The Crossdressing Girl 4

Charlotte Cavendish was a noble.

This wasn't some empty talk about blue blood or refined young ladies. She had been born into a noble house, raised on culture and common sense, and was sharp and gifted enough to choose the path of magic for herself. There was no way a woman like that would fail to recognize a grand duke's daughter.

While Han Se-ah followed her viewers' advice and ducked into Kim Seok-hyun's stream, Charlotte pressed in close beside me with a suddenly serious look and began murmuring under her breath. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠The subject, of course, was our northern little gremlin… Katie Wellesley, daughter of the Northern Grand Duke and the Sword Princess.

"There were rumors like that circulating in the capital's social circles."

"What kind?"

"The Northern Grand Duke has two daughters. The elder is active as a knight, but the younger vanished without a trace around the time of her coming-of-age ceremony. So the gossip ran wild—she'd been cursed, or her sister had eliminated her out of jealousy over her extraordinary talent, and so on."

"…It's nothing like that, for the record."

At my answer, Charlotte's gaze drifted back to Katie. She was standing in front of the powered-down Knight-type Golem, looking disappointed, fiddling with her long silver hair, then remembering the broken magic tool and sinking into gloom all over again.

Charlotte's eyes softened—melted, almost—and she watched Katie with a strangely knowing look. Katie's appearance was that of a tall, mature beauty, but the girl inside was still a clueless child. Maybe Charlotte's socialite-honed eye had picked that up at a glance.

"It does seem that way. Would you mind telling me what's going on?"

"Get her permission first, and once we're out of the Tower I'll tell you everything. For now, how about we start by checking that golem maintenance bay? I'm not about to go airing a noble young lady's private affairs on my own."

"My, even when it's this obvious? Is it really something you can't say?"

"…It involves the Northern Grand Duke as well."

Charlotte's brow furrowed again, clearly imagining some grave situation. The truth—that a spoiled daughter had stolen a family treasure and run away from home, and that the doting Northern Grand Duke had only come to check her face before heading back—was something I simply couldn't bring myself to say out loud.

Not for Katie's sake, but for the honor of the North, I needed to get our stories straight today. I had no desire to make an enemy of a Northern Grand Duke who'd appeared out of nowhere in a memory I didn't even have.

"…All right. If you're insisting that much, there must be circumstances."

"Yeah. Thanks for understanding."

Those "circumstances" were less a serious problem than an embarrassing one—a minor misunderstanding—but either way, Charlotte slipped into the hangar with her maid. What they needed to search for now wasn't living presence but facilities: pipes, mana tanks, and the like. Mary's thief skills would come in handy.

No need for me to crowd into a place full of mechanical arms. I figured I'd check whether the other bays of the hangar had any panels of their own. Turning my head, I found Han Se-ah bobbing her head earnestly at empty air.

Grace and Irene passed by without any particular reaction, so she must have been in a one-on-one conversation with that streamer, Kim Seok-hyun.

"Ah, Seok-hyun, thank you so much. The quest window suddenly updated, and while you were reading it a worm came charging from behind and hit you? Um, if you don't mind, could I see the quest contents a little…"

Kim Seok-hyun had been using Han Se-ah's stream as a future-sight guide himself, so he seemed to show her his quest window without much resistance. A glance at Han Se-ah's stream window confirmed it—the camera was showing a bunch of dark-clad men, not Grace and Irene.

From what I gathered, Kim Seok-hyun had more bad luck than skill. Or maybe not—he'd gained another 4-star companion for a total of four, so calling him unlucky felt a bit off.

The story that came through Han Se-ah's stream went like this.

Kim Seok-hyun had no senior adventurer like me, Roland, to put him through combat drills and manage his pacing. His companions were all 4-stars with basic adventurer experience already under their belts. So unlike Han Se-ah, who had spent time getting used to the caves, he'd simply climbed straight up.

He'd even only farmed a couple of the golem's Mana Stones before pushing on to the 30th floor just to catch up with Han Se-ah. Ten minutes after entering the 30th floor, the quest window updated—and the moment he stopped in a passage to read the refreshed system—

BOOM—!

The Giant Worm's charge—the kind you were supposed to stop by climbing into a Knight-type Golem—was nowhere near something a tank player could hold back alone. A donation video played of Kim Seok-hyun, who had died mid-quest-log and rolled back to morning.

Still, while the date rewound to morning and the NPCs' memories vanished, the quest logs a player had already obtained apparently didn't get wiped.

Thanks to that, the viewers, Han Se-ah, and even Kim Seok-hyun put their heads together and reached a conclusion.

"Hey—them? So there are multiple Giant Worms…? That's why there were four golems? You've got to be kidding me. Seriously."

Fortunately for the viewers who'd placed bets, the Giant Worm was not a boss monster. And then Charlotte walked right up to the dazed Han Se-ah and immediately shared what she'd figured out.

"I think I know where that Giant Worm's corpse went."

"What? Really, Miss Charlotte?"

"This clearing looks spacious, but you must have noticed the walls and floor are packed solid with mana circuits."

"Ah, right… mana circuits."

Unlike Han Se-ah, the fake mage who just waved her staff around and spammed skill cancels pretending to move mana, Charlotte Cavendish was a researcher of the Magic Tower. Her eyes sparkled with genuine interest as she launched into an explanation of the place.

Han Se-ah's reaction made it painfully obvious she'd never even thought about mana circuits, but Charlotte pressed on without caring.

"This place is a kind of furnace—or an incinerator, if you prefer. You could also call it a mana refining facility. This clearing wasn't built to operate those giant golems."

Somehow the more I listened, the more complicated and dizzying it got…

I wasn't the only one struggling. The rest of the party was staring at Charlotte with equally puzzled eyes.

Fortunately, no desert made an appearance on the 30th floor. The Giant Worms had never had the ability to burrow through earth in the first place—they'd been labyrinth-roaming monsters from the start. Strictly speaking, you could call them a Giant Worm subspecies, or ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠a variant, something like that.

In short, the Giant Worms weren't desert creatures. They'd come over along with the golems. We still hadn't figured out why their corpses didn't turn into Mana Stones, but Charlotte had at least worked out where the bodies went.

"So this place is a factory that converts monster corpses into liquid mana? And the Giant Worm corpse I left behind got turned into mana and absorbed too."

The hostile relationship between the Giant Worms and the Knight-type Golems seemed to predate their arrival in this world. They might even have been the enemies the golden golem—the one that gave us the key and vanished—had been fighting against.

That would explain why the Giant Worm had ignored me, the one who'd half-crushed its snout, and gone berserk charging at a Knight-type Golem it had never seen before. A golem that ground up the corpses of its own kind for fuel—a large-class monster would sense that instinctively.

Thanks to Charlotte's patiently repeated explanations, Han Se-ah finally got a handle on things and started counting on her fingers, sorting out the quest.

"So we came to the 30th floor, got chased by a Giant Worm, picked up hints about the worm, found a Knight-type Golem, hunted one worm, and then based on the earlier hints we were supposed to break down the worm and use it to repair the golem?"

"For now, maybe I ask Roland to drag every last worm over here and fill up the mana tanks…? But how am I supposed to explain this to the unnies. If I just say Charlotte's words gave me an idea and dance around it, they'll probably buy it, right?"

Even after figuring all that out, a problem remained. We now knew the Giant Worms were essentially battery material for the Knight-type Golems—but we still had no idea what the real boss monster was.

Han Se-ah glanced my way with a slightly uneasy look. Some viewer was cracking bio-energy jokes about the Giant Worms, so I held back a laugh and met her eyes; she smiled awkwardly. Now that the quest had gone sideways once, luring in the remaining Giant Worms was ultimately going to fall to me.

But hang on a second. If this facility was a place that melted things down and absorbed mana…?