The Legion of the 60th Floor 3
Irene is Maman.
Her personality sits at the complete opposite end of the spectrum from Grace—playful, proactive, always steering the conversation—and from Katie, whose boyish hobbies revolve around swords and knighthood and who throws herself into every fight with the same knightly fervor. Irene is quiet by nature, her every movement soft and overflowing with consideration. Like any true cleric, she serves from the rear with pure devotion, the steadfast big sister who always has her party members’ backs—whether in daily life or the moment combat begins. Put kindly, she is the ultimate supporter. Put less kindly, her contributions have a way of getting buried under everyone else’s spotlight.
After all, one protective holy spell from her and the rest of the party can sweep the enemy clean without taking a scratch.
“The Demon King’s forces are approaching quietly, and viciously. As if mocking us, as if declaring that humanity is already destined to lose.”
“So I ask you all. Do you desire a holy war? Do you wish to take part in a crusade more united and more righteous than any before, to halt the flood of evil?”
But right now, the story was a little different.
The swirling pillar of holy power was like a stage spotlight, and the golden hair fluttering free—her nun’s wimple having been blasted clean off by the force of it—made her look almost like the Goddess herself made flesh. A few of the onlookers even found themselves quietly bowing their heads toward Irene as she stood atop the earthen platform Han Se-ah had hastily raised. Holy power might have a different texture from mana, but in the end it was still energy. Put another way, a formless force on the level of a 5-star was whipping through the air; being overwhelmed was only natural.
No—the people gathering were not being overwhelmed. They were being converted.
“So will you, by your own conviction and faith, support the Goddess’s army, take up arms for justice, and fight until the day evil is driven from this land?”
Mana was endlessly mutable—shifting into every element imaginable, interfering with space itself, changing shape as freely as water depending on how it was used, a language of formulas no pure humanities major could ever hope to grasp. But the holy power bestowed by the Goddess possessed a far more fundamental nature.
The holy power of the Goddess of Life was, quite simply, primordial life force itself.
Whenever Grace complained that her shoulders ached from “all that fat,” Irene would knead the tension away with hands full of holy power. The morning after a heavy night of drinking, after a long tanking session, even when Han Se-ah was suffering the aftereffects of mana exhaustion—Maman’s hands were always the healing hands, and she never massaged anyone without pouring holy power into it for free.
“What’s going on over there?”
“They say the Demon King’s army has finally made its move.”
“Hmph. Those Empire bastards got cocky, and look where it got them.”
“The north? Damn it, that’s the direction the Dolchen party went.”
But even that was still a little short of enough. The faint buff effect of holy power might get a person’s blood pumping like some kind of energy tonic, but a single nun singing of holy war was never going to be sufficient on its own.
A holy war was total war—temple and faithful alike throwing everything into the annihilation of heretics without a single thought for profit or loss. Yet the adventurers, mercenaries, and handful of Imperial trainee commanders standing here were precisely the sort of people who weighed profit and loss harder than anyone.
Still, she had definitely seized their attention. Han Se-ah was just starting to wonder whether she should push herself up onto that platform as well, and whether the ogre Charlotte had sent might arrive around now—
“Uwahaha! I knew it! I knew this would happen!”
—when someone bellowed at the top of his lungs and slammed a long flagpole into the ground with a heavy thunk.
“What are you doing, Oleg?!”
“The Demon King’s army crawling across the far side of the plains! A nun of the Goddess Church singing of justice! The Hero chosen by the Goddess herself, and the tragic genius knight who drew the Holy Sword—!”
Alissa’s startled attempt to stop him, the baffled stares of everyone wondering what the hell this guy was doing—none of it mattered. Oleg had already pulled both his family banner and the banner of the Ice Cross Knights out of his magic rucksack.
I had figured the young nobleman simply owned an expensive magic tool, the kind that could swallow tents, rations, and cooking gear into a pack the size of a soldier’s kit. I had not expected him to pull a three-meter pole out of the same bag. It was no inventory, but the internal volume was clearly larger than it looked.
Han Se-ah and I could only stare blankly, still trying to process the situation. She was equally slow on the uptake, busy dealing with the lunatics in chat suddenly howling “JA! JA!”
…More importantly, when the hell did that bastard figure out I was that Roland?
“When the bards sing of the first footsteps taken upon these plains, they shall praise us for following without hesitation! In the name of Svedov, Guardians of the Empire—the Ice Cross Knights, comrades of the Hero’s party!”
“That’s it, Captain! Damn it, that’s exactly it!”
“Hey, Erick! You too?!”
While I was busy with that ridiculous thought, Oleg raised the Svedov family banner high and formed ranks before Irene on the platform. A young man came sprinting out to take the knight order’s banner from him.
Erick—if I remembered right, the one who had gotten along so well with Katie. They used to talk endlessly about Imperial and Kingdom chivalry, heroic epics, all that romantic nonsense. He still looked young enough that the viewers had teased him as “Kiddo MK.2” and “Empire-brand kiddo.”
And so the situation began to unfold in a way that was both complicated and strangely inevitable.
The Demon King’s army finally on the move. Quiet Irene pouring out a speech laced with righteous fury. Holy power swirling in answer. The Hero and the master of the Holy Sword standing silent in support (or rather, simply zoning out). And a knight order that, while everyone else hesitated, declared their participation without a single second of doubt.
One voice is not enough.
Even five is still ambiguous.
…But what if it becomes twenty? Thirty?
“Huh, a quest just popped up. The Demon King’s army is com—wait, a character quest?!”
They say three people together can invent a tiger that never existed. What happens when the number climbs past thirty and approaches fifty?
“So… what exactly is going on here?”
“What do you think? A historic moment—the declaration of a holy war.”
“Mm. Roland. I don’t think you have a talent for jokes.”
“Joke?”
“……It’s real? An actual holy war?”
Charlotte had insisted on climbing to the 60th Floor with a group of mages just so she could witness the rare spectacle of a named monster—the frenzied ogre—clashing with the Demon King’s army with her own two eyes. The scene that greeted her the moment she stepped through the gate was pure chaos, the kind of pandemonium that deserved the word.
“Tents! Tear a tent if you have to and paint on it!”
“No dye? Then use blood! There’s a priest right there!”
“Damn it, House Ester is not falling behind on something like this…!”
The first thing that caught the eye was a cluster of knights in splendid armor, crouching or kneeling on the dirt of the plains, ripping tents to shreds.
If no one had answered Irene’s speech, that would have been one thing. But when the second son of Border Count Svedov of the Empire threw his entire knight order behind the Hero’s party, the story changed completely. On top of that, every Imperial trainee commander who had come up to the plains was starving for merit.
What greater achievement could there be than joining a holy war alongside the Hero’s party?
“Seeking adventurer parties skilled in group combat!”
“House Sapia will not forget your efforts!”
And so the trainee commanders, thrown into confusion by Oleg Svedov’s sudden line-forming, had no choice but to start showering gold coins on the mercenaries and adventurers who had been watching with interest.
After all, they had each hired roughly the same number of mercenaries for the “examination.” Those fellow commanders of comparable strength had already been wrapped up and annihilated by the Demon King’s army. The original purpose—maintaining troop quality and learning strategy—had been completely forgotten. Their brains were now filled with nothing but the desire to spread their family names far and wide.
Which meant Charlotte was looking at a chaotic tangle of people frantically hand-making family banners, people trying to expand their forces by any means, and adventurers and mercenaries scrambling to raise their own reputations—a marketplace free-for-all.
But more important than any of that was, of course, the fact that Irene’s character quest had finally appeared.
“So what now? Send someone to the temple and request additional support?”
“We’ll have to, right? Ask a few people to go and—aaah, I get it, just be quiet! I didn’t even open the quest window, okay? Irene unnie opened it herself!”
The cyber ghosts who went feral at the sight of anything interesting were never going to be calmer than trainee commanders blinded by the promise of merit. In an instant the chat filled with every kind of ASCII art and fluttering flag icons.
Even if Han Se-ah’s Earth was an Earth 4 with full-dive VR games, the broad strokes of history hadn’t changed enough for something like a Hakenkreuz to show up directly—but the way the chat window was practically drowning in crimson banners made the intent crystal clear.
So inside the game stood 5-star “Candidate Saint” Irene, steeling her resolve once more in the middle of a free-for-all marketplace, while outside the game a million cyber ghosts were losing their minds. There could not have been a more perfect situation for the word “pandemonium.”
…Ah. Even internet news articles reposting the gallery’s breaking news have started popping up.