An Urgent Commission
Objectively speaking, our reputation at the guild wasn't particularly good.
There were two main reasons for it.
First, we'd turned down every party invitation that came our way in the early days... and second, we'd claimed Rank 8 positions right out of the gate.
From an outsider's perspective, we'd skipped years of grinding in a single bound, so it was only natural for people to sour on us. Stack that on top of the handful of times we'd tried recruiting party members and promptly judged and discarded them, and our image had solidified into that of arrogant hotshots.
And on top of that, we took a whole month off to look after an orphan.
Fortunately, Lena proving her own talent had turned the tide somewhat — it became an opportunity for people to reevaluate our judgment. Still, if we failed to deliver results on the commission that mattered most, our reputation might plunge into a hole we'd never climb out of.
We might take on more party members down the road, and that was a situation best avoided at all costs.
"So... are there any decent commissions available? Preferably something related to a dungeon or ruins."
I left Lena to dance around in glee under Noah's watch, and stayed behind with Amy to talk business. With luck's unexpected windfall of Lena's awakening, there was no reason to wait any longer.
I'd hoped to pick up dungeon- or ruins-related work, but Amy shook her head.
"Unfortunately, we don't have any of those at the moment. And honestly, there's no telling when one will come in."
"So they're not exactly common, then?"
"They can't be. Dungeons open in completely random locations... and ruins only become a commission when someone discovers one and files a report with the guild. Or unless one of the guild's own survey teams stumbles across one."
Of course...
Commissions like that were never going to be sitting on the shelf waiting. Monster subjugation requests came in daily, so I'd momentarily forgotten how the world worked.
Amy watched me for a moment, then spoke up carefully.
"Um... and, honestly speaking? Even if a dungeon or ruins commission did come in, unless circumstances were truly exceptional, your party wouldn't be the one selected, Ha Jun."
"I'm sorry, what? Why not?"
"You lack track record. Your party's also at bare minimum size. And the people who take exploration commissions professionally tend to be between Rank 5 and Rank 7, so..."
"Hah."
So it was out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Had I simply set my sights too high from the start?
My good mood from Lena's awakening deflated a little. But what Amy said next rekindled my interest.
"That said — we just refreshed our emergency commissions this cycle. Would you be interested?"
"Emergency commissions? What are those?"
"Exactly what it sounds like. Tasks the guild itself has determined need resolving urgently."
"Ah, I see..."
Missions that demanded a quick resolution. The rewards would surely be good, too.
"They're difficult, but if you complete one, it adds a substantial bonus to your promotion score. You've already accumulated quite a lot of points... so if you handle this well, you might just make it to Rank 7."
"I'll hear you out. What's the commission?"
"It's a missing persons case, of sorts."
...
I returned to where Noah and Lena were waiting outside. Lena was beaming so hard she practically glowed, her face full of a smile as radiant as the sun itself.
Anyone who'd known the old Lena wouldn't have believed this was the same girl.
Kids really are better when they smile.
"Got us a commission."
"Ooh! Our first commission! My heart's pounding!"
"What kind is it?"
The commission Amy had introduced to me was the kind of job that was simple if you wanted it simple, and complicated if you wanted it complicated: resolving a string of disappearances that had plagued a village since recently.
At first, people assumed it was human foul play, but as the investigation progressed, it came to light that monsters dwelling in the nearby forest had been abducting people. The goal of the commission was obvious — rescue the victims, or at the very least track down some trace of them.
And as a bonus, figure out why the monsters were doing such a thing in the first place.
"Several parties have already been sent in, and every single one failed. That's how it's made its way down to us."
"Failed? Does that mean they died?"
"Depends on the party. Some never even found a trace of the monsters. Others vanished alongside the missing people. Probably dead."
"...Um, isn't this a bit heavy for a first commission?"
"They said if we solve this, they'll bump you straight up to Rank 9 too. Apparently you did exceptionally well on your assessment, so your points piled up."
"Let's do it!"
I'd only been testing the waters, and Lena took the bait instantly. Where had all that caution of hers gone?
The mention of Rank 9 had apparently scrambled her brain; there she was, thrusting her hand in the air, eagerly broadcasting her enthusiasm. Not that I minded a little motivation, but still...
Noah, evidently thinking the same thing, delivered a firm knuckle-rap to the excited girl's head.
Thonk!
"Owk...!"
"Lena, what did I tell you? Stay this worked up and you might just die?"
"...Sorry."
"I don't enjoy saying this, but aren't you getting carried away? Awakening is nothing more than standing at the starting line. Frankly, I could subdue the current you with one hand. If you value your life, recover even half of your old desperation."
"Yeees..."
Cowed by Noah's iron logic, Lena shrank into herself, not daring to move a muscle. But the moment Noah casually scooped her back into her arms, she was beaming again as if nothing had happened.
Let's just say Noah is Lena's designated disciplinary officer.
"Now then, let me finish the briefing. This commission is dangerous — more than it sounds, I'll admit. But there's a reason all the parties before us failed."
And that reason was, by and large, a matter of competence.
The guild's blunder was treating it as a simple missing persons case and sending in greenhorns. The rookies, brimming with overzealous energy, either died to the forest monsters or came crawling back without finding so much as a footprint. According to the survivors' testimony, a powerful monster had attacked them.
"...So, in a nutshell, that makes us the strongest party on the list?"
"It does bother me that a party of Rank 8s got wiped out, but strictly speaking, we're Rank 7 or above. How much of the survivors' testimony we can even trust is another question. If a monster were truly that powerful, none of them would have made it back alive in the first place."
"Fair point. Still... you two are really strong, aren't you? I noticed during our sparring sessions."
"Hey. Why is Noah 'Unni' and I'm 'Ajusshi'?"
"Because I don't want to call you Oppa."
"...Why not? I'm only twenty-five, you know."
Both by the age we presented publicly and by appearance, Noah and I were in our twenties. In purely physical terms, of course, we were both less than a year old.
But Lena always called me Ajusshi.
"Weeeeell... back when I lived in the brothel, that was the word I heard most often. Every day it was Oppa~ I'm going to di—"
"A-all right! Ajusshi it is. Just Ajusshi."
"Hee."
...
The village where the disappearances had occurred lay roughly two days' travel from Bolston.
Two days, of course, meant two days by carriage — so unless we wanted to spend close to a week walking, renting a carriage was mandatory. Fortunately, since this was an emergency commission, the guild loaned us one free of charge...
But money found a way to leak out somewhere else anyway.
Outfitting Lena with her gear.
"Height's the same."
"Nrrrgh..."
Lena, all five feet of her and not an inch more, was grinding her teeth in fury.
She was only fifteen, so I'd figured decent meals might add a few centimeters — but as if under some kind of curse, she hadn't grown so much as one. A small frame put her at a massive disadvantage in combat, after all.
I'd wondered if awakening her mana might change something, but her height hadn't budged a millimeter.
"I'll grow soon!"
"Dunno about that. You didn't grow even after awakening — sounds like you're done growing. Looks like a lifetime as a shrimp for you."
"Eeeeek! Stop pressing down!"
She short-circuited beautifully every time I pushed down on the crown of her head. Her reactions were just too fun to tease.
Lena shrieked and dodged frantically around my hand — then abruptly went still, fidgeted with the armor she was wearing, and mumbled.
"Um... this armor, it was expensive, wasn't it?"
"Hm? Fairly, I suppose."
The equipment Lena now wore was a lightweight set of metal armor crafted from monster materials.
With a skill like Provocation, I wanted to raise her as a tank — but her current abilities weren't up to shouldering the vanguard yet. So instead of heavy plate, I'd fitted her with armor closer to light leather.
There was no need for her to actually absorb hits just because she taunted enemies, so I'd prioritized speed instead.
She's better equipped than we are, honestly.
Anyway — beyond the armor, there were the boots and gauntlets... a one-handed shield, and finally a flanged mace with its reinforced flanges.
All told, it came to a good twenty gold coins.
Which left exactly ten gold coins in my pocket.
"I'll pay you baaack... here's a deposit..."
When Lena heard the total price of the gear she was decked out in, her eyes went round as a rabbit's. Then, trembling, she dug a tarnished gold coin out of her grimy wallet and held it out to me — money that represented practically the entire sum she'd scraped together doing odd jobs.
Wow. Really squeezing blood from a flea, aren't we.
I tucked the coin back into her wallet for her.
"Keep it. This much comes standard between party members. You don't owe me anything."
"From what I've heard, even between party members, people keep their finances strictly separate..."
"You're practically in a community of shared fate with us. I told you that from the beginning, didn't I?"
"A community of shared fate...? Hehe."
Lena blinked in brief confusion at the unfamiliar phrase, then seemed to grasp its true meaning and smiled bashfully.
Raising the mace I'd bought her high overhead, she made her declaration.
"All right! Then I'll work my hardest too! Until my bones break!"
"Good to have the enthusiasm, but we'll be stuck on this carriage nonstop for a while."
"Ah."
...
Since we'd come out planning to take a commission no matter what, we were ready to leave at any moment. We skipped the inn entirely and headed straight out of the city in the guild's carriage.
"Uuugh..."
"Feeling queasy? Shall I treat it?"
"No... I'll tough it out... wasting mana on this would be such a shame."
It didn't take long for Lena — whose enthusiasm had been one spark short of detonation — to wilt like a wet rag.
The culprit, of course, was motion sickness from the swaying carriage. I hadn't thought it rocked all that much, what with some manner of shock damping built in, but the further we got from Bolston, the more unpaved roads appeared, so the dizziness was understandable.
Only after dry-heaving several times did Lena collapse limply against the seat.
"We have to ride like this for two whole days...?"
"Yep. This is our first commission taking us this far from Bolston, too. Boring, isn't it."
Hours of sitting in a carriage staring at monotonous scenery was genuine suffering — but reality had always worked this way. There was no auto-travel feature that whooshed you to your destination once you accepted a quest.
We were close enough to Bolston that bandits or monsters were hardly a concern, though. So this was just how we'd be spending our time.
I let my mind drift into thought during the lull.
...How exactly did Lena awaken?
It had been such a chaotic day that only now did the question surface. Well, the awakening itself I could chalk up to her exceptional talent.
What genuinely bothered me was that the strange phenomenon Lena herself had described had never once appeared.
If anything, it went too smoothly.
Noah had simply performed the mana extraction while tending to her treatment, and there had been no symptoms whatsoever of her mana flow destabilizing.
And yet, dismissing the phenomenon as Lena's imagination didn't sit right either... the strange currents in her mana when we'd first met her had definitely been bizarre.
Setting Noah's treatment aside, coldly speaking, we didn't actually do all that much for Lena. We got her diet in order, helped her with weapon technique and physical conditioning — that was about it. And with that modest amount of help, she succeeded in awakening in a matter of days...
No.
Come to think of it, there was one more significant change Lena had undergone.
Her living situation had shifted from a brothel in the slums to our inn.
...!
A hypothesis flickered to life in my mind.
A single line of reasoning built on leap after leap after leap.
What if something in the slums had been artificially suppressing Lena's awakening all along?