For the Runaway Girl 1
With Charlotte's help, the anomalies of the thirtieth floor were reported to both the Magic Tower and the Guild.
The Knight-type Golem that could be powered by a golem's Mana Stone, the appearance of Giant Worms that left behind corpses, the otherworldly processing plant that melted down bodies and magic tools to absorb liquefied mana, the hangar and the golem repair facilities hidden within it — all of it.
It was the kind of report that would normally be hard to believe, but when a noble young lady who also happened to be a mid-rank mage and an Upper-grade adventurer both insisted on the same account, there was little choice but to take it seriously. On top of that, the two people I'd handed lanterns to had made it to the Guild in time, and their testimonies were added to the pile.
"So the adventurers are going to pull out, and the mages are going to pour in by the dozens."
"Huh? Why?"
"Adventurers value their own lives, so anyone who can't handle large-class monsters will retreat to the twenty-ninth floor. Mages value knowledge more than their lives, so they'll all climb up to the thirtieth with the attitude of 'just don't get hit.'"
And so the two groups set off on perfectly opposite courses.
For the adventurers, earning money on the twenty-ninth floor or the thirtieth made little difference — both were cave floors. Anyone who'd made it this high could at least tell the difference between courage and recklessness. Not a single one of them entertained the idea of fighting a fifteen-meter large-class monster; they all headed safely for the twenty-ninth.
The mages, on the other hand, were lunatics starving for anything new. Worms that moved above ground, corpses that didn't vanish, a facility that extracted mana from bodies and magic tools, a giant golem you could pilot — every last detail was guaranteed to drive a mage into a frenzy. Of course they'd come charging in with fire in their eyes.
The one silver lining was that, after the orc incident last time, supply runs to the upper floors had become more lavish than usual, so expedition wagons weren't roaming the thirtieth floor's caves just yet. Other players might end up with expedition escort missions as side quests, though.
"So what should our party do?"
"If we've got enough food, I think we should stay on the thirtieth for a while. I want to check whether anything else came through besides the Giant Worms, and we need to have a proper talk about ownership of that golem."
"Ownership of the golem?"
Our party, gathered in a corner of the Magic Tower's tent-city research lab, all turned to look at me with questioning eyes. Katie, in particular — the one completely obsessed with the Knight-type Golem — had already blown through a family treasure, yet her eyes were sparkling so brightly I was starting to wonder if "golem addiction" was a real diagnosis.
Still, the rest of the party had tasted the golem's power for themselves, so the word "ownership" clearly piqued their interest. That power had come at the cost of Katie's magic tool in an act of extreme inefficiency, but still.
"As you all know, that golem melted down the family treasure Katie was carrying."
"Ah… right."
Katie hung her head as if I'd poked a raw wound. Irene patted her gently on the back and answered in her place. I felt a little bad for Katie, but thanks to her we now had a justification — so the least I could do was find a way to get her in less trouble.
Under normal circumstances, the standard adventurer routine would be to sell the golem to the Magic Tower and receive a token of gratitude for providing research material. But if we did that, our Northern Kid might get an earful from her father.
Given how much of a doting dad the Northern Grand Duke was, she probably wouldn't get scolded too hard — but there was a real chance he'd use the loss to the family as an excuse to haul her back for "re-education." And under the guise of re-education, he might quietly put her through heir training, after which her older sister would dump the work on her and she'd end up leaving the party.
"So here's the pitch: the fact that the golem woke up and moves properly is entirely thanks to the Wellesley family's magic tool."
"…Excuse me?"
"A magic tool held by House Wellesley woke a golem that had been sleeping inside the Tower for ages. Therefore, that golem isn't being sold to the Magic Tower — it's being sent to the Frost Wolf Knights of House Wellesley."
In short, to keep Han Se-ah's party from shrinking from a party of eighteen down to a party of fourteen, we needed to feed House Wellesley a big, sweet piece of candy. She'd burned through a priceless magic tool that couldn't be measured in money — so we'd replace it with something else that couldn't be measured in money.
The party members, who didn't know much about noble hunger for prestige, just blinked at me in confusion. That was when Charlotte, having finished her communications, walked over with a soft smile, as if she'd just overheard something amusing, and picked up my thread.
"My, so you're sending the golem north in exchange for keeping the young lady in the party?"
"Exactly. A precious necklace that sat locked in the family vault isn't something you can show off. But a steel knight standing at the vanguard of a knight order? You can brag about that to anyone."
"…I-is that so?"
In other words, a bribe for a doting father.
Your daughter has grown into a fine adventurer and awakened a steel giant sleeping on the thirtieth floor — so take it in the name of the Frost Wolf Knights, use it to purge the monsters of the North, and spread your renown. That kind of feeling.
When a child breaks a plate, the way to avoid getting scolded by Mom is to show up holding the broken shards together with a stack of perfect test scores, right?
The report was filed and the plan was set. Now we needed to roam the thirtieth floor, wipe out the Giant Worms, and find the real boss somewhere out there. While Han Se-ah fretted over how to spin things, I took the initiative and claimed that "something else might have come through," pushing us toward the main scenario.
We had two objectives on the thirtieth floor.
First: lure and exterminate Giant Worms to repair the three wrecked golems. Second: find and face the real boss wherever it was hiding. Of course, that was from Han Se-ah's perspective — the rest of the party had no idea a real boss even existed.
The viewers seemed to agree this approach was reasonable, and they started showing their hunger for the real boss. Points had already been bet, and the Giant Worms had nearly flipped the whole board, so they were a little on edge.
The points couldn't be converted to cash, and they accumulated naturally over time, so they weren't exactly scarce. Their uses — asking questions, coloring your own chat messages — weren't particularly precious either. But the viewers who'd already bet their points under the name of a "House" clearly had no room in their heads for such trivial details.
"Miss Katie, why did you want to become an adventurer?"
"Hmm… because it looked free? Or maybe because of the fairy tales I read as a kid."
"Fairy tales? Well, the children at the Temple also read fairy tales and dream of becoming adventurers. There are plenty who argue over which is better — becoming a free adventurer or a dashing knight."
"A knight, huh… Watching the soldiers train together, I can't really say it looks all that dashing."
Whether the viewers outside the screen fretted or not, Irene and Katie chatted quietly among themselves. Unlike Grace, who was still a bit awkward, Irene had been good at drawing people out, and she'd clearly gotten the conversation flowing. Bolstered by the viewers' countless cheers of support, we decided to return to the hangar and lure Giant Worms in to kill them.
Part of me wanted to haul around even a broken golem arm, but I decided against it just in case.
The story was already twisted beyond recognition — if I started messing around with golem wreckage and somehow interfered with the repairs, it would be a genuine headache. If a problem could be solved with raw strength and stamina, I'd push through it until people called me a brute. But golem repair was a completely different domain.
Even a toy robot's popped-off arm would shatter if you forced it back on with sheer strength. You couldn't fix delicate golem parts packed with gears using grip strength alone.
"So… do we just keep waiting for Roland to drive a worm all the way here?"
Drawing on last time's experience, I didn't go far — I just prowled near the single-path corridor connected to the hangar, roaring with mana-infused shouts while watching Han Se-ah's stream. Those things were faster than me anyway, so rather than ranging out, packing my voice full of mana was the better play.
An Intermediate-grade adventurer would get hit and pulverized into paste. Me? I'd just get unpleasantly coated in dirt and dust and dragged along the ground.
I spent a long while pacing back and forth across two or three large corridors, shouting "Aaaargh—" with the patience of a fisherman waiting for a bite.
…Should I go a little farther out?
"Yeah, doesn't seem like anything's nearby. That echoing through the tunnels is repeating at a steady interval, so it's definitely Roland yelling — and I can't feel a single vibration."
"Ugh, seriously! If I go out there, I get hit by a Giant Worm, reset to this morning, and end up reporting to the Magic Tower and Adventurer's Guild all over again, okay? …But wait, something just occurred to me."
"You little—! …Anyway, I just need to make something like a lure scent, right?"
Unable to withstand the viewers' relentless nagging, Han Se-ah pulled a golem Mana Stone from her inventory as if a lightbulb had just gone off.