The Legion of the 60th Floor, Part 2
A blood-soaked man spurred his horse across the grasslands. Even the mount beneath him bore a long, ragged gash across its rump where a massive orc longbow arrow had clipped it — and it kept galloping, blood gushing in thick pulses, until at last it toppled sideways and went down hard.
The man, drenched in blood that might have been the horse's or his own, tumbled across the dirt of the plains. Blood, soil, and shredded grass clung to him in a filthy mess until he looked like a walking scarecrow of turf — a gore-soaked horror doll — yet even with twisted, broken legs he refused to stop moving.
Running, rolling, falling, crawling — by the time you saw him like that, the man was a wreck. An arrow had hit him, and he hadn't even had time to pull it free; the broken shaft was still driven deep into the body that had been tumbling across the grass.
"What—what is this?!"
"Brother! You said the Demon King?!"
Fortunately, this was right in front of the 60th Floor gate. A priest from a passing adventurer party came sprinting over, and more priests who had borrowed a supply caravan's wagon to come offer prayers rushed in as a group.
Irene, startled, stretched out her hands. Her healing was inefficient, but the sheer overwhelming volume of holy power began to cradle the man's wounds in a soft glow — and the priests who had come running at the commotion refined that power into precise, careful treatment.
Even so, the blood he'd scattered across the plains wasn't coming back anytime soon. His face was deathly pale. Supported by a priest and still receiving treatment, the man refused to stop moving and came straight toward us.
Toward the Hero, that is.
"H-Hero! Hero!"
"Yes. What is it?"
A man so hideously wounded that it hurt just to look at him came running up on a leg bent sideways — maybe that was enough to put her on edge. Even after hearing about a boss monster, Han Se-ah answered in a stiff, rigid voice.
Whatever her reaction, the man clearly knew the Hero party's description. He ran straight to us and began babbling in a frantic jumble.
Empire. Commander. Mercenary tactics. Rookie. Centaurs. Stealth. Ambush. Encirclement. Annihilation—
"Hmm. Looks like he's in psychological shock as well."
"Still, I can roughly piece together what he's saying. And what the Demon King's forces are up to."
"For real? You can tell from just that, Roland?"
Beyond the physical injuries, the mental trauma had hit him hard. Words tumbled over each other in a mess, and the sequence of events came out scrambled, thrashing around like a drowning man. Looking at his clothes, he wasn't an adventurer or a mercenary, and he wasn't an Imperial trainee commander either. No spare fat, but no real muscle either, and no mana signature like a mage — call him a civilian who'd done a bit of exercise.
Probably some kind of clerk assigned to evaluate the Empire's trainee commanders.
"A mid-boss that can move freely between floors climbed the Tower and hitched itself to the 60th Floor's boss monster. And now they're gathering in one place and hunting humans like livestock for slaughter."
"Hunting like slaughter? Why?"
"To hide information as thoroughly as possible."
Even so, if you took the jumbled words he'd spat out and fitted them as best you could against game knowledge, a rough story took shape.
A black-mage-type mid-boss was smart enough to modify monsters. With free movement between floors, what it chose wasn't to go down — it climbed to the 60th Floor and joined the boss monster's army.
And whether they were plotting something or panicking at Han Se-ah's absurdly fast clear speed, they had barricaded the gate. Now, against the humans who had finally reached the 60th Floor, they had started cutting them down piece by piece to buy time — sending stealth centaurs in the direction humans were coming from, setting ambushes, fully surrounding parties, wiping them out, and abducting survivors.
This wasn't a world with cell phones or radios. Communication magic tools existed, but it wasn't a world where every adventurer carried one and spammed posts on the Adventurer Gallery. So even if an encirclement succeeded and an entire party vanished, no one would notice until weeks later, when the food-supply schedule brought them into contact with a caravan.
"I don't know the reason, but they're running a massive military organization while still trying to hide information and stall for time as hard as they can."
"So when the centaur unit spots the enemy, they cut off the retreat with stealth. Then they send exploding zombies out like bait to lure them in, surround them, and wipe them out."
That also explained why there had been no word of the boss monster. A centaur's detection ability was on par with a 5-star archer. If a party's scout was only 4-star, they'd already be surrounded before they ever noticed the army — and even a 5-star scout wouldn't immediately shout "run" the moment they saw the enemy, so they'd never spot the stealth centaurs either.
The direction the blood-soaked man had ridden from was northeast. Ironically, that was the direction the largest number of Imperial commanders had headed.
The 60th Floor gate became a hive of activity in an instant.
The reason was obvious — news of the boss monster's appearance. People who had quietly slipped down through the gate had sold the information to other adventurers as fast as their feet would carry them.
It would still take time for word to reach the harpy city and the Adventurer Guild on the 50th Floor, but if anyone had sprinted full-tilt for the safe zone around the gate, people would start gathering soon. The ones arriving now had come from the 59th Floor; before long, people from the 58th, 57th, and 56th would be climbing up as well.
"Hanna. The magic tool?"
"Use it right here?"
"The moment they spot us, they'll either try to surround and devour us or open a full frontal war. Now that we know their position, linking up with Charlotte here is the right call."
"Ah, right. You said the stealth centaurs are blocking the roads."
So what we needed to do was take the ogres from Charlotte and push northeast immediately. At my explanation, Han Se-ah pulled a crystal orb from her inventory and poured mana into it without a second of hesitation.
I liked that about her — she didn't drag things out like some cancerous streamer or a dental-sponsor stalling act. She was sharp and quick.
Charlotte, for her part, had good instincts and a working brain relative to her combat power, so she'd understand what a signal from the gate entrance meant. She'd figure something had happened on the 60th Floor and come. Which left us with one job.
"Hanna. Gather people."
"Gather people?"
"If idiots go charging out on their own and get wiped by the army, those bastards might use the corpses as sacrifices for whatever they're cooking up."
"Ahh — so whatever they're preparing, if bodies start piling up, it helps them?"
"Exactly. The guy who just arrived was ranting about the Demon King, so put Irene front and center and rally as many adventurers and mercenaries as you can. We can't stop every lone wolf, but most of them will respect the Temple's authority and the Hero's reputation enough to fall in line."
It was insurance against trolling we couldn't predict.
People who turned human lives into black-magic crystals were stalling for time. That meant they weren't planning to come at us like a normal army in open war — they had some scheme, some magical stunt in the works.
If the Magic Tower people brought the ogres, it would be half a day at best, a full day at worst. A single day's delay wouldn't put a dent in Han Se-ah's ultra-fast clear pace — but the moment the human variable entered the equation, everything changed.
Say some spoiled young-master commander, loaded down with self-defense magic tools, ordered a charge for glory, and pure coincidence plus Han Se-ah's rotten luck triggered some magical incident. What if they pulled an event trigger we didn't even know existed?
"I—I understand, Roland. If there's anything I can do…!"
"I'm counting on you, Irene."
She must have found my reasoning convincing. She nodded, firmly curling her delicate hands into fists. From the black-magic crystals made of ground-up people to the Imperial clerk who had barely crawled out with catastrophic wounds — her fury toward the Demon King was burning hot as she stepped slowly forward.
Matching her, Han Se-ah used Earth Control to raise stairs and a platform. Watching her invent an idea I hadn't even thought of and put Irene in the spotlight in seconds left me speechless.
An Imperial official who had screamed about the Demon King's army before fainting from blood loss and was now being treated. Clergy clustering and murmuring. Adventurers and mercenaries who had slipped through the gate at speed and were watching for cues. And in the middle of it all, a beautiful nun climbing a mound of earth that rose nearly three meters high.
"Everyone—"
Had she picked up a few tips from Laurencia, the Candidate Saint who had freed slaves in the harpy city-state? As the murmuring crowd's eyes gathered on her, what Irene did was very simple.
She didn't remove her nun's veil to reveal her beauty. She didn't raise a voice thick with pathos either—
"O-ohhh… holy power of this magnitude…"
"As expected of the Hero party's nun. At this level, you ought to call her a Saintess."
—she simply flooded the area with raw holy power.
High on the raised platform, a golden-haired nun who looked like a goddess poured out holy power until it overflowed. She looked like a statue of the Goddess carved from pure light — or, from another angle, like a towering pillar of sacred power driven into the earth.
All she was doing was radiating holy power outward, yet the sight was sacred and holy in equal measure. At Irene's majestic presence, the mouths of the people who had been murmuring nearby fell open.
"Right now, we stand before the Demon King's wicked host. They desecrate the noble lives granted by the Goddess, make corpses walk, and use human beings as materials for black magic."
Overflowing holy power made her veil flutter, and beneath it her beautiful golden hair cascaded down like a waterfall. Drawn by that radiant figure, the mercenaries and adventurers who had been lingering and reading the room drifted closer, mouths hanging open.
And mine and Hanna's mouths fell open too.
"So I ask you all. Do you desire a holy war? To halt the flood of evil — do you wish to take part in a crusade more united and more just than any before?"
Because under the name of a Candidate Saint, a total war called a holy war was about to begin.
I've seen this speech somewhere on the internet before… haven't I?