The Source of Corruption — Part 1
We had been camping out on the 35th floor for quite a while, preparing to explore the 40th.
In that time, all sorts of things had happened. Manash had become the mascot of Han Se-ah's stream and a local celebrity of the 40th floor, and several of the Magic Tower's research projects were already producing results — underground-cavern exploration tools, doppelganger detectors, herbicides for those ashen-white vines, and more.
...No matter how I look at it, we cleared this place so fast that the Magic Tower is just playing catch-up, aren't they?
The 40th floor was the first boss where the difficulty actually ramped up, so the game had clearly been building toward something — only for a natural-born 6★ to barge in and completely derail the whole setup. That was how alien a presence a natural-born 6★ Paladin named Roland really was.
How to put it? It felt like the kind of jarring dissonance you get when some guy force-inserts his self-insert OC into someone else's carefully designed game.
"Ah, for real! I was wondering why the quest wouldn't update — so you have to raise the giant Naga kill count before it even shows up?! That's so goddamn vicious. Wait, so if I'd just wandered around exploring without hunting anything, I would've been stuck rotting on the 40th floor forever?"
Whether I thought that or not, Han Se-ah — who firmly believed that even a natural-born 6★ character was something Heroes Chronicle had designed — could only grind her teeth at the vicious quest design. They'd told her to go look for something, so she'd wandered all over the place, only to find out she actually needed to raise a monster kill count first. How sadistic was that?
Even the viewers who normally lived to mock Han Se-ah's suffering were mixed with a current of okay, wait, that's a bit much — which said everything. When the toxic trolls who treated bullying Han Se-ah as their life's purpose and sacred mission actually started empathizing with her, you knew it was bad.
But what could Han Se-ah actually do about it?
Aside from grinding her teeth, throwing a tantrum, then grinning ear to ear the moment donations rolled in, there wasn't much. She couldn't exactly drop the world's number-one streamer title and quit the game just because she was annoyed — so she stared at the updated quest window and prepared to go hunt the boss monster.
Hunting the giant Nagas brought word from the Magic Tower.
Their mana stones carry an unusual mana pattern… the Tower's explanations are always so hard to follow.
Still, thanks to the Magic Tower, we can now locate the Source of Corruption… all that remains is purification.
You didn't find the boss clearing by searching for it yourself, and it didn't just spawn naturally over time either. You had to diligently kill giant Nagas, sell their mana stones to the Magic Tower, and only then would the boss monster appear.
I'd thought of the giant Nagas as a tutorial boss for upper-grade monsters — but was it overthinking to feel the game company's pure malice dripping off every design choice, deliberately screwing over players who breezed through the tutorial?
As if to announce that the sluggish story was finally back on track, a Magic Tower mage came calling at our tent once again. I'd never seen his face before, but Han Se-ah greeted him naturally — she must have met him while progressing the story — and received yet another magical tool.
"Thanks to Miss Hanna and all of your efforts, we've succeeded in uncovering a fair portion of the 40th floor's secrets! If you use this magical tool—"
"Ah, yes. Thank you."
Han Se-ah politely brushed off the mage — who, true to his profession, seemed a bit too fond of talking — and what she brought back was a long L-shaped rod. No matter how you looked at it, it was a dowsing rod for finding water veins, and yet they called it a magical tool. I almost wanted to meet whoever designed the thing.
The moment Han Se-ah gripped the short end of the bent rod, the long end started thrashing about. Still, as a quest item researched and issued by the Magic Tower, its performance at least seemed rock-solid.
The party members' eyes lit up at the sight, their resolve flaring — finally, they could clear the 40th floor. Our mana stones had made the tool possible, but if we didn't finish this quickly, the same tool could be handed out to other upper-grade adventurers or Temple knights.
The orc altar could have had its glory stolen by other adventurers — and by Rebecca. We hadn't been the only ones hunting golems on those floors either, so this time we needed to wrap things up before anyone else butted in. Han Se-ah, for her part, was too busy getting roasted by her chat as a cult leader to care.
"No, I mean — they've been making perfectly fine stuff this whole time, so why is this one like this? It's not like idol merch where you pull for quality variants. Does the Magic Tower just randomly spit out whatever form the magical tool takes depending on which mage gets assigned?"
To put it bluntly, the Magic Tower was basically a collection of research labs. Even when people lumped it all together as "the Magic Tower," the results varied wildly depending on which mage's lab took the project — and the condition of the slaves… sorry, the assistants assigned to that lab.
If a noble-born mage got hold of it, you might end up with some pretentious magical tool that prioritized style over function. If a four-dimensional lunatic of a mage took it, you could get something that went beyond a dowsing rod and looked like a cursed Ouija board. The real problem was that the vast majority of mages were lunatics.
Ugly as it looked, Han Se-ah's two-handed grip on that dowsing rod — wandering the 40th floor like she was searching for water — did manage to locate the Source of Corruption. Quest magical tool or not, it at least synced with the minimap, so it did its job.
The entrance was completely different from the collapsing trap clearings and the production clearings where the giant Nagas had been.
"…How did anyone miss this?"
"Without the Magic Tower's tool, there must have been magic concealing it from the naked eye."
Unlike the beast-burrow entrances hidden under tree roots, this one was a massive hole gaping open like a monster's maw — as if a sinkhole had simply torn the ground apart. It was so enormous I genuinely wondered how anyone could have failed to notice it.
Just as hunting the Full Moon Wolves had meant entering the nighttime plains rather than the daytime ones, the Source of Corruption — the 40th floor's boss monster — was apparently hiding in an entirely separate field.
Standing before that bottomless abyss yawning open in the eerie, toxic swamp, the party members swallowed hard with nerves. Even so, having met the Goddess herself, none of them flinched or backed away. They simply glanced at each other's tense faces and steeled their resolve.
"A foul, sssmell… below, the enemiesss wait."
"Then let's go down."
"Hah… may the Goddess's protection be with us."
As if the floor had no intention of making the descent itself difficult after all that searching, a steep slope had been carved along the pit's edge. Like the spiral passage Han Se-ah had carved when rescuing Katie and me, a single path ran clearly along the rim of the vast sinkhole.
Considering the boss kept producing things… if you left it alone long enough, would something start crawling up through this passage?
"Hoo… it's hard to even breathe…"
"We'll need to cast a purification holy spell before we go any further."
We spent a long while carefully descending the walls of that vast — no, that colossal — sinkhole. The damp, sticky swamp air gradually filled with the reek of rotting poison.
There was a reason the Temple forces joined the fight starting from the 31st floor: the boss monster's field itself was saturated with toxic miasma. The Full Moon Wolves had just been a dark nighttime plain with no moonlight debuff — but a full debuff field? The difficulty had clearly spiked.
Of course, none of that mattered to our party, which included a natural-born 5★ Apprentice Saint named Irene. Her recovery ability was weaker and she couldn't cast enhancement holy spells — but in exchange, her purification holy magic was so enhanced that it maintained a continuous immunity buff. A broken character, sitting right there in our party—
Pure white holy power settled gently over our heads like a blessing upon the party. The toxic miasma was swept away from around us in an instant, as if each of us were walking around with a personal air curtain hanging from the crown of our head. At the same time, the viewers' chat exploded in a frenzy.
"Right? Just my guess, but if we walked in ignoring this miasma, the boss's passive would stack hard and wipe the whole party. Sure, Roland-sensei could probably smash everything before that happened… but I don't particularly want to give the boss one more gimmick to work with."
"That too. Most of the people watching my stream play Heroes Chronicle themselves — if a natural-born 6★ just power-clears everything, how is that any different from a star streamer cheating and farming AI? Be honest, wasn't it way more exciting and fun watching the party members take down the giant ones together than just watching Roland-sensei sweep the board?"
Descending the dark slope into the poison-choked underground, the only sounds were Han Se-ah bantering with her viewers. The rest of the party held their breath in the tension, slowly spiraling down into the darkness.
What greeted us at the bottom was a clearing so vast I couldn't even begin to guess how many troops it was meant to summon — and, standing tall upon a raised platform within it, a pitch-black silhouette.
…In a place this huge, why are you all alone?