A Bit Too Enormous 2
After witnessing that shocking scene of pure destruction, our party quietly retreated to the dead-end passage we had claimed as our temporary base. No matter how tough or massive the creature was, there was no way it could punch through solid rock and appear behind us.
From the traces alone, I figured I could hold it back… but could the rest of the party even put out damage? With a body that size, Kayden’s sword wouldn’t leave so much as a scratch on the outer shell, and Grace’s arrows would look like toothpicks stuck in a grown man’s hide.
The only real damage we could hope for was Han Se-ah’s magic. Unfortunately she had focused on wind-type spells to deal with the cave spiders and bloodsucking bats, so her raw firepower lagged behind fire or lightning.
“…That thing—whether it’s a cave snake or not—doesn’t seem to have a very good sense of smell, does it?”
“You’re right. We were right there in the passage next to the clearing, and it only smashed the goblins and cave spiders before moving on. Maybe its hearing is sharper than its nose?”
“The trail it left is also strangely straight. An ordinary snake’s path should curve and twist, shouldn’t it?”
Even after seeing those overwhelming tracks, our party—charged with a mission from the goddess—showed no sign of turning tail. Grace took the lead, and everyone started tossing out theories. Viewers who had already placed their bets, still unable to confirm the creature’s true form, flooded the chat with their own ideas.
After nothing but mid-sized monsters, the first large-class threat had clearly snapped everyone awake. The chat exploded all over again with people arguing over option one versus option two and pushing their own wild guesses. The fact that Han Se-ah was seeing this for the first time basically meant the entire world was seeing it for the first time.
Even if people outside played as mercenaries or knight squires, creatures this size almost never showed up. Whether it was an ogre, a worm, or a wyvern, large-class monsters were simply too big to hide from human eyes.
Once their location was known, adventurers and knight orders wiped them out without fail. What lord would tolerate a five-meter man-eating giant roaming the kingdom’s breadbasket and snacking on serfs? Leave it alone and you were watching one percent of your entire fortune vanish every single day.
“Roland, do you know any methods for hunting large monsters?”
“Most people lure them into tight spaces or traps. Less damage, easier kill.”
“Traps… probably out of the question. If it only reacts to sound and has no eyesight, maybe we could force its head into a narrow passage?”
“First priority should be confirming its appearance. Guessing like this won’t get us the right answer.”
Kayden’s suggestion earned nods all around. Unless we planned to flee the Tower entirely, we had no choice but to face the source of that roar. And backing that decision was their trust in me.
Normally, if the party tank couldn’t handle something, the proper move was to fall back to a lower floor and grow stronger. But when your tank was a natural-born 6-star Upper-grade adventurer, you could afford to bend the rules a little and get greedy.
“Roland, can you hold it?”
“Of course. I’ll keep it locked down for sure, so start thinking about how you’re going to kill it. Finding a weak point on something that big is half the battle.”
An ogre or a wyvern at least looked like a person or a beast—you could smash a limb, knock it down, then go for the heart or the brain. A long, serpentine body like this was a different story. If the brain was tiny, or the real weak point sat somewhere other than the head, I’d have to grind my way from the mouth all the way down its entire length.
…If I let it swallow me, could the reflection damage kill it from the inside?
The cheap trick floated through my mind for a second, but no one in their right mind wanted to be covered in the mystery fluids and stomach acids of an unknown life-form. I sure didn’t. If possible I just wanted to cave its skull in with my mace and walk away with clean Mana Stones.
“All right. Let’s move.”
And so began our exploration of the 30th floor.
While we were still turning over ideas for how to kill the boss, a space that was blatantly out of place suddenly appeared ahead of us. Without anyone injecting mana into the wall panels, the corridor had somehow become smooth and polished.
It looked as though someone had sliced the Tower’s natural cave passage and a golem maze corridor in half and glued the pieces together. We couldn’t just walk past something that suspicious, so we stepped inside.
“This passage is identical to the maze where the golems appeared.”
“Do you think there are golems beyond this point as well? That golden golem you mentioned, for instance.”
Whether the Tower had literally mixed cave and maze or not, the corridor was completely silent—not a single monster in sight. Memories of hunting golems quickened everyone’s pace. With neither the mysterious roar nor the usual monster noise, the tension eased and impatience took its place.
First a large-class monster that pulverized entire cave tunnels instead of blind snakes the size of anacondas, and now smooth labyrinth walls instead of the expected forest of stalactites and stalagmites. The 30th floor was nothing like the 10th or 20th, and the viewers showed no sign of tiring as they flooded the chat.
“You’re honest, I’ll give you that. And because I like that honesty, I’m closing the point-betting function now. You saw the walls get shredded—you should have placed your bets already, right? Anyone still sitting on the fence can keep watching from the cheap seats~”
With the corridor empty of monsters, Han Se-ah wasted no time roasting her viewers. She kept their noisy complaints—“I just got here!” “Who cares!”—tucked into a corner of her vision and pressed forward.
Fortunately we didn’t have to walk for an hour the way we had when hunting golems. After a few sharp right-angle turns, a vast open space appeared.
Unlike the usual cave clearings with dripping stalactites, stalagmites, and pools of water, this place was perfectly smooth on every surface—ceiling, walls, and floor. It felt more like a logistics warehouse than a natural cavern. At the far end stood a row of massive doors.
“We should open those doors, right?”
“Feels like there might be golems inside… do we have to smash them open?”
“This place is so alien it’s hard to believe we’re still inside the Tower.”
The unnaturally polished clearing and the long line of enormous doors standing side by side. My modern mind immediately thought of a warehouse or hangar, but to the NPCs who had only ever known a fantasy world, it must have looked grotesque and incomprehensible.
A golem hangar, huh… not impossible.
After all, the golden golem had left behind a key-shaped Mana Stone. A quest item shaped like a key, and a whole row of locked doors. Even someone who had never touched a game in their life would try sticking that key into one of them.
“…Looks like someone got here before us. They tried to break the doors open.”
“This was a fairly skilled swordsman. Clear traces of mana in the blade. It’s almost absurd that the sword energy only left scratches, though…”
We crossed the open space and came face-to-face with the doors. Five of them stood in a neat row along the far wall, each one shaped like a heavy hangar shutter. And every one of them bore the marks of a furious assault.
Judging by the intensity, an Upper-grade adventurer party must have stumbled across the place. The sword scars weren’t thin surface cuts—they had carved into the stone and scraped against some unknown metal. Scorch marks from magic layered over them as well.
They had tried sword energy, then the tank had hammered the seams with a blunt weapon, and finally the mage had poured everything into offensive spells… yet the doors remained locked, their surfaces only lightly scored.
No monsters appeared in the clearing, so the previous party must have felt confident enough to burn through a fair amount of mana. Of course, every confident attack had been shrugged off, and the doors still stood shut tight.
…Do we need to find a keyhole?
“Grace, maybe we should look for something like a keyhole on the walls? I think we’re supposed to use the Mana Stone key that golden golem left behind on these doors.”
“Hmm, this place does look a lot like the area where that golem came out of.”
We circled the doors looking for a keyhole, but nothing stood out in plain sight. Whether she had reached the same conclusion or her chat had started giving advice, Han Se-ah asked Grace to search. The rest of the party nodded when she pulled the key-shaped Mana Stone from her inventory, and everyone began running their hands along the walls.
Archers had the edge when it came to spotting monsters, but for structural gimmicks like this you really wanted a thief. I thought about the strengths and weaknesses of each class while we kept searching.
“Over here—there’s something!”
True to her role as the party scout, Grace found it first.