How to Enjoy the Game 5
Meanwhile, whether the adventurers they ran into were face-planting into cave walls or not, every last scrap of the viewers' attention was locked onto the point-gambling. Climbing from the 21st floor all the way to the 30th took a long time, so the betting window stayed open and the chatter kept rolling.
"If we're going all the way to the 30th floor, we might end up spending two days inside the Tower instead of one."
"A day to climb, a day to come back down, and a day to explore the 30th. If we take a lot of commissions, we should be ready to stay even longer than that."
Whether the chat was a chaotic mess or not, the journey to the 30th floor still had a long way to go. Given the nature of the caves—where you couldn't just charge straight from a gate into a corridor—forced detours were a constant fact of life.
So there they were, Han Se-ah and Grace, lined up behind my back for minimap checks and scouting. Maybe because it wasn't the 30th floor yet, they'd let the tension ease a little and were chatting quietly behind me. With me blocking the front of the narrow single-file cave path, they were still exploring—but there wasn't a shred of tension in either of their voices.
As if the cave itself didn't want to interrupt those two relaxed conversations, not even a single common goblin showed up along the path, and we climbed the Tower in perfect peace.
"Ugh… Walk long enough and I can't even tell if I'm on flat ground or if this is an uphill or a downhill."
Peaceful or not, complaints about the cramped, pitch-black cave poured in by the dozen. The people walking through the dark had it rough—but the viewers forced to stare at that endless black for hours were complaining about eye strain too.
Apparently deciding the stream needed a change of pace, Han Se-ah quietly called me to a stop. Well, we had been walking a while, pushing the pace since there was no combat. I almost answered like she was talking to me instead of the viewers.
"Roland? How about we take a short break?"
"Hmm, we have been walking a long time. Any of the spots you marked with mana look good for resting?"
"A little further and there's a fork—the left path is a dead end."
She'd clearly stacked up enough adventurer experience to naturally push for resting at a dead end. For any real adventurer that was basic common sense, but Han Se-ah's image was so heavily weighted toward "streamer" that even little things like this made her feel like she'd grown.
Of course, to the viewers already fuming in the wriggling dark, none of that mattered. One of them must have had a lot of pent-up social frustration, because they stopped betting points and started fighting among themselves.
"Hey now, I told you to bet points—who said anything about picking fights? I open up the house for once and you all completely lose it? Once we hit the 30th floor, it'll be obvious whose call was right, so why are you cluttering up the chat?"
With our backs to the dead end, we spread out blankets on a reasonably flat stretch of ground and sat down, and the party members' groans of relief came out naturally. In the middle of it all, Han Se-ah—who didn't even seem tired—kept her mouth working overtime scolding the viewers, and the sight was oddly impressive.
On stream she was a professional broadcaster who had the chat eating out of her hand, and in combat she had better control than the average adventurer—yet underneath it all she was a voyeuristic little freak. Wasn't that the living definition of "people are multi-dimensional"?
After finishing our rest amid a bit of noise, we set out again toward the 30th floor.
"Even on the 30th floor, nothing's dramatically different."
"It's the same caves. Other than the monsters, nothing changes, so I've mixed up which floor I was on more than a few times."
Just as Grace's instincts suggested, the 30th floor—which the girls were seeing for the first time—didn't have much to look at. The caves were still dim, the air still musty and damp, and the passages still cramped. If this had been a PC game instead of VR, people would've been screaming about copy-pasted backgrounds and recycled monsters.
None of that mattered to the viewers, though. Every last nerve seemed fixed on who was about to go completely broke on points. The stream window I'd left floating in the corner of my vision had suddenly gone wild.
There were a few toxic viewers still fighting in chat, but most of them had apparently gotten bored of the endless dark cave footage and wandered off to do something else. Then Han Se-ah's voice announcing we'd reached the 30th floor sent them scrambling back.
I shot her a sidelong glance, and the moment she caught it, she slipped naturally into party-leader mode and started giving orders.
"We spent a lot of time climbing, so let's prioritize scouting the area. We need to find a spot to pitch tents and camp, and leave the real exploration for tomorrow."
"So should we avoid combat as much as possible too?"
"Yes, Unnie. They said Blind Snakes can barge in on the 30th floor, so once we find a clearing or dead end we can use as a base, we'll slowly sweep the surroundings from there."
A textbook set of orders with nothing unreasonable in them. Everyone nodded and looked toward me—holding a torch-type magic tool—and Grace standing at my side.
On an unexplored floor with no mana markers, where Han Se-ah's minimap still couldn't be used, we had to rely entirely on Grace's senses. After a brief exchange of opinions, our party started moving again.
Watching us, the viewers started expressing their anticipation for the unknown 30th floor in all kinds of ways. The topic that came up most, of course, was the 30th floor's named monster: the Blind Snake.
It could barge in during combat, and it could catch a scent while wandering near a campsite and come looking. That meant Han Se-ah's stream—which had been smooth to the point of peaceful—might finally face its first real crisis.
These were the same viewers who called Grace "Noona" and Irene "Mamang" and acted like they'd hand over their livers and gallbladders for them—but they still wanted to watch Han Se-ah suffer. Even if they'd given their hearts because the girls were pretty and kind, at the end of the day they were still VR NPCs. No matter who died or got hurt after Han Se-ah's hard work, a reset would bring them right back.
Amid that bloodthirsty, slightly unhinged chat, the first enemies to appear in front of us were a swarm of cave spiders.
"What's ahead are cave spiders… but for the 30th floor, there's a lot of them. From the footsteps, roughly twelve, and there's no path around them. We have to fight."
"Then I'll hit them with magic first and knock them down."
"The path is too narrow for me to step up. If any of them climb up and try to close in from above, I'll handle those."
After a short exchange of opinions, we moved forward—and even my ears picked up that unpleasant scraping sound. The distinctive noise of cave spiders' pointed legs raking across the cave walls and ceiling filled the narrow corridor completely.
Twelve of them packed into a passage barely wide enough for two cave spiders side by side made the creepiness feel doubled. Three of them took the magic hit, dropped, and clumped together to block the path—narrow enough that hunting them was easy, but looking at them was even more miserable.
"Whoa… at this point, aren't they so tangled up they can't even move?"
"Ugh, they really are disgusting. Leave the ones in front blocking the path and I'll shoot from the back. The idea of them crawling closer once the corpses despawn is already grossing me out."
Han Se-ah briefly called out a skill name, then watched the spectacle her magic had created and voiced an impression pretty close to mine. A giant spider with its fat abdomen wedged in the narrow passage, thrashing its long legs wildly in every direction.
It was more than enough to trigger revulsion even in the party members standing guard behind us. Maybe she decided she couldn't be the only one stuck looking at that nasty sight? A camera drone went whoosh—flying right over my shoulder as I held the corridor with my shield.
"Hey! I didn't threaten anyone—no, wait, this isn't 'not yielding to threats,' you're the one threatening me! …And the guy who donated after that? Refunding him and banning him would be a public service for every other viewer, wouldn't it?"
Faced with twenty-four spider legs thrashing through the air in a tangled mess, the viewers completely forgot about Team 1 versus Team 2 and started dogpiling Han Se-ah instead.
Whether the Team 1 / Team 2 political talk had been a deliberate mood reset or just mindless noise was hard to say. Either way, it ended up being a seasoned streamer's move, so I wasn't going to complain.
Viewers who'd been hyper-fixated on picking sides united as one to attack Han Se-ah—and thanks to that, she got to rake in money while eating insults, so maybe it was a win-win? Glancing at the chat thrown into chaos by her camera work, we pushed forward again.
"We'll pitch the tents—Roland and Grace, keep watch on the corridor."
…Oh, come on. The second I try to give her the benefit of the doubt, she pulls this.