What Happened in the Tent Village 5
Whether in the asphalt jungle of a city or a fantasy world crawling with monsters, human desire seemed much the same.
"…What are they doing?"
"Uh, well, um…"
While sweeping the 36th floor clean of doppelganger bandit gangs that outnumbered even the undead, Grace spotted something and her face flushed bright red. Katie, catching Grace's reaction, looked the same way—and that set off a chain reaction as Han Se-ah and Irene caught on too.
Where Grace's flustered gaze landed, an adventurer party could be seen right after a fight. Their opponents weren't undead but doppelganger bandits—holy power brands were visible on one side, absent on the subdued side.
The problem was what they were doing.
"Would they really want to do that to a monster? One the Demon King made, no less?"
"W-what? They're seriously… going after the Demon King's creations? Those guys?"
Curious, Han Se-ah whipped the camera over and muttered under her breath, sending Katie into a startled panic. And no wonder—those adventurers were working off the heat of battle in a distinctly adult direction.
A mixed party of Intermediate-grade and Upper-grade adventurers, without a scratch on them, had subdued a bandit gang that outnumbered them. They seemed to have a policy of killing the men and assaulting the women—already aroused, they were stripping the armor off a female adventurer who lacked a brand.
Looking at Han Se-ah's stream, the female bandit pinned to the dirt had looks that suggested she'd been cloned from a gacha-buffed character. Beautiful enough that even knowing she was a monster, lust was almost understandable.
"Pretty bold of them, doing that inside the Tower."
"The brothers at the Temple have reason to worry. In more ways than one, these are troublesome creations of the Demon King. Perhaps they were made specifically to stir human desire…"
"But are those really the Demon King's creations?"
"They don't seem to have attacked innocent adventurers. Even with all her companions dead and herself about to be subjected to something terrible, all I can feel in her eyes is murderous intent."
Grace, cheeks still flushed, spoke with certainty—so they hadn't assaulted an unbranded adventurer after all. Looking closer, even as her clothes were stripped away and she lay on the ground, her eyes held nothing but pure killing intent.
Tower monsters, unlike those outside, had no survival instinct. Even goblins would bare their teeth and charge at Upper-grade adventurers. Apparently even doppelgangers that perfectly copied human bodies couldn't escape that monster nature.
No shame at being stripped of armor and underclothes, no grief for slaughtered companions, no fear of the ordeal ahead or of dying—just thrashing hands trying to strangle the man pinning her down. That was the proof.
"Just leave them. Whether those guys get it up for monsters or not is none of our business."
"Yeah, true enough. It's pretty disgusting, but no reason for us to stop them. Irene, the Temple hasn't declared that kind of thing taboo or anything, right?"
"W-well, um, there aren't really any teachings about brothers who feel lust toward monsters…"
Still, on camera it was an unmistakable rape crime scene. Whether the victims were doppelgangers or creations of the Demon King hardly mattered. Under Han Se-ah's startled control, the camera spun a full 180 degrees in an instant and started framing our party's faces instead.
"Ugh, damn, almost got the stream shut down right there. At this rate I'm gonna eat a three-day ban before we even hit the 41st floor. If I get suspended, should I just rush us to the 40th-floor boss in the meantime?"
Between Han Se-ah bantering with her viewers and the rest of the party frowning hard, everyone seemed thoroughly sick of men who couldn't keep their lust in check regardless of time or place—but no one looked inclined to stop them.
Fair enough. What exactly were we supposed to say to adventurers trying to get their rocks off with doppelgangers? Whether they finished their adventure after working off that urge, or got ambushed by undead and died mid-act, that was all on their party leader to live with.
"By the way, aren't there way too many of the Demon King's creations that mimic humans instead of just being monsters?"
"There really are. The brothers at the Temple had every reason to worry."
Fight a doppelganger bandit gang, take down skeleton lizardmen, fight another bandit gang, sense something and follow Grace's lead only to walk in on that scene, then run into yet another bandit gang… Wait, was this not way too many?
By ratio, skeletons, zombie crocodiles, and troll bombs had felt like about 4:5:1—but now doppelgangers seemed to make up over 70%. That was enough for Han Se-ah, party leader and streamer, to call for a rest and start polling her viewers.
"Hey, should we stop combing the 36th floor and just rush straight up to the 40th? Unless doppelgangers are spawning out of thin air, there's gotta be some kind of hatchery making them. But if we just barge upward like idiots and the quest gets skipped like with the golems, the order gets all messed up and that's a headache."
She clearly thought doppelgangers were different from ordinary monsters. Just as there had been rideable golems and a place that repaired them, she was convinced there had to be a place that produced doppelgangers.
Fair enough—if human-perfect doppelgangers just popped into existence midair with no warning, that would be pretty weird too.
In fantasy, undead often came with nests, right? Some massive, contaminated lump of flesh writhing and stamping out zombies. That was the kind of thing Han Se-ah seemed to have in mind—she was set on finding the doppelgangers' source.
"Still, more human copies than undead… what on earth is the scheme here?"
"Is there even a scheme? Maybe it's just sheer numbers. Roland destroyed that horrific tree on the 35th floor, remember?"
"What does that have to do with it?"
"That huge tree was churning out tentacles nonstop. Maybe there's a tree that makes undead and a tree that copies people."
"Ah—so because Roland smashed the undead-making tree, the proportion of human-mimicking monsters went up?"
"It's pure speculation with no evidence, of course. What do you think, Roland?"
On the flat clearing I'd shaped with Earth Control, Han Se-ah and her viewers, Grace and Irene, all started spinning every theory they could about the doppelgangers. Watching them, I had only one hypothesis worth offering.
"Whatever else is true, the human-mimicking monsters need their source ripped out as soon as possible."
"Well, obviously. …Why so sudden?"
"Because if adventurers capture copies of beautiful women—a Saintess, high-ranking mages from the Magic Tower—and smuggle them out of the Tower, all hell is going to break loose."
"…You're right. It wouldn't be monsters breaking out—it would be brothers who couldn't master their desires, reaching for evil."
It might have been an overblown worry, but it was a real possibility. The moment a red-light district full of Saintess doppelgangers sprang up, a bloodbath could sweep the city. Having already watched adventurers take doppelgangers for themselves, the party had no counterargument.
With nothing left to say, an awkward silence washed through—and in its place, a fierce drive to conquer the Tower rose up.
When ordinary RPGs became virtual reality games and realism got bolted on, a whole crop of extremely annoying problems appeared.
Take, for example, an MMORPG quest like, "There's a bandit gang over the mountain—please wipe them out, Hero!" In a computer RPG, you could take the quest and hunt the bandits immediately, or ignore it forever and quit the game, and it wouldn't matter.
Even with a little interactivity, a few NPCs might die and the game would still run fine. But in the virtual reality game Heroes Chronicle, it was a different story.
You might head out hunting and get tangled up with a knight order on a subjugation mission. Leave the bandits alone and they might grow strong enough to raze other villages. The stench of corpses could draw wandering monsters, and the bandits' notoriety could give nobles a pretext for political fights.
"The Magic Tower's mages have probably already started researching this. Finding the source before them seems unlikely."
"Even so, we're climbing this way anyway—we shouldn't leave it entirely to the brothers of the Magic Tower. We should do everything we can."
"Right. We received the Goddess's oracle. Leaving those things alone would be staining the North's name."
So of course the party, spinning every kind of speculation, started picking up speed. For faith, for honor, for any number of reasons—the human-mimicking doppelgangers had to be dealt with.
Running into those lust-driven adventurers a second time had clearly made the party more serious. Honestly, it hadn't been a pretty sight, so I understood why the women felt anger and a sense of gravity about it.
The camera had been yanked away fast enough that the viewers never saw it, but from a third-party perspective, the image of a humanoid monster thrashing desperately to kill someone while men held it down to rape it had been thoroughly revolting.
"So I want your opinions. Like the 30th floor with the rideable golems—should we head straight to the 40th? Or comb every inch from the 36th through the 39th looking for something like that golem's secret chamber, the one that gave us the mana stone?"
Boss monsters appeared every ten floors, so going straight to the 40th would almost certainly put something there. The rideable golem's battery mana stone hadn't come from the 30th floor itself but from a floor below—so there might be something here this time too.
Both arguments were sound, and the party sank into thought.