"Useless guys stay backstage for life. You just stand there and carry the bags, Haruto."
Takumi Kuroki laughed into the stream camera.
Behind him, the comments scrolled past.
"Takumi looking hot as usual lol"
"who's that guy? the pack mule?"
"isn't that Amano, the bottom-tier streamer? the one with zero subs lol"
I, Haruto Amano, silently hitched my backpack higher on my shoulders.
Subscribers: zero. Viewers: zero.
That was my channel, in its entirety.
Takumi, who'd gone to the same high school as me, was now a popular dungeon streamer with five hundred thousand subscribers.
I was just his tagalong. A free porter whose only job was hauling recovery potions.
"You know the only reason I let you in the party is 'cause I'm a nice guy, right?" Takumi always said.
A nice guy, huh.
He hadn't changed since high school.
He'd eat my lunch without asking, copy my homework, and still grin and tell everyone around us, "He's my best friend."
Nobody ever listened to a word I said.
When dungeon streaming first started taking off, I thought—
Maybe here, I could finally become somebody.
The result: zero subscribers.
All it did was let the whole world prove I had no knack for it.
"Listen up, Haruto. Haul the gear all the way to the deepest part of the third floor. Even a D-rank like you can handle carrying stuff, right?"
"...The third floor's recommended for C-rank. It's dangerous."
"Huh? Got a problem with that?"
Takumi's cronies cackled.
I couldn't say a thing.
It had always been like that. I couldn't talk back. Nobody expected anything from me.
The deeper we went into the dungeon, the heavier the air grew.
The moss on the walls glowed, and a puddle at my feet reflected my own pathetic face.
The third floor. Its deepest point.
It happened the moment I set the gear down.
"Well then, it's all yours."
Takumi smirked and turned on his heel.
His cronies trailed after him in a line.
"Huh... Wait, hold o—!"
A heavy, grinding rumble.
The door behind me was slowly closing.
"Takumi! Hey, the door!"
"Oh, that? This is a 'sealed zone.' Once you're in, it won't open from the inside."
Takumi's voice came through the gap in the door.
"Thing is, you're in the way. Having a bottom-feeder hanging around me drags my rep down."
"Wha..."
"Relax, I'll tell the admins you 'got separated.' Not that anyone's gonna bother looking for a useless loser like you."
Ka-chunk.
It shut. Completely.
"Takumi!! Hey!! Open the door!!"
Only my own voice echoed off the stone walls and faded away.
In the dark, all alone.
I'd already handed every potion I had over to those guys.
All I had left was an empty backpack, and—
Something clicked at the bottom of the backpack.
An old chunk of ore. My dad's keepsake.
A piece of junk with no known use, engraved with nothing but the words "Blackiron Steel."
When I'd shown it to an appraiser, he'd called it "worthless." Just a pebble.
"This one thing—keep it on you, always."
Dad said that to me right before he died.
He never told me why.
Dad had been a dungeon explorer, and one day, he just didn't come home.
All he left behind was this one stone.
I squeezed it tight.
The one and only thing Dad had left me.
"...I'm getting out of here alive."
The moment I muttered those words,
a tremor came crawling up from the bowels of the earth.
Rmm... Thoom... Thoom...
Footsteps. Unbelievably huge ones.
Deep in the darkness, two red lights flickered on.
They were eyes.
A jet-black hulk whose head nearly scraped the ceiling.
Its whole body was hard as steel, and one look was all it took to know—this thing was on a whole other level.
In a sealed zone with nowhere to run, it was just the two of us now. Me and that.
A passage from the dungeon wiki flashed through the back of my mind.
A monster that should never, ever exist on the third floor.
Red eyes, a jet-black body of steel—no way. Was this...?
My phone buzzed on its own.
An error message I'd never seen before popped up on the screen.
"Streaming function: Rebooting..."
"...Huh?"
The red eyes turned toward me.