Things Growing Deeper 4
A few days had passed since we'd settled on the 35th floor.
The Temple had appointed Manash, the black Naga warrior, as an Honorary Holy Knight and bestowed upon him the same mark of the Goddess. The Magic Tower had built a laboratory on the 35th floor to study the specimens Charlotte had handed over, and the Adventurer's Guild had begun raising the skeleton of a building at the far end of the market street.
Aside from the Temple, the entire street had been nothing but tents — so when foundations started getting packed down and support pillars went up with a clatter of hammers, of course every eye turned that way.
"What's gotten into the Guild all of a sudden?"
"Probably just watching the Temple's face, right?"
The Adventurer's Guild was a commission-fee racket, not some righteous organization that rolled up its sleeves for justice or for adventurers' sake — so the looks they got were lukewarm at best. There was real worry mixed in: if you took a quest on the 35th floor, would they skim an even bigger cut?
Most of the adventurers currently on the 35th floor were Intermediate-grade types from around the 20th floor who'd pushed themselves up here chasing a big score. That might have been part of it. Plenty of them had gone gold-blind, charged undead they had no business fighting, and gotten themselves killed.
If you gave up on farming Mana Stones for cash and moved in packs of ten, you could overwhelm things with sheer numbers. But get greedy, wander off in a small group, and get surrounded by undead — at a 20th-floor skill level, you were dead without a prayer. Maybe that was why the atmosphere felt a little strangely subdued.
"Hell yeah, work's pouring in!"
"We came all this way — might as well do everything we can. Think the inns and other shops are gonna put up buildings too?"
"Can't exactly keep holding a woman in a tent forever…"
On the flip side, the construction crews of every trade, clustered by profession, had grins stretching ear to ear. Apparently they hadn't been dragged here on the bare pretext of serving the Goddess — they'd been paid handsomely. Even so, the temporary Temple only covered floors 30 through 35.
Just when it looked like the construction boom might be winding down, the Adventurer's Guild stepped up and started raising a building of its own — so of course expectations swelled.
Honestly, the Temple was small enough that I'd called it a miniature. The priests, nuns, and Temple knights stayed in tents; only the Saintess seemed to actually live in the tiny shrine. It was basically a Goddess-faith skin slapped on a white-marble hut.
The Guild, by comparison, was a branch meant to handle at least Intermediate-grade adventurers, so they were building bigger than I'd expected. Smaller than a city guild, sure — but they'd staked out a wide plot and prepared hefty pillars, clearly planning to raise it all the way up to this floor.
"Never thought we'd see a Temple inside the Tower, let alone an Adventurer's Guild."
"And we made it happen… somehow it still doesn't feel real."
"Honestly, meeting the Goddess in that forest didn't feel real either."
Soaking in those two opposing moods, we walked the streets of the 35th floor. Grace on my right, Katie on my left, Irene trailing behind taking in the sights, and Han Se-ah bringing up the rear with her camera shoved forward under the pretense of sightseeing. We were only heading to the Magic Tower's temporary lab — so if I felt a little pressure, that was probably just my imagination.
In the real world, inventing something and getting it into circulation took forever. But this was a game world. Spatial transfer gates got slapped together in a week — so a mere underground cavern detector was naturally going to be trivial.
Though, more accurately, it seemed less like they'd built one from scratch and more like they'd adapted an existing survey tool for the 40th floor.
"Once we grab the detector and head back to the 40th, think Manash will have found any suspicious spots?"
"Other Upper-grade adventurers might have found some too. If they locate a boss monster's lair, they can demand an information fee from the Guild. The Temple would pay handsomely as well."
"Of course. The Temple never turns its back on those who help spread the Goddess's will."
Everyone nodded at Irene's words. You could feel it just from the gold they'd burned on a single Holy Crusade and a single round of enhancements — enough to buy a castle. The doppelganger-producing trees had been priced at a staggering ten gold coins apiece, so adventurers had started calling them not people-cloning trees but gold-coin trees.
A Temple with no corrupt priests or incompetent clerics — just pure, ruthless competence. So competent that they didn't merely lean on Holy Power and authority; they wielded gold and political muscle to move people. It was almost frightening.
There was an old fable about that, wasn't there? A king who wanted to buy a thousand-li steed, but no one would sell. So he paid a fortune for the bones of a dead horse. Seeing even horse bones fetch that kind of price, the owners of living steeds came flocking to sell their thousand-li horses at a premium.
That was the vibe. Adventurers were roaming around thinking: ten gold for a single tree — so how much would they pay for the source of the corruption and the boss monster hidden on the 40th floor?
What the Magic Tower provided to the mage Hanna was a modified version of a magic tool designed to detect underground threats. Originally used to locate monster dens or dungeons that had formed below ground, or to rescue workers from collapsed mines, it had been refined with 40th-floor specimens.
These were the same mages who'd punched spatial transfer gates open using boss monster materials — so of course the thing had been casually upgraded for smooth player quest progression and dropped into our hands. Detector in tow, we arrived on the 40th floor.
"At last… you have come?"
"Brother Manash? What are you doing here?"
The moment we crossed the passage, a wall of pitch-black scales filled our vision. Manash, the Naga warrior — so massive even I had to tilt my head up slightly — was standing right in front of us.
If it'd just been him, I'd have figured he was waiting for us. But the pure-white armor standing beside him told a different story. For some reason, Temple knights were laughing and chatting with Manash like they were an adventuring party.
"Ah, Sir Roland! We were out on 40th-floor patrol and got to talking with Brother Manash here!"
"I thought it was just scales covering him, but a Naga's musculature is more impressive than I expected!"
"The knights'… training methods… are also… veryyy refined."
Looking closer, one of them was that musclebound macho knight who'd come to us last time for information and been deeply moved by Manash's story.
That burly Temple knight had been so touched he'd recognized Manash as a person rather than a monster and promised him safety — but I never expected it to go this far. A black-scaled Naga warrior and white-armored Temple knights, standing in front of the 40th-floor passage, bonding over bodyweight exercise routines.
Black scales or not, Manash was fundamentally an Upper-grade warrior — taller than his kin, with shoulders broad enough to fill a doorway. Apparently that made him a perfect match for the macho knights who trained their muscles with Holy Power.
"We got a magic tool that detects mana in underground caverns. If there's a powerful enemy, we go down and check it ourselves. If it's just a production base, we collapse it from the surface."
"That… is very good."
"Ohh, so you're off to eliminate those wicked ones we heard about? I'd love nothing more than to join that great journey… but one mustn't freely reach into another's trial of hardship."
I explained the situation to Manash, who'd been mid-muscle-discussion in front of the 40th-floor passage. He picked up the trident he'd set down and let out a long, hissing breath. The Temple knights, who'd grown surprisingly fond of him in such a short time, sincerely wished him luck before vanishing one by one.
"What the hell — how did a temporary companion NPC blend into the Temple this hard? Wait, was he never temporary? Is he actually a core NPC we're gonna keep seeing the whole climb?"
Han Se-ah and her viewers were cracking up at the sight. Apparently both she and the chat had assumed Manash was a temporary companion NPC — the kind you only see on the 40th floor, like the golden golem.
On top of that, a Temple knight and a Naga warrior holding a bodyweight-exercise symposium had flipped every laughter switch in the room. Some of the cheekier viewers already called him Black Naga-kun, and once you layered gym culture on top of that, the combo was just too perfect.
While Han Se-ah and her chat were busy laughing, the rest of the party naturally fell in behind Manash and prepared to move out. While we'd been on the 35th floor reporting to the Temple, the Magic Tower, and the Guild, Manash had been patrolling the 40th with the Temple knights and had already found several caverns.
"I found… three. The humans… two."
"Five spots already? Not a bad start."
An adventuring party had found one, the patrolling Temple knights another — and Manash alone had found three. Impressive. Maybe non-human races really did have sharper senses than people.
I found myself thinking, absurdly, that this was why humans were the weakest race in a fantasy world — and I watched the broad black back leading the way.
With Manash taking the temporary guide role, Grace had naturally drifted to my side. Which meant Katie had just as naturally glued herself to my back. The swamp paths were too narrow to walk abreast, so this was how we'd ended up…
The camera, perched just as naturally on Manash's shoulder, swung around to look at me. Me walking side by side with Grace. Katie behind us, half-jogging to keep up, waiting for a chance to jump into the conversation. And behind her, Han Se-ah shifting the camera again, sightseeing.
…I had a feeling this formation was going to repeat itself quite a lot from here on out.