The Legion of the 60th Floor 5
I made my way to the front of the chaotic procession and looked at Irene.
Katie clung to her right side and Grace to her left, both of them fussing over her with theatrical enthusiasm. Whether they'd picked up on the anger woven through her speech or not, they were showering her with praise — how beautiful her holy power had been, how like a goddess she'd looked — and Irene's face was burning scarlet.
She's the quiet, demure type who trails along behind everyone, so she really can't handle being buttered up to her face. Cute. Still, I couldn't stand around forever watching a scientific debate on whether Frenzy causes erectile dysfunction, so I quickened my pace and drew up beside her.
Clank, clank. Grace must have recognized the deliberate tread of my steel boots, because she grinned and scooted aside to make room.
"Irene."
"Yes, Roland."
Since the entire column was matching Irene's pace at the head of the line, walking side by side and talking was easy enough. Traveling on foot without carriages or horses — was that some kind of Goddess Church tradition? Come to think of it, even during the last real holy war, only the supplies had gone by wagon. The priests and nuns had walked the whole way.
I kept that thought to myself and walked on at an easy pace. Being at the very front had its advantages — no naked ogres or blood-painted banners in sight, just open grassland stretching out ahead. A relief.
We were close enough that our arms brushed with every step… except I was wearing solid plate. Worried I might leave a bruise on Irene's soft skin, I shifted half a pace to the side — only for Irene, who'd been watching me steadily, to take a decisive step closer and link her arm through mine.
"You don't have to be so careful with me all the time. I'm part of the hero's party too, you know."
"Right."
She was trying to act bright and unbothered, but behind the resolve in those golden eyes, a fury she couldn't quite hide was still churning.
The one silver lining was that there was no sign of the nonsense the viewers had been hyping — no Dark Irene, no Saint-turned-Witch, none of that garbage. If anything, I was starting to think Irene's character quest trigger had always been about shifting from a passive mindset to an active one.
Back in Korea the chat screamed "Maman, Maman," but the Japanese otakus and the weeaboo Yankees steeped in that culture called Irene a Yamato Nadeshiko.
Yamato Nadeshiko — a compound of the archaic name "Yamato" and "nadeshiko," the Japanese word for the dianthus flower, meaning a beauty. Originally it simply meant a refined and lovely young woman, but once otaku culture and weeaboo romanticism got their hands on it, the meaning drifted somewhere stranger.
It became the image of a traditional beauty skilled at housework and every domestic art, shyly devoted to her man. Of course, that particular fantasy of the selfless woman wasn't exclusive to Japan — the translated chat was already flinging around terms like "English Rose" left and right.
In short, Irene had been stamped in everyone's minds as the devoted, passive type who trotted along one step behind.
"I can't just stay in the back praying forever. I came into the Tower with adventurers because I hated that — and yet I was about to fall right back into standing behind everyone again."
"Priests and nuns are supposed to stay behind the adventurer party, aren't they? Best case is never having to step forward at all."
"That would be nice. But the world doesn't work that way."
And as the character quest window that had appeared before Han Se-ah proved, Irene was no longer content to passively follow wherever our party went.
From the moment she'd joined us on the Beginner's Grasslands all the way to the 60th Floor, she had always been at the rear. Now she had decided to stand beside us.
"Roland, do you know why priests leave the temple and set out on pilgrimages of penance?"
Because that was her faith.
"If you stay in the temple, you can help people. The sick and the wounded come seeking the Goddess's grace, so as long as you're there, you can be certain of helping someone."
"But put another way — anyone who can't reach the temple can never be saved. The people who make it to a temple are the ones whose situations are still good enough to get there. Those whose circumstances are too dire simply offer up prayers where they are."
"That's why the priests set out on the road of penance. The one who read me fairy tales when I was four, the one who taught me how to do laundry when I was six — one by one, they all left the city that way."
She finished speaking and smiled again without another word. But what filled her eyes wasn't so much nostalgia for childhood as a vast, quiet sorrow.
This was a world where the adventurers and mercenaries you hired today might collapse into bandits the moment you looked away — Schrödinger's hirelings. Anyone who wasn't completely insane left the Goddess Church's priests and nuns alone… but the world had no shortage of people who were completely insane.
Adventurers died at a rate of about seventy percent. The penitent priests Irene had seen off had probably died at something like thirty. This wasn't just a world where people were terrifying — it was a fantasy world crawling with monsters.
"So now it's my turn to step forward. Just like the others who looked after me and then set out. And luckily, by traveling with the hero's party, I can help even more people. …I'm sorry it took me so long to make up my mind."
"Irene, that kind of regret doesn't help anyone. You raised your voice to help people in the end, and they chose to follow you and stand against the Demon King. That's what matters."
As I listened to Irene's story, Katie — who'd been glued to her side — suddenly put on a rare serious face and squeezed Irene's hand tight.
And right on cue, someone bellowed at the top of their lungs.
"Stealth! Something estimated to be stealth centaurs approaching!"
An ambush by stealth centaurs — the kind even 5-star Grace, Arrow That Chases Shadows, struggled to detect. And the one who'd spotted them before they could finish encircling us was an adventurer archer hired by some Imperial apprentice commander.
5-star Rusalka, She Who Looks Beyond the Horizon — a character clearly modeled on a Native American scout girl.
Where Grace had taken a vital-point armor-penetration passive to shore up the combat power her scouting passives left lacking, Rusalka looked like a pure observer whose every skill was poured into detection.
No alchemical arrowheads, no penetration skills — for a 5-star, she couldn't even solo a mid-sized monster. But that one ability, detection superior even to a centaur's, had been enough for a flawless performance. Exactly the kind of play you'd expect from the top-tier adventurers gathered on the 60th Floor.
"And the ogres?"
"Save them. I'm not about to let these things take our rear, either. They're only a centaur unit, but the people trailing behind us after hearing the news might rush ahead and get picked off."
"So then?"
"No flanking, no encirclement — we punch straight through the front. Not that I'm planning to step in myself just yet. Grace, go pass a message to Oleg."
I kept my pace deliberately slow, pretending I hadn't noticed a thing, chatting between Han Se-ah and Katie. Irene clearly had no intention of stopping for a single unit of stealth centaurs either — she held tight to my hand and Katie's and kept walking forward as if she hadn't sensed them at all.
The chat exploded with comments about how we looked like a married couple, but those were immediately buried under a flood of tactical advice aimed at Han Se-ah.
"What should I tell him?"
"He raised his banner first, so tell him he gets the chance to take the vanguard."
I saw Grace off with a glance as she slipped toward the rear, then looked back at Irene, whose palms were starting to grow damp with sweat.
The resolve in her eyes hadn't faded, but her quickening heartbeat, the gradual rise in her body heat, and the beads of sweat forming somewhere other than just her palms made it plain how tense she was.
What finally cut through that tension — or more precisely, what made her jump and clamp down hard on my hand — was Oleg's voice thundering from behind once more. And right on its heels, the answering roar of twenty knights.
"The house of Svedov! Takes! The vanguard of this battlefield—!!!"
"Unmelting ice, as steadfast as our conviction!"
"May our faith be as clear as ice!"
Even the usually composed Alissa had given up on being Oleg's brakes. She quietly took up the banner and shouted right along with him. The family standard and the order's banner snapped side by side above Oleg and Alissa's heads as the nineteen knights bellowed with mana in their voices, then charged forward with murderous intent — no stealth, no ambush, just a frontal demolition of the monsters ahead.
At the sight of them, Irene's hand — which she'd been clutching until her palm went clammy — finally let mine go. I pulled my gauntlet back on with a faint twinge of regret.
"O Goddess, grant us your protection!"
While I was fastening the gauntlet and settling my armor, a holy ward of sacred power settled over the figures already racing across the grassland as if it were second nature. Weaker than the main barrier that nullified all damage below a certain threshold, but sturdy enough to tank the 60th Floor's self-destruct gimmick several times over — a solid protective blessing.
And that sight lit a fire under the fanatics (fake ones) carrying their blood-painted banners. These were people for whom reputation and results mattered more than conviction, and their eyes burned with desperate hunger.
"……"
I watched them and gave a small nod.
"Advance! Forward!"
"Don't fall behind — follow! Will you bow your heads before the name of Svedov?!"
"Let the world know the flames of the South burn hotter than the ice of the North!"
The stealth centaurs were scouts more than anything. I planned to save the ogres for the main force, so if the apprentice commanders and mercenaries trailing behind wanted to clear the path for us, we could only be grateful.
Bombs or ogres — the main course always belonged on the main force's plate.
Across the vast grassland, banners painted in blood snapped and billowed in the wind.