The Starving Beast 1
Whether the chat was chaotic and messy or not, time marched on. Once Charlotte had satisfied her curiosity and left, Grace, Irene, and Kayden fell into a deep sleep on the cabin beds. I lay face-down on my own cabin bed browsing the internet, while Han Se-ah chatted with her viewers from the cabin next door.
"There's not much to do at night anyway, so I might as well just hit the bed, right?"
Having said as much, Han Se-ah made a show of pressing the game's holographic UI floating in midair, exaggerated motions for the viewers' benefit. The moment she hit the Rest button, she crumpled onto the bed like a puppet with its strings cut, then settled into a neat, proper sleeping posture.
…So this is how it works?
At the same time, the internet broadcast froze. The chat that had been swarming like raindrops in monsoon season locked up as if a manager had hit freeze. But no black screen appeared to signal that the stream had ended.
The image had simply stopped, as if someone had yanked the internet cable.
Curious, I hopped over to other websites. At least the quest window the system had given me as a reward wasn't broken. After spending the whole night watching videos, I noticed one thing: the real-world clock in the bottom right corner wasn't moving.
When Han Se-ah paused, time in the game world stopped while the outside world kept flowing.
When Han Se-ah saved the game, time in the game world flowed while the outside world stopped.
Having confirmed that simple rule, I went back to browsing — and Han Se-ah's eyes snapped open on the bed. Simultaneously, time on her stream began flowing again as if nothing had happened. She wriggled against the mattress, apparently liking the feel of it, and picked up her chatter with the viewers right where she'd left off.
"Alright, it's morning, and the party should've gotten a good night's sleep, so what now? If we head outside, are the Magic Tower and the guild going to put together some kind of subjugation force again?"
Watching someone who'd been frozen stiff on the bed like an actress in a time-stop story casually pick up a conversation again was a little surreal. Sensing the rest of the party would be waking soon, I got up as well.
True to a place full of mages, even a cabin inside the Tower came equipped with a shower. After a quick rinse, I found the others gathered outside my cabin, looking considerably fresher.
"So what do we do now?"
"We'll just have breakfast here and head out. We could spend another day exploring if we wanted, but there's no need to wear ourselves out."
A poor adventurer might have milked every last Mana Stone out of Floor 20 while they still had access — but our party had no such need. With an Upper-grade adventurer footing the bills, living expenses barely registered.
No scrimping on inn rooms to cover gear repairs, no camping inside the Tower. A life of abundance. Everyone nodded along with my suggestion.
No matter how ambitious they were about conquering the Tower, nobody was going to object to resting on the third day after two days inside. Irene especially would be itching to get back and look after the children at the temple.
"Even if the Magic Tower and the Adventurer's Guild move fast, they won't have everything sorted the day after getting the report. If we rest well today, new commissions should start popping up at the guild tomorrow or the day after — bring back materials from orc warriors or shamans, scout an orc settlement, that kind of thing."
"So we take it easy today and start clearing Floor 20 commissions tomorrow?"
"Exactly. And in a situation like this, the Tower mages will be desperate — which means it's a perfect chance to spread our party's reputation. An incident this big will reach the nobility too."
Grace, who'd seen with her own eyes how relentlessly the mages had hounded Han Se-ah after the Full Moon Wolf incident, nodded. Kayden, who'd joined later, also looked like she'd already predicted the nobles' reaction — as expected of a princess.
With that settled, we stepped outside the cabin — and found the maid Mary standing stock-still by the door, hands neatly folded.
"What's going on?"
"My lady asked me to escort you to the dining hall."
As skilled a maid as she was a tea-brewer, Mary led the party with natural ease. Following her, we arrived at a cabin clearly larger than the lodging ones. With timber so abundant, everything except the walls was a cabin, apparently.
Research labs, communication artifact storage, lodging, and even a dining hall — all cabins. It felt very much like a safe zone built by mages.
The "dining hall" was just a large hearth and some tables. With practiced hands, Han Se-ah pulled a massive pot from her inventory and set it on the hearth with a solid thunk. Mary the maid jumped at the sight of a pot large enough for a person to curl up inside materializing from thin air.
"Oh my, is this… magic?"
"Yes. Inventory magic — you store things in a subspace and pull them out as needed."
The deadpan beauty's startled reaction delighted Grace more than Han Se-ah. Completely unaware that the viewers were snickering, Grace launched into praise like a doting dad showing off his daughter.
But could a gamer really get puffed up from praise of the game system? It was the equivalent of "This gamer knows how to press the I key!" — and Han Se-ah's awkward smile, the corners of her mouth twitching, instantly made her the new target of the mischievous chat.
Apparently done being the butt of inventory jokes, she bolted up and headed for the pot. Leaving Grace's praise barrage behind, she went off with Mary to fetch water. In a space whose only cooking equipment was a hearth, there was no chopping, stir-frying, or roasting to be done.
Fortunately, a water-producing artifact was available, so what we ended up eating indoors was a warm, simmered soup. Being breakfast, and with a party majority of women, she'd gone for something gentle. Not a thick stew packed with ingredients, but a thin soup that filled the air with a savory aroma.
"Aren't the other mages coming to the dining hall?"
"Same situation as the cabins. They built the dining hall large for expeditions heading upward, but most of the mages take their meals as dry rations in their research labs. …My lady is the same, so if you leave before lunch, you may need to go without seeing her."
"Ah… I see."
"Yes. She was examining the orc warrior's bracelet until dawn yesterday, so she may only just have gone to bed."
Mary explained this to Han Se-ah with a faintly embarrassed air while we scraped up soup with 1★ "Hearty" Johanna's bread — the kind that stayed warm from the inventory. No wonder she hadn't prepared any soup for Charlotte.
Once for the inventory, once for airing her mistress's less-than-dignified habits. The chat, having spotted cracks in the deadpan, perfect beauty of a maid, started boiling over again.
Han Se-ah averted her eyes from that mortifying spectacle. The madness of tens of thousands of people wasn't something a single individual could hold back. Whether Eastern or Western, gamers were all the same — even foreign viewers who'd come for a guide were joining the chat in translator-speak.
"Hey, smells good. Got any left?"
"…?"
"What, the fuck. Between you and me, I can't even get a bowl of soup?"
"No, that's not—"
I was just standing up, enjoying the warm, solid feeling of a soup-filled stomach, when someone dropped heavily into a seat at the table. Rebecca shook out her bright red hair like a dog flinging off water and demanded soup from me out of nowhere.
What was this situation?
Antenor was always an unpredictable old man. Finding him digging through dirt on Floor 10 hunting Full Moon Wolf traces instead of sitting on Floor 43 wouldn't have been strange at all. But Rebecca was a different story.
No matter how much she moved like a beast and acted on pure instinct, she was still Rebecca, the Mercenary Queen. The reason her system title never changed even after becoming an adventurer was simple: adventurers chase the unknown, but mercenaries chase money.
So why was someone who punched through the Tower's highest floors for big pay hanging around the research labs of Floor 20's safe zone?
"By the way, why didn't you go higher?"
"I did go up, then came back down, fuck. Did you lot see it too?"
"See what?"
"Those pig-headed bastards multiplying!"
She bared her teeth like an agitated animal and pounded the table. The party members rolled their eyes at each other, wondering what had the Upper-grade adventurer storming in like a hurricane first thing in the morning.
"Those fucking bastards flipped our kids' food wagons!"
"Uh…"
From Floor 10 to 20, past 30 and 40, all the way to Floor 43 — food transport that needed Upper-grade adventurers attached. But efficiency-minded mercenaries assigned escorts by floor. Intermediate-grade adventurers handled the Floor 20 convoy, meeting the upward passage and handing off to Upper-grade adventurers at Floor 30's safe zone. So having a food wagon stripped by dozens of orcs appearing en masse on Floor 20 wasn't impossible.
"I went down to Floor 1 and ordered a ton of beer for the kids, plus my own booze and tobacco — and the wagon never showed, day after day. So I came down myself, and what? The orcs hit the wagon? These fucking pieces of shit treating contracts like garbage…"
And of course a starving beast turns vicious. Territory invaded, belongings stolen, thoroughly famished — one 5★ red-haired beast.
Things looked pretty fucked.
…Not for me. For the orcs.