Growing Deeper 1
In the pitch-dark burrow, I moved my hand slowly. Lying on the dirt floor in full armor, I could only manage a gentle, unhurried stroke of wrist and forearm.
There was no light source at all, and even after my eyes adjusted, the tunnel remained nearly black — yet the bright silver hair resting on my palm seemed to glow with a soft light of its own. Smooth and silken, it was soft enough to make me forget that long hair usually snags and tangles.
The space was so cramped that when I wrapped my hand around the waist of the woman straddling me, I could feel her slender figure clearly even through the armor. Was it because of that game-style armor that ignored historical accuracy in favor of pure aesthetics? The impure thought must have shown somehow, because a voice rose from against my chest.
"Roland… you said you've been an adventurer since you were very little, right? Why did you become one?"
"There was a Tower in the city."
"Pfft — is that actually true…?"
A bad habit I'd picked up entertaining capital noblewomen under the pretext of stress relief had, before I knew it, carried over into natural physical affection. She'd seemed anxious, so I'd tried to soothe her — and this was the only way I knew how.
A beautiful woman resting her head lightly against the armor over my chest. My hand rose of its own accord to that soft hair, and with the two of us pressed together in the narrow burrow, our voices dropped low, the atmosphere turning strangely intimate.
Using my breastplate as a pillow, Katie's whispered voice slipped through the armor and tickled against my chest. My free arm naturally found her waist, and even as I stroked her hair, she showed not the slightest sign of dislike.
"I came to the city and there was this strange Tower jutting up into the sky. So I thought — I should climb to the top of that thing."
"And then you quit at the thirty-seventh floor and came back down."
"Even with a tough body, living like a beggar for months without a single bath gets old real fast."
"To mess up Earth Control so badly the carriage sank… is Hanna really that amazing? She hasn't made a single mistake so far."
Whether it was light fondness born of camaraderie or admiration for someone of a higher realm than herself, the distance between us had clearly closed — and by this point, there was no denying it.
Katie Wellesley was in love with me.
A fresh, sweet kind of love, different from the lonely noblewomen of the night. Katie probably thought the thick darkness of the burrow was hiding her expression… but unfortunately, Han Se-ah's streaming camera seemed to have a bit of brightness correction applied.
Could that be useful later when we're clearing dark areas…? Though we'd better not end up so low on mana we can't cast Light magic. And it's not location-based — it's NPC-locked, stuck right on top of us.
Lying on my back against the dirt floor, pretending to stare up at the empty air, I pulled up Han Se-ah's stream window where the camera couldn't see it. In the hologram was a beauty whose expression belonged to anything but someone buried alive.
Cheek pressed to my chest, body draped over me like she was riding a giant teddy bear. The way her chin kept nuzzling was probably an unconscious reaction to my hand stopping its stroking for a moment. No matter how you looked at it, this was not the posture of someone waiting to be rescued from a live burial.
Which was why the chat was as lively as ever — no, twice as lively as usual.
"Oh my? Katie always talks about nothing but knight orders, armor, swords, and golems whenever I chat with her on her days off — I figured romance wasn't even on her radar. But Roland-sensei is pretty handsome. Honestly, can any of the female viewers swear they wouldn't fall for him in that situation?"
Katie shifted slowly atop my armor — whether trying to overcome her anxiety or simply savoring the thrill of darkness — while I held her, patted her, and stroked her hair.
Two people lying on a dirt floor in a cramped burrow, clinging to a half-severed tree root… but set that scene aside, and the moment was almost painfully tender. Or perhaps the viewers found it even more entertaining precisely because they understood the allure of love blooming in the face of danger.
With the camera filming us outright, I couldn't fall into unnatural silence, nor could I stop stroking that hair I'd been enjoying the feel of. We'd been cuddling just fine before the camera showed up — I couldn't exactly freeze the moment it started rolling.
"Hanna is… no. Roland, what were you planning to do after conquering the Tower?"
"…Make a name for myself, then buy a quiet manor somewhere with no bothersome nobles around. Fill every room with household magic tools and live in luxury."
"Mmm, Roland really… seems to like magic tools more than nobles."
"They're convenient. Can't help it."
"True enough — that's why you quit climbing the Tower and came back down."
Truth was, I'd thought conquering the Tower would let me return to Earth. That a goddess or a creator or a shattered Demon King would show up, explain the whole situation, and send me home. A delusion I'd given up on once — but thanks to Han Se-ah, I could hope for it again.
I liked comfort. I wanted to live easy. It wasn't even a lie — more like the second-priority goal of my life — so by now I could bring it up without a second thought.
No matter how powerful the body, you can't escape the flow of time. I had no desire to still be charging across battlefields as a grizzled veteran in my old age, so preparing for retirement was only natural. When I said I wanted a peaceful, comfortable later life, a giggling breath rose from my chest and tickled beneath my chin.
"If you like comfort that much, shouldn't you have become a knight instead of an adventurer? The North, at least, will take commoners into the knight orders if they've got the skill. …Starting as a squire, of course."
"That's true. If I'd never seen that Tower soaring into the sky, I might have joined some knight order somewhere."
The North's casual willingness to recruit commoners with talent — was that another regional cliché? In the early days of my isekai possession, if I hadn't been so obsessively fixed on the idea that clearing the Tower would send me back to Earth, I might have attached myself to a noble household instead of becoming an adventurer.
Dropped into this world with no status and nothing to my name… maybe I really would have joined a northern knight order, just as Katie said.
"If Roland had joined a northern knight order, it might've been pretty fun. With skills like yours, you'd have risen to a high rank in no time — you might even have gotten close to my father."
"Then I'd have been disciplined for failing to stop the second daughter from running away with the family treasure on the day of her coming-of-age ceremony."
"That's true too. …If Roland had been there, maybe I never would have run away at all."
She'd muttered that last part as quietly as she could, but it reached both me and the camera perfectly clearly. Whether or not she'd meant to hide it, a small giggle rippled through the darkness.
While the two of us were having our untimely little moment of romance in the burrow, the rest of the party was moving busily above our heads. Of all people, the two party members responsible for close-range protection had been buried underground side by side.
"I'll recover my mana like this, then dig down. Luckily, you two weren't buried too deep."
"Leaving a mana wedge behind in the middle of all that — impressive."
"Thanks to Miss Hanna, we should be able to rescue them without even waiting a full day."
Even with the floors properly cleared, Han Se-ah had decided that pushing from the fortieth floor down to the thirty-fifth with only an archer, a mage, and a priest was too much of a gamble — so she'd set up camp on a clearing with unstable ground. Rather than go down for reinforcements, she seemed determined to leave the escorting to Manash and recover her mana first.
Through the camera she'd confirmed Katie and I were safe, and with the minimap giving her our coordinates, she planned to dig straight down vertically.
If we'd fallen further — into a second or third cavern — it would have been a forced reset with no way out. But she'd noticed at the first cavern, so she clearly had no intention of wasting a whole day. Instead, her image as a genius mage only seemed to grow more solid.
"Stealth so refined that even an Upper-grade fighter can't sense it… incredible!"
"Ah, ahaha… please don't put me on such a high pedestal, Unnie."
"If you push a little harder and raise your realm, maybe even Roland won't notice?"
In reality it was a player-only exploit using the minimap and the streaming camera drone — but to the NPCs, it looked like Intermediate-grade mana control so subtle and precise that even Upper-grade fighters couldn't detect it. Manash, standing guard around the clearing with his trident, hissed in admiration as well.
While I'd smashed through the ceiling and pulled Katie into my arms, Manash had been the one who erupted with aura, kicked off the dirt floor, and shot skyward to save the nun.
Using his serpentine lower body like a spring, he'd shattered the crumbling ceiling a second time and carried Irene — still wrapped in her Holy Protection spell — to safety. A half-beat behind me, but a sharp enough fighter to have instinctively sensed the cavern's collapse. With Manash himself impressed, Grace and Irene had no choice but to acknowledge it too.
"Ugh, seriously — now even the temporary party NPC is hyping me up? How did I end up becoming this genius mage…"
Pointedly ignoring the viewers' teasing, she firmed up the ground of their temporary camp and began carefully excavating the earth above Katie's and my heads. Thanks to the minimap and camera drone, she worked without a shred of hesitation — and the misunderstanding only deepened further.
Embarrassment flushed her face at the chatter coming from behind her, but to those who didn't know the truth, it simply looked like humility.