Lucky Star 3
The crushed grass left by a slime, the chewed stalks where a horned rabbit had grazed, the clawed earth where a horned fox had scraped, the flattened patch where a weary goblin had sat and rested. Across a prairie of endless grass that rose and fell in gentle waves, a tracker saw things the rest of us never would.
"Wow, you're really amazing!"
"Once we leave the Tower, I'd say you've already got a hunter's eye."
"Thank you for saying so."
Of course, Grace was looking at Hanna with equal satisfaction. After tracking a goblin that had sat exhausted for a long while before dragging its feet onward, Hanna had cleaned it up by herself without a hitch. An incantation without hesitation, Magic Missiles that streaked forward like arrows, and control so precise that every shot struck a vital point without a single miss.
Grace's fox-like eyes practically dripped with honey as she watched Hanna — the look of someone who had met more than a few subpar mages in her time. She'd approached them in the first place because an Advanced Adventurer was stuck to the girl, but a mage this skilled was something to celebrate no matter how you sliced it.
A gifted tracker had met a mage with a bright future. So long as human drama didn't tear them apart, those two had what it took to climb all the way to the Tower's upper floors together.
"I'd say that's proof enough. I'll guide you to the path up to the second floor."
"Sounds good. Or should we take a break and have lunch first?"
"Lunch…?"
Grace echoed the word with a puzzled look. They hadn't brought a porter, and nobody was wearing a backpack — so lunch? Grace had clearly been planning to dig some jerky out of her pocket and chew it slowly to keep the hunger at bay.
Hanna, clearly enjoying that baffled stare, plunged her hand into empty air.
"Ta-da! The food from the inn Roland recommended yesterday was so good."
"Stew just came out of thin air?!"
Oh for fuck's sake, is she just going to use that out in the open like— wait. Of course she is.
What kind of insane game would ban inventory use in front of NPCs, anyway? Just as NPCs never reacted when she talked to her viewers, the inventory was apparently covered by the same unspoken agreement. Other streamers had probably pulled things out right in front of their party members without a second thought. The fact that she wasn't just freestyling because she'd met a 6-star NPC like me — that she was basing her decisions on what other streamers did — made me wonder whether to call her a good gamer or just shrewd.
And sure enough, Grace didn't bat an eye. Even though a pot of stew Aunt Mariang had simmered for a few copper coins, along with freshly baked bread, had just emerged from a spatial magic tool rare even in the Mage Tower. By any normal logic, the whole situation made no sense.
"Is this Aunt Mariang's stew? Good heavens — I never thought I'd eat a hot meal inside the Tower."
"Having a mage in the party really does make life easier."
The three of us naturally found a patch of low grass and sat down on the bare ground. A large stew pot appeared in the center of our little circle, followed by a ladle, plates, spoons, and bread. She'd practically packed a full picnic set into her inventory.
Still, being able to eat hot food was a massive advantage. Unless you hauled a small army of porters into the Tower, an adventurer's rations boiled down to jerky, dried fruit, and hardtack. Water you could handle with magic or a magic tool — but there was no spell that conjured delicious bread out of thin air.
Thanks to that, the honey dripping from Grace's eyes as she looked at Hanna had thickened into the gaze of a lioness eyeing her prey. She seemed more serious about food than I'd expected, chewing the beans in her stew like she was already drafting plans to bury her bones in this party for good.
"This inn must be pretty famous."
"It is. Essential for Novice Adventurers. I heard Aunt Mariang's husband was a renowned adventurer himself — he never came back from the Tower."
"Ah…"
A heavy topic for a pleasant meal. But Grace, who lived close to death every day, simply chewed her stew-soaked bread and answered as if it were nothing. After all, adventurers failing to return from the Tower was common enough.
Death was more common outside the Tower than people liked to admit, too. A shepherd mauled by wolves, an herb gatherer stumbling into a goblin den, slash-and-burn farmers or pioneer groups or traveling merchants on the kingdom's outskirts swept away by a monster wave — it happened almost every month. When someone stopped answering messages, the natural assumption wasn't that they were too busy to reply. It was that they were dead.
"A lot of other inns just bleed adventurers dry. Intermediate Adventurers with money never bother with them, so the owners set their sights on clueless Novice Adventurers and fleece them for everything they're worth. Once you've spent some time in the city and rolled around as an adventurer, you stop going near those places — but if you're a country bumpkin who doesn't know how the world works, or you're just short on coin, what are you going to do about it?"
If the stories I'd told were an Advanced Adventurer's guide for beginners, Grace's stories were the everyday talk of one Novice Adventurer to another. Different information, different perspective — and Hanna was so absorbed she forgot to chew her bread.
Enough time passed that both of them had scraped their plates clean with bread, yet the food on those plates somehow never seemed to dwindle. They say when three women gather, plates get broken — here, two beauties had gathered and were letting the stew on their plates go cold.
"Ah, I think I've been talking too much."
Hanna had been sitting there holding her plate in a daze, just listening, when she suddenly startled and stuffed bread into her mouth. She'd glanced neither at Grace nor at me, but vaguely upward — so a viewer must have chimed in with some advice. If the chat window sat somewhere below, the donation alerts were probably up top.
Someone had paid money just to nag her, huh.
No matter how oddly Hanna behaved, NPCs never noticed — that was the game system's assist at work. Which made it all the easier to spot when she stared into empty air or muttered to herself a little too obviously. That awkwardly sheepish smile of hers made it obvious she was getting hammered by a one-two punch of paid and free nagging, even without opening the chat window.
"You're right. Let's head for the second floor. Do you have a lantern?"
"Yes. It's a new one that hasn't been registered yet, but…"
She pulled a lantern from thin air the same way. I could have sworn she'd hung it at her waist earlier — she'd stashed it in her inventory sometime in between. A brand-new lantern, its Mana Stone fragment still sitting quietly at the bottom, since we hadn't reached a Tower passage yet.
Grace nodded at the lantern in Hanna's hand and continued her explanation. Having someone else explain tracker business in my place was convenient. Maybe this was why university professors put graduate students and teaching assistants to work.
"It's best if every party member carries their own lantern and adventurer's badge so they don't get lost. If circumstances force the party to split up, the lantern is all you can rely on. Though as a mage, Miss Hanna, you're unlikely to lose yours."
From the grim daily lives of Novice Adventurers to Grace's stories about the worst clients she'd ever met — a talented player, a solid fundamentals-first 3-star archer, and a 6-star tank whose raw stats were completely off the rails. With a combination that made the first floor feel as safe and cozy as a living room, we crossed the prairie without a single crisis.
From the first floor to the second. From the second floor to the third.
"We're stopping at the third floor today."
"What?"
"The sun's about to set outside, and I've got somewhere to be on the shopping street. Besides, dinner's on me tonight — to celebrate our new party member."
A stone archway stood alone in the middle of the prairie, just like the Tower entrance. Passing under the empty arch was like ducking under a ladder — your vision warped, and you moved to the next floor. Hanna found it fascinating enough that she kept tapping the arch and checking her lantern, while Grace gazed at her with that same fond look. I told them it was time to head out.
If I didn't stop by the café soon and hand over a luxurious dessert set, Alice was going to start sulking. We weren't lovers sharing affection, but a senior receptionist who approached me first with kindness and smoothed over every bit of guild business for me was someone whose goodwill was worth maintaining. Building connections and getting free passes on tedious paperwork for the price of a few desserts was a deal that always came out ahead.
"Heh heh. A meal bought by an Advanced Adventurer. Maybe I should stick with the adventuring life a little longer."
"Stick with it longer? Who?"
"My, if you put it that way, I've got nothing to say. After all, we have a ten-year veteran in the party."
Trading pointless jokes, we made the return trip from the third floor back to the first. Magic skill and tracking ability had both been proven, so there was no need for the bother of hunting goblins — we just checked our adventurer badges and pushed straight toward the exit.
And so we arrived back on the first floor.
"I suppose we should part ways here for a bit. Shall we meet at the Tower entrance?"
"The Tower entrance will be crowded, so let's meet at the Adventurer's Guild. I need to let them know that out of the party recruitment posts, we've already found an archer."
Taking my words as a kind of confirmation, Grace beamed, waved casually, and strolled off across the prairie. Hanna watched her go, then spun on her heel and started striding across the grass with long, deliberate steps. The back of a child putting on a sulk. Of course, I knew perfectly well that I wasn't the target of that sulk.
Her viewers could be real troublemakers.
I should mention this properly now — Grace was a classic glamorous beauty. If Hanna's figure still showed feminine curves even in leather armor, Grace's was the kind that leather armor couldn't begin to hide — the very emblem of maternal abundance. There was a reason the viewers had started cooing "Archer unnie~" the moment they laid eyes on her.
With two well-endowed women stuck close together chatting nonstop, the viewers were bound to start talking. The second party recruitment came up, the chat had been plastered with bikini-armor warrior women and "please kill me, lady knight" nonsense — it would have been weirder if they hadn't started talking about chests. Between the realism and the combat scenes, the chat was so dizzying I half-wondered if the stream itself had been rated 19+.
"Miss Hanna, you can handle a drink, right?"
"Of course! You're not treating me like a kid, are you?!"
See? She's fretting about it like crazy.