The Call of the Underground 3
While I was enjoying a bit of web surfing, browsing every odd Heroes Chronicle stream I could find, Han Se-ah was busy contributing her own share of that oddness.
In short, it wasn't so much a nursing vlog as a "patient recovery" vlog — except there was no illness, and she was perfectly healthy. Irene sat beside Han Se-ah, who was laid out on the bed, reading from the scripture. Every so often she would gently stroke Se-ah's hair and forehead with a hand steeped in holy power, and the viewers were losing their minds over it.
"I mean… nothing actually hurts, but getting taken care of like this makes my whole body feel like it's melting…. Is this why guys go crazy for women with maternal instincts?"
Han Se-ah lying down, Irene at her side — a beauty gently soothing and caring for another beauty. There was barely any content to the stream at all. But between the two of them there was more than enough face value to go around, so even when she just chatted while reading the comments, nobody seemed particularly unhappy about it.
While I surfed the web, Han Se-ah soaked up the pampering, then saved at a reasonable point and logged out. Naturally, the timing of her reconnection was the next morning.
Grace and Katie, who'd come back entranced after buying arrowheads forged from special minerals and a flint that supposedly maintained a blade's edge just by rubbing it against the steel, had claimed empty guest rooms and spent the night as well. When we got up in the morning and handed silver coins to the stone dwarf who appeared to be the innkeeper as payment for the lodging, he swallowed them without a moment's hesitation.
"Mmm, definitely a different flavor. Ah — I can lend you the kitchen and ingredients, but I can't cook for you. I don't know how to make softie food."
"As long as we can use the kitchen, that's fine."
Despite having no mouth, he inspected the silver coins with delicate fingers, then carried them off with that smooth stone face of his and — gulp. Bite marks appeared as if an invisible person were taking a bite out of an apple, and half a silver coin vanished; a moment later the remaining half disappeared as well.
What we received from the stone dwarf who'd cheerfully chewed and swallowed our lodging and ingredient fees was, surprisingly, fresh vegetables. Maybe they'd come through when adventurers triggered the 45th floor's mechanism.
After a light meal of sandwiches Irene had put together, a stone dwarf showed up at the inn where we were staying. He announced that Elder Bobo had sent him, then toddled off ahead, guiding us somewhere. Following that little back, we eventually came upon something bright and red.
"……?"
"Don't tell me — is that a Vacuum Stone?"
Gone was any trace of a rough, crude rock. A single red crystal, cut and polished like a work of art, glittered in the open clearing.
But the reason my party and I were both stunned wasn't the finished product of a refined raw stone — it was everything surrounding it. All sorts of machinery and metal components were scattered about, and what was supporting the Vacuum Stone crystal was a broad, dish-shaped plate.
…In other words, a machine that looked like a giant antenna was standing ready to fire a Vacuum Stone beam.
Feels like the genre just jumped from fantasy straight into sci-fi.
Not a tunnel-boring rig for underground excavation — a massive antenna that looked ready to blast a signal into space at any second. Elder Bobo was waiting for us in front of it, waving us over in greeting.
"I thought it'd take longer, but some of the old equipment was still around. All we had to do was process the Vacuum Stone, so it went faster than expected."
According to him, that enormous antenna-like apparatus firmly cradling the Vacuum Stone was the same unit they'd used when building this city. The idea was to recycle rare Vacuum Stones like batteries while keeping the base infrastructure installed in every city.
In any case, standing before the prepared Vacuum Stone, Elder Bobo asked us one more time.
"With this, we'll open a passage in the direction of Old Pipi's city. And because of the noise and vibration, the monsters living underground will come pouring into that passage. The Vacuum Stone only breaks down rock and soil, so… you'll have to hold them off yourselves. Think you can manage?"
"Of course we can."
Building a passage connecting city to city was major civil engineering work, so originally they'd hired massive mercenary companies to defend the cities during construction.
But the only mercenaries in this city right now were the five of us adventurers. We were free from attacks by the flappers — as they called the harpies — and we'd secured a Vacuum Stone, but with only five people, a little unease was inevitable.
Still, their resolve to open the passage hadn't wavered. At Han Se-ah's unhesitating nod, Elder Bobo activated the Vacuum Stone.
The Vacuum Stone fired a beam.
Not a joke, not a figure of speech — it genuinely shot a searing red beam of mana, and one of the underground city's outer walls began to be sliced clean away. Like pressing a red-hot iron chopstick into ice, the rock wall started vanishing in a clean depression.
In the middle of that uncanny spectacle, I found myself zoning out on the light the way people zone out on a fire. After a set interval, the laser gradually shrank and then cut out with a snap.
"We'll fire it in cycles like this to keep the strain on the Vacuum Stone as low as possible. Or if those bothersome bugs come crawling out, I'll shut it off temporarily for the fight — I'll be counting on you then. They live off rock, so once they sense the Vacuum Stone's mana, they get vicious."
A red laser beam chewing through the city's outer wall, and underground bugs arriving at random intervals. So this was a defense game — protecting the city and the Vacuum Stone from creatures called subterranean beetles.
They showed no interest in rushing us from the start. Things stayed quiet for a while, and only after several rest cycles did the first monster finally appear. The light cut out abruptly before the timer was even up, and Elder Bobo's shout rang out from behind us.
As if it had always been that way, the city's outer wall had become a smoothly hollowed-out passage — and gray beetles came pouring through it. Monsters that looked like pill bugs or woodlice scaled up hundreds of times. One glance at that intuitive design and you immediately understood why they were called "beetles."
"Hmm, those shells look pretty tough."
"Maybe we should just hit them with dissolving fluid or something."
Even with their simple pill-bug silhouettes, each one was about the size of a compact car. Roughly eight of them wriggled forward, clacking the massive mandibles on their faces together in a threatening display.
Car-sized bugs, shells hard as rock armor, mouths built like those of rock-crushing carnivorous insects — but was that really enough to scare anyone? Honestly, just looking at them, the worms from the 30th floor were far more intimidating.
Maybe because it was a defense-style quest, they moved much slower than the rampaging worms. As the beetles lumbered closer, trusting their bulk, Grace loosed an arrow.
"…Yeah, a regular arrowhead won't even scratch them."
The arrowhead that had cut through the air with a vicious whistle bounced off with a dull tick and tumbled weakly to the ground. For the force behind it, the result — a few crumbs of rock flaking off — was almost disappointing.
Grace muttered under her breath, then without hesitation nocked a second and third arrow and fired them off in rapid succession. At the speed of a tractor, at best, there was no way she'd miss those things — she barely seemed to aim as the arrows streaked out.
This time she must have used alchemical arrowheads. The arrows slammed into the beetles' foreheads with a vicious force and went off with a sharp bang, each one a small explosion.
"Whoa — slow, but ridiculously tanky?"
"Still, if you pack enough mana into it, it gets through. Should be fine as long as they don't come out in packs of dozens."
Insect-like as they were, the head was the weak point. One of them had its skull blown clean off by Grace's arrow — which ignored both defense and resistance — and slumped over. When that massive corpse popped into a fist-sized mana stone, Elder Bobo nearly jumped out of his skin and came running toward us.
"What— what in the world is that?!"
"Ah, that's what we call a mana stone…."
As a stone dwarf who lived on rock and metal, watching a monster's corpse suddenly transform into a pretty little stone had clearly rattled him. Realizing something a beat too late, Han Se-ah started explaining the Tower's monsters to Elder Bobo.
"Oh — come to think of it, I should've just brought a mana stone to show him. I've been so busy dealing with harpies I completely forgot what they even look like."
He looked ready to bolt straight for the mana stone at any second, but a few monsters were still left. Watching Elder Bobo fidget like a dog told to wait in front of a treat was oddly memorable.
Apparently the whole race really was that serious about rocks — a few other stone dwarves who'd been spectating the fight were making just as much of a fuss as Elder Bobo.
"Got enough arrows?"
"As long as hundreds of them don't show up, I should be fine, Roland."
Now that we knew a well-placed shot to the weak point was a one-hit kill, Grace was going to be doing most of the heavy lifting for a while. Even expensive arrows wouldn't put us in the red against monsters that dropped mana stones like that.
And so the battle against boredom began.