Main Scenario 4
I was sitting at a guild table when a rat-whiskered man walked in. Something about his face was familiar — the type who hung around the Adventurer's Guild often enough. Which meant he was one of those extravagant nobles who bought adventurers' loot just to flaunt his masculinity.
As if to confirm my guess, he spotted me immediately, strode over, and thrust out his hand without preamble.
"Never thought I'd meet the Hero of the City like this!"
"That's an embarrassing moniker. The ones who actually fought off the monsters were the guards with weapons in hand, weren't they?"
He came looking for me and still pretends this is a chance encounter.
"Haha, modest on top of everything else. If only other adventurers were as humble as Sir Roland."
"Sir? I'm just an ordinary adventurer without so much as a knighthood."
"You donned armor and saved the citizens. Who would dare question Sir Roland's honor?"
After gilding my face with praise for a good long while, the man shook my hand, pressed something into my palm, grinned, and vanished out of the guild like a breeze. What the man who'd appeared and disappeared like the wind left behind was a silk pouch containing six gold coins.
The pouch alone was probably worth three silver.
"Was that the last of them?"
"Yes. That was the final noble to come offer official thanks. Your pockets should be nice and heavy by now — for the service fee, those fat macarons from last time will do."
"Yeah, got it. I live easy thanks to the guild."
"Not the guild — thanks to me."
"To me, the guild is you."
The building and door repairs had cost maybe a couple of gold coins, yet every noble I met pressed five gold into my hand just to save face. What a profitable business. This was the biggest reason I freely handed out gold for the sake of my reputation and pressed coins into the palms of unarmed old men I didn't even know.
They wanted to drop a single line at social gatherings — "I personally rewarded the adventurer who saved the city this time" — and for that, they were happy to shell out gold. Naturally, each one came equipped with an excuse: "The Hero of the City paid for the repairs after wrecking my building," or "He saved my servant," and so on.
"Nobles, honestly. Throwing gold around just to manufacture a single talking point."
"Most of the nobles in an adventurer city are loaded."
After seeing off the last guest with the memorable mustache, I spent a while browsing other players' progress through the broadcast station board. Since it was Hanna's stream board rather than a general internet forum, the information was limited — but thanks to netizens who loved comparisons, I still learned quite a bit.
First: the condition for Horned Wolves to appear in the city was reaching the 10th floor and hunting a certain number of times. Whether it counted by Horned Wolf Mana Stones or by byproducts, only players who'd hunted Horned Wolves without much trouble had triggered the event.
Second: the event situations other players had faced. In Hanna's case, I'd peeked at the chat window and responded immediately — but other players didn't have a 6-star Paladin Roland. Casualties had piled up, and the chaos in their cities had been worse.
Of course, "worse" didn't mean buildings getting demolished or city security collapsing. Once a player and their party started fighting Horned Wolves, the guards who detected the commotion would join the hunt.
A bunch of extra NPCs died, and if you were truly unlucky, the innkeeper or restaurant auntie where you were staying got killed and you lost your lodging and belongings. But nothing that completely ruined the game experience seemed to have happened.
On top of that, because Hanna had faced the Horned Wolves on stream, word had spread across the internet, and there were comments saying most people had gotten off lightly. It was her broadcast station, so some of that might have been inflated by fan loyalty — but if the information was out there, anyone with decent game sense would have handled it. Worst case, you could just reset to the morning.
"The frequency of running into people on the 10th floor has gone way up."
"I heard parties that were hunting on the 11th floor and above all came back down."
Mulling over this and that, I followed Hanna straight through to the 10th floor. Another party member spotted us, gave a nod of greeting, and passed by. They seemed to recognize my face — no wariness at all, more like they'd been about to sidle over before stopping out of politeness.
The gesture was actually pretty cute. It would have been cuter if it hadn't come from a scar-covered man who looked about two meters tall.
From the pauldrons bristling with vicious spikes to the two-handed axe as massive as his frame, he was clearly no novice adventurer hunting Horned Wolves. The scratches on those spikes said they weren't for show — a veteran warrior who'd perfected his own combat style. The party members trailing behind him looked like they could hold their own, too.
"The guild spread word about what we saw far and wide. A silver Horned Wolf twice the size of a normal one showed up."
"Wouldn't hunting the mid-floors still be better, though?"
"No. If someone actually manages to take that Horned Wolf down, the payoff would be enormous."
Grace tilted her head at my words. Still a novice adventurer, she'd never gotten tangled up with nobles, so she probably didn't quite get it.
"What byproducts does a Horned Wolf drop?"
"Horn, eyeballs, fangs, claws, hide."
"And the features of the one we ran into?"
"It was enormous, and… silver-colored — ah."
She started to speak, then cut herself off with a sound of realization. The moment nobles started throwing money around for the silver hide of the one-and-only alpha Horned Wolf, the adventurer who succeeded in the hunt could retire and live out the rest of their days in leisure.
While adventurers risked their lives scraping together copper and silver, nobles were the sort who tossed a dozen gold coins at a portrait of themselves. Just this morning, hadn't they each handed me five or six gold just to manufacture a single bragging right?
Still, Hanna will be the one to take it down. They said it's the main scenario.
We wandered the plains without a fixed destination, but I had no complaints. Hanna had known the quest was starting, so I trusted her to handle the progression herself. For a guy like me, it was easier not to overthink things — just run where I was told and let my body do the work.
Wasn't there a saying that if the body is weak, the mind suffers? If Hanna handled the quest, my job was to drive a mace through the skull of the alpha Horned Wolf when it showed up again. Planning for the future and designing elaborate schemes had never been my style.
I'd never once stuck to a summer vacation schedule in my life.
"That Full Moon Wolf doesn't seem to respond to this lure scent."
"Full Moon Wolf?"
"Ah, well, that's what they call it at the Magic Tower."
Not the Magic Tower — the system, more like. Still scoring a solid zero on acting ability, Hanna edged closer to Grace. Grace had slowed her pace a little to talk with me, so instead of walking side by side, the three of us ended up clustered together.
"But Unnie, did you drop formal speech with Roland?"
"Yeah. I casually brought it up yesterday while you were talking with the mages."
"Ah…"
They were whispering, but we were close enough that I heard every word. Hanna kept glancing my way mid-conversation, her eyes practically overflowing with the desire to drop formal speech with me too. Not that I'd reached the level of reading a woman's heart from her pupils alone —
True to a woman who'd made it big as a streamer, she seemed completely hooked on missions.
Maybe seeing Grace's smiling eyes, or the way they'd stood side by side outside the inn, had left her feeling a little left out. Either way, while mission-bound Hanna hemmed and hawed over her words, I struck first.
"You drop it too."
"Th-ah, what? Yes!"
"A party leader using formal speech with their own companions is pretty ridiculous, don't you think?"
"That… is true, ye…s."
"Still hard to drop it right away, huh."
Since she hadn't been the one to bring it up — I'd casually given permission instead — she seemed pleased, her eyes curving into a pretty smile. Of course, that smile was also thanks to the mission she'd just cleared so easily.
In that newly cheerful atmosphere, we started preparing a meal. Since we'd already closed ranks, it felt natural to fill our stomachs with something simple. Grace stared blankly as I pulled a picnic mat from my inventory, still finding it wondrous no matter how many times she saw it.
"No matter how often I see it, it's amazing… Having something like that would make hunting so much easier."
"Hunting?"
"If freshness is preserved, cleaning up after a kill would be so much more convenient. Outside the Tower, I mean — not inside."
Grace looked at Hanna with fond amusement as the mage, at the word "hunting," could only picture the Tower's interior. The more they talked, the more the image of a world-clueless genius witch layered over Hanna, solidifying into something unshakeable. I spooned up warm stew as I watched.
Thank goodness no Horned Wolves had shown up at Aunt Mariang's inn. The food at other novice-adventurer inns was so bad you'd rather spend silver on takeout every meal. As I quickly emptied a bowl of the hearty, stew-like gukbap, a scream reached my ears.
——Aaaah!
It was so faint I almost doubted it, but Grace, with her keen senses, also set down her stew bowl and looked in the same direction I was. Stuck between a superhuman physique and a sharp-eared scout, only Hanna stared at us in confusion.
"Uh, what's going on?"
"…That was a scream, right?"
Her voice still hesitated, not yet used to informal speech. Leaving the explanation to Grace, who was still debating whether she'd heard right, I shoved off from my seat and stood. With the stew pot in the way, my first step was a gentle leap upward — then, once I had distance, I launched myself hard enough to shatter the plains' ground.
"You can find me!"
"Yes!"
Grace's confirmation came from behind like a mosquito's buzz, and I ran toward the scream without worry. A scream on the plains where a unique specimen had appeared. The odds of it being a novice adventurer who'd come to hunt Horned Wolves and gotten into trouble were low. Which meant —
"Ro-Roland?!"
"Bandits, huh?"
Not the Full Moon Wolf — the possibility of bandits looking to prey on the surplus of fellow adventurers. Something that only happened because more people had gathered on the 10th floor than ever before. The one who leveled a weapon at me as I charged in, pulverizing the dirt of the plains, was an ugly man with a memorable snub nose.
Four men in armor — a full frontline of four — had two women pinned to the ground. One of the men's maces was caked in blood, and a pair of feet stuck out from the tall grass. So it wasn't two women who'd come alone to hunt Horned Wolves.
A novice adventurer party of one man and two women had run into a quartet of Intermediate Adventurers.
"Ah, damn. What a letdown."
"P-please help us!"
One of the women, pressed into the dirt and covered in dust, stretched a hand toward me with tears in her voice. A single tear rolled down, tracing a clean path across her pale cheek. Three of them on the 10th floor — probably around 2-star female adventurers.
Gacha-character adventurers with looks that set them apart from country girls. A party of dark-hearted men who'd failed to restrain their lust and jumped them.
"Hey. Got an excuse, at least?"
"D-dieeeeee—!"
One of them, recognizing me, went deathly pale and charged with his sword. The other three couldn't even think of resisting — they just stood there trembling. I'd come barreling in hard enough to smash the plains' dirt floor, so the sheer pressure had apparently left them stunned.
No matter how kind and courteous I usually was, I wasn't good enough to gently arrest rapists and hand them over to the guards. They seemed to know that too — the moment our eyes met, they went into full panic.
Still, as Intermediate Adventurers, their form was solid. A thrust aimed naturally at the joints in my armor — the kind of technique that said they'd killed more people than monsters. A sword that slipped precisely through the gaps in my lightly worn light armor, targeting my armpit.
"Whoa, holy shit. You guys been hunting orcs or something? That's not the skill of someone who's only done this once or twice."
"Wh-wha—?"
The blade that pierced my skin cracked and crumbled as if crushed in a press. From the tip of the sword to the blade, to the hilt, to the hand gripping it — a sickening crunch of bone as everything below the elbow twisted and shattered. Reflection damage that could pulverize a 10th-floor boss's skull. A mere human body was never going to withstand that.
Come to think of it… was Roland designed as a PvP character? Reflection damage doesn't mean much against boss monsters.