The 60th Floor Legion 4
Han Se-ah slowly read through Irene's quest window.
Naturally, with the stream running and the camera shoved right up against it.
"Grace was 3-Star, so her personal circumstances got woven into a quest, and Katie was 4-Star, so her family history came up as one, right? And Irene unnie is 5-Star… The quest difficulty is no joke."
Grace's character quest had been about protecting her hometown village. The difficulty wasn't particularly high — just rough up a few wandering orcs and you were done. The only real annoyance was that the missing kid turned out to have been hiding in a corner of the village instead of up in the mountains.
Katie's character quest had been a bit harder… but that was because we'd bull-rushed into unexplored territory insisting we finish it fast without any NPC cooperation. If we'd moved with the northern pioneering army, we probably would have found the ruined village a lot more comfortably.
3-Star is easy. 4-Star is harder than that. So of course 5-Star is harder still — basic game leveling logic. Thanks to that, people were already fretting over my character quest, but anyway.
"Hmm, looks like Irene unnie still has that… the innkeeper lady's death sitting heavy on her heart."
Irene's quest condition was the subjugation of the 60th Floor's boss monster. Thinking about it, the rewards for each character quest seemed completely different. Grace's had been a penalty quest where failure triggered a party-leave event, while Katie's felt more like an enhancement event that granted exclusive gear on success.
But looking at this quest window, Irene's was pure high risk, high return. She had to land the last hit on the 60th Floor boss herself without letting anyone steal it — but if she succeeded, the party would gain another 6-Star character.
So I could understand the contents of Irene's quest well enough.
"She must have been carrying it with her this whole time."
"Anyway, we should get moving soon… carrying what, Roland?"
"Louis, Paul, Luca, and the mid-to-low-tier adventurer party that followed them. And the lady they tried and failed to save."
Eleven years of roadside adventuring life. I was used to death.
I hadn't spent those eleven years running around with a fixed party, so how many people do you think I'd met?
Mercenaries who only worked the safe routes through the central and eastern regions like glorified porters. Safety-first adventurers who never hunted anything stronger than an orc. Adventurers who were basically hunters, killing more beasts than monsters. Wandering mercenaries who crossed the entire continent from north to south…
And more than half of them — maybe seventy percent — were probably dead by now.
That was the adventuring business for you.
The archer from last month's temporary party who'd navigated the swamp like a ghost, only to get snatched by a wyvern on his way home for a sabbatical year. A retired senior who faced a lone wandering monster in some rural village and ran into an ogre instead.
You'd suddenly think of someone, ask around for news from whoever you could reach, and they'd give you an awkward smile as they delivered the bad news. That was daily life. When an acquaintance died, you poured a single glass of liquor in their memory and let them drift off into the past — the life of an adventurer.
Clearing a quest without a single scratch thanks to Roland's broken physique, parting ways, then hearing they'd dropped dead somewhere else — it left a tight, bitter rage in my chest. …Well, up through about year four or five, anyway.
Even a fairly indifferent twenty-first-century modern man had nearly developed PTSD, and only survived thanks to that broken body and the sturdy mental fortitude that came with it. So what about Irene, born and raised in a temple, living her whole life loving the world through kindness?
The ladies who'd done good works for the village orphans and struggling adventurers had been killed by the Demon King. Acquaintances who'd challenged something beyond their abilities trying to save them had died. People who'd volunteered despite their difficult circumstances, overcoming their fear to help, had died too.
In a game, the tank takes damage first. In the real world, the good and the righteous who act first are the ones sacrificed first against the world's evil.
"I'm used to people dying. But Irene, who took care of kids at the temple? No way. No matter how well she hides it, it has to be eating away at a corner of her heart."
"That's… true."
Not that this meant Dark Irene was coming or anything — and yet more idiots were already spouting nonsense about it.
No matter how well Irene's speech had drawn a response, you couldn't just keep speechifying forever. Once it was over, leading the people who'd volunteered to follow and heading northeast was the natural next step.
Our party took the lead. The mages, including Charlotte, followed with the Ice Cross Knights, hauling the ogre cages. Behind and alongside them, the Imperial apprentice commanders marched with their heads held high, waving their shabby flags with all the swagger they could muster.
Thanks to the massive iron cages where the sleeping ogres crouched in Terminator poses, the scene captured by Han Se-ah's camera looked less like a holy crusade and more like a circus.
"Unnie, you're sure you're okay?"
"I told you I'm fine. Really."
At the head of that bizarre procession, the women clustered around Irene kept up a steady stream of chatter.
Han Se-ah had been casually bantering with her viewers about Ogre-nator dick size and other nonsense — until I casually brought up PTSD, at which point the fire hit her feet.
She had a global audience in the millions. Not just the Korean military-service veterans who loved giving unsolicited advice, but people who'd actually been in combat somewhere, or pulled a trigger a few times, or at least pretended they had, all came flooding in screaming about protecting our Maman.
A gentle, soft-featured blonde beauty wounded by the death of someone she knew. Was there a better setup for triggering a man's protective instincts?
"Put her in mourning clothes instead of the nun's habit, keep her on the back line, and go huff-huff-thump-thump… Looks like the AI still hasn't learned that kind of stuff yet. Our little AI Snippy needs to get used to Jotgan's malice and perverse desires ASAP."
[Chat message deleted by moderator]
Thanks to all that, today's chat was packed to the gills with infant-regression perverts screaming Maman — no Noona Squad, no Brat Squad in sight. Not half water and half fish — half beast and half degenerate, so "no actual human beings present" was the most accurate description.
Turning away from that chaotic chat window to survey the surroundings, the thing that inevitably caught the eye was the massive iron cage cases.
Much smaller than a Frenzied ogre that hit around ten meters when it went berserk — roughly six-meter square prison boxes — but since we weren't in a position to worry about the ogres' muscles and joints, we'd forced them to their knees, heads bowed deep, folded them up tight, and put them to sleep. The size worked out roughly right.
Those boxes, each stuffed with a crumpled ogre, sat two abreast in five rows. Exactly ten named-class monsters rattling along on top of wagons — hard not to stare.
"Well? Impressive, right?"
"It is impressive. As expected of the Magic Tower — worth trusting with the job."
Even the Imperial apprentice commanders still high on divine power, and the top-tier adventurers who'd cut their teeth in the Tower, were standing there with their mouths hanging open at the sight. The mages' shoulders swelled with pride.
Of course, regardless of whatever pride they felt, the giant-type monsters locked in cages surrounded by blood-red banners made the whole procession look like apocalyptic barbarians on a supply raid. If Irene hadn't been leading the way, we might have been mistaken for dark mages.
That shocking visual was starting to pull aggro even from the zealots who'd been chanting JAJAMAMA, their attention slowly drifting toward the rear.
"Whoa, these are a hundred gold each, everyone. Sure, they'd sell for more if you gutted them and sold the parts, but still — a hundred gold apiece sunk into these guys."
A holy crusade hauling naked giants put to sleep and dragged along… something about this felt deeply wrong.
Then again, we already had a bomb-happy hero, so a monster crusade wasn't the worst thing in the world.