Adaptation Phase 1
From the 10th floor to the 20th, and from the 20th up to the 21st.
Come to think of it, they still haven't built the gate. Maybe I should've taken a day off, using Holy Power as an excuse.
The pride match between the Mage Tower and the knight order might have ended, but it looked like the gate itself was still a few days out. If the subject of rewards came up, I'd take a gate pass and call it even.
After a long climb, we stepped through the 21st-floor gate — and instead of the crisp air of the forest, a damp, musty stench hit my nose. No matter how many times I smelled it, the air on the 21st floor always made climbing the Tower feel like a chore. At that unfamiliar sensation, Grace, who'd been following close behind, quietly pressed herself against me.
Whether it was because the others hadn't crossed the gate yet, or because a hunter used to racing through wide forests and mountains found a sealed-off cave unsettling, she clung to me like a frightened child.
"It's wider than I expected?"
"Wide enough to walk through, inconvenient for a fight. And the width of the passage is uneven, so stay careful."
She peeked past my arm to look ahead, but until Han Se-ah crossed over and cast her light magic, our visibility wouldn't stretch past ten meters.
One by one the others came through the gate, glancing around the cave. The passage was roomy enough for a single person, but two walking side by side would inevitably bump shoulders. Needless to say, there was nowhere to pitch a tent.
"As you can see, the floor is uneven and the passage width is irregular. There's no space to set up a tent at all, so keep that in mind too."
"Are there safe zones even in a place like this?"
"There are enormous caverns. But since there aren't footpaths the way there are in the forest, the guide has to memorize the routes."
At my words I felt Grace, still pressed against me, swallow hard. An unfamiliar cave already made her uneasy — and now she had to memorize the paths like a maze. The burden seemed to weigh on her a little.
Of course, I hadn't said it to put pressure on Grace. I'd said it so Han Se-ah would have an opening to lie.
"Hmm… Roland? If that's the case, I think I can handle it. Like I did in the Avergne Forest — once I've walked a path, I can remember it with mana."
"Is that so? Then Grace can scout the routes, and Hanna can mark them with that mana of hers."
She claimed the inventory was magic, and now she's framing the minimap as some mana-wedge parlor trick? Still, once she's locked in a concept, playing along gets a lot easier.
Thanks to Han Se-ah's minimap, Grace no longer needed to memorize every path from the passages to the safe zones and back out again — and her expression eased considerably. She could have just left marks on the cave walls; there hadn't been any need to stress over it that much.
"As I said, the cave spiders and vampire bats that start appearing from the 21st floor climb walls or fly, so keep that in mind as we move. The 20th-floor gate still hasn't been built, and caves are unfamiliar territory, so let's just take a light look around the area today."
"…Then Roland should take the front, followed by Grace unnie, Irene unnie, me, and Kayden, in that order."
I glanced over at Han Se-ah as I finished speaking, and she picked up on it at once, establishing the formation as party leader. The others offered no complaints, shuffling carefully into position in the narrow passage just as she'd said.
Now that I had Holy Power, I was fully committed to defense — so I pulled out a torch-type magic tool I'd bought on a whim. The moment I did, Grace tapped my armor from behind with a soft tok-tok.
"What's that, Roland?"
"A torch-type magic tool. A little dimmer than a regular torch, but the flame doesn't flicker, so it's much more convenient."
Magic tool or not, it looked more like one of those rods construction workers wave around. The brightness was too weak for combat, but it was enough to walk by. And looking the way it did came with an upside.
For something so expensive, the light output was weak — but it had been built absurdly tough. Once a fight started, I could just toss it on the ground like a glow stick or a flare. Following that feeble light, nowhere near sunlight, we set foot into the cave.
"The visibility really is limited… though it doesn't interfere with sensing presence."
"You'll want to get used to it. Past the caves comes a swamp — and some stretches are so overgrown they might as well be jungle."
I answered Grace's quiet murmur from behind me. The higher you climbed, the more inconvenient the Tower's structure became, which was why the 41st floor worried me. After these winding, narrow caves came a swamp you could barely walk through — so what kind of miserable terrain would come after that? Thinking of it like a game, something like a desert or a snowfield seemed likely.
We were walking through the silent cave when Grace whispered for us to stop, and the whole party halted.
"Did you find something, unnie?"
"It's a fork, and I can sense monsters to the right. Not goblins or kobolds… spiders, maybe? The way they move is really distinctive."
"If they were vampire bats, they'd be hanging motionless from the ceiling, hiding. A moving presence means cave spiders."
At my words the party swallowed hard and shifted into combat readiness. Looking at their individual skill and specs, they had no reason to tense up over a mere 21st-floor fight — but the unfamiliar cave was more than enough to put a psychological strain on them.
For one thing, it was so dark beyond the fork that you couldn't see a thing. Monsters squirming in darkness with no visibility secured. Unless you were a veteran used to night combat, tension was inevitable.
Even so, they stayed tense without panicking, naturally angling toward the right where the cave spiders' presence could be felt. I matched their pace, raising my shield and the torch-type magic tool high as I headed down the right-hand fork.
"Hanna. Light."
"Got it."
With Han Se-ah's murmur, a round orb of light floated up from her staff and settled above the party's heads. Thanks to that, the cave spiders clinging to the walls and ceiling were laid bare in full, ugly detail.
Having sensed our presence, spiders roughly a meter across came climbing the ceiling and walls toward us. Smooth and pale, with no fur and no eyes — round heads and slightly elongated bodies were their defining features.
"As you can tell just by looking, the thin legs are the weak point, and their bite force is surprisingly stronger than a moss wolf's. If those pincer jaws clamp down, a venom stinger shoots out of the snout in place of a tongue — so as long as you don't get caught, they're easy."
If you failed to notice them and let them close in, they'd drop from overhead aiming for the nape of your neck — but with a 4-star archer in the party, there was no way we'd hand the first strike to ordinary monsters. Honestly, 4-star archer or not, anyone with a torch could have spotted them.
If you couldn't notice a meter-long spider crawling up the wall to right above your head, you'd already have died to an orc hunter somewhere on the 20th floor.
The moment my explanation ended, a sharp shweeeek of air being split rang out, and arrows flew toward the spiders. Legs might have been the weak point, but apparently Grace had judged them too awkward to aim for with arrows — hers smashed through the pincer jaws and buried themselves dead-center in the snouts.
"Between the cave spiders and the vampire bats, looks like I'm going to go through a lot of arrows."
"Of course you are. Grace is going to have it rough in the caves."
I could hardly tell Kayden, who was covering the rear, to kick off the cave walls and leap up to cut spiders down. Fantasy world or not, this wasn't some titan-invasion neighborhood, and nobody here was pulling off three-dimensional maneuver combat.
So naturally Grace's hands would stay busy intercepting monsters with arrows before they closed in. If they swarmed beyond what she could handle, Han Se-ah could drop the light magic for offensive spells even with limited visibility.
Every time Grace released a fully drawn bowstring, arrows split the air and punched home. For spiders, they were surprisingly quick — not every shot buried itself dead in the maw with perfect accuracy, but none of them missed the head.
Me holding the line with my shield, and Grace behind me, covered, loosing arrows in rapid succession.
Just the two of us cleaned up all eight spiders, and the viewers' teasing only intensified. Once we reached a wide cavern later, Han Se-ah would have plenty of magic to cast… but neither the party nor the viewers knew that yet.
"Cave spiders gather in bigger numbers than I expected?"
"We've climbed higher in the Tower, so you can take it that the numbers have gone up."
"Which means goblins and kobolds also…?"
"Right. They swarm in huge packs."
At Grace's murmur, Han Se-ah asked the question in a small voice. Moss wolves and helmet deer had wandered around one at a time, but the cave spiders had bunched up eight strong right from the start — so of course the thought would cross her mind.
If vampire bats, faster than cave spiders, came flying in by the dozens, Grace's arrows alone wouldn't be enough. Or we'd run into a pack of more than thirty goblins and kobolds in a cavern. We'd only climbed a single floor and the headcount had more than doubled — Han Se-ah would get to fire off magic until she was sick of it.
"Oh, come on. Stop with the 'it's so bright, it's so bright.' Seriously, before you stack the camera drone on top of the light magic. Did I laugh too? Yeah, and the fact that I snorted because of that is wounding my pride, okay? So cut the forced hate and switch back to loyal retainer mode already."
For now, the teasing was just about whether the party's mage was actually the party's pack mule.