More Reliable Than Anyone 1
We had been deep in heated discussion about the upper-grade magic of Han Se-ah — genius porter, mage, warrior, and streamer — when we recovered our stamina and beat a spirited retreat.
"I can't believe the harpies actually cut off the path."
"Instead of just ducking into a cave and pushing past, we should learn some magic, clear them all out, and then move on."
The closer we got to the peak, the more the harpies had milled about in confusion — until, as if orders had come down from the nest deeper inside, they hauled over boulders and collapsed the entire cliff path.
Which meant that reaching the harpy nest now required clinging to the sheer face of the ruined cliff like the protagonist of some action game, climbing sideways for nearly three hundred meters. There was no way we could traverse a cliff face with over a hundred harpies diving at us.
The mountain peaks were so high and steep you could have called the whole range the Blade Mountains; following a ridgeline with no path was impossible, and hanging from a cliff face was out of the question with Han Se-ah and Irene short on raw strength. So we marked the spot on the minimap and fell back, saving it for another day.
"The harpies couldn't have used magic or alchemy… Is this connected to the Stone Dwarves somehow?"
"Probably, right? It seems like a special ore that only comes from those high peaks."
"We'll have to go ask around the Stone Dwarf village on the 41st Floor. The way they call them Flappies, they must know something. …No, of course we'd figure that much out on our own. What 'porter's rebellion' are you talking about, you lot."
And the boulders the harpies had clutched in their talons as they emerged from the clouds weren't ordinary rocks — they were closer to bombs. If they had simply been throwing stones, we might have ignored them and forced our way through. But the moment one hit the trail, it went vwoom with some sci-fi special effect and carved a chunk clean out of the mountain range.
In short: a bad matchup against flying monsters, plus unfavorable cliff-path terrain in a high alpine zone, meant free rides were off the table. We had to progress the story properly, from the beginning, step by step.
Of course, since this was inside a dungeon, the trail would probably restore itself in a few days — but there was no reason to sit around in a cave waiting for that. Rather than thrashing about trying to force another free ride, it would be easier all around to just head back and attempt things the proper way.
And so, instead of the harpy nest on the 43rd Floor, we found ourselves in a cave somewhere on the 42nd.
"Should we visit the dwarf village on the 41st Floor first, or head straight for the 40th and go outside?"
Irene murmured the question almost to herself as she stirred soup over the campfire, preparing a late dinner. With the unprecedented collapse of the cliff path under the harpies' explosive rocks forcing our retreat, we did need to reassess our priorities.
If we were thinking of learning magic, the first stop would be the Magic Tower in the city to find old Antenor. But you couldn't just walk up to an upper-grade mage and ask him to teach you for free — so if we needed to prepare a reward, that meant going to the Stone Dwarf city.
"Ah, thanks for the soup. Hmm… since we came down early anyway, how about we hit the underground city?"
"I think the opposite — we should meet Upper-grade Mage Antenor first. We can't just prepare everything blindly when we don't even know what he wants."
As we accepted warm bowls of soup from Irene, Grace's vote for visiting the Stone Dwarves and Katie's vote for the Magic Tower split cleanly down the middle. Irene, as always, simply smiled gently and kept ladling out soup as if she would follow whatever we decided — so I kept my silence too, just to keep the balance.
In other words, I was too lazy to bother, and left a decision of this scale to Han Se-ah as the party leader.
It wasn't a question with any real right answer. We needed to learn magic to open the path, and we needed to clear side quests either way — so it didn't much matter which we did first.
But people being people, don't they always catch fire over things that barely matter?
As if Han Se-ah would never learn high-tier magic in her entire life if we didn't go to the Magic Tower right this second, as if the story the Stone Dwarves knew would be buried in darkness forever if we didn't go to the underground city this instant — every voice in chat started shouting their own opinion at full volume.
As always, this was the kind of moment best left to the streamer herself.
"I'd like to go see the Stone Dwarves first. We've got food to spare, and leaving the Tower already feels a little disappointing. I think we should gather information first, then head outside."
The moment the arrows of decision flew her way, she casually slurped a spoonful of soup and stated her opinion without a hint of hesitation. After all, the Stone Dwarves' underground city on the 41st Floor sat right next to the gate to the 40th — so food wasn't a concern.
Follow a deep stairway winding down from a cave on the 41st Floor long enough, and an underground city appears. Inside a cavern carved into the heart of the mountain range sits a city built entirely of stone.
A city of another race — Stone Dwarves living in houses chiseled from rock, furnished with furniture carved from stone, eating stone and earth.
"The Softies are back again! Plenty of the young ones been looking for you."
After walking down those stairs for what felt like forever, old Bobo — who had been crouched near the landing as usual — rose with a grinding clack-clack of stone. From the way he talked, he seemed to be the eldest, treated like a mayor or chieftain, and yet he also worked as the gatekeeper. Truly a peculiar race.
Clearing the previous side quest and picking up something like an enhancement stone had given us a rough grasp of the Stone Dwarves.
They looked exactly like someone had rolled up loose rocks into the shape of a person. They had clear standards for which stones were food and which weren't. They had enough experience trading with various other races that they didn't hesitate to hand out quests…
"The Flappies threw red rocks at the mountains and the path collapsed?! Th-that's real?"
"Hold on, what? The Softies saw a Vacuum Stone?!"
…and when it came to anything involving stone, they were more serious than anyone.
The moment we brought up the red rocks — the whole reason we'd come back to this city — the Stone Dwarves swarmed us in a rush, side quests be damned. Clearly there was a connected storyline; they came tumbling over in such excitement that stone dust flew in every direction. It was not a normal reaction.
Han Se-ah's face flooded with open panic. She had clearly expected to clear a few side quests at a leisurely pace, learn some magic, and then dig into the harpies' red rocks.
It wasn't as if anyone had asked her if she knew the Way — they were asking if she knew about rocks, which was awkward enough on its own. But the reaction was like a global superstar had dropped a guerrilla concert. Of course she was flustered. No — at this point it was more like dumping a bag of puffed rice into a lake full of carp.
"W-wait a moment?"
"Softie! Tell us that story in detail!"
"Is that really true?"
The Stone Dwarves charged in as if they meant to wring the story out of us. Even old Bobo edged closer, rolling that heavy head of his with a low rumble — but what did we actually know? We had just stood there watching harpies fly in from a distance, cut the path, and flee.
Still, the Stone Dwarves pressed in with a terrifying intensity, hungry for even a single word. By now it wasn't just Han Se-ah, cornered after opening her mouth — the rest of the party looked thoroughly bewildered too.
"How are the Flappies using Vacuum Stones?"
"Could it be Granny Pipi's city?"
"But Granny Pipi's city isn't somewhere Softies could go and come back from this fast."
"Still, Softies wouldn't know about Vacuum Stones on their own!"
"Right — these Softies had never even seen the essences we gave them."
Whether we reacted or not, they kept talking among themselves so loudly the sound of tumbling rocks nearly drowned everything out. It was clearly not a trivial matter. A rock that looked like ordinary stone yet could obliterate a radius of a dozen meters or more — of course there was some extraordinary story behind it.
If something that vicious just lay around on the local hillside like common pebbles, how would anyone ever clear the harpy nest? They wouldn't even need to cut the path. Drop a rock on an adventurer's head and the whole party would be dead.
"Excuse me, Elder Bobo. What exactly is a Vacuum Stone?"
"That red rock you saw is a Vacuum Stone. Not something the Flappies ought to be using, though…"
"Yes. When it hit the cliff path, it collapsed the entire area around it. The power looked so terrifying we retreated."
"Hm? Terrifying?"
While the others were busy eavesdropping on the chatter — especially the concerning keyword "Granny Pipi" — I stepped over to old Bobo and slipped in a quiet question. Sure enough, he knew something; he responded at once.
At the mention of the towering mountain that seemed to house the harpy nest, and of the harpies emerging from it to drop red rocks on the cliff path, the old dwarf made a grinding sound like stones being crushed, as if the news sat poorly with him. Then he asked, genuinely puzzled, what there was to be afraid of.
"You're Softies, aren't you? So why are you scared of a Vacuum Stone?"
Humans were Softies, harpies were Flappies — and this race that called a hard chunk of rock a Vacuum Stone with total sincerity. Old Bobo, who seemed the sharpest among them, launched into an explanation.
A Vacuum Stone, true to its name, was a special ore that turned its surroundings into a vacuum. That humming mana wavelength it radiated, the way it had erased an entire stretch of cliff path — that was the Vacuum Stone's power. But it was not, as we had assumed, something you could hurl at a person like a bomb.
"…So how do I put this. It's like mining dynamite that doesn't hurt people?"
Just as Han Se-ah's analogy put it — a thing that pulverized the surrounding dirt and rock and nothing else.
Come to think of it, how else could these tiny Stone Dwarves have cleanly hollowed out the inside of a mountain range and carved caverns hundreds of meters high? They must have had some special magical tool to make it possible. Surely they hadn't scraped it all out by hand, one painstaking stroke at a time.
They were a craftsman race in the vein of dwarves — not some mad species that cleared a city foundation bare-handed.