The Start of the Tutorial 04
Han Sea the internet streamer — now Novice Adventurer Hanna — turned out to be a lot more talkative than I'd expected. That makes it sound like a criticism, though, so maybe I should say she was energetic and good with people. Even on the way out to the open lot behind the guild building, the questions never stopped coming.
"Is there a reason adventurers all gather in this city?"
"What are the benefits of raising the rank the guild assigns you?"
"How do parties usually form among adventurers climbing the Tower?"
These were the barest basics a novice adventurer could ask — about as clueless as a hunter-in-training asking why hunters don't make any noise when they walk. There was no common sense in the questions at all.
Probably questions from her viewers popping up in chat, I figured.
She was trying not to show it, but her sidelong glances had already climbed past the dozens and were well on their way into the hundreds. It was honestly impressive that she could keep sneaking looks off to the side like that and still not trip while following me.
Of course, no matter how many questions she threw at me, I had no choice but to answer them kindly. If being nice to her was what it took to escape this vaguely uncomfortable medieval fantasy and get back to reality, I would have licked her boots.
There were mana-stone faucets, sure, but bath products like soap were worse than the thousand-won disposable junk from a convenience store. Modern dishes like fried chicken showed up now and then, but they tasted about as good as a college freshman's first attempt at cooking. Running water existed, so cleanliness was possible in theory — yet most people couldn't afford the blessings of magical civilization, which meant they were filthy and they smelled. That kind of subtle, grinding inconvenience.
"Adventurers gather here for the obvious reason — to climb that Tower. For some reason, when monsters die inside it, their corpses vanish and mana stones appear in their place."
"Raising your rank means you get steered toward better commissions. The board in front of the counter is for public requests open to everyone, but as your rank climbs, you start getting private jobs offered directly to you. Those tend to have better terms and much fatter rewards."
"As for parties, people form them however they like… but most prefer groups of four or five. Fewer than that and long-term commissions get rough; more than that and the split on the rewards gets too thin."
…To put it bluntly, the Adventurer's Guild system was basically identical to a mobile game. Field content run in four-person parties, dungeon content in five, and even a feature where you could send idle characters out on expeditions and they'd come back hours later with loot.
I explained everything one piece at a time, feeling like a babysitter, and Hanna's eyes sparkled with every answer. She clearly had a gamer's fundamentals, because she absorbed my explanations immediately and seemed to be piecing together the overall structure on her own.
"Oh! And right now — where are we going?"
"There's a pretty wide open lot behind the guild. It's used for all sorts of things, but mainly for parties to test their chemistry before officially forming up."
It was also where bottom-rung losers who got mouthy with high-ranked beauty adventurers got their faces rearranged — but I swallowed that last part and pushed open the wooden door into the lot. It looked like a giant training ground, stacked with logs and bales of straw.
Being a busy guild, of course there were people around. In one corner I could see the broad backs of men hammering away at logs. I'd expected the place to be empty at this hour, but there were a few. Someone driving a hammer into a log to get used to the weight of a weapon in their hands. Someone throwing daggers at a crude scarecrow made of straw. Someone who'd brought three or four spears of different lengths and was whirling them through the air with a whoosh.
Hanna's eyes lit up at the fantasy scenery. In front of her, I dragged over a heavy log and drove it into the ground like a post.
Thud—!
"Whoa…. But why did you bring that over?"
She gaped at me, clearly amazed that I'd dragged a log thicker and longer than a person with one hand. After packing it roughly into the dirt by using my fist like a mallet, I turned to her.
"First I want to see what kind of weapon Hanna uses."
"…Ah, my weapon?"
"Yes. Do you have something you normally use? If not, learning the basics of whatever class you want is fine too."
"Well, uh……."
Her eyes started spinning again. She'd clearly shown up without thinking any of this through.
She wasn't even bothering with sidelong glances now — just staring a hole through empty air — and the look on her face told me exactly how flustered she was. I almost laughed. Of course, laughing at this particular moment would just make me a rude old fossil mocking a novice who didn't even know her own weapon, so I kept it locked down.
"The most common choice is the sword, of course. Plenty of people use them, so the techniques have spread far and wide."
Whether it was because this world was based on a game or because the Middle Ages had always been like that, one of its defining features was how many adventurers fought with swords. Spears were mostly military gear — not something individuals used for hunting monsters. Those six-meter, ten-meter pikes were for taking down giant monsters in organized subjugations.
"Um… what about mages?"
"Mages?"
If swords were common, mages were the rarest of all. And that was the question that came tumbling out of Hanna's mouth.
"Mages don't go through the Adventurer's Guild — there's a separate Magic Tower Branch. That's where you get your magical talent certified."
This, too, was common knowledge any aspiring adventurer would know, even a kid raised in some mountain backwater. Rumors about a place where spell-slingers all lived together had spread far and wide. Hell, anyone who'd read a few fantasy novels could have guessed it.
There was probably only one reason Hanna was asking questions like this.
The game just opened.
She had zero prior information.
If the game had already been live and she were a latecomer, chat would have been full of viewers doling out unsolicited advice. Mages go to the Magic Tower, how do you not know that? — the internet was crawling with freeloaders who puffed themselves up over scraps of knowledge that tiny.
Streamer Han Sea is a pioneer. That's why her viewers' basic questions came pouring in all at once.
Whether this was an alpha test, a streamer privilege, or just a simultaneous launch with everyone else, one thing was certain: she had no information. It might have been pure speculation, but I also suspected the tutorial quest floating in front of my eyes had triggered the moment the game went live.
"Of course, people with a mage's talent are extremely rare. That's also why you barely ever see a mage outside of high-rank parties."
"Ahh… I see."
She wilted a little at my answer. The strength drained visibly from her shoulders and neck — she must have had a gamer's romantic attachment to the mage class.
In that case, I needed to adjust the schedule.
"If you'd like, shall we visit the Magic Tower first? If you have a mage's aptitude, becoming a mage is the best option for building a party."
"Is that really okay!?"
"Of course. Imagine registering as a frontliner with a sword, only to find out later you had a mage's talent. How unfair would that be?"
Hanna becoming a mage was pure upside for me. Given the quest, I was going to have to stick with her no matter how unskilled she was — so a mage was far better than a frontliner who actually had to use her body. Two warriors was worse for party balance than a warrior and a mage.
The tutorial quest had outright told me to form a party, so under the assumption that I'd be with her, building the right combination was the correct play.
"Then… I'm sorry to be a bother, but I'd like to go to the Magic Tower first."
"Understood. Nothing to apologize for. I'm doing this because I want to."
I didn't know Han Sea's streaming style, so I kept things polite and a little favor-currying as I turned around and led us back out of the guild. We passed through streets packed with adventurers and headed for the Magic Tower, and the neighborhood changed unmistakably.
Instead of shabby people in battered armor and swords, the proportion of clean, bespectacled types in robes rose sharply.
The adventurer district was full of low-rankers — poor novices who never got to enjoy the blessings of magical civilization. They rinsed the filth off in stream water, sure, but they couldn't afford to bathe for cleanliness or grooming. Coming from that into a mage district where everyone took hot showers every day and used bath salts, shampoo, and perfume — of course the whole feel of the place flipped.
"Wow, this place is really… the streets are so nice!"
Hanna's eyes shone with wonder as we left the grimy adventurer streets for the clean mage district, complete with mana-stone streetlamps and paved roads. Even if you loved fantasy, it was human nature to romanticize a cool mage in a robe more than a filthy novice who couldn't even take a bath.
"That pure white building over there is the Magic Tower Branch. Magic Towers in other cities actually build towers, true to the name — but in the Adventurer's City, they went with this design."
"A Magic Tower that isn't a tower? Why?"
"Because the word 'Tower' carries a lot of negative baggage in the Adventurer's City."
Country-boy killer. Widow-maker. Graveyard of greenhorns. After ten years of watching people die, you could almost say half the Tower was built out of human corpses.
Hanna nodded, apparently getting the gist from my bitter little smile.
Ahead of her, a pure white cube of a building rose into the sky.