Big Ones and Small Ones 5
Setting aside fretting over quests that couldn't be solved right away, it was time to move for the sake of progressing the game.
A week might seem short for getting anything done, but for the viewers it was an eternity of boredom — and for a thoroughly pissed-off Temple determined to hunt down those trees and rip them out by the roots, it was more than enough time.
With Intermediate-grade adventurers flooding up from the 20th floor in droves, all it took was opening the purse strings without a second thought and everything got resolved.
"Brothers, I would like to commission a search for the trees that gestate monsters."
"That has to go through the guild, Sister."
"Ten gold coins in information fees per tree, no questions asked!"
"As of today, our party is no longer hunting undead — we're exploring the 31st floor!"
Undead populations slashed to near nothing by the holy-power beams of priests and nuns. Intermediate-grade adventurers who'd come up greedy for coin. And a Temple that had completely lost its mind over a trinity of insults aimed at the Goddess, the Saintess, and the Saint all at once.
Those three forces meshed together, and the swamp floors transformed into something out of the Wild West. Adventurers swarmed not to hunt monsters but with the fervor of people determined to find the far edge of an entire floor. Some parties even stopped bringing a single guide archer and started forming parties composed entirely of archers — that said it all.
Adventurers normally form parties of four or five for the sake of splitting the spoils after a fight — a tightrope walk between safety and profit. But when the reward jumps from silver to gold, the math changes. Even a ten-person party hunting trees still nets each Intermediate-grade adventurer a gold coin, and that is pure profit.
"Whoa… is this even still the Tower?"
"There's really nothing left but swamp. Aside from the naturally spawning monsters."
Far ahead, a party of three vanguard fighters and seven archers was pushing boldly through the marsh. The occasional lizardman skeleton would burst from the muck, only to be pulverized in an instant under a rain of blunt, heavy arrowheads designed as undead-killers.
With ten people, finding a single tree meant an absurd one gold coin per head — so they didn't hesitate to burn through expensive arrowheads. On top of that, the monsters of the 39th floor dropped thick mana stones, so they could at least break even.
Right. The 39th floor. Humanity's former front line, a place where once even setting foot had been forbidden to anyone below Upper-grade — and now Intermediate-grade adventurers were charging in on nothing but sheer numbers.
"The Temple put up gold, sure, but is it really worth going that far?"
"Of course it is. Just because our party clears commissions every single day doesn't mean other parties do the same. Once you get above the 20th floor, most commissions take about a week to finish."
"Oh my, really?"
"But finding trees — if you're lucky, you can track one down in a few days. That's why everyone's eyes are bloodshot. Though it looks like most of them have been cleared out by now."
Grace murmured in wonder after watching the spectacle several times, and Katie immediately launched into an explanation as if the question were absurd. Grace, whose only experience was herb-gathering parties, sparkled with interest at Katie's stories from her days as a mercenary and high-floor porter, and the two of them chattered away.
Monsters were scarce; adventurers with gold-fevered eyes were plentiful. With Holy Brands serving as identity papers, even when parties crossed paths they simply flashed their seals and went their separate ways without wasting time on mutual suspicion.
Because of that, nothing stood in our way as we pushed past the 37th floor and punched through the 38th and 39th. Grace and Katie, Irene and Han Se-ah could stick together and gossip all they liked without it mattering in the slightest.
"Roland? What are you thinking so hard about?"
"…Whether it's okay for my personal best as an adventurer to be achieved this anticlimactically."
"You said your record was the 37th floor, right? What kind of companions were you with back then?"
Honestly, with the Gate available, the 39th floor felt more like the 9th to me. Punching through floors 1 to 9 and starting at 30 to punch through to 39 weren't meaningfully different, so the whole thing left me cold.
While I was thinking that, Grace and Katie — who'd been talking about other Intermediate-grade adventurers — glued themselves to my sides and handed the conversation over to me. And as I'd noticed before, Katie's sense of personal space was closer than expected.
Whether it was from her long years of cross-dressing as a man leaving her unable to gauge distance, or from the camaraderie felt under the Goddess's name, she stuck to me almost as tightly as Grace, who was halfway to being my lover already.
"Back then I didn't travel with a fixed roster like this. Each climb took at least three months, so whenever a big commission came up I'd form a temporary party on the spot. That's how I met Lily Depp, the spear-user we ran into last time."
"Ahh, so that's why you know so many people. What about Lady Rebecca, then?"
"Same deal. Rebecca's mercenary company has solid numbers, but they're short on Upper-grade strength. So for top-floor commissions they tend to pad the roster with a lot of adventurers. Upper-grade vanguard types without a fixed party — like me — are especially rare."
Katie, now practically glued to my side, was of course curious about Rebecca and me. She'd been the youngest member of Rebecca's company and had been recommended to my party, so she must have been fairly close to her — close enough to experience that nightmare personality firsthand, and close enough that when she dropped the male disguise Rebecca had snapped, "You take off the cross-dress and suddenly you don't even say hello?"
Rebecca was the kind of woman whose past would naturally make people curious, I figured, and opened my mouth. Katie wasn't the only one interested in our history together.
The camera drifted naturally in front of me, framing Katie, Grace, and me as a trio. Han Se-ah, pretending to chat quietly with Irene, kept glancing our way. She was so obvious about it that Irene noticed, smiled softly, and considerately gave her space.
Between curiosity about Rebecca's explosive on-stream behavior and the boredom of a full week of tree-hunting map-clearing, the viewers were taking an almost oppressive interest.
Having a camera shoved right in my face was a lot, but it was too late to shut the conversation down now. I turned my head slightly toward Katie, as if dodging the camera's stare, and started talking.
"Most of the commissions Rebecca and I took together were the guild's highest-difficulty jobs. The kind that required the Upper-grade realm — projecting mana outside the body — as a baseline. So the majority of them were jungle exploration around the 35th floor…"
I kept walking as I spun stories — like the time Rebecca, half-mad from the heat during a stakeout to observe monster ecology, massacred an entire lizardman village and extended the commission by two weeks — and before I knew it, the passage leading to the 40th floor was right in front of us.
Climbing while chatting with beautiful women, eating warm food, bathing clean, and resting in comfortable beds. I never in my wildest dreams imagined I'd hit the high-water mark of my career like this.
Reaching the 40th floor didn't mean anything dramatic happened the moment we crossed the passage.
It was just that Intermediate-grade adventurers found the jump from a leading digit of 3 to 4 intimidating enough that the 40th floor still had a fair number of undead left. Then again, adventurers weren't low-intelligence AI extras — of course they'd sense the danger of the 40th floor.
Something catastrophic had happened every ten floors — the 10th, 20th, 30th — and people had died. Hard to believe the 40th would be safe.
Adventurers were the type to believe not only in the Goddess but in every superstition built on top of that faith. Citizens had died to the full-moon wolves of the 10th floor; knights had been ambushed by orcs on the 20th and left for adventurers to clean up; on the 30th, adventurers crushed by a worm had appeared. Fearing the 40th was only natural.
"Whoa — a troll… Feels like forever since I've seen one."
"Shoot it and blow it up, or lure it over if there are other undead nearby?"
"The terrain's bad. Just blow it up."
Even the bold, arrogant adventurers who'd swarmed up to the 39th floor chasing gold apparently hadn't dared set foot on the 40th. Which was why we ran into a troll within five minutes — a creature we hadn't glimpsed once while roaming around lighting up the minimap.
Come to think of it, Han Se-ah had talked about making troll bombs and still hadn't done it. Well, if they'd truly been necessary, the Magic Tower researching the trees that spawn trolls probably would have said something on its own.
"Ahem. That's far too much slander. Go reflect for thirty minutes."
The idle viewers were now in an uproar over their hunger for troll bombs, while Katie — apparently moved by the feeling of stepping onto the unexplored 40th floor that even Roland had never reached — had been swiveling her head every which way for a while now.
Irene smiled softly at how adorable it was, and Grace, mid-scan of the surroundings, let out a quiet laugh and patted Katie's shoulder to tell her to calm down.
Beastly, wild-haired Rebecca. Magic Tower mages who blamed everyone else the second they made a mistake. An archer who'd put an arrow in my back and hadn't even apologized. My past party members had been few, but the villains among them had left deep impressions — and the contrast with this group was enough to almost bring a tear to my eye.
Every one of our gacha-buffed party members had a kind heart, too…. I was so grateful Han Se-ah wasn't one of those so-called "spicy" streamers — the kind so bad at games that viewers grind their teeth until they need a dentist.