Character Quest - Grace's Hometown 2

The virtual reality game Heroes Chronicle sold ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠itself on extreme realism. You could tell just from the fact that, despite the main quest being to climb the tower and reach the top, they'd gone and fully rendered every kingdom surrounding it.

Viewer stunts proved that overflowing VR realism over and over. There were people who got locked up for everything from trying to scale the outside of the tower to all kinds of other nonsense.

If you chose to reset before nightfall, you could roll back to before the arrest. But if you accidentally let a full day pass, you got to play a virtual-reality prison diary — complete with a data-reset confirmation. There was the guy who got beaten half to death by a guard for hitting on a brothel girl, and so on.

Whether you climbed the tower, wandered the outside world, or got thrown in jail for a crime, time treated everyone equally. The real problem was that for a single-player game, there was no SKIP function whatsoever — pure, unfiltered realism.

The game itself wore unfriendliness like a badge of honor under the guise of realism, so the viewers didn't give Han Sea a hard time. A few sleeping-man faces and zzz emotes trickled in, that was all.

Still, the caravan people had no intention of dumping chores on an Advanced Adventurer who'd shown up in place of an Intermediate one. They built the campfire and pitched the tents on their own. As escorts we still had to take night watch, but I could handle that solo.

"Caden, have you ever camped before?"

"Yes. I did it often when I was following a mercenary company. I was on grunt duty, so my job was putting up the tent poles."

Kindhearted Irene stepped forward to help with the chores and got gently shooed away by startled workers. Making a valued guest do labor was already unthinkable — and when that valued guest was a lovely young woman in a nun's habit, they had no choice but to stop her.

That attitude of Irene's seemed to be slowly thawing the taciturn Caden; she talked a little more when Irene was around. Watching a Candidate Saint hiding her identity chat with a noble young ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠lady cross-dressing as a man—

"Ah, I should wrap the stream here for today. Nobody wants to watch night watch duty, and I'll just skip through the travel parts during my break and come back. Honestly, streaming back-to-back like this is pretty rough. Better to skip the boring bits and only go live when the quest really moves forward, right?"

Han Sea's voice came from behind me, and a strange sensation prickled across my skin.

It felt like an electric shock and a full-body shudder at once — that eerie feeling you get in a life-or-death fight when your life flashes before your eyes and the world around you slows to a crawl.

Sparks leaping up to feed the campfire drifted in slow motion. The dust kicked up while pitching tents, the leaves swept aside by a broom, the murmuring caravan staff and our own party members — everything seemed to have decelerated to a hundredth, a thousandth of normal speed, thick and viscous.

…What was that?

Of course the bizarre sensation vanished in less than a second. The sparks caught the kindling and became a proper campfire, and a worker who'd brought a big pot — carefully dodging the dust and leaves — started boiling a mixed stew.

"Sleeping in a tent is a first for me. It's a little exciting."

"It won't be that great an experience."

Caden and Irene carried on a perfectly ordinary conversation, and Grace — still tangled up in her thoughts — paced alone. I blinked, then immediately opened both the chat and the forum boards to figure out what the hell had just happened.

Unless some ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠ancient evil god or sealed mage had popped out of nowhere on the road, this was a hundred percent related to Han Sea's stream.

The boards and chat window confirmed it with completely opposite pictures. Dozens of popular posts I hadn't read had piled up on the forum, while the chat was empty.

I carefully went through the posts that had accumulated over several days. Normally I just laughed them off and skimmed the popular ones, so I'd never noticed. For me it had been one second; outside, three days had passed. Looking closer, the first popular post I didn't recognize was dated two days ago.

Who the hell checks the timestamp when they're reading popular humor posts on a board?

What I learned from that:

First. Han Sea had talked to her viewers while the expedition prepared to camp out, then closed the game and the stream. That strange sensation I'd felt must have been this world's time stopping. If an inn was a save point, this was more like a quick-save-and-quit.

Second. Han Sea had been streaming every day to pull in viewers off her number-one ranking, but she was planning to ease back to her old schedule. There was no reason to full-stream repetitive forest scouting or overnight carriage travel.

Questions piled up — how I'd been able to feel that sensation at all, how my sense of time related to the real-world-to-game time ratio — but a forum board alone wasn't going to answer any of them.

"Roland? What are you doing?"

"Just thinking about something."

I'd been standing there blankly while browsing the boards, so Han Sea came over. A player who'd spent three days outside in the span of one second. It hit me all over again that I was an NPC inside a game. Not that I planned to wallow in pointless melancholy over it.

After everything I'd been through in ten years, fretting over something that small was a waste of time. As long as there was a clear objective called a quest, I had no reason to waver.

"Yeah? Then I've got something I'm curious about. Can I ask?"

"Sure. I'm this party's guide, after all."

While I was thinking that, Han Sea sidled up and opened her mouth. Looks like she wanted to quietly stockpile some knowledge while the stream was off. She'd been mocked for being clueless so much she probably wanted to act like she knew things in front of her viewers.

Her motives were written all over her face. I nodded, and she spoke right up.

"I'd like you to tell me about the Stray Orc for this commission."

"Of course I will. Once everyone's gathered at mealtime, I'll explain it to the whole party. Caden might know from her mercenary days, but Irene and Grace probably don't."

Han Sea nodded at that. The look in her eyes said that once I explained the commission to everyone, she'd fire up the stream when the job actually started and show off her knowledge to the viewers. It wasn't a bad thing, so I decided to give a fairly detailed rundown.

Apparently the satisfaction of schooling the viewers with her age last time had been pretty good — she went off in high spirits toward Grace and Irene. While that was going on, the workers finished setting up camp and started preparing the meal.

"It's fine. I may not be able to do heavy work, but something like this I can handle."

"But…"

"I've done plenty of cooking at the Temple, so it's really all right."

This time Irene actually pushed the workers aside and started preparing our meal herself. It wasn't hard labor, and she insisted on making the food we'd be eating with her own hands — they couldn't very well stop her. A caravan worker walked off with a conflicted look on his face.

He must have been deeply devout; the way he watched Irene roll up the sleeves of her nun's habit and peel potatoes, guilt written all over his face, was almost funny.

The "cooking" was nothing more than dumping beans, potatoes, and tough chunks of meat into boiling water and stewing them until they practically fell apart — but even that was apparently too much to ask of a nun. Oblivious to the stares, Irene led Grace over and the two of them started prepping potatoes and beans together.

"When your heart's in a tangle, doing something simple like this and emptying your mind is good too. Peel the potatoes and bean pods, sit by the fire, and look at the stars."

"Just a few beans, okay? I don't like beans in stew."

"Don't you think beans are tasty?"

Irene's steady encouragement had clearly lifted Grace's spirits; she joked around and casually pushed the bean pods aside. Caden, reading the room, brought over firewood and water for the pot. Looks like her time as the mercenary company's junior grunt hadn't been wasted.

Meat scraps, prepped potatoes and beans went into the pot, along with jerky and dried fruit from the rations Alice had packed for us — a proper mixed stew left to simmer.

Irene hadn't been lying about cooking often at the Temple; a good smell rose from the slapdash stew pot. Breathing in the hunger-stirring aroma of the stew and the warm glow of the campfire, I spoke up.

"I'll explain about the Stray Orcs we'll be dealing with on this commission. Caden, do you know anything about them?"

"They're ones driven out of their tribes for various reasons — disease, old age, and so on, right? I only know that they're weaker individuals than the ones who live in groups."

She answered model-student style even to my sudden question. Accurate, but a little thin. Call it an eighty-five. The biggest difference between monsters inside the tower and monsters outside it — especially the ones that wandered without a home.

At Caden's answer, Han Sea raised her hand like she was about to present and asked me,

"Last time you said the biggest difference was hostility. What about that?"

"Good memory. But what I'm talking about now is the traits of the ones the Guild specifically classifies as 'stray.'"

Everyone's eyes turned to me. There was already a difference between inside and outside the tower, and then some of the outside monsters got labeled "stray" on top of that — of course they'd be curious. Not that the classification was anything more than a convenience the Guild had roughly decided on.

"When a commission is posted for a Stray Goblin, a Stray Orc, and so on, those are individuals with frail bodies but cunning minds. They got abandoned by their tribes for physical defects, yet they still crossed the kingdom's borders, dug their way inland, survived, and started harming people."

If I had to compare them to something, they were like old lions. Wounded and driven from the pride, but somehow surviving in the wild, then prowling around villages and preying on humans weaker than themselves.

The real problem was that cunning. The ones with a working brain would kidnap children as hostages, or enslave weaker monsters and build up a bandit-style force.

If an orc warrior was an axe-wielding maniac charging you head-on while screaming, a Stray Orc was more like a psycho killer who snatches kids in the middle of the night.

"…So if the village puts up a strong fight, they might already have run by the time we arrive."

At that, Grace's face darkened again, and Irene shot me a sharp look — so I hastily added more.