The Giant of the Grasslands 3
Catch the ogres!
How?
With money!
At first glance, Han Se-ah's proposal might have sounded absurd, and a few of her viewers were already fretting over the cost of commissioning magic tools under the Hero Party's name, hiring people to capture the beasts alive, and then storing and handling Named-class monsters.
But those worries were premature. Our party carried a coin purse fat enough to live up to the name of a Hero Party.
Unless we were trying to gather hundreds of Frenzied Ogres and forge an entire ogre legion, we had just enough gold to make it work — if only barely.
"Think we can pull it off?"
"Hmm. We haven't spent much until now, so if we treat it as an investment for clearing the 60th Floor, it should be fine."
After all, our party earned like top-tier adventurers but almost never spent a coin, so of course the gold had piled up.
To explain: we set aside roughly half of every gold haul from our adventures as party common funds. The remaining half was split five ways, one share per head. If a single adventure netted ten gold, five went into savings and each of us took one gold home.
But once we became top-tier adventurers, our earnings soared into the dozens of gold — and with no one in the party actually spending anything, that gold simply sat there and accumulated.
First, Grace. Coming from a rural village, she sent a few gold home to her parents and covered the cost of alchemical arrowheads, and beyond that she never spent a single coin. Jewelry, bracelets, gems — she had zero interest in luxury goods of any kind.
Next, Irene. True to her calling as a temple sister, she put money toward donations for orphans and offerings to the Goddess Church, and never once spent gold on her own desires. Like Grace, the only ornament she wore was a single religious necklace stamped with the Goddess Church's symbol. That said it all.
And Katie — she was openly the pampered second daughter of a northern grand ducal house… but her tastes ran not to dresses and jewels but to armor and longswords. A full-blown military maniac. She spent more than the rest of us, relatively speaking, but next to our earnings it was a drop in the ocean.
Han Se-ah, being a game player, did burn through some gold making bombs and the like — but she used her personal funds, not the party's common purse. As for me, I'd spent eleven years saving up for a house and land. There was no way my expenses outstripped my income.
The only real drain on the common funds was buying Grace's alchemical arrowheads. Early on I'd covered the lodging myself, and later we'd acquired a mansion through player privileges. That said everything.
Clothing — equipment. Food — consumables. Shelter — lodging. All three categories, clean. Nowhere for the money to go.
"Have we really saved up that much gold?"
"We've saved a lot, sure, but more than that — we've barely had anything to spend it on. The Magic Tower covered our gear, the Kingdom covered our consumables, and for lodging we ended up with two whole mansions. What was there to pay for? I'm not joking — outside of meal money, our party's common funds almost never got touched."
"Ah… now that you mention it, that does make sense."
In ratio terms: earn a hundred gold, bank fifty, split ten gold each — and of those fifty in the common pot, forty-eight were still sitting there, while each person's private gold had maybe three left over.
It was like someone pulling in ten million won a month, a hundred-million-a-year salary, and living on three hundred thousand a month. House under the parents' name, living expenses subsidized by hundreds of thousands more every month — of course the entire salary just vanishes straight into the bank account.
When an adventurer who clears dozens of gold in a single haul treats a few dozen silver's worth of grain sacks and ten-silver cuts of meat as the height of luxury, how could the gold not pile up? The hundreds of gold coins nestled neatly in a corner of the inventory gave a soft clink, and everyone's eyes went round.
"Mmm. We really have saved more than I thought."
"Well, our gear came as rewards for hunting boss monsters, so there was never anything to buy."
"I'd heard that most adventurers spend years saving just to replace their equipment. We had a lot of help from the Magic Tower… and from the princess, didn't we?"
None of us were particularly greedy, so when it came time to settle accounts I just did a rough tally and dumped everything into Han Se-ah's inventory. Personal shares got handed out, sure, but a gold pouch this heavy was something most of them had never seen in their lives. Of course they were shocked.
Ah — Katie the duke's daughter had probably seen the real thing when she raided the family vault.
There's a saying about striking while the iron is hot, and another about how Koreans do everything ppalli-ppalli — hurry, hurry.
The Hero was going to buy adventurers with money, capture Named-class monsters alive, and hurl them at the boss. What viewer wouldn't get excited about a plan like that?
The plan was set, the funds confirmed sufficient — and the very next day, without a shred of hesitation, we decided to leave the Tower. No matter how impatient we felt, there was no reason to force a sleepless night march under a sun that wasn't even up yet.
Han Se-ah's broadcast has begun!
HanSe-ah_Ah lmao the ogres are all dead █▬▬ ◟(`ﮧ´ ◟ )
Instead, the moment we opened our eyes and crawled out of our sleeping bags — the moment she logged into the game and flipped on the stream — we were leaving the grasslands behind.
The viewers' heat hadn't cooled one degree overnight, even after a full night spent in the sleeping bags we'd managed to protect through the ogre rampage. Han Se-ah herself had lit that fire under them in the first place, and she was just as hyped as they were. There was no way a single night would put that out.
I'd cut my sleep short and checked the internet before dawn, and the cyber phantoms were still wide awake, thrashing around in the comments of her ended stream, talking about nothing else.
"Well, good morning! Look at you all pouring in first thing — someone's got expectations, huh? Sure, we haven't even left the Tower yet, but you all know what we're about to do, right?"
"Exactly. Not sure how many gold each one will cost, but for now I'm thinking ten. How do I put it — five feels like too few, and more than ten feels like an impossible goal? With this kind of thing, you just feel like the number has to land clean, you know?"
While the Ice Cross Knights finished their night watch and came back to break down the sleeping bags, Irene — with Grace's help — set a pot of soup to boil.
Fresh potato soup, restocked not long ago from the merchant caravan, bubbled and sent a savory steam curling up to tickle the nose. The knights moved in crisp formation, packing tents and bedrolls, stowing their magical kit, then lining up for Irene's soup — and through all of it, Han Se-ah kept chattering away without a pause.
Her eyes were sparkling almost as brightly as they did when she was blowing monsters apart with bombs. A thought crossed my mind unbidden.
Has this girl gotten a little tired of the same combat loop over and over?
"Alright, everyone, dig in! We're heading outside the Tower today anyway."
"Ah — in that case, might I trouble you for one more bowl?"
"Hey, Captain! You start stuffing yourself and can't even run, we're leaving you behind."
"…I don't eat that much no matter how hungry I am!"
"Oleg! What do you think you're doing in front of food?!"
I accepted a bowl of the fragrant soup and watched Oleg get ribbed by one of his knights, only to be physically restrained by Alissa — and through all of it, Han Se-ah's lips never stopped moving.
She must have logged out, cut the stream, and stayed up half the night drafting plans, because from the moment the pot came out to the last bite of that lavish breakfast of soup, bread, and jerky, she didn't exchange a single word with the party. She talked only to her viewers, nonstop.
Which was why Irene, tidying up afterward, inevitably drifted over to me with a worried look on her face.
"Um… Roland?"
"What's up, Irene?"
Grace had heard Han Se-ah's plan the night before and was already out front, senses sharpened, scouting the return path for any ogres. Katie, fired up by the talk of capturing Frenzied Ogres, was pestering Alissa about whether the Empire had ever tried capturing a monster wave, fishing for war stories.
But Irene had spent the whole morning — boiling soup, serving breakfast — orbiting Han Se-ah like a worried little satellite, and at last she reached out and gently tugged my sleeve, her face full of concern.
"Hanna seems to have been deep in thought since she woke up. There isn't some problem with the party, is there? If she has something she can't tell us and she's fretting over it alone…"
Those gentle golden eyes darkened with worry, and a whole lot of nonsense rose right up to the tip of my tongue. What I wanted to say, right then and there, was: Hanna's just busy milking her viewers for info and donations, so don't worry about it.
Obviously I couldn't say that. So I soothed Irene's fretting by gently taking the small, soft hand that had caught my sleeve, and smiled. The warm, squirming little heat of her palm against mine tugged the corner of my mouth up all on its own.
"Don't worry. Hanna's probably just running the ogre-capture plan through her head over and over, revising and refining it. She hasn't talked much this morning, sure — but she doesn't look like she's struggling."
"Is that so? I suppose you're right."
"Of course. If Hanna had something weighing on her, she'd tell us for sure. We're a party, after all. No reason to worry alone."
Hands folded together, talking quietly — and that was when the camera finally swung our way. Even if she was using the ogre-capture plan as bait for donations and building strategy off overnight posts from the fan café and Hick Gallery, three solid hours of the same topic was about the limit. Of course the lens would wander.
From last night until now, the ogre bait had been running for nearly half a day. Viewers starting to tire of it naturally turned their attention to Maman, whose hand was still firmly held in mine.
"Well then… um, Roland?"
"Yeah?"
"Just in case… would you go give Hanna a big hug?"
……Huh?
And the chat window, for an entirely different reason, burst into flames.