Streamer Hanna 4
Hanna still couldn't claw her way free of the shock and terror of glimpsing her own dark future in my story. At least she could log out. I was looking at a future of sleeping rough in swamps and caves with no escape hatch. Thinking as much, I stared blankly at her vacant face for a moment — then clapped my palms together right in front of her eyes. Smack.
"That's the kind of thing Top-tier Adventurers deal with when they push the absolute summit of the Tower. Way too early for a Novice Adventurer who just learned magic to lose sleep over it. The next spell you'll try is Magic Missile."
"Ah — right!"
Only the sharp sound in front of her face snapped her back to reality. She had barely cleared the tutorial on Floor 1 at Level 1 — what business did she have fretting over endgame content? Whether my unspoken point landed or not, she adjusted her grip on the staff and blinked up at me with wide, earnest eyes.
"Should I bring over a log to shoot, or aim at that bale of straw?"
"Shoot my palm."
"…Excuse me?"
Of course, those newly sharpened eyes clouded over again in under a minute. Had she already forgotten that I'd crushed her Shield with nothing but a fingertip? I stood there with my palm held out in a pose that practically screamed Stop!, and only then did Hanna come back to her senses.
The way her eyes darted around told me she was probably getting an earful from her viewers for stalling.
"Okay — here I go! Magic Missile!"
Bolstered by her chat's nagging, she swallowed hard, leveled the staff at me, and chanted the spell. At the tip of the staff, a fist-sized translucent orb materialized out of thin air. She swung the staff through the empty space like a fishing rod, and the Magic Missile streaked straight for my open palm.
Pretty clean for a first spell — Shield earlier, Magic Missile now. Is that the skill window doing the heavy lifting?
Thud—
A solid impact shoved my palm back a fraction. Heavier than a goblin's sling-stone — heavier, even, than a novice warrior's opening strike. Still nowhere near enough to scratch my skin, let alone leave a red mark.
"You were aiming for the palm, right?"
"Yes. You told me to shoot your palm."
"Fast cast, solid accuracy. You're already handling both Shield and Magic Missile like you've been at it for years. At the very least, I don't have to worry about you cracking an ally over the back of the head."
"Th-that story too…?"
"Exactly. Rookie mages with shaky control occasionally hit their own party. And it's not just mages — talentless archers, or thieves fumbling a crossbow they brought as a sidearm, will put an arrow in a teammate just as readily."
This was a world with no system assist to prevent team kills or friendly fire. Whether the arrow came from a party member or a monster, getting hit still hurt — and still killed. There were plenty of novice parties that had nearly wiped because someone tried to support the front line and instead blasted the back of a skull.
That was why non-offensive basics like the Spark Hanna had learned were surprisingly useful. Most monsters didn't wear proper armor, so a quick sear to the armpit or the back of a knee wouldn't deal Magic Missile–level damage, but it could wreck their stance just fine. Try throwing a clean punch mid-bout while someone holds a lighter to your underarm hair.
And if you accidentally singed an ally in the chaos, the frontliner was wearing armor — a stray spark wouldn't even startle them. Unless you had the unholy talent to land it precisely on the bare nape between helm and gorget, of course.
"For the rest of the spells, just aim at the floor."
A sphere of light bloomed above the staff and bobbed gently in the air — Light. A tiny flame sparked on the floor where she pointed, left a scorch mark, and vanished — Spark. A droplet of water barely large enough to cover that scorch mark — Water.
Whether it was raw mage talent or the skill window carrying her, all three spells earned a passing grade. Power would come with stats and levels; what mattered was control. First time in a VR game, first time casting magic, and her aim was already clean — that was a pass in my book.
She must have realized the praise wasn't empty flattery, because her shoulders squared with fresh confidence. No freezing up against goblins, accurate spellwork — she could probably push as far as Floor 5. Of course, even Floor 5 meant wandering that vast grassland four more times on the way up, so it would still take a while.
"Magic: pass. Now let's put in a party recruitment request and swing by the Tower for a bit."
"Party recruitment?"
Her eyes lit up again — she'd clearly been hoping for party members. Staff clutched tight, she trailed after me toward the counter like a little chick. Listening to her footsteps behind me, I offered a casual nod of greeting to a receptionist I knew by face if not by friendship — not Alice, but close enough — and spoke up.
"I'd like to put together a party for a Novice Adventurer."
"Yes, Sir Roland. Alice has been going on and on about you taking on a junior — so it was true."
"She's a chatterbox, but she doesn't talk empty."
"Since she's a mage, would a frontliner, a scout-type, and a priest about cover it?"
Everyone else is 'one person,' but the priest gets the honorific. Fair enough — the ascetic priests who walked the Tower instead of sitting in temples deserved every scrap of respect you could give them. I nodded, and Hanna nodded right along beside me.
While the camera was pointed elsewhere, I cracked open the chat window for a peek.
…Why had this suddenly turned into a public confession of everyone's fantasy fetishes?
Even a quick skim made my head spin. I closed the window without reading further. The station's community board was still more useful than live chat. My superhuman eyesight caught a few mentions of other streamers mixed in, but none of it was particularly nutritious.
Calling the guy a "thief" probably meant he'd gone the rogue route — except here, a thief wasn't a dual-wield DPS monster. They were the party's pathfinder: scouting, disarming traps. If you showed up on day one without lockpicking, trap disarm, tracking, and the rest of the toolkit already leveled, people would ice you out. Without those skills you were no different from Farmer A down the road.
"Since I'm here, skip the pure tank for the front line — go for someone with a solid offense-defense balance. And for the scout role, an archer over a thief if you can manage it."
"Understood."
I slid another gold coin across to the nodding receptionist. Generous for a tip, sure — but social grease made the wheels turn, and in a medieval world that had never heard of professional ethics, let alone human rights, that went double.
Hanna, glued to my side, just stared with saucer-wide eyes. If she'd logged back in yesterday and theorycrafted her magic tech tree with her viewers, she would have looked up the price of the lowest-grade Mana Stones by now. Coin to silver to gold — the classic fantasy currency ladder.
"Um… is putting a party together really that expensive…?"
A gold coin was something you couldn't hold even after hoarding hundreds of the lowest-grade Mana Stones. Having already spent two of them, Hanna asked me on the road toward the Tower.
"No. Party matching is free."
"Then why did you pay gold?"
"So the receptionist actually finds us decent people. By the book, Novice Adventurers just get matched with other Novice Adventurers. A farmer-frontliner who spent his life savings on one sword, a hunter-archer who learned to shoot from his dad but knows nothing about monsters, a mage who puts Magic Missiles in the back of allies' heads… mages are rare, sure, but parties that awful are the everyday default."
"Ah…!"
She caught on fast. The Adventurer's Guild could process paperwork and sort people into Novice, Intermediate, Advanced, and Top-tier all it wanted — at the end of the day it was still a medieval guild writing everything by hand. No game system sorting levels and ranks for them.
So even among Novice Adventurers you got extremes: gifted mages like Hanna on one end, and on the other, some guy who showed up with a sword, froze at the sight of a goblin, and started sniffling that he couldn't bring himself to kill anything. The gold was a tip meaning please filter those ones out for us.
A tip that wasn't silver but gold — more than a month's wages — would have the receptionist screening out the dead weight on her own. At minimum, she'd round up people with a record of entering the Tower solo and cashing in lowest-grade Mana Stones. That was the most common proof of competence a Novice Adventurer could show.
"What about the priest, then?"
"Priests who climb the Tower are rarer than mages. Mages become adventurers to harvest Mana Stones themselves and study the anomalies inside the Tower. Priests become adventurers for one reason only: faith."
"Faith?"
"The city has The Temple to heal the sick and wounded. You can't build a temple inside the Tower — so they go in themselves."
"Ahh — so they climb for the people who get hurt. That's incredible."
"Which is why you never pick a fight with a priest in the city. Just being involved in something ugly with one will tank your reputation into the dirt."
The silver lining was that these priests were the real deal — genuinely devout. This world had no dark-fantasy corrupt clergy who turned their backs on the dying for coin. Then again, in a world where a god's existence was proven by holy power itself, who'd have the guts to pull that kind of stunt?
Hopefully Hanna doesn't unlock any weird storylines as she plays.
Corrupt churches, rotten nobles — the kind of headaches I can live without.