Wrapping Up 3
A soft, pale blue light — nearly the color of the sky — illuminated the guild's training yard.
It was a vicious aura, the kind that could slice through rock as cleanly as tofu, yet to the eye it was beautiful enough to pass for a laser light show. Any country bumpkin who didn't know better might have taken one look at Katie and dropped to their knees, convinced they'd found a beautiful witch.
Every time the sound of something slicing through empty air whispered past, a chill prickled across the skin. There was a reason her title had shifted from Sword Princess to Frost Blade — pale blue aura streamed from her blade in ribbons of cold.
"Hah… so? How is it?"
"Good. Hard to believe you only just awakened it — it's that strong."
Katie Wellesley was northern-born, so of course her swordsmanship was that of the northern knight orders. The blade of pioneers who carved out a living cutting down monsters amid snow-capped peaks and endless white plains — a sword forged for survival. And somehow, her blade carried the scent of the north with it.
Which, for a swordswoman, was a roundabout way of saying her elemental damage was absurdly high.
It wasn't just pressure that made the air feel cold. Freezing chill rose from her aura itself, cold enough to ice over any wound it opened. In a clash of aura against aura, she held the advantage; a direct hit on bare skin would freeze the injury solid and tear it open in the same breath.
In game terms, she was a freeze-type who slapped speed and defense debuffs on anyone who got close. Damn ice users — no matter the game, they always ended up broken. This was a world apart from a natural 3★ archer who merely ignored 80% of defense and resistance.
Slow. Frostbite and freeze. Gauge drain. Defense up. Temporary invincibility. Blizzard AoE. Shatter burst damage… For a second, PTSD from every broken ice character I'd ever faced nearly surfaced, but that was a decade-old story. I managed to keep my grip on reality. Even the kind of guy who used to lose his mind over a character's gender and spam macros tends to change a little after ten years of grinding.
"This chilly aura — is it the Wellesley family's power?"
"That's right. It's a trait of our house's swordsmanship."
Even though I was sparring with pure evasion and deflection, careful not to crush her under my reflection passive, my aura was still being chipped away bit by bit. Considering the gap in our realms, a swordsman of equal rank would have a hard time beating Katie under ordinary circumstances.
When two fighters clashed with the same power and only one side took losses, who was going to win? Katie only had to weather the shockwaves of aura. Her opponent had to endure aura that rippled and wore away, a blade and armor freezing solid, cold blanketing their skin, and fingertips going numb.
"Nice. Really nice. The way the swordsmanship and aura weave together — this is what a storied noble house's blade is supposed to look like."
"Hehe. Thanks for the compliment."
She hadn't landed a single effective hit on me, yet Katie's expression was pure sunshine. First reason: she had reached the Upper-grade realm of projecting sword aura at a remarkably young age. Second: once you hit Upper-grade, you could feel for yourself roughly how much power your blade carried.
While Katie and I tested the strength of her aura blade to blade, Grace — who had spent the earlier session peppering my shield with arrows and cleaning up afterward — had glued herself to Han Se-ah and was deep in conversation about something.
Grace's skill was a passive that ignored 80% of an enemy's defense and resistance when she struck a vital point. But some enemies had no vital points, and even with defense ignored, a single thin arrow wasn't going to threaten something the size of an ogre.
So Han Se-ah's thinking was that the important part wasn't the "ignore 80% defense" — it was the "ignore 80% resistance." Specs aside, Grace was a seasoned archer who could freely use alchemical arrowheads, and Han Se-ah had taken alchemy as her secondary profession.
"So… should I dig deeper into alchemy?"
"You're interested in alchemy?"
"Mmm. Between the troll we ran into this time and the idea of making arrows for Grace unnie myself… I was thinking it might be worth it."
It had probably started back when she was wandering the city lighting up the minimap. Roughly before we took down the Full Moon Wolf — back when baby-newbie Han Se-ah was riding the Roland bus, breezing through the early floors like eating cake, and filming goblin-hunting mad movies as mage Han Se-ah instead of just the pack mule.
I hadn't seen it on stream, but at some point Han Se-ah had become a mage-slash-alchemist and shown up carrying things like wolf-lure incense. Whether the secondary-job tutorial had forced it on her, or she'd spotted an alchemy workshop while mapping and taken a bite with her viewers, I had no idea.
"The troll, though… should I have killed it earlier and turned it into bombs?"
Even so, she had never been serious about alchemy. Han Se-ah was a player who'd gotten hooked on being a mage, not an alchemist. Classic RPG player behavior — try it early because it's there, take a nibble, lose interest.
The problem was that after she'd lost interest, its real usefulness had come to light later on.
A ranger wasn't just someone who shot a bow well — more like special forces who ran the mountain ranges — and somehow Grace had ended up with a defense/resistance reduction passive slapped right onto her. Ignoring 80% of an enemy's resistance wholesale meant she could drive every vicious toxin an alchemist could brew straight into a vital point.
If you could just pierce the skin somehow via the defense reduction, then a lethal poison that ignored 80% resistance would slide in as easily as a syringe into a kid's backside — and every status effect under the sun could cover for a lack of raw attack power.
A mage loaded with every support skill imaginable, tucked behind an obscenely broken shield. An archer methodically planting vicious alchemical arrows. A zero-tier tank who never gave ground. And a freeze swordsman who slowed down anyone trying to flank.
Just thinking about it was enough to make your teeth chatter. A thoroughly disgusting party composition.
And that was this era's Hero Party.
Whether the Hero Party deployed tactics as vicious as their title or not, time outside the Tower kept moving. The Temple made no attempt to hide anything — they recognized the adventurer-mage Hanna as the Hero who would stand against the Demon King, and declared unlimited support for her Tower climb.
Free use of outposts and gates. Provisions like potions for the ascent. Authority to summon Temple knights if the monsters grew too numerous during a climb. All manner of game systems for Han Se-ah — written as Hero Party, read as Player.
In plain terms: the difficulty had gone up, so they'd cut her some slack on her paper-thin wallet. Higher difficulty meant longer leveling, and longer leveling meant the wallet filled up anyway. They made a show of generous support while offering little of real substance — so desperate to keep the game balanced it was almost touching.
But "loud and empty" still meant it was loud.
And in this fantasy world, there was a particular breed that always stuck their noses in whenever something loud happened—
"Ugh, I'm so done. So done."
"I'm starting to miss the north…"
The city's nobles, of course.
The same nobles who had come running at the mere rumor of the Full Moon Wolf, gold pouches jingling. The Temple had outright declared the existence of a "Hero who, by the Goddess's will, would overthrow the Demon King" — as if they were going to sit still for that.
How bad was it? Even good-natured Irene had to ask people that if they wanted to talk, they should come through the Temple — she was a Temple sister before she was a member of the Hero Party. While I skimmed a few gold pouches and deflected the rest, the others had fled to the 35th floor and hidden themselves in a corner of the tent village.
Being a tent village, the facilities were far worse than any lodging outside — but after hearing a voice announce a noble's visit every five minutes, no, every three, that corner of the tent village stopped feeling like a miserable campsite and started feeling like a leisurely vacation spot.
"Why is everyone going this hard?"
"Because they're city nobles."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Nobles with money but no territory. So they cling that much harder."
Han Se-ah, who'd been wandering the city thinking she might finally rank up her alchemy, had fled here too. The nobles' clinginess made the mages from the Magic Tower last time look tame by comparison — she looked thoroughly fed up.
Of course she was. Mages came out of intellectual curiosity. Nobles came for money, for prestige, to recruit her, to look devout, to look generous, to look like free-spirited adventurers… reasons beyond counting.
"Ahem — no political comments, please. Anyway, when Roland-sensei was collecting allowance from nobles I just let it slide, but now that I'm the one dealing with it… it's rough. Maybe handling nobles as a famous adventurer is something you only get good at with experience?"
Well, of course — Han Se-ah was the Hero of the Hero Party, so the most nobles latched onto her. Even Katie, a noble young lady who'd grown up navigating high society until her coming-of-age, was thoroughly sick of it. The nobles who'd settled in the Adventurer's City had a particularly tenacious streak.
So while we were camping on the 35th floor dodging some viscount who claimed he'd donated heavily to the Temple, some baron who supposedly knew people in the Capital, and some other baron who'd been watching since the Full Moon Wolf days — a bigger fish showed up.
"Um… Hanna? The Temple asked me to pass along a message. Her Highness the Princess wishes to meet with you…"
"Wait, unnie? A princess? For real?"
"Yes. Saint Ambrose said someone from the kingdom's knight order has arrived."
A princess — blue blood far too noble to compare with one-generation nobles who held no territory and couldn't even pass on a title.
The problem was, as far as I knew, this kingdom only had two princes.
Why do they keep adding new lore and wedging it in…