The Tutorial Begins
If I wanted to trail after Han Sea for the quest, I needed to think about things from her perspective.
Start the game, ride a carriage, and arrive at the city gates — that was how the tutorial opened. After the jostling ride and the rural scenery rolling past the windows, the game would show off Adventurer's City itself: surprisingly sleek and modern for a fantasy setting. She'd compare the outfits of ordinary citizens and adventurers, chat into the camera to hook her viewers' interest, then walk straight into the Guild. Anyone who wasn't hopelessly directionally challenged would recognize a building that size.
Adventurers clustered around well-worn tables. A quest board plastered thick with request slips. And behind a clean, neatly arranged counter, a beautiful blonde with blue eyes looking right at her — that was probably where the chat would explode.
I'd been stuck in this fantasy world for ten years, but guys were the same whether it was my past life or this one.
A soft-skinned, small-faced, large-chested beauty smiling sweetly and recommending a senior adventurer out of pure goodwill? Almost no one would turn that down. Even another woman would struggle to say no in the face of a smile that pretty.
Neither Han Sea the gamer nor Han Sea the streamer was going to refuse this.
I could dress it up all I wanted, but the logic was simple. A random guy approaching her out of nowhere would look suspicious. A beautiful receptionist making the introduction gave it credibility — and her viewers would eat it up. As a pretty streamer, she had to have plenty of those thirsty male viewers they called "broth." So rather than me walking up to her myself, bouncing the approach off Alice the receptionist looked like the better play.
"Senior… Adventurer Roland?"
"Yes. I'd love nothing more than to sit behind the reception counter with you, but I hear you're dreaming of becoming an adventurer."
At Alice's gentle words, Han Sea's eyes swept over me. More precisely, not over me — over the empty air from my chest down to just below my chin, as if she were reading something. Was she looking at some kind of hologram because she was a gamer?
Whatever she was seeing, her eyes went round as saucers. Alice misread the reaction, grinning as she reached across the counter and jabbed me in the side with a finger.
She probably thought some country kid had just heard the famous name Roland and dropped her jaw. She was a little off.
Those eyes had clearly traveled all the way down past my solar plexus.
With a superhuman body and ten years of combat experience, reading someone's eye movements was trivial for me. From below the chin to above the navel, her gaze kept sweeping left to right, then down to the lower left — unmistakably the motion of someone slowly reading a text box from top to bottom.
If this weren't a game world, I might have assumed the same thing Alice did: a novice adventurer too intimidated by my reputation to meet my eyes.
Form a party by joining streamer 'Han Sea'
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Judging purely by her eye movements, whatever she was looking at was wider than the hologram floating in front of me. Mine was a quest window; she was probably reading a character info screen or something similar.
The thought sparked a sudden rush of curiosity. What she was staring at with those startled eyes was almost certainly Roland's — more precisely, 6★ 'Great Paladin' Roland's — status window. Setting aside the fatal flaw of being a male character, one look at those stats and skills left no doubt the developers had deliberately pushed him to the top. Monstrous numbers.
I hadn't memorized the entire status window from the five seconds I'd seen it ten years ago, but I remembered the difference in the leading digits well enough. Say a tier-one main tank's 5★ Level 1 HP sat around ten-something thousand — Roland's 6★ Level 1 HP was in the low twenty thousands. Even as a pure Level 1 with no leveling, no awakening, no skill builds, he was a monster who could chew through every mediocre character of 4★ and below.
If she'd seen that, there was no way Han Sea would turn me down.
"W-woooow…!"
"Yes, an opportunity to begin your adventures with that Paladin Roland?"
"R-really, with me? You're… forming a party with me?"
Whatever she'd seen on my info screen had hit her hard enough to make her stammer. In front of a camera drone with what had to be dozens of viewers at minimum, she normally rattled on without so much as a pause.
Her eyes kept flicking to the right while looking at Alice — so the chat window was over there. Status window in the center, chat on the right. That layout was close enough to the streaming setups I remembered that it put me at ease.
A blonde beauty recommending a blonde pretty-boy broken character. As a streamer, she pretty much had to take the deal. As if confirming my thoughts, she nodded so hard her jet-black hair whipped like a flag, broadcasting her feelings for the whole room.
"I came here intending to, so I've got no problem with it. But it looks like our junior here hasn't even registered yet?"
"Ah, right! Let me get your adventurer registration done first."
I stepped aside from the counter, and Han Sea walked slowly up to it. Her eyes locked onto Alice, who was rummaging busily through the shelves behind the counter — maybe curious about the registration process. Under that gaze, Alice pulled out a crystal orb roughly the size of a human head.
I'd seen them often enough in fantasy novels: a kind of appraisal device that revealed your rank when you touched it.
Supposedly it detected the mana flowing through your skin and read some kind of pattern or whatever — as a magical layman, I'd never really understood it. An object that could measure a person's abilities just by placing a palm on it? Now that I knew this world was a game, it finally made sense.
"Alright! Place your hands on this. Cup it with both hands, just like that."
"Like this?"
"Yes, just a moment, please."
Two beauties facing each other across the counter, close enough that their faces nearly met — the stares from around the Guild grew even thicker. Curiosity about a rookie's first step piled on top, and it felt like every eye in the building had zeroed in on this spot.
The Guild's crystal orb for judging a person's ability delivered its results in a very simple way. No illusions formed inside it. No rainbow of colored lights to indicate rank. Just pure white light that glowed brighter in proportion to latent potential. Why something that supposedly read the mana in your skin would measure potential instead — that kind of question had been answered by the game system.
Convenient for users, pairing the crystal orb with the status window when putting a party together.
Adventurer's City — a place where every adventurer in the world had gathered because of a single tower. For a medieval setting, it was an absurdly large city with a floating population approaching the tens of thousands. Dozens of new adventurers arrived every day; you couldn't open an info window on every single one of them.
"Hmm, not bad at all!"
"Is that so?"
The crystal orb didn't blast out light bright enough to blind anyone. It simply glowed well enough to illuminate the hands cupping it. Whether that measured Han Sea's individual talent or whether all playable characters just ranked reasonably high, I was a little curious. Did other people's games also have me — the character 'Paladin Roland' — in them?
"Yes! Anyone whose crystal stays dim and dark isn't suited for combat. If yours had been even a little darker, I would have suggested you become my junior receptionist instead of an adventurer."
"So is the process finished, then?"
"Normally there's basic training for novice adventurers… but I'll leave that to our bored senior here."
"You're not 'leaving' it — you're dumping it on me, aren't you?"
"Dumping? Hardly. It's a bonding exercise to strengthen the senior-junior relationship."
She said it with a bright little smile that was thoroughly annoying, but her looks made it hard to get properly angry. Besides, I was the one who'd said I was bored and offered to train a beginner, so I was stuck as the tutorial handler either way. Behind me, I could hear Han Sea quietly muttering to herself, "Is this the tutorial…?" — could no one else hear that?
Then again, if anyone else could see game-related things the way I could, there would have been chaos already. A translucent camera drone floating over someone's head was far too much for medieval fantasy people to process.
Something translucent bobbing along after a person, and the person talking to herself on top of it? Word would spread in no time that this batch of rookies included a steel spirit-caller, or a witch who commanded ghosts.
"Um…. Please take care of me, Senior!"
While I was discreetly tracking the camera drone filming the Guild interior with my eyes, Han Sea finished listening to the explanation about basic training and came over to me. The drone drifted naturally above her head — so it was framing me head-on.
I couldn't exactly lock eyes with a drone, so I lowered my gaze to Han Sea's jet-black eyes. A black-haired, black-eyed beauty — rare in this Western-inspired world.
"Of course. Please take care of me as well. And your name, Junior?"
"Ah, my name is Han…na!"
"I'm Roland, a warrior who holds the front line. Looking forward to working with you, Junior."
Had she scrambled for a name because 'Han Sea' was too hard to use in a fantasy setting?
Talking to a modern person, though — suddenly the speech patterns I'd gotten used to felt strangely awkward on my tongue.