Adaptation Period 2
Floors 20 and 21 were different fields entirely, and the jump in combat difficulty was far more than a single floor's worth.
Unlike the orc hunters, moss wolves, and helmeted stags that charged in alone, the cave spiders and vampire bats came in packs of five or more as a baseline. Goblins and kobolds, meanwhile, boasted numbers anywhere from a dozen to nearly thirty.
No sunlight meant torches, magic tools, and spells had to keep the light going — an awkward setup on top of fighting several times as many enemies. The uneven ground only made fatigue pile up that much faster.
"Hah… At this point, even goblins are turning into a real nuisance."
"We had to keep the holy arts up longer than I expected. Maybe we underestimated them a little too much?"
Moss wolves and helmeted stags I could block or let slip past for Kayden to cut down. But more than thirty goblins? No matter how hard I held the line, surrounding us was just a numbers game. We had no choice but to use shields and barriers against blind stone throws and poison darts.
I wrapped my shield in Holy Power and sealed off one side of the clearing like a wall, while Kayden swung her sword breathlessly from another direction — and still the enemy numbered over thirty.
Magic and arrows crossed paths with flying stones, and the dull thunk-thunk of impacts against the barrier shattered the cave's silence. Of course, no amount of goblins was going to leave our party hurt. We just felt the excess drain on stamina and mana more than usual.
"I'll grab the mana stones. Everyone catch your breath. You can feel it yourselves, right? You were way too tense for a goblin fight."
"The footing's unstable, so swinging a sword burns more stamina than you'd think."
In the middle of the melee, a torch-type magic tool had been kicked and trampled by goblins several times without so much as a scratch. I picked it up and started collecting goblin mana stones while Kayden spoke up first. The others followed, each adding a line as if running through a self-critique.
"Once I turned off the Light spell, aiming magic got a lot harder. That's why I burned through more mana than usual."
"Yeah. When Hanna was keeping Light up, I didn't notice — but relying on just that one magic tool to shoot, I couldn't hit the vitals cleanly. Feels like a few arrowheads got wrecked because of it."
"If it had been an ordinary torch instead of the magic tool Roland bought, it would've gone out mid-fight and left us even darker, wouldn't it?"
Even for the first chaotic free-for-all in a wide cave chamber rather than a corridor, there were no real mistakes, and they spotted every problem right away. That was our star-rated companions for you — and Han Se-ah's gamer instincts shining through.
Aside from the heavier-than-usual stamina and mana drain, it had been a solid fight that earned better than average marks. The party's mood loosened a little.
The only ones complaining were the viewers who hadn't gotten to enjoy the fight properly.
The sole light source was the torch-type magic tool I was carrying, and Han Se-ah — a little tense in the unfamiliar environment — had left the camera on auto and been scrambling all over. Viewers couldn't see a thing even if they wanted to.
And with the lighting so dim, the party members' faces were hard to make out too — which, of course, ranked high on the complaint list. Typical of a chat that lived and died by female characters.
"Oh, what? You didn't see a single second of my incredible performance? Ugh, seriously. With eyes that bad for watching combat, how do you even plan to clear the Floor 20 orc temple and make it to 21? You keep whining about it being a little dark and — what? You'll just become goblin food the second you hit Floor 21."
Even then, I could hear Han Se-ah muttering away, dumping verbal damage on her viewers nonstop. Honestly, if she just sat there looking pretty the chat would swarm her — the fact that she bickered with them like this was a talent of its own, wasn't it?
I finished scooping up the goblin mana stones scattered across the floor and headed toward Han Se-ah. An armful of them, the blue growing clearer the higher the floor. Rare moss and mushrooms you could forage in the cave would sell for money too, but our party didn't look ready to spare the attention for that yet.
Well, it was only our first day in the caves. They'd get used to it gradually. After catching our breath and checking our gear, we filled the inventory with mana stones and set out again.
"…Hey, that pitch-black thing next to the stalactite — is that a vampire bat?"
"Good eyes. Those things are bats, but they dive like birds of prey and go for your face and throat. If it comes to it, duck low and dodge."
After cave spiders and then the clearing full of goblins, the third monster we met was a vampire bat — wings fully spread, well over two meters across. Calling it a bat didn't mean thin wing membranes and a frail body.
True to the name "monster," a strong flap of those wings could deflect arrows; the sharp, oversized claws could sever a human artery with a swipe; and a full-power body slam could send a mage or priest tumbling. Muscular frame and all.
Looking at them, they seemed less like vampire bats and more like some vampire's thralls. Outside the Tower, you'd only find things like this in the nastier dungeons.
"Ah, damn! My arrows—!"
"I'll drop Light and use attack magic instead!"
Unlike the cave spiders, which only knew how to drop from above, these things flew every which way and obsessively targeted people's napes. They had at least minimal intelligence — they didn't go for my armored neck, but for the other party members with bare, pale skin exposed.
As vampire bats, they seemed to instinctively know whether an attack could draw blood. The way they only went for the throat made me wonder if they really were related to actual vampires. Thanks to that, Irene spread her holy arts while Kayden swung her sword hard enough to leave her breathless.
I swatted three diving vampire bats out of the air with my shield like swatting hornets with a book, but they also traveled in packs of five or six as a baseline — enough to fill a cave passage.
"These things tangle with each other mid-flight!"
"The wings are tougher than the body! Arrows won't stick in the wings!"
Grace's arrows bounced off wings and snapped, and Kayden — swinging sword techniques upward in the tight space — stumbled more than once. But thanks to Irene, no one got hurt.
Wing membranes tough enough to deflect arrows still couldn't hold forever against a mana-wielding swordsman's blade. One by one the vampire bats dropped to the floor and turned into mana stones. After getting a firsthand taste of the strongest of the four monster types that appeared in the caves, beads of sweat rolled down the party's foreheads.
"Holy crap, is this really a bat? Wings tough enough to bounce arrows, body so tanky it just ignores Spark and keeps flying. Looks like only attack magic is going to deal real damage in here."
The biggest reason Han Se-ah had overspent her mana was a skill-rank problem. Separate from her plan to sit inside Irene's barrier as a freeze-CC shuttle, she simply hadn't learned any new magic from the Mage Tower.
No matter how high a spell's attack power, trying to milk a basic attack skill learned on Floor 1 of the Tower all the way to Floor 21 was obviously impossible. She wasn't some novel protagonist who could master Magic Missile and fire thousands of them.
"It's getting late. Let's start heading back. Hanna, you said you could remember the path, right?"
"Yeah, I can."
And so, having safely finished our first combat on Floor 21, we made for the exit of the Tower — carrying a list of homework to solve, one item at a time.
Up through Floor 20, we'd more or less bulldozed everything with star power. But the moment we stepped onto Floor 21, problems started surfacing one by one.
First, Grace's issue was shooting accuracy. On the plains, in the forest, or even in the swamps that started on Floor 31, it might not matter — but in a dim cave, accuracy inevitably dropped. Especially when vampire bats flapped those massive wings right over the light source, her eyes tired fast. For someone whose main strength was detection rather than pure archery, it was bound to be rough.
Kayden's problem was that her swordsmanship leaned heavily toward anti-human techniques. She'd apparently learned the northern knight's blade as Katie Wellesley, and applying that to monsters that crawled and flew through caves didn't seem easy.
Lastly, Han Se-ah's problem was low attack power from basic skills. Trying to take down the third scenario boss with skills learned in the tutorial was greedy play, plain and simple. Once she claimed the Floor 20 rewards and learned new magic, that one should fix itself right away.
As for Irene… well. A party's priest wasn't really a combat member so much as insurance — healing wounds and preventing death — so she didn't have a problem to speak of. As long as her barrier didn't break, that alone was one person's worth of contribution. No, more like three.
"Haa, once I get skill points this time, I'm learning magic first. But Magic Missile could crack a moss wolf's skull — how does it not even break a bat's wing…? I guess in games, a monster's level is the real bully, more than its shape or name."
Thinking that over as I lay in bed watching Han Se-ah's stream, I saw she had felt Magic Missile's limits too — she was talking about skills.
Magic that would work on Floor 21… Looks like it was time for Jjanhae-jwa to write another post.