Floor 34, The Waiting Room (2)
Terrorism? By the elves?
Even granting that they were elves who dined on pests instead of proper meals for the sake of nature, terrorism still felt like a stretch. The image refused to form in my head.
Cannibalism……?
Now that she mentioned it, my first boarding of the airship came flooding back. The way they'd blocked us from going inside, the metallic tang of blood hiding beneath the scent of flowers, and Roxanne's lips, faintly stained red.
But surely I never saw them carrying anyone aboard, did I? If there had originally been people on that airship, there wasn't even a single sound of resistance to prove it.
Had they simply eaten the sleeping passengers where they lay, and been done with it?
A chill crawled up my spine, late as it was.
Setting aside the whole question of who was stronger, I had shaken hands with a group that ate people.
Worse — I'd spent five days with them aboard that airship.
Come to think of it, I never did hear her explanation about floor 35. She'd clearly said there was nothing I could do before the point where the 35th-floor trial actually began.
Well, that figured. The god's very name had been Ceaseless Hearth, after all.
He'd claimed he wouldn't lend his power directly, but in the old days, it seemed, he had granted hearths to the people below.
Still, one thing didn't sit right with me.
Hm. Punishing your own believers because a hearth got destroyed.
By my understanding, it made no sense whatsoever — and yet I could believe it all the same. Gods seated on thrones had never been the type to do only good things.
Anyway, moving on……
A faction choice. It was a trial structure I'd never encountered before.
Ah. Now I understood what Heijeong had meant by "works out great."
An information vacuum. By spreading what I knew, the climbers' factions would stay lopsided, and we'd avoid bleeding each other dry — that seemed to be her plan. In the 1st regression, she hadn't been able to do that, and a great many people must have died.
They wouldn't die this time, technically. But battles would still break out.
'Come to think of it...... this is a situation a lot like the one I went through.'
Stand with the elves, or stand with the humans.
Though I had a small question about the neutral option.
I saw what she meant. Elves and humans. Climbers would already exist who had committed to one side or the other. Those people, too, would throw themselves into the fight for the sake of their rewards — so for a neutral climber to stand between them and halt the war? Hopeless.
When I voiced the thought, Heijeong agreed.
Ah. Now the disappearance of floor 33 made sense.
And then, all at once, everything I'd done — every worry I'd carried through this floor — felt hollow.
What exactly had I been doing on floors 31 and 32?
The war between elves and humans was going to happen regardless. Whether I slaughtered the sky whale or spared it changed nothing. I had simply been standing in the path of a war that was always coming.
I couldn't fathom why the Tower would go so far as to rewrite my personal floor just to hand me a trial like this. Was this what it felt like — being swept along by a current too vast to resist?
A bitter taste filled my mouth.
'......Wait. No. That's wrong.'
But my thinking turned around almost at once.
If everything I'd done on floors 31 and 32 had truly been pointless, the Tower would never have offered it up as my personal floor in the first place.
Let me remember what happened on the floors before.
'On floor 12, I saved the dragon and earned a token. On floor 23, I found the comet and the sacred relic.'
Everything I'd gained on those floors had proven enormously valuable in the overall floors that followed. This time would be no different.
First, I had prevented a pointless war among the climbers themselves. And I'd obtained the sky whale's orb.
The first alone was a resounding success. Even without being able to tell them everything, the bloodshed between climbers would be a fraction of what it otherwise would have been.
The second was the whale's orb — I didn't yet know what I could do with it. But it had come as the reward of a hidden mission. It would earn its keep eventually. The dragon's scale token had been exactly the same.
Fair enough. There was simply a gap in civilizational development, after all. Even with wonders like airships, their pollution would be a drop in the bucket next to Earth's.
Though that raised a fun little question — what happens if the elves ever reach Earth?
Would they actually try to blow up a real nuclear plant?
While I was mulling it over, Heijeong's next message arrived.
Ah. Fair enough……
I couldn't argue. I myself had always thought of elves as a race of breathtaking beauty.
And it was all Lord of the Rings' fault. The Legolas I'd watched as a kid had left far too deep an impression.
Still, actually declaring myself for one side left a sour taste in my mouth. Because that meant I would have to cut elves down with my own hands.
Given the choice, I'd have gone neutral — but the rift between the two sides was already too deep for that to work.
'No. The elves' goal is to erase humans from that world. Remember that.'
I hardened my heart.
Elves had never been a cannibal race to begin with. And now they were trying to drive an entire species to extinction……
It was beyond my comprehension, and I had no obligation to tiptoe around their values.
As I was thinking, another message came in.
Once I'd washed up and opened the community, I found quite a few posts searching for me.
Apparently, while I'd spent close to a week inside the floor, the people waiting had grown restless. And on top of that, I'd skipped a floor outright — the floor-mates who'd been forced to sit on their hands until I conquered floor 33 were bursting at the seams with curiosity.
Which made it the perfect moment.
Now I needed to explain the situation a little and put up a post casting the elves in a negative light. All I had to do was lay out how this race were fanatical eco-extremists who, on top of everything else, practiced cannibalism.
'Wait — she said a lot of people have fantasies about elves......'
I should also mention that, unlike the elves of our imagination, they weren't especially beautiful — and that they ate pests until they were skin and bones.
Granted, judging people by their looks wasn't exactly admirable. But shattering the fantasy surrounding the elven race was, in a very real sense, an act of saving the floor-mates' lives.
The moment I organized my notes and posted, the responses exploded.
Of course, a vanishingly small handful of floor-mates did take the elves' side.
I couldn't wrap my head around it, personally……
But the overwhelming majority of climbers now looked on elves unfavorably, and that was what mattered.
Right — the posts could stop there.
Just as I was about to head off to train, I remembered the thing I'd planned to do here in the Waiting Room.
'That's right. I said I'd look for Erendil's broom.'
Now that I'd actually opened the shop, though, I had no idea what to type into the search bar.
Would it show up if I just searched "broom"?
The instant I hit search, tens of thousands of brooms floated up across the window.
Every broom in the universe, apparently.
I was used to this by now — the shop was never kind to its customers. Naturally, there was no finding it in a pile like this.
Time to narrow the list down.
'Hmm. Combat broom? No — magic broom is probably the better call.'
I searched again for magic brooms, and this time several hundred floated up. As I skimmed the list, I spotted one that looked strikingly similar to Erendil's broom.
But I couldn't laugh.
'Ah, you've got to be kidding me......'
Because the magic broom was women-only.