For a Better Tomorrow (7)
The man who had volunteered as our guide turned out to be an absolute chatterbox.
Gryu Telz was his hometown, he said. He used to be a pirate before he washed his hands of that life and became an adventurer. After the Tatara incident he quit adventuring and came home, and now he was helping out at his little brother’s tavern. On and on he went without so much as a pause for breath.
“Please restrain yourself.”
The problem was Dev. If it had been just me, I could have written the whole thing off as free entertainment for my ears. But with Dev laboring under his usual misconceptions about me, I couldn’t let it slide.
In other words, I had to act annoyed just to live up to his expectations.
“…Reflect upon yourself first.”
Look, my concept really didn’t like chatterboxes—that much was true—but coming right out and telling someone to restrain himself?
Did he think I was about to draw my sword? I hadn’t gone that far with the character.
I still had no idea what kind of image of me Dev was carrying around in his head.
“Here we are.”
Gryu Telz: Adventurer’s Guild
At any rate, we had arrived at the Adventurer’s Guild. I pushed open the door of a building far larger than the ones I had seen in other cities. Even at night, a few lamps still burned inside.
“Yes, this is the Gryu Telz branch of the Adventurer’s Guild.”
The clerk greeted us with one foot propped on another chair, a rather insolent posture. He had been tending his nails; his head lifted a half-beat late.
“What? I thought you were retiring.”
“They’re the ones with business. Not me.”
Sea-tanned skin and bright brown eyes turned our way. Whether the look was pure laziness or simple negligence was hard to tell, but combined with the blond hair it gave him a vaguely thuggish air.
“Well now, new faces. What brings you out at this hour of the night?”
Still, he hadn’t completely abandoned the job. The moment he saw us he put his foot down and sat up straight.
“A request concerning the Sea Dragon. We would speak of it.”
Before the clerk could even ask, I tossed my adventurer’s tag onto the counter. Because I made no attempt to hide the preparatory motion, he caught it easily.
“Authentication’s fine, but… the Sea Dragon?”
“If you put it like that, he won’t understand a word.”
Fortunately I had a tongue on hand to cover for the verbal ineptitude my concept demanded. Dev stepped forward and explained the situation.
“Wh-what?!”
“Something that serious?!”
An adventurer who had stuck around to listen by pure chance flew into a rage, while the clerk’s face settled into an uneasy expression. He did not look as though he thought the story completely absurd, but neither did he look brimming with belief.
“It’s true the weather’s been fickle lately and the catch has fallen off, but… we haven’t found any particular signs. This city has a temple and a Magic Tower. If demon worship were going on, we would have noticed long ago.”
“That’s something we’ll have to wait and see. And whatever the cause, the fact that the Sea Dragon has been tainted by corruption is certain.”
“Even so, to believe it so readily when the incident—”
“No. It’s real.”
“Hey, you—”
“Why would a guy who got a Medal of Merit in Tatara go around making stuff up?”
“Wait—what? A Medal of Merit?”
The clerk’s eyes suddenly went wide, and he stared straight at me. What followed was a trembling, pleading voice.
“C-could you… show it to me, perhaps…?”
“What does that have to do with this?”
“Statements from medal-bearing adventurers cannot be ignored by the Guild. Even with supporting evidence, verifying the facts would still take a fair amount of time… but if a medalist’s testimony is added, that time can be cut down considerably.”
So the world only listens when you have money or fame. I felt the truth of it all over again as I dug through my inventory.
The medal traced a graceful arc and landed in the clerk’s palm. He fumbled the catch in his excitement and it bounced a few more times before he secured it.
“…Doesn’t that thing mean anything to you, my lord?”
“It is empty formality. Nothing more.”
What reason was there to care? A Demon Knight who rejected wealth and renown alike in pursuit of vengeance. I put on a peevish face.
“Truly…”
In the meantime the clerk finished verifying the medal’s authenticity and spoke again. A dry tongue swept across his lower lip.
“Is something truly wrong with the Sea Dragon?”
“I do not know.”
“But you said there was a problem.”
“I have no habit of judging what I have not seen with my own eyes. I merely weigh the possibility.”
At my words the clerk licked his lips once more. Then, returning the medal, he said:
“I’ll send the matter upstairs at once. Please wait a little. And you—go spread the word among the adventurers. An emergency request may be coming down.”
“Got it.”
Somehow, I had the feeling I had done everything I could at the Adventurer’s Guild.
“Sorry to be late.”
The Archmage was the last to join us. The temple, once corruption of any kind appeared, treated it as their business no matter the cause and stepped forward as a matter of course. The Magic Tower was different.
According to the Archmage himself, the Tower ran on practical interest rather than principle, or something of the sort.
They did intervene in moral matters—most of them demon-related, admittedly—but problems of this sort always meant swallowing a loss, so they examined every scrap of evidence with the stinginess of a miser. Hence the delay while they pored over the proof, just like now.
“You’re a Great Sage. Isn’t that a fairly high position in the Tower? And they still make you jump through this many hoops?”
Dev, sitting cross-legged atop a stack of crates, asked the question. The Archmage’s shoulders rose in a shrug.
“Being a Great Sage does not automatically mean one holds real power.”
It was an admission that he himself possessed none. The tone was utterly plain: not ashamed of the fact, merely acknowledging it.
“I see.”
“Something like that. More importantly, I hear you secured cooperation beyond our expectations. Thanks to you, we shall save considerable time.”
“Save time… meaning…?”
“Exactly what it sounds like. Thanks to the Inquisitor, word will have reached the lord of the city early as well, and with the Adventurer’s Guild responding like this… an investigation team should be assembled by the day after tomorrow at the latest.”
Listening to that, a distant feeling settled over me.
Right. So we would have to board a ship tomorrow or the day after. Understood. Another walk straight into hell.
“So we can think of it as setting out within two days?”
“Not quite. The investigation team will confirm the facts first, and only then will the main force be dispatched. We will likely be included in that main force.”
In other words, the difference between a vanguard and the main army. Which meant the actual date of the Sea Dragon raid itself was completely up in the air.
I was glad the boarding day had been pushed back, yet the question of what to do in the meantime left my heart restless and unsettled.
“Besides, given the high probability we will have to fight the Sea Dragon, we must ascertain its location and devise countermeasures, not to mention secure a vessel capable of withstanding it…”
“That’s going to take forever. So what do we do in the meantime?”
“Nothing is fixed. But as always, we can look for what work we are able to do.”
Which was another way of saying: kill time doing something else. A classic pattern in ordinary games.
Of course, in those games if the player started talking the NPCs usually said, “Oh! Ready already? Then let’s go!” and skipped the prep work, but still.
Anyway—what was I supposed to do until then? Maybe clear whatever local requests I could. We had been spending money without any income, and that was becoming a problem.
“In that case…”
Once resolve is firm and the conditions are set, you move at once.
I pushed myself up from where I had been leaning before the Inquisitor finished speaking. Straightening my back brought the dull weight of the two-hander strapped across it into clear focus.
“Where are you going?”
I hated wasting time. The requests here all took forever, so I needed to grab whatever was available right now.
More than that, if I lounged around without taking any work, three people would start screaming “Demon!” and try to crack my skull. Even if I wanted to rest, I had no choice but to move.
Though… did this place have a limit on how many quests you could accept at once? That would be inconvenient… no, probably not. There didn’t seem to be many requests I was suited for anyway.
As for the time they took, the raid prep looked like it would drag on, so anything up to a week should be safe enough.
“Uh… Adventurer?”
“Requests.”
Dawn had broken and the guild was growing busy, but the number of clerks had increased to match. I strode up to one of them and demanded recommended requests without the slightest hesitation.
For the record, neither the adventurer who had guided us here nor the thuggish-looking clerk who had received us earlier was present. Each had gone off to handle their own business.
“You’re not secretly a dragon’s descendant or an iron golem or something, are you, my lord?”
“I shall accompany you as well!”
What was Dev even talking about? The Inquisitor was her usual sunny self, so that was nothing new.
I shot a glare at the two dumplings who had caused all this, then pressed the clerk for the request forms. I wasn’t hoping for anything demon-related; all I wanted was something that would kill time while still being acceptable under my concept.
“What you could take on right away is…”
But when I laid out various conditions the way I had last time, the options left to me were not many.
“This is about all there is. Would you like to take a look?”
To be precise, there was exactly one.
“Pirates who’ve been raising hell along the southern coast are starting to push up toward our waters as well. We’re mounting a large-scale subjugation, and this is a recruitment request for that. The call ends in two hours. Everything else is bounty hunting—bring back the heads of the listed pirates. Though with the big sweep today, those bounties will probably become meaningless.”
Or rather, one category.
“Well? Will you take it?”
In short, whichever I chose, I would still end up boarding a ship. At this point it was fate.
“….”
“Are you certain? You seem rather prone to seasickness…”
“Pardon? My lord gets seasick?”
I had been keeping silent, and the Archmage had to go and open his mouth for no good reason. I had already been wrestling with that exact point, and the remark just now decided everything.
The corner of my mouth gave a faint twitch; the muscle beside my left eye tightened.
“This one. I will take it.”
Hwaaaagh. He knows perfectly well that touching my pride makes the impossible possible—why ask?! He’s just tormenting me, isn’t he?! That’s it, isn’t it?!
“Are you truly all right?”
Grit.
I barely held back the urge to whine, kept the expression on my face, and ground my teeth.
I wanted to say, It’s all an act, but of course that was impossible. This was one of those moments when you had to hold the tears back no matter what. If I got sentimental now, the character would collapse.
“That is, not, for you, to, concern yourselves with.”
I chopped the words into pieces and forced strength into my eyes. It wasn’t hard. All I had to do was let the indignation welling up inside me show there.
Fortunately, the look that reached everyone else’s eyes was not a bad shape at all.
“Do not overdo it.”
I had already been overdoing it for a long time, so the advice hardly applied, did it?
I glared at the mage who handed out both poison and antidote, then signed the request form. The clerk, who had been watching carefully, quietly announced that the contract was complete.
“As you will have confirmed, you are to proceed to the listed location and join the city forces. By eight o’clock today.”
A “large-scale sweep” really just meant a sizable fleet touring the pirates’ main hunting grounds. It was convenient for killing time, so I wasn’t particularly picky.
The pay was ten thousand gal per head, though I had no idea how many pirates there actually were. Being able to earn any money at all was probably the lucky part.
“We will accompany you as well.”
“Th-then you will need to present your adventurer’s tags…”
Even though I had more or less signed the contract on my own, the party intended to come along. I wasn’t especially happy about it.
If it weren’t for those people in the first place…
Ah, wait. The more I thought about it, the angrier I got.
“Ah, this old man had best remain here. Someone must stay behind to watch how events unfold.”
“Ah, understood.”
“I don’t have an adventurer’s tag.”
“Why not make a new one while we’re at it?”
I swallowed the injustice boiling up inside me and spun on my heel. The three-part hem of my coat flared once like a bird’s tail feathers.
“Ah, please wait!”
“Uwah, do I have to take a test to make an adventurer’s tag?!”
“We do not accept just anyone as an adventurer.”
“Ugh.”
Endure it. Endure it. They say if you can’t avoid it, you might as well enjoy it. Maybe this was some kind of opportunity too.
An opportunity to train my seasickness, that sort of thing. Whether seasickness was even something you could overcome with familiarity was another question entirely.
“Demon Knight!”
“Moving without pay is the absolute worst…”
“Will you stay behind, then?”
“Fine. I should experience ships at least once anyway…”
I tilted my head back, recalling the location written on the request form.
The Archmage was bowing out as well. Was I really going to be able to lead these two dumplings and endure seasickness on top of it?
Suddenly I felt uneasy.