The Price of Safe Passage
William met with Lorolen as our representative.
Naturally, with bankruptcy hanging over his head, the negotiations tilted in our favor.
Instead of taking the escort fee he’d originally promised, we agreed to receive two magic tools per person. Since having magic tools would obviously strengthen our fighting power, we took them in advance. Of course, the condition was that if the escort failed, we had to return them.
This time, we even drafted a formal contract.
Lorolen looked like a man being robbed at knifepoint, but compared to bankruptcy, it was a cheap price to pay.
All the magic tools he was transporting were commercial goods, so each one came with a label and a description of its abilities.
William chose a necklace that increased mana recovery speed and an orb that assisted with magical calculations.
The time required for magical calculations was basically cooldown, so you could think of it as an orb that reduced cooldown time.
Lee Suyoung chose a bracelet enchanted with barrier magic to replace a heavy shield, and a slightly rusted belt that increased her summon slots by one.
Unlike the others, that belt seemed to be something excavated from ruins rather than a manufactured item.
The belt that increased summon slots must have been truly expensive, because Lorolen practically begged her to please pick something else. But Lee Suyoung had already strapped it on and summoned a new slime.
The new slime was a red slime that spat fireballs.
“Your name is Bulpungseon. Nice to meet you, Bulpung.”
The name was still so absurdly straightforward it almost made me laugh.
After some deliberation, since nothing particularly caught her eye, Le Thi Hoa picked a staff that could fire up to ten fireballs a day and a magic waterskin that could hold up to a hundred liters without changing weight.
Both seemed versatile enough that she could easily resell them later for seed money.
If I hadn’t been able to make use of the space on the Tower 1st Floor, that waterskin would’ve been tempting.
While browsing, I found a stone with no description attached.
There was almost no mana coming off it from the outside, but something inside felt latent, sealed away. It felt similar to a mana stone, yet not quite the same.
“What’s this?”
“W-well? I’m not sure either. I got it as a free extra when they told me it was a lucky stone found in some ruins.”
When I glanced over at Le Thi Hoa, she nodded, indicating he wasn’t lying.
“Hmm. I like the look of it, but I don’t want to take this instead of proper compensation, so I’ll just buy it. How much do you want?”
I had no intention of accepting some unidentified object in place of a magic tool. For all I knew, it could be cursed.
At my words, Lorolen smiled with a merchant’s practiced charm.
“Since it came from ruins, it’s worth about as much as a magic tool.”
Le Thi Hoa shook her head.
Breaking into a cold sweat under my stare, Lorolen hurriedly corrected himself.
“T-that said, I don’t actually know what it is, so I can’t exactly price it the same as a magic tool. Seven thousand credits... six thousand... ah, forget it, just give me three thousand five hundred credits.”
Faced with his natural enemy, Le Thi Hoa, Lorolen finally named the real price he had in mind, with only a little profit added on top.
He should’ve done that from the start.
Those magic tools had to be worth at least hundreds of thousands of credits. Just how much of a sucker had he been trying to make me?
I handed over 3,500 credits and put the stone into my inventory.
Then, while choosing my reward, I noticed there were around twenty magic books as well. Pretending to hesitate, I slipped them into my inventory one by one and took them back out, making sure no one noticed.
From the outside, each one had only gone into my inventory for barely a tenth of a second.
But during that 0.1 second, I entered my reincarnation avatar’s body, copied the magic books, and saved them onto the computer and the mobile phone my main body occasionally used to listen to music. Then I printed and bound them into actual books and stored them on the Tower 1st Floor.
I felt a slight twinge of guilt, but Lorolen wasn’t losing anything, so it was probably fine.
As my actual magic tool rewards, I picked a Cleanliness Bracelet enchanted with cleaning magic that could disinfect and remove grime up to three times a day, and an anklet that let the wearer use Double Jump without any limit on the number of uses.
Now even if my whole body got drenched in monster blood, I wouldn’t have to bother washing clothes by hand anymore.
“Oh, it really does let you double jump.”
I immediately tested the magic tool’s performance, and it felt like an invisible foothold appeared for three seconds whenever I wanted to jump again.
I did have to touch the ground once before creating another foothold, so I couldn’t just keep running through empty air forever, but that also meant it was effectively an item that let me stay airborne for three seconds.
Once we’d all claimed our rewards, we resumed the escort.
“Whew... if the 14th floor is already like this, I’m starting to dread the 15th.”
William let out a sigh as he drank a low-grade mana recovery potion bought from the Tower Shop.
The closer we got to York, the more monsters seemed to be appearing.
With their numbers increasing, more and more monsters naturally slipped through the ranged attacks and got close. Most of the ones that reached the wagon ended up being dealt with by me.
At William’s sigh, Lorolen’s eyes shifted uneasily.
“Are you hiding something else again?”
“Pardon? Hahaha, of course not.”
Lorolen smiled at my question.
At this point, I found myself automatically glancing at Le Thi Hoa whenever he spoke.
“It’s vague. He’s not exactly hiding something, but it feels like he is.”
Faced with the judgment of his natural enemy, Lorolen looked between us and finally spoke.
“Actually, the canyon road we have to pass through on the way to York City is an area inhabited by a large number of monsters.”
“Near a city? And they just leave them there? Doesn’t the city send extermination forces?”
“They do, of course. But even when they do, there are many caves nearby that make good hiding places, and the canyon terrain makes it difficult to deploy a large number of troops at once.”
Even so, wouldn’t they have chosen a place without monsters when building the city in the first place?
Lorolen answered my unspoken question.
“In the distant past, this city was invaded by foreign tribes. At that time, there was also a monster ecology laboratory—the recipient of the goods we are transporting now. The city was short on troops back then, so in order to make it harder for the invaders to approach this place...”
“They released monsters? Are they insane?”
It was ridiculous.
Still, it apparently hadn’t been pure madness. It had been a calculated move.
Most of the monsters they released back then were killed by the invading tribes. And after taking serious losses dealing with those monsters, the invaders still attempted to storm the city, only for the city to easily defeat them since they were exhausted and reduced in number.
What they hadn’t anticipated was that the few surviving monsters would multiply and build up their forces over the following decades.
So now the laboratory was conducting various studies to deal with the monsters entrenched in the canyon, and the cargo we were transporting was apparently one of the materials needed for that research.
If I had to guess why a Monster Growth Elixir would be needed for monster extermination, the most likely answer was that they intended to place it at the center of a trap and lure monsters in like moths to a flame.
“We’re about to enter harpy territory. Harpies have an exceptional sense of smell, so they’ll come for us no matter what.”
Maybe because his own life was on the line too, Lorolen kindly offered us a warning this time.
About ten minutes after that warning, I saw harpies swarming in from far off in the sky.
Even at a glance, there had to be well over fifty of them.
“Keep the wagon moving. Just focus on getting to York as fast as possible.”
At my words, Lorolen tried to soothe the frightened mule and keep the wagon from stopping.
I climbed onto the canvas cover of the cargo wagon, drew my sword, and observed the harpies.
Harpies were monsters with the upper bodies of humans and the lower bodies of birds.
Their bodies were small, about the size of elementary school children, but their wings weren’t especially large for that size, nor were they flapping so rapidly that they blurred like hummingbirds’ wings.
Their structure made it look impossible for them to fly at all, so I examined the flow of mana and found that their wingbeats generated a specific magical current, creating both uplift and a reduction in gravity around their bodies.
In other words, harpies flew through the sky using primitive magic.
“Aim for the wings instead of the head—they’re harder to hit there!”
If their wings were injured, they wouldn’t be able to perform the specific wingbeats they needed, and they’d naturally fall.
Harpies weren’t small and lightweight like actual birds, so if they fell from high enough, they died. No exceptions.
At my shout, Lee Suyoung and William began shooting down harpies by striking their wings with ranged attacks.
But there were too many. It was impossible for just the two of them to bring down every harpy.
Le Thi Hoa also attacked with the fireball staff she’d been saving, but with only ten shots a day, she burned through them quickly.
The harpies that reached the wagon went for me first, since I was standing on top of the cargo cover.
I cut down the harpies as they thrust out their chicken-like legs at me.
“Seriously, why do all the birds in the Tower have blades on their legs?”
Judging by the feel through my sword, their bones were hollow, almost like they had osteoporosis.
Well, even if they used primitive magic to fly, their bodies still had to become lighter somehow. Evolution would naturally push them in that direction.
“These things are worse than goblins if they can’t fly!”
Le Thi Hoa fired soul beams at the harpies as well, knocking more of them from the sky.
The problem was that the soul beam’s range was short, so if the harpies flew too high, it couldn’t reach them properly.
I see. So that’s why she said it was mainly for close combat.
I leaped up from the wagon, planted a foot on a harpy diving at me, swung my sword in a cool arc, and tried to jump into the air again.
“Uwah!”
But how easy was it, really, to leap again from something that was already falling?
The harpy couldn’t support my weight and dropped sharply, and I fell with it toward the ground like someone who’d stepped onto a plank floating on water.
When I suddenly plummeted, everyone’s eyes turned toward me.
Gaaaah! This is so embarrassing!
“Damn it, if only I knew a lightfoot technique.”
I hadn’t gotten that far in training yet.
Once I was back in my reincarnation avatar’s body, the first thing I needed to learn was a proper lightfoot art.
Still, I wasn’t hurt. The harpy under me had cushioned the fall.
Needless to say, the harpy I landed on died instantly.
My face burning bright red, I sprang back up and pulled a stone axe out of my inventory before hurling it.
Hand axes could at least be sold for scrap metal, but the stone axes made by goblins honestly had no real use, so I’d picked up plenty of them along the way thinking I could throw them as much as I wanted.
They still didn’t fly anywhere near the direction I intended, but the sky above the wagon was packed with around thirty harpies that hadn’t been shot down yet, so even throwing them at random worked well enough.
Maybe because I was hurling them with strength reinforced by internal qi, any harpy they struck—wing, head, chest, it didn’t matter—dropped immediately.
Since they had descended to attack the wagon, falling didn’t automatically kill them, but once a harpy was on the ground, it was worth less than a goblin.
Naturally, the fallen harpies were cut down by William and me.
Once we’d exterminated the swarm that had gathered around us, everyone let out sighs of relief.
Now that the most dangerous flying monsters were dealt with, things should get a little easier from here on out.
It took only a few minutes to realize that relief had come far too soon.
“Another flock of harpies!”
More harpies were streaming in through the sky.
(To be continued)