I dug a hole and pushed deep underground.
At the end, a layer with a clearly different texture from anything I'd encountered before appeared.
It was, by any measure, impossible to be natural. It was artificial.
I tried using earth magic, but there was absolutely no response.
Earth magic, despite its name, actually affected a pretty wide range of materials.
Whether earth or metal, as long as it was a solid object with a defined shape, it could affect just about anything.
That was why Araba could construct bridges on the fly, and why I could dig through soil like butter.
And yet, the wall beneath my feet repelled that earth magic.
That meant it had magic resistance.
I used Wisdom to Appraise the wall's details.
「Appraisal failed.」
I hadn't exactly expected otherwise, but I couldn't Appraise the wall at all.
Since I knew it had magic resistance, I probably couldn't break it with magic.
As for brute force — well, it wasn't impossible, but I had no idea what would happen if I tried.
With no other choice, I decided to use Detection to map out the full layout of this underground facility.
It didn't work.
Detection could penetrate to a certain extent, but the hollow spaces inside came out blurry, and the skill refused to activate properly.
Some kind of jammer was interfering.
This was, um… yeah, this was pretty bad.
If the jammer was just a property of the walls, that would be one thing. But if some kind of spell was active in there, that meant this underground facility was alive.
That was a massive problem.
Should I tell Gülie?
Not that I had any way to contact him, anyway.
Guess I had no choice but to go in.
Detection did manage to find what appeared to be an entrance to this facility.
I dug along the wall and made my way toward it.
Along the way, a square space about five meters on each side appeared inside a break in the wall, filled with packed earth.
Well, "filled with earth" was about the size of it.
I used magic to clear away the soil.
And there it was — a door.
It was made of heavy, imposing metal and appeared to slide open to the left and right.
There was no handle or anything of the sort.
Well, yeah. Obviously.
This was clearly from a civilization far above the one on the surface.
It was a mechanized door, designed from the start to open automatically.
This square space had probably been an elevator once.
A door that had no business existing in a fantasy world. I placed my hands on it.
The door, which had been buried in earth for god knows how long, did not open automatically.
I had to force it open by hand.
Heavy.
I could open it thanks to my Status, but come on — this was way too heavy.
But that complaint became irrelevant almost immediately.
Beyond the door I had pried open — faint green emergency lights cast their glow, and the interior of the underground facility emerged dimly from the darkness.
Well, I had Dark Vision, so it didn't matter much.
There, lined up against both walls, were objects I could hardly believe.
Metal figures, roughly two meters tall.
In a word — robots.
And they were built with incredibly advanced technology.
They were arranged in neat rows along both side walls.
No, no, no.
I mean, I'd kind of predicted this?
Sure, but — robots? In a fantasy world? What the hell?
And these robots were obviously combat types, thank you very much!
The worst part was that they were still functional.
As if to prove it, a piercing siren blared and the robots began powering on one after another.
Along with the siren, some kind of voice announcement was playing, but unfortunately, it was in a language I didn't recognize — not one of the tongues I'd learned from the Queen's knowledge — so I couldn't make out what it said.
Well, it was probably something along the lines of "Intruder detected. Initiating countermeasures."
Intruder. That was me.
I was about to get countermeasured.
Damn it.
The robots stood up.
They were quadrupedal.
But they had four arms.
Two of those arms reproduced human arms, while the other two had weapons that looked like swords and guns fused into one mounted in place of hands.
Two guns, two swords?
The human-like arms also wielded imposing large-caliber firearms.
Four guns?
Their heads were missing. In their place, small gun barrels were mounted.
Five guns?!
About a hundred of these world-view-destroying robots.
"About," because Wisdom wasn't functioning properly inside this facility.
It seemed the Detection jammer wasn't a property of the walls after all — it was a spell interference field active within the building itself.
I tried activating a spell, but the construction was disrupted by something, and nothing worked.
This was bad.
This was a quiet, genuine crisis.
As long as I was in here, I couldn't use any of my Skills at all.
All I could rely on was plain old hand-to-hand combat.
Spell interference — true to its name, it interfered with the activation of spells.
Meaning: no magic.
And most Skills were, in truth, spells.
Skills were spells made easy — simplified and assisted by the power of the system, allowing anyone to activate them without difficulty.
They took the power of the user's soul and gave it a tangible, understandable form.
My threads, my poison — all of it was a product of spellcraft.
And that naturally included resistances.
The Physical Nullification I possessed, for example — it was a barrier constantly projected around my body that negated physical attacks.
It wasn't actually me personally nullifying those attacks.
And even so, "nullification" didn't mean much if someone hit me with enough force to shatter the barrier. A clean hit would deal damage just fine.
If some alien from a planet of super vegetables decided to punch me for real, I'd be nothing but pulp.
A resistance was a defensive barrier and neutralization field for a specific type of attack, deployed at all times via spellcraft.
And since it was a spell, spell interference affected it too — which meant that right now, I was in a completely bare state with no resistances whatsoever.
What's more, my Status was also maintained through body-enhancement and damage-resistance spells.
My attack power was just my physical strength amplified by magic.
My speed came from magically boosting the corresponding muscles.
These were cast internally, so the spell interference had a smaller effect.
Smaller, not zero.
My defense, on the other hand — fine inside the body, but my outer skin was hit directly by the spell interference.
Meaning: separated by just a thin layer of skin, I was essentially at zero defense.
My insides could still take a hit, but once that outer layer was peeled away, my defense would drop at every exposed point.
And if something punched clean through — eventually, it would be fatal.
Getting your skin gradually stripped off layer by layer — what kind of torture was that?
A hundred-strong robot army versus me — no Skills, Status weakened.
Yeah. This was genuinely bad.