Adventurer's Equipment 4
Adventuring in the North had more headaches than I'd expected.
The brutal mountain ranges alone were enough of a pain, but with the freezing temperatures and constant snow, the list of things you had to prepare for was endless. If it were just me, I could wander around bare-chested and not care—but the mercenaries I'd hired to hunt down materials weren't superhuman like I was.
You needed skill to find the stuff, skill to harvest it, and yet another specialized skill just to store and transport it. I was starting to understand why upper-grade adventurer gear cost so much.
"Heheh. I think I've found it."
"Already?"
"I told you—these mountains are like my own backyard. …So about that bonus—"
"You'll get what we agreed on."
Put another way, everything could be solved with money. The materials I needed were expensive and rare, sure—but they weren't some legendary substance that couldn't be obtained at all. My original plan had been to just tough it out and finish the commission with elbow grease, but—
"If we want a good spot to pitch tents for the night, do we need to find a flat clearing? But can Grace unnie's scouting even find something like that? It's not a monster or a Tower passage—how do you search for an empty patch of ground? Do we just wander until one shows up?"
"Thanks, HomelessFor12Years-nim… Wait, thinking about it—there's no night inside the Tower, so what the hell was that merchant doing selling me a lantern? A campfire I get, since you need one to cook, but—"
Watching Han Se-ah's stream while surfing the web was just too entertaining.
Sprinting around a snow-covered mountain range hunting for fist-sized rocks, versus lounging in a plush chair at an expensive inn with a drink in hand, watching videos online. The scales weren't even close to balanced.
So I paid a premium and hired a whole crowd of people. Once I climbed higher up the Tower with Han Se-ah, recovering the gold I was throwing around down here would be trivial. The northern cities weren't exactly poor—but their economy was on a completely different scale from the rest of the continent.
I set the rates based on Tower commissions and tacked on a little premium. Intermediate-grade adventurers who'd been sitting around sucking their thumbs for lack of work came running like they were ready to lick my boots.
"That should cover our quota. Shall we head back?"
"Yeah. The others should be gathering up their finds around now too."
I'd personally gone as far as the mid-slopes of the mountain range—too dangerous for intermediate-grade adventurers—but in the more manageable areas, the mercenaries I'd bought with gold were scouring every inch with fire in their eyes. A wealthy upper-grade adventurer scattering gold coins to buy time with money.
Nothing illegal about it, and it wasn't particularly hard or dangerous work either. Just doing the same commissions they always did, except now the pay was double—a situation that might as well have been magic. Once those adventurers heard the jingle of gold, nothing in the world could stop them.
I'd bought people with money, and I'd bought time with money.
Precious northern time, purchased with gold coins earned through sweat. And I was thoroughly enjoying every second of it—sprawled out in a comfortable inn room, working through ice-cold northern specialty beer and fried chicken. Beer so cold it made your teeth ache, and fried chicken brined until it was spicy-salty perfection.
This was a world where medieval markets sold tornado potatoes and cafés served Americanos and fat macarons. Of course an inn in a game world could deep-fry some K-chicken.
"If I started making kimchi, would they catch on right away…?"
The day after I'd thrown money around and snapped up everything I needed, heading straight back felt like a waste—so I bunkered down at the inn and started touring the nearby restaurants. …The room was pleasant and clean, sure, but the innkeeper's cooking was an absolute crime.
Fried chicken. Grilled lamb ribs. Spare ribs. Seasoned pig's trotters—
Dishes that made you wonder if they really belonged in a snow-covered northern continent of a fantasy world. Of course, you got the quality you paid for, so my tongue was happy—but even while ordering, I couldn't help feeling absurd. Tossing gold coins at a rough-faced hunter in furs and asking him to boil up some pig's trotters for me.
"What day is it now? About five days, right? The commission's going to take a while, so they should be back in a week or so. Hunting on the nineteenth floor, practicing coordination, learning magic… that's all fine, but…"
"Don't jinx me, you little—"
Watching the stream, Han Se-ah seemed to be getting a little restless. Not because she was worried I'd never come back—more the anxiety of a streamer-gamer whose progress had completely stalled.
This was already her second camping trip inside the Tower. She was gradually getting used to pitching tents and standing watch, but repeating the same content over and over was awkward for a streamer. The silver lining, I supposed, was that without me around, the combat had gotten a bit more intense and exciting.
"Helmet Stag approaching from the front. Looks like it caught our scent and got agitated."
"Then I'll hold it off."
At Grace's whisper, Irene stepped forward. Amid a barrage of chat messages mixing worry and affection from the viewers, a pure white barrier stopped the Helmet Stag's charge cold. Even a ferocious rush that could snap thick tree branches like dry straw couldn't put so much as a scratch on a 5-star priestess's shield.
Thud, thud. The creature shook its head, battering the barrier, then turned its savage gaze toward Kayden beside her. Having registered the candidate saint's shield as a wall—or something like a giant boulder—it was hunting for a new victim.
Its tangled, razor-sharp antlers sliced viciously through the air with every toss of its head, ready to tear a person apart.
"Hmph. Is that all?"
Of course a 4-star Sword Princess wasn't about to lose a swordfight to a pair of deer antlers. Her blade moved smoothly, shoving the stag's horns aside—and the weight of those antlers dragged its solid skull around with them. The creature's long neck was left naturally exposed to the rest of the party.
And that was the end of the Helmet Stag's brief, bold life. A magic missile drove into its jaw like an uppercut, an arrow buried itself in the soft inside of a foreleg, and a one-handed sword carved through its neck all at once. After a fleeting exchange, all that remained where the Helmet Stag had stood was a single Mana Stone.
"Appreciate the support. This looks like a good spot for the tents—shall we set up here?"
"That sounds good."
Han Se-ah slipped the Mana Stone into her inventory, then—following Kayden's suggestion—pulled a tent out of the same space. You'd think she'd be used to it by now, but watching a tent bigger than a person pop out of thin air never stopped being weird.
Her party members on camera clearly weren't used to it either, their mouths falling open in little "whoa"s. Gathering around Han Se-ah to receive tents and sleeping bags, they looked for all the world like baby birds waiting to be fed.
Even the pretty young man mixed in among them—whom the viewers already knew was a girl in disguise—had the chat going wild over every pretty face that hit the camera. I took a sip of beer while watching the chat devolve from filthy into just plain ridiculous. It washed the chicken grease clean out of my mouth.
Hot chicken, cold beer, internet streaming. Equipped with the holy trinity that could keep a man from leaving his room for a week, I watched Han Se-ah's broadcast. Day five now—if I let them roll around for about ten days total before heading back, that should work.
Factoring in travel time, I'd need to leave around day seven, which still left me two full days. Maybe I'd dig up a few movies on a video streaming site in the meantime.
Quest clear rewards don't include electronic currency, do they?
Sit down and you want to lie down—that's human nature. Once the browser was open, the urge to make paid purchases started itching.
Try to watch anything on a video platform and you got two of those damn "King's Sword" ads crawling out for fifteen seconds each. And any movie you actually wanted to see still cost a few thousand won to buy, even after all this time.
"Since it looks like the camping's going to keep repeating, I'm going to turn off the stream for a bit and keep going offline. But by the next stream, Roland-sensei should be back, right?"
"Then Mage Hanna's party is heading straight for the North. Anyway, from here on it's just cooking meals and standing watch with nothing much to show, so I'm ending the stream, resting a bit, progressing on my own, and then I'll be back."
As Han Se-ah waved goodbye to the camera, the world briefly turned gray again. The stream window open in my browser went pitch black, and the chat fell silent. She'd put it on pause and stepped away to rest, it seemed.