Sewer Reconnaissance Request (3)
Creak… Creak….
The moment I climbed down the iron ladder, the air thickened with the rancid stench of a toilet drain. In three fucking seconds I was already fantasizing about subcontracting this subcontract to yet another subcontractor. The only thing stopping me was the headache of figuring out who the hell would accept three coppers a day.
“There’s already a malfunction right at the entrance,” Gentric said, sweeping his lantern across the interior. A small opening clung to the wall—an iron-grated circular drain that looked like a prison cell. One entire section of bars was missing.
“A sewer grate? No, it’s a passageway.”
“An emergency exit,” Tirsi explained as she climbed down after us and unfolded her map. “There are several more marked inside the sewer system.”
“An emergency exit, huh. So they built these in case of a flash flood or some other urgent situation?”
“Who knows what they were originally for? They’re locked, so we can’t use them anyway.”
“Damn.”
Don’t jinx us with that ominous crap, old man.
“Miss Francesca? Could you note down ‘A01 sewer passage iron grate missing’?”
“Grate missing? Understood.”
Francesca copied the number Tirsi read from the map. Her handwriting was round, neat, and surprisingly pretty—exactly what you’d expect from a dexterous dwarf. Still, the military terminology brought back memories of inspecting barbed wire during my conscript days. Even after falling into another world, those damned soldier memories remained painfully vivid.
“Let’s move. I’d like to finish before nightfall,” Tirsi said.
With her words as our cue, we began the reconnaissance.
Step… step….
Gentric and I took the lead by unspoken agreement. Warriors always tank from the front. Especially when the warriors in question can’t use magic, possess zero utility skills, and—most damning of all—are men. Therefore it was only natural law that we become the meat shields for the female mage and rogue. This was a world thoroughly infested with machismo and bravado, after all.
We wandered the sewer interior for a long time. The tunnels resembled the London sewers I’d seen in documentaries; if you ignored the darkness and the stench, they were surprisingly bearable.
“The rope on this bridge is damaged. Should we record that too?”
“Uh… yeah, write it down.”
“The bricks at that sewer entrance over there have collapsed.”
“That’s… a corner that turns inward. There’s no designated number on the map. What should we do?”
“How about noting it as between sewer passages D04 and D05?”
“That works. Let’s go with that.”
We carried out the commission with sincere diligence. According to Tirsi’s pocket watch, nearly three hours had already passed. The sewer system mapped on her chart was long and complicated, so we had to plan an efficient route. But walking in silence grew boring, so conversation naturally bloomed.
“Miss Tirsi, why did you volunteer for this particular request? A mage of your caliber could surely take much better commissions,” Francesca asked, hurrying to match our stride.
I’d been wondering the same thing, so I kept my ears tuned to the conversation behind me while I walked.
“It’s for my promotion. Not to Silver Class, but with a longer-term perspective.” Tirsi pulled out the plate hanging from her neck while her map stayed tucked under one arm. “Up to Gold Class, your request history basically determines everything. But beyond that… to obtain a platinum or mythril plate, you must satisfy the standards set by the Adventurer Guild Union.”
The Adventurer Guild Union. Considering “guild” literally meant “union,” the name was ridiculously redundant—like calling it the Adventurer Union Union. Yet the actual meaning matched the name perfectly.
“You mean the organization formed by the various adventurer guilds,” old man Gentric added, glancing back.
Tirsi nodded. “Yes. It maintains branches in every country and acts as a mediator between the guilds and national governments.”
Exactly as she described. From everything I’d seen and heard, I’d come to view the Adventurer Guild Union as this world’s version of a corrupt, armed UN. A faction that pursued its own interests while occasionally flexing military power. Seemed like a pretty accurate analogy to me.
“Are there separate conditions for advancing beyond Platinum?” I asked, curiosity getting the better of me.
My respected thesis advisor, Professor Brammaton, was Gold Class. There was no way someone capable of holding a professorship at Carmine University would stall at that rank. Tirsi’s tone definitely suggested additional requirements.
“There must be promotion criteria. The Union simply hasn’t publicly announced the exact conditions, so I don’t know them. I’m only making educated guesses.”
Tirsi slipped the plate back into her robe.
“What is fairly certain, however, is that adventurers affiliated with other organizations find it extremely difficult to reach Platinum or higher.”
Huh? Why?
I tilted my head for a moment before the reason clicked.
“It’s about vested interests and pride.”
People like Professor Brammaton or me—who operated in “other industries”—were apparently treated harshly. Even if they handed out Platinum or Mythril plates to archaeologists, we weren’t about to abandon our careers to bury our bones in the adventurer business.
“…I’m impressed. Your understanding is remarkably quick.” Tirsi’s eyes widened in genuine surprise. She seemed astonished that I’d caught on without further explanation.
“Huh? What does that mean?” Francesca, who had asked the original question, still looked lost, so I gave her the short version.
“A blacksmith doesn’t go around praising a rival workshop, right? In the end, the other guy is competition. Praising someone else doesn’t help you.”
“Ah—I get it. So it really is a ‘pride and vested interest’ issue.”
“Exactly. The tendency is especially strong toward unaffiliated mages from the Magic Guild.”
Tirsi sounded genuinely bitter. “They can’t discriminate openly, so they nitpick. They’ll say your request history in your rookie days shows you only chased profit, or that you lack the mindset to cooperate with other adventurers—that sort of thing.”
“People are the same everywhere.”
Losing points for insufficient team cooperation. The exact complaint group-project leaders heard when their teammates ghosted them. Even if you stayed up all night doing everything yourself while your group members screwed around, some professors still gave you that bullshit. The incident happened years ago, yet it still pissed me off like it was yesterday.
“So taking this commission was a way to build up volunteer service points,” I concluded.
“…I wouldn’t call working with all of you ‘volunteer service.’”
“My apologies. Poor choice of words. I just remembered that some places factor volunteer hours into evaluations.”
I’d said it because it reminded me of the community service hours needed for prestigious high school admission back when I was a 1995-born kid aiming for a top school. In hindsight, it probably sounded bad. When I apologized, Tirsi shook her head.
“No, it’s partly true. To be honest, I wanted to leave a record of completing a generally avoided request as party leader.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that. We’re helping each other out.”
I smiled. “We get to borrow the strength of a Bronze-tier mage, and you gain something too. If anything, we should be thanking you.”
“…Thank you.” Tirsi replied, looking slightly embarrassed. Gentric and Francesca both chuckled quietly at her reaction.
“Ah, look over there! Another sewer lid is missing!” Francesca suddenly pointed across the way. The grate meant to block debris had been ripped clean off.
“You’re right. Hmm. So that passage over there…”
While Tirsi shone her lantern across the map searching for the corresponding number, we paused.
“Hoo… Seriously, why is the entire sewer system falling apart? Are delinquents just smashing things for fun?” Gentric grumbled, massaging his knee. After finding over ten problems in three hours, the endless workload was starting to get to him.
“Not entirely wrong. The monsters that crawl into human settlements are worse than any delinquent.”
Whether on Earth or here, the creatures that wrecked barbed-wire fences were always vermin. If the things living in the sewers were breaking everything to make shortcuts, we were the ones suffering.
“Monsters did this? That’s ridiculous.” Gentric looked genuinely shocked despite his long career.
I was about to score another point against the locals’ common sense when his next words froze me.
“Then why haven’t we encountered a single monster yet?”
“…Wait, yeah. Why is that?”
I had absolutely nothing to say. He was right. If monsters were the ones tearing up the sewers, after wandering around for hours we should have been fighting for our lives by now.
“Right? If not monsters, then what? Humans wouldn’t have any reason to destroy the sewers,” Francesca said, lowering her notepad with a puzzled frown.
“It has to be monsters. Now that I think about it, we haven’t seen any of the cleaning slimes the Magic Guild released either,” Tirsi added after listening to the three of us.
“Uh……”
I’d been following the quest like a good little gamer and completely missed the growing sense of wrongness. The dark sewer that I was finally getting used to suddenly felt like the stomach of some grotesque creature.
Humans wouldn’t have done it. Monsters were nowhere to be seen.
“If monsters broke everything but the monsters themselves are missing…” I opened my mouth, trying to shake off the bad feeling. “Does that mean those monsters disappeared for some reason?”
The instant the words left my mouth, they appeared.
Crunch. Crackle.
We discovered the creatures clinging to the wall at a dead-end in the sewer. Six jointed legs, two antennae, huge exoskeletons—insects. Nothing strange about bugs living in a sewer.
“What the—?”
If only they weren’t fucking enormous.
Crunchcrunch—crunch.
The dozens of oversized insects froze their antennae and movements under the lantern light—then
SCRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!
They scattered in every direction, dropped to the floor, and charged straight at us.
“Uwaaaaaaaaah!!!!! Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck!!! What the hell are those!!!!!”
I screamed at the top of my lungs in the dim underground passage.
Once, I read an article online. It said that if spiders the size of humans existed, they would become the apex terrestrial predators thanks to their insectoid physical abilities and hunting techniques. But the article concluded that insects reaching human size was impossible. Their exoskeletons supposedly couldn’t support their own body weight at that scale.
Back then I’d been incredibly grateful for Earth’s gravity.
“But holy shit, they’re clearly supporting their damn weight!!!”
Black carapaces glistening under our lantern light—shine, shine, shine!! They were all the same species of giant bug!!
“Uwaaaaaaaaaah!!! It’s a goddamn giant cricket!!!!”
“Kyaaaaaaaaah!!! There’s so many of them!! So fucking many!!!”
“Eeeeeeeeeek!!! The sound!! I hate that wing sound so much!!!”
Fuck! I let my guard down! This was a world with giants and dinosaurs running around. Of course there would be bugs the size of a man’s knee. Insects with faces that were some grotesque hybrid of crickets and cockroaches!
Maybe there really was no god in this world. And even if there was, surely he hadn’t created every living thing here. Because if he had, that would mean a god who thought these things were a good idea existed—and I’d rather abandon my faith than acknowledge the existence of some insect-loving deity. It would be better for my mental health.
SCRASCRASCRUNCH!! SCRASCRASCRASCRASCRUNCH!!
“Eeeeeeeeeek!!! They’re flying!!! Flying crickets!!!”
“Run, everyone!!!!!!”
“Run for your lives!! Ruuuuuuuuuuun!!!!!”
“Kyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!!”
We became a single screaming speaker system, sprinting back the way we came through the underground passage. The brave party of four adventurers had been reduced to a profanity-spewing emergency vehicle, legs pumping desperately while we hurled curses and screams.
“Fuck!! Fuuuuuuck!! How can bugs like that even exist?!”
“They’re Giant Roaches! Carnivorous ones!”
“Thanks a fucking lot for the extremely useful information!!!!!”
A deadly race between humans and insects unfolded in the sewers beneath the city. Thankfully, the bastards didn’t seem to possess the full physical abilities typical of insects. If real crickets grew to this size, they should have been able to leap forward with a single bound and land ahead of us. Maybe they’d dumped all their stat points into maintaining that ridiculous body mass and their jump power had suffered? If so, thank every god that might exist.
If creatures with such insane reproductive and survival rates also had top-tier specs, the sky and earth would have been nothing but cockroach eggs the moment I arrived in this world.
Even now the giant crickets weren’t catching up. We were squeezing out every ounce of strength in our souls to run, but at least our leg power was equal to or greater than theirs. Which meant if we steeled ourselves and fought them head-on we might actually have a cha—
Oh my fucking mother of god they have compound eyes!!! That’s so fucking scary!!!!!
“Uwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!! Tirsi!! Miss Tirsi!! Cast some magic, anything!!!!”
“You want me to concentrate on magic in this chaotic situation?! More importantly I’m out of breath and can’t run anymore!!!! Can’t you please carry me, Mr. Nord?!!!!”
“Are you fucking kidding me right now!!!!!!!!!!”
“Kidding?! I’m not kidding!! But yeah it is kind of ridiculous!! Sorry!!!!!!!!!”
Fuck. Trying to run while carrying a forty-kilo rice sack with a completely ruined center of gravity against these things would trigger a ten-second countdown to total life destruction. There were clearly over twenty of them. Getting surrounded and eaten alive? Even Hercules would die. A corpse chewed up, torn apart, tasted, and enjoyed by bugs would be so disgusting that even Zeus wouldn’t be able to put it in a constellation.
“Th-th-th-th-th-there!!!” Francesca suddenly shouted, trembling violently.
What? Was she saying her breasts were bouncing so hard from running that they felt like they were about to rip off?
“Th-th-there!! Over there!! Let’s escape into that sewer passage!!”
What she pointed at was a round iron grate set into the wall. The surroundings were so dark it was hard to spot at a glance. Gentric, who had seen the same thing, screamed.
“Idiot! Didn’t we just say the emergency exits are locked?! Do you want to die in front of an iron grate?!”
“Give me ten seconds!! No, five seconds and I can open it!!”
Goddamn it. We were already running out of breath; arguing among ourselves was completely useless. I glanced behind us. The distance between us and the writhing mass of cricket-roaches had barely changed. It wasn’t that they were the same speed as us. At first we’d actually pulled ahead comfortably. But now that the four members of this trash party were hitting their stamina limits, the gap we’d created was steadily shrinking.
At this rate we’d get caught! And with our stamina already depleted!
“Miss Tirsi!!” I shouted, squeezing out every last drop of strength I had left. “Magic! Attack, defense, anything!! Please!!! At this rate we’re all going to die as bug food!!!”
At my roar Tirsi flinched, then gripped her wand and began chanting. Her expression was as solemn as a nun offering her final prayer before a horde of zombies. But that wasn’t enough. We needed to buy even one more second. If she fucked up the spell now it was an immediate countdown to heaven.
So I enacted my second contingency plan.
“Miss Francesca!!”
“Yes!!”
“I’m throwing you!! Brace yourself and prepare to roll when you land!!!”
“Yes?!!”
There was no time to wait for an answer. I scooped up the running Francesca like a piece of luggage and hoisted her onto my shoulder. Whoosh! Her small frame contrasted violently with her chest, making her heavier than expected. Still, I could definitely throw her this far!
“Hrrrrrrrrrrrrgh!!!”
I poured power into the fantasy muscles I’d over-adapted across three years in this world and pulled my body back as far as it would go. I planned to throw her to buy even one second for the lockpicking.
That was when it happened.
SCRASCRUNCH! Grab!
“───What?”
A disturbing sensation at my waist. How the hell do I even describe it? It felt like six thick plastic bubble-tea straws had latched onto my waist at the same time. Which made sense. Slowing down to lift a person and pulling my body back would obviously create an opening for one “lucky” bastard to attach itself.
SCRASCRASCRUNCH! —But fuck, this thing is moving really fast.
“—Oh.”
I felt all the blood drain from my face and screamed.
“—OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOH!!!!!”
“—Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiik!!!!!”