Lucky Star 2
And so the novice adventurer party fell apart. They'd only scraped the bare minimum on the herb-gathering request, so the payout would be next to nothing. On the first floor, even working alone rarely put you in real danger—not with the low-floor veterans around—so maybe this was their unspoken agreement: better to split up than keep grinding each other's nerves. Their entry points had been close enough that they drifted off in roughly the same direction, just keeping a polite distance.
Then again, when the party leader and the party's only scout had been jabbing fingers at each other mid-argument, the four of them marching out in a tight clump would have looked pretty ridiculous anyway. Leaving the sullen men behind, the female archer Grace slipped quietly over toward us.
"Excuse me. I heard you're training novice adventurers."
"That's right."
"If you still need party members, what about me? I may not look it, but my father trained me as a ranger. I'm a scout, and I'd put my skills up against most hunters without blinking."
Considering she was a 3-star, that pride of hers was probably the real deal.
A 1-star character was basically someone born with a slightly better body—a strong farmer, a woodcutter good with an axe, a seasoned hunter. Not the kind of person you'd bring along for serious work. A 2-star was someone like the swordswoman Cora: talented in a specific skill and able to get strong fast. Perfect inferior versions of 3-stars, which was why I hadn't recruited any of them either.
From a 3-star like Grace onward, you started to feel something special—techniques that were truly their own. The ranger skills she mentioned, a thief's trap-disarming, that sort of thing. And the higher the stars went, the more likely you were to find things like a noble house's secret sword style instead of some scrappy street-fighting technique.
"If that's the case, you should be talking to her. This isn't my party—it's hers."
"My, you're strict about that sort of thing, aren't you?"
I answered and gave a slight nod of my chin. Grace took a natural step forward and came to stand in front of Hanna. Hanna was already training her camera hard on Grace, the corner of her mouth twitching—one more second and she'd be bouncing off the walls over the sheer luck of running into a 3-star.
Everyone else started with a 3- or 4-star NPC and was scraping just to land a 2-star party member. She got a 6-star NPC, private one-on-one tutoring, and a 3-star character walking up to her unprompted out in the field. Of course she was thrilled. Which was probably why, when I snuck a look at the chat while the two of them were talking, half the messages were roasting Hanna—half joking, half dead serious.
"So? What do you think of me? If you'd like, I can join for a bit right now and show you what I can do."
"I'd love that! But…"
Hanna beamed at Grace's offer, then shot a sidelong glance my way, reading the room. In her mind, I was the one leading the party and handling the training, so she probably figured she needed my permission.
"Do whatever you want. I'm not the party leader right now. You're the leader, and I'm just here to help. That's what a party leader is… Excellent mindset."
"Ahem! Then let's go together!"
I tossed her own little pearl of wisdom right back at her, and she cleared her throat and spun around. The chat window I'd had open on the sly lit up instantly—mischievous viewers pouncing to tease her. It was a perfectly natural line if you were committed to the fantasy roleplay… but the second someone clipped that moment and watched it on its own, it became comedy gold.
A beauty in leather armor nodding along with "That's… what a leader is"—viewers were never going to let that slide. Even in a parallel world where full-dive VR games existed, the memes and humor codes were basically the same.
For a moment I found myself genuinely curious about the outside world—Hanna's reality, the one where this VR game had launched. It had all the hallmarks of a classic modern game-fantasy novel opening. How nice would it be if clearing every quest meant I'd open my eyes in a capsule someday too?
"You said we're heading to the upper floors, so if I spot any monster traces along the way, I'll let you know."
"Monster traces?"
While I was quietly watching the chat, the two of them finished introductions and started figuring out how to move. Hanna knew almost nothing about the Tower, so Grace—who had at least a little more experience—ended up explaining things to her.
"You know monsters just appear out of nowhere inside the Tower, right? Outside, they build nests or dig burrows to breed. In here, they just… show up."
"Yeah, I know that much."
"Which means Tower monsters don't have a home. They spawn and wander aimlessly. Party scouts read the traces and track them down. Beating around the Tower hoping something spawns is a lot less efficient than following footprints and the like."
Hanna nodded along to Grace's patient explanation. On day one she'd spun in circles near the exit staring at her minimap, desperate to find a monster—so of course she understood how valuable a scout was. The grasslands were at least open. Higher up in the Tower, where your field of view got choked off, a scout mattered just as much as a mage.
In a dense forest, or on a cave floor so dark you couldn't see a hand in front of your face without Light magic, wandering around blind wouldn't earn you money—it'd leave you in the red on equipment repairs. A rookie ranger who'd only ever worked the lower floors was earnestly coaching a brand-new mage on her second Tower run. Both of them beautiful, too. Not a bad view at all.
…My fans were fine—once they hit Intermediate Adventurer, they'd sometimes pool their voices to help me out or buy me a drink—but most of them were burly, hairy middle-aged men. Adventuring was a life-or-death job, so of course the gender ratio skewed male. After spending so much time hemmed in by grimy uncles who'd rather buy another round than pay for a bath, watching two beauties chatting and laughing together was genuinely warming.
"Alright then. I'll take the lead."
"Okay!"
Grace said it, flicked a glance my way, and started walking at an easy pace. Naturally, she headed in the opposite direction from her former party. She wasn't on Cora's level, but she had some experience—pulling a lantern from her belt and checking their bearing, she looked considerably more practiced than Hanna.
I'd read something once in some half-remembered internet trivia from my past life: people can't walk in a straight line. Get lost in a desert and you'll circle around until they find you right near where you started. I didn't know how accurate that was, but it had a ring of truth.
The lantern proved it. If you didn't keep checking, you'd think you were going straight—then glance down and find the direction had drifted. Moving a real body was nothing like holding an arrow key and sending a game character cleanly forward.
"No goblin traces, but there are horned foxes. What should we do?"
"Are there footprints or something?"
I was ambling along behind the two of them when Grace suddenly dropped her head low. She flattened herself until her grey hair nearly brushed the ground and gently raked at the base of the grass. Curious, Hanna stuck right to her side, camera drone and all.
"Not footprints. Look under this short grass—there's a faint trace."
"…That's a trace?"
"It looks like fine root fibers, but it's horned fox fur. Looks like it scratched itself with its hind legs and lay here for a bit."
What Grace had found, calling it a "trace," was a few strands of fox fur stuck to a clump of grass. Even knowing foxes were red, picking out one or two individual hairs—her eyesight had to be better than mine. Honestly, watching scouts work like that felt more magical than actual magic. Then again, magic existed and so did the game system, so this ghost-level tracking was probably a skill of its own.
"Guide, scout—there's a reason they call them that. If I hadn't had any talent for magic, archery was my second choice. I'm so glad I didn't go that route. How do you even find this? Wait, the camera can barely pick it up either, right? Even if you pinch it between your fingers and hold it right in front of my face, I can barely see it."
I wasn't the only one stunned by that delicate observation and sharp eyesight—Hanna started chattering away. As expected, her streaming voice didn't reach us NPCs; Grace kept searching for more than just the horned fox traces without so much as a flicker of reaction. With Hanna going on about "archer unnie" this and "recruitment" that right beside her, and Grace not even blinking as she combed through the brush—there was no way that was acting.
After chatting with her viewers for a bit, Hanna turned back to Grace.
"Horned rabbits and horned foxes don't drop Mana Stones much, right?"
"Right. And they're quicker than goblins, so people don't usually bother tracking them."
"Then we ignore them and keep going."
No Mana Stone income, but both of them had the corners of their mouths curling up into little smiles. Hanna was savoring a 3-star's scouting ability and the string of lucky breaks that kept landing in her lap, all while watching her jealous viewers seethe. Grace was pleased she'd proven at least a little of her skill the moment she joined—with nothing more than a few strands of horned fox fur.
Hanna. Seriously lucky.
Meeting me was one thing, but a proper scout like this was as hard to find as a proper mage. Adventurers were a grab bag of every oddball imaginable—the world was realistic in all the wrong places. And looking at the party composition, we already had a tank, a scout, and a mage.
Now all we needed from the Adventurer's Guild was a frontliner for sustained damage and off-tanking, plus a priest for party healing, and we'd have a full five-person party… as first-floor novices. How luxurious was that?