A Beginner's First Steps 3
Leaving the shrieking kyaaaaah! behind us, I led Hanna out of the guild. Our destination this time was, of course, the tower at the heart of the city… no—the various places every adventurer needed to know.
"First, I'll show you the spots inside the city you absolutely have to know."
"What kind of places?"
"A skilled blacksmith, an inn that's decent for Novice Adventurers, a tavern with good food, and the Temple, more or less."
Add the Adventurer's Guild and the Magic Tower Branch, and that was everything an adventurer needed to know by heart. And because those places mattered so much, the city was crawling with shops that fleeced country bumpkins for everything they had. As an Advanced Adventurer, I had a duty to point her toward the right ones—unless I wanted her to get her nose cut off with her eyes wide open.
At a blacksmith, you could get overcharged for repairs or stuck with defective gear. Cheap inns left their doors unlocked so your belongings walked off overnight. And some taverns served food that tasted like medieval dog chow. Better to know the good ones.
Of course, Hanna was a player—item appraisal, inventory, the whole package—so she was probably immune to most of that nonsense… but a senior adventurer had a reputation to maintain.
"So this is the tavern… Wait, can you do companion gacha here later?"
"……"
"Directionally challenged? Excuse me? Roland's showing me around right now, so everything's already marked on my map. Why would I get lost? And why do I call him 'sir'? Because if you pulled a 6-star NPC, you'd be carting him around too. Show him a good time in the party and maybe he'll hook you up with a full blinged-out gear set, right? Materialistic? Hey—do you have any idea how much early-game equipment gaps matter for climbing? Talk like that and you're a fake gamer."
I nearly reacted to the muttering trailing behind me as we walked the streets, but superhuman self-control clamped my mouth shut just in time. Companion gacha? No matter how I sliced it, that was not a word I was supposed to respond to.
Hanna launched into full conversation without a filter—whether she had some kind of toggle between talking to me and talking to her viewers, I couldn't tell. Listening in on her chat banter, I somehow managed to walk us past the Temple and all the way to the tower entrance at the city's center.
"Anyway! Looks like we've arrived at the entrance, so I'm locking back into the game."
The tower stretched impossibly high, punching straight up through the clouds as if it had never heard of a sky. In a fantasy-style city where even three- or four-story buildings were rare, a structure like this standing dead center was absurdly tall. Looking up at the tower and the blue sky from the entrance was the exact composition of the game's loading screen—one of the sights that had forced me to accept this world had been built on a game.
"Whoa~ It's so tall!"
Hanna was just as stunned by the grandeur. Her mouth fell open as she tipped her head back toward the sky. The camera drone tracked the angle of her neck, tilting with her. A colossal tower piercing the clouds never got old, even after ten years—her viewers had to be losing their minds.
Standing there in leather armor, long staff in hand, before a tower so tall it wore the clouds like a belt, she seemed overwhelmed by something like awe. She just stood still for several minutes.
The tower soaring into clear sky was a spectacle, sure—but the adventurers streaming in and out of the entrance below made for a fantasy tableau all their own. She deserved a moment to take it in. Warriors in steel helms stomping past in packs. Arrogant-looking mages with the hems of brand-new, glossy robes flapping behind them. Adventurers in filthy, battered armor staggering back out of the tower on wobbly legs.
Hanna had been staring, completely absorbed, when she suddenly flinched and nearly jumped out of her skin.
"Ah! Sorry. It was just so cool, I—"
"Don't worry about it. Everyone does that the first time they see the tower. Back when I was a Novice Adventurer, I stood around gawking forever before I went in."
"……Play one more voice donation like that and I'm banning every last one of you. Consider yourselves warned."
She dipped her head in apology after that startled hop, then dropped her gaze and muttered under her breath, jaw clenched tight. Either the scare had really gotten to her—or she was mortified at how she'd looked.
After that oddly pointed threat at her viewers, she lifted her head again. Not toward the cloud-belted tower this time, but toward the adventurers bustling through the entrance.
"Is there any kind of inspection process?"
"Not really. Honestly, you don't even have to be an adventurer to go in."
"Really?"
"Yeah. The Adventurer's Guild isn't kind enough to stop people from walking off to their deaths."
"…Huh?"
Hanna jumped at that. As a gamer, she might think the tower was no big deal—but for the people who actually lived in this world, the NPCs from her perspective, the tower was the most terrifying place imaginable.
Even the lower floors, where Novice Adventurers wandered, made the point. Sure, wild animals and monsters existed outside the tower too—but ordinary farmers barely ever saw them. Village hunters drove off or bagged the beasts; soldiers and adventurers dispatched from the city handled the monsters.
If you were truly unlucky, a whole village could get wiped out by roaming monsters—but that mostly happened to slash-and-burn settlements far from any city's protection.
For a farmer living a normal life near a city, the most dangerous thing he'd ever encounter was a starving wild dog, or some old, sick goblin an adventurer had accidentally let slip. The village men could handle that much with clubs.
But inside the tower?
"Inside the tower, monsters appear—and when they die, their corpses vanish and turn into Mana Stones. Completely different from monsters outside. You understand what that means?"
"Uh… the monsters inside are stronger?"
"No, not stronger. Just… there are a lot more of them."
The problem was that monsters spawned randomly inside the tower.
You'd clear a path forward, only for monsters to reappear behind you. Make noise, and monsters that hadn't been anywhere nearby would pop into existence and charge. Clear those out, turn around to leave—and the way back was blocked by a fresh wave that had just spawned.
That was why adventurers entered the tower in parties even on the lower floors. If your luck was rotten enough, you could get surrounded on the way in, break through, get surrounded again on the way out, shake them off—and still have a monster materialize right in front of your face.
"Some guys swagger in after clubbing one or two goblins outside. Usually the types who brag about being the strongest back in their village. They take down a couple of straggler goblins on the first floor, get a Mana Stone in their hand, and feel on top of the world. Then they push deeper into the tower… and run into problems they never saw coming."
"What kind of problems?"
"There are special safe zones inside the tower. Everywhere else, a monster can spawn at any time. You sit down to rest and a goblin pops out of the brush. You're mid-fight and something appears behind you and grabs your back."
In game terms, it was basically random encounters.
On the way in, three or four monsters at most—easy enough to push through. On the way out, exhausted, ten or twenty could pour out of nowhere for no fair reason at all. That was this damned tower. I'd suffered plenty because of it before I got used to the place.
They spawned when you tried to rest. When you tried to sleep. When you were prepping a meal. When you were heading back. Unless you were a seasoned adventurer, there was no good way to handle those sudden appearances.
"Adventurers have ways to prevent it, of course. But if a non-adventurer wanders in on their own, they get surrounded without even understanding what's happening—or their stamina gets whittled down until they die a slow death."
"Uh… so the tower's more dangerous than I thought?"
"That's why adventurers risk their lives. Though on the lower floors, it doesn't usually come to that."
I flashed her a grin and started walking toward the tower. Hanna scrambled after me. She must have taken my warning as the kind of joke a senior adventurer told a junior to put the fear of god into them, because she cleared her throat and struck up conversation again.
"Well, the first floor should be fine, right?"
"Fine for an adventurer. Hotheaded idiots who come in without the guild's help die on the first floor too."
"Uh, why? As long as you don't get greedy, it should be okay…"
I didn't answer that one. I just picked up the pace. I'd been laying low for a while, but fame didn't just evaporate—people's eyes were starting to stick to us. Stick a statue-handsome face with blond hair and blue eyes into a crowd of buckteeth, freckles, dandruff, fat guys, skinny guys, and assorted unwashed uglies, and of course the stares would lock on.
And trailing behind him, a pretty young woman whose leather armor couldn't quite hide a generous figure? The men's gazes went past focused and straight into sharp.
Our destination was the enormous arched doorway punched clean through the tower's outer wall. It was so huge it looked less like a door and more like the mouth of a tunnel. I stepped into that dim space without a word. Light footsteps hurried after me.
"Wait up!"
Dark shadow wrapped around the two of us—and in the blink of an eye, the scenery changed.
"Why so sudden—wait, huh!?"
"Because this," I said, "is the first floor of the tower."
An endless grassland unfurled before our eyes, so vast you could go forever without running into another adventurer.