The Broken Blade
C2-rank adventurer Pia found Aslan and Zeroa utterly unbearable.
If not for the party members who had been injured in the last request and were still out of commission, she would never have bothered with these two. The irritation was immediate.
One was an E-rank who got treated like a beginner, and the other was a D-rank former porter.
One might even think a C-rank adventurer who was only a single step above D-rank was being arrogant. In truth, real adventurer work began at C-rank.
From C-rank onward, you could walk anywhere without being looked down on and be treated as a colleague. Plenty of people remained C-rank adventurers their entire lives, proud of belonging to the true professional realm.
Yet these two beginners acted as if they were equals.
Zeroa still listened to Drex’s instructions and seemed to have gathered a decent amount of miscellaneous experience, but Aslan was so useless Pia wondered if he had been brought along as a joke.
Adventurer requests came in many kinds.
Simple errands, collections, escorts, hunts, investigations—everything from the mundane to the dangerous. This time the request was an investigation.
Among investigations, the most tedious was the ecological survey, which required observing the flora and fauna of a specific area.
Most were commissioned by countries or academies, arriving periodically with low risk but still demanding real knowledge.
That was why Aslan was useless.
“Is this correct?”
“No, that’s a mushroom. We’re looking for something with smooth leaves and a slightly rounder shape. It’s similar but different.”
'What’s similar?! They’re completely different!'
Pia gritted her teeth and shouted in her mind.
Watching Aslan shout about pulling weeds and Zeroa teach like a child made her stomach boil.
Zeroa’s unnecessary kindness and the way he encouraged them despite their obvious differences, or Aslan’s apparent lack of thought—both scraped at Pia’s nerves the same way.
“All plants look pretty much the same, so I don’t know.”
“I thought the same at first. You get used to it after a while.”
Pia frowned at the two’s casual conversation and glanced at Drex.
Drex offered a kind smile and whispered softly, his eyes full of complaint.
“Still, they’re the kids Craosa recommended…”
“Did Craosa do something to you? Otherwise, why these useless bastards…”
“They’re the Rat Slayers.”
Lydia slipped between them and spoke quietly.
“Rat… Slayers, right?”
“Yeah, Rat Slayers. You don’t remember? About half a year ago, there were guys who cleared E-rank in a single day. Those are them.”
Lydia remembered the three who had once been called the Rat Slayers.
Pia tilted her head, realizing something like that had happened, and Drex nodded as if it clicked.
“Ah— So the people who kept talking were them. I wanted to see their faces once, but my wish came true.”
At the time, Drex’s party had returned a week after Rai left the dungeon and had only heard stories about the Rat Slayers.
“Lydia, how did you know?”
“I heard people talking about Zeroa and Aslan. And did you see the receptionist? We had a sewer rat extermination request we hadn’t even taken, and he was staring at it with starry eyes. The guy who always had dead eyes suddenly had clear ones.”
Somehow the usually tired receptionist had greeted them with a bright face.
Pia had dismissed it as nothing special at the time, but now she understood the reason.
“So what? It’s nothing. Do I have to be treated specially just because I clean sewers? Rat Slayers, hah— I’d rather kill myself than get a nickname like that.”
Thinking Pia’s voice might carry, Drex tried to stop her.
“Well, it seems like that’s just your opinion.”
“Are you picking a fight now?”
Lydia teased, and Pia’s expression darkened.
Lydia had been staring silently at the stupid duo, then looked at Pia again.
“Then, no matter what you do, can you break through to E-rank in just one day after registration?”
“… … No.”
E-rank requests had little achievement and were full of annoying errands. Both achievement and pay were poor, and it took time to escape E-rank.
Usually it took one or two months, and excluding the Rat Slayers, the fastest record was one week.
“Luck was on your side, huh.”
“Yeah, in the adventurer world, luck is the most important thing.”
Lydia teased again, and Pia couldn’t answer this time.
“The first E-rank you see is always the most terrifying. Don’t be arrogant about ranks and grow up a bit.”
It was a common joke among adventurers.
It carried several meanings: because you didn’t know what kind of person you had been in the past, be careful; it could also mean you might get trolled when going on a request together.
Pia’s dissatisfied expression softened into a small smile as she looked up at Lydia.
“You’re siding with them a lot.”
“Because they have achievements, they get acknowledged. If you keep acting like that, you might get your ass kicked by that huge bastard?”
“You’re funny. Since little kids came in, you want to eat them. Is your light ass itching?”
Lydia laughed brightly at Pia’s words.
Lydia, who had a cool smile, suddenly rushed forward, grabbed her ponytail, and Pia didn’t back down, grabbing her hair too.
To stop the embarrassing fight between two adventurers who were fighting like monster hunters, Drex tried to intervene, but he got kicked by both.
Aslan, who had been learning about plants, watched the noisy Drex’s party silently and said,
“They’re not normal either.”
“Haha… Shouldn’t we stop them?”
“Well, they’ll stop soon.”
Aslan shook his head as if pitiful and turned to Zeroa again, asking him to concentrate on teaching.
The two groups who saw each other as fools continued the survey, but no results came out.
What they were investigating was the habitat of the Dew Forget-Me-Not.
Sometimes abnormal phenomena occurred and the ecosystem changed, so investigation requests came, but usually it was a mistake or habitat destruction from indiscriminate collection.
Yet the Dew Forget-Me-Not was unaffected by collection.
The dew on the grass was used as an alchemical reagent, and the plant itself was hardly consumed. At best, it was eaten by herbivores, and there had been no reports of a specific animal increasing.
“No one deliberately dried the seeds or anything.”
Drex muttered uncomfortably as he felt something wrong.
Aslan looked around with a frown.
“His spirit isn’t good.”
“Hah. Spirit is bullshit. Hey, Rat Slayer. What do you feel here?”
Aslan frowned and looked, and Drex rushed over and covered Pia’s mouth to stop her from picking a fight.
“Sorry, sorry. Even if it’s boring to say such things now, just ignore what he says.”
“Bu bub bub!”
Ignoring Pia shouting even with her mouth blocked, Aslan concentrated to feel the mana spread around.
It was different from the mana usually felt in nature. It couldn’t be explained exactly, but it felt a bit stickier.
Only Aslan, with his sensitive senses, could feel it, and others couldn’t notice.
“Is there something?”
“Um… The mana around feels a bit sticky.”
“Really? I don’t know well.”
“It might just be your imagination.”
Listening to the two’s conversation, Lydia thought for a moment and approached.
“Is that some kind of evil spirit or something?”
Her own voice was unsure and lacking confidence, but the two looked at each other as if they had realized something and drew magic circles on their palms.
Lydia whistled in surprise at the two easily casting magic, and Pia frowned as if unwilling to admit it.
“You really use this.”
“Yeah. When I was learning, I wondered if I’d ever use something like this.”
The magic the two used was mana detection.
It was not the general detection magic, but used to detect mana that was not ordinary.
Rai had told them it would be good to use when catching undead or demons, but black magic had been obsolete for a long time, and the last record of demons was 500 years ago.
Aslan thought it would be useless, and Zeroa too, but surprisingly, they started using it quickly.
“Cheating.”
“Yeah, it seems like it’s from that side.”
“Is something caught?”
As they talked looking at the magic circle, Lydia approached and asked.
Zeroa, who felt close in a way, tried to stay calm while smelling her sweet scent and answered,
“Yeah, as Lydia said, it’s an evil spirit. Undead… no, is this corruption?”
“What is corruption?”
“Usually, we say they have fallen. Like fallen spirits.”
Usually, it meant those who were kind or didn’t show aggression suddenly became ferocious or went mad.
“Zeroa-kun is smart. Impressive.”
“Huh? No… I just learned it too…”
Lydia smiled with her eyes and praised, making Zeroa flustered.
Pia muttered something about a tail and Drex smiled bitterly, and the group entered the forest and discovered a black charred tree trunk wandering around.
The outside was charred black like burned, and black mud dirtied the ground where the tree trunk walked.
Around the black mud, the grass was withering rapidly, as if some bad spirit was coming out.
“Plague Tree…”
Drex muttered as if to himself. Other people also looked gloomy because they didn’t know what the Plague Tree monster was.
It wasn’t an extremely strong monster, but its compatibility was bad.
It had high magic resistance and hard skin, so it was hard to deal with with the current party members.
Heavy weapons like greatswords or axes were needed, but Lydia’s arrows or Pia’s short swords didn’t help much.
The only one who could scratch it was Zeroa’s shield and Aslan’s greatsword, and Aslan’s greatsword was the only usable one.
Thinking his strength was good, but since he hadn’t actually checked, Drex couldn’t gamble on it, so he exchanged glances with the other party members.
They nodded as if they had the same thought.
“We shouldn’t retreat now. If we report to the guild, a hunting party will come out.”
The request was an ecological survey, so there was no need to endure danger. It was the correct judgment as an adventurer, but Aslan seemed to think differently.
“Is that strong?”
“Yeah— According to the classification table, 3-rank? 4-rank? I don’t remember clearly. I also don’t like Audrey sensei’s grades much…”
As they were about to retreat, they were having a casual conversation.
Worried that young blood couldn’t overcome recklessness, Drex said as if it was the answer.
Aslan jumped up.
“The lid opener was 3-rank, right? Then it’s nothing.”
“What are you doing now.”
Pia, who couldn’t shout loudly because she might be heard by the Plague Tree, tried to stop Aslan.
“We have to catch it. Since it’s shitting everywhere like that, we can’t just leave it.”
“Are you crazy? It looks like a tree from the outside, but its bark is extremely hard. Don’t be arrogant and sit down.”
Even if pleaded desperately, Aslan’s blank expression didn’t change.
“It doesn’t look that strong… What is there?”
“It’s hard, but not up to the strength of iron, so it should be fine.”
“Got it? I’ll go alone and come back. It doesn’t seem helpful for the survey, so I have to do something like this.”
Although he didn’t say it, Aslan, who was annoyed that he hadn’t done anything in the request, left Pia trying to stop him and walked forward.
This was why the first E-rank you saw was the most terrifying.
Thinking Aslan was doing a stupid thing, Pia gritted her teeth and put her hand on the sword.
Drex and Lydia also prepared for battle, but Zeroa, who came out in front of them, turned back with a reassuring smile.
“It’s okay. Trust us.”
Without waiting for an answer, Zeroa followed Aslan.
“What? I’ll do it alone.”
“No. It’s better to finish quickly if we do it together.”
The two walked while talking without tension.
The Plague Tree noticed them and roared, but Aslan, who was swinging his arms and loosening up without caring, pulled out his greatsword with a confident voice.
“Listen up, I’ll shut your mouth soon.”
“… … Hey… Aslan-kun?”
“Why?”
“Can’t… you fix the sword?”
Zeroa pointed cautiously, and Aslan looked at the greatsword in his hand.
It was short for a greatsword. It was the greatsword he had broken in the dungeon with Rai before.
Since it was a cheap sword he bought to pretend to be an adventurer, Aslan had never taken it out since then and had completely forgotten it.
Drex and Lydia stared blankly, and Pia looked at him with contempt.
Aslan, who received the burdensome gaze, felt awkward and swung the broken greatsword a few times in the air to adjust his balance and charged at the Plague Tree.
“Die!”
Aslan’s shout, which was angry at the Plague Tree for no reason, echoed through the forest.