworn off Sein with a great deal of righteous conviction earlier. But the supplies were simply too useful to pass up.
He couldn't use magic. Any Minior he caught had to come through bare hands or tools. And a Poké Ball, without question, beat rope and similar gear by a wide margin.
"Sein Dungeon? Think I've heard the name, but it's fuzzy — doesn't seem like a particularly well-known place. Why not pick something established, like Red Fang or White Hole instead?"
The adventurer asked, genuinely curious.
"Why're you asking so many questions? Just pick it."
The young man shrugged and handed over Sein's whole package. Walking off, he muttered to himself:
"Strange old man. If it were me, I'd definitely pick somewhere better-known... where have I even heard Sein before? Can't place it."
"Tch. Clueless kid."
Teppi watched him leave.
"Give it a few more days. Sein'll be burned into your brain by then."
Throwing money at the problem, Teppi bought over a dozen sets of Sein's package outright, hired another rotating batch of "temporary partners," and launched a full assault into Giant Stone Dungeon's beginner zone — Black Quarry.
One of the few spots in the whole dungeon where the sky remained visible. Its monsters amounted to nothing more than standard stone golems.
Capturing Minior here felt genuinely safe by comparison.
Teppi had originally brought along a servant whose entire job was purchasing Sein supplies on his behalf. Unfortunately, that servant had been flattened by the Fallingstar Beast earlier.
Which left Teppi doing the running himself.
His hired adventurers, meanwhile, carried wildly inconsistent skill. Heavy-handed, poor control, entirely incapable of managing a target's remaining health properly. Either the Minior died outright from too much force, or it escaped entirely.
Genuinely constant trouble for the whole operation.
"Damn it. Guess I actually need to train my own crew for this..."
Pile after pile of Poké Balls thrown out. Four or five hours gone.
Total haul: eight Minior. Only four caught properly with balls — the rest currently just being held in adventurers' arms.
On the walk back toward the teleport gate plaza to restock, Teppi's mood had soured noticeably. He looked around, hunting for scenery to distract himself with.
"Is that... the Mirror Plain Dungeon's signature item, the [Super Vision Mirror]?"
An adventurer nearby exclaimed in surprise.
"Mirror Plain runs three branches across different countries. Super Vision Mirrors are scattered throughout each one — they let you watch, in real time, whoever's passing a mirror in one of the other branches. Usually used to disorient adventurers exploring inside."
Something clicked, briefly, in Teppi's thoughts. If that was really its function — maybe this particular mirror let them randomly glimpse adventurers from any one of the forty-plus participating dungeons?
Genuinely curious what everyone else was up to, he walked toward it. The surface flickered.
Several figures resolved into view — standing in front of a matching mirror on the other side, staring back.
And when he saw who it was —
Teppi's expression froze solid.
Leon's brow furrowed at the exact same instant.
Father and son, not laid eyes on each other in far too long, meeting entirely by chance in this exact moment.
Both of them, at the same time, caught sight of the Poké Balls clutched in each other's arms.
The Minior in Maru's grip broke loose entirely and flew off, forgotten.
"..."
A flame — the exact shape of competition — ignited simultaneously in both Leon's eyes and Teppi's.