The Pied Piper's Clink

The metallic clink rang out sharply as the golden plaque struck the cave wall, sending echoes scattering in every direction. Five golden nameplates lay scattered across the damp dirt floor, casting an eerie golden glow beneath the flickering torchlight.

The party leader standing at a distance had his pupils quivering as they tracked those metal lumps—his very lifeline.

“The corpses stuffed inside the cave. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Was that your doing?”

I asked while wiping the ogre’s murky fat from my blade with a blood-caked rag. The sticky gore soaked into the cloth, wetting the gaps between my fingers. Inside the sealed cave, the foul stench of ammonia mixed with the metallic reek of blood stabbed at my nose.

The leader’s gaze darted between the variant’s torso loaded on the cart and the blade at my fingertips. His Adam’s apple bobbed heavily.

“No. Just idiots who didn’t know their place and crossed the line.”

He swallowed hard and tried to sound relaxed, puffing out his chest. Yet in contrast to his rigidly raised chin, the shadow cast by the torchlight trembled like a leaf in the wind.

“I knew the limits of my skill. They didn’t. That one small difference decided who lived and who died.”

A despicable yet brutally realistic answer. He had recognized his own shortcomings, shoved others into the jaws of death, and survived atop their corpses. That tenacious, ugly survival instinct had real value. He had thrown morality to the dogs, but men like him were the easiest to use.

“Still, Slave Trader. We stood guard outside and even tipped you off about the variant.”

He finally showed his true colors, jerking his chin. Greed-smeared eyes scanned the cart compartment pushed deep into the cave.

“Shouldn’t you at least throw us a cut? There’s such a thing as business ethics.”

I tossed the blood-soaked rag into the cart and stared straight into his brow.

“Information? Guard duty? All you did was hold your breath outside to see who would win. What would you have done if that variant had torn me apart?”

The leader’s eyes lost their focus at my question.

“You would have come in to feast on my corpse. While the ogre chewed my limbs, you’d strike it from behind… or, if that failed, you’d rob my wagon and run. Isn’t that right?”

An extremely logical and cruel insight. The information he had provided was nothing more than a bet that I would lose. After that, he was merely an opportunist waiting for scraps while protecting his own life.

“B-but the information we gave was accurate! We stood guard outside just like we said!”

“That tongue never stops wagging after meeting the wrong master. Shall I isolate that pitiful tongue and grant it freedom?”

My voice resonated low along the cave walls. The leader’s whole body stiffened like stone. The damp air froze instantly, and a bead of cold sweat slid stickily down his neck.

“Th-then… we can take the ones we couldn’t load and left behind, right? They’re basically trash anyway.”

His instant attitude shift, still trying to lick up even the dregs. Even in this situation, the way he fought for every advantage was almost admirable.

Zero transportation costs and zero labor costs. Voluntary labor from a subcontractor.

If I left the regular ogre corpses strewn across the cave floor to these men, I could generate cash without spending a single coin on logistics. They were both witnesses to my hunt and free laborers who would maximize my profits.

“Deposit thirty percent of the sales under my name.”

“Are you insane? We’re the ones doing all the back-breaking work of hauling these heavy things out, and you want thirty percent? This is daylight robbery…!”

“Forty percent.”

At my calm figure, the leader’s veins bulged as if they would burst. Just as he opened his mouth to protest again, the combat slaves who had been clearing a path for the cart—Numbers Three and Four, along with Elina—gathered behind me as if by silent agreement.

Thud. Thud. The blood-drenched combat slaves approached with indifferent steps and lined up behind me like a massive shadow. Ogre blood still dripped from their blades onto the floor.

A heavy silence filled the enclosed cave. Only the crackling torches, popping as they burned, pushed back against the quiet.

The leader finally realized whose palm his life rested in and shut his mouth like a beaten dog.

“Forty percent confirmed. Deposit the amount in the guild under my name without the slightest discrepancy.”

“I-I’ll do that.”

The reason I insisted on a guild deposit was clear. Forcing him to register forty percent of his earnings under my name was not merely collecting money. It was a brand that crushed the pride of his Gold rank and publicly declared to the world that he was my subordinate.

The hunting dogs that have found their master.

With this simple act, my influence would take root deep inside the guild. The fact that even a Gold-ranked adventurer was nothing but a dog crawling beneath me would be burned into the eyes of every adventurer in the guild.

He had become a loyal servant who would elevate my status until the day he died.

“Let’s go.”

Rattle, rumble. The heavy cart began to roll, crushing bone fragments and gravel beneath its wheels. The flickering afterimages of the torches along the cave walls grew fainter as we neared the entrance.

When we finally emerged, the forest was already steeped in the crimson energy of early evening. The sun’s final rays, about to vanish beyond the western mountains, poured over the massive corpses of the twin-headed and three-headed ogres in the cart.

The silhouette of the cart leaving the forest with its back to the dark red sunset displayed a grotesque majesty all its own. The cool, earthy scent of the forest brushed my nose, and long shadows stretched far along the path the cart had to follow.

“We return. Before the sun sets completely.”

The sky was already filled with the burnt remnants of the dark red sunset. The sun sinking beyond the horizon spewed a bizarre twilight of mingled purple and orange like a final struggle, and those cold afterglows shattered against the capital’s massive castle walls.

As the rough dirt road ended, the cart procession entered the capital, wheels grinding against solid granite.

Kwagugung—!

The gatekeepers guarding the castle gate looked up at our cart and dropped their spears. Their heads tilted back so far it seemed their necks would snap. The cart’s height—requiring three stacked adult men to even reach the top—and the enormous silhouettes protruding from the cargo bed were pure terror.

“W-what the hell is that…”

The variant twin-headed ogre’s corpse, split in half yet still mountainously huge. The dark red blood clots covered in coagulation powder glistened like fossilized jewels under the twilight, radiating an eerie light. The fishy, thick stench pouring from the severed neck spread through the cold night air and into the streets.

Citizens, nobles, and slaves walking the streets all stopped in their tracks, entranced.

“My god, it has three heads… Does a monster like that really exist?”

“It fills two full carts and still overflows. That’s a walking disaster.”

The thick body odor and astonished murmurs of hundreds of people rolled over us like a wave. Like the Pied Piper, an enormous crowd began trailing behind our cart.

Tap.

I stepped lightly down from the cart, my shoe striking the stone with a dull scrape. Beneath my neatly rolled sleeves, thick forearms veined with power were exposed. Even under the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠gaze of hundreds, my broad shoulders showed not the slightest tremor. To Elina, they looked like the shoulders of a conqueror.

She had crossed countless battlefields at the forefront, amid crowds cheering victorious trumpets. She had seen commanders at the head of knight orders receiving the reverence and envy of the masses. Yet now, the sight of her master walking with the sunset at his back filled her vision more massively and overwhelmingly than any hero’s legend.

Cool judgment. Command. Swordsmanship whose limits were impossible to measure. And the salvation that had pulled her back from death’s threshold.

The memory of her master roughly scooping up her broken body and carrying her surged up, and Elina’s breathing collapsed. The firm muscles of his arm, the heavy body heat transmitted through his shirt—it had been too intense to be real, too vivid to be a dream.

A desire to be held in those arms again—a longing shameful for a knight—surged from the depths of her heart.

Why am I like this?

Elina was horrified by the unfamiliar vortex swirling inside her. The ‘Grim Reaper’s’ instincts, which had chased only slaughter and honor her entire life, were now reveling in the pleasure of submission at the mere sight of one man’s back.

Her leather breastplate rose and fell as if it would burst. The cold night air she inhaled deeply clashed with her heated blood, sending electric shivers across her entire body. A thin bead of heated sweat slid down her rigidly straight neck.

The nape hidden beneath her helmet flushed burning red, and her sapphire pupils lost focus, blindly chasing only the heels of her master’s shoes.

This was no simple loyalty. It was the shudder of a prisoner whose soul had been mortgaged by a single embrace after a life spent at the very bottom.

Creak—.

I pushed open the old oak door and stepped into the Adventurer Guild. The receptionist shook ink from his quill and snorted.

“Back already? The forest air must have been harsh. Did you at least bring back some rabbit ears?”

“Twin Head Ogre.”

At my flat answer, the employee gave a dry laugh and shrugged.

“Dreaming pretty high, aren’t you?”

“And a three-headed variant.”

In that instant, a roar of astonishment from hundreds of people outside pierced the guild’s thick wooden walls. The dull vibration shaking the ground made the ink bottle on the desk tremble.

The frowning receptionist walked to the window. Thud. His eyes bulged as if they would pop out, and the quill slipped from his fingers and fell to the floor.

“Th-this… what the…”

At the receptionist’s dazed mutter, the veteran adventurers who had been drinking in the hall rose one by one. From arrogant Gold ranks to battle-hardened mercenaries, they crowded the windows and main entrance to see what was happening.

What followed was a suffocating silence.

“No way. You’re telling me that thing is standing right outside the guild entrance?”

“Three heads… it’s a variant! You hauled that on a cart?”

Outside the window, several massive carts stood with the sunset at their backs. The adventurers’ faces turned ashen the moment they saw the grotesque three heads of the ogre protruding from the loads and the jewel-like gleam of the cut surfaces coated in coagulation powder.

The drinking glasses of the men who had been cackling about me as a ‘greenhorn slave trader’ shattered on the floor. They had instinctively realized the truth: the monster who had butchered in a single day a creature from an abyss they could never reach even if they devoted their entire lives to fighting was now breathing the same air as them.

The deathly pale receptionist scrambled back to the desk. His fingers trembled violently as he frantically flipped through the score ledger.

Twenty-three ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠thousand points total. Even divided among party members, it was an explosive number that could instantly push everyone to Gold rank.

The receptionist looked at me, then at the slaves standing indifferently behind me, his eyes filled with horror. The dozens—hundreds—of adventurers currently killing time with drinks inside the guild building. A terror-laced certainty flashed through his mind that even if they all combined their strength, they could not possibly defeat the six people who had dragged these corpses here.

He now understood that I was not a mere Copper-ranked novice slave trader, but a monster capable of turning the entire guild into a bloodbath whenever I wished.

A vertical rise achieved in a single day. The receptionist bowed deeply and offered six smooth silver nameplates that radiated a silvery light.

The cold, smooth feel of metal against my fingertips.

“Are there points left after the promotion?”

At my question, the receptionist rubbed his hands together awkwardly.

“Um… the rule is that all remaining points are reset after promotion.”

“Why?”

“The guild system verifies ‘adaptability and credibility’ appropriate for each rank. Every time you rise in rank, you must complete new missions of the required difficulty to renew your qualifications. Please understand it as a long-standing safety measure to prevent the abuse of higher-rank privileges through explosive point accumulation alone.”

A logical yet brutally bureaucratic reason. In the end, no matter how big the catch, you still had to climb the stairs one step at a time.

“I see. Understood.”

The receptionist’s attitude, which had been sneering just moments ago, was now so servile it was hard to watch. I had already known this would happen, so I felt little emotion. Still, watching a human who had laughed at others as beneath him crumble the moment he faced a monster beyond imagination never grew old. Not bad. It made an excellent aperitif.

“……I will now ask a few routine verification questions for the monster corpse ownership registration process. Please answer without taking offense.”

The receptionist’s hand holding the quill trembled as he spoke. Hunting personnel, time taken, travel route. The obvious, tedious questions continued. I answered dryly without hiding or embellishing anything.

Clumsy mysticism only backfires. The most efficient way to cut off the buds of suspicion in advance is to casually share the core facts and paralyze the other party’s imagination.

“We went a little deeper into the ogre’s territory, inside a cave. That’s where we caught them. There were several adventurer corpses scattered inside the cave as well.”

“C-corpses? There was a report that a Gold-ranked party had gone missing…”

“From the state of them, they’d been dead for quite a while. Either they became food for the variant or they didn’t know their limits. One or the other.”

At my indifferent answer, the receptionist’s face grew even paler. A man who had dragged these monsters out without a single wound from a place where even a Gold-ranked party had become corpses. No one in the guild would call me a ‘lucky slave trader’ anymore.

The receptionist nodded repeatedly and scribbled on the parchment.

“If I hand the corpses over to a guild-certified dismantling yard, what happens to the tax paid to the guild?”

“Copper rank pays ten percent of profit, but Silver rank receives a two-percent reduction, so you only pay eight percent!”

An eight-percent commission on profits. It stung a little that they took a cut without doing much, but considering it was necessary to maintain the guild system, it was a reasonable level of tax.

It seemed every legally operated dismantling yard in the capital was included in the guild-certified list. I confirmed that the yard I had entrusted the basilisk to was on the approved roster, took the thick parchment certificate of monster corpse ownership, and left the guild.

The moment I stepped into the square, a thunderous cheer that threatened to burst my eardrums poured down like a waterfall. The hot fervor and admiring gazes from hundreds of people stung my skin.

But the cheers were not directed at me. My gaze went beyond the cheering crowd to the hastily built wooden platform in the center of the square.

There stood a noble from the capital, arrogantly thrusting out his oily belly, dressed in luxurious silk embroidered with golden thread. His greedy eyes, holding a voice-amplifying magic tool, slid stickily over the variant corpses on the carts. They were the eyes of a butcher appraising a delicious cut of meat.

His passionate oration sprayed spittle. Beneath the grand cause, his ugly true intentions were blatantly visible. In the end, he was solemnly preaching that high-quality aphrodisiacs to replenish his virility should be sold at a bargain price.

He must be running out of steam.

Creatures that don’t know their place and open their mouths the moment they see prey usually end up with those mouths torn apart.

I stopped walking, crossed my arms, and stared at the platform. A cold sneer lingered at the corner of my mouth. I didn’t need to forcibly remind myself that I was ‘alive’—the crude yet dynamic farce unfolding before my eyes filled me with boundless pleasure.

Life-and-death struggles against monsters, sordid negotiations with people whose expressions changed according to the flow of profit, and now lowbrow agitation and trickery hiding behind lofty causes. Every threat and greed this world offered stimulated my nerves like top-shelf wine.

This is exactly the scenery of the world I wanted.

Unaware of what kind of despair might descend like a noose upon that oily ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠neck, the man’s voice rang even more arrogantly across the square through the magic tool.

“Citizens of the empire! Must we waste the fruits of this noble sacrifice merely to fill one man’s pockets!”

The ugly desire hidden behind his smooth rhetoric tickled my ears. Maybe I should listen to a little more of his sophistry.