A Golden Facade
SLAM!
Inside the adventurer guild, it was as noisy as ever.
A woman slammed a massive, blood-dripping sack onto a table.
"There! The goblin village subjugation quest—completed perfectly, just as requested!"
At her confident declaration, the surrounding crowd began to whisper.
"Wait, wasn't that quest only posted last night?"
"No way... She wiped out an entire village in less than a day?!"
"And it wasn't just any village. Didn't a B-rank party struggle there last time because of the shaman?"
"I guess an A-rank adventurer really is on another level."
Hearing the astonished admiration from all around, the corners of the woman's mouth twitched upward into a smirk.
Of course, she immediately tried to force her face back into a solemn, dignified expression.
"Um, Lady Reina? This is..."
The guild receptionist asked, looking at the sack with a troubled expression.
"Didn't the request say so? Bring back the goblin shaman's corpse for research, and there'd be a bonus."
"Ah! I will verify it immediately."
She basked in the admiring gazes of the crowd.
In the imperial capital or other major cities, S-rank adventurers might be relatively common, but in a remote guild branch like this, an A-rank adventurer was practically the pinnacle of power.
"Here is your reward! Excellent work, Lady Reina Cloud."
Her name was Reina Cloud, the daughter of Baron Cloud.
She had blonde hair styled in twintails, a face that practically radiated boastful pride, and a red axe crest engraved on the sword at her hip.
It was a crest symbolizing her membership in the temple of the constellation, the Great Warrior of Tartarus.
Furthermore, the fact that she had been bestowed a sword bearing this crest meant she was no ordinary believer—she was an incarnation who had signed a direct soul contract with the Great Warrior of Tartarus.
Naturally, envy and jealousy colored the faces of everyone who looked at her sword.
But that lasted only a moment.
"Lady Reina, that was amazing!"
"Could you come over here for a moment and tell us how it went?"
"No, over here! Barkeep, bring another round!"
As she collected her reward and turned to leave, people scrambled to get her attention.
After all, she was an A-rank adventurer—a rare sight in a backwater town like this—and an incarnation contracted to a supreme-grade constellation to boot.
Of course, the Great Warrior of Tartarus did not have the best reputation among constellations.
He was notorious for using his credits to mass-expand his incarnation slots, signing contracts indiscriminately with anyone who showed even a shred of talent. Rumor had it that his incarnations already numbered in the thousands.
By inflating his numbers this way, he expanded his divine influence, but because he had so many incarnations, he provided almost zero individual support to them.
Even so, a supreme-grade constellation was still a supreme-grade constellation.
Besides, hadn't Reina herself promoted to A-rank after contracting with the Great Warrior of Tartarus?
Before that, she had been written off as someone who would never be able to reach A-rank.
Greed gleamed in the adventurers' eyes.
Just sitting down and sharing a drink with her would give them bragging rights as a close friend of an A-rank adventurer. And who knew? If they were lucky, they might even get to party with her.
What if the constellation was watching her right now?
Perhaps they could catch his eye and secure a contract for themselves—with a supreme-grade constellation, no less!
Normally, an adventurer would need to be at least S-rank to contract with a supreme-grade constellation, but the Great Warrior of Tartarus was famous for his indiscriminate recruitment.
And so, everyone swarmed around her.
"Hmph... Well, I suppose I could stay for just one drink."
Relishing the attention, Reina walked over and sat at a table where a drink had already been ordered for her.
"Come on, tell us! How on earth did you take down the monsters that made Jason's party turn tail and run?"
"Well, it wasn't really that difficult. You see, I was staking out the area from a nearby tree since last night..."
Thoroughly pleased, Reina tried to act nonchalant but eagerly launched into her tale, while the surrounding adventurers chimed in with enthusiastic reactions to flatter her.
This went on for quite some time.
"...So, ignoring the ones rushing at me, I charged straight for the shaman first, and—oh, wait a moment."
Right in the middle of her animated storytelling, she suddenly stood up.
"Where are you going?"
"Oh, I just remembered something I forgot to take care of. Keep drinking, I'll be right back!"
Forcing a casual smile, she exited the building.
The adventurers watched her sudden departure with bewildered expressions.
"What was that about?"
"Maybe she really had to use the restroom?"
The adventurers snickered.
The moment she left, the topic of conversation shifted to the supreme-grade constellation who had newly appeared yesterday: the Seeker of Supreme Knowledge.
While Reina's solo raid on the goblin village was somewhat interesting, the adventurers had only been pretending to care to flatter her anyway.
Once outside the guild building, Reina quickly scanned her surroundings before slipping into a nearby restroom.
Only after locking the door behind her did she lean against the wall, panting heavily.
Her hands were trembling violently, and her clothes were drenched in cold sweat.
She hurriedly pulled out a pendant hanging around her neck.
Opening the pendant, she revealed a single black pill inside.
But her hands shook so badly that the pill slipped from her fingers and rolled onto the floor.
"No!"
Desperate, Reina bent down and frantically groped around the floor to find the pill.
When her fingers finally closed around it, she let out a ragged sigh of relief.
Even though it had fallen onto the filthy restroom floor, Reina shoved the pill into her mouth without a moment's hesitation.
She leaned against the wall, catching her breath. How long did she stand there like that?
Finally, the trembling in her hands subsided, and her breathing returned to normal.
"Haa..."
She let out a long, weary sigh.
Peering into her pendant, she saw that only two pills remained.
"I need to go get more."
Reina muttered to herself.
The church had insisted they were perfectly safe and had absolutely no side effects, but by now, even a fool would have realized the truth.
It was a lie.
"No, my seniors said it would be fine. Everyone else is taking them too, anyway."
Reina muttered, desperately trying to deceive herself.
In truth, even if she wanted to stop, she couldn't.
If she went even a little too long without one, her hands would shake and her body would begin to break down, just like before.
But more importantly, it was this very medicine that had allowed her to become an A-rank adventurer.
If she stopped taking it now, she would not only face a demotion in rank, but she might also have her contract terminated.
Reina closed her eyes, letting her mind drift back to how it all began.
Reina Cloud was the youngest daughter of a poor, rural barony.
Her parents were the type to prattle on about noble dignity while indulging in luxuries far beyond their means. Her older sister was no better, staying in the imperial capital to buy designer goods and desperately trying to seduce a wealthy noble into marriage.
Reina had inherited her parents' blood; she loved to show off and cared deeply about how others perceived her. However, she was at least the most responsible and sane member of the Cloud family.
Then came the day when the Baron, blinded by his own extravagant and gullible nature, fell victim to a scam that plunged the family into a mountain of debt.
The day most of their fief—their sole remaining source of income—was seized.
Upon discovering that her father planned to marry her off to an old commoner merchant in exchange for clearing a portion of the family's debt, Reina packed her bags and ran away.
It was a marriage that was, in essence, selling her off.
For someone as prideful and conscious of her reputation as Reina, such a marriage was utterly unacceptable.
But having fled, she found herself with no practical skills and no money.
Ultimately, she turned to the one job anyone could do: registering with the adventurer guild and living hand-to-mouth.
Even then, she couldn't stop worrying about her family. Feeling a lingering guilt that her escape had prevented them from paying off their debts, she constantly sent whatever spare change she had back home, leaving her with no savings to speak of.
It was during this bleak period that a constellation approached her with a contract offer.
She was a noble, but her family was ruined, and she possessed no obvious talent for adventuring.
She had merely been scraping by using the basic swordsmanship she had briefly learned back at the barony.
She had no idea why a constellation—even if it was only a lowest-grade constellation—would want to contract with her.
Feeling as though she had met her savior, Reina eagerly signed the contract.
From then on, things began to look up.
Back when she was living a safe, sheltered life as a noble lady, she had never realized it, but she actually possessed a natural talent for the sword.
It hadn't shown when she was just gathering herbs or hunting a couple of low-grade goblins, but once combined with the meager support her lowest-grade constellation squeezed out to help her, her latent talent began to blossom.
Climbing the ranks one after another, Reina finally achieved B-rank.
In a remote region like this, a B-rank adventurer was considered quite formidable.
Naturally, rumors of a new B-rank adventurer rising in such a short time began to spread, prompting a follower of Tartarus to visit the guild to check her out.
And realizing he had no incarnations in this frontier region of the empire, and seeing that Reina's current constellation was only a lowest-grade one—unlike the few other A- and B-ranks in the area—the Great Warrior of Tartarus offered her a contract.