More Reliable Than Anyone 2
Listening carefully to the explanation, I could see why the Stone Dwarves were in such an uproar.
The Vacuum Stone was a special ore that blasted out mana to pulverize the surrounding rock and soil, which meant it came with its own particular method of use. For a race whose entire bodies were made of stone, mishandling something that erased the rock around them would lead to a catastrophe far beyond anything you could call an industrial accident.
"So the flappers just chucked those things onto the cliff path?"
"They were using them to bring the cliffs down."
"Feathered bastards. Always the problem."
As an ore that radiated mana, it was something only a mage or alchemist — or, in modern terms, an industrial engineer — should handle with extreme caution, like a piece of cutting-edge machinery. And yet those winged bird-brains, those feathered old hags, had been flinging the things at cliffs with raw force just to keep out intruders. Of course the Stone Dwarves listening to this were losing their minds. Imagine a team of researchers watching hired thugs occupy their lab and start using multimillion-won equipment as slingshot ammo for a sit-in protest. How would that feel?
Not that hired thugs were likely to seize a research lab anytime soon, but that was roughly the vibe my cheap imagination could manage. A precious tool that, properly controlled, could hollow out an entire underground city — and they'd been tossing it on the ground just to block a single road, letting it tumble off the cliff.
"If that's what it is, we can deal with it when they throw them. Shoot them down midair, or deflect them with magic."
"True. It was a completely new phenomenon, so we got more scared than we needed to. If we cut them out of the air before they hit the ground and start collapsing the terrain, they might not even activate. They wouldn't erase the metal in a sword too, would they?"
According to old man Bobo, at least, it wasn't some black-hole bomb that annihilated everything nearby. It was closer to a mining tool — one that, depending on the user's settings, left valuable ore alone and only ground away ordinary dirt and rock.
So if a harpy flew in carrying one, we could shoot it down with an arrow or leap up and bat it away like a baseball, and neither our gear nor our bodies would get erased.
…Hell, of course a trash mob on the 43rd floor wasn't going to have a pattern that ignored defense and deleted flesh and equipment. That kind of magic was the sort of thing a Demon King would use.
"Still, Vacuum Stones are rare enough that cities holding them are hard to find. And you discovered some just a few days' distance away. Hmm, in that case…"
The Stone Dwarves were still buzzing about Pipi's city, while old man Bobo trailed off mid-explanation and started turning over the thoughts inside his stone head. Sensing something big coming, Han Se-ah edged closer to me with her camera in tow.
She can be clueless about everything else, but her mana control and streamer's instincts are beast-level.
As the camera locked obsessively onto a stone head with no facial features at all, the viewers started getting worked up too. Meanwhile Bobo muttered something to himself with intense concentration. Pipi, city, softies, Vacuum Stone, flappers, passage—
"You softies. Mind if I ask one favor?"
"Of course!"
There was no reason to refuse the request Bobo finally managed after all that brooding. Whether it was genuine leadership or just the Stone Dwarves' natural temperament, the rest of them fell silent in an instant.
Our party ringed around old man Bobo, and the Stone Dwarves ringed around us — a strange little standoff. Even after saying he wanted a favor, Bobo hesitated again, and everyone held their silence, staring down at that squat stone head.
"By any means necessary… could you bring back a few Vacuum Stones from those flappers? I've got a feeling we need to open a path to the other city."
"Another city?! He said another city!"
"Old man Bobo's made up his mind!"
His request was more or less what I'd expected — bring back Vacuum Stones. If the harpies threw them onto the cliff path again once we got near the nest, we could just snatch them up. Since they radiated mana pulses, we'd probably need to stop by the Magic Tower and buy some kind of mana tool to contain them.
I was sorting through the to-do list in my head when, sure enough, the chat window exploded. Reading through it, they were fighting over something completely pointless again.
"Who knows? Maybe the story goes that they try to dig a passage, fail, and finally believe me when I say this is the inside of the Tower?"
"What do you mean 'ahem'? You already typed the whole thing!"
At least climbing the cave stairs wouldn't be boring.
Having nearly had her title upgraded from Han Se-ah to Comrade Han Se-ah, she pulled up the quest window to redirect the viewers' attention.
The Stone Dwarves of the 41st Floor Underground City have shared an unbelievable tale.
With nothing more than a red rock called a Vacuum Stone, they claimed, a path could be carved to another city.
Could they truly open a passage leading to a city on another floor…?
"See? So there are two things we can predict from this. One: there might be one city per floor. So from the 41st to the 42nd, the 42nd to the 43rd… connecting the cities with passages like that. What would they use it for? Not us — the people hauling supplies, obviously."
"And the other one? The other one is that there might be underground monsters besides the harpies. You think we're just gonna dig dirt the whole way with zero combat and then — bam! — 50th floor? Digging through, something's bound to show up and threaten the Stone Dwarves, and we'll be the ones who stop it. That's the story."
The moment the long-overdue quest window refreshed, the viewers swarmed it. These were people who loved spinning wild theories, so they dropped the whole "rebrand Han Se-ah from national hero to North Korean army" bit and immediately started spamming chat to prove their own delusions correct.
Thanks to that, even climbing the stairs out of the underground city wasn't dull.
"Roland, if the Stone Dwarves dig a passage, could they actually reach another floor?"
"Hard to say… Maybe they'll find out it's impossible and fall into despair. This really is the inside of the Tower, after all."
As we climbed the stairs, the rest of the party seemed just as curious — they started talking about the same things as chat. Could the Stone Dwarves really dig a passage to another city and arrive there?
By old man Bobo's account, his city sat on the 41st floor and Pipi's on the 43rd. For an adventurer passing through the gates, that was barely more than a day's travel. For Stone Dwarves boring through mountain ranges, it might as well be forever.
No matter how far they dug into the mountains, the end might never come into view. Or perhaps some unknown force inside the Tower — the game system set by BB Games, in other words — would rise up like an immovable wall and stop them cold.
"Maybe when they dig the passage, something will open up like a gate."
"That could happen. The Tower's an unknown space, so nothing would really be strange. …Still, I hope those harpies never make it outside the Tower. Flying monsters are such a pain."
Grace answered the moment I tossed in a comment. She seemed to be thinking back to the orc pursuit, her voice edged with concern.
Fair enough — even the orcs running on solid ground had eventually left a few stragglers that got dumped on the kingdom's knight order. That thing that infected wandering orcs outside the same way as the ones inside the Tower… was it still roaming the northwestern wastelands?
"Orcs maybe, but I don't think the harpies will leave. We found their nest, and the way they fought so desperately to protect it — I don't see them abandoning it to go outside the Tower."
"I think Irene's right. Even up north, the monsters that raided territories weren't the nest-obsessed kind. They were the ones that ranged far and wide."
Chatting like that, we reached the end of the stairs before we knew it, and the cave opened up ahead. Just as expected, the black-feathered harpies kept their distance now that we'd put Nest Mountain behind us.
And so Han Se-ah stepped out of the Tower to learn magic.