Temporary Ally and the Inevitable Plot 3
The blackened naga had looked massively stronger after its transformation, but apparently even that wasn't enough to steamroll the 40th floor's gimmick in a single day. After spending a full day exploring the floor, we checked Han Se-ah's minimap and headed to the rendezvous point — only for the black naga to shake its head from side to side.
Well, of course. We'd already burned a whole week just trying to uproot trees on the 39th floor and below. Spending a week dealing with named-rank production facilities down there, then casually finding the boss monster in half a day? That would have been absurd.
Maybe that psychology was at work, because more viewers seemed relieved that Han Se-ah still hadn't found the boss than annoyed by the boredom. Of course, even more of them were just delighted to have something new to tease her about.
"Hmm. If it were something huge, you'd think it'd be pretty hard to miss."
"Maybe it's not a tree at all. Could be something else."
"Something else like what?"
"…Roots, maybe? Hidden underground?"
That exchange between Katie and Han Se-ah drifted into my ears as we surveyed the surroundings. Katie, convinced the 40th floor's boss might also be a giant tree, was craning her neck in search of something towering overhead. Han Se-ah, timing when to clear a path, was studying the ground instead.
Roots, huh. Roots buried underground… That actually makes sense.
Whenever undead or infection-type hatcheries show up in fiction, they always nest in ant-colony-style burrows and churn out monsters from there, don't they? This time the named-rank hatcheries took the form of tree trunks and fruit — so the boss-rank one could very well have sunk its roots deep underground.
Viewers who agreed with Han Se-ah the same way I did. After all, the classic image of wicked, sinister creatures isn't them strutting around in broad daylight — it's them lurking in tunnels, caves, or some dimly lit secret base, right?
The source of the corruption might be hidden beneath the poison swamp. Underground, accessible only through a tunnel concealed by tree roots.
When Han Se-ah floated that idea to both her viewers and Katie, Irene and Grace both nodded along. Even the trees that gestated trolls stood taller than buildings, and the ones that birthed doppelgangers were practically apartment-sized.
Put simply, they scaled like villas, apartment complexes, and 63 Building-class monsters — and if anything bigger existed, the porters heading for the 43rd floor would have spotted it first. Something taller than 63 Building would be Lotte World Tower-tier, and from what I knew, you could see that from anywhere in Seoul unless a mountain or building was blocking the view.
"True. The tree on the 35th floor was so massive you saw it the second you stepped into the passage."
"If there were a tree that huge on the 40th floor, that black naga warrior would've found it immediately. Even if it's not underground, it might be a lot smaller."
Something that size would be visible from Gyeonggi Province, never mind Seoul — and this place wasn't a forest of skyscrapers. Even the original trees had been wiped out, leaving nothing but a flat swamp. So it wasn't a towering tree form. The more I thought about it, the more Han Se-ah's theory of a hidden underground space gained weight.
Maybe I was thinking too much in terms of games and web novels — but this world was a virtual-reality RPG called Heroes Chronicle, after all.
A swamp overrun by poison. Undead drifting slowly through purple nerve toxins and pitch-black paralysis venom. Doppelgangers mimicking humans, and the ash-white vine-tentacle monsters living inside them. Add monster-gestating trees and an ant-nest dungeon hidden beneath their roots, and wouldn't that be perfect?
"Still, the source of the corruption being small seems less likely than it being hidden underground."
"Well, if the entire land has been corrupted like this, it makes more sense that the contamination started from below," Irene agreed.
I'd learned in some college elective that when everyone in a meeting starts pushing the same opinion, it's dangerous — that you need someone to shout "NO"… but with the viewers included, we were talking about numbers in the tens of thousands. At that point, it was probably fine.
There had to be a tunnel tangled in the roots of those ash-gray trees. Thanks to Han Se-ah, that thought just wouldn't leave my head.
The third day since linking up with the black naga warrior.
"You found a suspicious tunnel?"
"That… is sooo…"
Unlike our party — whose guide was an archer specialized in detecting living things, and who had therefore found nothing — the black naga claimed it had discovered something. And of all things, the very suspicious tunnel we'd been theorizing about.
Obviously this was inside the Tower, on a floor designed as a swamp. We hadn't found a single tunnel from the 31st through the 39th floors, so a tunnel existing only on the 40th pushed the suspicion meter past 100% and straight into 1,000%. Who would dig a tunnel in a place that had nothing but poison pools, paralysis mud swamps, and ash-gray trees?
Zombies, skeletons, and bomb trolls digging tunnels? Obviously not. And doppelgangers were incomplete without the ash-white vine tentacles that needed to inhabit their bodies, weren't they?
"So it really was hiding underground."
"You… anticipated, thisss? To possess both… wisdom and… valorrr…"
At Irene's murmur, the black naga warrior's narrow eyes went wide. It seemed astonished that our party members had apparently predicted the secret location it had spent three straight days scouring the place to find. In reality, we owed it all to Han Se-ah — a game streamer steeped in games, manga, novels, and every other corner of subculture.
Even if Heroes Chronicle was the world's first virtual-reality RPG, how twisted could the story really be? The groundbreaking parts were the virtual reality itself, the human-like NPCs, and NPCs created through actual soul abduction — like Roland. Not the plot.
A streamer fluent in subculture had floated the idea, and tens of thousands of equally subculture-soaked viewers had piled on. A casual opinion became settled doctrine in an instant. Narrowing your thinking like that was dangerous, sure… but sometimes the simple answer really is the textbook correct one.
"So where is it?"
"Follow… meee. I shall… guide youuu…"
The black naga answered, tapping its tail against the dirt in a rhythm that mixed admiration with something like dissatisfaction. Its massive serpentine lower body began to slither, gliding naturally over the dirt path and out onto the paralysis mud swamp.
So it really had reached the Upper-grade realm — capable of projecting mana outward. And watching it crawl across the mud swamp with a body easily twice a human's weight, it was clearly skilled in technique as well.
Born with a species' natural strength, yet also a technique specialist fluent in mana manipulation. Once again, just how fragile were humans in a fantasy world? I'd win in a fight, sure, but I couldn't walk on a mud swamp — and honestly, wasn't that just a species difference?
"Right… thereee…"
"…That's a little, uh, narrow?"
"Indeeddd… so narrow… even I… cannot enter…"
Following the black naga along the dirt path Han Se-ah had created — while privately inventing some ridiculous self-justification — we came upon the tunnel. Just as Han Se-ah had described, a pitch-black hole sat beneath the roots of a small ash-gray tree the Temple hadn't yet uprooted.
It was so small that if you'd spotted it while hiking in 21st-century Korea, you'd have assumed a raccoon lived there. No wonder the black naga looked so put out.
Frankly, without Han Se-ah's Earth Control, even a human wouldn't have fit through that cramped tunnel. A naga with broad shoulders and a massive serpentine lower body couldn't force its way in without bringing an excavator.
"Wind… from within the tunnel… wind is… flowing outtt…"
"You're right. This isn't just a hole from a little dirt collapsing. The way air is periodically flowing out from inside, the interior must be pretty spacious — and there's probably another entrance too."
After several meetings, Grace had completely dropped her wariness of the black naga warrior. She stepped naturally up to the tunnel and reached a hand inside.
No matter how heavily her stats leaned toward life detection, a 4-star passive holder wasn't going to miss a tunnel sitting right in front of her. True to her hunter's instincts, she was sensitive to the flow of wind — and when she nodded, confirming the black naga's words, Han Se-ah raised her staff without a moment's hesitation.
"Then let's open the entrance. We've got plenty of food in the inventory, so we can start exploring right away. If it turns out too big for us to handle alone, we can just call the Temple knights up from the 35th floor."
"True. We stocked up on food specifically because we figured this expedition might run long."
"Mageee… can you… open the path… wider…?"
Earth Control had mostly been used for making paths and dropping pits under doppelganger bandits' feet, but it was originally a mid-tier spell that freely manipulated the ground's surface. Naturally, turning a cramped tunnel entrance into a cave big enough for people to walk through was well within its capabilities.
It would completely drain her mana, leaving her unable to join any combat… but wasn't that what a mage was for? Making the inaccessible accessible?
At Han Se-ah's confident declaration that she'd open the way, the black naga warrior's unconscious tail-tapping against the ground stopped cold. It exhaled a sharp snort and bowed its head toward her staff with a look that was almost desperate.
"I don't know how far we'll need to dig, so I was planning to open it just wide enough that even we'd have to stoop. That'd be incredibly uncomfortable for you… are you okay with that?"
"For the sake of… salvationnn… crawling on the ground… is something I can endure…"
Han Se-ah had said it with the risk of running dry on mana from recklessly carving a wide tunnel in mind — but the black naga immediately dropped flat onto its belly, and she looked utterly speechless.
Just how desperate does an Upper-grade warrior who walks on mud like solid ground have to be to press its belly to the dirt and move even its human upper body like a snake? Han Se-ah muttered the thought toward her viewers, and I nearly nodded along without thinking.
Whether it was the life of a warrior speaking, it naturally positioned itself at the front, pressing its head into the tunnel mouth as if volunteering to take point. If that looked a little like a dog waiting for a treat… would that be rude of me?