Our Dungeon Guild
I had originally been a student of the Academy.
In this country, most of the lower class could not even read, so a man who had attended the Academy could fairly be called a person of considerable learning. Of course, I had dropped out partway through, and now I was reduced to scraping by as an adventurer.
In this world, adventuring was a truly shitty trade — hard, dangerous, and unstable in its pay besides. Even so, countless people at the bottom still threw themselves at it. A dungeon was perilous and grueling, but hidden inside it, at a miserably slim chance, lay a lottery ticket: some tremendous stroke of fortune, or a chamber heaped with gold and jewels. The kind of heaven-sent luck that could overturn a life in a single blow could be met in a dungeon, however rarely.
Those who actually obtained such dungeon-born treasures numbered fewer than one in tens of thousands... and yet, low as the odds were, I had no choice but to stake my life on the dungeons.
An Academy dropout. A commoner of no account. I had nothing. Short of meeting some fated windfall in a dungeon and reversing my fortunes, there was not the slightest chance I would ever live well, and taking up again the magical studies I had abandoned was no easy thing either.
Should I have endured, and not dropped out?
No.
I shook my head. Quitting the Academy had been the right decision. It was a place nobles attended, and commoners there were few. For a commoner like me, what came was unending persecution and harassment — and worse, the most ascendant circle at the very top of the caste had marked me in earnest. I simply could not bear it.
The Academy was, by nature, a premier institution where the children of wealthy noble houses went after coming of age, seeking more specialized knowledge. A place to learn the sort of advanced learning ordinary people could never touch — magic, for instance, or systematized swordsmanship. An elite school for the upper class, in other words. Scholars have something of the same sort, don't they?
But unlike scholars, the noble sons and daughters of the Academy ran low, on average, in basic decency. Most of the student body were nobles whose family coffers were already rotting with more money than they could spend, and they came to that expensive Academy for nothing more than a handsome credential — proof they had picked up a specialized skill. Only a commoner like me treasured the knowledge taught there as if it were worth a fortune in gold.
I was feeding myself by running dungeons on the rudimentary magic I had learned in my first year. Among adventurers, most of them from the bottom rungs, a mage was a rare thing, so if you could use magic at all — however shoddy your level — you received at least a little regard. A license, if I had to put a name to the feeling.
Even now, thinking back, I regretted it. Had I stayed at the Academy longer, I might have learned high-tier magic as well. Knowledge of that order could not even be approached unless you were taught it in a specialized place, or by someone qualified to teach it. It was learning you could not acquire unless you belonged to the Academy or the Magic Tower. And so my skill with magic had stalled at the beginner level.
Damn it.
If not for the bullying, I could have stayed longer. I had clenched my teeth and endured a year, but enduring any further had been beyond me. Blows from the male students, I could bear. But the things the Academy's female students did to torment me...
For a moment, an ugly memory surfaced. Even now, it seemed I could still hear those vicious girls mocking me at my ear.
"Open your mouth, doggy. I'll spit for you."
"This is fun. He has a little sister, doesn't he? Doggy, is your sister a masochist just like you?"
Remembering that day, I felt heat gather low in my body, and I stiffened. Damn it — nothing but a physiological reaction. Irritation surged up through me.
Those bitches. Who did they take me for, some perfect mark...
I never wanted to be tangled up with those fucking women from the Academy again, not for the rest of my life. Dragging the bad memories back up soured my mood all at once, and I stalked toward the guild, seething.
An adventurer was required to carry insurance. You could be badly hurt running a dungeon, and with poor luck you could wind up dead. Resurrection by revival magic, without even a policy? Live through that, and it was still hell. Revival magic cost so much that coming back raw, with no insurance, would leave you a slave for life and still not cover the debt. And the insurance itself was expensive, of course. No company that wasn't run by morons would ever insure a dangerous trade like adventuring on the cheap.
So the workaround for cutting those premiums was the guild. It helped to think of a guild as a kind of corporation: if any one of you died and was brought back, the rest could shoulder the repayment, and the more you banded together, the safer the bet.
As for our guild's numbers...
A measly three. Better than me running alone, granted — but even this three-person guild was something I had barely scraped together by gathering up everyone I knew.
"Tyr! Good news! I found an amazing dungeon!"
A woman called out to me from inside the guild office, smiling radiantly.
Calling it a guild office was generous. In truth we had simply cleared out an old barn and declared it one. Three wooden tables. Two cots. The facilities were wretched beyond words, but there was nothing to be done about it — how much could a three-person guild like ours possibly earn? Barely enough to cover meals. Even the gear we used had been bought on debt.
The three of us were myself, my childhood friend, and my younger sister. I had seen great guilds numbering over a hundred, while ours was a hole-in-the-wall operation. Even so, we had no choice but to stake everything on dungeon exploration. Fuck — there was no other way to live.
Please. A windfall. Just once, come to me.
Gold and jewels, a potion that could make a man superhuman, some mysterious ancient magic. Anything would do. Please — just once.
I closed my eyes for a moment and prayed with everything I had.
A red-haired beauty with an innocent face was watching me with wide eyes. My childhood friend, Erhil. She was brimming with confidence, and since even on an ordinary day she was as spirited and boisterous as any man, she fluttered the dungeon prospectus in her hand and declared, bold as anything:
"Feast your eyes on what this big sis found! A dungeon with a whole six percent chance of a treasure room? This is an opportunity we absolutely cannot miss!"
Six percent?!
I started, eyes flying wide, and rushed over.
With so many explorers chasing a reversal of fortune through the dungeons, the Central Dungeon Management Association calculated estimates of exactly this kind. The so-called event room. The treasure room. The odds of meeting one in a dungeon were ordinarily nothing more than a thin decimal, a fraction of a percent. A six percent chance of a treasure room appearing — a six percent chance to turn a life around. An insane figure.
"We have to go! Only a fool would let this slip! Other explorers are probably already swarming it like bees!"
Erhil's eyes glittered as she carried on.
No. This was good news worth carrying on about. A dungeon with odds this high would not come twice.
I looked over the exploration brief and dragged a hand down my face, my expression grim.
Intermediate Dungeon Risk...
Even within the intermediate grade the danger was finely subdivided, and judging by the risk, this was a dungeon too much for our guild to challenge. But Erhil, who had brought the prospectus, spoke with fierce energy, as if giving it up were simply not an option.
"I know. It's too hard for us. But this is too good a chance! Let's go. Yeah?"
Bad luck, and every member of the guild dies. Good luck, and still one or two of us might. Insurance or not, if two people died we could never repay the cost of revival magic. As guild master, I had to weigh it carefully.
That was when it happened.
Someone stepped into the barn — no. Into our guild office.
A woman with her hair in twin tails and a full chest. She came in wearing a rather revealing outfit that nonetheless looked easy to move in, working a stick of gum with loud, wet chews. I looked at her and asked,
"Kairing... don't tell me you've been walking around dressed like that."
"Huh? Why. What's wrong with it."
Kairing looked herself over. The clothes were short and tight enough to bare her thighs entirely, but they were sporty, and they did look easy to move in.
"Oh~"
Kairing let out a snort of a laugh. Cheeky as she could be, she was still my little sister.
"What's it to you, Oppa? Always nagging. Don't you know what I can do? Boys who try to hit on me dressed like this are one punch, and they're done."
She giggled, lifting her bandage-wrapped hands out to either side and giving a shrug.
Right. My little sister Kairing was a professional adventurer. Not a great veteran, maybe, but among amateurs she was more than enough to throw her weight around. That I had resolved, after dropping out of the Academy, to make my living as an adventurer was entirely thanks to her. The moment she heard I had quit, she came running — she would feed me, she said, so we should be adventurers together. That was why.
The difference in our ages was not great. I looked at Kairing: a healthy, solid body, as you'd expect of a martial artist, stronger than most men and stronger than me without question. And yet, for all that she looked like such a formidable woman, she was a soft-hearted little sister who tried to look after me, and I was grateful for her.
As her older brother, I can't help feeling ashamed.
She had belonged to a guild that was quietly on the rise, and she had thrown even that away to support me. However skilled an adventurer Kairing was, a three-person guild left her little room to show her strength. In the end, for all of her efforts, our guild had not flourished. It had merely stayed poor.
"Erhil unni, what are you and Oppa looking at?"
Kairing came over with her hands in her pockets, chewing her gum. Erhil smiled with absolute confidence and declared,
"A new dungeon. A treasure-room rate of six percent, no less! Isn't that an incredible opportunity?"
"What? Six percent? No way... give it here a second."
Kairing rushed over and snatched the paper from my hand to read it. She read it straight through, then said in a breath,
"We're going."
"Kairing, it's too much for the three of us to clear. We ought to judge this carefully..."
"Even if it's dangerous, we have to go. I've never seen a dungeon this good in my life. We need to clean that treasure room out before anyone else finds it."
A treasure room did not necessarily mean gold and jewels. What manner of fortune waited inside was anyone's guess. Kairing's eyes shone.
"Oppa, file the exploration application first."
"If even two of us die, the revival costs..."
"Then we hire a dungeon exploration helper. Is now the time to be picking at that?"
Kairing shouted it, fierce and breathless, then dropped her head. When she lifted it again, moisture had gathered at the corners of her eyes.
"I promised I'd make you succeed as an adventurer..."
The moment I saw my sister's tears, my heart dropped like a stone.
Only then did I understand why Kairing and Erhil had made such a fuss. All of it was for me — useless as I was. The reason they meant to force their way into a dungeon too difficult for us to clear, even if it meant overreaching: every bit of it was to hand me a chance at fortune. The two women were precious bonds who had believed in me and followed, and as guild master I owed them something in return.
So our guild could not be allowed to fail. If only to repay Kairing and Erhil, I had to make it prosper. I had to.
"Tyr."
In Kairing's silence, Erhil set a hand on my shoulder. She wore a warm, clear smile.
"Let's apply. This dungeon might just change our lives."
I nodded at that.
And Erhil's words proved true. That dungeon changed the fate of our guild, and with it my life and the lives of those two women.
Whether for the better...
Or for the worse.