Chapter 7: The Height of Absurdity
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 7: The Height of Absurdity
Late afternoon on the day Alto left Lukart at dawn.
Mirei and the rest of her party members didn’t crawl out of bed until well past lunchtime, the lingering exhaustion of last night’s “vigorous exercise” with their respective partners weighing heavy on their limbs.
“Mmm…”
Resin, still half-asleep and groggy, only recalled their previous conversation after Krima nudged her several times. She finally spoke to Mirei and Diane about the matter regarding Alto.
“We didn’t even get any money from Alto, so why do Resin and I have to…”
Mirei, a Hero-rank adventurer, looked at the priestess and the ranger with clear disapproval.
“If something like this happens again, we’ll let you two have Alto’s spare cash. So please, just cooperate. Honestly, we were a bit too much. For the last six months, we haven’t even given him a proper response unless it was about a quest.”
“I don’t think those words should be coming from the person who made him borrow 40 million Dalk,” Resin retorted.
“What? If it wasn’t me, you would have done it, Resin!”
Krima and Resin looked ready to start another spat.
As their voices began to rise, Mirei, stretching her stiff body, intervened.
“Stop it. If Alto is still in the house, he might hear you.”
“I don’t feel Alto’s presence. He’s usually out working at this hour anyway.”
Diane, a petite, slender woman with short blue hair, dismissed Mirei’s concern.
The ranger had a visible bump on her forehead—the price for her drunken insolence toward Alto earlier that morning.
That was the extent of it.
The “remorse” and “consideration” Krima felt for Alto amounted to nothing more than a quick rap on the head for the person who had crossed the line.
She was ignoring the fundamental sin, focusing only on maintaining outward appearances.
‘Why did you hit me!’
‘Diane, treating the man of our party like that in public tarnishes our reputation. Control yourself!’
‘But it was just us!’
‘Regardless, you behave whenever we’re outside our rooms!’
In the end, she was only thinking about the party’s prestige; she hadn’t done it for Alto’s sake at all.
“Yawn~. Resin, should we go see Claude?”
“Is that a good idea? He’s just going to ask if you bought that Primda wallet every time you see him.”
“Sigh, thanks to certain people, I can’t even see my boyfriend.”
Mirei and Resin shot dirty looks at their teammates before retreating into their rooms.
After being picked on repeatedly, Krima simply shut her mouth.
Diane, however, muttered her frustrations in her stead.
“As if they don’t ask Alto for money just as much as we do.”
“There’s no need to be dragged down by the bitter words of losers. Gerend was happy and gave us so much affection; we should just endure it.”
“Gerend only gave you affection, Krima! He just played games with me and gave me a kiss at most! If I knew it would be like this, I would have been the one begging for a loan.”
“Oh my, you were the one who dumped the task on me because you didn’t know what to say, Diane.”
“…Hmph!”
With a body that was almost childlike save for a few slight curves, Diane had yet to receive any physical affection from Gerend beyond a simple kiss.
Her face was cute and pretty, but in a world overflowing with beauties, that wasn’t enough to make Gerend truly embrace her.
Since her personality was also stuck in childhood, Diane failed to realize she was nothing more than a wallet to Gerend.
However, it was precisely because of that lack of progress that Krima felt safe bringing Diane along to meet him.
“So, can we go see Gerend now?”
“We should lay low for a while. Did you forget we’re short on pocket money too?”
“Ugh… I wish men would spend money like Alto does…”
When Diane complained again, Krima scolded her, looking horrified.
“Don’t you dare say that anywhere else! Expecting a man to spend money? People would point and stare if they heard you.”
“But Alto does it!”
“Alto is… a bit different, isn’t he? We’re the ones doing him a favor by hanging out with him, considering his face.”
“Still, he has a good personality. He’s fine as a friend.”
Krima let out a sigh. She actually agreed with Diane on that point.
“He’s definitely a good person as a friend. That’s why we’re trying to cheer him up like this, right?”
“Since he’s a nice guy, once we start partying with Gerend, let’s introduce Alto to another good party.”
“Oh?”
At the unexpected suggestion, Krima finally let out a soft smile. She was proud of Diane for coming up with such a thought on her own.
“Yes. We should at least do that much for him. Aside from his looks, he’s a decent man.”
Feeling good about the praise, Diane let out a lazy yawn and stretched.
“I hope we can party with Gerend soon! Then we can hang out using the money we earn and Gerend’s national subsidy.”
“I agree. I’m looking forward to it too~.”
However, these two were completely oblivious.
A man’s national subsidy belonged solely to the man.
In a modern society where the female-to-male ratio was 1 to 21, a man’s “proper profession” was, unofficially, being a kept man.
In other words, even in a party, the man would simply stay in the safest part of the dungeon while the women handled everything from chores to combat and administration, all while offering the money they earned to the man. It was a deformed social structure.
They had no idea that men focused entirely on squandering their national subsidies, childbirth subsidies, and childcare subsidies on their own pleasure.
Mirei and Resin were no different.
This was all because they had met Alto at the very start of their careers as rookie adventurers.
For five years, they had watched him take on every menial task outside of combat and even invest his own national subsidy into the party’s operating funds. Because of this, Mirei’s party had no idea what the actual reality of male-female relationships was like.
Even when they interacted with other parties, the women in those groups took the status quo as common sense, so they never felt the need to explain it.
Mirei’s party simply walked away with the vague impression that “Alto is definitely one of those men who spends money.”
The four of them had mistaken Alto’s kindness for their right.
That was the starting point of the fundamental problem.
“Alto will be back late, right?”
“Probably. His supporter duties increase during the off-season.”
“Then I’m going back to sleep.”
“Me too.”
“Hmph, I miss Gerend.”
“Now, no whining!”
“Hmph!”
Cruelly enough, not a single member of the party stepped outside on the most important day of their lives.
This became the first tragic condition that allowed the future situation to escalate beyond anyone’s control.
* * *
In front of the main gate of the Lukart Carriage Station.
Despite it being a carriage station, the Branch Manager of the Lukart Adventurer Guild and her receptionist were standing there together.
“It’s the carriage that left at dawn, right?”
“Yes. I clearly heard the driver urging the station staff to hurry because they were heading to Hus Dakuren.”
The Branch Manager looked incredibly haggard, with dark circles reaching down to her chin.
The receptionist, on the other hand, had wide, bloodshot eyes and a face as pale as a ghost.
Both were in a state of extreme stress and exhaustion, their conditions pushed to the brink.
“Branch Manager, is this really the right way to handle this?”
The receptionist hesitated, but the Branch Manager rubbed her face with her hands and whispered lowly.
“At best, we can only control things internally. We have to stop the news from spreading outside. Don’t forget, our top priority is survival.”
“Yes, I’ll keep that in mind.”
As they trudged into the carriage station, a staff member recognized the Branch Manager immediately.
“Branch Manager of the Adventurer Guild?! What brings you here without notice? Are you going on a trip?”
“No, I’m here to see the Station Manager.”
“Our manager?”
The staff member frowned slightly at the Branch Manager’s informal tone toward her boss, but the Branch Manager was too dazed to notice.
“I have news to share. It’s urgent. Extremely urgent. Is she in?”
“Yes, she just arrived for work. I’ll show you the way.”
“Please.”
The Carriage Station Manager’s office was located on the second floor, just like the Adventurer Guild’s.
The sleep-deprived receptionist could only wonder if high-ranking officials simply liked being on higher floors.
“What’s this? Why the unannounced visit?”
“Something urgent came up. Give me some coffee.”
Offended by the Branch Manager’s blunt demand for a drink, the Station Manager merely gestured toward the shelf with tea and coffee.
“Make it yourself.”
Without a word of protest, the guild receptionist began brewing tea for the three of them.
Look at these two, the Station Manager thought, her mood souring further.
“Why are you here?”
“Let’s get straight to the point.”
The Branch Manager pulled out a cigarette with trembling hands.
She lit it with a match and took a long, deep drag.
By the time half the cigarette had burned away and she exhaled a cloud of smoke, the receptionist handed her the freshly brewed tea.
“A man left for Hus early this morning, didn’t he?”
“How did you know? I just got the report myself. Why, is he famous? Is he one of Lukart’s top two beauties, Claude or Gerend?”
“No.”
“Then who?”
Now it was the Branch Manager’s turn to be incredulous.
“You’re the ones who put him on the carriage, and you know less than I do?”
“It’s not like we can stop a man if he wants to leave. If he’s leaving a place like Lukart, he must be completely fed up with it, right?”
“Yeah… you’re right. And that’s exactly the problem. Ha…!”
“Hey.”
When the Branch Manager reached for a second cigarette, the Station Manager’s expression hardened, and her voice dropped.
“I asked why you’re here.”
Ignoring her, the Branch Manager lit up again.
She had chain-smoked over a pack since dawn, but her mind refused to clear.
“Alto.”
“Alto? Which Alto? You mean the male Alto? From Mirei’s party?”
“Yeah.”
“Then it’s not even a loss for our city. We have over thirty men here, and we just lost the ugliest one. Good riddance. Does a backwater place like Hus even have five men in the whole city? Sending an eyesore to a place like that is a positive cycle, a win-win.”
“A positive cycle…?”
“Yeah, a positive cycle.”
The Branch Manager snapped her cigarette and stood up.
From her coat, she pulled out the party withdrawal form Alto had filled out and a copy of the report she had sent to headquarters this morning.
“Let’s see if you can still call it a ‘positive cycle’ after reading this.”
This bitch is acting so high and mighty, the Station Manager thought. Just because the Adventurer Guild is doing a bit better than the carriage station doesn’t give her the right to be this rude.
Suppressing her irritation, the Station Manager began reading the documents. Before long, her jaw dropped, and she pulled the paper closer to her eyes.
“National Merit Recipient? Be-Bertrand…?”
After finishing the withdrawal form, she quickly devoured the emergency guild report. The Station Manager almost slammed her desk but barely restrained herself.
“You bitch…! What the hell are you trying to do?”
“What do you mean?”
“Aren’t you trying to pin the entire responsibility for Lord Alto Bertrand leaving Lukart on our carriage station?”
“…As if!”
BANG!
It was the Branch Manager who actually slammed the desk.
“Listen carefully, Manager. The primary cause is those sluts in Mirei’s party who cheated on Lord Alto, but no one in this city is innocent for keeping it a secret from him. Furthermore, I failed to stop him from leaving the party, and you sent him away from Lukart with your own hands!”
“How was I supposed to know he was that Alto? Much less a National Merit Recipient!”
“Dammit, stop making excuses! Your station allowed a man to leave the city without even verifying his identity or making a basic attempt to persuade him to reconsider!”
This loophole—the tendency to rush through policy implementation and public service without establishing detailed procedures—was something Alto himself had pointed out privately.
Even Alto probably hadn’t expected the consequences of this flaw to surface so quickly.
“If you had shared this information with me, we would have done something!”
As she spoke, the Station Manager felt a dark premonition.
“Wait, you…?”
Did this bitch intentionally keep me in the dark so Lord Alto would leave Lukart?
But the Branch Manager just scoffed and pulled out another cigarette.
“You bitch, he came here knowing the Bloodhound was being treated like a fool. Could you have stopped him? He glared at me once, and I didn’t just piss myself—I felt like I was going to die. Seriously.”
“You were just yelling at me for not stopping him!”
“Whether you took the basic minimum measures or not is a completely different issue!”
The receptionist just wanted to cover her ears and go to sleep. There was nothing she could do here.
“This one-eyed bitch…!”
The Station Manager ground her teeth.
“What do you want?”
“To survive together.”
“Do you think that’s possible?”
“It has to be. I only want one thing from you.”
“Spit it out.”
“From now on, if any man says he’s moving to the provinces, don’t just follow the basic procedures—give them the runaround and block them from leaving. Use the excuse of preventing the drain of the city’s male population. Under that same pretext, make sure your staff keeps their mouths shut about Lord Alto’s departure.”
“And what about you?”
“I’ll make sure the adventurers in Lukart stop talking about Lord Alto.”
“How?”
“The same way as you. I’ll tell them there are subversive women from the provinces trying to scout our men. I’ll order them not to speak about men in public places.”
“What about Mirei’s party?”
The primary culprits.
At the mention of them, the Branch Manager literally bit through her cigarette.
“They won’t know a thing. I’ll keep them in the dark and give them no work. Even if I do, it’ll only be quests that pay pennies. I’ll slowly wither them away. I’ll make sure Claude and Gerend abandon them, and I’ll push them to the limit—further than what we’re facing—until they submissively do exactly as we say.”
“And if they try to go to another city to be adventurers? Ah… I suppose you’ll tell me to block that too?”
“Manager.”
The Branch Manager dropped to her knees.
Her knees felt much lighter now that she had already knelt once before.
“I’m not playing games. We have to survive this crisis.”
“……”
This bitch dragged me into the same boat on purpose.
The Station Manager felt disgusted, but she had no other choice.
“How far are you willing to go?”
When she asked the Branch Manager, whose eyes had gone completely vacant, the answer was chilling.
“If it means bringing Lord Alto back, I’ll even kill Claude and Gerend.”
“What…?!”
It was an answer she hadn’t expected in her wildest dreams.
“Are you insane?”
“Of course I am! Between the Bloodhound and those two kept men, who do you think is more valuable?”
“But they’re still two men…”
“Those sons of high-ranking officials or rich bastards who all hid in the rear? You and I both know the truth. Lord Alto, who survived the war and remained devoted to the women he considered his own, is a real man—unlike those things who just survive to chase skirts! Whether you look at honor or character, Lord Alto is far superior!”
“…I suppose that’s true.”
The receptionist, still brewing tea, twisted her face at the pathetic conversation.
As if they weren’t the ones looking down on him for being ugly just a moment ago.
However, the receptionist failed to remember that she, too, had participated in that very same gossip.