Plant-Type Monsters 5
No particularly refined or meticulous scouting ability was needed. Just by heading in the direction where the vines still lingered, a single enormous tree came into view — impossible to miss. It stood beyond a few poison pools and paralysis mires, yet somehow it seized the eye with an almost unnatural insistence.
It made every ash-gray tree around it look like cotton fluff by comparison.
"Th-that's huge. Bigger than the buildings in the city, I think."
"At that size, it's not a city building — more like one of those little fortresses in the Capital or up north, isn't it?"
Looking at it long enough, it started to feel like a skyscraper looming at the edge of your vision. A tree so massive it evoked the same feeling as that LottX Tower people in Seoul used as a fine-dust measuring stick. The moment it slammed into the camera's frame, completely ignoring any sense of perspective, the viewers went wild.
Even through a modern person's eyes, accustomed to skyscrapers and viewing everything through a camera, that tree was simply too enormous. If it had been a building or a golem, it wouldn't have felt so wrong — but the fact that it was a tree made it all the more unsettling. And it wasn't just the size. The thing looked so grotesque it barely qualified as a tree at all.
Back when I was a kid, there had been a tree planted on the elementary school playground to shade the stair landing. A big one with vine-like stems hanging down in thick curtains from its branches. Whether it was a wisteria or something else, I never really knew.
"Looking at how creepy that thing is, it's gotta be the culprit behind the 35th-floor mid-event, right? …No, please don't start picking apart every single word just because I called a tree a 'culprit.' Come on. That thing is clearly the source of the quest."
Just as Han Se-ah said, the massive tree was wrapped in ash-white vines so densely it was nauseating. It looked as though every single leaf of what had once been a grand, flourishing giant had been replaced by vines.
Ash-white vines dropping from the branches like leaves in the wind — thud, thud, thud — then crawling like snakes to coil around the surrounding gray trees. Anyone watching would immediately think of words like erosion and infection.
The closer we got, the clearer the scene became. Like sticking eyeballs onto a doll, or shoving batteries into a toy, the tree kept planting vines into one tree after another — a process that was somehow full of life and utterly revolting at the same time.
"Mmm. Looks like they're all dead after all."
"Ah… O Goddess…"
And as we drew nearer still, other things came into view. Remnants of what looked like adventurer, priest, and Temple knight equipment, along with pure white bones. The vines reacted to Holy Power, but that clearly didn't mean they refused to eat people — victims reduced to bare skeletons in a single day lay scattered about.
Whether they'd been dragged here from the safe zone and forced to endure unspeakable things along the way, neither their gear nor their bones were particularly intact. Irene let out a soft, pained sound and traced a small sign of the cross.
They were nothing but fleshless bones, yet those bones — twisted and warped like rebar bent by heat, cracked and shattered — silently testified to the horrors that had taken place. And as we inched closer, every head in the party tilted further and further back.
"…It's big. Insanely big."
"Vines everywhere, too. Is it just expanding its territory by growing more of them?"
A colossal ash-gray tree endlessly spewing ash-white vines. It felt less like a tree or a monster and more like a factory made of concrete. Taking in that magnificent, terrible form, the party's footsteps gradually slowed until they came to a natural halt.
No one had discussed it, but as the angle of their craned necks climbed higher and higher, everyone felt it instinctively. This was not something our party alone could handle.
…If I tried to smash it solo, no joke, it'd take a full month.
If it was nothing more than a production plant for vines, I could destroy it by myself. Knock down all the nearby trees, charge in, dig out the roots. It probably didn't have any impressive offensive capabilities, so if I took it slow, resting as needed, I could pulverize it from the bottom up the way you'd take down a giant.
The problem, of course, was efficiency.
As impressive as my body was, I wasn't so mindless that I'd spend an entire month logging a tree for a quest. At that point, I'd rather hire mages I knew from the Magic Tower and dump alchemical reagents all over the thing.
Just because a human body can generate the raw power of heavy construction equipment doesn't mean any sane person would try to demolish a skyscraper with a single excavator. Why bother with a one-excavator building-demolition challenge when you could just use explosives and bring more machines?
"We should stop here and go bring the Magic Tower's mages, right?"
"It doesn't seem to react to magic much. Better to restore the safe zone with the mages and push forward from there."
Faced with a tree too vast for any single person to handle, the party members began voicing their thoughts one by one. Katie kept glancing at me — more precisely, at my mace — but eventually bit her lip hard.
She seemed to think that even I, an Upper-grade adventurer, could smash it alone if I really wanted to — but she couldn't exactly tell me to go wreck it by myself. As the atmosphere naturally settled on a retreat, the chat window erupted.
The chat had split into two camps locked in combat: "Just throw Roland at it" versus "We already know how that ends, so why?"
Seriously, treating a person like a demolition charge…
The funny part was that the dominant opinion wasn't "Even Roland can't do it" — it was "If we make Roland do it, it'll take forever and be boring." Probably because yesterday's stream had ended awkwardly while I was clearing vines, and public sentiment wasn't great.
In the end, with the chat still roaring, our party headed back out of the Tower — to deliver the news to the Temple and the Magic Tower.
Vines that absorbed Holy Power. Plant-type monsters that dropped no Mana Stones. And the appearance of a colossal monster that infinitely multiplied those vines. Just hearing about them was enough to make anyone's head ache — yet the adventurers felt no real sense of crisis.
All because of a single trait: they only reacted to Holy Power.
If we hit that main body, a counterattack pattern is going to kick in for sure…
Hadn't the quest window itself said to enter with the Magic Tower's help? That had to mean research needed to be done on the ash-white vines and the giant species endlessly mass-producing them before the quest could progress properly.
If we wanted to brute-force it, we could just call in the connections waiting beyond the 40th floor. Explain the humiliation the Temple forces had suffered, open the purse strings, and they'd come pouring down with both justification and interest.
Smashing it alone would take over a month of mindless labor — but gather about twenty Highest-grade adventurers, throw caution to the wind, and just wreck the thing outright, and it could be done in a week. Hell, round up a dozen or so high-ranking mages from the 43rd-floor tier and have them dump skills until they ran dry of mana — what was a mere 35th-floor monster going to do about that?
The problem was the worry that doing so might tangle the quest the same way things had gone wrong on the 30th floor.
If this were a pure open-world RPG, I wouldn't care whether the quest got messed up and would just steamroll through. But a highly suspicious Goddess was tangled up in the storyline, and that was the issue. Anyone could see she was connected to my hologram window — I couldn't just ignore that.
…Though ever since that nameless god's blessing, both the quests and the rewards had been sitting frozen.
"So, what's the Guild planning to do?"
"The Guild? They'll just follow the Temple's lead. And the Temple is in total chaos."
I was sprawled across the table lost in thought when Elise naturally drifted over and spoke up. Her eyes sparkled with interest — she'd snagged quite the juicy incident. For all her years of experience at the Adventurer's Guild, this was the first time she'd ever seen something like this.
It was a main scenario quest kicked off by a player's involvement, after all. Calling it "the first in history" wouldn't even be wrong.
Irene had left for the Temple with a grave expression, and the Adventurer's Guild had erupted into frenzy, dispatching people to both the Magic Tower and the Temple. A safe zone was that absolute a space for adventurers. The adventurers themselves might not have thought much of it, but on the Guild's side, all hell had broken loose.
Monsters did not appear in safe zones. They did not deliberately attack safe zones. That was why the guards stationed there were security personnel protecting the Magic Tower's expensive magical tools — not soldiers prepared to fight monsters. It was a rule that had never changed since the first moment an adventurer set foot in the Tower.
That rule had been broken. And in the breaking of it, mages from the Magic Tower and people from the Temple had died. Even without any guilt of their own, they had no choice but to move as if their feet were on fire.
"So, reading the room — what do you think will happen?"
"I don't know exactly what they'll do… but the Guildmaster's face was covered in new wrinkles. Looked like he was ready to pour everything into this."
"The Temple will probably mobilize on a massive scale, and the Guild will support them until their finances shake. No matter how free the Adventurer's Guild claims to be, they can't hold their heads high in front of the Temple's losses."
Katie, who had been listening silently to Elise's explanation, nodded. Being of noble birth, she was more sensitive to matters of honor and retribution — she added that the Adventurer's Guild and the Temple would thrash about like they were having a fit.
And as if to prove Katie right, chaos erupted mere hours after we left the Tower.
"—Therefore, in the name of the Goddess, we seek to purge this wicked abomination! All who uphold the Goddess's will, take up your arms—"
I'd known the Temple would join the fight because of the undead, but I never expected the 35th-floor mid-event to be a Holy Crusade declaration event.