The Iron Rules of RPGs 3
A towering spire rose from the heart of the city, and around it the rest of the buildings clustered in a tight, jumbled press. There were tall structures that called themselves Magic Towers yet had long since abandoned any pretense of looking like one; lavish merchant-company halls; and the shoddily built workshops of the poor — a skyline without a scrap of architectural unity among them.
Which made sense, really. The original Tower had appeared on empty wasteland, and the city had grown up around it as people gathered one by one. Of course it looked like this.
The one mercy was that this "Tower" hadn't jabbed up out of the side of some brutal northern mountain range like a wafer stick jammed into a soft-serve cone. It had appeared on open plains near the temperate middle of the continent — good weather, good land — and that, as much as anything, was why a city had taken root here.
"This is the street where the alchemists' workshops are clustered, right?"
"That's right. You're more familiar with this place than I am by now, aren't you?"
"Well, yeah. I've been here plenty of times."
People had founded a Magic Tower to study the Tower. Mercenaries and adventurers had flocked in and built a guild. Merchants had gathered to sell those mercenaries and adventurers their supplies and formed a market. Craftsmen had appeared to buy up some of the byproducts that came out of the Tower —
And then the washouts, the ones who'd lost the competition between the Magic Tower's mages and the workshops on the main streets, had huddled together in a dim back alley, waiting for the day they might finally take flight.
Judging by looks alone, the place seemed less like an alchemists' quarter and more like the kind of alley where a thieves' guild and a pack of thugs would step out and deliver some tired old line — Hey, buddy, nice face you've got there~ or Hand over everything you've got! The girl too! — but unfortunately, no such event ever materialized.
Pull a stunt like that in a city of adventurers and some Aura user walking by might draw steel with a sharp You bastard!; a mage out for a stroll near the Magic Tower might decide you'd make a convenient teaching aid for a little magic practice; and there was always the chance some unhinged alchemist had planted something that went boom all over the alley. It was the same principle as gangsters not hanging around a meatpacking district.
"Heh, heh-heh… just the catalyst… if only the catalyst would come…"
"Oh Goddess, Goddess, Goddess, why does this even work, it was clearly broken?!"
"If I just finish this I can build my own workshop and take on apprentices fifty hours without sleep is no longer possible please."
Those were the eerie voices drifting into my ears as I walked alongside Han Se-ah, who was sneaking peeks at the minimap while I thought all this over. They seemed even worse off than the last time I'd been here. Something must have happened.
An alley that by rights should have been littered with nonfunctional scrap metal and botched reagents was, instead, strangely clean. Not that it was free of clutter so much as free of piled junk — the workshop walls were cracked with age, and the alley itself was thick with soot and scorch marks.
And on top of that, alchemists muttering like cult fanatics were staring at us with hollow eyes through dusty, broken windows, so fervently that I couldn't tell whether this was a date or a dungeon crawl.
In Heroes Chronicle terms, a name like [Market Street Rear — Alchemy Alley] didn't fit half as well as something like [Labyrinth — The Resentment of Fallen Alchemists].
"Ugh, ah, t-tattai…"
"Ugh, uu… Hero-nim?"
"Hero? Did someone say Hero-nim? Mage Hanna-nim?"
But the moment Han Se-ah strode confidently into that place, an alchemist who'd been sprawled in the alley like a drug addict fixed her with rolling, wild eyes.
Then, like zombies that had heard a human voice, the alchemists came shambling and staggering out into the alley. The windows were broken and the walls so thin they were cracked through, so apparently soundproofing was a complete non-factor.
I tensed, wondering what the gathering alchemists were about to do and whether I should step forward — and then they dropped flat onto the alley floor. Watching them fling themselves onto the sooty filth of the street as if some member of the royal family were passing by was enough to give me a headache.
"…Hanna. What… what is this situation?"
"Ah… they really don't need to go this far."
Judging purely by the spectacle, it looked as though the Queen of Alchemists herself had made an appearance. People in worn, shabby robes they'd tried to dress up with a coat of polish, their sparse hair slicked back with oil, came surging toward us in a crowd.
Their clothes were old and dirty, but you could tell they'd gone to some trouble to show a minimum of courtesy. The ones who couldn't even manage that much slipped back into their workshops of their own accord and peeked out through the windows with only their eyes showing. The whole scene was bizarre enough that the viewers' chat started rolling in.
They weren't being entirely serious, but the "Han Se-ah, Back-Alley Gangster" theory had already started circulating as if it were the most natural thing in the world. It didn't take long for that particular smear to fall apart, though.
One alchemist in a robe that was actually intact pushed through the crowd, ran out, and bowed at the waist.
"Welcome, Hero-nim! The bombs you ordered last time have all been prepared!"
Han Se-ah was neither a back-alley gangster nor the queen of some criminal syndicate. She had never turned off the stream for a surprise special and unified the underworld, and she had never partnered with the temple to oppress the backstreets' poor… well, the alchemists.
So what, exactly, was clearing the minds of alchemists who lived like broken wrecks who'd lost all reason, and making them bow their stiff, prideful necks even when they had no money?
"Heh, heh-heh. Hero-nim, about the payment you mentioned last time…"
"Ah, here you go."
"Thank you, thank you!"
Gold. Pure and simple.
Grace sent a portion of her earnings to her parents and otherwise spent nothing except on consumables like arrows. Irene's only luxury was buying snacks for the children at the temple. Katie, the precious jewel of a grand ducal house, treated the money she earned as an adventurer like a keepsake and just saved it up.
But Han Se-ah was the player. There was no reason for her to carefully hoard every gold coin she'd scraped together climbing from the 1st Floor to the 60th as living expenses or a nest egg for the rest of her life.
After all, game money in an RPG is practically designed to be a victim of inflation. You thriftily save up 1 gold on the 1st Floor, grind yourself raw for 10 gold on the 20th — and by the time you hit the 50th, you're picking up 30 gold off the side of the road. That's just how RPGs work, isn't it?
"H-how was my work?"
"I haven't gotten to use that many of them, but the ones I did use really packed a punch. Felt great, honestly."
"Heh, heh-ha-ha-ha, heh-hee-hik, heh-het — thank you!"
Han Se-ah had needed somewhere to spend her gold. As the world-rank #1 player who'd cleared every quest without a single failure and nailed every NPC time attack, she'd been handed all her equipment for free.
And the gear the Magic Tower provided wasn't some common trash rolling around the market streets — it felt more like solid green-tier value pieces or reliable blue-tier performance items. There was no reason to dump her entire fortune hunting for purple-grade gear.
So naturally Han Se-ah had gone looking for something other than equipment to spend gold on, and if not equipment, then consumables —
"So, about that — can you boost the firepower a bit more?"
"Th-the firepower was insufficient?"
"It wasn't insufficient, exactly. Just in case."
"I'll do my best."
With Irene in the party, nobody ever got hurt, so in Han Se-ah's mind the only consumables worth buying were the ones meant for offense. That had become common sense.
Is this… a date?
The viewers and I both had a few minor objections on that point, but anyway.
"Explosives — explosives are my specialty!"
"Not just simple explosions — how about traps that mix a variety of attributes?"
"Please take a look at this multi-purpose projectile launcher I invented!"
An alchemist who'd received Han Se-ah's praise puffed up his shoulders, stuck his nose in the air, and strutted off down the alley with a series of self-satisfied ahem-ahems before vanishing into his own workshop. Looking closer, his workshop — unlike the ones right next to it — had thick walls, clean windows, and was a new building free of cracks and age.
Just as the Magic Tower cut her commission fees out of respect for the title of Hero, and the Adventurers' Guild accepted her requests at vaguely favorable rates, the alchemists apparently got the same boost from riding the Hero's name.
Then again, even in modern society it was well established how useful celebrity marketing could be, so this was only natural.
"So, Roland — what do you think of this?"
"What even is that."
I was thinking all this over and looking around when Han Se-ah turned to me for my opinion, the way a woman might ask about a new shade of makeup or a dress she'd just tried on.
What she was holding, however, was neither pretty nor cute.
"This is a sticky scatter bomb. It's an evolved version of the adhesive arrowheads Grace unnie shoots. If you nail the max range right, it spreads over roughly a five-meter area, and they say it can pin down something the size of a centaur so it can't move at all."
"Ah… right."
"And this is a freeze grenade launcher. Max range of about fifty meters, and depending on the round you load, it can lay down ice over roughly ten meters. Wider area and longer range than the sticky stuff, but weaker performance, apparently."
Eyes sparkling, Han Se-ah insisted that after topping up her firepower she also needed to top up her CC tools.
Thanks to that, the viewers were starting to clutch their heads over whether this counted as a date — and from further back down the alley, Grace, Irene, and Katie, who'd been secretly watching us, were staring with equally round, incredulous eyes.
If she'd planned this on purpose, she was a genuine streaming genius. And if she hadn't…