Lucky Star 4
Worn tables and adventurers chattering at full volume. Waitresses weaving through the crowd with trays of food, and the hairy-backed hands of men getting slapped for eyeing their slender waists and plump bottoms. Amid all that chaos, expensive magical tools kept the place as clean as a modern restaurant — a strange sight indeed.
"Welcome! To all you lucky scoundrels!"
If Auntie Marianne's inn felt like a gukbap joint packed with construction workers, The Lucky Scoundrel was closer to a college-district bar or a cabaret. I'd never set foot in a cabaret myself — only seen them in movies — but from the beautiful waitress who greeted us with a loud, cheerful welcome the moment we walked in, to the ones hustling around with beers, there wasn't a single plain face among them.
They weren't the kind of knockouts that made your eyes pop like the guild receptionists, but the staff kept themselves clean and wore neat makeup. A first-floor dining room maintained by magical tools, second-floor lodgings stocked with cheap household magic devices, prices that had no conscience relative to portion size — and food that, to its credit, tasted every bit as expensive as it cost.
"How many in your party?"
"Table for three, rooms for two!"
I called it out loud to the woman in a uniform that was clearly modeled after the guild's, and slapped a gold coin right onto her openly displayed cleavage. On a street packed with adventurers, a gold coin was basically a business card.
Even Intermediate Adventurers could earn gold coins, but not enough to casually tip one for drinks or entertainment. So flashing a gold coin like this was a kind of status proof. Walking into a restaurant and shoving an Advanced Adventurer badge at a waitress just didn't look right. That wasn't my personal opinion — it was the culture of this street.
Hanna and Grace hadn't joined me yet, so a little flirting should be fine. A man living in a world like this with looks like mine had no reason to stay pure. The waitress whose eyes had lit up at my appearance ran her tongue slowly over her full lips at the sight of the gold coin nestled in her cleavage.
"You can sit over here. ...Your companions — ladies?"
"I'll be leaving the two women at the lodgings."
"Hee, I see."
Unlike me, who'd stripped off all my armor and come out in just a simple shirt, the two women were running a bit late — maybe they had something to fuss over. Thanks to that, I got the closing-time info from the waitress and was sitting at the table for a while when I spotted Hanna and Grace opening the door and looking around.
"Over here!"
I raised my arm high and called out, and I heard tongues clicking in disappointment around me. Like me, both of them had taken off their armor and were wearing ordinary cloth clothes, which left their feminine figures on full display. The exotic, lively beauty with black hair strode over, showing off her feminine curves, and the grey-haired beauty with her bouncing, enormous breasts—
Those are... pretty big, aren't they?
Those symbols of motherhood — more suited to a saintess than an archer — were now exposed to the gazes of thoroughly drunk men, so the lecherous stares flying their way were only natural. Ignoring those sticky looks, the two of them came over to my table and sat down.
"Why is the inn called The Lucky Scoundrel? Even Grace unnie didn't know."
"I go into the Tower a lot, but I don't really know places like this."
They must have run into each other on the way and chatted, because the two of them had already gotten close. Just an hour ago they'd been calling each other Miss Hanna and Miss Grace, and now they were already on unnie-and-younger-sister terms. Maybe it was the camaraderie of being in the same party.
Even if Grace had looked more experienced than Hanna in the Tower, it was only natural she wouldn't know much about inns like this. One look at the glamorous waitresses with their cleavage on display and the magical tools keeping the place clean made it clear what kind of establishment this was. A place that wore the mask of an inn while openly targeting male adventurers — knowing about it would be the strange part.
"Exactly what it says on the sign — a place for the lucky scoundrels who made it out of the Tower."
"Lucky how?"
"Guys who didn't die and made it to Intermediate Adventurer, and rookies who somehow scored rare materials and hit the jackpot!"
The method for charming the waitresses here was simple. A fat tip paired with a good adventure story, and they'd stick right to your side. Of course, this wasn't a red-light district place that just sold women's bodies. It was also a fine dining establishment where lucky guys could unwind with high-class food.
Not some mixed stew or watered-down beer — this was a high-end restaurant where you could enjoy dishes made by chefs who'd made a name for themselves in the kingdom's capital, paired with premium liquor certified by the merchant guilds. The cheapest menu items were priced in silver coins, not copper, so unless you were exceptionally lucky, a Novice Adventurer couldn't even set foot in here. And those adventurers getting their hands slapped over there? They had money, but no adventure stories, so they were getting rejected.
"Is it really that expensive?"
"The steak you're about to eat costs about as much as three hundred and fifty goblins."
"Hyeek?!"
After subtracting lodging, food, and equipment repair costs from the money earned on lowest-grade mana stones and herb-gathering quests on the lower floors, a meal this luxurious was an impossible dream. So the customers who came to this place were two kinds of scoundrels: lucky ones who'd somehow struck it rich as Novice Adventurers and came to blow off the stress of life-or-death battles, or lucky ones who'd steadily entered the Tower, never died, and climbed from Novice all the way to Intermediate.
Skill mattered, of course, but the general adventurer mindset was that surviving and thriving in the Tower was a matter of luck. Monsters popped up so randomly that the luck factor did seem right. If I hadn't had this body, I'd have been a corpse stuffed in some cave corner myself.
"Of course, it's only expensive for Novice Adventurers. Once you're Intermediate, you can come once or twice a month."
"Is the income difference really that big?"
"Novice Adventurers are a dime a dozen, so lowest-grade mana stones are too — but from Intermediate on up, the numbers drop sharply. Never mind lower- and mid-grade mana stones — alchemy materials and herbs from the mid-floors jump entire orders of magnitude in reward."
The quest Grace's party had taken was herb gathering — a beginner-only quest where you carefully dig up herbs growing wild on the plains without damaging the roots and submit them to the guild. Even filling a bag the size of a human head by hitting several growing spots only got you about twenty copper coins.
But a forest material-gathering mission for Intermediate Adventurers paid at least two silver coins, no matter how low you cut it. Considering the game-style exchange rate of a hundred copper to one silver, even a similar quest paid more than ten times as much.
"So you two are today's lucky scoundrels. Novice Adventurers freeloading a meal from an Advanced Adventurer — you don't see that every day. Ah! And I've already booked the rooms, so you can stay here."
"The rooms too?"
Grace asked back, looking a bit flustered by my words. Getting treated to a big meal and having your lodging paid for did feel a bit different. But there were various reasons for this generosity. First and foremost was the word-of-mouth problem, stretching from the gold coins all the way to the hammer I'd given to a fan.
If rumors started spreading like That never-backs-down Paladin Roland put his novice party members up in some dump worse than a stable~, it'd be a real headache.
Fellow adventurers would just shrug it off, but the patrons funding my luxurious, comfortable life were mostly nobles. Nobles looked down on adventurers in some ways, but plenty of them also saw us as romantic figures out of storybooks.
"If an Advanced Adventurer puts his own party members — especially beauties like you — up in some dump, people talk. So don't get all proud and refuse support from an Advanced Adventurer just because you're Novices."
"Beauties, huh... Do you conquer women's hearts as well as monsters?"
Romantic sword-swingers who risked their lives fighting monsters and exploring uncharted, unknown places. That was roughly how they thought of adventurers, so you had to maintain an image of being bold, free-spirited, generous, and just — roughly that — if you wanted good commissions to come your way.
Some adventurers called it groveling, sucking up to blue bloods, but so what? Even if I freely handed out gold coins and gifted spare weapons, the returns were always bigger. Grace, who roughly knew how the adventurer business worked, understood what I meant and shot back with a joke.
As for Hanna... rather than understanding, she just looked happy to have found a patron with both stacked stats and a stacked wallet, with no intention of refusing.
"Anyway, Miss Hanna, Miss Grace — here's to working well together from now on!"
Unlike lukewarm cheap beer, this one was ice-cold enough to make your teeth ache. Did people in the Middle Ages even drink beer cold? I set that question aside and raised my glass, and the two of them raised theirs with equal enthusiasm. Hanna's rather impressive assets and Grace's even more impressive ones forcibly drew the eyes of the surrounding adventurers, but the two of them, already drunk on the atmosphere, didn't seem to care one bit.
Clack! The wooden mugs collided with a solid sound, and the impact sent white foam spilling across the table.