Temple Knights 4
An ominous boom, followed by screams of agony. The Temple knights guarding the sanctuary were the first to launch themselves into motion. Watching those white-armored figures shrink into tiny dots in an instant, I hesitated for a moment over whether to rush out after them — until Irene's hand tapped lightly against my arm.
"It would be best if you went and saw what was happening."
"Yeah, alright."
I'd worried that some event-style combat might put the party in danger, but then I remembered where we were — the Temple's sacred grounds. The idea that a 5-star protection-specialized Saintess could be taken out in an instant inside a Temple sanctuary was hard to credit, so I followed those white suits of armor toward the source of the blast.
I'd barely drawn close when a wave of heat hit my face as if I'd sat down in front of a campfire. The scorching air, thick with an acrid stench, shoved aside the purple fumes rising from the poison pools — proof enough that the roar had been an explosion.
"What in the world…?"
"Sister, were you attacked by a mage?"
On top of that, a blackened crater sat right where a blast epicenter would be, looking for all the world like a gas explosion or a bomb going off in the modern world. The Temple knights, who'd arrived a step ahead of me, were cradling the groaning adventurers and administering emergency treatment with Holy Power as they fired off questions.
The only woman among the adventurers still in one piece — the one who ought to have been answering — just stood there pale as a sheet, her mouth working soundlessly in a full-blown panic. She was the one who'd screamed for help, so why was she like this?
Honestly, once you hit upper-grade adventurer status, watching people die wasn't a once-or-twice kind of experience. From the early days of the job, you saw fellow adventurers drop and civilians get slaughtered by monsters — death came in every flavor. So panicking this hard when her companions weren't even dead, just dying, felt a little off.
"Sister? …Hmm. She seems badly shaken. We should treat her first."
"Agreed. Stabilize them, then move them into the sanctuary. Better to leave the real healing to the other brothers than try it ourselves."
A man and a woman caught in the blast, with severe burns across their upper bodies — especially the bare arms and faces where armor hadn't covered them — and a longbow-wielding woman who couldn't get a single word out, just opening and closing her mouth. So the two melee fighters had been caught in the explosion, and the archer behind them had screamed for help?
The Temple knights glanced my way briefly, but without asking for assistance they hoisted both patients and hurried off.
Whether there was a fire-magic monster out there, or some mage driven genuinely insane by an undead curse who'd ambushed that party — the person who could tell us wasn't talking, so there was no way to know. Looking around, there was nothing of note beyond the injured adventurers.
"Uh… ah… I… I…"
"Hmm. Excuse me a moment."
Even after the Temple knights had shouldered the two wounded and vanished, the female adventurer remained rooted in place like a stone statue. I wrapped an arm around her waist and hoisted her up like a sack of cargo. Safe zone or not, I wasn't leaving her standing next to the site of a mystery explosion and a poison pool.
Whether she'd always been fragile or not, she didn't put up the slightest resistance while I slung her over my shoulder. Still, anyone hunting on the 32nd floor had the physical stats to back it up, so I carried her without strain and headed back toward the safe zone.
"Roland, that person…?"
"She's with the wounded. Looked like she was standing there half-fainted from the shock, so I brought her along."
The entrance to the safe zone was already packed — Temple knights, the injured, priests treating them, and adventurers who'd come out to rubberneck after hearing the blast. Han Se-ah slipped a question through the crowd with perfect casualness.
Of course she already knew the whole situation thanks to the camera mounted over my head, so the deadpan act of pretending she didn't was equal parts ridiculous and funny.
Thanks to Han Se-ah's camera, the chat already had the full picture, and viewers started tossing out theories. The leading consensus was that the yellow-gas trolls exploded. If that acrid troll gas was flammable, it actually made sense.
Just beating one to death made the gas go psssh and flood the area — so if that same gas had detonated, the whole incident suddenly clicked into place.
"Hmm… do you think she's in psychological shock?"
While the viewers were already treating the troll-explosion theory as confirmed fact, Irene drifted over. Her protection specialization and healing-reduction traits meant she couldn't do much about the catastrophic burns from the blast, but calming a rattled heart was well within her reach.
A soft glow of Holy Power gathered in her gentle palm and seeped into the female adventurer's chest — the woman still staring blankly into empty air — as if soothing a child.
"I… I…"
"There, there, Sister. It's alright. You're alright."
Faint as it was, Holy Power was still Holy Power, apparently.
Under that Holy Power-laced comfort, the female adventurer broke down and bawled like a child.
After crying for a long while in Irene's arms, she blinked her swollen eyes and looked up at us. Maybe it was the sight of the Holy Power-filled sanctuary instead of the toxic swamp outside, or Irene's serene smile as she paid no mind to the tear-soaked front of her habit — something in it seemed to move her.
As adventurers quietly gathered around and priests finished treating her companions and approached, the female adventurer finally forced her mouth open.
"A troll… a huge troll covered in yellow tumors all over its body…"
Her voice was raw and hoarse, the testimony coming out in a slow trickle — and it confirmed exactly what the viewers had said. The troll had been the culprit.
Just as I'd been so startled by a suddenly appearing troll that I'd even used a Holy Power reflection skill, the three-person party had dumped everything they had into the sudden ambush. The problem was that "everything" included the archer's alchemy arrows.
"It looked a little strange, but it was still a troll, and it had turned undead, so I thought fire arrows would work… hic…"
"Sister, did the troll explode when the fire arrow hit it?"
"Yes…. I thought the tumors covering its head were a weak point, so I shot an arrowhead inscribed with flame magic, and then suddenly — suddenly it just exploded, and those two, because of me…"
In her panic, she'd used the alchemy arrowhead without even signaling her party — and with a ground-shaking boom, the troll had gone up in a single BOOM.
The warrior who'd been shoving the troll back with his shield from the front, and the adventurer who'd been circling to the side to cut its ankles and slow it down, had both been caught in the blast. The tank who'd taken the explosion head-on had his face melted where the shield couldn't cover it, and the fighter swinging his sword had taken horrific wounds to both arms and his face.
And so the archer, with her exceptional eyesight, had watched every detail of her two companions getting blown apart because of her misjudgment — and her mind had simply checked out.
"…That gas can cause an explosion that big?"
"G-good thing I didn't use any fire magic. Honestly, I'd been thinking about lighting the corpse piles with a Spark spell just to clear them out."
Having poured out the entire incident like a confession while buried in Irene's arms, the adventurer shoved her face back into Irene's chest — and the expressions of the surrounding adventurers twisted into something ugly.
The standard way to hunt a troll was always to open as many wounds as possible, then sear them with fire to stop the regeneration. So for intermediate-grade adventurers who couldn't project mana outward as aura, the odds of seeing a troll and reaching for fire the same way this woman had were roughly ninety-nine percent.
Holy Power looked like a weakness for undead trolls the same way fire did — but weapon reinforcement with Holy Power was the exclusive domain of the Temple knights.
"Well then. We need to get this sister's account to the Temple as soon as possible."
"Brothers? Is there a communication magic tool here as well? We should spread the word before there are more casualties."
While a few adventurers with rigid faces bolted into the tent village at the exchange between the Temple knight and Irene, Han Se-ah and her viewers had already started spinning a different take.
A troll that detonated harder than mid-tier attack magic from a single fire arrow — they were already analyzing it as a usable gimmick. The most popular suggestion was to exploit the undead's slow movement speed, lure them into overlapping paths with a troll, and trigger the explosion on purpose.
"Yeah, if it's a walking bomb that blows up that hard, it was probably designed to be used that way. Undead-slow movement speed means as long as you don't let it get close, it could be pretty solid. The problem is if you set it off wrong and the poison from the pools just sprays everywhere?"
"…Appreciate the great idea."
While Han Se-ah bantered with her viewers, Grace — who'd been absently stroking the quiver at her hip with a complicated expression — sidled up to me and asked a quiet question.
"Um, Roland? I have the same kind of alchemy arrows that adventurer was using… should I use them on the trolls?"
"…Let's go check the blast site first and see if any mana stones are left. Then we'll decide."
Apparently Grace had also been planning to shoot fire arrows the next time she ran into a second troll.
I'd come this close to weathering an explosion shower instead of a gas shower.