Holy Crusade 5
The event monster of the 35th floor had been cleaned up with an almost absurd ease — but the fallout was anything but small.
The biggest change was that the entire 35th floor had been purified. What other gamers would have had to contort themselves through every kind of miserable scramble to clear, Han Se-ah had essentially breezed through for free. Either way, the 35th floor had become a safe zone where not a single monster appeared.
Common wisdom held that the Tower was an unholy space beyond the Goddess's grace — so when an entire floor was purified wholesale, the world erupting into uproar was only natural.
The Magic Tower came pouring in to research. Merchants with more guts than sense hired adventurers and clawed their way up to the 35th floor to set up shop. Between the people who lived for research and the people who lived for profit, tents were already up and business was underway before a full day had even passed. It was enough to leave anyone speechless.
"Whoa — these are all commissions from the 31st floor side?"
"Thanks to the Temple, the mages are going crazy. And with the merchant companies jumping in for real, it's gotten completely out of hand. At this rate, upper-grade adventurer commissions are going to outnumber the lower- and intermediate-grade ones."
That was why Elise — who was listening to our exploits with genuine interest — had dark circles under her eyes. The Holy Crusade might have ended with almost comical ease, but the office workers were still buried under mountains of leftover paperwork.
An entire floor of the Tower had been purified. I couldn't say for certain, but the Adventurer's Guild, the Magic Tower, the Temple, and the nobility were probably all hammering out negotiations over this sudden new piece of real estate until their heads were ready to explode.
The Temple had done the purifying, and I — an adventurer — had helped. But that didn't mean you could just ignore the kingdom's nobles when the Tower sat inside the kingdom itself.
"There are so many commissions I can't even pick out the good ones for you. Want to scoop up everything that pays like you used to? If you pick the overlapping ones carefully, you could clear more than ten at once."
"Nah. Those days of scraping every last coin are over."
"That Roland? …Well, I guess that's why you started over from the lower floors."
Elise remembered the old me who had wandered every corner of the kingdom, and she was needling me about a chance to rake in gold. But with Han Se-ah, I had a Tower to climb. There was no reason to take every commission just for gold grinding.
It wasn't as if our progress was stuck, and it wasn't as if our wallets were empty. Money could wait. Right now, racing up to the 36th floor made more sense than cleaning up every petty job related to the 35th.
"Elise unnie, is everything normal on the 36th floor?"
"Hmm? Oh, yeah. The monsters just turned into undead, so it's not really different from the 34th."
"Wait, these commissions aren't even for adventurers — they're basically looking for construction laborers. Digging dirt, packing ground, covering swamps, filling poison pools…"
While Han Se-ah was asking Elise about the 36th floor, Katie — curiosity piqued — checked the armful of commission papers Elise was holding. A stream of listings that hardly sounded like upper-grade adventurer work spilled from her mouth.
Now that a monster-free floor had appeared, they weren't stopping at tents and shacks. They were packing the ground to build an actual village.
"Well, if you're not taking the 35th-floor commissions, I'd recommend these. After all the chaos, a ton of jobs have come in from the Magic Tower rather than the 35th floor itself."
"That so? Thanks."
Elise was so swamped she just grabbed a fistful of whatever was at hand and dropped it on the table. Even so, she'd roughly sorted them — the papers on the table weren't the manual-labor commissions.
Material gathering and undead hunting from above the 36th floor, explicitly labeled as above the 35th, to check for any connection to the 35th-floor anomaly. Most commissions were bundled by tens of floors, but these had the exact floor numbers specified.
"If they're only accepting materials from the 36th floor, we won't need to gather anything on the way up."
"The Temple's already stationed from the 30th through the 35th anyway, so hunting below the 35th would be hard."
"True enough. When we went up yesterday, they were just bulldozing everything with Holy Power."
We sat at the table that had become more or less our party's reserved spot, checking commissions and chatting. Soil and poison samples from the 36th floor, bark from 36th-floor trees, mana stones from the 36th… every one of them oddly specific about the exact floor.
Even so, the actual content of the commissions hadn't changed much. Gather materials, kill monsters, bring back mana stones — same as always.
"But how do you even prove a mana stone is from the 36th floor?"
"You can't filter that out, so they'll probably just punish fraud harshly if they catch anyone."
And so, after a day of rest, we checked the commissions and headed for the 36th floor once more.
Passing through the gate into the 30th floor and making our way to the 36th didn't even take a full day.
"The Temple is… really serious about conquering the Tower."
"Are the priests still here?"
From the 31st through the 34th, priests and nuns were roaming about as if determined to wipe monsters out of existence. The relatively few Temple knights were guarding the miniature temples, while the hundreds of priests and nuns who had entered the Tower moved in packs, melting undead with Holy Power.
Even with plenty of upper-grade adventurers around, a normal day might see a few dozen per floor at most. With hundreds swarming about and frying everything with holy magic, of course no undead would survive. It looked like a newly opened RPG hunting ground where the players outnumbered the monsters.
On top of that, the Holy Power that had bulldozed the paths made a bigger difference than expected.
The Tower was a space where you wandered looking for bare doorframes of passageways standing alone in empty wilderness. But Ambrose and hundreds of priests had charged straight ahead with Holy Power, plowing a path between the doorframe leading up into each floor and the one leading higher still.
No more long detours around poison pools. No more being blocked by paralysis swamps. Step out of the 31st-floor passageway, walk across bare earth purified by Holy Power, and keep going straight. Just walk forward, and the passageway up to the 32nd floor was right there.
"We might as well call the 31st through 34th safe zones at this point."
"I never expected to see more priests than monsters."
"Our brothers and sisters are all throwing themselves into this with great zeal. We should hurry upward as well…"
From the 32nd to the 33rd, the 33rd to the 34th, the 34th to the 35th — the same story. The land purified by Holy Power wasn't narrow; it was wide enough for hundreds to move in groups. We walked forward as if out for a stroll, exchanging polite bows with priests we passed along the way, and before we knew it we were on the 35th floor.
And the 35th floor was an entire safe zone now.
"Wow, they're already putting up pillars. No wonder northerners click their tongues whenever the southern merchants come up."
"There aren't that many adventurers. What kind of business are they planning with buildings this lavish?"
"Still, those adventurers are all upper-grade. Just selling booze to someone like Rebecca would make decent money."
"Fair point. Upper-grade adventurers earn enough that even a small number means fat wallets."
As we walked forward, watching them raise buildings with the energy of people about to pave roads, construction guild laborers who looked completely out of place in the Tower moved past in packs of dozens.
Maybe because you couldn't find a monster anywhere from the 30th to the 35th, there were absurd numbers of frail laborers who couldn't even use mana. Then again, the stonemasons who'd been brought in to build the temple hadn't left either — so of course the headcount was ridiculous.
"I was wondering why there were so many construction commissions — turns out there are a ridiculous number of people here. They're probably aiming to do business with the highest-grade adventurers above the 40th floor. No, I'm not just talking out of my ass… look at those shops. They're way bigger and fancier than the ones in town. They're clearly planning to gouge people with luxury goods, aren't they?"
There were even people who'd thrown up oversized tents in a hurry and started selling booze. Tables spread out in front of the tents, waitresses hustling between them. The short skirts that had no business in a medieval fantasy showed off every curve of their hips — these clearly weren't women who only sold food.
They were targeting the highest-grade adventurers currently clearing the late 30s and early 40s. In short, you could call it a branch of the Lucky Scoundrel Tavern.
Upper-grade and highest-grade adventurers were rich and had a high chance of dying young, so the joke was that they made excellent husband material. Of course the prostitutes would be after them.
"Still, if a big market like this pops up here, isn't it convenient for players? The whole reason you leave the Tower is for food supplies — if you can restock your inventory here, climbing gets a lot easier. And commissions… once the quests keep going, won't an Adventurer's Guild branch show up here too?"
"Hey now, don't start ganging up on me with that ghostly precision again. Didn't I already say this before? If you're jealous, go pull your own 6-star companion and play the ga— okay, that's enough of that."
The gap between map balance designed for ordinary players and Han Se-ah blasting through with me — a natural-born 6★ — was almost funny. I eavesdropped on that conversation from the side as we passed through the 35th floor, which had turned into one massive construction site.
Our goal was the 36th floor — to hunt the undead monsters that had already become hard to even find.
…So what happened to the troll bombs? Should I nudge her into making some for the 40th-floor boss?