The Guildmaster
After a quick rinse in the guild's shower room, I headed straight for the Guildmaster's office. The sharp, spicy scent of tobacco was already drifting down the hallway.
I glanced at the staffer guiding me. She wore the blank, unbothered face of someone long used to the smell. So the Guildmaster's a real chain-smoker, I thought, and did my best to ignore it.
"Guildmaster? It's Rebecca."
"—Come in."
"This way, please."
At her invitation I stepped inside, and the spicy haze that had only been a hallway hint slammed into me full force. The room was thick with smoke of some indeterminate kind.
I pushed through it. On the far sofa, the outline of the Guildmaster resolved itself — cigarette between her lips. She looked me over and gave a lazy chin-jerk.
"—You? The brat who caused the mess?"
The Guildmaster was a red-haired beauty with a generous chest. Fatigue sat heavy on her face, and a few scars marked her skin, but neither could hide the looks or the figure that defined her.
I settled onto the sofa across from her without ceremony. She exhaled a long stream of smoke — huu — and the spicy vapor worked its way into my lungs. Not acrid so much as peppery. An unfamiliar tobacco smell. It made my head swim just enough that I frowned, and the Guildmaster let out an amused snort.
"Never even smoked before? What a complete kid."
"…Does that matter? More to the point — is that any way to talk to a guest you summoned?"
"Guest? What guest? All I see in front of me is a walking disaster who got himself hauled upstairs."
She blew out another cloud. My frown deepened. My hand drifted, almost of its own accord, to my hip.
The sword I always wore was gone. My fingers found only empty pockets.
Ah… right. I left it.
While I was washing off the blood, the guild staff had collected my ruined clothes and the sword whose edge had been ruined. I'd changed into the clothes they provided and come straight here.
Only then did it hit me how exposed I was. I could fight bare-handed well enough, but having a sword and not having one were two very different things.
"Don't get cold feet, brat."
"…I never had cold feet."
"Sure. If you say so. Huu… First, one question. Why'd you do it?"
She wanted to know why I'd pulled a stunt like that — snatching high-difficulty requests far above my rank and clearing them on my own.
I held my silence in stubborn defiance, but the dizziness in my head kept growing. Slowly, I opened my mouth.
"I wanted to stand out. Fast."
"Stand out, huh. Why?"
"Well… just because…"
"Just because? There's no such thing. Everything has a reason. What made you think that way?"
"…I don't particularly want to say."
"Then we've got no choice. We'll have to arrest you."
I narrowed my eyes at the word arrest. The Guildmaster shrugged as if to say, You didn't even think of that?
"For all we know, you're a foreign spy who snuck into our country. Investigating is only natural."
"No, arresting me is a bit much…"
"I've got nothing more to say to a brat who won't even give a reason."
She reached for the bell on the table. Ring that, and the staff outside would bring the guards.
I moved first — snatching her wrist before she could touch it. She flinched. Her chest swayed with the motion. I watched it carefully, then bit my lip.
"…Because I want a girlfriend."
"What?"
"I-I want a girlfriend. To get one, I need to be popular… so I figured if I finished requests fast and became a Highest Class adventurer, I'd get popular…"
"…Is that true?"
I gave a short, stiff nod. The Guildmaster snuffed out her cigarette and fell silent. Mortifying. Dragging a desire that deep into the open was this humiliating.
The silence held for a beat — then she burst into rough, unrestrained laughter.
"Pwahaha—! So you pulled that stunt because you wanted to get popular? You're out of your mind. Completely out of your mind."
"…What. Is something wrong with that?"
"No, no. Fine. Now that I know the reason, the arrest is off. —Which means we talk about something else."
She rose, cracked a window, and let the smoke pour out of the room. Then she turned, back to the light, and looked at me.
"First… the requests you cleared. I can't recognize those achievements right away."
"Why not? Anyone who finishes a request finishes it, right?"
"You never formally accepted them, did you? So I can't count them as completed. Those are the rules."
"What kind of rule is that?"
"What, you think every other idiot just smiles and does whatever we say without complaining? There are no exceptions to the rules."
"I don't know about idiots, but maybe they just weren't confident in their skills."
I met her eyes with a slightly sharper look. She waved a hand as if she'd already read my mind.
"Aaah— looks like there's a misunderstanding. I'm not saying we're pocketing your pay or erasing your achievements. I'm saying we put them on hold."
"…On hold?"
"Right. Once you've cleared a certain number of requests and peeled off that Novice sticker, we'll process the lot of them in one go. Everybody wins, yeah?"
Her pitch was this: the Adventurer Guild couldn't break its own rules for one person — but it could cut a side path. First, clear the guild's assigned requests, shed the beginner label, and then they'd count the jobs I'd already finished and rocket me up the ranks.
For the guild, maybe. For me, the offer had zero upside.
"Why should I do that?"
"—You said you wanted a girlfriend, right? I'll introduce you to a pretty senior adventurer who'll teach you the ropes."
"Thank you."
I dropped into a full bow of gratitude. The Guildmaster, flustered by the sudden formality, tried to haul me back up. For several reasons, I could not straighten my knees.
Her chest…!
Really. For several reasons.
After Evan left, Guildmaster Francesca bolted for the bathroom and retched. Side effects from the psychoactive drug she'd been smoking in her office.
Only after she'd emptied everything she'd eaten that morning did she feel slightly human again. She immediately chugged a potion — a blend of antidote and fatigue recovery that scoured the drug and the exhaustion from her system.
"Pwahh— that damn brat… his willpower alone is ridiculous."
The tobacco she'd been smoking was a kind of truth drug. Inhale the smoke, and it could steer a person's mind.
She herself took precautions and countermeasures before lighting up, so the drug never touched her. The kid who'd just walked in — Evan — had looked like he had none of those protections.
He hadn't seemed prepared at all, and yet his resistance to the drug was unnaturally high. Normally, the moment someone stepped into that room, their innermost thoughts should have spilled out unfiltered.
There was a reason she'd been blowing smoke straight into his face from the first second.
How the hell did he hold out?
Filing him away as an odd one, Francesca flipped through the reports her receptionists had written. They were stacked with the requests Evan had cleared that very day.
Wyvern subjugation in the highlands. An earth dragon that burrowed beneath the ground. A chimera guarding a dungeon built by an ancient mage… a pile of ultra-high-difficulty jobs that even solid Upper Class or Highest Class adventurers would take days to finish.
If anyone in the trade heard that some Novice no one had ever heard of had cleared work like that, they'd laugh in your face. Francesca would have done the same. Without the materials Evan had brought back as proof, she would have dismissed the whole thing as a bad joke not worth believing.
"Does this even make sense…"
And yet — a handful of superhumans capable of feats like this flickered through her mind. The Thirteen Castle Lords who ruled domains of their own. The heads of the Eight Great Houses, heirs to legendary bloodlines. And the countless other superhumans who wandered the world trailing renown behind them.
Every one of them was far too big a fish to be tied to something as small as an Adventurer Guild. If Evan were a superhuman on their level, the scale of what he'd done would make perfect sense.
But.
At that age?
To her eye, Evan was fifteen, sixteen at most. Painfully young. Far too young to believe he'd already become a superhuman.
Unless he possessed talent so monstrous that, even at that unbelievable age, he already wielded superhuman force.
If that were the case—
"We'll have to keep him somehow."
There was a limit to what an Adventurer Guild could offer. Money, fame — matching the level superhumans demanded was impossible.
But Francesca already knew Evan wasn't after anything material. Hadn't she just heard it from his own mouth — the real reason he'd caused all this trouble?
"Women, huh."
If he'd simply wanted to hold one, he would have gone to a brothel. She thought of his age, of the way his cheeks had flushed when he looked at her chest, of the thoughtless, boyish recklessness — and she knew exactly what boys that age usually wanted.
Romance. Not the adult kind of arrangement. The sweet, green, adolescent feeling only a teenager could have.
That was what he was after.
"That's easy enough."
Fortunately, the Adventurer Guild was crawling with women like that. Beauties so gifted they'd never known real crisis, so sheltered they barely understood the world.
A few names rose to mind. She scribbled notes, weighing who would be best to put in charge of Evan.
Moonlight began to flood the office. Another night she wouldn't be going home on time.
The next day.
I waited quietly in the guild lobby for someone.
The Guildmaster had promised to assign me a senior who would teach me the adventurer's trade.
I wonder who it'll be.
She'd said she'd introduce me to a beautiful adventurer. I didn't need a senior — but if that senior was beautiful, that was a different story.
Preferably someone with a big chest… I waited for a senior whose face and name I didn't know, hoping the Guildmaster's taste would match mine.
"You Evan?"
Before long, a voice called my name. A little rough for a woman's. I turned and met the eyes of a white-haired beauty walking toward me.
She scratched the back of her head like the whole thing was a hassle. The moment I saw her, I offered a silent prayer of thanks to the Guildmaster.
Thank you…!
She had a big chest.
Bigger than the Guildmaster's.