Luck or Misfortune 1
From the 21st floor to the 22nd. From the 22nd to the 23rd.
And from six mana stones, past ten, all the way to twenty.
"What are these mana stones even for, anyway? I was about to feel proud of myself for collecting around ten, and now we've somehow hit twenty."
By now the party had grown thoroughly familiar with the caves, the mazes, and the golems, and they gathered the golem remains with practiced ease, pocketing the mana stones as they went. The Magic Tower was always hungry for research material, so they bought every scrap of golem debris without fail.
Of course, hauling every last piece of a two-meter-tall golem was far too much, so they only took a little of each body part — but even that paid about as well as a full commission.
Thanks to that, the Tower mages had already run a few simple reaction tests and figured out at least one weakness. The golems had been built absurdly tough, but they had no direct resistance to magic, so spells worked surprisingly well on them. Not attack magic — ordinary construction magic meant for softening rock.
"It's a lot better once they go soft. Swinging a sword at a pile of dirt is way easier than swinging it at solid rock."
"Honestly, I never thought magic like that would even work."
Once the joints were softened into something closer to soil, Kayden would dodge the golem's sluggish attacks and hack off its limbs. Softened joints meant the heavy stone body no longer had the strength to hold itself up, and the golem would naturally fall apart.
In game terms, it felt like a golem with sky-high defense but paper-thin HP taking fixed damage from a magic debuff, its limbs shattering in an instant.
"The Tower exploration is going smoothly, but… Roland, are you sure you're all right?"
"All right about what?"
"Your, um, finances. I've heard that men will take a monetary loss just for the sake of their pride…."
After finishing the post-battle cleanup and looking back down the passage from the maze into the cave, Irene stepped up beside me, tapping the forearm of my armor as she spoke. The more golem mana stones piled up in Han Se-ah's inventory, the more often Irene's brow furrowed.
Grace, who had grown up in a slash-and-burn farming village, had been stunned by the idea of ten gold coins — but only at first. Once she heard that our still Intermediate-grade party was already raking in silver by the pouchful every day, and that Upper-grade adventurers must earn even more, she understood and moved on.
Our candidate Saint, however, came from a faith base that closely resembled Catholicism and Christianity. Frugality was a virtue to her, and since I was shouldering every party expense alone, it clearly sat poorly with her.
"It's not that bad. Don't worry about it."
"Ah! That's exactly what the Sister said, word for word!"
"Something your teaching Sister told you?"
"She called it the wisdom of the elderly. That men are like children, and that they end up taking losses because of it."
Even a shy, reserved nun, after camping together long enough, loses all that awkward distance. Now she was fretting over me like I was some immature little boy.
Of course, with a body this broken and a wallet fattened by every noble-related commission I could snatch up, she had nothing to worry about — but her reaction was cute enough that I didn't mind. I wasn't so twisted that I'd get angry at someone fretting over me. Especially not when that someone was a beauty.
We shared a brief chat, and then the rest of the party drifted over to join us. No monsters had ever appeared while a maze turned back into a cave, but there was no reason to let our guard down inside the Tower.
"Shall we head back?"
"We got a golem mana stone, collected golem body parts, and picked up two kinds of moss and one mushroom on the way in, right? Yeah, looks like we've completed every commission."
And so, without incident, another day of Tower adventuring came to an end.
"Hmm… Roland? There's something that's been bothering me a little."
"What is it?"
After defeating the golem and coming back out, it was still earlier in the afternoon than expected, so the party decided to rest at a guild table for a while before having dinner together. We were sitting around leisurely settling the results of the day's adventure when Elise sidled up to me.
Gone was her usual sly, smiling gaze — her eyes were faintly furrowed, as if something sat poorly with her. The topic she brought up was a heavy one.
"There's an adventurer party I know, and I haven't heard from them in days."
"Why does that matter?"
"They're aiming for the 30th floor — a party of Intermediate-grade veterans, practically. They told me they were going to the 21st floor to look for golems, and then the contact just stopped."
Elise had connections everywhere.
The big sister of every guild receptionist, the most senior of the clerks, the one who managed commission paperwork and even had ties into the finance department — a true social butterfly. Naturally, she knew a staggering number of adventurers, from promising rookies to Intermediate- and Upper-grade adventurers who completed commissions like clockwork.
That was exactly why I had told Elise I was looking for companions for Han Se-ah. Unlike other receptionists, whose networks were limited by the paperwork they handled, Elise knew everyone from beginners to Upper-grade veterans.
Knowing that many people made her current worry all the more credible. If Elise remembered someone well enough to personally pass along their story, their track record was solid.
"They've been gone longer than they were supposed to be back?"
"Exactly. They're a pretty well-funded party, so they use the gates. They'd take the gate all the way to the 20th floor, and it's already been four days since they went to the 21st. The party leader is the type who obsesses over plans — there's no way he'd go higher than the 21st without a word."
A party seriously aiming for the 30th floor, stuck on the 21st for four days. Yeah, that was definitely something to worry about. In this town, a party that didn't return from the Tower for a long stretch was simply assumed dead. The only suspect in this case was the golems our party had been investigating.
Veterans aiming for the 30th floor wouldn't have gotten careless and gotten themselves killed after Elise had already briefed them on every golem precaution. Which meant there had been some anomaly our party hadn't encountered yet….
"Whoa, is that a plot hook? Like a sub-quest teaser where the golems get more dangerous, or there's a hidden gimmick with them. But we've been walking those mazes for anywhere from ten minutes to an hour at a time and still haven't found anything — when are we supposed to cash in that hook?"
Hearing Elise's words, Han Se-ah seemed to be thinking along the same lines as me. It wasn't as if other monsters appeared alongside the golems in the mazes — it was always one maze, one golem. For Intermediate-grade adventurers to fall to golems that had nothing threatening about them beyond being sturdy felt wrong no matter how you looked at it.
The grasslands and forests at least had beautiful scenery for the viewers, but the caves were so dark that the audience was already complaining of fatigue.
Of course, for all their talk, their real complaint was about the lighting. Outside the chat window, which was censored in real time by the A.I., people on the internet were a lot more blunt about what they actually wanted. Things like the torch-type magic tools being too dim to show the party's bouncing assets, versus the opposing camp arguing that the bouncing in the dark created an optical illusion that was actually better.
…These bastards never change.
At this point I had to wonder whether people watched Han Se-ah's stream because it was the world's first broadcast progressing the story, or because her companion NPCs were the prettiest of any streamer out there.
"Ugh, I'm going to lose my mind over this whole 'bad luck' thing. Aren't these the same people who used to roast me for having the worst hands and the worst instincts before I even started Heroes Chronicle? They practically gaslit me into believing Han Se-ah has no luck and terrible gacha pulls, and now look at them."
With that thought, I pretended to ponder while casually glancing at the chat, where every theory imaginable was flying around.
The hypothesis I liked best was the floor-25 mid-boss theory. Weakening an absurdly over-specced boss monster with a gimmick or items you'd collected along the way was a pretty common RPG pattern, after all.
Surely it couldn't be like the viewers were saying — that we'd been so unlucky we'd somehow ghosted past the event across a dozen-plus battles all the way to floor 23.
……Wait. Actually?