The Starlace Order took their first step into a Legendary-rank dungeon.

  Instead of a monster’s roar, they were greeted by the crackle of flames and the stink of smoke. A dwarf town was burning, and the ones who brought the fire were humans.

  Silica barely looked up. Her eyes were locked onto her quest window, and her mind screamed.

  For a heartbeat, she wore a surprised face. This was the first time the system had ever slapped a Legendary-rank quest into her hands. Then she forced herself to calm down, lifting her gaze to the chaos below the cliff.

  Her fingers tightened around her daggers. The excitement faded into a thin, uneasy smile.

  The truth was, Silica had been scared from the moment she took the expedition quest. Normally, no player should have been able to enter a place like this due to level restrictions. Yet there she was, walking in like she belonged, simply because she carried the name of the Starlace Order.

  And she knew her limits. Compared to Frostina and the executives, she was still on the weak side. In her head, high level quests were great, but she still needed to be carried and tried not to slow everyone down.

  But Frostina was not here.

  Nearby, Cryssa and Ayla focused on a different system notification altogether. Cryssa’s eyes narrowed, and she murmured silently.

  There were some new terms they never heard, such as Chronicle Dimension and World Record. The rank of the quest was even treated as Mythical despite this dungeon being a Legendary-rank. The last time they received a Mythical-rank quest was during the previous catastrophe, and now they received another one.

  Even so, the words ‘Preserve the history’ were what caught their interest the most. Because it was the only term they could understand… and had a significant meaning for Ayla.

  Inside her mind, Ayla’s voice answered with a weight that did not belong to a simple quest prompt.

  (“I see... So that’s how it is…”)

  Ayla had been in a low mood ever since this expedition was decided. Even now, that gloom clung to her presence.

  (“Yeah. At least I’m a bit relieved now.”)

  Cryssa, knowing fully Ayla's memories, understood her feelings, so she didn’t push. She simply breathed out and let the silence settle for a moment.

  Then Iori spoke, pulling everyone back to the present.

  "What should we do now, my lady?"

  Everyone turned toward Cryssa. The silver-haired leader stared down at the burning town, her blue eyes reflecting flickers of morning light. When she spoke again, her tone was steady, but the question itself was heavy.

  "Do you guys... have a resolve to kill humans?"

  For a moment, even the wind felt like it had stopped. The question made her stance clear without needing another word. They were here to help the dwarves, not the humans who were tearing their home apart.

  Balandir snorted first, breaking the hush with the kind of confidence only a veteran could wear so casually.

  "Heh. Don’t worry about us, my lady. Killing bandits was like our daily lives."

  Kaidos, Vorgar, and Gilbert nodded along without hesitation. For former mercenaries, drawing a line through human lives was not unfamiliar. It was unpleasant, but it was also normal.

  Iori’s smile was bright, almost too bright for the scene below, yet there was resolve behind it.

  "Even if it’s fellow elves, I would kill thousands of them if it’s your order, my lady."

  Glacia gave a calm nod beside her, expression cold but eyes quietly supportive.

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  Then Yuki let out a small laugh, gentle in sound and terrifying in meaning. She tightened her grip on her staff as if she had been waiting for permission.

  "My hands have been itching, wanting to freeze disgusting men since a long time ago."

  The four former mercenaries went stiff. Their faces paled in perfect unison.

  "Oi, oi. Don’t say such things casually while smiling like that."

  "I hate to admit it, but this time I agreed with Kaidos."

  "Can’t you put it nicely if you agreed?!"

  The banter snapped the tension like a thread. Even with fire and screams in the distance, laughter rippled through the group.

  Cryssa’s gaze shifted, landing on the last two.

  "How about you two, Silica, Chika?"

  Silica answered instantly, voice clean and without a tremor.

  "It doesn’t matter to me."

  In her mind, the natives looked real, sounded real, and bled real, but they were still NPCs driven by a frighteningly good system. The line between real and not real was blurry, yet she told herself it was still a line. An NPC with a good AI was in the end still AI, not a real living being.

  Chika watched Cryssa instead of the battlefield. Her question came out careful, but it still carried the sting of worry.

  "Rather than worrying us, how about yourself, Lady Cryssa?"

  It might have been overstepping, but Cryssa understood the intent. Chika was not challenging her. She was checking if their leader was about to break under a burden she had never carried before.

  Not long ago, Cryssa had been a pampered noble lady who loved cute things and lived far away from hardship. Then the civil war and the catastrophe had ripped that softness apart, forcing her to grow mature just to survive.

  And now, for the first time, she had to accept something even heavier. If it came to it, she would have to kill humans with her own hands.

  Her smile appeared, but it was thin and forced at the edges.

  "I... I will be fine."

  She turned away before anyone could stare too long, then shifted the topic quickly, like slamming a door shut before anyone could enter.

  "Alright, let’s go down and help the dwarves. Silica, you go ahead and scout the situation first."

  "Understood."

  They started descending from the cliff. Silica moved first, slipping ahead alone, light as wind through the trees.

  ......

  Silica sprinted through the forest and climbed until she stood atop the tallest tree near the battlefield. The moment she looked out, she was stunned.

  "What the..."

  The fight raged in the open field in front of the town gate. Sections of the wall had been shattered, leaving jagged wounds of stone and timber, yet the dwarves were still holding the line… barely. It looked less like a defense and more like a stubborn refusal to fall.

  At a glance, the numbers were cruel. Leaving aside the countless soldiers who had already died, roughly a hundred dwarf mages stood on the wall, hurling spells until their arms shook. Below them, around a thousand axe wielding dwarves dug in, using shields and bodies to plug gaps that should have already swallowed them whole.

  On the human side, the pressure was overwhelming. Around five hundred mages and two thousand swordsmen surged forward in waves.

  But the numbers were not what stunned Silica.

  It was the sheer scale of the battle itself.

  Explosions rolled across the field. Smoke swallowed the air, and the ground itself seemed to groan every time a spell struck. This was nothing like the fantasy anime she had watched back on Earth, where normal soldiers existed only to be tossed aside to make heroes look cool.

  These were normal soldiers. Warriors and mages.

  And every single one of them fought like a B-rank mercenary at minimum.

  Silica squinted, watching the haze around their bodies. Aura and mana shimmered above them like living heat, like invisible beasts coiled over shoulders and backs. It reminded her of Gilbert and Frostina during the recruitment test a few days ago. She had only seen that kind of presence once, and because Gilbert was an A-rank former mercenary, she had assumed anyone showing a similar manifestation had to be A-rank too.

  Now she was watching hundreds of them.

  Worse, the attacks were not just flashy. They were destructive in a way that made her stomach tighten. Every swing of an axe and clash of steel spat sparks and tore up the earth beneath their feet. The terrain kept changing, collapsing into broken ground that should have tripped and crippled anyone fighting on it.

  And in a battlefield packed this tightly, those devastating attacks hit allies too.

  Yet the soldiers kept standing as if being thrown into shockwaves was nothing more than a strong wind.

  The mages matched that violence with spells that felt absurdly advanced. A lot of advanced spells and crushing waves of mana slammed into warriors’ bodies that refused to fall. When spells crossed into the enemy mage line, barriers rose and flickered, blocking the destruction and erasing it with ease.

  That was why parts of the town were burning too. Not all spells were blocked. Some were deflected upward. Some exploded in the sky like dying stars. Others arced back down and slammed into rooftops, igniting homes and workshops that had probably stood for generations.

  Silica watched the patterns and still could not make sense of them.

  Why were some spells stopped cleanly while others were deflected and got redirected?

  Why did warriors keep standing and moving after being hit by attacks that should have crushed bones?

  Was it armor? Buffs? Training? Or was it simply that the people in this dungeon were built differently from what she understood?

  "How the hell am I supposed to report this..."

  At first, Silica had accepted that she was weaker than the others. Even so, she believed she could at least provide basic reconnaissance. She could be useful. She could be the eyes that helped the team choose the right move.

  But now she could not even judge the enemy’s strength. Everyone down there looked stronger than her, and she lacked the experience to measure the world’s power scale. What’s worse, they all looked like common soldiers.

  This was the second time she had felt truly powerless.

  Back in E-Sport, she had always told herself she lost because her teammates could not keep up with her. It was an easy excuse, and it fed her pride.

  In Dream Land Online, reality did not care about her excuses. She had felt it the first time when Frostina carried her during the recruitment test.

  Now she felt it again, sharper than before, because she could not even do the one basic thing she was sent to do.

  A bitter thought slipped in.

  ‘Maybe this is karma…’

  Silica took one last look at the battlefield, forcing herself to memorize what little she could. Then she exhaled slowly, turned, and disappeared back into the forest, moving fast as if she could outrun the frustration clawing at her chest.