What Gold Can Buy 2
I walked the familiar road and pushed open the guild doors. The moment the wooden doors swung wide, the first thing that hit my eyes was a drone filming the entrance head-on. Behind it, my party members sat at a table, all of them looking my way.
One of them had a hand thrust high in the air, looking for all the world like a kid who'd been waiting all week for a field trip. Or maybe a child answering when Santa called their name. The hand wasn't waving so much as flapping, and that frantic little flutter said everything about how she felt.
"Roland!"
I'd left her stream open in a corner of my vision through a browser window, so I'd expected a reaction — but Han Se-ah's was more intense than I'd figured. I'd assumed a little push-and-pull once or twice wouldn't get much of a rise out of her, but a streamer's instincts worked a little differently from what I'd imagined.
Grace, sitting right next to her, nearly jumped out of her seat at the sight of that flapping hand. By now, Grace's head was probably spinning out some full-blown soap-opera plotline about love and war.
Whether Grace was staring in shock or not, Han Se-ah just beamed at me and waved me over. I gave her a casual wave back and took a seat at the table.
"Been a while. You finish your homework?"
"We camped overnight in the Tower for a day and a half, then took a day off to rest up, and repeated that. No real mistakes, nobody got hurt in combat — so I'd say we completely conquered the nineteenth floor."
Grace and Irene, sitting behind her, gave small, affirming nods at Han Se-ah's confident report. The repeated camping trips seemed to have boosted their confidence as adventurers a notch. I glanced over at Kayden, and she gave a small nod of her own, as if to say it checked out.
She was the last member to join, but setting me aside, Kayden had the most real combat experience of anyone here. Curious how the Sword Princess rated the rest of the party, I asked.
"Kayden, how did the three of them look to you?"
"Yes. As I mentioned yesterday, aside from the condition dip after the first night watch, there's little to criticize. If I had to point something out, it would be that Miss Irene tenses up excessively when she has to step to the front."
Kayden nodded at my question and answered without missing a beat. Irene had ended up on the receiving end of the critique more or less by accident, but she didn't look particularly put out by it.
Using a barrier to protect your allies when you had a frontliner was one thing. Having no frontliner and having to plant that barrier yourself to hold the line was something else entirely — especially when something like a helmet stag came charging and you were the only one standing in its way.
"Standing right in front of a monster was a little scary…"
"Even so, she never froze up, and her holy arts never came out late."
Irene's cheeks flushed with a soft, embarrassed pink, and Kayden hurried to add the second part. Grace and Han Se-ah, for their part, didn't seem to have any bad habits worth calling out. Honestly, even from where I sat, there wasn't much to criticize about either of their combat.
Neither Kayden nor I knew the first thing about archery or magic, so the only fair yardstick was how well they synced in group combat. And on that front, both of them consistently performed above average.
"Glad to hear everyone's settling in. If the camping gear's ready, I was thinking we'd hit the twentieth floor today. How about it?"
I took in their light impressions of the camping homework I'd assigned, then moved the conversation forward. Without a frontliner, the monsters got more aggressive in a free-for-all and made things a pain. The difference between a frontliner pinning a charge and stopping one with a barrier. Round and round it went until the whole discussion had somehow turned into a Roland-appreciation session on the necessity and importance of a defensive frontliner, and I wasn't sure how to feel about that.
"Hey now, stop slandering our sensei."
The viewers were clearly on the same wavelength, because the chat exploded in every direction at once — from the mustachioed guy with the sickle and hammer to the triple-chin piglet who looked like he could launch missiles. The world might have changed a little, but the major figures of history apparently hadn't.
Anyway, I left the chat window drowning in terrible jokes behind and headed for the gate with the party.
"Roland, I heard the reason you went north this time was for Kayden's armor?"
"Yeah. There was something that needed an upper-grade adventurer on the job, so I went myself."
Most of the conversation as we walked was about the north I'd just come back from. None of them knew anything beyond the Adventurer's City, so of course they were curious what the kingdom's northern reaches were like.
Grace, a country girl from the eastern countryside, and Irene, born and raised in a city temple — both of them were looking at a complete unknown. Han Se-ah was no different. Even among the gamers who'd bolted out of the city, the ones who'd actually put down roots in the cold, harsh north were a tiny minority.
If you ran out of the city without earning any money first — whether you became a mercenary or a wanderer — you still had no cash, so sleeping rough was inevitable. But if you tried camping your way north, the cold would wreck your body and freeze you solid, so most people had no choice but to stick to warmer places.
That was the kind of realism this game ran on. There were no hunger or thirst gauge bars like in a survival game, but if you stayed in a harsh environment long enough, your physical condition steadily deteriorated. And the people figuring that out by sleeping naked outdoors were, of course, the gamers.
…There really were a lot of lunatics out there.
"So then, Kayden's armor…?"
"We've got the materials now, so next we need to find a craftsman who can repair it. Kayden, anyone in mind?"
"Yes. Through Lady Rebecca's introduction, I know a blacksmith."
Talking as we went, we passed through streets packed with adventurers and into the gate. Our faces must have been getting familiar by now — the mage barely glanced at our adventurer tags before waving us through.
And so we walked across a sun-warmed grassland. We were at the level where anything goblin-tier or below could be ignored and walked past. A party heading out to hunt orc hunters had no reason to waste time on a few sickly goblins.
Lantern in hand, we made a straight line for the passage, ignoring any monster that didn't come at us. Even so, the occasional horned wolf that happened to be lurking right on our path spat out byproducts and a mana stone before vanishing.
"That magic armor — I'm curious. Could we see it?"
"Yes. Once it's repaired, I'll be wearing it on adventures anyway. I plan to drop it off for repairs after this run — would you like to see it then?"
The party kept chatting as casually as if a horned wolf leaping out of the brush wasn't even a threat anymore. Fair enough — after killing dozens of moss wolves, getting startled by a horned wolf would have been ridiculous.
In raw physical specs, the horned wolf — a named monster from the tenth floor — was superior. But for stealth, the moss wolf, with moss stuck to its fur and hiding in dim shadows, had the edge. Unless you'd blundered onto the eleventh floor without a proper scout and gotten wrecked the way some internet war stories described, there was no reason to be surprised.
As we passed the grassland and reached the passage leading up into the forest, Grace drifted a little closer to my side.
"Roland, so what was the north like?"
"The cold beer was good."
"You just went up there to drink?"
"Ate a ton of meat, too."
Her eyes sparkling with curiosity about the north, Grace edged up beside me — and Irene quietly drifted in behind her. In a world without the internet, even secondhand stories from someone who'd been there were worth hearing. In a place where bard was an actual profession, it was a natural enough reaction.
Of course, for the viewers watching us through the camera drone, it was a natural reaction of a completely different kind.
Grace's feelings for me were obvious enough from her character quest alone. The way she clung to me after drinking, the times Han Se-ah had openly pushed the two of us together. And then there was Irene, whose face was the only part of her that showed — but even that was striking enough — stuck right up against me like this.
A flower in each hand. That was the phrase for moments like this.
Grace, who wore her love out in the open, and Irene, who was slowly opening her heart. Because it was a game stream with a mostly male audience, more and more viewers seemed more interested in Roland's love life than in the mage Hanna's adventures.
In my past life there'd been people who got way too invested in celebrity couples and shipping wars — why would this place be any different? A capable, handsome fantasy knight, a lovely archer, a gentle priestess. The chat filled with viewers who'd immersed themselves in completely the wrong direction.
"Hey now, Roland's harem? Irene unnie hasn't even been on a date yet. Watching it quietly is fun though — maybe I should give them a little push later. Though shipping them before the character quest even shows up is a bit scary."
"Ah, thank you for the mission. The username's a little cursed, but the mission content is pretty interesting. Yesterday there was someone called SnowySnowCountrySnowy or something — you're not running alts, are you?"
Even Han Se-ah herself was getting interested and steering the viewers that way, which said it all. There was a reason people on the internet's spiciest anonymous boards called her a money-grubbing cash demon.
She was milking mission donations off other people's love lives.