The Bigger, the Better 2

When you play games, there are times you find joy in the strangest places.

Like a sunglass-wearing bug rolling around and plinking silver arrows into a tank with absurdly high HP. Or dumping pure magic damage on a target whose physical defense is off the charts. Or sniping, from way out with a twelve-times-zoom laser rifle, some shotgun-toting close-range kingpin who thought he owned the fight.

Neutralizing an enemy's specialty and beating them senseless from a position of total advantage. Tormenting them until it stops feeling like a strategy and starts feeling like pure mockery. Who on earth would hate that?

"It was too big to be called a sword. Massive, thick, heavy, and far too crude. It was, in every sense, a lump of pure mana."

"Hm? What was that, Hanna?"

"The monster looked huge, but Roland's holy sword looks even bigger. …Mission complete, so I'm taking that."

Using the always-raucous nonsense of Han Se-ah and her viewers as my personal fight anthem, I circulated my mana. Mana that had no intention of bursting free from its solid shell erupted outward like lava from a volcano, riding the blade out, and out—

It sounded a little ridiculous to say out loud, but the sensation was genuinely addictive. The feeling of gripping a laser greatsword that could smash everything in the world and swinging it however I pleased.

For a soft-bellied, mobile-game-addicted, military-service-completed returning student, it was a sense of omnipotence I could never have imagined, let alone felt—the body of an Upper-grade adventurer. Placing absolute trust in Roland's physique, I took a single step forward, and the giant bug flinched and stopped dead.

"You. Can you sense mana?"

Screeeech—!!

True to its status as a named-class monster of the 42nd Floor, it seemed to detect the mana and halted out of sheer survival instinct. But when your crawling speed was slower than a turtle's, how exactly were you supposed to dodge a laser sword well over ten meters long?

A colossal greatsword of light lit up the clearing in a brilliant blaze, and the metal-shelled bug—far too massive to be called a mere living creature—was split cleanly in half without the slightest resistance, and died.

And Durandal still had four minutes and forty-five seconds remaining.

…Even against named-class monsters, I should think of Durandal as a butcher's knife for slaughtering cattle.

Ten seconds to circulate mana through my entire body and condense it into Durandal. Five more to hoist it high and bring it down. That alone was enough to drop a giant subterranean carapace beetle with almost insulting ease.

When a blazing greatsword of aura bisected skull and guts while ignoring all defense, what chance was there of survival? Even if the opponent had been undead, a mana shockwave this crude and overwhelming would have pulverized them without leaving a single bone fragment behind.

And so, twenty seconds after summoning Durandal, all that remained were the shell and mandibles I'd seen last time, a mana stone, and a newly dropped pair of long, slender antennae.

…And then there was the noisy chat, of course.

"I-is that the holy sword the Temple was talking about?"

"To recreate that with magic, you'd probably need several Upper-grade mages working together."

"The nature of it seems a bit different from a knight's aura, doesn't it?"

"If I asked to study it… they wouldn't let me, would they?"

"A mace and shield combining into a sword—maybe we could get a sample through Miss Charlotte…"

I did my best to ignore the mages whispering among themselves and sending me uncomfortable stares, and started walking toward my party. Katie's eyes lit up like twin lanterns as she came bolting straight at me.

The target of her fierce gaze was, of course, the Durandal in my hand—now down to four minutes and fifteen seconds of duration. She must have burned mana to close the distance, hopping several meters with every bound, and when she arrived she didn't quite dare to touch it. She just stood there with her mouth hanging open, drinking in Durandal's form.

"Form" was generous—it was little more than a greatsword-shaped silhouette wrapped in surging aura—but Katie's face was full of pure delight, as if that alone was enough.

"So this is the holy sword, Roland? I felt weird asking you to show it off, but getting to see it like this is great."

"You like it that much?"

"I'm a sword user! Of course I'd be curious about a holy sword!"

Adventure, golems, heroes, and holy swords. Given Katie's personality, those were words she couldn't help but love. And while she was bouncing around in excitement, the one who came dashing up behind her wasn't one of our party members—it was Elder Bobo.

As a craftsman race, he seemed fascinated by the way a mace and shield had fused into a greatsword, and by how that transformation alone had altered the wavelength and nature of the mana.

To Katie, it was a holy sword out of the stories she'd loved as a child. To Elder Bobo, it was more like a transforming robot that had just walked out of fiction into reality. And once the fifty mages who'd been hanging back reading the room started edging closer too, the whole scene started looking uncomfortably like a zombie horde.

Thanks to that, for the roughly three minutes it took Durandal to break down and return to mace and shield, I got a profound education in how a monkey at the zoo must feel. So this was what it was like to be a spectacle—the way Han Se-ah always was.

From the 41st Floor to the 42nd.

From the 42nd Floor to the 43rd.

"Well I'll be—Softies, is that you, Elder Bobo?"

"Pipi! If it isn't Granny Pipi!"

The Stone Dwarves who had carved a path through endless waves of wriggling things finally came face-to-face with a city of their own kin. Not half a year away, not a full year—two cities discovered within a mere six days' travel of each other.

One city was a ruin, without a single living Stone Dwarf left. The other was left gaping in confusion at the Softies who had suddenly vanished and the fellow dwarves who had come pouring in.

Elder Bobo's city still only had hazy memories of the transfer, still wondering things like "why aren't there any Softies inside the city?" Granny Pipi's city, for its part, seemed equally clueless about why every last visiting member of the other races had disappeared from within their walls.

"What? We lost to the Demon King, and now we're stuck inside some place called a Tower?!"

"Hero Softies brought a Vacuum Stone, and outside there's a whole mess of Flappers?"

"You opened a passage with a Vacuum Stone and found a ruined city of our own kin just a few days away?"

Well, for Granny Pipi it was one unbelievable story after another. Her reaction was no different from Elder Bobo's, and both the party and the viewers watched with wry smiles.

Granny Pipi looked as if she were determined to prove she came from a different mountain range entirely—her stone was a lighter shade than Elder Bobo's. Watching a pitch-black Stone Dwarf flap his stony arms and legs in front of a gray one looked for all the world like a scene from a children's cartoon.

What finally put an end to Granny Pipi's doubts was, as always, a mana stone dropped from hunting a subterranean carapace beetle.

"…This is a gem that came from hunting those wriggling bastards?"

"That's right! Have we been living our whole lives being played for fools? We used a Vacuum Stone with those Softies over there and punched a tunnel straight through!"

"Well, your city couldn't possibly have been this close… Still. Softies wiped out by the Demon King, you say?"

She seemed well-versed in mana-bearing ores and gems; the moment the blue mana stone settled into her hand, Granny Pipi started scratching her chin. Watching basalt try to persuade granite nearly made me burst out laughing.

The voices were the deep, gravelly tones of old men and women, but the faces moving were round little stone pebbles, so the whole exchange felt like watching a storybook being acted out. While I stood there frozen, the ones who moved without a moment's hesitation were the fifty mages who had been hanging quietly at the rear.

Whether Charlotte—who hadn't joined today's tunnel-clearing due to poor condition—had given them advance instructions or not, the moment Granny Pipi was convinced, they swarmed over to her and started talking about something.

"Hm? Softies, what's this about?"

"We'd like to trade for goods from this city. We intend to pay with our metals and these things called mana stones."

"Hrmm. This… tastes rather good!"

The mages pulled copper coins, silver coins, gold coins, and mana stones of every size from their robes, and Granny Pipi's delicate stone fingers snatched them up at once. From goblin mana stones to zombie crocodile mana stones—crystals ranging from nearly transparent to deep, rich blue, spanning every tier of the Tower.

Different city or not, they were still Stone Dwarves. With a crunch-crunch of grinding stone, one mana stone and one gold coin were chewed to pieces in midair and vanished.

Han Se-ah entered Granny Pipi's city with her viewers cackling as if they were watching a strongman show. Granny Pipi herself showed no interest in stopping Softies from visiting—as if Softie city visits had always been a normal occurrence.

More precisely, she looked far too busy chewing on mana stones and coins to care.