1.
What it meant to become an apostle of a god.
At its core, it meant deciding to serve that god.
It was not so different from declaring that one would become the god’s devoted believer.
It meant taking the lead as an agent who delivered the will of the gods.
In that sense, whenever Dolores, Gaia’s apostle, entered the Tower, she would naturally be transported to a certain place before heading anywhere else.
First, to Gaia’s temple.
"Thank you always for the embrace of the earth. Thank you for bestowing your blessings."
Given the circumstances today, she intended to offer a quick greeting and leave for the eighty-eighth floor.
She really had done it quickly.
But normally, Gaia would respond to this.
With words of encouragement, or at least some brief remark.
Perhaps other gods would not, but Gaia was especially kind.
Yet strangely enough...
"..."
Today, there was no response at all.
Tap tap tap...
She began tapping her foot.
Dolores was growing anxious.
Ordinarily, she would have waited calmly, but she had no room for calm right now.
What if Lionel has gone missing?
The moment that thought crossed her mind,
Dolores hurriedly finished her greeting.
"G-Gaia, I’m in a great hurry...!"
And simply skipped the rest.
Just this once, she felt she had to entrust herself to the mercy and compassion of the one she served.
Hoping Gaia would forgive her irreverence,
she immediately headed to the eighty-eighth floor.
When she opened her eyes,
she was standing before the Tower’s inter-floor transit device.
...Lionel!
Shouting that inwardly, she rushed out at once.
Whoosh...
Hot air washed over her face.
Inside the Forge Tower on the eighty-eighth floor.
Most climbers headed for the inter-floor transit device located outside the Forge Tower, at the Dwarf Company, so this place was relatively empty.
However, she had visited the inspection office here for Lionel’s gloves last time.
So she had naturally come here.
She thought she would find him quickly because there was no one around, but...
"..."
...No matter where she looked, Lionel was nowhere to be found.
The invitee would arrive through this inter-floor transit device.
So if she waited, Lionel would come.
She waited.
How much time had passed?
By the time she was on the verge of biting her nails,
Hummm...
A humming sound came from the transit device.
Flash!
A pale green light burst forth.
"...?"
A short figure took shape.
Step. Step.
"Wow. I feel like I’m going to puke."
A boy stumbled out.
It was Lionel.
He blinked a few times with a vacant expression and looked around.
How frightened he must have been...
She did not know where he had been dropped off alone or what he had seen.
And the caretaker of the invitation ticket was infamous for her terrifying appearance.
Of course, Lionel looked perfectly fine and showed no sign of having been scared at all.
Patapatapat!
Dolores sprinted toward him in an instant.
"Lionel!"
"Dolores!"
For a moment, she wished he would call her Mommy.
Still, she was simply relieved to see him.
Squeeze.
Dolores pulled Lionel into an embrace.
"Are you all right...? Lionel."
"Yes, I’m fine."
"You’re not hurt anywhere?"
"Nope."
"You weren’t scared..."
That was when it happened.
"..."
Dolores realized that a very familiar scent lingered in her nose.
At its base was a sweet fragrance.
The scent of earth rising after rain.
Unknown flowers mingled with it, layered beneath the scent of grass.
A scent that made the tension drain from her shoulders just by smelling it.
"..."
Where had she smelled this before?
Where, exactly?
No.
This scent, unless it came from there...
Or unless it came from...
That person...
Just as she could not make sense of it,
Dolores’s gaze slowly lowered.
"What is it?"
Lionel’s hand.
In the boy’s hand was a single white flower.
A flower that was obviously imbued with an immense amount of divine energy.
Divine favor.
The act of a god declaring a climber to be their own.
In other words,
it was a threat telling the other gods, This one is mine, so stay away.
The gods used this means sparingly.
Only as a way to mark someone desirable before anyone else could claim them.
But the source of this fragrance...
Dolores knew. Gaia was gentle.
Because Gaia was gentle, she never held anyone back... and normally never called anyone her own.
Why, then, this time?
"Um, Dolores?"
Lionel looked up at her from within her embrace, his face blank.
"This... someone gave me a flower..."
Dolores could not say anything.
And only then
did she think she understood why there had been no response in the temple today.
Lionel...
had been chosen by Gaia.
And received her divine favor.
2.
Gaia.
Anyway, I met her in an incredibly warm place and was teleported to the eighty-eighth floor.
A space filled with steam and heat.
Something like lava flowed below.
And above us...
"...A furnace."
I’m a blacksmith, so of course I knew what that was.
That was exactly the sort of furnace everyone knew.
"..."
Dolores headed outside the Forge Tower while tightly holding my hand.
For some reason, she had been quiet since earlier.
And she was gripping my hand rather hard.
I’d noticed it before, but she seemed to do this whenever she was even a little uneasy.
Ah, come to think of it, she had been a little like this ever since I mentioned getting the flower.
Dolores also said that the woman seemed to have really been Gaia.
Well, she was wearing my earring, so that made sense.
For now, I left the flower in Dolores’s subspace storage.
Since a god gave it to me, shouldn’t it be special somehow?
Maybe I should boil it and drink it or something.
When we stepped outside the Forge Tower,
the scenery was completely different from what we had just seen.
Compared to the hot interior,
the air was pleasant and cool.
And something was slowly descending below us.
Hummm...
At the same time, something else was rising.
Could this be...?
My eyes widened just then.
That was when—
"It is a circulating transport machine. You may think of it as a device connecting the exterior and interior of the Tower’s eighty-eighth floor."
A man in a suit explained with a smile.
So...
it was an elevator, wasn’t it?
We boarded it and slowly descended.
Villages below came into view, as did mountains.
And...
a huge white building came into sight too.
That was probably...
the Enchant Room.
It looked like it would be my first destination.
It was also Harngar’s request,
and something I was personally curious about.
Just how did they enchant equipment that it sold for so much?
There are plenty of guys in suits on the other floors of the Tower too. Guys in suits are all long-winded.
That was Harngar’s creed.
And I agreed, more or less.
Not because the only suit I had worn in my past life was an interview suit rented from my university.
I just hated suits.
[ㅠㅠ]
Don’t cry, Yuna.
You’re making me sad out of nowhere.
As we talked,
this state-of-the-art elevator brought us right before the Enchant Room.
Hummm...
"We have arrived. I hope you have an enjoyable enchantment experience."
"Thank you."
I wasn’t sure how enjoyable it would be.
Anyway, we would be enchanting equipment today, but the gear we were entrusting to them belonged to Dolores.
The reason was simple.
She was famous and a high ranker, so it would seem natural for her to have equipment worthy of bringing here.
"...You’re really okay with this, Dolores?"
"Of course I am."
The first item was:
─────────────────
[Blue Silver Bracelet]
[★★★☆☆]
[Enchant Level: +0]
─────────────────
A three-star, high-performance piece of equipment bought from a dwarven equipment shop.
The second was
something she had used before obtaining her unique equipment sub-weapon.
─────────────────
[Magic Grimoire]
[★★★☆☆]
[Enchant Level: +18]
─────────────────
Apparently, she had originally planned to pass it down to Ruby.
What I make will be better.
I could do better than this thing, so we decided to enchant it instead.
So, to sum it up,
we would submit two items: one with no enchantments, and one with a high enchantment level.
With that, we entered the Enchant Room.
According to what I had seen in the community, it was supposed to be packed with people...
"...Hm."
Well, there were plenty of people,
but not quite that many.
"Welcome. Ah, isn’t that Duke Dolores!"
Bow.
Whoa.
"It has been some time since your last visit. Have you been well?"
The reason I flinched just now was
that when the man in a suit greeted us from afar,
Dolores’s expression instantly soured.
It returned to normal right away, but
I had never seen her look that irritated before.
It felt different from when Isabella was involved.
It was more like she had just seen something filthy.
"..."
Dolores merely gave a small nod in response.
"We have registered your two pieces of equipment."
The employee smiled as he slid the paperwork into the next room.
"I hope you have an enjoyable enchantment experience. May fortune be with you."
I turned to look around the interior again.
Rows of rooms arranged in a circle, with people seated in front of them waiting for their turn.
We had been assigned Room 6,
so we headed straight there.
Creak.
The room was surprisingly spacious inside.
Before us stood a single enormous machine.
So this was the enchantment machine.
The legendary thing I had only heard about.
There was a glass window in front of it, and beyond it was a large compartment where something could be placed.
And on the other side of the machine...
"..."
Huh?
Every employee I had met so far had been human, but...
the employee sitting before us was a dwarf.
He was short,
and his muscles were so huge that the buttons across the chest of his suit looked ready to burst.
He sat there awkwardly in an outfit that suited him in absolutely no way.
"H-ha ha. Welcome."
Rustle.
He rose from his seat.
"Which piece of equipment would you like to do first?"
"..."
He was making sales pitches like someone wearing clothes that did not fit him.
"...Let’s start with this one. Please set the target number of attempts to one hundred."
"Yes, understood."
Rustle.
Dolores held out the Blue Silver Bracelet.
The dwarf took it and placed it inside the glass compartment.
For reference, each attempt cost five hundred gold.
You might think, What, that’s cheap? But converted to Korean won, it was five million won.
From what I could tell, that was the absolute limit beginner climbers could afford.
The cost rose further after +5.
After +10, it rose even more. After +15, it rose even, even more.
Not by a few hundred gold, either—it multiplied.
That was how the pricing structure worked.
"We will begin the +0 to +1 enchantment."
Dolores and I sat on a plush sofa and watched.
Now then.
What was enchanting?
It was an incredibly meticulous and delicate task.
So I had been curious how exactly a machine would do it.
I watched the inside of the glass compartment carefully...
Fwoooosh...
Blue shit-powder was sprinkled over it.
Ugh, low quality. It was painful to look at.
Then—
─────────────────
[Would you like to begin enchanting?]
─────────────────
A message appeared before my eyes.
I nearly answered instinctively, but
I remained still.
Before long,
a circle began forming over the bracelet.
It was shrinking.
Slowly shrinking.
...You have to hit it, right?
Hey.
You need to start hammering soon.
"...This is driving me crazy."
Why wasn’t he hitting it?
Why wasn’t he doing anything?
Hey, you need to hit it!!! Hit it with the hammer!!!!!!
The hit circle turned red and vanished.
That meant it had failed.
Another one vanished. That meant this one had failed too.
Tremble tremble.
My legs began shaking without me realizing it.
I raised my nails to my mouth, overcome by anxiety.
How many circles had he missed now?
[Four, five.]
Yuna was giving me a running count, but
I was seeing all of it with my own eyes.
He was missing every single one in real time.
It was probably...
showing Terrible, Terrible over and over again.
You crazy dwarf bitch.
Hit it already!!!
The total number of hit circles from level 0 to level 1 was eight.
But...
the final hit circle vanished too.
In the end, he failed every one of them.
"..."
This was absurd.
I stared at the dwarf with my mouth hanging open.
What the hell did you even do?
And what the hell was this piece-of-shit machine?!
What a waste of shit-powder.
Then it happened.
Whirrr...
Suddenly.
So damn suddenly and completely out of nowhere.
The doors on both sides inside the machine opened, and a hammer slowly crept out.
Then—
Tap tap tap tap tap!
Tap tap tap tap!
At a point when every last circle had long since passed and vanished what felt like thousands of years ago,
it began wildly pounding the Blue Silver Bracelet, which no longer even had any circles on it.
"...What the fuck?"
Unable to believe what I was seeing, I closed my eyes.
Then
the result screen appeared before me.
─────────────────
[Hammering Total]
[Amazing] [0]
[Excellent] [0]
[Normal] [0]
[Bad] [0]
[Terrible] [8]
─────────────────
[Final Success Rate: 50%]
[Failure Rate: 50%]
─────────────────
【Attempting...】
─────────────────
Wow, this fucking...
I hardly ever swore, but I couldn’t hold it in today.
I had never seen results like this in my life.
I was amazed at this generous enchantment system that gave a fifty-percent chance even after missing all eight circles.
So, the Dwarf Company.
This Enchant Room of the Dwarf Company.
Put simply,
it did not enchant by carefully striking with a hammer.
It just ignored the circles entirely, blindly pounded away, and then
simply enhanced the item with the base success rate assigned to each level.
That was all it did, wasn’t it?
It only pretended to hammer.
It was just pretending to do something.
Later on, there would be more hit circles, so it might get lucky and land a few more strikes, of course.
But in the end, this...
was not enchanting.
And it definitely was not an enchantment machine.
It’s just a machine that sprinkles shit-powder and then beats the shit out of something with a hammer five seconds later.
That would be a more fitting description.
"Urk..."
Looking at the nauseating result window,
I barely held back my urge to vomit and rose from the sofa.
─────────────────
【Enhancement Successful】
─────────────────
[Blue Silver Bracelet] [★★★☆☆]
[+0 → +1]
─────────────────
"...Success."
The dwarf before me,
though I had no idea what the hell he had done right,
"Phew..."
wiped the sweat from his forehead with a proud expression.
Fuck.
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