SSS-Ranked Trash Hero: I Was Scammed Into Being Summoned-Chapter 80: Veth
Next morning, Lena tightened her bag straps, greeted Caelum one last time, and left for Veth.
Inside the wooden carriage she sat alone with her thoughts.The carriage was tied to a horse-like creature, but the difference was clear the moment you looked at it.
The thing was a lot bigger than any normal horse, built wide and heavy, and where eyes should have been there was only one, sitting dead center on its flat broad skull. It moved without sound, which made it worse somehow.
For the first time since arriving in this dungeon, Lena was out of Ashfen.
The surroundings for the first hour were nothing but Deadland. No greenery, just pale cracked earth stretching flat in every direction like the world had given up on itself out here.
She laid her back against the carriage side and let her eyes close halfway.
Her mission. Making the demon prince, who had already fallen from the succession race, into the demon king. That alone was already an impossible task by any measure. A prince who had been cast aside, written off, forgotten. And she was supposed to put him on the throne.
But now she also had to worry about not getting caught. Not being recognized. Not slipping up in a place where a single wrong word could end her before she even got started.
Why can’t this dungeon be a normal dungeon, she thought. But she already knew the answer.
She knew well enough why she was hoping it wasn’t. If this dungeon was normal, she would have fallen with the others at the start.
They would have killed her without a second thought, and she would have died knowing she never had a chance. So the strangeness was the only reason she was still alive. She couldn’t afford to resent it.
That thought led her to another one. The other heroes. She hadn’t had any direct communication with them, none at all, because the system didn’t allow it. But she was sure they were here too. This dungeon pulled everyone in.
Were they inside the demon empire? Did they have the same mission she did? She wanted to believe that. It would have been easier to believe they were all working toward the same thing, that there was some invisible thread connecting them even without contact.
But she couldn’t afford to be that optimistic. This was a special grade dungeon. The rules here were different. Missions could conflict.
People who were supposed to be on the same side could end up working against each other without ever choosing to. And if that happened, who would survive? How would any of them clear it?
She didn’t have an answer. She sat with that uncomfortable silence in her chest for a while and let the question go unanswered.
Her eyes wandered to the window.
The terrain outside had changed. The Deadland had given way to something greener, long trees rising in rows on either side of the road, their canopies heavy and dark. It was strange.
She had grown up hearing that demons were an evil race, destructive by nature, and yet here was this greenery, unbothered, even beautiful in its own heavy way. It made something sit uneasy in her.
Not long after, they reached Veth.
There was an entrance to the city like a border crossing, with guards posted at the threshold.
When the carriage got close enough for them to make out what they were looking at, she could see the shift in their posture from where she sat.
A carriage like this, the kind found only in higher noble houses, with no royal symbol but still carrying the unmistakable weight of authority, that was enough.
They didn’t stop her. They didn’t ask questions.
They stepped aside and let the carriage through, and she caught the eyes of one of them for just a moment as she passed. She was certain that guard went as red as a tomato.
Veth was more developed than Ashfen. She could see it immediately in the way the streets were laid out, the size of the buildings, the steadiness of the foot traffic.
Soon the carriage reached the main estate of Veth’s ruling house and rolled to a stop.
Lena stepped out and met the sun.
The light hit her instantly. She was wearing a deep wine-red dress, with silver threading along the collar and cuffs that caught the light when she moved. The sleeves were long but sheer from the elbow down, and the fabric itself had a faint sheen to it, the kind that only came from materials that cost more than most people earned in a season.
Her dark hair was pinned loosely, a few strands falling forward, and the sunlight caught all of it at once and made her glow in a way that didn’t feel entirely natural.
She walked toward the main gate. A guard standing post near the entrance noticed her, and even from a distance she watched his face go red.
"I’m expected by the lord of this estate," she said.
Her voice met deaf ears. The guard was staring too hard to actually hear anything.
Her inner man trembled for just a second.
She tried again. "I’m expected by the lord of this estate."
Same result. His eyes hadn’t moved.
Now she was getting annoyed, and she could feel that specific crawling sensation moving across her skin, the one that came when she was being looked at like that. It was too familiar.
She remembered that the original Lena had dealt with this kind of situation often. And she had her own way of handling it.
Lena closed her eyes. Just for a moment. She pulled inward, focused on her will, the kind of pressure that only became available after surpassing mortal rank, the thing that lived underneath thought and training and sat closer to something raw.
When she opened her eyes, it came out.
A pressure rolled off her body in a wave. It wasn’t visible in any normal sense, but the guard felt it the way you feel a thunderclap before you hear it. The air around her seemed to thin.
Her presence collapsed inward and then expanded all at once, it was only visible to the guard for a fraction of a second, but that was enough.
He shattered out of whatever trance he had been in.
His legs gave. He hit his knees on the stone and stayed there, trembling.
Lena’s voice, when it came, sounded like something rising from the bottom of a very deep place.
Open the gate.
