Five Stars 3
The orc boss would be far more useful dead than alive.
Capturing it alive would have meant a bigger reward, sure — but what mattered wasn't the gold or the glory waiting right now. What mattered was the gate that would take us straight to the twentieth floor. The shorter the expedition's path to the Tower's upper levels, the easier it would be for adventurers to push the frontier higher.
If the mages decided to chase some crackpot experiment instead of building the gate… if the kingdom took the orc as a hostage for invading the royal forest and kidnapping a knight… if the temple decided to purify the orc that had defiled land blessed by the goddess—
What if greed for a bigger payout meant the twentieth-floor gate never got made at all?
"Ah, you absolute bastard."
"Hey, I said I was sorry."
"You son of a bitch…"
So I killed the orc boss.
While Rebecca and Han Se-ah were still talking, I reflected the enraged orc boss's area attack right back at it and finished it off. The moment that ominous mana swirling through the air touched my shield, it rebounded in full and tore its own master to shreds.
…If a projectile can be bounced with a shield, does that mean even an instant-kill skill can be reflected?
Anyway, the end result was the orc boss's remains scattered across the floor — and Rebecca, lips jutting out in a full sulk. She pouted those plump lips, muttered under her breath, and started thumping me with her fists.
Of course, considering that a single casual thump from a forty-third-floor adventurer had once reduced a mutant orc to paste, the way my body rattled every time she hit me wasn't pure theatrics. Every time Rebecca smacked my back or my arm, I rocked forward and back, side to side.
This one was on me, so I took the beating in silence. No pain, but my head was getting thoroughly rattled.
Rebecca had waited for my whole party to arrive so she could negotiate — only to get backstabbed and have the last hit stolen out from under her. If that didn't make you angry, you weren't an adventurer or a mercenary; you were a saint. Honestly, if all she was doing was thumping me like this, I was the one who should feel guilty.
Did the looks buff come with a nicer personality, too?
From the outside it looked like cute little taps, but my actual position was that even if she started dropping mother insults and swinging for my jaw, I had nothing to say in my defense. To Rebecca, who knew nothing about game quests, this was a guy she'd known for ten years stabbing her in the back over a reward.
Something like "I counterattacked by accident" wouldn't even begin to fly, so better not try.
Cute and playful on the surface — but the contents of those fists could pulp a human skull, never mind a mutant orc's, into overripe persimmon mush. They whistled through the air. Still, she seemed less furious than she could have been; at least she wasn't aiming for the back of my head.
"I waited so we could split it, you little shit. And you just gobbled the whole thing up?"
"I, uh, figured it could take one hit."
"You've been playing with that shield downstairs so long you forgot how to hold back. Real impressive."
It was a little funny, actually — Rebecca wasn't sulking because I'd taken the last hit and claimed the reward. She was sulking because she'd been saving that massive mutant orc for herself and I'd one-shot it. In short: not enough hand-feel. She was mad about the lack of satisfying impact.
The steady little noises — thump, smack, bang — rang out like footsteps, and our party members flinched a little with each one. Thanks to that, the awkward atmosphere held the whole way from the base of the pyramid altar back toward the exit.
"Ugh, it's the chatty old man. You're coughing all this up next time, you hear me?"
At the end of the dim corridor, near the entrance leading up to the pyramid's peak, Rebecca must have sensed a presence. She gave my back one last solid thwack and bolted. For a close-range warrior, did she have a scout's senses or what?
We stood there blankly with the rest of the party, watching her shudder and vanish into the forest — and then Antenor came flying through the air toward us as we descended the pyramid.
Was this the classic case of fleeing the fox only to meet the tiger? His face was haggard from burning through so much mana, but his eyes were huge and rolling with heat and excitement. Put generously, he looked like a scholar overflowing with passion. Put less generously, he looked like a madman with his eyes rolled back.
"I was going to pull myself together and head inside, but you're already out! What a shame! What was in there?"
Pull himself together, my ass. He'd been so busy scouring every material from the pyramid's foundation up that he never even thought about going inside. A mage who holds back in the face of the unexplored unknown simply does not exist in this world.
Of course, saying any of that out loud would just get him asking how I knew, followed by an exhaustive dump of everything he'd figured out.
When dealing with Rebecca's rage, you flatten yourself and wait for the storm to pass. When dealing with Antenor, you dump everything you know as fast as possible and run. Once a conversation starts and information starts flowing both ways, the chatter can easily stretch past a full day.
"Inside was the leader of orcs who use a peculiar kind of shamanism. Seemed like he knew space-related magic — he could summon mutant orc warriors and shamans."
"Hoh. An orc summoning orcs. And the, ah, remains…?"
"Hanna? Pull the stuff out of the inventory for me."
As a boss monster, the thing had dropped a mountain of materials. The silver lining was that, unlike the full-moon wolf buried in dirt, these were sprawled across a flat stone floor. The minion monsters had crumbled into smoke without leaving mana stones or materials behind, which was something.
The most eye-catching of the orc chieftain's remains was the massive Indian-style feathered headdress he'd worn. Beyond that there was a huge necklace that would hang down to the navel, bead bracelets that started at the wrist and wound all the way up the forearm, and assorted other ornaments.
Antenor's eyes sparkled as an armful of materials and mana stones popped out of thin air. You could practically see him debating which to talk about first — the materials or the inventory.
"Old man, you remember what you promised, right?"
"Of course. Being able to build a gate on the twentieth floor would be interesting enough on its own."
"Building a gate is… interesting. Fine, just make sure the gate comes first."
So I dangled the gate the way you'd throw a chunk of meat to distract a predator. I had zero interest in a lecture on how a stone pyramid ended up in the middle of a forest. Han Se-ah, for her part, didn't even want to stand in front of Antenor — she handed me the materials and took up position hiding behind my back.
Antenor, of course, paid her reaction no mind whatsoever and just turned the materials over in his hands this way and that. He'd already seen the inventory last time; the orc chieftain's remains were a first, so those took priority.
The sight made me uneasy enough to throw in one more line.
"Don't go 'oh, research got interesting, something just occurred to me' and put it off for days. Build the gate first, then play with whatever you want. Please."
"Come now, such a worrier. I've already done it on the tenth floor — a gate is something I can knock out in no time!"
That's exactly the problem. If having experience means you start with other experiments first, who knows how many weeks you'll bury yourself in there.
I swallowed the retort that nearly surged up my throat with superhuman patience. No matter how comfortable we were with each other, I was still the one asking for a favor. And for all that the old man talked too much, he wasn't the type to ignore a request made like this.
Getting away from him and heading to the guild was the top priority. His mouth was clearly starting to itch — the frequency of his gaze drifting from the materials over to Han Se-ah was climbing.
"Everybody shut up for a second. I'm scared as hell right now too… I want to fake passing out and get carried all the way to town. No — forget the lab, I'd rather get dragged there on the ground than go back."
I wasn't the only one who caught that ominous shift in the air. A vicious muttering drifted from behind my back. Fair enough — when even the great Rebecca sulked herself into a foul mood, then bolted in pure disgust, that said everything.
The rest of the party and I were clearly on Han Se-ah's side. Kayden had already lived through one of these with Rebecca's mercenary corps, and the others had gotten swept up with Han Se-ah back in the safe zone.
I wasn't the party leader, but as the upper-grade adventurer guiding the party, I had a duty to protect our newly intermediate-grade members. Not from monsters — from a eccentric mage's psychological assault. Tanking for the party, the proper way.
"Oh, right — if you go down below that altar, there's an underground cavern. From a quick look it seemed bigger than the altar itself. They must have dug deep and done major construction work."
"Orcs… not content with raising an altar, they did excavation and civil engineering as well? Hmm. Understood. I'll take a light look around and then get straight to work on the gate."
I knew full well that "light" by this old man's standards meant "call in all my assistants and spend a week perfectly mapping the interior," but there was nothing to be done. I felt a little bad for Antenor's assistants, but nobody had held a staff to their throats and forced them into the job.
And so, sacrificing Antenor's assistants as our scapegoats, we pocketed just a single mana stone from the orc boss and made it to the twentieth-floor passage without incident.
Antenor had taken the materials with him; he'd share them with Charlotte at the lab later. Rebecca had worked out her temper on my back and thighs and would be heading back to the forty-third floor. That left only submitting this mana stone to the guild and reporting to the Royal Knights — and the quest would be done.
Help Streamer 'Han Se-ah' Clear Her Main Quest
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Han Se-ah's main scenario quest — and that mysterious quest that had landed on me — both of them.