Ways of Enjoying the Game 4
Wasn't there an old saying about how once a monk tastes meat, not even a bedbug remains in the temple?
Having crossed that line once, Han Se-ah threw herself into virtual-reality porn with abandon—or so it seemed, the way she started moving with even more enthusiasm. More precisely, her camera drone began locking onto me with the eyes of a beast in heat.
Granted, if the other party was a virtual-reality NPC, there was nothing to hesitate over. In a maple-leaf world you hunted thousands upon thousands of monsters a day; in an FPS world you became a respawning soldier and gunned down enemy troops thousands of times; you raided tragic villain bosses hundreds of times just to snag an item.
Against game NPCs, gamers would mow down massacres with guns and bazookas, or lock someone on a roller coaster and imprison them in an amusement park for eternity—so why would anyone feel guilt over a little peeping? Thanks to that, the camera started moving almost like a sex-crazed parrot.
Of course the camera couldn't actually talk, but something like a silent will seemed to come through.
Not only when I was alone with Grace—whenever I visited the Magic Tower to discuss golem mana stones and ran into Charlotte Cavendish, or whenever I chatted with a female adventurer I knew, like the spear-user Lily Depp, the camera clung to me with sticky persistence.
"Alright! Today we finally head to Floor 30. Will we get a giant jewel golem that outclasses the golden ones, or a cave boss monster with nothing to do with golems at all?"
That said, it wasn't as if her antics were causing any problems for the tower climb that would fulfill my dearest wish. The moment the stream went off, Han Se-ah acted like a middle-schooler who'd just discovered porn sites for the first time—but the moment it went back on, she snapped right back into Han Se-ah the gamer-streamer seriously gunning for the world number-one tower climb.
Why she refused to enjoy porn in real life and instead fixated on pleasure inside Heroes Chronicle—and why, of all people, she fixated on me—I honestly had no idea. But if it wasn't actively getting in the way of climbing the tower, there was no need to grit my teeth and put a stop to it.
Yeah, fuck it. Watch all you want and get me out of here…
If some greasy, bloated old man were the one peeping, that would be another story—but the peeper was a beauty on par with the female characters the game developers had poured their hearts into designing.
It was human nature for even a special-forces robber to get a fan club calling her an angel and pleading not guilty so long as she had a pretty face; a little secret peeping was something I could put up with. Feeling shame and rage over something that minor would be ridiculous after everything I'd been through in this bizarre fantasy world over the past ten years.
With that thought set aside, the Floor 30 raid began. We gathered around a guild table and started talking about the thirtieth floor.
"Roland! What's the big shot of Floor 30 like?"
"The one that shows up on Floor 30 of the cave is the Blind Snake. Just like the name says, it's a huge snake with no eyes—but what it lacks in sight it makes up for with an incredible sense of smell, so it picks up prey from a long way off and comes hunting. Odds are the snake will find us faster than Grace finds it."
My party members' eyes went round at the explanation. Until now, every single monster had been caught by Grace's scouting without exception. Whether they were stealthed or roaming in packs, we'd always held the first-strike advantage—so hearing that this time would be different was bound to surprise them.
But of course it would. This wasn't some ordinary monster; it was a boss… or rather, if the ones that appeared in the scenario counted as bosses, then the Blind Snake was a named monster. Users couldn't keep holding a pure-stats advantage over named monsters forever, could they?
No matter how broken a natural 5★ character was, if a single user character outclassed a named or boss monster that required a full party to take down, the game would lose all meaning.
"So a fight with the Blind Snake is unavoidable. It'll catch our scent and come looking, and Grace will only spot it while it's already charging at us."
"Meaning once we enter its territory, combat is guaranteed."
"Exactly. It might show up while we're fighting other monsters, or while we're setting up camp to rest. So nobody lets their guard down. The good news is that the thing has no special abilities—it's just tough and fast."
A snake roughly eight to ten meters long. A movie-monster of a serpent that sniffed out humans and slammed straight into them. Aside from the absurd force of that charge and the crushing constriction that followed, there was nothing particularly terrifying about it.
Getting rammed by that massive body was scary, sure—but a tank who'd made it to Floor 30 could lower their stance and take the hit. If you couldn't block that in the first place, you had no business being on Floor 30. From a game-design perspective, if the tank couldn't survive a single blow, it just meant your specs were underleveled, right?
And once you blocked that first brainless charge, the thing had nothing left to fear beyond its toughness and sheer size. If I had to put it simply, it was basically a golem with one extra charge pattern tacked on. As long as the front line held it properly, you could hunt it without any real danger.
"Other than the charge and the constriction, it's just a tough customer with nothing threatening about it, so think of it as fighting a long, skinny golem. At least cave spiders and vampire bats try to drop on you from above—the Blind Snake doesn't even do that. It just comes straight at you from the front, stubborn as a rock."
"…When you put it like that, it does sound a little easier."
For the viewers hungry for information, Han Se-ah had planted her camera in front of me like she was conducting an interview. Thanks to that, the audience who'd heard my explanation let their imaginations run wild. Fair enough—Floors 10 and 20 both had bosses, so a Floor 30 without one would feel like a letdown.
Especially since, unlike the floors below, the golems had only dropped mysterious foreshadowing before showing up from Floor 21 onward. Would a snake boss appear the way Full Moon Wolves and Orc Chieftains had as upgraded versions of Horned Wolves and Orc Hunters? Or would an upgraded golem boss appear, cashing in on all that foreshadowing? Those two camps started clashing chaotically in the chat window.
And there was no way streamer Han Se-ah was going to let that chaos pass her by.
"Alright, alright, everyone's so rowdy—shall we open a betting board for the first time in a while?"
Apparently that other world also had points that accumulated the longer you watched a stream, because Han Se-ah gently needled her viewers into opening a board. Pretending to check her inventory, she tapped away at a hologram and laid two extremely simple options in front of the audience.
What will Floor 30's main scenario boss be?
Pink and sky-blue gauges started racing immediately. The options were so simple that even foreign viewers seemed to be tossing points in for fun—translated speech patterns, English, and Russian chat messages flooded in between the usual comments.
Watching her audience bet with near-manic intensity, Han Se-ah grinned. As if fanning a house fire weren't enough, she looked ready to throw on more firewood.
"Oh, right—I opened the point gambling den for the first time in ages and forgot to update the prizes. Instead of the usual point-purchase items and subscriber emotes, should I throw in some Heroes Chronicle-related stuff? Like those question tickets we did before."
As points brimming with raw desire piled up, we left the guild and headed for the gate leading to the tower.
Drawing in the forest air of Floor 20 with a touch of regret, we entered Floor 21. Passing a few adventurer parties with their faces buried against the walls hunting for golems, we kept moving upward.
"Every adventurer we run into seems to be looking for golems."
"Hmm. Probably because of me."
"Uh… why? Golems are ridiculously hard to kill. And if you're unlucky, it can take hours. Compared to regular commissions, it doesn't seem like a very attractive option."
Seeing every adventurer in the same state, Grace—who always sensed other adventurers first—tilted her head with a puzzled look. I'd been buying golem mana stones, sure, but given how tough the golems themselves were, she didn't seem to think they made for appealing targets.
Even our party couldn't handle rock golems without my and Han Se-ah's magic, and steel golems required something on the level of an upper-grade adventurer to destroy.
"That's only if you're thinking about money alone."
"Ahh, because of the Magic Tower? I heard they're buying them up like crazy."
My short answer still left Grace without a clear picture. The one who cut in from behind with the correct answer was Han Se-ah. She'd probably dug up some information at the Magic Tower thanks to the mana stones stockpiled in her inventory.
"That's right. I was the first to discover them, and word spread that they're special mana stones upper-grade adventurers are collecting at ten gold apiece. If a rock golem's mana stone is worth ten gold, then a steel golem's should cost even more—that's just common sense."
Ten gold for a single mana stone was an absurd price by any normal measure—but "a differently colored mana stone, discovered for the first time in the world by an upper-grade adventurer on Floor 21, ten gold apiece" made perfect sense once you factored in the rarity.
And a steel golem's mana stone—"discovered for the first time in the world, differently colored, cut and polished like a gem, obtainable only by upper-grade adventurers"—had already soared well past ten gold each.
The mages of the Magic Tower, in particular, were a collective of madmen thirsting for new research topics for their papers. They didn't hesitate for a second to buy uniquely discovered special mana stones. I hadn't particularly planned it, but setting that first price so generously had ended up playing the role of a shill.
If I don't need mana stones on Floor 30, I'll just sell them all to the Magic Tower through Elise at twelve gold apiece.
The roughly fifty golem mana stones stacked in Han Se-ah's inventory—the ones I'd told her not to resell—weren't part of any grand scheme.
I simply had every intention of using my connections.