Familiar Taste 2
The deliberation was brief, the execution immediate. With a warrior's instinct etched into his body, he swung the mace exactly the way you'd swing a golf club. Having never formally trained in weapon techniques, he was only adapting the clumsy form he'd learned in middle and high school PE class — but Roland's absurd physique made even that devastating.
A sharp paang cracked the air, and a wave of purple venom surged up like the artificial tide at a water park, crashing over the bandits right in front of him.
"Wh-what the—?!"
"M-my eyes!"
Upper-grade adventurers were superhumans who could project mana outside their bodies. A stomp of their foot could shatter the ground, and a rock thrown as a feint hit harder than a crossbow bolt. Watching these men flail in panic over a mere splash of liquid made it obvious they weren't Upper-grade.
Still, they at least knew poison on the mucous membranes was dangerous — some squeezed their eyes shut, others crouched and covered their faces with small bucklers. Their reactions were instant. The problem was that those were not the reactions you showed with an enemy standing right in front of you.
The warriors who should have been blocking the path were crouching with their faces covered. The archers who should have been providing covering fire from the rear dropped their bowstrings and scattered, terrified of getting splashed, their stances completely broken.
…Well, that took the wind right out of my sails.
Surprise was one thing, but the enemy was less than ten meters away, weapon in hand, staring them down — and they were squeezing their eyes shut or deliberately blocking their own vision while crouching? Even without holy reinforcement, ten meters was close enough to call point-blank range.
Just like right now.
"Hyaaah—!"
In the brief moment the purple venom wave blotted out their vision, Katie assessed the situation, drew her sword, and charged. She sprinted lightly across the poison pool on the opposite side of where he'd swung, stepping as gracefully as a dancer.
Watching her run across the venom pool, he almost thought she'd already reached the Upper-grade realm — but a closer look revealed tiny mounds of earth under her feet. Stepping stones Han Se-ah had secretly shaped while stalling with meaningless conversation, thinking she was buying time.
Katie sprang across those earthen mounds like stepping stones, and her blade found its mark: the bandit vanguard, eyes squeezed shut as he tried to shake the venom soaking his face.
"Hey— front, the front!"
"Ghk—!"
The long edge of her one-handed sword slipped between the plates of his armor without the slightest resistance and punched a hole straight through his neck. Even crouched tight and covering his face with a buckler to block the venom, the strike found the gap like a snake.
She might have been a noble young lady they called a northern brat, but at her core she was a cold-blooded swordswoman. Trained by a knight order and tempered in real combat with a mercenary company, she killed without a shred of hesitation.
The only one rattled by that ruthless efficiency was Han Se-ah, whose sense of reality had made her momentarily forget this was a game. Right after, Grace's arrow punched clean through the eyeball of a bandit archer scrambling to get his stance back in the rear.
"What is with these guys? They're way weaker than skeletons."
"I've got a pretty good idea. A mid-floor bandit crew that preys on the rabble climbing up because they trust the Temple."
"Ah, that makes sense? With so many easy, high-paying requests, Intermediate-grade adventurers have been flooding up here…"
It had been her first real fight as an archer against other archers, so she'd been tense — only for the tension to drain out of her the same way it had for him. Grace's voice came out limp and deflated, completely at odds with the fact that a single arrow had just killed a man. Fair enough. Nobody expected a bandit crew that had openly blocked the road to be this fragile.
While they traded that halfhearted conversation, Katie was tearing through the front like a fish in water. Facing undead her swordsmanship couldn't touch had apparently built up more stress than expected.
"Uh… wow. She really doesn't hesitate at all. And being 4★, she's just toying with them, huh? I figured Roland would just smash everything to pieces like last time."
Having confirmed the enemy was weak enough that mercy wouldn't matter, Grace's next arrows pierced the backs of the bandit archers' hands instead of their eyes and throats. Three bandit archers were neutralized in an instant, before they could even nock another arrow.
One had taken an arrow through the eye and died on the spot. The other three writhed with shafts buried in their hands and forearms, then got drenched in venom and started foaming at the mouth. Thanks to that, Katie was easily handling the four remaining bandits still standing, soaked in purple poison.
"Y-you fucking bitch!"
"Get out of the way! You bastard, move!"
"I don't even know what gave them the courage to charge."
They were such a ragtag mess that Katie clicked her tongue while cutting them down. Plenty of experience bullying weaker targets with superior numbers, but zero experience fighting a handful of stronger opponents in a cramped, awkward space.
Attacks too pathetic to even call a pincer strike flailed through empty air, and Katie's blade curved like a silver snake — thuk! — punching another hole through a bandit's body.
They'd at least put on leather armor with something layered underneath, but she kept stabbing into necks, the crooks of elbows, armpits, and they dropped without resistance. It took less than five minutes for them to end up sprawled across the dirt floor, thickly soaked in venom.
"These two are dead, and the other three… should we tie them up and hand them over to the Temple knights on Floor 35?"
"The archers are all dead. I was trying to subdue them, but the venom must've gotten into the wounds."
Two dead: the one whose throat had been pierced first, and the one who'd bled out from a blade through the armpit. The remaining three had taken hits to the joints of their armor, dropped their swords, and been taken alive. The absurd part was that the ones Grace had shot had thrashed around in pain and poisoned themselves to death.
Unlike the warriors who'd dropped their swords and sat down on the ground, these idiots had taken an arrow to the forearm, rolled around on the floor, and died of poisoning. What kind of clowns were these? Anyone could see it was the stupid behavior of people who only knew forest terrain below Floor 20.
On a dirt path he'd thoroughly doused in venom, if you flattened yourself to the ground thinking you were taking cover, of course the poison would enter through your wounds. In their own minds they were probably recalling the days of ducking behind forest logs or cave stalagmites… but on Floor 36, which had turned into a toxic swamp, it was a clear act of suicide.
"No, they had a poison pool right in front of them and thought to use it, then got poisoned and died themselves…"
"A fitting end for criminals who rejected the Goddess's grace. We can hand them over to our brothers on the lower floor."
"Still, I can't tell if these guys are just that weak or if I've gotten stronger. I took on four alone and barely felt anything."
With no interest in hauling corpses, they did some basic first aid, pulled tent rope from inventory, and bound the bandits while chatting. The fight had ended so anticlimactically it left them speechless — and watching them carefully read Irene's thoroughly furious mood was adorable.
The only one who either couldn't read the room or simply didn't care about Irene's mood was Katie. She seemed eager to confirm the swordsmanship she'd honed adventuring in the Goddess's name.
Fortunately, they hadn't gone far from the passage leading to Floor 35. Arms twisted behind their backs and bound with rope, and the dropped swords and shields discreetly scooped into Han Se-ah's inventory. With three oversized burdens suddenly on their hands, of course they had to head back to Floor 35.
"These might have bounties on them. Should we cut the heads off and take them?"
"We're not handing them to a city guard — we're giving them to the Temple. Just leave the bodies."
"Yes. Even if we brought the heads, I don't think the brothers on Floor 35 would recognize them."
"Then let's just hurry down and back. We didn't even go that far from the passage, right?"
Han Se-ah jumped at the sight of Katie casually considering collecting the heads of the bandits who'd died so pathetically, but Grace and Irene stepped in and nothing came of it. Adult-rated game or not, tearing heads off corpses and carrying them around was a bit much for a streamer.
Having nearly stuffed a bunch of dripping bandit heads into her inventory, Han Se-ah hurried the party along.
"Come on, of course you get banned for dismembering limbs and spilling guts all over the place…. Even horror movie reviewers have to cut gore scenes carefully, and if you do a live organ showcase in real time, the mods are going to have a field day."
An arrow stuck in armor, or a blade sliding between the joints — that was probably fine. But as Han Se-ah said, slowly sawing a head off a corpse was not something you could show on stream.
"Is Hanna scared of corpses?"
"She might be. Hanna is a mage, after all. Even among our brothers, there are many who shy away from killing."
"True. Killing monsters and killing people feel different."
That attitude simply registered a little differently to the rest of the party. To Grace, who'd grown up in a slash-and-burn village and dealt with wandering monsters and bandits; to Irene, who'd walked a path of penance and seen all sorts of things; to Katie, who'd ground herself down at the bottom of a mercenary company — Han Se-ah must have seemed like a flower raised in a greenhouse.
Her desperate efforts to keep the stream alive only piled one more misunderstanding onto the party's image of her, and with that, they headed back to Floor 35.