Crossdressing Girl 5
Watching Katie Wellesley pilot the Knight-type Golem against the Giant Worm, I'd thought, Isn't that output a little too strong? Even if it was a boss-fight gimmick, the way she handled the Giant Worm was far too easy.
A monster with a four-meter maw and a body roughly fifteen meters long wraps around your ankle, and you just swat it off? That shouldn't make sense. Sure, I could do it—but from a gamer-balance perspective, it was clearly broken.
It wasn't as if Giant Worms came in packs of dozens. The "standard" play should have been needing at least two golems to take down a single one. Somehow, the mass-produced mana stone mounted on the golem's back had been burning through far less energy than it should have.
And we'd skipped even that process entirely.
"I-It really does feel heavier than yesterday…"
After reporting the thirtieth floor's danger to the guild and before setting out to find another Giant Worm, Katie climbed back into the golem and muttered in a hollow, tearful voice. I'd wondered if that melting-and-absorbing chamber really worked that way—and it turned out it did.
Apparently, a royal gift beyond any monetary value, a treasure of the North, had been reduced to a one-use enhancement stone and devoured by the golem.
"D-Don't tell me… because I rode the golem yesterday…? For real…?"
The mental shock was so severe that Kayden's speech patterns and Katie's speech patterns had scrambled together into a mess. Even Charlotte was left speechless by the pitiful sight. Neither adventurer nor mage could have dreamed that a golem discovered in the Tower would melt down a family heirloom.
The Northern Grand Duke's daughter—who'd vanished leaving only wild rumors behind—was now piloting a giant golem with a world-collapsing expression on her face. Even Charlotte, well-versed in high society, seemed to be struggling with her poker face.
"Still, look on the bright side."
"…Of what?"
"If you'd been wearing that magic armor that's still under repair, that would've turned into scrap metal too."
"……Hiek."
For a golem, it had a refined palate. Rather than the mass-produced mana stone on its back, the Knight-type Golem had greedily sucked up the highest-grade mana sealed inside a kingdom treasure. And the boost only lasted a single day. What kind of absurd efficiency was that?
The viewers who'd figured out the situation snickered and teased Katie in chat, but the intensity was infinitely lower than when they roasted Han Se-ah. Quite a few of them even seemed delighted by the sight of a beautiful girl looking so dejected. Of course—these guys only ever put their whole heart into bullying Han Se-ah.
As I glanced back and forth between Katie and the chat window, Charlotte—who'd been talking with Han Se-ah about something—approached me.
"So, what do you plan to do now?"
"We'll have to clear out the Giant Worms for the other adventurers' sake. This isn't a problem an expedition force can solve. And if we take down the Giant Worms, we might be able to repair those golems too."
"True. If large-class monsters have appeared in numbers, Intermediate-grade adventurers aren't going to cut it."
Charlotte was right. Small and medium monsters were, at most, comparable to animals—but from large-class onward, you had to start comparing them to tanks. The difference was extreme.
When ranking adventurers and knights, the gap between beginner and Intermediate-grade was mostly skill and knowledge. From Upper-grade on, the dividing line was whether you could manipulate mana and project it outside your body. Looking at it that way, the standards were actually pretty well designed.
So even if a beginner adventurer could somehow hunt a medium monster, an Intermediate-grade adventurer couldn't hunt a large one. Asking a martial arts champion to fight an oncoming subway train wasn't a duel—it was a traffic accident.
"Still, we should put out a warning. Is there a Magic Tower research lab in the thirtieth-floor safe zone too?"
"Of course. Mages would never leave an environment as unique as a cave alone."
"Then we should head there together and report to both the guild and the Magic Tower."
Charlotte the researcher was reliable, but Charlotte the adventurer wasn't ready for the thirtieth floor yet—so we'd have to stick together. Especially with an unknown number of Giant Worms roaming outside in place of the Blind Snakes.
I would have loved to haul that Knight-type Golem outside, but it was so massive that crawling through the passages would probably get its armor jammed halfway through. Once the thirtieth floor's story wrapped up and the Magic Tower came to build a gate, they could dismantle it and carry it out piece by piece. If I tried to smash my way out with it, it'd end up looking like a plastic model kit wrecked by a beginner.
In that sense, BB Games really had built a solid game.
"Alright, everyone—let's head for the safe zone."
"Mary has the landmarks, so she can take the lead."
"Yes, milady."
Katie, still looking thoroughly dejected as she climbed down from the golem; Grace and Irene, awkward about her sudden transformation into a woman; and Han Se-ah, getting buried under a mountain of viewer abuse for letting Katie solo the Giant Worm—all of us gathered again in the clearing and set off for the safe zone.
"They really are roaming around out there."
"A few more people have probably died."
The safe zone turned out to be closer than expected. Grace and the maid Mary led the way, sticking as much as possible to the narrow passages the Giant Worms couldn't enter. Even so, vibrations kept rumbling through the ground, and a grinding ddddrrrk echoed in our ears over and over.
As if to prove the Giant Worm hadn't been alone, the thirtieth-floor caves—which should have been silent—were anything but quiet.
"Luring them one by one is way too inefficient. Wish we had some way to draw them in."
The silver lining was that our party had a thief, an archer, and a player with a minimap—so we reached the safe zone without running into a single Giant Worm.
The forest safe zone had been a wooden fortress built from surplus timber. This one was a sprawling tent village beyond a low passage I had to crouch slightly to enter. With an entrance that narrow, hauling construction materials would have been nearly impossible—so they'd probably only brought lab equipment.
Then again, we were inside the Tower, in a cave. No need to block out wind and rain. Honestly, you could have managed without tents at all.
"Hm? What brings you here?"
"We need to contact the Magic Tower."
With Charlotte openly leading the way, attended by her maid, the safe zone guards dropped their guard immediately. Fair enough—the only man in our party was me. Two beautiful mages with staves, a beauty in a maid uniform, and a beauty in a nun's habit. Being wary of that lineup would have been stranger.
Charlotte's temporary lab was on the twentieth floor, but this was still a Magic Tower branch, and she headed for one of the tents as if she knew the place. Just as the twentieth floor had a cabin with a communication magic tool, the thirtieth floor apparently had a tent with one. A mage sitting in a chair outside the tent, reading a massive book in a strangely familiar pose, looked up at us with mild confusion.
"Adventur…ers?"
"I'm Charlotte Cavendish of the Magic Tower, here to investigate the anomalies on the thirtieth floor."
"Ah, I see. You've come to file a report with the Tower, then?"
The communications mage, who'd been eyeing us as if wondering what kind of adventurer dragged a maid around, nodded at the words "noble mage." Mages were famous for their eccentricities, and the nobles in Adventurer's City took it a step further.
Having somehow convinced himself through that bizarre logic, the officer and Charlotte headed into the tent, leaving the rest of us outside with nothing to do. An awkward silence settled over the party.
The cause, of course, was Katie Wellesley—whose male disguise had been forcibly stripped away. To a girl from a slash-and-burn farming village and a nun raised in the Temple caring for orphans, the title "daughter of the Northern Grand Duke" carried serious weight.
Han Se-ah the player was, by her own setting, a talented commoner who'd ridden a carriage up from the countryside. And I'd just dropped into this world with no roots—I had noble connections, but I wasn't a noble myself. One way or another, Katie Wellesley was floating alone, disconnected from the rest of the party.
"Ah, um, Miss Katie… you're from the North, right?"
"Yes. I wanted to become an adventurer, so I came here to climb the Tower."
Still, the tearful, childlike way she clutched her ruined magic tool seemed to bring out Irene's protective instincts, and she was making an effort to talk to her. Grace, on the other hand, had startled and sidled up next to me… Wait. Was she just using Katie as an excuse to get closer?
"Roland, did you already know?"
"Not before. I found out in the forest. The Northern Grand Duke suddenly summoned me for a talk."
"Really? So the Grand Duke knew?"
"He seems to dote on his daughter—he knew she'd run away and still looked the other way. Of course, I have no idea what to do about that magic tool problem."
"It's kind of surprising to see a princess that depressed. Must've been a really expensive item?"
Grace's comment—she didn't know much about magic tools—drew a crooked smile out of me. She'd heard there were dragon-related legends attached to it, so she probably figured it was just an overhyped antique. Wanting to see her shocked face, I lowered my voice and whispered into her ear.
"Making just one of those would take thousands of gold coins."
"…What?!"
"That's the production cost. If you sold it, you'd get over ten thousand easy."
Even after becoming an Intermediate-grade adventurer and handling silver pouches—even after watching me casually hand out gold coins—a five-digit gold figure was an amount Grace couldn't begin to imagine. At the mention of that unfathomable astronomical sum, her eyes transformed in an instant.
"She broke something like that? What do we do…"
If pity was what it took to get them closer, that worked for me.