Into the Forest 3
Just because I could write on the board didn't mean I could freely dump everything I knew.
In terms of progress, Han Sea sat at world number one — which meant no information existed past the eleventh floor. Koreans and foreigners alike were all watching her stream to learn about the eleventh-floor forest field.
That moss wolves hid in the shaded parts of the forest, so a party without a scout would walk right into an ambush. That helmet deer didn't simply gore you with their horns — they swung their heads around like they were locking antlers, slashing wildly with that chaotic rack of points.
All of it was common adventurer knowledge I'd taught them under the guise of education during Han Sea's stream.
What should I write? …No — how should I write it?
Given the situation, I couldn't pass her information about the eleventh floor and beyond — the forest — disguised as fan service. That left only city-related stories, not tower ones, as information I could freely share.
On top of that, I needed to settle on a persona for consistently using the board. No matter how solid the content, if the title didn't pull aggro and the writing wasn't entertaining, it would get buried on a chaotic internet forum.
Back when the board was quiet in the early days of her stream, just slapping down the two words "Info" would have gotten Han Sea and the board users to read it. But now domestic and overseas users were logging in, pecking out posts with translators.
Yeah, thinking hard really isn't my thing.
The silver lining was that I could freely share information about outside the tower. Watching viewers certify all sorts of antics, I could tell the cities were all pretty similar. Players who'd watched Han Sea's stream had all made going to Aunt Mariang's inn the basic strategy — so everything else was probably similar too.
I sipped a drink or two while mulling it over, then decided to take it easy this time as well. A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step — I wasn't going to become a board celebrity with my first post, get recognized by everyone, and start controlling Han Sea.
I tossed up a post with the most trivial scrap of information I could find as a test — and immediately discovered a problem. My eyes weren't a camera, so I couldn't take pictures.
I had board-writing privileges and a photo-attachment button, but no way to actually take a photo. What was this, some scummy game company selling DLC? For fuck's sake. Without a picture, the post wouldn't pull any aggro, so the odds of anyone even looking at my first post were basically zero.
The night was growing late, so after writing my photo-less post I gave the board one last glance. …Even the whores of the red-light district got stars, huh. With that final post — deleted as the price of good information — I flopped onto the bed and closed my eyes.
"Hey, Roland? While we were looking around the city I got curious — is there something like a carriage stop?"
"Of course there is. The Coachmen's Guild has contracts with the other guilds, so carriages circulate through the city's major hubs."
She'd actually seen a post that didn't even have a picture.
As always, we gathered in the morning and headed for the gate, and Han Sea casually asked me the question. Grace slipped in to back her up, apparently thinking Han Sea's lowered voice was from embarrassment. Come to think of it, neither of them was from the city.
Grace was from a slash-and-burn farming village, and Han Sea's backstory had her as a country girl who'd come to the city chasing the dream of becoming an adventurer. On her first day, camera drone and all, I'd overheard her getting off a carriage and talking to her viewers.
"Coachmen have a guild too?"
"Get enough people together and they make a guild. It's not as grand as it sounds."
There'd been an internet joke like that in my previous life. Something about Korea's National Cabbage Transport Federation. Even the Freemasons, if you translated the name straight into Korean, just meant Free Stonemasons' Union.
"Then why don't you ride the carriages, Roland?"
"Because me lightly jogging is several times faster than a carriage. And those city-circulating carriages mostly run the big guilds and the inns where out-of-towners stay. Adventurers heading into the tower don't really use them."
"…Ah, that makes sense."
Novice adventurers skipped the carriages to save even the fare. From intermediate adventurers on up, a light walk already matched the speed of a carriage crawling through the city. So adventurers simply weren't part of the Coachmen's Guild's main customer base.
Even my nothing-special explanation had all four of them listening with sparkling eyes. Caden — whose title was "Princess of the Sword," so she really was a noble lady — was showing interest in my stories too.
A player who'd logged in with zero common sense, a slash-and-burn village girl who didn't know the city, a candidate saint born and raised in the Temple, and a crossdressing noble lady hiding her identity. Yeah — this was a combination that couldn't help but find stories about the adventurer city fascinating.
"So if you want to see the famous spots in the city, riding the carriages around is the way to go. They don't hit every back alley, but from the various guilds to the famous trading companies, carriages are set up for most of the city's major locations."
"Ah, shit, it was real. Someone told me to check the board, so I did…. Right, you guys have been around the city more than I have. But in a tower-climbing game, isn't it a bit much to fill the city minimap to a hundred percent before even entering the tower for the first time?"
Han Sea hadn't seen my post herself — rather, the post I'd written to tease her had become a kind of fuse, and the viewers had run with it. The first hunt in the forest had been so textbook that there wasn't much to pull aggro with, so they'd dug up the board post instead.
Of course, there had also been a mountain of talk about the crossdressing Caden, but most of it had devolved into a grand showcase of the world's most unhinged fetishes under the excuse of discussing crossdressing women. Viewers arguing about the difference between a woman in men's clothes and a feminine man, freestyling about every flavor of desire — not exactly a topic a female streamer could comfortably touch.
"Mage Hanna, confirmed."
With Han Sea at the lead, pulling the Mage Tower's pass from her inventory, we stepped through the gate. That strange feeling of taking one step out of the city and finding yourself on the plains. The crowds vanished, and our party stood alone on the quiet grassland.
"Today we're entering the twelfth floor, then exploring east from the passage. Grace unnie, I'm counting on you."
"Got it. So we head straight to the twelfth-floor passage we found yesterday?"
Han Sea issued orders as party leader without any intention of dawdling. We ignored the horned rabbits and horned foxes, dealt with any horned wolves that charged us, and followed the lantern deeper in.
The tower's structure had a passage connecting the tenth and eleventh floors, and another connecting the eleventh and twelfth. On some floors the distance between passages was short; on others, it was quite far.
So in a forest with no landmarks, the standard adventurer approach was to use the passage you'd climbed through as a reference point and explore outward from there. Had she studied this while I wasn't around? The only person near Han Sea who would know this kind of common sense was Alice.
They'd gotten close enough to call each other unnie and dongsaeng — maybe Alice, as a guild receptionist, had given her advice so she could shed that novice adventurer label. Thinking that, I walked quietly through the forest, and once again Grace sent a hand signal.
"There's a kobold camp up ahead."
"How many?"
"About fifteen."
Unlike the lone moss wolves and helmet deer, this time we were facing a pack of small monsters. Still, having done this once before, the party members took their positions with practiced ease. I took the front; the priest, archer, and mage held the center as a shield; and Caden swung her sword from the rear.
Confirming everyone was in position, Han Sea nodded at me and gestured. Honestly, at this distance she could have just spoken, but she seemed to have taken a real liking to Grace's hand signals.
The viewers couldn't even wait a second before roasting Han Sea. Turning my back on her voice behind me, I trudged forward without even bothering to hide my presence.
I smashed through the branches blocking my view and advanced, revealing a clearing in the forest. Just as Grace had said, fourteen kobolds were resting in the sunlight. They hadn't built huts or started foraging yet — freshly respawned, then.
Fur-covered beast heads that looked like a dog and a rat mixed together. About the same size as goblins, but the fur made them look a bit bulkier.
Kyank-kyank—!
To them, I must have looked like a steel giant suddenly bursting out of the undergrowth. A bit more beastlike than goblins, they sensed the threat and tried to surround me.
If I just take two, that should be enough.
Han Sea, Grace, and Caden handling twelve among the three of them worked out to roughly four each. Running that calculation, I strode forward and booted the kobold right in front of me.
Sturdier and meatier than the goblins from the tenth floor and below — but there was no way it was surviving my kick. Without even managing a squeal, one of them went flying like a bouncy ball, slammed into a tree trunk, and vanished into a mana stone.
Only then did the rest start squawking like they were screaming, rushing past me toward the rear. Still, for all that they were monsters, they didn't flee — they charged at the smaller-framed women behind me.
"Having a mage in the party is truly convenient. Remarkable work, Miss Hanna."
"That's all thanks to Miss Irene's barriers."
"Ah, n-no. Miss Hanna's magic is so fast and accurate…."
Not that it mattered — they'd just get cleaned up by party members casually chatting among themselves.