Girl Meets Boy (5)
It was a story that had already made the rounds among the three childhood friends more times than anyone could count, so Sophie answered with a practiced ease, even as a flush of embarrassment colored her face.
"Oh, come on, me...? There's nothing that special about it. You two got stats like that too, didn't you?"
"Sure, for the other stats. But Sophie was the only one whose mana came out high. Luon and I were just average."
Everyone in this world had mana. For most people, though, that amounted to little more than the most basic everyday magic — cleaning themselves off, conjuring maybe a cupful of water. To go further than that, to become a proper mage capable of attacking and defending with spells, you needed far more mana than an ordinary person possessed.
That was what Kiven meant.
"Kiven's right. Like I told you last time, you..."
Luon cut in, and before I knew it the room had turned into a gossip lounge for the three childhood friends.
"Ah! Sorry! We just talked among ourselves the whole time. That was boring, wasn't it?"
Sophie, who had been going on with the other two for quite a while, suddenly remembered I was sitting right there and apologized, looking mortified.
"No, it was worth listening to."
I wasn't being polite. It had actually been surprisingly worth hearing. They started with the time they'd used a makeshift status scroll they'd found in a storage shed, drifted into other old stories, and eventually worked their way around to the latest village gossip. At that point it was basically a housewives' chat session. Most of it was useless rambling, but here and there I managed to fish out information that was actually valuable.
From what I gathered, Luon and Sophie had been close first, and Kiven had inserted himself into the mix later. More than a decade had passed since then, so other people — and the three of them, for that matter — thought of the group as childhood friends. But Luon and Sophie went back further than that.
There was other talk, too: a Hero had appeared, born with the destiny to stand against the Demon King's army and strike the Demon King down. A familiar story, as far as I was concerned. That would be Serina — the character I'd set up through the Achievement Character feature — already beginning her work as the Hero. I'd heard that starting a new playthrough with a different character could put you slightly out of sync with the point where your previous run had begun.
And then there was the information that actually mattered to me right now. The goblins we'd run into in the forest hadn't been some passing stragglers. There was a real nest out there.
After going on at length about everything that had happened today, Luon turned to me like a man who needed someone to hear how unfair it had all been.
"We were pretty focused on gathering herbs, sure, but there were three of us, so of course we kept checking our surroundings. We're adults — you think we'd just wander into a forest we were told not to enter without thinking? We've spent well over a decade running around those woods. We know where the line is. Inside that line, we didn't see a single trace of anything dangerous."
"But those goblins just appeared out of nowhere. Nine of them — you think we wouldn't have noticed that? I swear they popped up out of the ground."
Luon had said it to vent about how wronged they'd been. I already knew better.
Goblins rise from the earth.
More precisely, if a goblin nest sits underground, the ones bursting out of it can look like they're erupting from the ground itself. I'd run into that more than once in my previous playthrough. So Luon saying the goblins had appeared out of nowhere meant there was a high chance a nest sat somewhere nearby.
If I believed them that the area hadn't originally been that dangerous, the nest probably wasn't very large. The terrain around there hadn't looked like it could support a big one, either. Goblins have never had anything going for them but sheer numbers, so even a small nest wouldn't have been limited to those nine — but it wouldn't be a light fight, either.
I tucked the information into a corner of my memory, in case I ended up taking on a goblin extermination myself, and finished tidying the room and laying out the bedding.
"Took longer than I thought."
"That's because you suddenly started bringing up old stories, Kiven."
"Why are you only getting on my case, Sophie? You and Luon were having just as much fun talking!"
If I just sat there and listened, the chatter was going to go on forever, so I cut in at a reasonable point.
"I want to go to the Adventurer's Guild next. Is there one here?"
Fortunately, Kiven hadn't forgotten that he was supposed to be showing me around. He answered right away.
"Of course. It's not even that far. Let's go right now."
Luon went off to help with work, just as his father had told him, and Sophie said she was heading home for now, so we split up there.
"So why are you going to the Adventurer's Guild, Soira? You're a famous adventurer, right? I didn't see it myself, but Luon said you were insanely strong."
Luon hadn't actually seen much of anything either. If taking down a handful of goblins was enough to get me talked about like that, this place had to be well behind the front lines of the war with the Demon King's army. The closer you got to those lines, the thicker the monsters became, and the harder people got. When the Demon King's army invaded, I once saw a kid who couldn't have been older than single digits hauling arrows while wyverns wheeled overhead. Even knowing this was a game, I went quiet.
That said, the part about me being strong was true enough. Like I'd told Luon's father, I could take care of myself — and in this world, monsters and bandits ran rampant the moment you stepped a little too far from a village. I'd only just started this playthrough, so my proficiency with every weapon was still sitting at F, but I had the experience of playing this game for research, plus the martial arts I'd learned in real life to get physically stronger. I could wander around in my underwear and still solve most problems with raw force.
I'd tried it once, actually. Underwear only, bare hands, one-on-one against a bandit with a weapon. I won.
"A famous adventurer? Nothing like that. I'll get there soon enough, but right now I'm just on my way to become one."
"You're not one yet? That's surprising in its own way. If you're not even an adventurer, why were you wandering around outside the village? A woman, all by herself."
A fair enough question. But it wasn't like this was my first or second time playing WM. I already had an answer prepared for questions about my origins.
"The place I used to live was a lot smaller. There wasn't even an Adventurer's Guild, so I left my village to become one."
"And then you got lost in the forest? Come on. I get that you're confident in your skills, but isn't that a little reckless?"
Ah. So that's how that connects. Come to think of it, I'd completely forgotten I'd used getting lost as my excuse for following them back to the village.
At the Adventurer's Guild, I told them I wanted to register as a new member.
"You'd like to register as a new member? Our branch is a small one, so we can't provide identity verification — we can only issue a temporary card. Would that be all right? Would you like me to explain what a temporary card is?"
"That's fine. I already know. I'll take that, please."
An adventurer card could be used as a form of identification. In the bigger cities, inspections sometimes required you to prove who you were, and the card came in handy then. Of course, handing that kind of certification out to just anyone would tank the guild's credibility if something went wrong, so they only stamped the identity-verification seal on your card once you'd reached a certain rank.
This branch not being able to verify identity meant that even if I ranked up on merits earned in this village, they still wouldn't be able to stamp that seal. Not that it mattered to me. I'd be leaving this place soon enough anyway.
"Then please write your name and race here. You'll need to have your photo taken, so head into that room over there and come back when you're done."
An adventurer card didn't originally require a photograph. This world's setting didn't even have cameras to begin with. So why did cameras exist now?
Because I'd added them as a setting, obviously.
Because it's way hotter that way!!
An erotic status screen is supposed to have nude shots — that's just the rule — and when you're taking dirty pictures, there has to be a regular, everyday photo sitting right next to them. That contrast between the ordinary face you see every day and a filthy, intimate shot that nobody else should ever lay eyes on... how is anyone supposed to resist getting off on that?
Guys get off looking at nudes and doujinshi like that, but depending on their tastes, women get off on it too. If that kind of thing didn't turn people on, secret social media accounts wouldn't even exist. Doing it in real life, though, is way too risky. If those pictures ever leaked, you'd be socially dead in a heartbeat.
So I put it in. In the game. Because it gets me off.
This was just the prep work for that. All I had to do was take a regular photo, so I'd be in and out in no time.
Name: Soira. Race: Human. I filled in the two fields and headed for the designated room.
Kiven was... I glanced over. He seemed to know one of the adventurers in the guild and was chatting with him. Figured this would take a little while, I supposed.
The photo room was already fully set up. A camera sat on a tripod, a circle had been drawn on the floor — marking where you were supposed to stand, apparently — and a man who looked like the photographer was waiting.
Did they really need a separate person just to take one photo? The staff member from earlier could've done it. The question crossed my mind, but I let it go. Fair enough, I guess.
"Hello. Miss Soira, is it?"
"Yes. I was told I take my photo here."
"That's right. Then if you could stand on that circle there."
I did as I was told, stepping onto the circle and facing the camera.
"Do I just stand like this? Nothing else I need to do?"
"You can pose if you want, but since we'll only be getting you from the chest up, it won't really matter. Want to?"
"No. Just take it like this, please."
"All right~ Then look at the camera for me. It might be a little bright. But if you close your eyes we'll have to take it again, so try not to blink."
It was the same line you'd hear at any photo studio in the real world. Then again, if you've got a camera as a tool and photographer as a job, maybe there isn't much room for things to turn out differently.
"Taking it now~ One, two, three!"
Flash!
The shutter clicked, the flash went off — and at the same instant, the circle under my feet lit up.
"Huh?"
"Is something wrong? I'll take another. One, two, three!"
Flash!
This time I saw it clearly. The circle had lit up. What was that?
"Excuse me. What's this thing under my feet? It keeps lighting up."
"Ah~ that? It's a new assistive device that just came out. Apparently it activates at the same time as the camera and helps the photo come out better. I don't know the details, but they said it's new technology, so I brought one in to try."
Is that so? It did activate at the same time as the camera, so something was clearly linked. I'd set the cameras up myself, but I didn't know exactly how the implementation would play out. So that was probably it.
"One last shot. One, two, three!"
Flash!