Point of Contact
Point of Contact
My proposal was accepted on the condition that the rest of the party would decide whether taking the risk was safe.
That was about as reasonable a restriction as you could ask for when moving as a party, so I accepted it without complaint and let the matter rest. I wasn't planning to force things if the situation was beyond me anyway. I only had one life; I intended to keep it.
"We've already confirmed the enemy's location and numbers. Our guild members estimate that even including finalizing the plan, carrying it out, and the round trip, the whole job should be over within three days."
Receptionists and guild staff didn't just record requests and hand over rewards. Their main job—and the single most important function of the Adventurers' Guild—was to assess requests, judge their difficulty and fairness, and adjust them accordingly.
And knowing that fact, we were able to ease our minds just a little.
"So as long as we move quietly, it's still a job the guild can actually measure. That's a relief."
"If some actual officer from the Demon King's Army suddenly shows up, though, there's not much anyone can do about that."
"Ha ha. Even we wouldn't hand you a request we couldn't assess at all. Jobs like that go to Silver-rank adventurers or higher."
At the end of the day, this wasn't charity. It was work and business. Even if the guild acted for the good of the kingdom, adventurers moved for money. That was probably why Engrim had deliberately chosen people who were already on the verge of outgrowing their current ranks.
"As I mentioned, because this came from the royal family, the pay is unusually high. Part of it is effectively hush money, so I think you'll be satisfied with the amount."
"How much is it?"
Engrim silently raised two fingers. Every one of us stared. With that much confidence behind the gesture, it couldn't possibly mean a couple of pathetic silver coins; there wasn't a chance.
"Gold coins?"
"Gold coins. Two for each of you."
Even Gaendal and Gin, who had been utterly composed until now, couldn't hide their excitement as they tilted their cups. Yekaterina started tallying on her fingers, and Rellie leaned back in her chair, laughing openly. And I was no different.
Green-rank requests didn't pay in gold, and neither did Blue-rank ones. At most you might see around ten silver coins. I'd heard Purple-rank adventurers could get gold for larger requests, but even those were usually jobs no one could handle alone.
And now we'd been offered not one gold coin but two. The royal family really was on another level. Once I imagined how much money or influence the guild itself must be getting, yesterday's chocolate and this ridiculous dinner started to make sense.
They'd been paid enough that spending this much was probably necessary just to avoid being accused later of skimming our share. Whether we were actually worth that much remained to be seen.
"That should cover the preliminaries. We've eaten, so let's get into the actual operation."
What followed was the kind of briefing that normally should have come with a stack of documents.
The short version was simple: twenty targets, all competent, all holed up in a dungeon that had been abandoned after being judged worthless, and every one of them had an unusual past. Engrim delivered the details with appropriately grave thoroughness.
"Making us memorize all this stuff on the spot is too much."
"Ha ha. I had a bit of a rough time memorizing it myself."
I was about the only one who openly sympathized with Yekaterina's complaint. The others had already switched into work mode and were memorizing Engrim's briefing. Even Yekaterina, after grumbling once, buckled down and focused on the details that mattered to her role.
Honestly, memorizing it wasn't difficult. I didn't know whether I was especially smart, but everything Engrim said felt like game lore or novel setting notes, and sheer interest made the details stick on their own.
After memorizing and analyzing it, the greatest common denominator among our targets was their past.
They were the children of families that had made enemies of the kingdom one way or another—rebellion, tax evasion, insulting the royal house, whatever. From the outside they looked like hopeless bastards trying to sell out their country one last time. But from my perspective as someone not born in this world, they were still just people acting on their own circumstances.
The only real difference was whether the ally they'd chosen for revenge against the kingdom was another country or the Demonfolk.
No matter how badly I wanted the head of the Demonfolk commander I was hunting, that was because I wanted to crush the person who gave the order—or came up with the plan—and carve in the lesson that nobody should ever mess with me again. It wasn't because I hated Demonfolk as a whole. In fact, I could say with confidence that I held no general grudge against the race at all.
Demonfolk were simply another race. The only problem was that they were too strong. They weren't specifically man-eaters, nor were they a wicked species that specialized in heinous acts. Those were classified as demons, and they actually existed separately.
It wasn't anything more exotic than an ordinary war between states. The only difference was that the enemy happened to be Demonfolk, whose average physical ability was absurdly high, so propaganda dressed the conflict up as though humanity itself were in danger.
But because a Hero chosen by the gods existed, humans simply accepted the Demonfolk as evil without questioning the premise.
And that very point was also my biggest question.
This wasn't a world like my previous life, where the existence of gods was hard to feel. Official history recorded gods manifesting, granting miracles, and acting through avatars, and similar events still happened in the present day. Inventing a nonexistent Hero and pretending to follow a command no god had ever given would be the kind of plan only a lunatic attempted. So the Hero almost certainly did exist.
Yet there were no stories of Heroes being chosen for wars between humans or for wars against other races. Heroes appeared only in wars involving the Demonfolk.
Granted, the Demonfolk and their Demon King system operated on a track unlike anything found among other races. The structure was so unusual and self-contained that it was hard to treat them as just another species.
Humans could become tremendously strong through aura and Mana, but only a small minority ever did. For humanity as a whole, the physical average was only somewhat higher than in my previous life.
Demonfolk were different. Physically and magically, they were strong as though they'd been born for combat. I couldn't enter Demonfolk Territory to verify it, so I couldn't be certain, but their average strength was probably at least two whole levels above humanity's.
But even that shouldn't have been enough to put an entire race at odds with a god and produce an oracle ordering the Demon King defeated. Something didn't add up.
And it wasn't as though every god blessed a single Hero. Every time, without exception, the Hero was chosen specifically by the God of Light worshipped by the Imperial Divine Council. That only made the whole structure more suspicious.
The oracle itself was strange too. It didn't say to wipe out the Demonfolk. It simply ordered the Hero to defeat the Demon King. And historically, once the Demon King fell, the whole chain of crises somehow fizzled out.
If the Demonfolk were genuinely evil and intent on exterminating humanity, I figured the continent would have been overturned four times over by now.
I'd reincarnated, so I wasn't about to deny that gods existed. But whatever their real objective was, it clearly wasn't the simplistic story humanity believed.
"Those assholes just had to choose the Demonfolk as their allies."
After thinking it through that way, I couldn't react like everyone else and go deadly serious the instant Demonfolk were mentioned. To me, these people were just ordinary villains who'd made a bad plan and chosen the worst possible ally.
"Hm? You say something?"
Slightly surprised that Yekaterina had caught my muttering amidst all this noise, I answered naturally.
"Just thinking out loud. Apart from the Demonfolk, I don't see anything especially dangerous here."
As ordinary villains went, they weren't especially threatening. There were roughly five aura users among them and at least one mage, but since they'd turned against the gods who opposed the Demonfolk, their recovery options were limited to potions and whatever natural regeneration Mana could support.
On top of that, long-term life in a dungeon without proper facilities had wrecked their routines and made it harder to stay in peak condition. Most importantly, the guild had surveyed the dungeon years ago. There was nothing unknown about the place; with the internal map in our hands, we practically knew exactly where the enemy was standing.
"That seems less like confidence and more like accurate situational judgment. I feel the same way, actually."
Maybe it was the dwarf in him, but while I'd been off thinking through all the Demonfolk questions, Gin had already asked Engrim whether the guild had a map of the dungeon. Once that was confirmed, he'd relaxed completely, drinking as he agreed with me. Nobody else objected, but none of them looked careless either. After dealing with so many half-baked adventurers, meeting people like this really did feel like watching characters from a novel come to life.
"Twenty people in the open would be a harder fight, but inside a dungeon it's a different matter. And when we've already got the dungeon's layout, the only real unknown left is the Demonfolk."
Even Yekaterina answered with complete confidence. She looked so certain that I'd have been ashamed of ever doubting her intelligence.
"I'm good enough at judging people, but I'm no expert at planning operations like this. Still, the capable person who estimated three days said almost exactly the same thing. Hearing all of you reach the same conclusion is reassuring."
Thoroughly satisfied with our response, Engrim smiled and nodded.