Affinity Farming 1
The scream Grace had been letting out in my arms gradually turned into delighted whoops. She was a three-star gacha character herself, after all — not some ordinary country girl with zero stats. A little speed wasn't about to leave her trembling in terror.
With the camera drone and Grace in tow, I tore off toward the beast den where those malnourished orcs had been holed up. The only real danger circling the village was those things, so better to deal with them first.
Even a little girl would have long since passed ten years old. She wasn't a horned rabbit — no way she'd lose a fight to some tiny mountain hare. Kill the orcs and even that one-in-a-million chance disappears. So I kept running straight for the den.
"Roland! Are we heading for those tracks you found earlier?"
"I already found the orcs."
"Really?"
"Yeah. Didn't see the kid, though."
Kicking up clouds of dirt as I thundered noisily through the mountains, I reached the beast den again in under ten minutes. Startled by the unconcealed sound of my footsteps, four malnourished orcs stood on high alert, clutching old, rusted weapons and scanning every direction.
"…Those are the wandering orcs?"
"Now you see why I said they were weak."
There wasn't a single burly, muscle-bound warrior among them. Just starved, gaunt bodies. When a monster's forearms are thinner than a village farmer's, that pretty much says it all. The camera spun around the orcs, apparently just as shocked by their pitiful state.
Scrawny arms, sunken eyes, filthy skin, rusted scrap weapons, and tattered leather armor covered in scratches. Calling them homeless orcs would have been more accurate than wandering ones.
They squawked weakly, but nothing could stop the end that was coming for them. Unlike the monsters inside the Tower, these ones left corpses behind. Kick them around and smash them up and you'd end up covered in their remains, guts, and worse — so better to kill them from a distance.
Still holding Grace in my arms, I kicked a suitably sized rock the way you'd boot a soccer ball. Like shotgun pellets, like a claymore mine, the rock shattered into hundreds of fragments and blasted outward with a sharp bang.
Unfortunately for the orcs, their hide wasn't tough enough to stop several hundred stone shards flying faster than arrows.
"Ugh, whoa…"
Having lived almost exclusively inside the Tower, Grace hadn't seen a corpse in ages, and her brow twisted hard at the sight. Han Se-ah hurriedly swung the camera toward the natural scenery instead. Then it stopped dead and melted away into nothing.
Looks like she figured she'd seen enough and switched the viewpoint back to the village.
Unaware the camera even existed, Grace kept frowning as she carefully scanned the surroundings. Doing it while nestled in my arms just made her look adorable. She must have felt the same, because she hopped down from my embrace and started combing through every inch of the area.
"There's really nothing. Not a kid's presence, not even a wild animal's."
"Those guys were making a racket trying to catch rabbits, so everything probably ran off."
"Rabbits?"
"The tracks I found were a campfire and leftover rabbit meat."
With light, springing steps she darted around, checking every place a child could possibly walk with uncanny precision. But even with her razor-sharp scouting skills, no trace of the girl turned up. She was probably hiding somewhere in the village after all.
A little kid out playing hide-and-seek wasn't going to be scaling ten-meter cliffs. She wasn't going to be navigating ravines so rough even herb gatherers wouldn't dare try them. We focused on places a child could reach on foot, but still came up empty.
Just in case, Grace rode me around like some kind of cash-shop mount, thoroughly searching every mountain ridge and every valley — and of course, the results were the same.
"Nothing here either."
"No other tracks?"
"Nope. Those orcs were all of them. They didn't even have the strength to jump an herb gatherer, so they were probably creeping closer hoping to snatch women or kids."
No matter how thoroughly we searched, all we found were old traces of how the orcs had been approaching the village. There was no way a missing girl was some hide-and-seek prodigy capable of dodging a six-star tank and a three-star apprentice ranger.
After two full circuits of the village outskirts with my help, Grace finally relaxed. The kid still hadn't come back, but she hadn't been anywhere dangerous — so maybe she'd just dozed off somewhere.
"Let's head back. Searching any further is pointless."
"Yeah… wait, huh?"
"What are you doing? Pick me up."
As if it were the most natural thing in the world, she spread both arms wide and hopped right back into my embrace. Having spent the whole mountain trek being carried, she went completely limp and settled in as comfortably as someone sinking into a car seat. No reason to refuse, so I scooped her up gently and headed for the village.
"Ah, Roland, Grace unnie! They found the missing kid!"
"Really? Where was she?"
"Apparently she wanted to win at hide-and-seek so badly she snuck back to the village alone and hid. She buried herself in a straw pile in the village storehouse and dozed off."
We made it back before sundown, and the one waiting to greet us was a brightly smiling Han Se-ah. What we'd half-suspected had turned out to be exactly right. Grace let out a long sigh of relief at the good news.
Coming home for the first time in ages only to find a teenage girl dead on the mountain — nobody would feel good about that. I figured that was the end of the quest, but then—
"Grace? You — you little rascal!"
An unexpected ambush appeared.
A flood of curse-laced messages poured into the chat window and were rapidly scrubbed by the chat managers. Even so, Han Se-ah couldn't bring herself to calm the viewers or shift the mood.
"Holy shit, I almost got completely screwed. What kind of quest is this?"
Her spine had gone ice-cold too.
The wandering orc tracks had been a trap. The missing girl could be found in the village storehouse. But the missing girl herself had also been a trap. What really mattered was who appeared once the quest cleared — Grace's parents.
A mother sobbing her heart out as she clung to the daughter who'd run away to become an adventurer, and a father earnestly trying to persuade her to come back to the village — that was the real content of this quest.
"Wait, so if I hadn't been farming affinity this whole time, Grace unnie could've just quit the adventuring life and gone home for good? What the hell would I have done without Roland?"
An NPC's status window had all kinds of metrics, but favorability wasn't one of them.
This was a game about climbing the Tower, not about seducing NPCs into doing something indecent. The reason Han Se-ah got along so well with the NPCs was simply that — even though they were game characters — she liked their personalities, and watching the party dynamic play out scratched that otaku itch of hers.
A country girl who'd become an adventurer to find the man she'd fallen for at first sight. A kind-hearted nun hiding the fact that she was a candidate Saint. A young girl concealing her identity as a noble princess, cross-dressing as a mercenary and wandering the world. And the handsome blond Roland who'd started getting tangled up with all of them, little by little.
"If we go into the forest and our scout just up and leaves, then what? Who detects the moss wolf ambushes? Who finds the passage to the next floor? Oh my god, for real…"
Before she was a streamer she was a gamer, and as a gamer she also had a mild otaku streak — that was Han Se-ah. Beyond Grace, who openly showed her affection, the party was packed with things worth watching.
Irene seemed to like Roland's gentle side and was slowly opening her heart. On the way here, hadn't that sweet Irene shot her a sharp look full of meaning? And Kayden, the cross-dressing girl, was a classic subculture trope — she wanted to shove them into the same tent just to see what kind of reaction she'd get.
Who could have guessed that all those schemes she'd cooked up to tangle her party members together, under the excuse of "good stream content" while really just feeding her own selfish interests, would turn out to be a stroke of pure genius?
No matter how realistic the game was, if you didn't build up a rapport, a recruited party member could simply walk away. In hindsight it was obvious — but nobody had expected that truth to come packaged as a quest-shaped test.
The chat and the forums both descended into chaos, spewing every opinion imaginable. The one silver lining was that Grace hadn't wavered.
It was Roland's presence that soothed the mother sobbing as she clutched her runaway daughter. The word of a six-star, an upper-grade adventurer, and the man who'd once saved this very village was enough to finally turn Grace's mother's heart.
Once the mother was convinced, the father nodded along as well. As a former ranger himself, he could tell at a glance that the leather armor Grace wore and the bow she'd brought were treasures a frontier village like this could never dream of owning.
"That was way too close. I need to grab onto this and push Grace unnie hard. Heroes Chronicle, time for a genre shift? Let's make it a Roland x Grace shipping simulator, huh?"
Of course, now that it was resolved, it was pure stream content.
The cold sweat down her spine was one thing — but once the incident wrapped up cleanly, all that remained was the perfect stream angle to whip the viewers into a frenzy and the perfect moment to collect. Using Roland, who was more popular than the stream's actual star, as material sent lust-filled chat messages and donations surging in like a tidal wave.
Of course, the anxiety that had run cold down her spine hadn't been fully put to rest.