The Big One and the Small One 2
The moment I laid eyes on that massive ash-gray tree mass-producing doppelgangers by feeding on undead, something clicked. No wonder we'd been drowning in worthless fur-covered doppelgangers that left nothing but corpses, while the undead that actually dropped mana stones were nowhere to be found. Could you feel the game company's pure malice radiating off this setup?
Anyone could see it — the Temple faction had started helping the players, so they'd locked down the farming to make everyone's wallet suffer.
Han Se-ah had climbed without resting a single floor, thanks to me and her shameless full-squad party of a natural 5-star, 4-star, and 3-star companion. Other parties, though, spent ages stuck on each floor grinding guild commissions, trying to promote their 1- and 2-star companions up to 3-star and scrape together decent gear.
BB Games, you absolute bastards… you're quietly vicious, aren't you?
A base on the 35th floor where the cost of living was a little higher in exchange for not having to shuttle through gates. And a doppelganger bandit crew that slashed the mana stone drop rate to less than half. If you hunted all day and still got no mana stones, the only way to make money was guild commissions — and most of the commissions on this floor were undead-hunting jobs.
You needed to hunt undead, but the mob spawn rate was about half of normal. So broke adventurers ended up doing construction grunt work on the 35th floor? Wasn't this monster composition just pure evil, jacking the difficulty sky-high every thirty floors?
"We'll handle the bandits. Roland, snap that tree's waist for us!"
"Want me to clear a path, or are you just going to jump over?"
"We can just run across the undead and the roots. Hanna, help the others take those things down."
Trembling with rage at BB Games' schemes, I kicked off the dirt path and vaulted clean over the doppelgangers that were barely hauling themselves up out of the sticky slime.
Whether other gamers sent BB Games' management staff's mothers to heaven or prayed for their resignations was none of my business. I had ten years' worth of gold coins saved up, and I was more than willing to bankroll Han Se-ah hard enough that her viewers would start dropping mother jokes on her.
The doppelgangers that had been charging Katie with lewd remarks and drawn swords suddenly went blank-faced and wheeled around to chase me instead.
"Roland! They're all running at you!"
"Looks like they're trying to protect the production organ! Let's finish this as fast as we can!"
No matter how quick Katie's feet were, a dozen doppelgangers turning their backs and sprinting away still took time to clean up. Even so, none of them managed to catch me or get in my way.
The tree was apartment-building tall, so its roots sprawled as wide as an apartment complex parking lot. Dozens of undead tangled in those roots, sucked dry until they crumbled without leaving a single mana stone — a vast open space. Intermediate-grade adventurer physiques had no hope of keeping up with me.
One by one they went down with swords and arrows in their backs, the lewd-talking act completely gone. It felt like watching one of those human-mimicking creatures straight out of a horror movie.
"Hup—!"
If the target had been smaller, I would have had to hold back. But this was a massive tree the height of an apartment building. Even if I put everything I had into smashing the base, a tree that was roughly fifty meters tall wasn't going to shatter into pieces — so I poured mana into my mace until it was overflowing.
Even if the explosion came out a little bigger than when I'd taken down the Full Moon Wolf, the top ten meters or so should still be left standing, right?
Nope. Fuck.
"Uh, well… sorry. Looks like I misjudged the power a bit."
Grace hurried over the moment she saw my face crumple, trying to soothe me, while Irene chimed in right alongside her.
"Mm, Roland? Looking at the shortage of undead and the number of monsters disguised as humans, there have to be a few more of those trees out there."
"She's right. Uprooting a tree that spawns such wicked abominations is only natural. There's nothing to feel sorry about."
Maybe it was the aftereffect of carelessly drawing up holy power after the Temple said doppelgangers didn't react to it. The single blow to the tree's base sent a strange wave rolling outward, and everything — from the roots coiled around undead to the pod-like tips of the branches cradling doppelgangers — crumbled and vanished in one clean sweep.
It felt like carefully snapping the wrist off a well-built Lego statue, only to discover it was actually a line of dominoes and watch the whole thing cascade into rubble.
All that remained in the desolate toxic swamp were undead that had been drained of mana until they couldn't even move, wheezing out guttural sounds, and doppelgangers reduced to cold corpses. Not a single scrap of bark left to submit as evidence to the Temple, let alone hand over to the Mage Tower for research.
"Still, if we tell the brothers at the Temple, they'll believe us."
"True. If one was tucked away in a corner of the 37th floor, there are bound to be more somewhere else. We should work with the Temple, find them all, and wipe them out."
"They won't just keep spawning infinitely like other monsters, right?"
"Hardly. If it were that bad, creatures of the Demon King disguised as humans would already be swarming the 35th floor the way those ash-white tentacles did last time."
I'd expected that smashing the base would leave at least some of the roots and branches behind. Those were the critical parts that absorbed undead mana and gestated doppelgangers, after all.
My companions carefully steered the conversation elsewhere, trying to spare me the awkwardness as I dry-washed my face. I was grateful for their consideration — but what really threw me wasn't them changing the subject. It was the viewers who pounced with supernatural timing.
"Hey now, stop babying our Roland-sensei. You know those memes of male celebrities with the 'oh, how pitiful… so fragile' captions? He might be thinking something like that right now, for all we know."
That split second when I'd smashed the tree and it vanished in a wave of force, my eyes going wide — my companions had been behind me and missed it. But the camera Han Se-ah had stuck on me with supernatural precision had zoomed in and broadcast my fluster to every single viewer.
Ahh. So this was how Han Se-ah felt whenever she got roasted…
I was having an untimely moment of self-reflection and walking a mile in someone else's shoes, but I couldn't just stand there forever. I helped Katie, who still had her sword drawn, stomp out the monsters one by one — the ones that still couldn't get up off the ground even after the roots had vanished.
"These things aren't dropping mana stones."
"The roots must have been sucking up all the mana after all."
"Absorbing a monster's mana to gestate human-disguised monsters… what disgusting creatures. It's like they exist solely to blaspheme the Goddess who represents life itself."
Was that how it worked?
Well, the Goddess's faith was a religion built on the doctrine of life. You could see it in the settings alone — holy power dealt damage to undead, but not to ordinary monsters.
And the Demon King who had appeared before that faith? He endlessly respawned monsters inside the Tower that only mimicked the shells of living creatures, and now he'd started making doppelgangers wearing human skins on top of that. Looking at his track record, it was nothing but a campaign to desecrate the Goddess of Life.
Which was exactly why they'd declared a Holy Crusade against that massive tree that drank holy power. This was the same Temple that hadn't even gotten angry over the Full Moon Wolf that attacked a city with a Temple in it, or the orcs that invaded a sacred precinct.
"So what do we do? Search for the passage up to the 40th floor again, or have Hanna mark this spot with mana and head back to the Temple on the 35th?"
"W-why mark a place where the tree didn't even leave a trace?"
"You never know. It might grow back here, the same way monsters keep spawning."
My companions, who had been talking among themselves out of consideration for me, finally looked my way — or more precisely, toward me and Han Se-ah. They'd thought everything would resolve itself once we reached the 40th floor and fought some powerful enemy, so having something this weird pop up on the 37th had clearly thrown them.
Han Se-ah, who had been busy cracking jokes about me for the viewers' entertainment, finally opened her mouth — she couldn't ignore a question about the party's schedule. Honestly, this brat made me want to go full board-terrorist instead of staying as Jjanhae-jwa. Her snide little needling made me wonder if this world also had something like HALC-AS Unit 1, that strategic weapon of a website that used to shake entire game communities in my past life.
In the middle of finally understanding why someone as undeniably beautiful as Han Se-ah got roasted and bullied by her viewers instead of being coddled as a female streamer, she spoke without a hint of hesitation.
"Sorry for the hassle, but I think going back to the 35th floor and reporting to the Temple takes priority. We only just came up, but given how serious this is, we should head back down."
"That does seem best, doesn't it? We'll need the brothers at the Temple's help."
"True… even a tree that size could exist on every floor. We should tell the Temple and the guild and have them search for any unusually massive trees."
The consensus was to inform the Temple and sweep everything from the 31st to the 39th floor. Since it was a tree that copied people, everyone seemed to share the same worry. After all, hadn't we seen an adventurer party openly committing sexual assault on the way here?
Whether fooling around with a doppelganger's lower half counted as a sex crime or not was debatable, but it was basically a given that a handful of adventurer bastards would lose control of their desires and go dark with monster-fucking. With that thought, we decided to head back down toward the 35th floor.
A tree that vanished without a trace, doppelgangers that left only corpses, and undead drained of every drop of mana to make those doppelgangers — crumbling without even dropping a mana stone. With nothing to loot, we headed straight down to the 36th floor… only to be greeted by yet another adventurer party gearing up to ambush us.
Isn't that the guy who was railing a doppelganger earlier?
An adventurer party with holy seals carved into their forearms.