Opening Skirmish 5
Everything in this world comes at a cost.
"Hmm, so you were outside enjoying a bit of reading when you ought to have been tending the crystal orb. Ah, no, I'm not scolding you. It's simply that I've grown rather curious about the book you were reading. Was it research for a new paper? Or something to clear your head? And if it's a favorite you've read many times over, might you introduce it to me?"
"Th-that is…"
Having finished with the crystal orb, I tossed the mage in charge of it to Antenor and hauled our party members out of the laboratory. With Antenor pressing them so hard it was less conversation than a verbal barrage, our group's footsteps quickened of their own accord.
Honestly, I'd expected him to launch into a "back in my day" monologue. I hadn't predicted he'd steer things into a deep magical debate over whatever book the man had been reading. True to form for an eccentric who loved listening as much as he loved talking.
Han Se-ah shot me a resentful glare. Her camera drone and her pretty face locked onto me like a matched pair of eyes, so I shrugged and turned my back on the laboratory. One mage sacrificed in exchange for extracting the party… a profitable trade, all told.
"Ugh, seriously. If he weren't a 6★, I'd have smacked him one."
"But he's a precious member of the party, and he's always held the front line so reliably. From lodging fees to guild connections, I've received so much from him that I must decline any mission that would have me repay Roland-sensei with ingratitude. I'll gratefully accept the ten thousand, though, ManaStoneThief."
Ominous chatter drifted from behind me as I kept my back turned. Han Se-ah walked between the huts — outwardly no different from one another — chatting with her viewers. Grace and Irene, having already poured out everything they had to say inside the laboratory, simply trudged along with weary faces.
We were still walking among the huts, looking for a guest cabin or a guard who could give us directions, when a familiar face approached.
"My, Miss Hanna and Sir Roland — what brings you here?"
"Miss Charlotte? I didn't expect to find you on the 20th floor instead of the Magic Tower."
"Yes. Thanks to the Full Moon Wolf incident, I've grown rather eager to uncover new facets of the Tower."
Pink-haired noble lady, 2★ Ambitious Charlotte Cavendish, and her loyal maid — blue-haired 1★ Maid Mary, trained in thief skills.
The combination of a noble lady whose chest armor was as ample as her pink hair suggested, and a slender beauty of a maid with a deadpan expression, sent viewer opinion spinning on a dime. Hard to believe these were the same people who'd been spamming curses and getting timed out mere minutes ago.
It was probably that soft, feminine air of hers — the same maternal presence that had her tending children at the Temple. The noble-lady-and-maid pairing brought its own fantasy appeal, too. And just like that, chat launched yet another World's Greatest Abnormal Lust Competition.
"By the way, even as Upper-grade adventurers, you can't exactly use this place like an inn…"
"Something came up that we need to report to the guild in a hurry. The Magic Tower needs to hear about it as well."
"Have you discovered something else, after the Full Moon Wolves?"
Charlotte's eyes went round with curiosity. Fair enough — barely any time had passed since the Full Moon Wolf incident, and already another anomaly had cropped up. To other NPCs, it must have felt like standing beside a boy detective counting corpses.
Putting the NPCs' assessments together, Han Se-ah came out as a capable, promising genius witch who dragged incidents and accidents in her wake. Laid out like that, it was almost funny.
"If there's lodging for visitors, I'd like to set our things down and talk."
"Ah, of course. Spending so much time inside the Tower makes one terribly insensitive to the hour. How rude of me."
The sun blazed brilliantly overhead — we'd cleared the trees, after all — but by the outside world's clock it was somewhere around three or four in the morning, when the moon ought to have been riding high. Unlike Han Se-ah, who'd paused the game and taken a full day off, the rest of us needed rest.
Realizing we'd come here after a long stretch of forest exploration, Charlotte elegantly covered her mouth with one hand. At that soft gesture, her sharp-eyed maid was already the first to start moving.
"Then allow me to show you to a cabin used for lodging. The mages don't use them, so it should be clean."
"They don't use them?"
"Because of Lord Antenor… thanks to him, everyone stays in their laboratories."
She had definitely been about to say "because of Antenor" just now.
Viewers who'd been fixated on the soft sway of her pink hair and the rise and fall of certain soft masses with every step were not about to miss that slip of the tongue. Half the chat was airing its own shameful desires; the other half was roasting the endlessly talkative mages. A thoroughly chaotic chat window.
Whether the chat was a mess or not, Han Se-ah quietly followed behind Charlotte. She'd taken a full day off outside the game, yet she still looked tired — that wasn't just my imagination. Kayden, who'd snuck out alone, actually looked fresher than Han Se-ah after her day of rest.
The cabin we were shown looked identical from the outside, but inside it was furnished with rugs, beds, chairs, and the like. Charlotte opened the door, glanced back at us as if presenting the place, then slipped inside and settled naturally at the table.
"All the cabins around here have beds. No one has a permanently assigned one, so just pick whichever you like and flip the sign on the door. That means someone's using it."
"Ah, yes. Thank you, Miss Charlotte."
"Then would you mind telling me what this is about? I'm curious why you deliberately sought out the Magic Tower's safe zone without leaving the Tower itself."
It was well past the hour they should have been in bed, so Grace, Irene, and Kayden — all looking exhausted — naturally said their goodbyes and slipped out of the cabin. We'd already relayed everything to Antenor, a high-ranking mage, and filed a report with the guild. Our work was done.
I settled comfortably at the table, and Han Se-ah took a seat as well. She'd only just logged in, so heading straight to bed apparently felt wrong. Gaming taking a back seat to the streamer's lot in life, I supposed.
Charlotte watched with round eyes full of curiosity at the prospect of not one but two people explaining, but without a word she sipped the warm black tea Mary had brought and prepared to listen.
"New monsters have started appearing on the 20th floor, Miss Charlotte. What we've confirmed so far are large numbers of orc warriors and the orc shamans commanding them."
"My? 'Confirmed so far' meaning…"
"There's likely a higher-ranking entity above the shamans."
Charlotte wasn't the only one whose eyes lit up at my words. Han Se-ah, already aware of the "Orc Kingdom" through a quest, straightened up and looked at me with open interest. Mary standing behind Charlotte, Charlotte and Han Se-ah themselves, and tens of thousands of viewers beyond the camera.
Finding myself in what felt less like a conversation than an interview — or an interrogation — I moistened my lips with the warm black tea set before me. Bitter, warm, with a subtle sweetness rising through it.
Being a starred Maid, was her tea-brewing skill near perfect as well? For all I knew, Maid Mary's skills might not be lockpicking or trap disarming at all, but cleaning and brewing tea. I'd kept them hanging longer than intended, but only after a few more sips of tea could I begin the explanation.
"First of all, a mere shaman commanding dozens of orc warriors is clearly abnormal. Orc shamans earn respect for their characteristic cleverness — but they are not beings who can actually command and rule the others."
"Ah, yes. Dozens of orc warriors does sound strange."
Thinking of orc denseness, a fitting analogy came to mind. Of course, I was reverse-engineering this to fit the "Orc Kingdom" quest name Han Se-ah had explained to her viewers on stream.
To an orc warrior, an orc shaman was roughly the equivalent of the neighbor's kid who got into Seoul National University. You acknowledged they were smart and capable, but that didn't give them the authority to issue orders. If the neighbor's SNU student knocked on your door and declared that since you went to a no-name college you had to obey him, work construction, and hand over your wages — who would actually submit?
Just because the neighbor upstairs or downstairs has a better degree and a higher IQ doesn't mean they get to give you orders. For savage monsters like orcs, raw strength and grip power matter far more than wisdom. No shaman is going to overpower dozens of orc warriors.
"So there must be a monster of higher rank than the shamans commanding the warriors. One that granted the shamans their authority. Of course, this could be empty worry, and we might simply keep seeing orc villages centered on shamans."
"But adventurers are people who always prepare for the worst. The appearance of a higher entity — a plausible hypothesis."
My reverse-engineered explanation must have sounded convincing enough; both Charlotte and Han Se-ah nodded. Events inside the Tower could unfold completely differently from the outside world, but most other monsters still shared roughly the same habits as their counterparts beyond it.
Even Grace, who came from a slash-and-burn farming village, knew that the habits of horned rabbits and horned foxes outside held true inside the Tower. A mage like Charlotte would hardly be unaware of that.
Of course, the viewers who'd heard my explanation were still too busy airing their own desires.
Orcs and female adventurers… the fact that I understood it only made it more absurd.