Full Moon Wolf 4
The day Hanna fled to the Temple to escape the chatter of the mages, an awful lot managed to happen in the span of a single night.
The biggest change of all was the massive stone gate standing tall and proud from the crack of dawn. Whether by magic or by the System's power, a colossal gate had been slapped together overnight — large enough to swallow not only people but the expedition's carriages whole.
"So, what's the reward for taking down the Full Moon Wolf?"
"Unlimited free use of the tenth-floor gate, for starters, plus Intermediate Adventurer gear sets for me and Grace. Irene and Roland each get one magic tool of their choice. They used every last byproduct of the Full Moon Wolf to build the gate, so there's no cash left to hand out."
"A magic tool? Nice."
Next came the upgraded gear for Hanna and Grace. Hanna received a mage's robe woven from pure mana and a staff set with a massive mana stone, while Grace got leather armor tanned with alchemical reagents.
Of course, intermediate-tier equipment meant nothing to me, and Irene insisted on keeping her nun's habit for her pilgrimage through the Tower — so the two of us received magic tools instead. I got a purification device that worked roughly like an air purifier for the inn, and Irene got a temperature-maintenance unit so the children could stay warm through the winter.
Equipment and skill upgrades instead of cash? Not a bad deal.
I didn't say it out loud — it was a System thing — but on top of everything else, Hanna the mage seemed to have picked up a few extra skill points. I wasn't sure how it worked for other classes, but the game apparently treated boss kills as contributions to the Mage Tower and doled out benefits accordingly.
While I was half-glancing at the broadcast station's message board, our party sat gathered around a café table, chatting away. Since it was the day after we'd taken down the Full Moon Wolf, we'd followed Grace's suggestion and taken the day off, meeting up on the market street.
Adventuring was a profession where you staked your life on every fight. If you didn't rest when you could, you'd work yourself into the ground and drop dead. From a gamer's perspective, logging in every day and hunting every day turned into a seven-day workweek.
Seven days a week, three hundred sixty hours a month, no life insurance — what kind of insane schedule was that?
"But unlimited gate access?"
"The Mage Tower built that expensive gate for research purposes. Even without the Full Moon Wolf's byproducts, a spatial-transfer gate like that would cost more in materials alone than your average noble's estate."
"Yeah, it does seem like some serious magic."
Obviously, spatial-transfer gates weren't something you could knock together like a child's toy. Even for a mage, magic that skipped across space wasn't cheap or easy to use.
If gates were that simple to make, I would have just hopped one whenever I took a job out on the kingdom's outskirts. Gates connecting the kingdom's cities were rare to begin with, and the only people who could use them were high nobles and the big shots at the Mage Tower.
Opening one of those gates for unlimited use by a bunch of commoner adventurers was a massive privilege in itself. In a world with a class system, it meant they were folding us into the privileged class in place of cash.
"So starting tomorrow, we begin from the tenth floor? That's really nice."
Grace said, slurping her drink through a straw. Most people would be thrilled to skip the grasslands of floors one through nine, which barely paid anything. As long as the gate fees weren't a total rip-off, intermediate adventurers would use it a hundred percent of the time.
The mages would set a reasonable price if they had any sense — something the tenth-floor adventurers who made their living hunting Horned Wolves could actually afford. The idea was to make them think, I'd rather pay the Mage Tower a gate fee and spend that time hunting more Horned Wolves than walk nine floors on foot.
Of course, none of that applied to our party, who got to use it for free.
"By the way, what was that wolf, anyway?"
"Hm?"
"The Full Moon Wolf. A monster that suddenly appeared outside the Tower, leading a whole pack — that was a huge deal. Even if we did wrap it up a little too easily."
"Well… yeah."
Grace turned the conversation on me while I was lost in other thoughts. Looks like she still held a little grudge from the last time I'd teased her. What surprised me was Irene chiming in agreement. Grace seemed just as startled by Irene's support, her eyes going round as she looked at her.
Of course, the kindest, most timid Candidate Saint in the world wasn't disappointed because the adventure had ended too easily.
"As someone who took holy orders and set out on a path of hardship, I wonder if it was right for things to resolve so smoothly. But as a nun who has to care for people at the Temple, I'm glad the whole affair ended without anyone getting hurt. It's… a complicated feeling."
"Ah, is that so? Well, as long as nobody got hurt, that's what matters."
For the Temple's clergy, climbing the Tower was a kind of penance and pilgrimage. Where a Christian pilgrimage meant visiting places of religious significance, a pilgrimage in the Goddess's faith meant those who carried holy power going in person to places the Goddess's will did not reach.
When a religious adventure with that kind of meaning went so smoothly, of course it left you feeling a little empty. How to put it — like finding a shuttle bus running on an eight-hundred-kilometer pilgrimage you were supposed to walk on foot? And since that shuttle bus also saved lives and prevented further casualties, the feelings got even more tangled.
It was Hanna, of course, who soothed Irene as she fretted over a tiny cookie with a complicated look on her face. Afraid our precious five-star healer might start having second thoughts about adventuring, Hanna stopped mid-chew of her madeleine and quickly spoke up.
"Aww, but if you think of it as being able to spread the Goddess's will even further because it was resolved so easily, isn't that a good thing? Looking at it that way, you're allowed to be happy it went smoothly."
"That's true as well. Sister Hanna, you always know just the right thing to say."
Two rare beauties — one of them carefully wrapping her figure in modest clothes, but both of them lovely of face and form — sat smiling and chatting, and naturally, eyes began to gather. We were killing time in a café that sold desserts too expensive for the city's free citizens, where noble young ladies made up most of the clientele, when someone came up behind me and smacked the back of my head with an open palm.
"Hey, kid! Your tastes have changed a lot since I last saw you."
"……?"
Somewhere between rude and boisterous. The woman was so brazen about it that even my companions whipped their heads up in shock, staring as if to ask what on earth was going on. But the reason I was startled had nothing to do with the rudeness.
…I didn't notice her until she hit me?
She had strode straight across the café and walked right up behind me, and I hadn't sensed a thing. I wasn't a professional scout, but with this superhuman body of mine, I hadn't detected her until she smacked the back of my head?
I spun around in alarm, and looking down at me was a tall, long-limbed beauty. Her glossy red hair fell to her waist, though it jutted out in places like a beast's mane. Did I know anyone like this?
"…Who are you?"
"Huh? This bastard's gotten better at jokes since I last saw him. Back when you first climbed the Tower, you looked like a green recruit in a mercenary company — face like a funeral, sniveling the whole way."
"Wait — are you… Rebecca?"
"'Are you Rebecca'? What kind of line is that? Just Rebecca."
She dragged a chair over from the next table, sat down beside me like she owned the place, and casually snatched the iced coffee I'd been drinking, guzzling it down in big gulps. Watching her white teeth crunch through the ice like she was chewing meat, a single name finally surfaced.
Rebecca the mercenary — the one I'd parted ways with on the thirty-seventh floor, who should have been on the forty-third by now.
There was only one red-haired swordswoman skilled enough to approach me from behind without a sound. Her speech, her mannerisms, her personality — it was unmistakably Rebecca herself. But there was one reason I hadn't recognized her.
Rebecca had never been this beautiful.
"It's been a while. You've gotten even prettier."
"Came back to the city for the first time in ages and scrubbed the grime off. What, is big sis's face making your heart flutter a little?"
The way she lounged in the chair with her legs crossed was quite a sight. Unlike Grace and Irene, who still hadn't figured out the situation, Hanna sat with her mouth hanging open, frantically chatting with her viewers. Of course — she hadn't just gotten prettier. She'd gotten a star attached.
I already knew all sorts of people had become gacha characters with stars — from the neighborhood baker lady to Grace, who'd once been a scruffy slash-and-burn farmer's girl. But when the person in question was someone I'd known for years, it hit differently.
"Anyway, thinking of coming back into the Tower? I've been dying of boredom lately with no decent frontliners around."
"I won't be heading straight to the forty-third floor."
"Because of that beginner party you're raising? You even snagged yourself a priestess in that short time. Talented little bastard."
Rebecca smacked her lips with a look of mild regret. Thanks to her beautiful face, though, she came off more as free-spirited and bold than dirty and rude.
…Before she'd gotten a star as a gacha character, she'd been closer to a filthy wild animal. Inside the Tower's harsh conditions, her hair had been a tangled mess, and she hadn't washed properly, reeking of something close to beast-stench — practically a vagrant.
It was like a volunteer had washed a Seoul Station homeless man, cleaned him up, and turned him into a movie star.
"Um, and this person is…?"
"Me? I'm Rebecca. A woman who lived off the sword until she decided to climb the Tower for some real money."
She flashed Irene a grin wide enough to show her gums, then grabbed a fistful of my cookies and crunched them down. How to put it — it felt like a delinquent girl had crashed a group of model students. A sports-scholarship delinquent, at that.
Still, while she had no problem treating me roughly — I'd helped raise her in every way possible back when I was a novice adventurer — she apparently drew the line at being rude to a Temple priestess, because after plundering the coffee and cookies, she stopped.
"So, what about the forty-third floor? Why are you here?"
"Because of you, obviously. I heard you took down some rare Horned Wolf variant and opened a gate to the tenth floor of the Tower."
"Wait, what… the rumor reached the forty-third floor overnight?"
"This bastard really forgot everything after coming down from the Tower, huh. The old mage coot on the forty-third heard about an internal Tower gate and immediately started frothing at the mouth, screaming that we had to reverse course and head down. Word spread through the whole camp in no time."
Ah. So the old men must have bragged about it via crystal ball to the mage on the forty-third. Rebecca sprawled in her chair like a well-fed beast and opened her mouth again.
"So I came down to negotiate gate access for my people. Hey — if you're raising kids anyway, want to take one of mine and train them up?"