A Familiar Taste 4
Even in a world where the Goddess has proven her existence through holy power and oracles, madmen still exist. After all, it's precisely because there are guys with guts hanging outside their bellies that monks stay busy running around rescuing priests and nuns and putting down bandits.
And fools who gain a little confidence in their own combat ability become as brave as they are stupid.
Just because they're intermediate-grade, they think they're strong?
Once you hit intermediate-grade adventurer, you're skilled enough to swagger around with your chin up wherever you go. You can reinforce your body a little with mana, and while you can't imbue a weapon with aura, you can cut down more than a dozen ordinary soldiers single-handedly. Stronger than trained soldiers, and even against knights, stronger than lower-grade knights with little experience. Against fellow intermediate-grades you'd lose to a knight with solid gear and fundamentals — but how common are intermediate-grade knights?
Temple knights who might actually pose a threat openly wear pure white armor and travel in pairs of two, making them far too easy to spot. And since a band of adventurer-bandits looking to ambush people wouldn't lack archers, picking their targets would have been even easier.
White armor means Temple knights. People milling about in priest and nun robes are Holy Crusade participants. The poorly armed and numerous ones are hired laborers. Groups of four or five are intermediate-grade adventurers like themselves. Easy to identify, so they figured banditry would be easy too.
"Do these guys not even imagine that our party has an upper-grade adventurer?"
"Maybe they figured even if there was an upper-grade, they could crush us with numbers."
And these idiots committing banditry right under the Temple's nose seemed unable to even conceive of upper-grade adventurers existing on the 36th floor.
"S-shit, why won't the arrow stick…"
An axe warrior collapsed to the ground with a hole through his throat, making a wet gurgling sound. He'd worn a confident face right up until the alchemical arrowhead his comrade fired from behind flew at my neck — but when the tip bounced off with a soft pik and tumbled to the dirt, he stood there dumbfounded until Katie's sword ran him through.
An arrowhead meant for hard-shelled monsters, tumbling across the ground before exploding into fragments with a sharp pop. They'd prepared thoroughly to hunt adventurers, but only at a level capable of taking down intermediate-grades.
Frogs in a well, really. By endlessly crushing fellow intermediate-grade adventurers with sheer numbers, their arrogance had swollen far beyond their meager skill.
"Get her! She's just one girl!"
"Shit, the ground collapsed!"
"It doesn't poison you right away — just rush them!"
Because of that, they couldn't even leverage their numerical advantage against Katie's fluid swordsmanship, Grace's supporting fire, and Han Se-ah subtly collapsing the ground beneath their feet — and were killed one by one.
Occasionally arrows flew not at me but toward the rear, but arrows that couldn't even pierce my skin had no chance of breaking through a 5★ Candidate Saint's barrier. Despite the party including a nun, the bandits who charged in, bewitched by four beautiful faces, met their end as nothing more than cold corpses rolling on the ground.
Thanks to her rare black hair, Han Se-ah was an exotic beauty by NPC standards. Grace, whose voluptuous figure leather armor couldn't hide, smiling with that sly look. Irene, completely covered with zero exposure by her nun's habit and wimple, yet whose features alone kept her beauty undimmed among the party. And Katie, a pretty young girl with a noble air, her silver hair swaying as she moved.
Looking at just their appearances, no wonder the bandits underestimated them and charged in.
When they sensed our presence and approached to check, they'd grip their weapons, captivated by Grace's beauty. And with more beauties behind her, they'd naturally fire arrows at me first — the man. Every single group we meet does the exact same thing.
"She's just one bitch — grab her already!"
"How dare you!"
Then, when the arrows don't work on me, they panic — and in their panic, they hand the initiative straight to Katie. Same every time. And the one who thrives on this is Katie, freely swinging her sword and cutting the bandits down.
Even as bandits, their opponents were also intermediate-grade adventurers. Whether she was happy she could crush fellow intermediate-grades with pure sword skill alone, there wasn't a hint of hesitation in her fierce strikes. Bandits pierced by Katie's blade, suppressed by Grace's arrows, losing their lives one by one.
And so the party members, who had grown so used to these ambushes they could call it the destiny of a beauty party, unhesitatingly cut the bandits down.
Even knowing that adventurers with banditry as their purpose had come up here, I never expected to encounter more of them than monsters.
"Why are there so many who defy the Goddess's will…?"
"Maybe there are just a lot of idiots."
Attacks so frequent we'd just kill them all rather than bother escorting them down to the 35th floor. Whether it was because of the four beauties, whenever something seemed even slightly suspicious they charged us with a hundred-percent probability — it was absurd. Irene, sick of the sight, muttered under her breath as she looked at the dead bandits.
We've met three groups of undead on the 36th floor, but already five parties of bandit adventurers who attacked the moment Grace discovered and approached them. Frequent enough that capturing them and sending them down to the 35th floor was a genuine hassle.
"What, did someone smear honey on our party? How do fellow adventurers start a battle the second our eyes meet? This isn't some Pokémon world, for fuck's sake…"
"No, it'd be better to just knock them out covered in poison. Katie's beheading show makes me nervous too. Forget the stabbing — if I accidentally film an arrow through a face or a head flying off, won't I get the stream banned?"
While Katie excitedly honed her swordsmanship, Han Se-ah complained to her viewers. While Irene sought the Goddess and shuddered at the rotten mentality of these adventurers, Han Se-ah started fretting over adventurers dying in place of undead.
A skeleton shattering or a zombie crocodile's mossy skin tearing wasn't particularly gory — but a bandit's head soaring into the air on Katie's sword was dangerous in all kinds of ways for the stream.
The beautiful sight of her dancing like a ballerina across the narrow dirt mounds, swinging her sword with fluid grace, was beautiful enough to captivate countless viewers. But the human destruction unfolding at the tip of that blade was a horrific scene that threatened Han Se-ah's streaming career.
"If I get a warning over this, I'm just going to stick the camera in an extreme close-up of Katie's face. Honestly? You guys aren't going to copy or learn anything from Katie's swordsmanship anyway. Just enjoy looking at her smiling face."
Han Se-ah collapsed the ground under one bandit nocking an arrow, dunking him into a paralysis swamp, then locked the camera in front of her own face and kept talking. Now that the opponents were human, it was a trial of a completely different kind for her.
No matter how well she controlled the camera, she couldn't know whether Katie's sword would lightly graze past or dig in hard for a spectacular organ display — so she seemed to have decided not to film at all.
After confirming the floating camera had stuck firmly to Han Se-ah, I strode forward myself. Yielding for Katie's sword training was fine once or twice — we'd already met bandits five times, and I was starting to get annoyed.
"Katie, nothing worth looting. Let's finish this quickly."
"Yeah, got it!"
Even Buddha's smile only lasts three times — five is too many.
Without needing to use excessive force, I splashed forward through the poison pools that came up to my ankles. Arrows flew desperately, aimed precisely at my face, but as long as I casually dodged the ones flying unpleasantly at my eyeballs, they still couldn't even scratch my skin.
There was no dramatic breakthrough to upper-grade status in the face of life-threatening danger, like some movie protagonist, for intermediate-grade adventurers who resorted to banditry.
With nowhere to flee thanks to the collapsed dirt path, the bandits tumbled to the ground one by one with the sound of bones breaking under a single punch. Some had already lost their lives to Katie's blade, so once I joined in, the cleanup was instantaneous.
"The gear doesn't look like it'd sell for much. Maybe just the arrows if we're taking anything?"
"Their pockets are empty — doesn't seem like there were other victims… What about the bodies?"
"No bounty talk either, so if we dump them in the swamp, they'll sink."
I grabbed both the dead and the not-yet-dead by the scruff of the neck and tossed them into the nearby paralysis mud swamp, where they gurgled and sank. Only then did Han Se-ah pull the camera away from her face.
While she muttered — having apparently gotten another earful from her viewers in that short time — Grace stuffed alchemical arrows from the bandits' corpses into her quiver. Looks like we were their first ambush targets. Completely broke, nothing in their pockets.
Should I be glad there were no other victims, or wonder if these guys who hadn't even ambushed anyone else charged us just because they were captivated by the party's beauty?
"Hey, Roland? Maybe we should head down to the 35th floor for a bit?"
"Hmm?"
"We've already fought people five times, and there are an unusually large number of bandits, so let's check if a real subjugation order has been issued. Keep fighting battles that give us nothing is kind of… meh."
Han Se-ah quietly suggested this after the battle ended and cleanup was done.
She doesn't stammer when lying anymore, but her eyes keep drifting toward the hologram window. It's kind of cute, like someone inexperienced at presentations nervously looking down to secretly read a script.
Well — did some bandit-related side quest pop up?