The Big One and the Small One 1
The party's opinion was unanimous: make a high-speed push toward the 40th floor.
"Honestly, that was a pretty disgusting scene to watch."
"We should clean things up as soon as possible, before the brothers walking the middle path fall into corruption."
"Honestly, keeping fighting those things that don't even drop mana stones just wears us out. They leave corpses instead of mana stones… and it creeps me out."
Even for residents of a fantasy world who were desensitized to death, rape wasn't something they could just shrug off. Or wait—should I call it monster-fucking instead of rape…? Of course, we'd only run into the ones who flaunted their lust that one time, but just because we'd only met them once didn't mean they were the only ones doing that kind of thing.
If Grace, Irene, and Katie were pushing for a speed run for those reasons, Han Se-ah seemed to have a slightly different motive for heading straight to the 40th floor.
"If BB Games has any sense, they won't copy the players. At most, they'll rip off the companions. Why? Hey, how would you feel if a VR game took your body data, filmed rape porn with it, and distributed it?"
"Suspicion is whatever — they'd just brush it off with 'Players are specially chosen by the Goddess~' or something, right? Would you rather rewrite the story, or get sued by millions of female players plus celebrities and idols from every country on the planet?"
"Still, if those kinds of scenes keep coming up, streaming gets hard, so we need to get past this quick. Who would've thought an undead floor would suddenly turn into a sex crime floor? NoMergo, I'm writing down your ID. If I get banned later, I'm seizing that as consolation money. For real."
A game company would have to be completely insane to use a player's own model, but it was an extreme hindrance to streaming, so her mindset was to blow past it as fast as possible. Her point was something I hadn't even considered, but she had a fair argument.
I didn't know how a virtual reality game was made, but I did know that the capsule scanned your body so that the in-game Han Se-ah looked identical to the real-world Han Se-ah. For whatever reason, they'd designed it so you couldn't freely customize your physique.
It had been a long time since I'd read those capsule-game fantasy novels, so the cliché settings were getting fuzzy. For some reason, most of those novels had you play as your own face… Ah, was that because unlike Heroes Chronicle, those were online multiplayer games?
Anyway, unless the game company was staffed exclusively by psychopaths, a proposal like "Let's copy player body data and make them get raped~" would never get approved.
"Then let's aim to climb to the 40th floor as fast as possible. Rather than searching for the source that produces the Demon King's creations, it'll be better to deal with whatever shows up on Floor 40, like we have every time before."
"The Full Moon Wolf on Floor 10, the Orc Chieftain on Floor 20, the Giant Serpent on Floor 30. Come to think of it, is there some kind of mystical significance to powerful ones like that appearing every ten floors?"
Mulling that over, I matched the slightly quickened pace of the party. Grace had immediately found the passage from Floor 36 to Floor 37, which left my head crammed full of random thoughts.
Ten years of adventurer life since arriving in this other world. It had taken some time to adapt to a medieval fantasy existence with no concept of human rights and to get used to killing, and I'd wandered extensively outside the Tower trying to make money… but even so, in ten years, the farthest I'd pioneered was Floor 37.
And now, just because I'd come with a player, I was back on Floor 37 after a little over half a year.
"Roland? Is something wrong?"
"No, I just never expected to end up on Floor 37 again. It's a strange feeling, that's all."
"Ahh, you said you gave up and came back down from Floor 37, right?"
Apparently my distraction was visible, because Grace used the narrow dirt path as an excuse to press herself right up against my side. Looking at her flawless beauty even here inside the Tower, I felt the weight of how much had changed. They say ten years can transform mountains and rivers — I never imagined the Tower itself would change this much.
I'd figured that in ten years I'd be living leisurely in a manor house plastered with magic tools, loafing around and eating well. Instead, I'd become a player's first companion NPC, heading out with a beautiful harem party to push the Tower's highest floor.
"It wasn't a place contaminated by undead like this back then, but it was just as horrific. Now there's a Magic Tower gate on Floor 30 and the Temple has started providing support, but it wasn't like that before."
"Yeah, thinking about climbing all the way from Floor 1 does feel pretty overwhelming. That means every single expedition, you had to find and climb through thirty-six passages?"
Cross the grasslands, traverse the forest, explore the caves just to reach the swamp zone — and after the swamps, a highland region? What kind of hellhole was that. And yet that was the neighborhood I'd clawed through so desperately, trying to scrape together settlement funds for this other world.
So there I was, deploying the classic "Back in my day~" routine with Grace stuck to my side and Katie listening with fascination to my war stories from behind — when something caught my eye, something that just felt wrong.
It was like that subtle feeling you get in a spot-the-difference puzzle, where something is clearly off but you can't immediately spit out the answer. I stopped in place, blinking as I scanned the surroundings, and sure enough, sharp-eyed archer Grace pointed a finger in one direction.
"There — that!"
The subtle sense of wrongness I'd felt — and what Grace, the 4-star archer specialized in exploration passives, had discovered — was a massive gray tree.
Another tree? You've got to be kidding me.
Of course, even so, it wasn't the hundreds-of-meters-tall skyscraper size from Floor 35. More like a decent-sized villa, maybe. That was still an enormously large tree, but given that the last one we'd seen was the size of the 63 Building, this one felt relatively dainty by comparison.
"I knew something felt off — doesn't that tree alone have a completely different sense of scale?"
"Ah, you're right. I didn't think much of it since it doesn't have those disgusting tentacles."
Bulldozing the trees had been a Floor 35 story. Floors 36 and 37 still had ash-gray trees standing in their bleak, desolate places, but without the pale vines that drained holy power, none of the party had been paying them any mind.
Which was why that massive ash-gray tree sitting far off in a corner of our vision had nearly gone unnoticed. Looking at it now, it was far enough away that you'd have to cross several poison pools and paralysis mires to reach it — and yet it still looked about the same size as the other trees.
If the Floor 35 tree had felt like spotting the 63 Building or Lotte Tower from a distance, the one over there felt more like looking at the apartment complex next door from your own building? My brain was too stiff to explain it well, but it was definitely larger than the other trees.
"Let's head that way. After what happened on Floor 35, that huge tree is clearly suspicious."
"You're right. At a rough estimate it looks about five times bigger than the others — we should at least check it out."
Han Se-ah seemed to think it was the key to a quest as well, freely spending her mana to carve a straight path right to it. With a quiet murmur of Earth Control, a dirt road rose up in a continuous strip over the poison pools and paralysis mud, no detours needed.
Luckily, no undead monsters came bursting out alongside the dirt path. With undead numbers this low, it might not even be luck. As if to confirm that rough guess, the scenery gradually coming into view told the story.
Even if it wasn't 63 Building scale, the massive tree that looked about apartment-building height had undead of every kind wrapped tightly around its roots. And hanging like fruit from the ends of branches that drooped low like a willow were large amniotic sacs.
"What… is that…?"
"Using undead as nutrients to… mimic humans…?"
After a nauseating squirming that was unpleasant just to watch, a sac split open and a sticky fluid resembling culture medium splattered onto the ground. Using the undead coiled around the roots and the culture fluid as a cushion, what flopped down on top of them were adventurers.
They were curled up like infants, but every single one was wearing leather armor and armed, writhing and thrashing on the ground.
No wonder their equipment all looked so similar — apparently the armor and swords were also treated as part of the monster's body and mass-produced. Well, living armors and other equipment-type monsters existed in this world, so it wasn't completely absurd.
"Good heavens — a sapling of that blasphemous tree still remains!"
"Isn't that a bit too big to call a sapling?"
"True, it is smaller than the Floor 35 tree, but…"
A tree that gestated humans using undead as nutrients.
Faced with the ash-gray tree that produced not only leather armor but swords and bows of various forms — even quivers and arrows — the party members gaped in shock, mouths hanging open. Only Han Se-ah, who'd anticipated something like a hatchery, and I, who'd been watching it through the stream, remained unfazed.
The party's trembling eyes flicked back and forth between me and Han Se-ah, then they drew a long breath and steeled themselves. No matter how shocking the scene unfolding before their eyes, the fact that this tree was one of the Demon King's creations remained unchanged.
They tightened their grips on their weapons, entered combat stance, and advanced step by step, radiating a murderous aura. As if reacting to that killing intent, one of the bandits still covered in half-dried culture fluid and writhing on the ground looked up at the party and spat out a stream of filthy remarks.
"Heh-hah, look at these pretty ones! Kill the man and capture the pretty ones alive!"
"Ugh, disgusting."
"…Brother Roland, I think you'll need to hold back this time. If that thing is producing the Demon King's creations, we'll need to share the information with our brothers and sisters at the Temple and the Magic Tower."
Irene hurriedly tried to stop me, worried I might obliterate even the Floor 37 tree the same way I'd destroyed the one on Floor 35. Without the Holy Law of Enhancement, tree fragments would still remain — whether she was being overly anxious or overestimating my abilities, I couldn't tell.
My actual job is tank, you know…