A Little Too Big 1
Even the densest viewer alive would have no choice but to notice by now — if not from the footage itself, then from the chat. It started back in Grace's village, when I scooped her up and ran around with her in my arms. Ever since, the two of us sat side by side at every drinking table, stuck together at every meal, and Han Se-ah went out of her way to pair me with Grace at every opportunity.
Granted, looking at our five-person party, that pairing was the textbook formation. Tank and scout up front; mage, priest, and the swordsman guarding them in the rear.
Still — if you could watch her plant the two of us alone together and then slap a camera on top of it without feeling even a flicker of suspicion, you weren't merely dense. You were clinically unwell. If she hadn't been filming, fine. But she was sticking a camera on us in plain sight.
"Anything nearby? Picking anything up?"
"Hmm… nothing around here, I think. No faint sounds either, so it seems like there aren't any monsters at all. Another adventuring party must have passed through not long ago."
Even knowing the camera was there, I couldn't afford to act awkward. I set my mace down for a moment, planted my shield like a walking stick, and stared down the cave passage. The camera may have come over to us, but in the end it was fixed squarely on Grace's face.
Thanks to that, I got to drink in the tender look on Grace's face as she watched me from beside me — without ever taking my eyes off the tunnel. Naturally, the viewers got to enjoy it right along with me.
"Hey now, dirty ulterior motives? Fantasy needs a proper drama to go with it or there's no fun in watching. What about you lot, huh? You gonna keep spamming 'oof oof' in consonants every time someone stretches forever?"
Then show me as well — the drama of the two of them that you created
"…khff."
"Hm? Roland, want some water?"
"No, I'm fine. No matter how much of this cave air I breathe, I just can't get used to it."
"Well, yeah — it's damp and musty on top of everything. If we were carrying torches instead of magic tools, we'd be choking on smoke too. That's why everyone buys magic tools or lanterns even when they're expensive."
Our party's total innate star count added up to eighteen, which is how Han Se-ah's community nickname "That18" — a double entendre with a rather filthy second meaning — somehow evolved all the way into "porn girl." The sheer absurdity of that chat comment shattered my poker face; a laugh burst out of me like a cough.
Grace shot me a worried look the moment I started hacking — I never so much as cleared my throat normally, thanks to this sturdy body — but the sheer impact of the words "porn girl" kept me from getting caught on the camera drone.
"Still, once we hit the next floor — the swamp — walking gets annoying, but the air's at least a little better."
"'A little better'? The way you say that is making me really nervous."
"Damp, musty cave air or humid, sticky swamp air — they're both miserable in their own way. But the swamp at least has more open sightlines than a cave, so it feels less claustrophobic."
"Even there it's still 'less than a cave'?"
I could only smile softly at the way Grace talked, clearly already sick of the whole subject. That was just how RPG games worked, wasn't it? You started in peaceful meadows and villages, and by the late game you were marching into lands of ruin, demonic dimensions, and every other nightmarish field imaginable.
Flat grasslands, then dense forest, then narrow dark caves, then swamps that would swallow you whole if you put a foot wrong. I'd heard that past the fortieth floor — somewhere I hadn't been — it turned into highland plateaus where even breathing was a struggle.
While Grace and I were chatting about the Tower's brutal terrain, Han Se-ah, thoroughly roasted over the "porn girl" nickname and having endured her share of psychological hardship, finally pitched a tent, lit a campfire, and got a meal ready.
"…Roland, Grace — come eat."
Even on the thirtieth floor, the enemies didn't change much — so long as a Blind Snake didn't crash the party. In the forest, individual monsters had simply gotten a bit stronger. In the caves, they got stronger and came in greater numbers.
Still, with no way of knowing when or where a Blind Snake might barge in, Han Se-ah put her head together as party leader and introduced one change.
"From now on, let's have Kayden take the front line instead of Roland."
"I'm standing at the very front?"
"Kayden and I handle the monsters up front, and Grace unnie and Irene unnie cover the rear. If a Blind Snake shows up while Roland's busy holding off other monsters, it'll get messy — so I'm pulling Roland off the line from the start as dedicated Blind Snake duty."
In other words: put Kayden on the front line in my place.
With innate 4-star specs, she could more than handle frontline work. The Blind Snake's sudden charge pattern was the one exception — and that was a named-monster pattern a tank class was supposed to eat, not a swordsman.
The others accepted it without a word of complaint; Han Se-ah's reasoning must have sounded solid. Besides, when we were hunting cave spiders or vampire bats in the narrow passages, the vanguard barely had anything to do anyway. You just held your position and watched Han Se-ah bind them while Grace finished them off.
The strategy itself hadn't changed much — only Kayden's position and mine had swapped — so we started exploring the thirtieth floor without any real issues.
"I hear goblin cries up ahead. Sounds like they've run into cave spiders."
"Let's crash the party and clean them both up. We need to check the clearing anyway."
A faint kiiik carried from far off. Grace tilted an ear and read the situation in an instant. A cave spider roaming the narrow tunnels had crossed paths with a goblin pack camped out in a clearing.
Even if monsters killed each other, what stayed on the ground wasn't corpses — it was mana stones. We'd arrived on the thirtieth floor and rested a full day. No reason to dodge a fight today.
Kayden drew her sword and strode forward. Until now she'd been protecting Irene in the rear, but there hadn't been much for her to do. Unlike moss wolves, cave spiders and vampire bats just pushed straight in from the front — no fancy business.
Unless it was a brawl against small fry like goblins or kobolds, she barely got to use her sword. Even while playing the part of a skilled, taciturn adventurer, the urge to show off was pure eighth-grader-syndrome heart, wasn't it? With a restless Kayden in the lead, we moved to enter the clearing.
Or rather — we tried to enter.
Drrrrrk—!
"Wait, what is that sound?"
"What's wrong, unnie? Is it a Blind Snake?"
"I think so… but something — something's off."
If Grace hadn't suddenly signaled us to stop, we would have walked right in.
Under all our eyes, her face went grave. She looked at me with a rigid expression, clearly about to ask something. At that unfamiliar seriousness, everyone held their breath — questions and tension both — and listened hard to our exchange.
"Roland, can you explain the cave snakes again?"
"A big snake, roughly eight to ten meters long. Blind, just like the name says, with a sharp sense of smell — once it catches a scent, it comes looking."
"So ten meters at most… right? The length, I mean. Exactly."
KWADDDDDRRRK——!
As if answering her question for her, the roar swelled louder and louder. Nobody in that moment was slow enough to miss what was happening. It wasn't just noise — vibration rolled up through the floor, and a few stalactites shuddered free and clattered down.
The one silver lining: the roar wasn't coming toward us. Just as the free-for-all between dozens of goblins and a dozen-odd cave spiders had drawn our attention, that grotesque thunder had drawn its attention too.
"……Once the sound dies down, we head into the clearing."
Was this what it felt like standing beside a railroad track while a train roared past? A random thought, but for some reason the old children's song about the little hut by the tracks floated up in my head.
After the roar — less like something scraping stone and more like something smashing the tunnel itself to pieces — finally faded, we stood frozen in the passage until not a single noise remained inside Grace's detection range. Partly because the sound had been that enormous. Partly because Grace's face had been that grim.
Only once the silence was absolute did we finally step into the cave clearing.
"Oh my god…"
"This can't be a Blind Snake's trail, right? …Right?"
Calling it a cave clearing felt wrong. "Ruins of a destroyed world" fit better. Or, if that was too much, "a basement mid-collapse in an earthquake" or "a cellar half-demolished and caved in."
Stalactites and stalagmites alike had been smashed into rubble. Across the hard stone floor, a long, clear groove had been carved as cleanly as if someone had cut a water channel through it.
"The mana stones… they're all pulverized."
"Mana stones can break like that?"
"They're condensed mana that just happens to look like rock. Hard, sure — but not unbreakable."
The mana stones that had once been goblins and cave spiders were cracked or crushed to grit among the stalactite shards, as if something massive had simply rolled over them. Faced with that overwhelming trail of destruction, our whole party fell silent.
For fuck's sake. A Blind Snake was supposed to be an anaconda-sized snake with a body reinforced by mana.
Not a goddamn excavator Transformer that tore cave floors and walls to shreds.