The Giant of the Grasslands 2
The ogre, its limbs sheared clean off, thrashed about on its remaining left leg until the bleeding finally overcame it and it collapsed into a magic stone. The centaur stealth unit that had been lurking nearby was already dead — crushed under the ogre's rampage.
They'd scored a named-grade magic stone and dozens of ordinary ones without anything resembling a real fight, and yet Han Se-ah's face refused to brighten. Of course it wouldn't. Right before that ogre showed up, she'd been ranting to her viewers about bugs and glitches and every other excuse under the sun, insisting the game was broken and she was the victim.
"No, but this is — only now — haah…"
Its body, amplified from nine meters to ten, had thrashed across the ground like a broken-down truck, gushing blood with enough force to shatter the earth — but mercifully, every drop of blood scattered in all directions had gathered itself neatly back into magic stones.
What ended up in Han Se-ah's inventory: one named-grade magic stone and twelve pale-violet ones. The centaurs' stones had been flung who-knows-where by the ogre's thrashing, and there was no practical way to track them down.
Even so, under the concentrated fire of her viewers, Han Se-ah's face still wouldn't lighten up.
"No, but I just can't believe this. So you're telling me ogres were everywhere? Like, on the 59th Floor we already passed through, some little ogre was sitting on a fort somewhere, doing goblin mukbangs and chewing magic stones and spitting them out, and on the 58th Floor it was stomping landmines like they were shooting-star candy and dancing around? And I just didn't see them because I was unlucky?"
Han Se-ah's misfortune was, of course, her viewers' delight. The karmic debt of half a day's whining had walked right up from across the grasslands on its own two feet — there was no way the chat was going to let this opportunity slip.
In an instant, hundreds of messages starting with "No, but—" flooded past. Truly vicious cyber-specters, as if they'd memorized every single line of Han Se-ah's monologue from morning to evening, each one spinning out its own variation.
Since Heroes Chronicle ran in real time, Han Se-ah's stream was a life-consuming broadcast that started around 9 a.m. and wrapped up late at night. Put another way — some of those viewers had been logging her lines for eleven straight hours, from nine in the morning to eight at night.
…Yeah. The demons that latch onto internet streamers — especially female ones — are genuinely terrifying.
"You got all the magic stones?"
"The centaurs that were heading back look like they've all been cleaned up too. Want to sweep the area? Feels wasteful to leave the ones that got flung around."
"If you're going to, no solo wandering. …Hey, Oleg! I said no solo actions!"
While Han Se-ah sat perched on the wooden barricade, getting thoroughly roasted with her inventory freshly stocked, the Ice Cross Knights — already on break — were horsing around trying to scavenge even one more magic stone.
The sight of noble-born kids digging through dirt for magic stones was pretty ridiculous, but then again, guys with their buddies will find fun in any stupid thing they do.
Naturally, the knights started a bet over who could collect the most stones for extra soup rations. Oleg, of course, ignored the no-solo-action order and bolted off alone — and Alissa, unable to leave him to his own devices, scrambled after him.
On one side, the bleak tragedy of an internet streamer under crossfire from cyber-specters. On the other, a love comedy so cliché it bordered on old-fashioned. The contrast was unreal.
"What are you doing, Hanna?"
"Ah, Roland."
The chat cascading up the screen was enough to make anyone dizzy. She was getting hit harder than usual, and for some reason she wasn't even mounting a counterattack — so I approached out of concern. She looked up at me.
…But her face wasn't gloomy or irritated the way I'd expected. If anything, her eyes were sparkling as she earnestly worked through some thought.
I was still wearing a what the hell is going on expression when Grace and Katie lightly hopped up onto the barricade. Glancing back, I saw Irene carefully folding the sleeping bags Han Se-ah had pulled out earlier — and of course she wasn't just tidying her own. She was doing the whole party's and the knights' as well.
"What? What's going on?"
"I've got something to think through. …Roland, I've got a question for you."
She shot one more glance at the viewers, who remained completely unmoved by Irene's Maman energy, then looked at me with a grin that said go on, ask.
"The ogre — if we capture it alive, could we use it as a weapon?"
"…What?"
In the middle of a roasting storm that would have left a fragile person emotionally scarred, Han Se-ah had been thinking this:
Wait. If a frenzied ogre fights a monster army, isn't that a classic enemy-of-my-enemy, fisherman's-profit free win?
At this point, she really was a streaming genius.
Toxic chatters getting purged by the A.I. for crossing the line in their excitement, stalker-tier viewers who'd recorded and memorized every word she'd said from morning to night just to roast her with it — and the only thing on her mind was a game-cheese strategy.
Anyway, streaming-genius, mental-fortress Han Se-ah had suddenly landed on that idea. Boss monsters with legion gimmicks weren't going to be cleaned up easily by a handful of knights, so why not bump ogre-hunting to top priority?
Ogres weren't the kind of thing you found just by looking, and Han Se-ah herself had only discovered two so far — but she had her reasons for thinking this way.
"A device for finding and capturing these ogres — if we commission the Magic Tower with the party funds we've saved up so far, wouldn't that be doable?"
"Hmm, not a bad idea. If the mages can put it together quickly, it'd be really effective."
"That would also mean fewer adventurers and knights getting hurt, right? I think it's a good plan."
Her faith that the Magic Tower could pull it off was thoroughly well-founded.
After all, even with the system's assistance, the Magic Tower's mages were the ones mass-producing spatial-transfer gates for climbing the Tower on a weekly basis. Could people like that really fail to capture a big, sturdy, muscle-brained monster with zero special abilities?
And she had one more reason for thinking about live capture — a commission from a certain mage that she'd only looked at and never accepted.
"Plus, the mages put out a capture commission before because they wanted ogres as test subjects. We didn't take it since we were busy converting enhancement stones in the underground city, but… thinking about it differently, they only posted the commission because they already had a capture method, right?"
"That tracks."
"There's no way the mages would just demand we bring one in without having a way to catch it."
The more Han Se-ah talked, the more Grace and Katie nodded along, agreeing that it actually made sense. I also figured her idea wasn't baseless nonsense, so I just listened in silence.
By this point, even the viewers who'd been hard at work roasting Han Se-ah and composing variations on the Ani-ciating anthem were starting to get interested. The idea of hurling a ten-meter-tall lunatic giant into an enemy army — what game-stream audience was going to pass on that? Named-grade monster horde versus a boss monster? Pure content gold.
Before long, the public opinion that had been roasting Han Se-ah had smoothly pivoted to the ogre-versus-army bait. Chat messages mocking her terrible luck had already vanished from the window.
"So we capture as many ogres as possible — or even put out an ogre-capture commission under our own name for other adventurers if we have to. Then we use them for the boss monster hunt, convert the magic stones from the dead ones into enhancement stones, and hand any survivors over to the Magic Tower for research."
Catch the ogres. Crush the ogres, crush the boss, crush the enhancement stones, crush the boss clear rewards. A strange gleam of mania seemed to glitter in Han Se-ah's eyes as she laid it all out.
Who said she wasn't a mage?