Familiar Taste 1
The 36th floor — the level right below the 37th, where I'd gotten so disgusted climbing the Tower that I'd quit cold.
"Skeletons ahead, fourteen of them!"
"I'll clear you some room, Katie!"
"Roland, just sit this one out — I've got it!"
The moment monsters finally showed up, Katie drew her sword and bolted forward like her whole body had been itching for a fight. At the end of the narrow dirt path stretched a wide paralysis swamp, and from within it, lizardman skeletons came crawling up, toxic mud dripping from every bone.
As always, higher floors seemed to dial up the difficulty by sheer numbers. More skeletons than the floors below dragged themselves free of the muck, white bones emerging from the sludge as they lumbered closer.
Slow as they were, undead strength was no joke — get caught in those hands and even steel plate would crumple, leather armor tear clean through. A pack of monsters that could rip a living person apart was closing in, yet Katie showed not a flicker of fear.
If the enemy could tear a man apart bare-handed, Katie with a single sword could carve through dozens of ordinary soldiers. She was a seasoned swordswoman, pure and simple.
"These things — once you know how to fight them — they're nothing!"
"You sure you're okay?"
"Don't worry about me!"
She'd been stewing over how little she'd contributed early on against bone monsters that shrugged off anything but blunt force, and now she was practically glowing with joy as she tore into them. Sharp blade-work cracked through bone and severed joints, and skeleton limbs dropped off like the parts of a broken toy.
True to her birth as a 4-star swordswoman, her technique kept climbing by leaps and bounds. Even with a slightly longer blade, she was still an agile one-handed fighter — and after all that struggling against undead before, look at her now.
If I stepped in, I could smash two or three at a time with reinforced Holy Power — but Katie was part of our party too. I couldn't just solve everything myself. So I stood guard behind the group, feeding them experience, and sure enough Katie alone took every last head.
"Hah… at least they look close enough to human. Makes them easier to deal with."
"Fair enough. Croc-types are a nightmare to hunt with a sword, right?"
"Exactly. Most of the knight-order swordsmanship I learned up north was designed for fighting people."
Katie steadied her rough breathing without a single scratch on her, while Han Se-ah fished up mana stones and kept the conversation going. A pretty young girl carving through enemies with artistic swordplay — simple, but pure eye candy — and the viewers erupted into chatter.
I stood behind Irene, pretending to watch the perimeter while I peeked at the stream. The party moved busily — scooping up mana stones, filling glass bottles with the paralysis mud from the swamp the skeletons had crawled out of.
Katie handled the bipedal, humanoid skeletons; Han Se-ah and Grace took care of the tough, sluggish zombie crocodiles. The 36th floor exploration was progressing smoothly. Even the occasional troll that popped up went down to a single arrow from Grace, so nothing really blocked our advance.
What did slow us down was the sheer volume of undead. Zombie crocs with solid durability poured out in numbers that actually earned the phrase "crocodile swarm," stretching every fight longer than it needed to be.
"…They're coming out disgustingly fast. At this rate I'll be out of arrows by the time we find the passage up to the 37th."
"Zombie crocs are such a pain…"
Even with more than ten arrows stuck in their mouths, the zombie crocs kept crawling forward, jaws clacking as they tanked Katie's blade until their necks finally came off. When things got dangerous — surrounded, say — Irene's barrier completely shut down their bites, turning the fight into a one-sided beatdown. But even a one-sided beatdown got boring if it dragged on long enough.
"Hah… no wonder most of the knights who fight monsters up north just give up on swords."
"For real? Knight-order people abandon their swords?"
"Not the Frostwolf Knights — the ones from the neighboring territory, the Ashen Bear or whatever. The orders that clear mountain monsters mostly use axes. When I visited a forge with my father, the place was piled high with axes, not swords."
Katie grumbled as she shook the mud off her blade and tended to her sword between zombie crocs. Irene trotted over and carefully checked her for injuries — even knowing full well the protective holy magic had kept the crocs from getting anywhere near her, she still fretted.
The party washed off the mud with water Han Se-ah conjured, pocketed the mana stones, and started moving forward again.
"…Hold on. Someone's approaching from behind."
Grace's quiet warning stopped them in their tracks.
Running into fellow adventurers inside the Tower was only natural.
The interior was vastly larger than it looked from the outside — you could spend over a week just searching for a passage — but everyone still tended to roam the same general areas. The Magic Tower had already researched the spacing between passages, so most people just changed direction after a certain distance rather than pushing endlessly forward.
"…What the hell are you lot?"
"Heh heh, why so jumpy? We're just fellow adventurers."
And those fellow adventurers turning into bandits who preyed on their own colleagues' backs — that was a pretty common story too. Even with Irene the nun standing right there in our party, their eyes glittered with naked greed. They didn't look like they'd back off easily.
They just snickered even as Grace openly nocked an arrow. Probably because everyone but me was a beauty capable of flipping a man's brain inside out — lust short-circuiting any normal judgment.
Or maybe they figured the Temple had pushed up through the 35th floor, so the 36th was free real estate for a big score. Temple forces were concentrated from the 31st through the 35th, after all. And they'd brought numbers — clearly planning a proper robbery from the start.
"What do we do, Roland? There's more of them than I expected."
"If they attack, get inside Irene's barrier and stay there."
Most parties capped at five for profit reasons, but these idiots had five warriors and four archers — a completely inefficient setup. We had two frontliners, an archer, a mage, and a priest: exactly five. They outnumbered us by four, and with four delicate-looking beauties on our side, they must have felt safe.
In a world where mana existed and the Goddess was real, getting careless just because the other side was pretty — were these guys even actually Upper-grade adventurers?
"Hey. I've got a question."
"What? When you're headed to the afterlife? Or how many 'customers' your companions are gonna entertain?"
"…You guys don't know who I am?"
The fact that they didn't recognize my face already suggested they weren't Upper-grade.
It was a ridiculous question on the surface — the kind of line a back-alley thug might throw out — and the adventurers-turned-bandits hacked up phlegmy laughs. Their whole act was so sloppy it left me more baffled than anything.
I'd been dropped into this world ten years ago, and I'd spent those same ten years grinding myself raw as an adventurer trying to make money. Even with commissions that sent me all over the kingdom, my home base had always been the Adventurer's City.
I'd taken caravan escort jobs. I'd cooperated with knight orders to wipe out bandits near the city. And after Han Se-ah logged into this world, I'd even gone tearing through the streets yelling at the top of my lungs.
An Upper-grade adventurer who'd raced across rooftops saving citizens. On top of that — a handsome blonde with blue eyes, wearing the exact same full-body armor for ten straight years. At this point, any adventurer who didn't recognize me was failing the job description.
"What, are you some big-shot famous enough I ought to know you? Or a noble? …Looking at that face, grabbing you and selling you might actually pay better."
"Nah… if you don't know, forget it."
That reaction even after I'd basically announced myself told me they really weren't Upper-grade. Probably mid-tier hunters who'd been preying on people around the 20th floor and decided this was their chance to climb higher. Intermediate-grade and Upper-grade gear had a massive price gap — maybe that was the real target.
I took a single step forward, and an arrow came flying straight at my face. It cut the air with a sharp whistle, aimed at my exposed cheek — no helmet.
Thwack—!
"Wh-what…?"
"Poison arrow… ah, so you didn't bring poison separately — you just soaked them in a poison pool? Not bad. These guys actually used their heads a little."
"R-Roland?! Are you okay?!"
I hadn't even bothered to block. The arrow bounced off with the sensation of a light flick to the cheek, purple liquid spattering from the crushed arrowhead and briefly clouding my vision.
So that was why they'd climbed all the way to the 36th — to use the toxins from the contaminated wetlands. Fair enough. Poison that worked even on Upper-grade adventurers, painted on an arrow and driven straight into a vein, would be pretty useful.
What neither they nor our party had accounted for was the holy magic Ambrose had cast on me last time. My body had been reinforced another full tier.
"Sh-shoot everything! Just shoot already!"
"Yeah. Don't run. Keep shooting."
I wasn't some oversized monster, but attacks without mana behind them didn't even seem interested in piercing my skin. At this point, only another Upper-grade fighter packing a weapon full of aura could hope to scratch me.
Then a random thought struck me, and I glanced down at the ground.
They'd set up at a fork in the path right next to a poison pool. Follow the dirt road and you'd become a pincushion; try to flank and a deep-looking poison pool blocked the way. Thick purple toxin filled it — deep enough that your lower half would sink right in.
Not ankle-deep. Properly deep. If I took my mace and just… flung that whole thing at them, could I take them alive?