Streamer Han Sea 5
Hanna's steps toward the Tower were light, buoyed by the thrill of finally casting magic herself. I liked seeing her so full of drive. Even after learning the miserable reality of Tower conquest, she showed no sign of wanting to quit — a relief.
"Roland, does that mean you're thinking of going back into the Tower?"
"Of course I am."
If you don't go, I'll grab you by the pant leg and beg if I have to.
I swallowed that pathetic thought and gave her — and her viewers — the kind of answer they wanted to hear.
"Well, if you start pulling your weight as a mage, I wouldn't mind taking the front line."
"…Really?!"
"Good mages are hard to find on the higher floors. …Most of them disappear into the Magic Tower for research."
More precisely, mages hate living rough as much as I do, so they fall back to the rear lines just like me. Even with my absurdly overpowered body, I'm sick of camping out — there's no way fragile mages are going to rough it for half a year in some toxic swamp.
That was why the Top-tier Adventurers stuck on the uppermost floors weren't just desperate for supply runs — they hunted for competent mages with fire in their eyes. If Hanna kept leveling, every party in the Tower would probably be sending her love letters. Talent like hers, if it held, would have those high-floor ghosts living in tents seriously considering a kidnapping — player or not.
"Yeah, camping out does sound pretty rough."
"But what choice do you have? If you want to climb the Tower, you do it. I've rested long enough myself."
When I casually floated the possibility of not just being her mentor but actually forming a party together, Hanna lit up — and so did the chat window I was secretly peeking at. The world's only 6-star NPC dangling bait like that? Of course the gamers were going wild.
Trading lines like that, dangling the lure and reeling it back, we entered the Tower. Hanna strode into the dim entrance without a hint of the panic she'd shown on her first visit. As always, a vast, open grassland of almost painfully refreshing green welcomed us in.
"Today, let's climb a little."
"How far are we going?"
"I'm not planning to go deep, so we'll just get familiar with up to the fifth floor and head back. Anything higher, better to go with a full party. Even if it's a weak stretch that only spits out goblins, the danger ramps up the farther you wander."
With that, I reached into my coat and pulled out not an adventurer's badge, but a pair of small lanterns. One was my own, worn smooth with use; the other was a brand-new one I'd quietly lifted from the guild counter when I'd put in the request to register a companion. Naturally, the new lantern was meant for Hanna.
She stretched her arms wide, drinking in the scent of grass. I tore my gaze away from the generous curves her leather armor failed to fully conceal and held out the lantern — a palm-sized brass piece small enough to tuck into a coat.
"What's this?"
"It shows you the location of the passage to the next floor. Normally the party's pathfinder carries it, but it never hurts to have one on you."
Inside the brass lantern, instead of an oil-soaked wick, a shard of Mana Stone floated freely. It hung in the air like a needle set on a leaf floating on water — a long, pointed fragment of stone that behaved like a compass needle. Where the Mana Stone set into an adventurer's badge pressed down to project a hologram, this one simply pointed a direction.
The adventurer's badge showed the way out. The enchanted brass lantern showed the way up.
My lantern's Mana Stone was already drifting toward somewhere; Hanna's sat sunk and still. She tapped the lantern the way you'd jostle a broken machine, then looked over at me.
"Um, mine isn't moving."
"A lantern only recognizes stairways you've already reached. The Magic Tower's explanation is that it tracks the mana that forms the Tower's passages, but I never really got the details."
"So when you said we'd get familiar with the floors today…?"
"Register them on the lantern and it'll be convenient once we put a party together. Unless you'd rather depend on some archer you've never met and comb this entire grassland from scratch."
Looking like she'd just scored useful intel, she promptly clipped the lantern she'd been tapping to her belt. Whether she'd gotten comfortable with the leather armor by fiddling with it overnight, or some other streamer had already cleared the first floor and moved on, I found myself wondering.
After that, following the lantern across the grassland was easy work.
"Magic is a waste on anything goblin-tier or weaker. You can kick them to death barefoot — and if you're worried the horns will scuff your boots or greaves, just beat them to death with your staff."
Slimes you stomped flat; the occasional horned rabbit or horned fox you clubbed down with the staff. A horn-stab might draw blood like an awl, and a bite would leave tooth marks — but that was bare-skin talk. Against adventurers in leather, even a mage only added one more scratch to a secondhand set of armor.
If rabbit front teeth could punch through armor that stops a few sword blows, I guarantee I would have lived out in the real world instead of ever setting foot on the fifth floor — forget the thirty-seventh.
"Goblin! Should I try magic?"
"This time, use something other than Magic Missile."
The goblin from a moment ago had taken a Magic Missile and dropped dead on the spot. A creature that dies to a staff hit was never going to tank a spell several times stronger. The Magic Missile had split the air and, true to its name, caved in the goblin's nose bridge and killed it in one shot.
So the spell for this round would be something else.
"Something else… Spark!"
My earlier explanation must have left an impression — Hanna strode forward, swung her staff, and chanted. The staff thrust out like a spear, and with a sharp crack, a tiny spark bloomed in midair, right under the goblin's ugly nose as if she'd aimed it there on purpose.
Kyaaak?!
Whether the female had been hungry or just aggressive, the goblin had charged Hanna without warning — only to freeze mid-sprint, flailing its hands at empty air after the spark seared its philtrum. The reaction was so violent she must have timed it perfectly for when the thing was drawing breath.
"Hah!"
The goblin shook its head, too busy trying to shake off the stinging pain to notice anything else. Hanna hoisted her outstretched staff high overhead and brought it crashing down. If her last swing had been a baseball bat cut, this one looked like a kendo overhead strike delivered with a staff.
"The magic was accurate, and the staff trajectory was clean too. Did you study swordsmanship somewhere?"
"Ehehe, a little kendo when I was a kid."
"Kendo?"
"Ah — I mean, I learned a bit of swordsmanship."
So instead of a taekwondo dojo as a kid, she went to a kendo hall? The tip of her staff cracked the goblin's crown dead-center; her motor skills were clearly excellent. Then again, that was probably how she'd gotten famous doing workout streams on the side.
The fights that followed were just as one-sided. She blinded a charging goblin with Light magic and slipped to its flank for a thrust; she splashed Water magic into another's eyes to stop a simultaneous rush — every approach different, and not a single mistake.
…She really is absurdly good at this game.
Hanna's combat sense was impossible to believe for only a second day of fighting. She already knew she could hunt with the staff alone, so she didn't cling to magic — she freely mixed kicks, staff work, and spells, and it looked impressive as hell. Honestly, she was already better than I'd been as a first-year adventurer. Back then I'd just charged in trusting my armor, swinging wild punches like an elementary schooler.
We killed goblins, picked up Mana Stones, and kept pushing across the grassland. After walking this far we should have run into other adventurers at least once, but the place was oddly empty today. No matter how wide the plain, adventurers heading for the upper floors all funnel toward the same passages eventually.
Speak of the tiger and it appears — no sooner had the thought crossed my mind than a noisy clamor drifted our way.
"Another adventurer party?"
"We're on the path to the passage, so it was about time we ran into someone."
I couldn't make out the words, but it definitely wasn't a goblin's choking cry. Our routes must have overlapped; following the lantern, the distant dots gradually resolved into people. Of course, that was only true for me and my enhanced senses — on Hanna's camera they were probably still just dots.
The party makeup was two male frontliners, one female frontliner, and one female archer. Three up front and one archer — a pretty standard novice-adventurer composition. "Frontliner" here just meant anyone who grabbed a sword and shield and stood in front, trained swordsman or not, so the role always had plenty of bodies.
"So this is my fault?!"
"Then I suppose it's mine!"
By the time the four novice adventurers came into Hanna's view as well, their voices rang clear. The frontliners' armor was clean and well-maintained, so at least they weren't some bottom-rung disaster party scraping by below the fifth floor.
Which explained why they could scream at each other like that without worrying about a goblin ambush.
The ones arguing were the two women of the four. A female warrior and a female archer were shouting, faces flushed, jabbing fingers at each other, while a middle-aged man and a younger guy hung back a step, not even trying to intervene. Watching them sit it out like that, the party's leader was probably one of the women.
"…What's going on?"
Nothing beats a good fight for free entertainment. The two women had gone past finger-pointing and looked ready to grab each other by the collar; Hanna's eyes were glued to them. At the same time, her camera drone shot off in a hurry.
…For just watching a fight, Hanna's reaction is a little intense.
Camera already halfway across the field, Hanna locked onto the stream and completely tuned me out. Curiosity got the better of me too — I opened the chat under the pretense of watching the fight.
Wait — there's a 3-star character mixed in?