Main Scenario 5
They say ten years can change mountains and rivers — and after ten years grinding through the adventuring trade, I'd picked up a decent eye for people.
I didn't know formal swordsmanship, but watching someone swing a blade usually told me roughly where they'd come from and what they'd been doing. Farmers who gripped a sword like a farm tool because they'd never learned how to hold one. Hunters who'd used skinning knives far more than longswords. Soldiers and knightly lords with polished, identical stances drilled into them the same way.
And then the mercenaries and bandit bastards who'd killed more people than monsters.
"Ah, should've just blocked with my hand. Got myself stabbed for nothing. Hole in the clothes now, I bet."
"Hyaaagh— aaaaah, m-my hands…!"
"So, you lot got bounties on your heads or what?"
The other three, who'd been too stunned by the speed I'd torn across the plains to even think of running, were still sprawled on their backs in a daze. The two women who'd been the victims managed to push themselves up to a sitting position, gasping — and the whole scene turned faintly ridiculous. Five people sitting in a neat little row, all staring at the guy with both arms broken.
"Hey. I asked if you've got bounties on you."
"N-no, sir!"
"Then I can just bury you, right?"
"There are! We were banditing in the mountains southeast of the kingdom — if you take us in alive, there's a bounty!"
One of the hairy ones, glancing at the churned-up dirt and going pale as death, shouted it out like he was desperately contradicting his own partner. His filthy beard was trembling so hard his jaw rattled — clearly picturing himself getting buried alive.
Still, having at least one of them answer promptly was convenient.
I didn't have any rope to bind them with. Maybe just smash both arms and leave it at that? While I was turning that over, Grace and Han Sea finally caught up. They'd followed the straight scar I'd carved through the grass, the prairie's soft underbelly laid bare in a miserable strip.
"What the hell is going on here?"
Crying women and terrified men all sitting in a row — maybe she was slow on the uptake. Or maybe the two arms smashed into a red, mosaic mess were just too nauseating to look at. Han Sea was carefully looking anywhere else; Grace, on the other hand, seemed to have read the whole situation at a glance.
"Hanna, you got any rope in that inventory of yours?"
"I do, unnie. From the stuff the Guild recommended."
"Then pull some out."
Whatever snake-oil pitch the Guild had sold her, Han Sea hauled a long coil of rope out of her inventory, and Grace took it and set to work tying the men. Even with sturdy rope binding their arms and legs tight, an Intermediate Adventurer could probably work free — but none of them looked inclined to try.
That rope was my way of saying I intended to keep these robbers alive and haul them in. Everyone present understood that the second they cut the rope and ran, their skulls could end up as pulverized as their buddy's arms.
I looped a line around the neck of the one with the shattered arms and made them stand in a row — left me feeling like a slave trader. I was glaring at the four bandits, keeping watch, when a rustle came from the brush along with a pitiful sob.
"Hic… Enooook—"
"…We still have to take what we can, Belle."
While one of the two women clung to the corpse and wept, the other methodically gathered their things. She took the dead man's pouch and sword, then even the breastplate of his metal armor. Looks like they'd sunk real money into that gear just to make the tenth floor.
She left the helmet — crushed along with the skull — with the body, then grabbed the woman she'd called Belle and hauled her forcibly to her feet.
Still, they'd made it to the tenth floor; she wasn't some delusional dreamer living in a fantasy. Even with tears streaming down her face, she joined in collecting their things. Watching the two women pick through the corpse, Han Sea edged a little closer to Grace.
"Unnie… what are they doing…?"
"This is the tenth floor. They don't have the confidence to carry a corpse with a smashed head all the way back to the first floor, so they're just taking the gear and keepsakes that are worth money."
"Th-then burying him…"
"Not everyone has an inventory like yours."
I'd have preferred to keep hunting for the Full Moon Wolf, but now we were tangled up with bandits. Looks like we were heading back to the city the moment we finished eating.
"W-wait, no — I thought this was a full-on fantasy world. I mean, sure, it's rated nineteen, but does it have to go this far? Is there seriously a reset button so you don't have to kill yourself over rapists like these? Is that why it works without touch or voice recognition? This VR is insane."
Han Sea was busy talking to her viewers; Grace stayed silent, clearly turning something over in her mind. So the road back to the first floor was filled with the groaning of the bandit with the ruined arms and the sniffling of the weeping woman.
Absorbing the startled stares of the people we occasionally passed, we finally reached the first floor of the Tower.
"You two go on ahead and wait at the Guild. Or split up if you want. I've got to hand these guys over to the guard."
"We'll wait at the Guild — can we stick around while you turn them in?"
"Sure. Why the guard, though?"
"Ah, well… I heard the guard hunted a Horned Wolf, so I got curious."
The two women offered their thanks and left, still sniffling. Han Sea, as usual, rolled her eyes in a little circle before answering with a limp. The word "guard" had clearly piqued her viewers' interest. Fair enough — anyone playing the game normally would never have reason to get mixed up with the city guard.
They were the armed force responsible for the city's security; a Novice Adventurer had no business with them. About as much connection as a student in a peaceful neighborhood had with the national police headquarters.
A stream that showed things you couldn't see anywhere else. That, I figured, was what her viewers expected from Han Sea. Though maybe some of them just had a hobby of watching a snub-nosed ugly bastard with both arms wrecked, a leash around his neck, sniffling and crying.
"But why do only we have to leave first?"
"Because these guys' Tower exit is going to be different from ours."
"Ah. Right."
An awkward lie, followed by awkward informal speech.
Something was clearly weighing on her; Han Sea drifted away looking thoroughly out of sorts. Grace stuck right back to her side like a character out of some delusional romance novel, patting her comfortingly. Probably figured a kid who didn't know how the world worked had just gotten a good look at its filthy underside.
"Adventurer's badge. Which one of you is holding it?"
"M-me, sir."
I fished the rank, reeking badge out of the stinking man's clothes and pressed the button. Thankfully, the arrow pointed somewhere other than the exact opposite of where Han Sea and Grace had gone.
They walked with their heads hung low like condemned men… wait, no, fuck — murder, robbery, and rape. They were condemned men.
Anyway, four dark-faced men trudged across the plains in silence, heads bowed. We'd come in fairly close to a passage, so we arrived sooner than I'd expected. Geometric patterns visible through the wild grass that came up to our ankles.
One of them had a gleam in his eye — thinking he'd make a run for it the second they stepped outside without me. I kicked him clean behind the knee.
"Ghk— aaaaaagh!"
"W-why are you doing this?!"
"Relax. I'm not killing you. If I were going to kill you, I wouldn't have dragged you all the way here."
I kicked their calves and the backs of their knees until they were rolling on the ground, then crushed their ankles underfoot the way you'd scrape gum off a shoe. A nasty crunch, and both ankles on each of them shattered. Forget running — they wouldn't even be able to walk.
Did these bastards really think I was enough of an idiot to just tie the four of them with rope and send them outside alone?
"If you don't want to die on the plains, crawl out yourselves."
Letting Grace unnie's gentle, comforting words wash past her, Han Sea fretted and fretted some more. Even the chat window, which usually offered the occasional useful tip, felt right now like it was full of pure garbage.
The source of her dilemma was a newly unlocked game system.
Apparently this unfriendly game hadn't been hiding companion NPC skills at all — it made the player pull them personally. Only after the system window announcing that her Bond Level had risen did Roland's skill window become visible.
Roland had exactly one skill: a passive with the grandiose name Indomitable Knight. And its performance was every bit as outrageous as the name and his shameless stats. Unconditional damage reduction on everything he took, and for melee attacks, fixed damage reflection proportional to Roland's max HP and defense.
Reflect damage is usually a raid-specialized skill… is this skill tree built with PvP in mind?
Roland was strong. High stats, personal combat technique, and on top of that the fantasy-world staple of mana-reinforced physical ability separate from his raw numbers. The monstrous strength that let him tear the tenth-floor boss apart bare-handed couldn't be explained by high stats alone.
And that was exactly what had Han Sea stuck in a spiral of overthinking.
"No, chat, hear me out. With Roland-sensei's specs plus a damage-reduction passive, isn't his tanking already overflowing? Honestly, if a boss shows up in the Tower that he can't tank with those stats, no other gamer is ever clearing that floor, right?"
A buff that made him not just sturdy but disgustingly unkillable?
A tank skill that scaled off HP to shore up his damage?
Assorted debuffs to protect allies and pad utility?
Healing skills to turn him into a one-man do-everything tank?
Chat rioted because she wouldn't just make a snap decision the way they wanted — but Han Sea kept fretting, stubborn as ever. With Roland on her side, she genuinely believed she could become the world's number-one ranker and take over BB Games.
"Huh? Have none of you ever played mobile gacha? Looking at that passive, he was clearly designed to wreck people in PvP, so you've gotta lean into that concept. Be real — look at that ground-shattering sprint just now. If there's a boss that body can't tank, the game is broken."
The more she thought it through, the more her gamer instincts tilted toward a PvP-oriented build. Her own party alone had nobody good at fighting people — and only a little while ago they'd run into adventurers who'd turned into bandits.
No. A tank just needs damage reduction. I heard you can recruit a priest into the party later anyway.
Viewers who refused to back her and just piled on the criticism. She didn't care. If that was enough to break her, she'd have quit streaming the first time the sexist insults under her workout videos got too thick.
Grace unnie would fill out her kit with scouting skills. Han Sea herself would load up on debuff magic, then recruit a priest for shields and healing to hold the line. And then her 6★ paladin, Roland-sensei, would solve everything.
With that settled, treating her viewers' horrified chat as a side dish, Han Sea pressed the hologram button.
Click.