The Bigger, The Better 1
I'd thought I'd spent a night with no regrets — but come morning, things got a little awkward.
Thanks to the Stone Dwarves' craftsmanship, the inn's soundproofing was rock-solid. That still wasn't enough to fool a 5★ archer's senses, though. If a mere stone wall could scramble the perception of an Upper-grade ranger, the Stone Dwarves would have already crushed the Demon King's army with sheer technical superiority.
"Hmm~ Last night was… good, wasn't it?"
"……."
Which left Grace at my side, smiling coyly while making zero effort to hide her jealousy. She'd clearly sensed that not two but three people had spent the whole night in one bed, and now she was circling me with that sweet little grin of hers, laying on the pressure.
Katie and Irene, blessedly clueless about this sort of thing, still hadn't figured out what was going on. Han Se-ah, on the other hand — a woman thoroughly steeped in the vast world of the internet — had clearly caught on.
Well, of course she had. When Charlotte and her maid, who'd come as guests for various business dealings, suddenly locked themselves in their inn room citing "poor condition," anyone would start putting two and two together. …Especially since I'd gotten a little too excited about the master-and-maid sandwich and kept going from dawn straight through to morning.
"Hey now, today's the day we finally reach the 43rd Floor — you really want to rewind just to gawk at that? And even if I watched it, it'd only be me watching. You think I'd put that on stream? Instant ban, guaranteed."
"What do you mean 650,000 won?! Even if you subscribed to every single one of my old videos it wouldn't cost that much!"
If Han Se-ah had caught on, of course the viewers had too. The idea that a fellow party NPC had turned a pair of extra NPCs into a sandwich seemed to have been quite the shock — the chat was already roaring first thing in the morning.
Still, given her particular tastes, Han Se-ah's feet were clearly a little too warm for comfort. She had no intention of dragging this conversation out, so she pointedly ignored it and pushed the game forward, herding the still-oblivious Katie and Irene toward the ruins.
Grace, for her part, seemed satisfied enough with having needled me and watched me squirm. Without further complaint she restocked her alchemical arrowheads from Han Se-ah's inventory and started prepping for combat. That left only the still-rowdy viewers—
"Alright then, shall we do a point bet on Pipi's city on the 43rd Floor today? Hmm…… want to bet on whether the city is intact or not, or on whether a boss monster shows up?"
The moment Han Se-ah mentioned point betting, public opinion flipped on its head.
They say constant stimulation only makes you crave something stronger, and looking at these gambling addicts, that saying wasn't wrong. Far more people wanted to burn their points than dwell on last night's steamy business — which they couldn't see or hear anyway.
I could feel Han Se-ah's lingering regret over missing the show in the sideways glances she kept throwing my way… but what was I supposed to do, send her a message like "Shh, mid-sex—"?
"Alright, honestly, for quest progression reasons I figure Pipi's city has to be intact. Something's got to be left there so it can link up with the Harpy Nest above and keep the questline going. So the point bet goes on the King Earth Beetle."
With the Stone Dwarves' help we touched up our swords and armor, borrowed an alchemy workshop to restock arrowheads, resupplied food ingredients from the merchants flooding into the city, and set out for the ruins.
Grace stuck to my side like she had no intention of leaving, and Katie — still completely in the dark but following Grace's lead — fell in beside me as well. Off in the distance, the Stone Dwarves' massive, heavy cannons came into view.
Clearing a passage from the 42nd Floor to the 43rd was so smooth it bordered on boring.
Charlotte was sitting this one out for physical reasons, but the fifty Intermediate-grade mages she'd brought along — after promising them various interests — handled the work magnificently. Calling them Intermediate-grade mages undersold it; if you thought of them as 4★ characters, they were easily the equivalent of ten adventurer parties.
Going by raw magical firepower alone, you could even count them as thirty parties. And Charlotte had clearly been picky about her selections — their practical combat ability was outstanding.
"Hey, softies! More of 'em coming!"
"Team One, turn the floor into a swamp! Team Two, dissolve their carapaces! Team Three, firepower projection! Teams Four and Five, rest and replenish your mana!"
"……Wow. This feels like watching auto-combat run itself."
They'd split into five teams of ten: one turned the ground into a sticky liquid that half-sank the Earth Beetles and pinned their legs, another applied a dissolving spell similar to the one used against golems to shred their defenses, and the rest adjusted their attributes to avoid resistance reduction before blowing the creatures' heads clean off.
These weren't fast-moving orcs or flying wyverns — just high-HP, high-defense monsters that wriggled along the ground. There was no way they'd withstand a ten-person coordinated CC, stacked debuffs, and concentrated firepower.
Whatever they'd been promised, the mages smashed Earth Beetle skulls with the dedication of mission-driven soldiers rather than Tower mages, leaving our party with nothing to do but stand by just in case.
"So… is there nothing for us to do like this?"
"You never know. Those monsters might have subspecies or variants that need an Upper-grade adventurer to handle. That big one we saw last time might not be the whole story."
"Fair point. The one that wrecked the city could pop out anytime."
No sense using a butcher's knife to kill a chicken. We left the Intermediate-grade normal monsters to the Tower mages and agreed to step in only if a large Earth Beetle or mid-boss-class monster appeared.
Old man Bobo wasn't firing his cannons at ordinary wrigglers either, which meant… something that actually required those cannons was definitely out there.
You know how it goes in games — if there's a big open clearing with a massive ballista the player can fire, and ballista bolts start regenerating nearby, there's a 1,000% chance you're supposed to use it on the boss about to show up.
And sure enough, as I watched the mages endlessly chain their CC → debuff → focused firepower combo, the tunnel wall collapsed with a rumbling crash.
"Aigoo, that section's caving in! How long is that gonna take to patch?!"
"I don't think that's the important part right now?"
"Looks like the same kind… but somehow bigger?"
The large Earth Beetle we'd seen while clearing the 42nd Floor passage had returned.
Dragging a body that had grown considerably larger.
"That one appears beyond our capabilities, Hero. That peculiar shell is blocking our mana."
"Ah, right. We'll handle it."
Same dark metallic shell instead of rock — but the size was different. Regular wrigglers were compact-car sized; King Earth Beetles were dump-truck sized. That was how I'd been thinking of it, but the one that had just appeared wasn't a dump truck so much as one of those ultra-massive dumpers you only see in places like America.
Ignoring length and going by height alone, the last King Earth Beetle had stood around three meters at the shoulder. This one easily cleared five meters. In other words, it had roughly the bulk of twenty ogres lined up playing train.
"Still just as slow, though…… Roland, you want this one?"
"Sure, why not."
And I was a man who'd been beating down ogres long before I ever received the holy arts of enhancement.
I approached the creature that had emerged as we carved out the new passage, and its overwhelming mass became clearer with every step. Still, it wasn't quite large enough to flatten a city — which left a rather absurd worry floating up in my mind instead.
Shit. If a named-class specimen is already this big, how huge are the mid-boss and the real boss going to be? Probably something that makes the giant snake on the 30th Floor look tiny.
That 30th Floor snake had been big enough that we'd needed to fight it from atop a golem. Even so, a body that size couldn't have single-handedly stomped a city to rubble. Which meant the boss had to be far larger than the thing in front of me.
Still, the boss probably wouldn't show up today.
"Come forth, Durandal."
Using a defense-ignoring skill against a defense-specialized monster never got old. As the viewers — who'd completely missed the chant last time I summoned Durandal — kicked up a fuss over the hologram window about what the hell that was, I took the greatsword of light in hand.
When you're hunting a big monster, you need an even bigger sword.