What Replaces the Crocodile Swarm 3
For once, every table in the guild lobby was packed. Upper-grade and Highest-grade adventurers who were normally nowhere to be seen had flooded the place again, making a racket, and the faces of the relatively junior receptionists had gone pale blue.
Senior receptionist Elise had naturally drifted over to our table to dodge the hassle, but the other receptionists were stuck dealing with the upper-grade adventurers sitting around demanding information and raising hell. Lives were on the line, sure — but the way they were carrying on looked an awful lot like drunk problem customers at a restaurant.
"Hey! Hasn't the Magic Tower talked anything over with the guild?"
"What are you planning to do about supplies this time?"
"Wasn't there talk of sending up the mages who'd been investigating the thirtieth floor?"
"Does the Magic Tower or Alchemists' Workshop Street have any detox magic tools?"
The more seasoned receptionists soothed and coaxed the adventurers with practiced ease, dodging questions they didn't know and answering the ones they did — practically training people like animals. But that was only the experienced, skilled ones.
Most of the receptionists just sat there with tears welling in their pretty eyes, getting harassed by adventurers.
You could understand the adventurers' attitude, though. A massive upheaval had suddenly hit the thirty-first floor of the Tower — their lifelong meal ticket. Clean water pools you could boil and drink had turned into purple poison pools. Of course they were panicking.
"Hey now, 'looking all calm'? Can't you see I'm tense because the quest won't even start and the field's gone completely haywire?"
Yeah, your face is totally tense alright
"…Right. That's a nickname that really builds credibility."
Around the time Han Se-ah came back to the table, bantering with her viewers after accepting a pouch of mixed gold and silver coins from the adventurer she'd rescued, the guild doors burst open and a crowd of mages poured in.
Apparently the upheaval on the thirty-first floor had happened not long after the gate was completed — right before our party returned to the city — so the mages, hearing the news, had come racing from the Magic Tower to the guild in a frenzy of excitement.
"The thirty-first floor! I heard something's gone wrong on the thirty-first floor!"
"Is there any adventurer who brought samples back from the thirty-first floor?!"
"Tell us what you saw, and if you've got mana stones or gathered materials, we'll buy them at a premium!"
"If any adventurer came down from above the thirty-first floor, we're willing to buy information!"
Adventurers demanding information from the guild, mages demanding firsthand accounts from the adventurers. Put two groups competing over who could shout the loudest in one room and it turned into a full-blown flea market free-for-all. No wonder Elise was glued to our table with that sick-of-it look on her face.
While Rebecca kept her arm slung around Katie's shoulder, grilling her with questions that had nothing to do with the thirty-first floor, and Elise killed time pretending to consult with me, a tremendous roar erupted from the second-floor office of the guild.
"ENOUGH——!"
It was the bellow of Graham, a natural-born 5★.
"The incident on the thirty-first floor will be investigated by issuing commissions to adventurers at the Adventurer's Guild level! And per our contract, that information will be provided to the mages of the Magic Tower! Stop this nonsense, and if you're that curious, go up there yourselves!"
He was an old man who usually wasn't even in the guild building, but given the scale of today's incident, he must have been in the office receiving reports and organizing information.
A shout packed with mana thundered through the entire interior of the building. It carried enough physical force to set the hems of the mages' robes fluttering, yet not a scrap of it leaked outside — delicate control. It was such a refined roar you almost wondered if Graham even needed a Lion's Roar skill.
A completely different approach from someone like me, who only knew how to brute-force strengthen his body. If I'd yelled that loud, tables would have shattered, mages would have gone tumbling, and windows would have blown out. Truly a skill worthy of the "Seasoned Old Veteran" in his title.
"No, is that really what matters to you guys right now? The guild and the Magic Tower are teaming up to investigate a Tower anomaly, and you're seriously debating a volume battle between the guild master and Roland…?"
As Graham bellowed his declaration, the guild lobby fell quiet. Elise, who'd been hiding at the table like a dead mouse, finally rose a little, cleared her throat with a polite ahem toward our party and Rebecca, and spoke up.
At that, Rebecca — who'd been busily grilling Katie — tilted her head to look at her, and Elise pulled a pre-written document from her bosom.
"Here's the investigation commission list for the thirty-first floor. I've already set aside the easy, convenient ones — so, how about it? You're taking them, right?"
"You already drafted the commission list?"
"I only set aside the relatively simple ones in advance. Collecting water from the pools and toxic swamp mud in alchemy reagent bottles, gathering samples of the ash-gray trees and mana stones from mutated monsters, and so on."
Obviously, gathering commissions had to be limited. Even mana stones wouldn't sell if there were too many of them and would get hauled off west — so how much more for water and tree branches that were even easier to obtain?
No matter how many experiments the mages ran, they couldn't buy everything if upper-grade adventurers started hauling the stuff in by the liter. Watching Elise stamp the document she'd pulled from her bosom with a seal from her pocket, Rebecca's eyes narrowed thinly.
"Hey, is that even allowed?"
"These are commissions that had to be issued anyway. I just wrote them up this morning. The receptionists already discussed and set the quantity of commissions to issue today, and this just happens to be the first one."
"Then give me one more. You're not seriously only looking out for Roland, are you?"
"Of course not. My allotment is exactly five sheets, and two of the people who'll be taking commissions just happen to be sitting right in front of me."
Rebecca had been about to voice some discomfort at the blatant preferential treatment, but her face smoothed out again when Elise casually produced one more commission form from her bosom.
Whether upper-grade or Highest-grade, who was going to turn down an easy, comfortable way to make money? Most of the upper-grade adventurers sitting at the tables would probably keep pressuring the receptionists, snag a mana stone gathering commission at best, and head out.
"Then shall we head to Alchemists' Workshop Street? Hanna, can you make antidotes?"
"Uh, I figure we'll buy the commercial ones first, and if the price gets too high I'll have to make them myself. To make them, though, I'd need mud from the thirty-first floor so I can analyze it."
"Hmm, that makes sense. Impossible to brew an antidote without research samples. But Rebecca — planning to stick with us?"
"Obviously not. You lot are gonna be roaming the thirty-first floor. I've gotta buy every kind of antidote and head up first. Shit, who knew the horses would all drop dead before we even hit the fortieth floor. Wonder if the alchemist bastards even sell antidotes for horses?"
Around the time the guild tables started getting noisy with commissions being written in real time, Rebecca muttered under her breath, clapped Katie hard on the shoulder a couple of times, and shot to her feet. Foul-mouthed, beast-like, and seemingly uninterested in anyone else's business — but she was still the captain of a mercenary company.
She doted on her subordinates to a terrifying degree, so she'd load up on every antidote and paralysis cure she could buy on Workshop Street and race bare-bodied all the way above the fortieth floor.
"And you — if you ignore me and don't say hello next time we meet, you're actually dead, got it?"
"Ah, yes, ma'am…"
"Good. I recommended you 'cause you swing a blade well and you've got some sense, and then you switch parties and don't even say hello? How ungrateful."
Extremely rude for how one ought to address a noble, but somehow it sounded fundamentally correct — a peculiar kind of mental assault that had our northern brat using formal speech before she knew it. Rebecca clapped her hunched shoulders hard one more time, then cut through the crowd with her characteristic sharp movements and bolted out of the guild.
Watching her go, I headed out of the guild with the rest of the party as well. Graham's roar had toned down the flea-market shouting, but a space packed with guild receptionists, adventurers, and mages was still a bit stifling.
"Well then, shall we head to Workshop Street where the alchemists are and buy some antidotes."
"Um, Roland?"
As we turned our backs on the guild doors and started toward Workshop Street — the same place that had been in chaos during the Full Moon Wolf attack — Irene quietly approached and tugged on my sleeve. The way she was essentially blocking the path drew puzzled looks from the rest of the party onto her face.
Her cheeks flushed briefly under the attention, but she squared her shoulders and spoke.
"Based on what I felt when I tried purifying earlier… if it's poison at the level of what those adventurers suffered from the undead monsters, I believe I can hold out with my holy power alone, without potions. …It's a little embarrassing to say this, but I'm confident in purification holy arts."
"You think you can manage?"
"As long as I'm not standing in a poison pool for three days and nights straight, yes."
Irene was so compassionate she'd earned the nickname Mamang, and she normally never flaunted her abilities or showed off — just quietly supported the party from behind. This time, though, she was squaring her shoulders and putting her capabilities forward.
Thanks to that, the magnificent reservoir of holy power normally hidden under her thick nun's habit was briefly emphasized, sending the viewers into a frenzy and even snatching my gaze for a moment — but that wasn't the important part.
Preparing antidotes just in case was the obvious thing to do, so if she was stopping even that, there had to be a reason. The question about it should have come from Han Se-ah, the party's leader with any sense of the situation — so why was she getting her gaze stolen by Irene's figure right along with her viewers?
"Is it because the opponents are undead that you feel that way?"
"Yes. I don't know why creations of the Demon King that aren't even living things became undead, or whether they're just wearing the guise of undead… but as someone who serves the Goddess, I can't simply stand by. Accursed things in a blasphemous place must be purified as they deserve."
A firm, cold voice hard to believe belonged to Irene. Even Han Se-ah — who liked to tease her viewers back at the inn about how impressive Irene looked in lighter clothes — was startled by how icy it was.
Hmm. It seemed likely our apprentice saint had a character quest waiting on the stages from the thirty-first floor onward, now that the difficulty had gone up. Grace, Katie, then Irene — that even lined up neatly in 3★-4★-5★ order.