What Replaces the Crocodile Swarm 2
With a burbling of bubbles, the surface of a sticky purple pool in the swamp began to boil, then burst with a wet pop like a soap bubble. At the same instant, a purple gas that looked for all the world like toxic fumes hissed out and dissolved into a shimmering haze before vanishing into the air.
"Roland, this place isn't supposed to look like this, right?"
"…Obviously not."
Originally, the swamp floor had looked like some untouched stretch of Amazonian wilderness. The pools had been nothing more than a nuisance underfoot — clean water that did no harm if it touched your skin — and the plants had been nothing but dense trees, not the kind of vegetation that looked ready to swallow a person whole.
But the landscape before my eyes bore no resemblance whatsoever to the one in my memory.
Pools dyed a deep purple. Trees that looked less like a thriving forest full of life and more like a haunted gray thicket. And something writhing beneath the sticky muck — not vines or roots, but things that moved like tentacles.
"What on earth is…?"
"H-hey! Don't just stand there gawking — get down!"
A desperate shout rang out from far off while I stood blankly surveying the area around the passage. Naturally, the party's eyes — and Han Se-ah's camera — all swung in that direction.
Two big men who were clearly frontliners came sprinting toward us, each with a smaller figure tucked under one arm — a woman and a young man. The way they ran so easily along the narrow dirt paths threading between the purple poison pools told me they were at least upper-grade adventurers.
"Wh-what do we do, Roland?"
"There's nowhere to step aside for them here. We'll use the passage again and drop back to Floor 30."
"Got it!"
Looking closer at the runners, I could see the faces of the woman and the young man under their arms had taken on a bluish cast. I'd assumed the purple pools were poisonous just from the color — turns out they really were.
We fell back smoothly into the passage, and the swamp's foul, reeking air gave way once more to the musty cave air that stung the nose. I edged to the side of the passage with the big men in mind, and a moment later the adventurers came tumbling out of the far end, gasping for breath. Never mind the poisoned young man and woman — even the two carriers were in rough shape, their armor corroded in places all over.
"Hey — why has Floor 31 turned into that?"
"That… hah… I don't know either. More importantly, it looks like you've got a sister with you. Could we ask for a purification? …We'll pay you for it, of course."
No mage, no priest — a four-person party of tank, swordsman, archer, and rogue. Exactly the kind of composition with zero ability to detoxify swamp poison. At the big man's words, Irene stepped forward of her own accord. She glanced back at the rest of us, and everyone nodded.
Priests and nuns climbed the Tower out of a sense of duty to the Goddess, so treating even complete strangers was only natural.
"Yes. May the Goddess's grace be with you all."
With Irene's softly murmured words, glittering holy power settled over them like a shower of stars. Color flooded back into the two patients' bluish, ashen faces as they drew long, deep breaths.
It was the kind of skill you'd expect from a Candidate Saint specialized in purification and protection — weak on recovery, no buffs to speak of, but exceptional at what she did. The two who had been wheezing as if someone were choking them out settled almost at once into the ease of people about to sink into a deep sleep.
A brief silence fell as everyone savored the warmth of that beautiful holy power cascading through the dim cave, lasting until the softly glowing light gathered itself back in and Irene lowered her hands.
"I'd like an explanation of what happened on Floor 31."
"Sure. For our benefactors, that much information is the least we can do. But we only came up through the new gate that appeared on Floor 30 ourselves, so this is our first time dealing with it too. We don't know anything for certain."
"A firsthand account is enough."
While the man who looked like a swordsman — lighter armor — tended to the two unconscious party members, the big man in the corroded heavy plate dropped heavily onto the stone floor and started unpacking his story.
"We were just as shocked as you when we first set foot on Floor 31. That primeval forest bursting with life was gone without a trace, and something like a cursed woods had taken its place. I half wondered if it was the kind of forest from the stories I heard as a kid — the ones where an evil witch lived."
Whether he had a storyteller's gift or was just a chatterbox, the tank piled on the flourishes as he talked. Even so, listening to him was enough to piece together most of what we needed to know about Floor 31.
First, the ankle-deep pools had turned into faintly toxic purple puddles. Not the kind that poisoned you the instant they touched skin, but prolonged contact left your skin itching and your condition steadily worsening. The sticky tar bogs apparently carried some kind of paralytic toxin — step in by accident and your whole body locked up rigid as you sank and drowned. And most of the monsters had been claimed by the miasma and turned undead. Things like moss crocodiles that had become zombies, and lizardmen reduced to bare bone, would ambush people from inside the poison pools.
"So here's the thing — we lost our weapons to the corrosive venom a vine snake spat. We want to hire an escort to the Floor 30 gate leading outside. We can't pay you right now, so once we're out through the gate, come with us to the guild. We'll report in and settle up there."
"…What do you think, Hanna?"
"Huh, me? Umm… we might need to prep antidotes and things anyway, so heading out together first is probably best."
A fair number of viewers were ready to pick a fight with anything Han Se-ah said on principle, but most of the chat was nodding along. Any gamer could look at those purple pools — an obvious dead zone of virulent poison — and know antidotes would be necessary.
On top of that, our Candidate Saint, who couldn't ignore people in trouble, was already sending worried looks our way. The answer had been decided from the start. And so Han Se-ah's first Floor 31 adventure came to a close in all of two minutes.
Tank carrying the female archer, swordsman carrying the male rogue. Escorting our fellow professionals who'd been wrecked by Floor 31's upheaval, we headed for the guild — and found Rebecca there with a scowl so deep her mouth stuck out like a duck's bill.
"What, Rebecca? You didn't go up?"
"This fucking— did you see Floor 31? The supply wagons are blocked again. Every horse pulling them got poisoned and dropped dead."
Apparently she'd planned to hop on a supply wagon for an easy ride up after stocking up on tobacco leaf, only to get hit by Floor 31's catastrophe. Fair enough — the dry paths were so narrow that the usual method was to pick out the shallow pools and slog through the muck. Dip a horse's hooves in what had become poison pools, and of course the animals would get poisoned.
Rebecca had been chain-smoking from her pipe in front of a restless receptionist girl. The moment she saw me, she vaulted clean over a table and latched onto my side. She slung an arm around my shoulders and whispered in my ear like she had something to say.
"So, uh…"
"Hm?"
"Who's the silver-haired one? Where'd our Anne go?"
"…Are you seriously asking me that?"
"The fuck is that supposed to mean? You think I'd ask as a joke?"
On the way from Erteta to the Adventurer's City, she'd sat across from Katie and just stared blankly at her the whole time. I'd figured that as a mercenary company captain, Rebecca must already know the situation — but apparently she'd simply stopped paying attention to her surroundings once the heat of combat cooled off.
Get her worked up and she'd smash everything in front of her; once the excitement faded, she took no interest in anything around her. Behavior closer to a beast than a person. The thought was funny enough that I leaned in and whispered back.
"That's Kayden. More precisely — her cross-dressed form is Kayden. Take the disguise off, and she's Katie."
"Whaaat?!"
Rebecca startled so hard her shoulders jumped in place. Katie, who'd been waiting silently at a table while Han Se-ah settled the treatment fees and escort payment for the poisoned adventurers, whipped her head around toward us at the sheer volume of that shout.
Rebecca paid no mind to the stares of every adventurer nearby. She vaulted the table again and this time made a beeline straight for Katie.
"You're Kayden?"
"Pardon? Uh… …yeah."
Katie hesitated between the attitude of a mercenary company's junior member and that of the Northern Grand Duke's daughter, then answered casually — only for Rebecca to throw an arm around her shoulders and bark right in her face. Katie's shoulders hunched in on themselves.
"Then why the hell didn't you say hello, you little shit?!"
"Uh, uhh…?"
"You little bastard — I introduce you to Roland's party and now you act like you don't even know me? What, you're not a mercenary anymore, is that it?"
"That's not it…"
Under that completely off-target browbeating, our little northern gremlin shot me a look that screamed for help, but there wasn't much I could say. She'd known her, then acted like a stranger just because the disguise came off — if that rubbed Rebecca the wrong way, what exactly was I supposed to do about it?
The scene looked for all the world like a delinquent college-girl senior shaking down a high-schooler the second she put on a uniform, and the viewers' chat exploded into chaos. And of course Han Se-ah had left the camera pointed at the party the whole time.