What Happened in the Tent Village 3
The bandit archer Grace had shot dead on the thirty-sixth floor and the tanker from the adventurer party currently eating dinner on the thirty-fifth floor looked completely identical!
Any chance of them being twins, or of her simply misidentifying someone mid-combat, was dismissed almost immediately. The man himself had shaken his head when his own party members asked if he had a brother — and while everyone was still murmuring, Han Se-ah had already pulled up her stream VOD.
"Uh, what the hell. They really look the same? Twin or not, that long scar running from his cheek down to his neck, and that huge mole on his right forearm under the arm guard — they're identical. I don't know if twins can share the same mole, but they definitely don't get born with matching scars."
Han Se-ah shoved her translucent camera drone right up into the face of the still-confused warrior, filling the entire stream window with his features. She snapped a full frontal mugshot like a wanted poster, then zoomed in on the face of the bandit Grace had killed from the VOD — and the viewers took over the investigation on their own.
The scar running from cheek to neck. The mole on the forearm that had been exposed mid-fight. Even the slightly chipped, uneven front tooth visible whenever he opened his mouth. Features that couldn't match even between twins — and the chat started buzzing.
"So, uh… was that not a bandit quest but a doppelganger quest? And more importantly, how good are Grace's eyes and memory that she can perfectly recall the face of someone she shot from a distance half a day ago…?"
Of course — people steeped in fantasy novels immediately jumped to the doppelganger theory. I glanced at the chat out of the corner of my eye and thought it over for a moment.
Did Heroes Chronicle even have doppelgangers as a monster type…? In ten years I'd never heard of them, and they hadn't shown up in Heroines Chronicle either. So it was easier to just treat this as another brand-new monster I'd never seen before — like those rideable golems on the thirtieth floor.
While Han Se-ah bantered with her viewers and I secretly watched from the side, the nameless adventurer party in front of us started getting loud.
"Hold on — there's a guy out there committing robberies with my face?"
"Of all the faces to pick…"
"Still, she's traveling with a sister of the Temple. There's no way she'd lie about something like this."
"What if it's not a lie, just a mistake? Maybe she mixed him up with some other ugly, greasy-haired guy with a scar?"
"You little shit — we'll talk later, for real."
Because Irene was walking around in her nun's habit from the Temple district, the Intermediate-grade adventurer party never even considered that Grace might be lying. They didn't seem to know about doppelgangers either, so the prevailing theory was a lookalike mix-up or some assassin in disguise.
Even so, there was no real way to prove anything, so the conversation fizzled out. We couldn't show NPCs screenshots from Han Se-ah's stream, and there was no retrieving a corpse that had already sunk under the paralysis mud with an arrow through its skull.
"Well, uh, I get what you're saying. Just take it as a heads-up to be careful, right?"
"Y-yes…"
The tanker scratched the back of his head and tried to put the best possible spin on things — probably because of the nun standing right there — while Grace flushed pink, belated embarrassment catching up with her. With the atmosphere thoroughly awkward, we had no choice but to retreat to our own tent.
Grace, a 4-star archer, did not doubt her own eyes. Han Se-ah had confirmed Grace's claim with her viewers through the stream VOD. Katie still looked a little skeptical, while Irene simply said she trusted her companion.
And as the conversation went on, it drifted in a direction that made Han Se-ah's face twist in pure disgust.
"In that case, every time a bandit shows up, we cut off the head and keep it."
"……What?"
"We don't need the body — just cleanly sever the head and put it on display over by the Temple. Once we've collected enough of them, something with a matching face is bound to show up. Or the mages might be able to figure out whether it's a real person or a monster disguised as one."
If the faces were the problem, why not just cut off the heads and collect them?
It wasn't exactly Columbus's egg, but the conversation was rolling along in the spirit of Katie's head-on-a-pike approach. Only Han Se-ah, fretting over her stream's content rating, looked thoroughly appalled — everyone else in the party seemed to think it was a pretty solid idea.
Carrying around severed human heads came with plenty of problems. The stench of rotting corpses, for one, and once the numbers piled up they'd become a bulky load of baggage.
But we had a genius mage named Hanna. With her inventory magic — the kind that could swallow whole sacks of grain and giant cooking pots without breaking a sweat — a dozen or so bandit heads would fit just fine. Sure, it'd mean carrying less food or harvesting fewer mana stones… but given that we kept running into nothing but bandits anyway, it hardly mattered.
"A-are you sure about this? I keep our food supplies in the inventory…"
"So what? It's not like blood is going to mix in. The pot, the food, and the tent all go into the same inventory and they never get jumbled together, right?"
Han Se-ah, already walking a tightrope with her camera angles to avoid a stream suspension, put up a token resistance — but it was meaningless. These women might look like ethereal beauties who survived on dew alone, but at their core they were tough women raised in a harsh medieval fantasy world.
This was a world where public hangings were entertainment and the bloodstains of a beheaded criminal were considered good luck charms. Even the gentle priests of the Temple cheerfully went off to build gallows, saying the captured bandits should just be strung up.
To the rest of the party, Han Se-ah simply shifted from "beautiful genius mage" to "delicate beautiful genius mage" — and the decision to collect bandit heads was set in stone either way.
"Ugh, seriously. Looking at you all, you'd think you'd scream at a cockroach — but the second someone suggests chopping off heads and packing them up, you're all on board. Starting tomorrow I'm putting up a screen cover whenever we collect heads after a fight."
Han Se-ah grumbled while the chat teased her. Watching that familiar scene play out, I ducked into the tent assigned to me and pretended to close my eyes… while actually opening a browser window. Ever since the Rite of Fortification, my Holy Power had toughened my body even further — I could cut my sleep down to almost nothing and still wake up in perfect condition as long as I got some rest at all.
I spent that extra web-surfing time in pure contentment, and passed a thoroughly peaceful night inside the Tower.
"Whew. Good morning."
"Good morning. I can't believe we can spend a night this peaceful inside the Tower."
Being inside the Tower, there was no sunrise or sunset — just the same gloomy weather — but whether thanks to the miniature temple or the aftereffects of this place becoming a safe zone, the air was clean. One by one the party members stretched and emerged from their tents, Han Se-ah logged into the game, and the day began.
This wasn't a safe zone on a monster floor — it was a safe zone with no monsters at all — so everyone looked to be in good condition. Then again, with a miniature temple within a hundred meters as the crow flies, the air was probably being purified by that massive Holy Power anyway.
"Let's keep breakfast light with a thin soup, then head straight up to the thirty-sixth floor. We turned in early, so everyone's feeling alright, right?"
"Hmm, I'll have some bread with mine. Feels like I'll be swinging my sword a lot today, so I want something a bit more filling."
"Oh my, I hadn't thought of that. I'm sorry, Miss Katie."
"No, no — you prepare every meal for us. You don't need to apologize."
Grace and Katie, the physical types, lightly loosened up their bodies while Han Se-ah and Irene prepared breakfast. Other adventurers seemed to be planning an early start as well — savory aromas drifted up from the market street and from other tents. Once you hit Intermediate-grade, apparently, nobody felt like skimping on a hot meal.
We finished our light breakfast and were just about to pack up for the thirty-sixth floor when Temple knights suddenly came storming in.
"Brothers, we request your cooperation."
"Wh-what? What's going on?"
The pure white armor and pressed-down helmets looked the same as always — but every one of them carried a long hammer, Holy Power rolling off them in waves as they advanced on the adventurers in formation. Looking closer, I could see nuns and priests outside the lodging area preparing to deploy sacred arts as well.
"Uh, what? Did something go down because of those doppelgangers? Well, the Temple isn't completely incompetent — they could've found something on patrol. This one's basically a free quest on a silver platter."
Everyone in the party except Han Se-ah and me looked startled, so the only two people standing calmly in the open clearing were the two of us. That itself must have seemed suspicious, because five Temple knights started heading our way. Normally they patrolled in pairs — five of them approaching fully armed meant this was serious.
"Brother, we request your cooper— ah, Sir Roland!"
"Could you tell us what's going on?"
Of course, the Temple knights who'd been approaching with their hackles fully raised instantly turned into gentle lambs the moment they felt the Holy Power Irene and I were radiating. A doppelganger might copy someone's appearance, but it would never be able to mimic the Goddess's Holy Power — a perfectly reasonable bit of game balance.
The knight's tensed shoulders settled, and he was just about to explain something when an old man dropped soundlessly out of thin air — no noise, no dust — and cut in with a hearty laugh.
"Heh heh. I'll handle the explaining."
The only person skilled enough that I might fail to notice him was Ambrose, the 6-star monk who'd vanished somewhere after the Rite of Fortification. His tattered brown monastic robe was the same as always — but what he held in his hands was grim.
"Is that…?"
"It would seem some wicked creatures we failed to discover still remain among us."
The kindly smile was still there, but his voice felt like a beast's low growl. The old man was projecting pure rage through atmosphere and presence alone — decades of spiritual discipline shaken to the core. Wondering what had set him off so badly, I glanced at the heads clutched in his hands.
One was an old man's head, face thick with wrinkles. The other was a beautiful woman's, her striking golden bob unmistakable. Looking closer at what those even were, I realized the old man's face was identical to Ambrose's own.
Which meant the golden bob-haired beauty's head was…?
"In all this old man's long life spent following the Goddess's will, never once has anyone dared to impersonate the Saintess… and now the Tower's mongrels dare to mimic her. I have lived too long, it seems — I am seeing things I never wished to see."
Oh, shit…. It really was blasphemy.