When Five People Gather (1)
In the end, I could not become a merchant.
"Excuse me? Mister Robin? Enthusiasm is all well and good, but you can't even handle simple arithmetic—how do you expect to be a merchant? That girl over there is fine, but you, Mister Robin... I'm afraid it's hopeless. We do support novice merchants, but if you know absolutely nothing..."
"Hey, hey, no way. Get out of here."
"What, an illiterate merchant!? A blind man becoming a swordsman would be easier. What? Zatoichi? Ha... Bertholdt! Throw him out!"
In this other world rife with discrimination and hatred, a ninja with a liberal-arts brain had a hard time finding work.
After the thirtieth rejection, Orphe was the first to wear out. She asked if I shouldn't just become an adventurer instead.
Orphe is the alias I gave her—Yakuza Slayer. I tried shortening it to Yas, but she didn't like the sound, so I built it from her candidate number back in training: 568. Orphia crossed my mind for a second, but it felt like something I'd heard before, so I scrapped it.
I couldn't be bothered inventing a fake name for myself and planned to stroll around as plain old Shin Nobin, but Orphe demanded to know how that could possibly be a person's name. So I slapped on a little otherworldly flair and settled on Robin.
Thus my public name is now Robin.
Anyway, once I listened, adventuring turned out to be a surprisingly convenient line of work. You take jobs from a guild—basically a manpower office—and earn money by putting your body on the line. Classic freelance grunt work. Not much different from construction labor back on Earth.
Adventurer by day, runaway ninja by night. Perfect. Orphe and I bolted straight to the guild and signed on as apprentice adventurers on the spot.
"You said your name was Robin?"
"Nin?"
This scrawny four-eyed uncle's name was Satton, a teammate for today's group-project quest.
In this world, apprentice adventurers who haven't completed five or more quests are required to travel in groups of exactly five.
"Have you heard of the genius who became an adventurer?"
"Nin-nin."
How the hell would I know that?
Normally a ninja shouldn't show his colors among ordinary people, but according to Orphe this world doesn't even have the concept of ninjas. So a little nin-nin here and there should be fine, right? The only ones who'll hear it are either good people or dead people. Kakashi is already on the kill list, so she counts as dead already.
"...I think this is the right way...? The map matches the place, so it should be correct?"
Jina, our navigator and long-range attacker, the archer, stopped and glanced nervously at Bonita, the party leader of this group project. The girl seemed oddly lacking in confidence—and a bit lazy.
"That's right. Still, a guide needs to speak with more certainty. From now on, please say it with confidence."
Bonita, the kind-hearted sweet giantess in leather armor and armed with a halberd. The only guild-affiliated adventurer in our apprentice party.
Adventurers don't only do dangerous work. The guild also hands out jobs like washing grandmothers' feet at nursing homes or shoveling goat dung on farms.
The problem is that apprentices hungry for a big payday keep diving into yokai-extermination quests and getting wiped out left and right. So the guild had to take measures.
Their solution: stick one guild-affiliated (iron-rice-bowl) adventurer among four apprentices to prevent trolling and raise the survival rate on first quests.
You might ask why they don't just ban apprentices from yokai hunts altogether. But yokai extermination brings the guild a tidy profit. If the apprentices fail, the dead are nobodies who don't matter; if they succeed, the guild staff's performance numbers go up. In this world a commoner's life is worth less than a salaryman's lunch.
I heard that from Orphe, so it's reliable.
Once the guild built its little safety net, the apprentices started exploiting it too. People who only came for yokai hunts have zero interest in other jobs. Since the five-person party rule lifts after the sixth quest, they simply gather four others just like themselves who plan to run nothing but yokai exterminations from quest one through five and form a permanent five-man queue. That way the guild-affiliated adventurer doesn't have to hop parties every day giving crash courses, and the guild doesn't have to reassemble parties over and over. Classic win-win.
The downside is that the idiots you meet this way have an extremely high chance of being complete morons. Since it's just a bunch of trash-tier rookies clustering together, any real synergy—tank, DPS, healer—is impossible from the start. Still, I thought there had to be some limit. Turns out I was a third-rate ninja for thinking so.
"Onward, comrades."
Satton, this otaku bastard, gripped a shortsword reverse-handed like he'd learned swordsmanship from manga. Jina looked like she'd been a beggar—an archer with no dagger, just a bow and a quiver holding exactly three arrows. Was she planning to shoot all three and then beg the enemy for mercy so she could retrieve them? The imagination of a madwoman.
"It's a bit big after all."
Orphe clinked her armor, checking the fit. It was the armor of the bald man who had enjoyed his bondage session and then departed this world. The moment I gave her permission to scavenge, she had gone straight back into the cave and hauled out a bundle—this armor. Probably high-quality stuff. Orphe was stick-thin, but tall enough that the size roughly worked. Ill-fitting gear is a disadvantage against strong foes, but we had no money, so I understood. I myself was wearing only the quilted armor the dead instructor had given me.
"I'll scout ahead first."
Bonita, solid as a bowl of hot soup, pushed through the underbrush and took the lead.
Our party's first quest was to deal with a pack of yokai that had come down to the farmhouses and raised hell. Ocul, water-dwelling yokai, apparently used the aftermath of heavy rains as a chance to invade human territory looking for food. Probably this world's version of gators.
"Monster hunting for the first time—my heart is racing. Have you any experience, young Robin?"
Satton struck up conversation, apparently bored of waiting. The way he kept talking suggested he hadn't had anyone to chat with until now.
"I've killed a few oversized caterpillars. Some bigger than my forearm."
He was still an innocent civilian, so I played along. Whether those bugs counted as yokai I wasn't sure, but they were ugly enough to qualify.
"Caterpillars that large can only be the larvae of thunder bugs. They appear often in books—did you not know the name? Speaking of books, I am actually a man of letters. I once nearly serialized a full-length novel in the newspaper popular among nobles, The Hall of Artists."
A story I had zero interest in. Still, the existence of newspapers was mildly surprising. Information gathering is a ninja virtue, so I decided to listen.
"I am writing a romantic novel about interspecies breeding between monsters and humans. But having never actually encountered a monster, I find the descriptions difficult. So I decided to experience it firsthand for inspiration. If you are curious about this Satton's work—"
His words stopped reaching my ears.
This bastard was a yokai-fucker!
Of course, some yokai maintain friendly relations with humans. The classic example is the Great Sage Equal to Heaven, who got thoroughly trained by the monk Tripitaka. But I know the true nature of these yokai bastards!
They were the ones who fed humanity the fruit of knowledge and gave them the pretext for corruption. They were the ones who manipulated dictators into pushing the "Human Meat-Quality Improvement Policy." They were the ones who occasionally land spaceships in some honest farmer's field and ruin an entire year's harvest. All of it—yokai!
If ninjas hadn't fought them from the shadows, Earth's transformation into a butcher shop would have been inevitable!
Should I cut him down?
The end of a yokai-fucker is always yokai worship. But killing an ignorant civilian over mere uncertain possibility is not the way of a runaway ninja.
Buddha, what am I supposed to do? Is it right to snip the seed of evil before it has committed any crime!? Answer me at once!!!!
"I've confirmed the Ocul habitat. Let's go."
Bonita returned, so I decided to think about it later. I could always kill him whenever I wanted. Gripping the arming sword—the ninja instructor's drop item—I followed behind Bonita.
"What the—?!"
A bizarre sight gouged itself into my vision!