Plant-Type Monsters 4
The desolate landscape of the 35th floor—nothing but ash-gray trees as far as the eye could see—was more than enough to stir a strange feeling. It felt like an unfinished game map where no monsters had ever been generated. An empty place with nothing but poison pools, mud swamps, and ash-gray trees.
Looking out over that barren land, the same thought kept circling back.
Shit. Was coming here right now really a bad idea?
Even I had to admit it might have been a bit stupid.
I'm not the type whose head spins with mathematical brilliance. But if vines had been wrapped around every single tree in a jungle of hundreds upon hundreds of them, I could roughly guess just how many there were—and how foolish it was to smash them all one by one.
Still, results had come out far faster than waiting on the Magic Tower's research, so it didn't matter. Thinking that, I moved up beside Irene. After thrashing the place this thoroughly, if any vines were going to react, Grace would notice first.
"How about it, Grace? Sensing anything?"
"Not yet. Not really. When those things stay still, maybe because they're plants, I can't pick up any presence at all. So it's a bit confusing whether vines are sleeping outside my field of vision, or if they've all been smashed and are just gone."
"That so? …Then should we move toward where there seem to be more trees at a glance?"
"Let's. The vines and those creepy trees seem to increase together. It's not even a nest or anything."
Whether it was because we'd been smashing for so long, or because the holy power Irene carefully raised was less than the holy power reinforcing my body, the vines showed no sign of swarming. So we headed toward where the trees were clearly growing densest.
Using the safe zone as a reference point, one side had trees packed so thick you couldn't even see the ground. Since these grayish-white vines always wrapped around ash-gray trees, going where there were more trees made sense.
That meant I should take the lead again.
"By the way, Roland, are you really okay? You spent a full half-day using mana to smash everything. Shouldn't we rest before moving on?"
"Thanks for worrying, Grace. But I've still got plenty of mana left, and I know my own body better than anyone. Back when I hunted large-types, I once fought three days and nights straight, so don't worry too much. Once you reach the upper-grade level where you can project mana outside your body, that much is possible."
Thud, thud. Even without vines, I still had to smash through trees to advance. As I opened a path with my mana-infused mace, Grace stuck close beside me, chattering away with worry.
I'd seen with my own eyes several times how upper-grade and higher adventurers displayed superhuman prowess, but apparently she couldn't help fretting when I skipped a night's sleep and went without a couple of meals. Meanwhile, I was actually feeling better than usual—holy power plus some nameless god's blessing stacked on top of each other.
As we smashed trees and advanced, repeatedly releasing holy power in between, we got a bite.
"…Something's crawling this way at high speed from over there."
Even if still vines didn't register on an archer's detection, once they started moving like snakes, of course she'd notice. And these vines weren't even trying to be stealthy—they were openly flinging their bodies at us. Vines rushing through the ash-gray trees like snakes hunting prey.
Like water snakes swimming across a river after a meal, grayish-white vines were swimming toward us across the poison pools, sending out ripples.
"Honestly, they're so disgusting it's hard to believe they're plants."
"Whoa… They're coming while thrashing their bodies like that—are those really plants?"
"You cut them open, so you know. No guts, no muscles. Just sticky fibrous vines."
Even so, their numbers were very few. The fact that creatures that once swarmed enough to block vision now looked like snakes swimming on water meant there were barely ten of them at most.
Should plant vine monsters even be counted as "heads," or was there some other unit? While I was having that random thought, Katie stepped forward as if restless and sliced them all in an instant. The vines, cut clean without so much as a scream—as if insisting they were plants despite their appearance.
Instead of the terrifying numbers that had swept the safe zone, the pitiful sight of them weakly crossing the poison pools only to be snipped one after another by Katie's sword was almost pathetic.
"Looking at them like this, they're really nothing special."
"That's because Roland took care of all of them. I think it's more amazing that any are left after I fought for a full half-day."
"By the way, these things are monsters but they turn to dust and vanish without dropping mana stones, so other adventurers probably won't even think of coming to the 35th floor."
Adventurers were already reluctant to set foot here because of the ominous vines wrapping the 34th floor passage, but there are always those overflowing with adventure spirit. A day had passed since we raised hell and uprooted the vines, so some would enter the 35th floor knowing about them, while others would enter knowing nothing.
And what they'd face would be a 35th floor with nothing but trees growing and not a single monster. Thinking about it that way, it seemed like a somewhat serious problem.
"…You're right. No mana stones. If the 34th and 36th floors end up like this too, no mana stones will come out of the Tower."
"What on earth is happening in the Tower?"
Was the Demon King conducting economic retaliation against adventurers? That ridiculous joke briefly crossed my mind. Of course, realistically speaking, rather than economic retaliation locking down mana stone distribution, it was probably just a vicious game company gimmick blocking player income.
During the orc incident, they'd flooded mana stone distribution to get peddlers moving around, then had orcs that escaped the Tower attack them—and now the opposite event was happening? Of course, since we'd bulldozed our way in and were searching the 35th floor, a mana stone depletion event probably wouldn't occur.
"They came from beyond that swamp, so should we head back this way?"
"No, I'll make a path. Since there don't seem to be any monsters at all, no need to conserve mana assuming combat."
The chat that had been laughing and joking while watching me smash things like an idiot was starting to roll out the sharp ones, spines raised—looked like they were getting bored. For these cyber-ghosts, picking on Han Se-ah the moment things got dull had become a kind of sport.
From my perspective it had been a full half-day of combat, but through the viewers' eyes it was different. Han Se-ah had ended the stream as if she'd had enough of that near-repetitive destruction, but beyond that there hadn't been much to watch.
Probably something like: day two of the broadcast and nothing's progressed since rescuing the NPCs on the 35th floor~
"Hey, what do you mean I'm 'starting' to use my brain? I've been using it a ton this whole time, okay? …Sure, I leaned hard on Jjanhae-jwa's posts, but we've gotten this far, so give me a little credit!"
Honestly, as a viewer myself, I half wanted to spam the chat asking if the quest window had updated. What if, like what happened on the 30th floor, we'd skipped so far ahead that the quest had glitched?
When we beat the golem half to death, we'd jumped so far ahead that we had to go back and carefully retrace the points while watching Kim Seok-hyun's stream. This time, because I'd bulldozed through with raw force, it wouldn't tangle up the same way… right?
As if to soothe that uneasy feeling of mine, Han Se-ah—who'd been bickering with the viewers to stave off boredom—pulled up the updated quest window.
With the Magic Tower's help, we entered the 35th floor—yet for some reason, no monsters existed there.
Instead of undead-turned monsters, what greeted us were countless vine monsters.
The fact that not a single mana stone drops… does that mean all these creatures are part of a colony?
Following the plant-type monster hint, the words "part of a colony" appeared—and the viewers who'd been suffering from boredom erupted into noisy speculation in chat. It was such a mess it was hard to even read; right or wrong, they were just dumping their thoughts first.
The opinion gathering the most support was none other than the appearance of a colossal-type. Mid-event, so we figured nothing special—but turns out that wasn't the case~ The viewers were bouncing around like a pack of kids hyped right before summer break, and it was getting a little dizzying.
Setting the childishness aside, the opinion itself was sound.
A ridiculously huge tree? Or a bloated mass of vines?
No matter how many vines you killed, no mana stones dropped—because each vine wasn't an individual monster, but part of one colossal monster. The quest window itself had said "part of a colony," so the 35th floor event had to be some enormous plant hiding somewhere, fattening itself up.
Compiling every short and long chat message plus the cash-powered donations screaming their opinions, that was the consensus.
"…Is that it?"
"If it looks like that from this distance… just how big is it…?"
And it didn't take long to learn that collective intelligence hits the right answer at a higher rate than expected.