SSS-Ranked Trash Hero: I Was Scammed Into Being Summoned-Chapter 47: Edge of Nothing

Hiroshi climbed out of the pool and looked around properly for the first time.

Trees surrounded them. Dense forest with thick underbrush. The sunlight filtering through the canopy. But something felt wrong. He couldn’t name it yet but the feeling sat in his gut.

Elias emerged from the pool carrying the injured guard over his shoulder. The man was unconscious now, his broken leg dragging. Elias set him down carefully on the bank and checked his pulse.

Baros came through next, stumbling out of the water and collapsing on the ground. "We made it. We’re out."

The woman guard stood at the edge of the clearing, staring into the forest. Her hand rested on the knife at her belt. "Which direction?"

Good question. Hiroshi looked around for landmarks. Anything to indicate where they were or which way led back to civilization.

Nothing looked familiar. Just trees in every direction. No paths. No signs of human passage.

"We go downhill," Elias said. "Water flows downward. Eventually we’ll hit a stream or river. Follow that and it’ll lead to settlements."

It was sound logic. Hiroshi nodded and started walking in what he thought was a downward slope. The others followed, Elias carrying the unconscious guard again.

They walked for maybe twenty minutes. The forest looked the same. Thick trees. Heavy undergrowth. The light never seemed to change despite time passing.

Then Hiroshi saw something that made him stop.

A pool of water. Small. Fed by a stream. In a clearing between trees.

The exact pool they’d climbed out of.

"We’re back here," Baros said, confusion in his voice. "How did we...we were walking straight. We didn’t turn around."

The woman guard looked at the pool, then back the way they’d come. "We went in a circle."

"That’s not possible," Baros said. "We were going downhill the whole time."

"Clearly it is possible because we’re standing here." The woman moved to a tree at the edge of the clearing and pulled her knife. She carved a quick mark into the bark. An X. "Let’s try again. Different direction."

They picked a new direction. Walked for thirty minutes this time. Deliberately keeping track of which way they were going. Making sure they weren’t curving back on themselves.

The forest never changed.

They ended up at the pool again.

The X was still carved into the tree trunk.

"What is this?" Baros’s voice was rising toward panic. "Some kind of magic? Are we trapped here?"

Elias set the injured guard down and walked the perimeter of the clearing slowly. "It’s a bounded space. Some kind of enchantment keeping us contained in a specific area. The forest looks infinite but we’re actually just circling the same territory."

"Can we break it?" the woman guard asked.

"Depends what’s maintaining it. Natural phenomenon or deliberate spell." Elias crouched and touched the ground. "The earth feels wrong. Too uniform. Like it’s not real terrain."

Hiroshi felt it too now that Elias mentioned it. Everything looked right but felt slightly off. The trees were too similar to each other. The undergrowth repeated the same patterns. Even the bird sounds in the distance seemed to loop on a schedule.

This place wasn’t real. Or it was real but constructed. Artificial.

He walked away from the group, examining the forest more carefully. Looking for anything that broke the pattern. Anything that seemed out of place.

There.

Between two trees, almost hidden by shadow, was a gap. Not a path. Just an opening where the undergrowth didn’t grow. It was small. Maybe three feet wide and four feet tall. Easy to miss if you weren’t looking for it.

Hiroshi moved closer and felt something shift in the air. A pressure. A presence.

Text appeared in his mind.

[Dungeon Entrance Detected: Rank Unknown]

[Warning: Current party status insufficient for dungeon exploration]

A dungeon. Here. In this bounded space that was probably part of the dungeon itself.

Hiroshi looked back at the others. They were still discussing the enchantment. Trying to figure out escape routes. He looked back at the dungeon entrance.

He didn’t mention it. Not yet. They were injured, exhausted, and trapped. Going into a dungeon in their current state was suicide. But if it was the only way out...

He’d keep it in mind.

Hiroshi returned to the group. "Found something. Come look."

They followed him to the edge of the clearing. He pointed into the forest, away from the dungeon entrance. "There. See that?"

They all looked where he was pointing. Through the trees, barely visible, was a change in the terrain. The ground dropped away sharply.

A cliff. 𝐟𝐫𝕖𝗲𝘄𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝕧𝐞𝚕.𝕔𝕠𝐦

They moved toward it carefully. The forest gave way to open air. A cliff edge that dropped into darkness so deep no bottom was visible. The space below was just black. Void.

"How deep is that?" Baros asked, his voice barely above a whisper.

Elias picked up a rock and threw it over the edge. They waited. No sound of it hitting bottom. It just disappeared into the darkness.

"Very deep," Elias said. "Or not deep at all. Could be an illusion. Could be a portal like the pool. Could be exactly what it looks like...a cliff that drops forever."

"So we don’t know what’s down there," the woman guard said.

"No."

They stood at the edge, staring down into the black. The void seemed to swallow light. It hurt to look at for too long. Made Hiroshi’s eyes water.

"This could be the way out," the woman guard said slowly. "The pool brought us here. Maybe falling brings us somewhere else."

"Or it kills us," Baros said.

"Maybe. But we’re trapped here otherwise. We can’t go back through the pool, tried that. We can’t walk out, we just loop back. And we can’t stay here forever." She looked at the unconscious guard lying behind them. "He’s dying. Hours left at most. We need to make a decision."

Elias was quiet, studying the void. "It’s a risk. A big one."

"Everything’s a risk." The woman guard pulled a small whistle from her pocket. Metal. Meant for signaling. "I’ll go first. If I land somewhere safe, I’ll blow this three times. If you hear it, follow. If you don’t hear anything after five minutes, assume I’m dead and find another way."

"That’s assuming the sound carries back," Elias said.

"You have a better idea?"

He didn’t.

The woman guard moved to the edge. Looked down into the darkness one more time. Her expression was hard. Focused. The same look she’d had when Tomas died.

"For Tomas," she said quietly.

Then she stepped off the edge.

She didn’t scream. Didn’t make a sound. Just disappeared into the black void like she’d been erased from existence.

They waited.

One minute passed. Two. Three. The silence pressed down on them. The void below seemed to breathe.

Four minutes. Baros was shaking. "She’s dead. She has to be dead. Nothing could survive..."

Three sharp whistle blasts echoed up from below.

"She made it," Hiroshi said.

"Or something down there blew the whistle," Baros said, his voice cracking. "We don’t know what..."

"We know enough." Elias picked up the unconscious guard and moved to the edge. "We’re out of options. This is it."

He stepped off without hesitation. The guard in his arms. Both of them disappearing into the darkness.

More waiting. The void breathed its cold breath. The forest behind them was too quiet.

Baros looked at Hiroshi. "I can’t do this. I can’t just jump into...into nothing."

"You can stay here," Hiroshi said. "But that guard needs help. The woman needs help. Elias might need help. And we need to get back to report what happened."

"I know. I know but..." Baros stared at the void. "What if it’s not an exit? What if it’s just falling to death?"

"Then we’ll find out."

Hiroshi walked to the edge. Looked down. The darkness was absolute. His Fighter Instinct screamed warnings about unknown threats. About danger that couldn’t be calculated or predicted.

He stepped off anyway.

The falling sensation was immediate, Just movement through space that didn’t follow normal rules. The darkness was complete. No light. No sound. Just the feeling of falling through nothing.

Time lost meaning. He might have been falling for seconds or hours. No way to tell.

Then light appeared below. Distant but growing. Blue-green and pulsing.

The light rushed toward him.

Everything lurched sideways again.

Hiroshi hit solid ground and rolled. Not hard. Softer than it should have been. Like landing in deep sand.

He lay there for a moment, catching his breath, making sure nothing was broken.

Then he sat up and looked around.

He was in a massive cavern. Walls that stretched up into darkness. The blue-green light came from crystals embedded in the stone. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Lighting the space with their pulsing glow.

And at the center of the cavern was a structure. Built from black stone that reflected no light. A doorway carved with symbols that hurt to look at directly.

Another dungeon entrance. Larger than the one in the forest. More ominous.

Elias stood near the entrance with the unconscious guard at his feet. The woman guard was beside him, staring at the structure.

Behind Hiroshi, reality rippled and Baros fell through, hitting the ground hard and gasping.

"What is this place?" Baros asked once he could breathe.

Nobody answered. They all just stared at the black stone doorway.