More Reliable Than Anyone 4
Hero Han Se-ah had been gloriously sacrificed in the name of defeating the Demon King.
With no idea when Antenor's special lecture on lightning magic might end, I ducked into a nearby tavern for a mug of beer. Chewing on simple bar snacks—jerky, cheese, that sort of thing—I kept an eye on the laboratory entrance, but she showed no sign of coming out.
A glance through the hologram window at her stream told me the viewer count was so high she couldn't even shut the broadcast down; she was just rolling with it.
"Heehee, I'm not going down alone! If you want upper-grade magic, you can sit through this too!"
She didn't look particularly inclined to shut it down either.
An hour passed, then two… Watching her viewers lose interest in Han Se-ah herself and start chatting among themselves about magic theory, I opened another hologram tab beside her stream window for some casual web surfing and nursed my drink.
Time flowed like water, and by the time Han Se-ah finally emerged from the laboratory having learned her magic, the moon outside was already preparing to set—dawn was breaking.
Not the sun. The moon.
"Welcome back, Hanna."
"Rolaaand, how could you just abandon me…"
"It's not like I can learn magic."
I collected Han Se-ah as she staggered out like a zombie who'd started overtime on Friday and was finally clocking out on Saturday, loaded her into a carriage, and rode out of the Tower of Magic. By the time we made it, the eastern sky was starting to lighten.
No climbing the Tower today, then. For Han Se-ah, logging out and shutting off the game would be rest enough—but there was no chance the party would drag a mage who'd pulled an all-nighter learning magic at the Tower straight into a climb.
Kind heart or not, when your own life was on the line, an adventurer had to be thorough.
"Hanna? Don't tell me you only just got back?"
"Upper-grade magic after all, huh… We'll have to start the expedition tomorrow. Let's take it easy today."
"W-wait, I'm fine, really…"
"Absolutely not. Even if you've reached the upper-grade threshold, Hanna, you're still a mage. Your stamina isn't what carries you—when it's time to rest, you rest properly."
Judging by how the stream had run continuously, she'd probably paused Antenor's lecture midway, spent a day offline, then come back—but there was no way our party would know that.
You couldn't exactly tell a delicate young woman who'd stayed up all night absorbing the great knowledge of upper-grade magic—wisdom only attainable upon reaching the realm of the superhuman—to go risk her life mountain-climbing in high-altitude terrain. Katie and Grace latched onto her arms and started hauling her off, determined to make her rest whether she liked it or not, while Irene patted her soothingly the way she would settle the temple orphans for bed. Watching them, I headed for my own room. Healthy body or not, after a night of web surfing, a catnap wouldn't hurt.
Of course, the internet kept me up longer than planned and the nap ended up even shorter—but that couldn't be helped.
The place we headed with Han Se-ah and her newly learned upper-grade magic wasn't the dwarf city on the 41st Floor, but a quiet corner of the 40th.
Even the temple knights, who smashed undead skulls the moment they appeared—apparently intent on purifying everything from the 31st through the 40th Floor wholesale—couldn't cover every layer perfectly. If the temple alone could have managed that, the Tower would have been conquered long ago.
From beyond a swamp thick with toxic miasma, a pack of lizardman skeletons came shambling toward us. Twenty of them—as if determined to show off the full dignity of a 40th Floor encounter.
"Hoo…"
What stood against the monster horde trudging across the poison swamp with old, rusted scimitars in hand was neither my shield nor Kayden's sword, but Han Se-ah. At the very front, she steadied her breathing atop a platform of her own making.
A stream title that made her intentions crystal clear. Gripping with both hands the staff she'd received as a quest reward and had refined with a stone dwarf's enhancement stone, she raised it toward the sky—then slammed it into the ground.
"…Call Lightning!"
The cheerful ring of her incantation pealed out the instant the staff's tip struck the dirt. The chant that neither a natural-born 6★ nor a player could skip was spoken, and dark clouds gathered inside a Tower that should never have known weather.
The murky sky blackened as the storm clouds massed. Crackling, ominous current surged through them—then, without a moment's hesitation, lightning bolted for the earth.
In that brief instant when pale current split from sky to ground and forked into branching paths, we saw it clearly through bodies that had reached the upper-grade realm; her viewers saw it through the stream's recording function and subsequent slow-motion playback.
The thick bolt spat out by the storm clouds split into exactly twenty forks—and each one was drawn, with perfect precision, into the crowns of the skeletons still ambling leisurely forward, utterly oblivious to what was unfolding above their heads.
One spell. Twenty forks of discharge. And twenty mana stones.
Like thunder rolling in a beat late after the lightning strike, the viewers' chat erupted a half-step behind.
"Wow! Th-that's amazing, Hanna!"
"Good heavens. So this is why upper-grade mages are treated as strategic assets of their territories…"
A spell that could fry twenty 40th Floor monsters in a single blow. Used at reduced power over a wide area against ordinary soldiers who couldn't even handle mana—not gacha characters—it could produce casualties in the hundreds.
Faced with that overwhelming display, Grace and Katie got far more excited than Han Se-ah herself, squealing and clinging to her arms.
"Hoo… I won't be casting that twice in a row."
"If a fight ever required using something that terrifying twice, shouldn't we be thinking about retreat?"
Honestly, Han Se-ah had so rarely shone in combat that worry for her had apparently piled up in the party's subconscious. Seeing her demonstrate power like this seemed to put them at ease—she wouldn't get hurt now.
With her remaining mana she shaped an earthen path, thriftily scooped the twenty mana stones floating on the swamp into her inventory, and we made for the 43rd Floor.
Even with Han Se-ah's new upper-grade magic, the black harpies still refused to come down for a closer look—so she was free to quietly recover her mana all the way to the vicinity of their nests. She could have killed them easily enough, but the mana stones would tumble off the cliff, so she didn't bother hunting them.
Fair enough. Back when I played RPGs, I'd always wait for flying monsters over cliffs to come down to solid ground before hunting them too. Even a trivial reward felt bad when it vanished right in front of you.
"It's not a distance we can cover in a day, so let's sleep in the next cave and move on."
"The next cave? That seems faster than I expected."
"If we skip the next one, the one after is too far. And if we run into other adventurers, it'll be a hassle. In the swamp we could firm up the ground with Hanna's magic and keep watch for the slow-moving undead, but the terrain here is different."
Walking on like that, we ended up spending the night around the 42nd Floor. According to Grace's memory, the path to the 43rd Floor had fewer caves.
Unlike Han Se-ah, who couldn't remember anything even with a minimap, Grace recalled the locations of the caves and the distances between them. Following her lead, we arrived at a cave sitting empty and ownerless, waiting for us. Along the way we'd spotted campfire smoke a few times and worried some other adventurer might have claimed it, but thankfully that wasn't the case.
We were entering the highest-grade domain now, and encounters with other adventurers had become vanishingly rare. Traces remained—campfire smoke, cliff paths scarred by combat—but that was all.
"Ah, there it is. At the next fork we head down, then take a side path for a bit."
"You mean past that boulder?"
"No, a little further down. The cave entrance is cleverly hidden in the boulder's shadow—you won't see it easily."
The women, now so used to harpies circling overhead that they barely registered them, pointed toward the ridge on the right as they talked.
All I could see was grey rock, and Katie was just staring at the big boulder too—but Grace was piercing right through the shadows beneath it. With no weather changes inside the Tower, it seemed someone had deliberately used the shadow to conceal the cave mouth.
Following a gentle trail downward, we found a rope bridge connecting to the adjacent ridge. Had this been installed by people from other worlds coming to trade with the stone dwarves?
"These harpy bastards always edge a little closer whenever we cross something like this."
"They're still not attacking, though? I thought I'd get to watch Hanna's magic again."
The moment the party set foot on the unstable crossing, the harpies drifted nearer as if deliberating. Still, they stayed just outside arrow range.
Flash arrowheads or explosive tips made through alchemy could have dropped a few of them, but the mana stones would vanish over the cliff edge, and the black harpies on reconnaissance would simply be replaced—so it would amount to nothing more than flinging gold coins at the sky.
After some hesitation the black harpies climbed again, and we crossed to the neighboring ridge without incident and slipped into the cave. The moment we were inside, Irene naturally set about building a campfire and looking for a spot to set the pot.
"Miss Hanna, I'd like to start a fire—could you smooth out the floor a little?"
"Yes, unnie."
Watching Han Se-ah use Earth Control to level the cave's surprisingly uneven interior, the viewers let out a collective sigh.
"Ah, damn it—if anyone clipped the magic from earlier, send me that!"
Magic. Still, we'd reach the nest tomorrow, so she'd have something to show the viewers then.