Character Quest - Grace's Hometown 5
There was no grand twist waiting at the end of the quest. What greeted me instead was a handful of scrawny, half-starved wandering orcs. Following the footprints and snapped branches trailing away from the campfire led me to a small burrow — some animal's den, seized by sheer numbers.
Judging by the state of them, there was nothing here that even required my intervention. They were far too thin for orcs, clearly half-dead from hunger. That was probably why the four of them had been skulking around the village.
Even brainless monsters knew when their bodies weren't right. They didn't have the confidence to raid the village for food — they knew that even jumping a single fleet-footed herb gatherer would be a risk. That peculiar cunning unique to wanderers let them predict exactly what would happen if they attacked a human and failed.
Of course, their intelligence stopped right there. They'd shown enough caution not to attack people rashly, but they'd still sat around tearing into live rabbits and lighting campfires on the hillside without the faintest thought of covering their tracks.
This is ridiculously underwhelming… Is there really nothing else?
I genuinely hadn't expected enemies this pathetic.
At this point it wasn't just a lack of twists — it was actively sabotaging the stream. Three full days in a carriage just to turn on the broadcast and face four malnourished orcs. The only things to gain were Grace's affection and a quest clear.
Thinking as a party member, it wasn't bad. Nothing serious had happened to Grace's village, and she got a modest homecoming-in-glory moment. But thinking as someone helping Han Se-ah's stream, it was painful.
Still, convinced there had to be something more, I left the cowering orcs alone and kept moving. The status-window-like thing had told me to help Han Se-ah clear her quest for a reason, after all.
Even so, I never thought the problem would be that it was too easy.
I'd rushed out here worried Grace might get hurt. Now I was running around worried Han Se-ah's stream would fall flat. I'd have preferred dozens of orcs so I could thin the numbers in advance. Four orcs living in hiding, too starved to put on any weight.
Frankly, orcs that hungry would get wrecked by moss wolves or helmet deer. In Tower terms, roughly Floor 10 — stronger than a sickly goblin, weaker than a horned wolf. I combed the entire mountain range just in case, but aside from those four orcs, the whole area was absurdly peaceful.
On a hunch I even vaulted a peak and scoured the neighboring mountain. Same result. Besides the four wandering orcs, there was one freshly matured bear and nothing else. Peaceful as it was, they really had picked a good spot for a village.
"Grace? She'll be in that building over there."
"You're already back?"
At this point, all I could do was return to the village with a hollow feeling in my chest. If there'd been something like an ogre, I could've crippled its limbs and dumped it unconscious next to the orc den. Instead I headed back and let the dazed-looking guard uncle point me the way.
In a modest village of mostly shabby wooden buildings, it was the only sturdy house built of stone.
It stood alone in its relative finery, practically advertising that someone important lived there. Of course, "fine" by frontier-village-hut standards — in a city it would've been a poor craftsman's workshop. I trudged toward the door just as my party came pouring out of the house in a cluster.
Wedged among them was a man in leather clothes. Thick beard, sharp hawkish eyes — the kind of face that quietly announced he'd been a force to be reckoned with in his day.
"Roland! Find anything up on the mountain?"
I didn't remember the face of some village uncle I'd glimpsed years ago, but with Grace glued to his side, he had to be her father. Looks like they'd already gotten the quest — or rather, the commission — explained by the village chief and Grace's dad.
"Wandering orcs, just like we thought. Nothing else unusual."
"Was there… a child, by any chance?"
Hold on. What was that about?
I glanced around at their faces. Every one of them was thick with worry. I'd come here to deal with orcs — why was a kid suddenly in the conversation? Then a single phrase flickered through my mind.
That bloodstained scarf story I'd thought of earlier.
A missing child from the village would light a much bigger fire under people than a missing adult. A curious kid wanders into the mountains they're told to stay out of, and it just so happens to be where the orc tracks are… Plausible, and painfully cliché.
"No. I scoured the whole range. Not a child, not even a human trace."
"Oh… really?"
The explanation that followed matched my guess exactly. As the orc tracks drew closer, the adults had warned the kids not to play in the mountains. But kids who actually listen when adults say no aren't really kids. A few of the neighborhood troublemakers had gone up to play hide-and-seek, and one of them never came back.
The silver lining was that what I'd found was a half-eaten rabbit, not a half-eaten little girl. My companions, who didn't know that, still looked grim — but I wasn't particularly worried.
She wasn't on the mountain, so she's probably just hiding in some corner of the village.
I trusted my own abilities. On legs faster than a warhorse, I'd run from the village entrance to the peaks and torn through the entire nearby range. I'd even sprinted over to the next mountain just in case there was a threat — or stream content — waiting there.
A little girl playing hide-and-seek outrunning me, going farther than me, on a mountain? Impossible unless some absurd 6★ character like "Tomboy" Catherine showed up. Still, because the missing person was a little girl, the worry refused to leave my soft-hearted companions' faces.
"Um, Roland? What if we tried this?"
"Let's hear it."
While I was thinking that, Han Se-ah sidled up and looked back and forth between Grace and me. It wasn't worry filling her eyes so much as naked ambition, which was deeply suspicious. Still, I owed her a hearing, so I gave her the go-ahead.
And the completely out-of-left-field suggestion she offered, after diligently glancing between Grace and me:
"Roland carries Grace on his back and runs."
"…Huh?"
"You want me to ride on Roland?"
I'd expected her to say we should go look for the child right now, or reassure the villagers that the kid would be fine. Instead she produced an answer so sideways it made me wonder if internet streaming really was a job only certain people could do.
The chat window I'd unconsciously opened was going just as haywire.
Less a gamer's solution and more a VR gamer's solution, I supposed. Han Se-ah's bold proposal was so absurd it was funny, and the viewers seemed to feel the same. Of course, she steamrolled right past their reactions and pushed her idea harder.
She grabbed Grace's sleeve and tugged her over to my side, then flashed a grin. Same move she'd pulled during night watch — was she engineering skinship between Grace and me again?
"Roland's the fastest of all of us, so he carries Grace unnie — she's the best tracker — and the two of you comb the mountain. Irene unnie, Kayden, and I will search the village just in case."
Whether it was ironclad faith that a party of 3-4-5-6★ characters could never lose to mere orcs, Han Se-ah split the party without a second thought. She seemed to take my word as absolute gospel that I'd found nothing on the mountain but orc tracks.
Grace didn't seem to mind either — cheeks faintly pink, she let herself be pulled along with a flustered little "ah, um." Playing along didn't seem like a bad idea, so I stepped right up to her. A stream of us flirting as NPCs would play better than one about hunting malnourished orcs, after all.
"Not a bad idea."
"Not a bad— wait, niiih?!"
If you're going to put on a show, go all out.
Without hesitation I reached out, one hand sliding under Grace's knees, the other gently wrapping around her shoulders. She went airborne against her will and flailed in shock, but to me she weighed less than a feather.
I bounced my shoulders and lightly tossed her slender frame up into the air. She settled naturally into a princess carry; her arms half-reached to loop around my neck, then met my eyes, and she shyly pulled them back to fold against her own chest instead.
"Y-you are…?"
"Roland, party leader and upper-grade adventurer. Feels like it's been a while, but let's finish the search first."
I suddenly felt like a barbarian abducting a maiden right in front of her father. Ignoring the way the thick-bearded uncle's eyes went round as saucers, I started walking. I'd learned enough not to level this fragile little village by accident.
I bounded over cottages and vaulted fences, and Grace's delightful scream rang in my ears.
"Hyaaaah—!"
"You're gonna bite your tongue!"
"Then run a little softer!"
Once we got going she must have felt unsteady, because those neatly folded hands finally locked around my neck like a safety handle. Thanks to that, the chest she hadn't quite managed to pin down started bouncing inside her leather armor. Even pressed flat like that, it could still sway that much.
And I wasn't the only one enjoying the view.
A translucent camera floated in front of me, tracking along. The problem was the angle — looking down at my face put Grace's cleavage dead center in the frame. Chat started flooding with keyboard-smash reactions, declaring this was exactly why it was an 18+ game.
She's a real streaming monster, that one.
There was a reason she'd had a personal fanbase long before she ever tried VR gaming.