The Golden Nest
The Golden Nest.
“Kkyu! Kkyu! Kkyu!” Blinded by jealousy because the Contractor kept ignoring him to pet the slimes indiscriminately, Kkachi bounced across their tops with rhythmic little springs. “Kkyuuu!” (Currently spinning in circles.) There was a brief, comical scene in which he rode atop their squishy bodies like a cat on a robot vacuum, pecking at them busily with his beak and harassing the hardworking slimes.
But the Contractor’s single icy command of “Kkachi. Enough.” was so cold that even I flinched. The rampage ended in an instant.
Maybe it was the red eye, but the Contractor’s signature dead-serious expression—tilting his head just enough to reveal one side of his face—radiated an almost mystical pressure. Or maybe it wasn’t pressure at all. Maybe it was the sheer secondhand cringe. Damn. I still can’t get used to those eyes that look like crimson contact lenses.
“Seriously…”
When the Contractor saw Kkachi totter over with his head lowered like a guilty retriever, he let out a small sigh and offered a helpless smile that said he simply couldn’t stay angry. Realizing this was his chance to improve the Contractor’s mood, Kkachi flew straight to his shoulder and began rubbing his head against the man’s face in a frantic display of affection.
“Ow! Kkachi, please…!”
“Kkyuk!”
Staggering under the onslaught, the Contractor seized the little shadow beast with both hands, stuffed him into his robe, and turned to the cleaning lady who commanded the slimes.
“My familiar caused trouble for yours. I’m sorry, Tamer.”
“Hehe, please lift your head, adventurer. Children grow by squabbling over little things like this, don’t they? Thanks to today’s experience, I believe they will mature and grow even stronger tomorrow. At least, that is what I choose to believe.”
“Oh.”
The cleaning lady waved away the Contractor’s repeated bows with a bright, reassuring smile. Her smile was dazzling. Her voice was so gentle and lovely that one could almost mistake her for a saint rather than a cleaner.
“We’ll be on our way now…!”
“Take it easy and don’t overwork yourself, cleaning lady~nyang!”
“Then, goodbye.”
“Hehe, I wish you all a day filled with good fortune.”
We waved to the teal-robed cleaning lady and her teal slimes, then set off toward the appraisal office that had been our original destination.
The closer we drew to the adventurers’ guild, the more the Contractor’s once-light steps began to skip and stutter like a child the day before Christmas.
“Ugh… Sion, I’m so nervous.”
“This body is excited too, since it’s my first time appraising an artifact, nyang!”
Huh? First time appraising an artifact?
I knew from Senior Chroma’s explanation that they were valuable, but were they so rare that even a fifth-tier adventurer had never done it before? Just what on earth did that demon give me?
“Hmm? That’s quite surprising.”
Sion wore a bitter little smile as she watched the Contractor and me tilt our heads in confusion.
“This body is not an adventurer. This body is a dungeon guide employed by the adventurers’ guild—a sherpa, nyang. Even if this body finds an artifact while guiding novice adventurers through the dungeon, this body cannot claim ownership of it, nyang!”
Good grief. I had thought the sherpa job was pure honey, but it hid a sting like that.
“Then… does the artifact belong to the novice adventurers?”
“No, nyang. Since this body discovered it first and not the novices, it must be turned over to the adventurers’ guild that this body belongs to, nyang.”
I’ve thought it before, but the job really is no different from being a civil servant.
“…I see.”
“A thief getting robbed by another thief.”
“There’s no need to pity this body so much, nyang. This body still receives about thirty percent of the appraiser’s fee, so it’s fine, nyang.”
“Still, it’s a shame.”
“It is a shame, nyang. But getting something is better than getting nothing, nyang!”
She was right. If the system had been truly black, they would have simply swallowed the artifact without a word. Better to receive something than nothing at all. If this had been our old company… ugh, better not to think about it.
While listening to Sion’s sherpa stories, we walked on and soon passed the adventurers’ guild entirely.
And we simply kept walking past it.
Excuse me? Miss Guide?
“Thief, where are you going? I believe we just passed the adventurers’ guild.”
“We are not going to the adventurers’ guild right now, nyang!”
To appraise a skill or item, didn’t we need the appraisal office inside the adventurers’ guild?
“Then where are we going?”
“We are going to the Golden Nest, nyang!”
“The Golden Nest…? Hmm, that sounds familiar.”
“Didn’t the leader of the fugitives tell you before we returned from the dungeon, nyang!”
“Jackson…? Ah! You mean the vault that converts checks into dallants?”
“Correct, nyang!”
The Contractor really displayed superhuman memory whenever dallants were involved. Was this truly the same survivor who had lived an entire year in Terraforming?
“But weren’t we going to have the artifact appraised?”
“Item appraisal is possible at the Golden Nest too, nyang. They can also purchase and store artifacts, so heading there from the start saves us from doing the same work twice, nyang.”
And most importantly, after lunchtime the guild became so crowded it was difficult to even step inside, meaning a long wait for any appraisal.
As expected, our seasoned veteran had thought of everything.
“Indeed…”
“That makes sense.”
Slightly impressed by Sion’s seamless explanation, we nodded and followed after her. Her gray tail swayed majestically with every step, looking wonderfully reliable.
Piled like a lofty mountain range were relics, treasures, and heaps of gold coins. Sacred light poured down upon the wealth like sunlight piercing storm clouds. The majestic, beautiful sight was so dazzling it stole the breath from anyone who beheld it and drew involuntary gasps of wonder.
Of course, across more than two hundred long years, only two beings had ever come and gone from this secret space. Yet even though lunchtime had ended and work hours had begun, the one currently buried in the mountain of dallants and enjoying an afternoon nap at least believed the number was still two. And his thinking was not entirely wrong.
A vast underground cavern. Countless treasures and riches stacked into mountains. Magic lamps deliberately, artificially arranged to illuminate the hoard in the most beautiful way possible. It would not have seemed strange if the god of wealth himself had descended upon such a scene, and there was probably no adventurer in all of Bastion who could have held back their admiration.
And at the center of this extravagantly luxurious cavern, amid countless reflections of light so brilliant they threatened to blind, rose and fell a single firm chest—like gentle waves upon a tranquil sea.
The sharp lines of muscle visible beneath the pure white shirt resembled a master sculptor’s finest torso. Yet the continuous rippling of those muscles made it clear this was no statue of a male deity, but a living, breathing being.
After passing the chest that would make any man instinctively want to spread his arms and embrace it, one found skin so white it softly reflected the light of the magic lamps that blanketed the ceiling like a galaxy of stars, and golden hair that looked as if it had been spun strand by strand from molten gold.
His face, only slightly visible among the piled coins, was truly a living work of art. An inspiration engine for artists. An eternal idol for womanizers and man-lovers alike.
“And also… um. What came next? Yes, since my memory fails me, I shall stop here. Therefore, please be satisfied with this much and rise at once, Contractor. Do you have any idea what time it is?”
The white-haired man lightly lifted his gold-rimmed glasses, which had been bleached pale by the light reflecting off the dallants.
At that moment, with the sound of coins cascading like a waterfall, the figure buried in the golden hoard vigorously sat up.
“Is the most handsome male in Bastion—no, the entire world—not present? My friend.”
Brushing back his disheveled golden hair, he revealed teeth so white and perfect that even another man might fall for them, and flashed a dazzling smile. With a playful expression, he looked down at his close, longtime friend.
“What is it? Were you not sleeping?”
The white-haired man knitted his brows as if the sight annoyed him greatly. The deep sigh that followed as he straightened his crooked tie made his displeasure perfectly clear.
Wow. He’s angrier than I expected.
Sensing that any further mischief might result in something quite unpleasant for dinner, the golden-haired man hurriedly moved to soothe the mood of his old friend, servant, roommate, and outstanding employee, Mamon.
“Wait just a moment, my friend! I’ll come down right away!”
He began rolling down the golden mountain made of his own scales.
“Uahaha! It’s so fast I can’t control the speed! Catch me, my friend!”
“…Oh, dear god.”
Watching his Contractor roll down the mountain of dallants like an orc barrel tipped sideways on a hill, Mamon unconsciously slapped his own forehead.
When they had first met, the man possessed only a moderate amount of narcissism and had been a noble, magnificent dragon worthy of the title “God’s Worker.”
Just how far has he fallen?
Mamon was seriously worried that at this rate the Contractor would have his deputy administrator position revoked and end up becoming a demon himself. The future of Bastion’s largest vault, the lair of the great Golden Dragon, the Golden Nest, looked truly bleak.
“Whoa! What was that?”
“Kyaaak! Boss! What are you doing? That’s dangerous!”
“Hey, everybody move! Dragon rolling through!”
Staring with an expression of utter exasperation at the Golden Dragon Aurion, who had vanished through the vault entrance he had opened ahead of time along the red carpet, Mamon sighed.
“Haah… I want to quit.”
Once again, Mamon let out a powerless sigh.
“Nyang? Didn’t you hear something like a wall being hit just now, nyang?”
“Hmm. I didn’t hear anything.”
“Hey, thief. Cats and humans, you know…”
“You damn crow! Shut your beak, nyang! That is a species discrimination statement, nyang!”
No, that was simply a fact. So it would be wise to sheathe those claws—unless, of course, you wanted to receive mandatory nail care in the style of the Plague Doctor.