Black Mage Clichés 4
Our hero party's objectives on the 60th Floor could, broadly speaking, be divided into three.
The first was, of course, taking down the boss monster. Now that we were finally approaching the 60th Floor, mercenaries and adventurers with the mindset of "Something as dangerous as a boss monster should be the hero's job, right?" had started to show up.
But flip that around, and it also meant there were people thinking, "If I take that thing down, I'll get hero-tier money and fame…!" and getting greedy. Kill a boss monster and free Magic Tower gate passes, equipment support, and non-monetary rewards from the temples and the kingdom all came pouring down — so of course they did.
Which meant that if I strutted around calling myself a hero and let my guard down, some top-tier adventurer party popping out of nowhere, or an elite mercenary hired by an Imperial apprentice commander whose eyes had rolled back at the thought of glory, could snatch the last hit right out from under me.
The second objective was securing research samples from the 60th Floor and sending them to the Magic Tower.
"Capturing goblins alive, huh. Should be doable if we just keep their hands off those belts, right?"
"Aim for the armpits or wrists and disable their arms — that should work."
As Katie's sharp observation pointed out, the monster army's weapons had started leaning more and more toward explosives. Variant monsters made by a black mage using bombs as their main weapon — what kind of hybrid abomination was that supposed to be? Then again, a mad mage doubling as a mad alchemist was a pretty common occurrence in this world.
Just look at Han Se-ah: mage (secondary class alchemist, inventory holding twenty-five-plus varieties of bombs). Whether black mage or regular mage, one corner of their brain had gone completely off the rails — that much I could guarantee under the name of Roland, eleven-year veteran of fantasy.
"So we capture goblins alive whenever possible, and if that doesn't work out, we at least snatch those belts off their waists?"
"Even if we grab the belts, won't they just disappear when the goblin dies?"
"You never know. They're organized like an army — maybe the belts are issued as separate supplies."
"And Grace, if you spot an ogre during scouting, report it as top priority."
"Got it, Hanna. I want to enhance my bow too, after all."
And the third objective was hunting the frenzy ogre — the one we'd killed exactly once and never seen again.
An ogre that could be traded in for a rare enhancement stone was showing its face so rarely that calling it a named monster was underselling it; unique monster felt more accurate at this point. We should have finished farming Special Enhancement Stones below the 50th Floor before moving into Season 2, and now we were paying the price for not doing so.
Katie had slapped a single Special Enhancement Stone called Winter Fragment onto her longsword, and the ice-attribute aura that used to apply Slow had evolved into Freezing. Of course the viewers who'd played a few games in their lives had their eyes spinning in their sockets.
No, seriously — a passive that applied Slow evolved into full action lock?!
Wasn't the biggest rush you got out of an RPG the gear high? That feeling when one successful enhancement changed the number of digits on your damage, let you farm monsters you couldn't touch before, and hung a whole string of bonus effects you never had?
But that gear high was reserved for Katie alone. The other players still didn't seem to have farmed any Special Enhancement Stones. I didn't know what second-place Kim Seok-hyun was up to, but it looked like he'd unlocked regular enhancement without cracking open special enhancement yet.
Thanks to all that, if you opened the Heroes Chronicle Gallery, Han Se-ah had been ousted from the gallery master seat, reinstated, ousted again — absolute chaos.
She'd progressed too fast without enhancing anything, so they forced her to step down. But Elven Noona Grace was hot, so they reinstated her. Playing favorites by only enhancing the brat was annoying, so they ousted her again. But the brat getting excited waving her sword around was cute, so they reinstated her once more…
Even in the minor galleries — the Han Se-ah Gallery where fans from her old gaming and fitness streaming days gathered, the Hero Hanna Gallery that only talked about her Heroes Chronicle broadcasts, and so on — Special Enhancement Stones kept coming up nonstop.
"Boss monster scouting, goblin capture, ogre hunting. We'll move with those priorities in that order."
"Ogre hunting ranks lower than goblin capture?"
"We can't go looking for ogres. We can't just ignore everything else and run around trying to hunt one."
"Yeah, fair point."
Once the strategy meeting — inundated with countless invisible tips from the viewers — wrapped up, everyone nodded as if they understood. Honestly, calling it a strategy meeting was generous; it was just stating the painfully obvious before dinner.
"All right, shall we have dinner, everyone? Line up and take your portions in order."
"Aigoo, always so grateful!"
Right on cue, Irene stood smiling with a ladle in hand before a pot of soup bubbling away, while the Ice Cross Knights received their portions with both hands held out respectfully. Just the fact that they were eating a hot, delicious soup instead of hard biscuits softened with spit was enough to keep the corners of their mouths from dropping.
Well, even I — who still retained some modern palate — and Han Se-ah, a modern person simply used to MSG, found Irene's soup delicious. Compared to those rock-hard brick biscuits made for preservation or the cheap jerky that smelled faintly of mold, it was a genuine delicacy. People being people, stuffing yourself with good food and getting a proper rest was always going to put you in a better mood.
The human heart has a reputation for being complicated, but it also has some fairly simple, universal traits.
If you can fill your belly with delicious food instead of garbage, your mood improves regardless of age or gender. Conversely, if something disgusting wanders around in front of you reeking to high heaven, your mood tanks in an instant.
"Ugh, the smell."
"Why the hell are those bastards suddenly out on the grasslands."
"Corpse soldiers… is that it? What a truly horrific thing to do. Hardly something one can tolerate."
As if goblin suicide bombers weren't enough, the 60th Floor had added a zombie legion. Zombie soldiers crafted without regard for species — human, goblin, orc, and everything in between.
No special abilities to speak of. For zombies, they were packed tight in armor and shields, shambling around in dense clusters at a crawl — which gave them the distinct feel of an upgraded goblin infantry. Literally just meat shields with nothing else going for them.
Orc grenadiers had started using catapults. Orc hunters used heavy bows and ballistae. The centaurs either gained stealth or bulked up in size, splitting into light and heavy cavalry. So after enough experiments, the goblin infantry either became variant suicide bombers or zombies?
…Yeah, typical treatment for the bottom-feeders of the fantasy ecosystem. Everyone else got better tools or evolved abilities. The goblin infantry just got recycled.
Of course it wasn't only goblin zombies, but from a game-design perspective, that was the vibe.
"Looking at how they're walking, they're probably heading back to base. Not sure if the zombies are roaming on their own, or if the other monsters already got cleaned up by adventurers."
"Or they could be chasing enemies at that glacial pace."
"Haha, even a yeti that froze to death up north would be faster than that."
"Yetis freeze to death?"
"It's a figure of speech for someone that stupid, Hero."
Wounds deep enough to show bone. Maggots boiling in the flesh. A stench spreading under sunlight that beat down twenty-four hours a day. A grotesque spectacle that took grasslands more beautiful than most tourist destinations and ruined them in an instant.
Even the way they lurched along at a crawl was enough to gently furrow everyone's brows. Irene, who served the Goddess of Life, went well past "gently" — her face twisted hard enough that "crumpled" would have been fair. She was furious.
Of course, her usual expression was so soft that even a full-on glare of rage came off less threatening and more like a puppy growling at its owner in irritation — cute, if anything. Still, seeing the normally gentle Irene react this intensely was rare.
Irene looked ready to dump holy power on them that very second. And the Ice Cross Knights, still riding the goodwill of a good meal, drew their swords and prepared for combat without hesitation. No matter how foul-smelling and filthy the things were, and no matter that dozens of them were clumped together, you didn't turn tail in front of a nun of the Goddess Church.
"Damn it, thinking about it — there aren't dozens of zombies hanging around the safe zones, right? That'd make resting pretty uncomfortable."
"We're inside the Tower, though. Kill them and the corpse residue and the stench should disappear too, right?"
I raised my mace and shield and charged forward, and Irene's emergency barrier wrapped around me without a second's hesitation. She was so worked up she'd even forgotten my request not to put it on me — I needed the reflected damage for my build.
Trailing behind came Oleg and Alissa, grumbling about corpse disposal. The zombies were so slow that when I glanced back, Oleg and Alissa, Katie and the knights following them — all of them — were glowing under the protection of holy power.
Seeing that, I poured holy power into my mace instead of aura and put some force behind it, just to help lift Irene's mood. I was still a walking tanker with no elemental damage to speak of, but matching the vibe felt like the right call.
Twenty-six aura users fully armed with holy power and aura.
Rotting goblin zombies armed with shields and armor.
The result of that matchup was so one-sided that describing it would have been a waste of time.
CRUNCH——!!!
And then — BOOM!