Little Hana
"We sold this much...?"
The manager of the Idaya café could only gape at the day's sales. Bringing in Starlight Coffee beans had drawn a crowd at the start, but this was another dimension entirely. Headquarters had been pushing the promotion hard, and the staff who had survived the day were already limp as melted wax, having faced more customers than any of them could have imagined. The manager liked to think of himself as a reasonable man. He fully intended to pay them a bonus for the trouble.
An ordinary café did well to clear four or five hundred thousand won in a day. Most people who came in were only stopping for a short rest, and the ones who took a table usually ordered a single coffee and then sat gossiping for half an hour to an hour.
There was, in other words, a physical ceiling on how many cups you could actually sell. A few customers took their drinks to go, but most walked through the door specifically to sit. Not today.
Nearly everyone was leaving with a takeout cup. A handful still claimed tables, yet even with a notice on the door declaring the crowd so thick that only takeout was available, people kept swarming in. The promotion helped, but anyone could see that coffee brewed from Starlight Coffee beans was simply too good, and the two effects fed each other. If the taste had been lacking, no event would have drawn them past a certain point. Hand out tens of billions of won like a lottery and the place would have been mobbed regardless, of course, but the prize on offer this time was nothing of the sort.
"Nearly two million won...!"
Proof they had sold four or five times the usual volume. The manager's mouth curled, and he couldn't stop grinning. They had moved so much coffee that the ingredients were hanging on by a thread. He had watched the stock with his heart in his throat, wondering whether he would have to close early. The beans from headquarters were already gone. They had sworn the shipment was generous, and even the staff at HQ had failed to imagine a crowd like this.
At this pace, sixty million won in a month was not out of reach—a figure that, on an ordinary month, would have been pure fantasy. Selling a cup of coffee looked as if it ought to leave a fat profit, but the truth was that a single cup earned almost nothing.
The raw ingredients cost little enough. Add rent, wages, and the rest of the interior expenses, and hardly anything remained. A café lived on thin margins and sheer volume, selling as many cups as it could. At numbers like these, though, something real would be left over. If coffee kept moving the way it had today, even the manager could end up rich. Fixed costs ran to several million won a month no matter what; past that line, every extra cup was gain. Selling more did not make those fixed costs grow.
"Boss, how'd we do today?"
While he was still tallying the numbers, the floor manager who had ground through the day couldn't stand the curiosity. She was certain they had blown past a normal take, but she wanted to see the actual figure.
He turned the sales screen toward her. Same pot, same rice—hiding it wouldn't have kept the number from her.
"This much."
"Whoa... we really sold a ton. Boss, I thought my arm was gonna fall off making coffee."
She said it while shaking her arm this way and that. By the sound of it, the cups she had pulled today numbered well into the hundreds. It was impressive she hadn't walked out. The moment one customer left, the next was already at the counter, and her body had simply given out.
"I'll square you away with a bonus later."
"Okaaay~"
What she could not know was that the number of customers walking through that door was only going to grow. It was not going to shrink.
A meadow beaded with damp dew rose up to meet her. Rinea had been asleep when she was dropped, without warning, into this place. She wanted to return to where the World Tree was, but the mana in this dimension's air was pitifully thin. At the World Tree's side she could cast even without mana. Here, there was nothing. Only a pitch-black dark waited to greet her.
Dimensional travel...?
Dismay settled over Rinea's face. Dimensional travel was not an impossible magic. Her seniors had devised it in the hope of finding the World Tree, who had crossed into another dimension. In practice, though, the odds were so hopeless that the spell existed only as theory they studied and never used.
Searching for the World Tree by leaping through random coordinates, with no precise fix, was like dropping a needle somewhere on the face of the world and being told to find it. There might be thousands of dimensions, or hundreds of millions, and the chance that the single one you happened to land in held the World Tree was beyond imagining.
The mana it demanded was just as unthinkable. Young as she was, Rinea did not even have the strength to cast without the World Tree's help.
The thought that she had to get out of here set her moving, slowly. Cut off from the World Tree's side, she was—to put it bluntly—disarmed. She could not use the magic her master had taught her, and she had no idea when a monster might come and carry her off.
Then her keen ears caught footsteps. At the soft crush of grass, Rinea's eyes flew wide, and she broke into a run the other way. But her stride, on a body still so slight, was not very long.
"Hah... hah..."
The footsteps were closing in. From the sound, whatever followed her was not all that large. Even so, she could not shake the pursuit. Her breathing grew ragged, and her pace began to fail.
Worse, the steps that had come from only one side were slowly ringing her in. They had formed a cordon. Running was no longer possible. Despair rising in her, Rinea drew up what little mana remained in her body for one last act of resistance.
She did not know what the enemy was, but it clearly had a mind. Otherwise it could not have built a net like this. A spear of cold ice coalesced in one hand, and she lifted it to hurl at whatever was coming.
The enemy was faster. The instant Rinea sensed a presence at her back, she was already subdued.
"@%%##@"
Something was being said, but to Rinea it was an alien tongue she could not understand.
Click.
The moment something snapped shut around her neck, Rinea lost consciousness.
World Tree...
Even at the very end, she cursed her own wretchedness for failing to attend the World Tree.
Park Deokgu felt an uncanny familiarity he could not name. The moment he sensed something inside the gate, déjà vu washed over him.
He spoke into the communicator hooked over his ear.
"Heads up, kids. One unidentified life-form, dead ahead. Mana on it don't look like much of a threat, but you never know, so move careful."
"Copy that."
It was a low-risk gate anyway. The chance of Park Deokgu or his crew getting hurt was essentially zero at this grade, and because it had been so long since they had met a life-form with a mind, the others could not quite hide their excitement.
Ever since they had found the being called Hana, they had not encountered a single intelligent creature. Wormlike animals, plants that moved—none of the things they had met lately possessed a mind like that.
The team tightened the cordon exactly as they had been trained and put her down without trouble. Those pointed ears carried an existing identification code. She looked like an elf. They did not usually drag a target off this roughly, but Park Deokgu had seen her summon an ice spear and, unwilling to risk his people getting hurt, had ordered them to take her down hard.
Park Deokgu and his crew were skilled enough that a child's ice spear probably would not have scratched them. Still, you never knew.
"Boss, the way you're haulin' her, this looks an awful lot like a kidnapping."
Someone said it like a joke, watching Park Deokgu tuck the unconscious elf under his arm.
"Ain't wrong, though. We are kidnapping her."
Someone else chimed in from the side. There was not a scrap of tension on the scene. Asking veterans who ran A-rank gates to stay sharp inside a C-rank gate was never going to be easy.