Min-Maxing My TRPG Build in Another World - Volume 7 - Chapter 3

Early Summer of the Fifteenth Year

NPC Adventurers

Adventurers are not irreplaceable or unique—the field is teeming with competition. Whether a PC befriends those around them in search of better work or antagonizes them to protect the quests they’ve been given is the player’s choice.

Similarly, the responsibility of dealing with a shady friend or becoming a social pariah also rests with the player.

Darkness began to settle in on the road. A short ways off the main highway, we were setting up camp in a campground that had been neatly cleared out for merchants and travelers.

And by “we,” I meant the caravan we’d cast our lot with. Up went tents and smoke as our company prepared to see through the night.

“Heya, Erich. Hard at work, huh?”

“Boy, you’re quick. Thanks for the flame!”

“Keep up the good work, pal.”

After I’d set up and lit a campfire, a diverse smattering of mercenaries swung by to light their own torches and lanterns, each then wandering off to patrol the perimeter.

As for me, I was just a traveler who’d paid a small fee to join the group’s ranks. A caravan’s strength lay in numbers; since every additional member lent security to the rest of the group, last-minute additions were generally accepted without issue.

If there were too many of us to kill at once, someone would end up fighting back: whether bandit or beast, no one was dumb enough to attack if the threat of a counterattack was plain to see. Plus, having more hands to help when problems arose was always welcome, as were the shorter shifts on night watch when there were more people to share the load. Yet perhaps the greatest benefit of all was that our collective dues could be put toward hiring a reputable gang of mercenaries without the organizers burning through all their funds.

Manpower really, truly did solve just about any problem.

The convoy we’d joined was one that, when factoring in all the merchants and guards, numbered a hundred strong. Margit’s hunch had been right: a quick trip to the city had been all it took to find intrepid entrepreneurs venturing into distant lands in place of the cheapskate salespeople making their rounds of the cantons. The magnitude of this international corporation was made evident when one considered that the average domestic caravan was composed of thirty-odd people on average.

Of course, a company like this one attracted tons of people who wanted to enjoy safer travels. As a result, membership came with a steep price tag attached. Although we had the funds to pay upfront, we were commoners at heart: instead, we’d struck a deal to help with miscellaneous chores during the journey to get a discount. Besides, I’d known all too well that paying a few drachmae for the privilege of doing nothing would just see me getting antsy in a few days’ time.

Once more, I found myself a menial servant.

And, as servants so often were, I was busy. I cared for the scouts’ horses and the donkeys hauling cargo, made campfires for the cooks, and washed the laundry. There was a lot to do, but I secretly handled all my chores with magic, and I was well regarded within the community for my fast work.

As I should have been. I’d been working earnestly for a month now, and my labor was fit to serve a count.

Tinderbox in hand, I pretended to light a fire naturally. At this point, a mage would need to be right next to me to even notice; anyone watching from a distance would have no clue I was using magic. But in a few short minutes, I’d started another healthy campfire—with how big the caravan was, I had to set up a lot of them every day.

As I continued about my business, the smell of supper began to fill the air. The usual dried rations and wild vegetables that made up a normal on-the-road diet ended up becoming tasty meals here, thanks to the head merchant’s decision to bring a proper cook along.

Looking back, this past month had been the epitome of peace. No bandits, no horse thieves, and thanks to how professional the caravan’s leadership was, no stupid fights. The bodyguards all belonged to a mercenary band that was exclusively employed by the group’s organizer, and none of them caused any trouble; if nothing else, I didn’t have to worry about them picking a fight with me when I was a paying guest.

I really, seriously should’ve done this from the beginning. Adventure was great, but I wasn’t some kind of battle junkie constantly looking for a fight.

“Hey, Erich! Come lend me a hand if you’re free!”

“Oh, yes sir! Just one moment!”

Once I finished setting my last campfire, the cook waved me over. The hulking orc had been getting the head merchant’s assistants to help him prepare meals before, but he’d recently taken a liking to me after seeing me prepare meat and vegetables once.

According to him, most people didn’t know how to handle a cooking knife. The other day, he’d been grumbling about how the ingredients wouldn’t cook properly if they were different sizes, and how sloppy cutting ruined the texture. Mind you, he’d said this while stirring a pot of stew that included anything we could get our hands on—but I supposed he knew his stuff, considering how that mystery stew always ended up tasting good.

“You know, kid...”

The man looked over as I casually peeled some turnips. I noticed that he was doing the same and, despite not looking at his hands, was keeping the outer peeled layer perfectly thin. Considering his skill, I imagined he must’ve trained at a well-known kitchen to get a job cooking for a caravan this big.

“You sure are good at this,” he said. “You ever apprentice under a chef?”

“No, but I used to be an indentured servant in the capital. If I seem capable, it’s probably because I’ve been made to do anything and everything that I possibly could.”

Though I wasn’t hiding my real name this time, I was hiding my connection to the nobility. Sharing that information wasn’t going to do me any favors: the people here had chosen to use their skills for a life of self-sufficiency. At best, I could expect a clicked tongue for my trouble of telling them I’d curried favor with the privileged.

“A servant, eh? Coulda fooled me. I woulda thought you’d been training to be a cook too with how you handle a knife. Most rookies get all cut up when you put ’em in the dark with nothing but a fire, but look at you, peeling that thing like a champ.”

“Well, practice makes perfect. And when it comes to chores...I’ve had a lot of practice.”

With Divine Favor in Dexterity, I could peel vegetables with my eyes closed. Honestly, it was so easy that sometimes I made a game of trying to peel the whole thing in one go or slicing off as thin a layer as I could; but that also meant that my skill wasn’t so impressive that a servant backstory would raise any eyebrows. The caravan had given us a serious discount, so I was happy to be able to return the favor by doing my best—this was nothing in exchange for having a safe place to sleep.

“I had to take care of myself back then, and I learned a bit about cooking along the way. Just enough to make porridge on the road that people won’t spit out, that is.”

“C’mon Erich, don’t be so humble. Kids your age are cuter with a chip on their shoulder, yeah?”

“Ha, I’ll keep that in mind.”

I wasn’t trying to be humble: my skills genuinely weren’t anything of note compared to his—the guy made killer grub. Part of that came from the luxury of having several carriages dedicated to holding food, but the quality of his ingredients was by no means the only factor. He was constantly on the lookout to see how tired people were or what the weather was like to come up with the perfect dish on any given day, and had the chops to turn his ideas into reality.

My cooking was closer to following a recipe and letting my blessing do the rest. It had gotten good reviews out of Dietrich, but I wasn’t under the impression that I was good enough to make this my job.

“Hey, kid. You wanna help season the dishes?”

“Huh? Can I, really?”

“Sure. The more people I get cooking, the fewer pots I gotta handle myself.”

“I’d love to!”

The offer was surprising, but welcome. Learning from others decreased the cost of skill acquisition significantly, and I would never turn down the knowledge of how to make tasty meals in the middle of nowhere. I was sure Margit would appreciate my learning from an outdoor cooking veteran too.

You know, meeting new people and talking to them wasn’t all bad after all. It wasn’t all fights and bloodshed: there were fun opportunities to be had.

“Aight, let’s get this over with then. Don’t want the guards coming over to graze before we can get to the real work.”

“Sure thing. I’ll pick up the pace.”

I peeled, cut, and bored the bad chunks out of vegetables for another hour or so. My fingers were so soaked in their juices by the time we finished that I began reminiscing about the convenient rubber gloves we’d had back on Earth.

With the prepping done, I ran from pot to pot and seasoned the dishes as per the chef’s instructions. Someone had sniped a bird today, and dinner was looking like it’d soak nicely into black bread.

“Okay, that about does it. The flavor changes depending on what part of the guts you throw in, so I always take a bite raw before I— Ah, wait. Mensch get stomachaches when you eat raw meat, huh?”

“Unfortunately, yes. That would arguably be the best-case scenario.”

Orcish digestive systems were incomparably sturdier than ours. Their stomach acid was said to be potent enough to kill bacteria and parasites before they could settle in. I would not be following his example on this front: orcs could drink raw bat blood without a care in the world, and copying their eating habits was a death wish.

“My bad, pal. You’ll have to save the taste test for after it’s done, I guess. It’ll be a lot more trial and error, but you’ll figure it out.”

“That’s fine by me. I’d rather not destroy my stomach, so I’ll leave the precooking calibrations to the masters. Taking it one step at a time is perfect for an ordinary person like me.”

“What’d I say about being humble? Ah, whatever—just do your best, kid. C’mon, I’m gonna go put on the finishing touches, so watch carefully.”

“Yes sir!”

We made the rounds to each of the bubbling pots, and the man taught me what herbs and spices ought to be used for what flavors. The fun learning experience was followed by a busy period of serving portions, cleaning up, and washing dishes—these sorts of campgrounds were almost always by rivers—until my work was done and I looked up to see the moon hanging high above my head. The Mother Goddess was barely present tonight, Her light faint; meanwhile the False Moon approached its fullest form, like a slice of the abyss carved out of the night sky.

I averted my gaze from the pull of darkness and stretched. Moving my back felt great after crouching down to wash dishes for so long. Doing good work that used my body always felt rewarding.

Back in my old world, I would spend moments like these with a can of coffee and a cigarette; sadly, the Empire had no coffee beans, let alone vending machines, so I’d have to settle for just the smoke. With all the fellow reincarnators that had left their mark on this world’s history, you’d think one of them would’ve ventured off to find a new continent with coffee already. Red tea wasn’t bad, but I couldn’t forget the bitter hit of caffeine that came with a good brew. Alas, just as those who’d never had tonkatsu would never crave it, I would have to bear this suffering alone.

I let out a puff of smoke. Invigorated by the False Moon, a couple of nameless fairies flew by, but I waved them away and headed back to camp. Most folks were setting up their tents, but some of the poorer travelers had laid out their sleeping bags right next to the open fires. I walked by them all and slipped into the sturdy roofed carriage that we’d been assigned to find a small bundle of blankets on the floor.

“Margit, wake up.”

That bundle of blankets was, more precisely, my partner from Konigstuhl.

“Mmn... Mm?”

I gently rocked what I thought to be her shoulder, and I caught a glimpse of her face scrunching up. She let out an annoyed mumble like a kitten being woken from a pleasant nap, but then opened her hazel eyes and got up.

Wiping the sleepy tears in the corners of her eyes, she shed the veil of blankets and stretched. Despite having a spider’s lower half, her form was strikingly feline: watching her bend forward and straighten out to the tip of her butt reminded me of the stray cats I’d sometimes played with in Berylin.

“Good morning, Erich. Is it that time already?”

“Yeah. I have your dinner here. It’s still warm, so feel free to take your time.”

Shaking off the drowsiness, Margit straightened herself out and accepted the magically warmed plate of food.

Make no mistake: she hadn’t been sleeping for lack of things to do. Rather, it was precisely because she had an important job in the coming hours that she’d been given the chance to rest up early.

Nearly all types of arachne had some form of Darkvision. Equipped to work well in lightless forests, their sight was good enough to make out text with only the light of a new moon: they were the perfect midnight lookouts.

In particular, Margit’s sensory prowess as a huntsman had netted her the role of keeping watch. Other than that, she also went hunting in nearby forests while the rest of us were setting up camp—a common way of lowering the total cost of food—to earn her keep as a member of the caravan. From each according to their ability: Margit was too small to help lift heavy cargo, and it would’ve been a waste of her skill set to have her do miscellaneous chores. Just as I was well regarded as a handyman, she was doing well as a lookout at night.

I worked at noon and sunset, but had her protect me at night; she dozed off on my lap when we were on the road, but had a job to do once the stars were up. This would probably be how we’d be even after we became adventurers.

“I can only hope tonight will be another quiet night,” Margit said.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “I’ll pray that nothing happens.”

“Worry not. Even if something does, I won’t let anyone bother you in your sleep.”

After finishing her tasty mystery stew, she donned an arachne hunting outfit designed to blend into the night and hopped off the wagon without a sound. The mercenaries were patrolling the perimeter, but she was to join a few others keeping watch around the camp in case anyone slipped through the cracks.

Once I’d seen her off, I threw on the still-warm blanket and got ready to sleep myself. The floor of this buggy was harder than the beds of an inn, but it was still many times more comfortable than the ground. Besides, this was good practice for the future: everyone knew the best adventurers were the ones who could fall asleep anywhere.

[Tips] No matter what skills or traits are taken, there are some racial bonuses that cannot be replicated. For example, mensch can never fly with their bodies alone, nor can they stay submerged in water forever.

The classy buzz of a metal string rang out until the cool of night soaked it away.

“Tonight, I shall tell you the tale of a hero—he who has captured the hearts of those in the western lands.”

A low, sonorous voice joined in atop the clear sound of his lap-harp. As might be obvious from its name, the instrument was a stringed one that rested in his lap. It had a flat, oblong surface with five strings of varying thickness running across it; a mechanical contraption sat above, letting the player press down on the strings with a series of keys. Many solo minstrels considered it their instrument of choice: it had a small footprint, offered variety in sound even when played one-handed, and required minimal movement so as not to distract from the song it accompanied.

Tonight, one poet was putting on a show for the people of the caravan. In part, this was a way of keeping us all from getting too bored; but for the performer, this was his way of keeping his skills sharp on the long journey.

The allure of entertainment had gathered a decent number of people around the fire, and Margit and I were part of the crowd. We were both off duty tonight, and I’d always wanted to listen to an epic around a dark campfire.

Although my travels had taken me all over, I’d never gotten to enjoy a moment that epitomized road trip life quite like this. Lady Agrippina was never going to listen to some two-bit minstrel, and my personal journeys had all been without much company.

Three long years later, I was finally on an adventure that was properly adventurous! The performance hadn’t even begun yet, and I was already getting emotional—but perhaps not as emotional as the minstrel was as he struck the strings and began weaving the tale.

“To the west lay the ends of all earth, but the story begins farther west still: the gateway to oblivion, Marsheim. Built in a day was its castle, upon the never-ending springs of its mother river the Mauser.”

The man strummed his instrument and played with its keys, creating the aural image of a gentle river flowing into the opening act.

In a funny twist, the scene of the story was the very same Marsheim that we were headed for now. That said, I’d heard that traveling poets researched the lands they planned to visit and chose their setlists accordingly. It went without saying that a hometown hero’s tale would get good reactions, so this was a natural choice for someone who was fishing for tips.

Composition wasn’t exactly a widely marketable business in this world, so this probably wasn’t the minstrel’s original work. But on the other hand, that meant this was a piece that he’d enjoyed enough to consider adding to his own repertoire—I was really starting to get excited.

“From the glorious waterway come her daughters, each a lifeline for the humble villages on their banks. It is here that we find our young hero—heed! See him clad in armor and be awed, for the holy crest of dawn adorns his chest. The hero Fidelio stands proud, ready to dispel all darkness as the first rays of daylight do.”

Tonight’s heroic saga covered a trope as difficult to use as it was well-known: the slaying of an evil dragon. Because evil dragons were so timeworn, even in the Empire, establishing a modern hero with such a feat was a storytelling challenge. The royal road had been thoroughly paved by the classics, and any slipup in the details could send a story tumbling down the beaten path of cliché.

Yet thanks to either our performer’s or the original writer’s talents—or perhaps the real-life deeds of whoever had inspired the tale—nothing stuck out as particularly trite.

The story followed Fidelio, a lay priest—a devout believer who refused to affiliate with any given parish—of the Sun God. One day, he wandered into a small canton, where the kind villagers housed and fed him for a night. Eager to repay his debts, he agreed to slay the limbless drake that had been terrorizing the people of the region.

However, this was no hackneyed tale content to stick to formulaic dragon-slaying or a beat-for-beat Prince Charming romance. Enraged by the magistrate’s callous lack of action thus far, the man broke the mold by first marching to the local lord’s manor in furious protest.

“‘Answer me! Is the collection of taxes your sole duty as a noble?! Choose your words wisely, for my pact with God demands I right injustice apparent!’”

Although the clergy of the Empire tended not to insert themselves into politics, they were known to try and solve the problems of common people...to an extent. No one would ever dare kick down a magistrate’s front door and lecture a noble to their face. While I was sure the story was being embellished for dramatic effect, the courage needed to petition the magistrate directly was already more than impressive.

But the magistrate wanted nothing to do with the insolent priest. So, Fidelio proposed a deal: he would slay the dragon and, in exchange, the lord would have no say in whatever he did next to help the people of the canton.

Scoffing at the priest’s arrogance, the magistrate told him he was free to get himself eaten if he so wished.

Truth be told, this was a reasonable response.

Limbless drakes were one of the weakest types of dragons and had extremely limited intelligence. As the name suggested, they had no limbs: they’d evolved away from their brethren’s trademark wings and gargantuan legs to become giant snakes that burrowed in the earth like worms. Despite being classified as dragons, they were so inferior that true dragons seemed not to register them as kindred beings...and yet they were still living calamities by human standards.

Designed to plow through soil, their outer scales were thick and powerful, and fashioned into a unique file-like pattern. They had huge jaws mainly to scarf down dirt while they drilled, but their mouths were lined with rows of razored teeth like a lamprey’s. Once fully mature, they were at least three meters in diameter—more than big enough to swallow a grown man whole.

Worse still, their length was made to match their girth: what they’d lost in limb mass, they made up for by being dozens of meters long. In the old divine myths (which were understood to be close to historical fact), there was said to have been one specimen that could seize an entire mountain in its coils.

Whether the Father God had blessed him or not, a lone priest taking on an opponent like that was ridiculous. Anyone in the magistrate’s position would have laughed.

But the fearless Fidelio laughed right back, declaring that God suffers no liars. Suddenly, the Sun God’s blessing came beaming down from the heavens: the Holy Father presided over matters of contract, and He had made their deal absolute.

The magistrate began to quake. Being a bureaucrat, he knew all too well that the Sun God only entrusted His powers of arbitration to pastors at the very least—that is to say, priests acknowledged to be worthy of leading others.

Reality sank in: Fidelio was no fool spouting nonsense. He was an exemplar of virtue on a mission to deliver justice.

“The drake squirms, it writhes, it thrashes across the river! Oh, the horror! For every twitch of its muddied scales bids the river’s banks to crumble; the crystal waters run dark as the rotting shells of eaten fish fly forth in a storm of pestilence! The hideous beast knows nothing of man’s toil: levees generations in the making, erased in but an instant!”

Told over an ominous low drone, the description drew out a few terrified yelps from children in the crowd. The adults holding their hands tight likely hailed from a riverside town. Coming from a village on the plains, the fear of a broken embankment was difficult to internalize for me, but it was a chilling thought for those who knew its true horrors.

“Yet one man stands tall against the master of this blighted river! Fidelio gazes down from his hill; his shining helmet comes down and his magnificent spear rises up as he offers the battle to his god! Prayer on his tongue, he lunges, piercing the water’s surface—the darkened sludge boils at once, forcing the foul creature to the air!”

Thinking rationally, one might be tempted to ask how the hell an entire river instantaneously began to boil, or otherwise question why boiling water would even bother a thick-skinned dragon. Yet disbelief was easily suspended when divine miracles came into play.

For a deity as powerful as the Sun God, selectively boiling a massive body of water in order to bring pain to the unjust was within reason. That was the might of the heavens: the whole point of a miracle lay in turning the impossible into the possible.

Once the serpent was forced ashore, Fidelio faced it in a battle so fierce that it reshaped the land. The dragon chomped at him, swallowing the earth with every bite; he stabbed it again and again with a spear burning with solar heat.

The beast thrashed its gargantuan body every which way, kicking up a storm of rocks and flailing hard enough to send its scales flying. Yet no matter how many times he was beaten down, no matter how much blood he spilled, Fidelio continued to swing his spear; every bead of red became a burning droplet of the sun’s fury, and he rose more surely than the first light of morning.

The plot was gripping, but what had captured me even more was the man’s fighting style, fueled by blessings I hadn’t so much as heard of. From what I could gather, this wasn’t pure exaggeration for the sake of an exciting story—the details were too fleshed out for that. It sounded more like someone had witnessed the battle firsthand and retold the story to the eventual author.

Fiery daylight that burned only the evil, self-healing to rival the cyclical sunrise, and the ability to turn one’s spilt blood into a weapon... Put to gaming terms, he was a maxed out, multiaction battle monk—the guy was a freak.

Battle monks were scary, man. They could handle their buffs and healing on their own, all while beating the daylights out of anything that crossed their paths. It wasn’t even worth asking what made them strong: their brains were on average about 120 percent muscle anyway, so the answer was that they were just strong. Armored up, the bulky maniacs could eat magic to the face and shrug it off, only to run over enemy frontliners like walking tanks. As if that weren’t enough, they healed themselves and their squishy allies, all while using their minor actions to cleanse debuffs.

Builds like these were so hard to kill in a fair fight that balancing around them made games impossible for weaker combatants, but going too easy would mean letting the whole campaign get bodychecked by unspeakable holy violence. A min-maxed battle monk was a terror for GMs everywhere.

From what I could gather, Fidelio was one of them. I got goose bumps just thinking about what he could do with a strong back line, or even a frontliner who could cover for his blind spots.

The data munchkin in my heart was smitten, but to tell the truth, it wasn’t for me. There were no tricks to his build: he was just brutally strong. Personally, I was more interested in putting together something clever—not to say I’d ever complain about having an ally like that, of course.

“There certainly are some amazing people out there,” Margit whispered to me. “To think someone would hunt a drake all by himself.”

“There really are,” I whispered back. “You know, I look up to people like him, but what about you? Do you ever think about being that strong?”

“I intend on remaining mortal, thank you. I don’t have any plans to do anything that outrageous.”

The melodious story went on, detailing how Fidelio’s struggle lasted for half a day. After hours of fighting, his spear snapped in two; disarmed, the hero jumped into the monster’s mouth and tore its jaw open with his bare hands to end the battle. This part was pretty plainly overstated...I hoped. Could someone please confirm that it was?

Because if not, Margit was right: the man was categorically inhuman. So much so that I bet he could throw hands with Lady Agrippina.

I mean, I’d sworn to myself that I’d make that scoundrel cry uncle, but...could I really ever be that broken? I could imagine taking down a drake with a competent party and some smart strategy, but doing it by myself bare-handed was a bit much.

“Besides,” Margit said, “I’d much rather achieve something the two of us than hone my skills alone. Isn’t that why we set out together in the first place?”

“Yeah, you’re right. We’ll do great things—together.”

There was a certain romance to conquering trials all by oneself, but the whole reason we found ourselves here at all was because of the girl looking up at me from my lap. We had no need to push ourselves past the bounds of reason.

It was best to take things one step at a time. I might have “completed” a portion of my build, but I still only had one Scale IX each per stat and skill. Letting this story of an absurdly strong hero get to my head was sure to spell bad news; I took a moment to reel in my expectations.

Haste makes waste; the shortest path is hidden along detours.

“But you know,” I said, “I do want to hunt a real dragon one day.”

“...I wouldn’t leave you on your own if you set off to do so, but even I have my reservations about following you on a dragon hunt.”

That bad? Come on, everyone dreams of slaying a dragon at some point, right? In my past life, dragon-slaying had been so prevalent that the legendary monsters had ironically been reduced to a bunch of jobbers.

I cocked my head, confused as to why Margit seemed so uneager; meanwhile, the minstrel’s tale reached its conclusion.

With the terrible dragon slain, the clever Fidelio took its valuable corpse not to the magistrate, but to the viscount that the magistrate swore fealty to. There, he explained the cruel fate that had befallen the canton’s citizens and asked that the viscount help them rebuild.

The magistrate’s actions had been outright criminal negligence, and their divine pact forbade him from getting a word in edgewise. And while going straight to an aristocrat’s superior was a major faux pas, the priest’s heroics were too great to ignore.

Moved by Fidelio’s bravery, the viscount accepted all the terms laid out: the canton would enjoy ten years of tax exemption and receive help rebuilding their levees. As for the magistrate who’d been collecting sixty percent of his citizens’ yields—the most draconian rate technically allowed by imperial law—while sitting on his ass, he was promptly fired.

Fidelio, meanwhile, was recognized as a proper saint for his efforts, and everyone lived happily ever after. As the story neatly tied up, I reached into my pocket to hand the musician a copper piece with just one thought on my mind: I hope they’ll sing songs like this about me one day.

[Tips] Limbless drakes are the most primitive of all drakes, but the threat they pose to society is undeniably draconic. Left to their own devices, they can devour mountains’ worth of precious metal or cause tremendous flooding by eroding river foundations. As such, sightings are commonly met with the mobilization of troops.

I was a luckless man, and that bred mistrust. No matter how peaceful things got, I was always preparing myself for the next cataclysm.

Would it be a massive bandit clan, big enough to target a hundred-person caravan? Or maybe a sudden mutiny would break out. Perhaps we’d be stopped and frisked at a border checkpoint by a corrupt magistrate’s men. In the worst case, a dragon might suddenly appear out of nowhere!

Fate was a comical thing, entirely dependent on the mood of a pair of clattering cubes or a single twenty-sided die. I couldn’t count how many times I’d been trampled over by an unfair encounter only to reincarnate as someone else who conveniently shared my name and abilities.

So I was ready. Ready for anything. And finally...

“It really is a shame to see you go. There’s a place for you if you just say the word, you know. It isn’t every day that our crabby chef gets along with someone.”

“And everyone here appreciates how hard you two work. In fact, we’d be happy to welcome you both to the main branch of our store. Are you sure you don’t want to come with us? Couples don’t have to live in-house, even as trainees!”

...we’d made it to our destination without a single road event going awry.

I felt, uh, weird. Like something was missing, almost. But I was also relieved? Yet I felt like I needed to grab ahold of someone and ask, “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

No, no, no—I knew that this was normal. I hadn’t gone far enough off the rails to think that my childhood under Lady Agrippina had been anything less than insane.

Still, it was a strange feeling to be seen off by the mister and missus running the caravan like this, not to mention all the others who’d treated us well all this way.

“Thank you very much for the offer,” I said. “But, well...”

“...This is a dream we’ve shared since childhood,” Margit completed. “Isn’t that right?”

The floresiensis couple who’d founded the caravan were nice and hardworking; they held our hands and practically begged us to stay. For any other common kid, this would’ve been a dream scenario. They were the main traders for a large pottery company based in a state capital city. From here, they planned to continue west past the imperial border, past the Kingdom of Seine, out to the Pyrenian Union bordering the Emerald Sea.

Pyrenia produced unique earthenware with a lot of foreign influence in style, and the merchant couple were evidently wanting for dependable help. Transporting fragile cargo was a tremendous undertaking—a shocking amount of the cargo they’d brought with them to sell had already cracked—and having trustworthy workers would make the long trip home much easier.

A grand expedition that unfolded across two major nations did sound like a healthy source of excitement. Being surrounded by unfamiliar tongues, seeing foreign technologies, and enjoying exotic foods was sure to make for a wonderful adventure.

Alas, it wasn’t quite what I had in mind.

We politely apologized and refused their offer before collecting our things and saying our goodbyes. Over the course of the last two months, the familiar faces of the group had become our friends; even the Dioscuri seemed to be saying farewell to the horses they’d shared the road with.

Looking back, this was the calmest my life had been since my uneventful days in Konigstuhl as a little kid. Servitude in the capital hadn’t been constant action, per se, but the work had kept me a lot busier.

I wonder if we’ll find this kind of peace again.

After splitting off at a fork in the road, Margit and I waited until the last member of the convoy was finally out of sight. They were planning to skip Marsheim and go straight for the border, so this was where we parted ways.

My mind felt crystal clear as I saw off our traveling company. The turn we’d stopped at was on a small hill, so I hurried up it to take in the view expanding before me.

At the peak, I was greeted by an ocean of green fields and a lush, unmaintained forest. Between them stood a city surrounded by towering walls. Here lay the ends of all earth: the city of Marsheim, capital of the westernmost state of the same name.

Small though it was, the sturdy castle at the city’s center served as a proud landmark. It carried an air of impenetrability, bolstered by its sister forts off in the distant mountain range.

The city walls were similarly impressive: they were thick and tall, and had mystic barriers strong enough to see from afar. Its make had all the hallmarks of the School of Polar Night and its monomaniacal fixation on refuting magic, as if it were an architectural declaration that no spell would pass.

Faced with these defenses, I could finally believe the old legends about how eight thousand troops had fended off an army of fifty thousand.

Famed as both the beating heart of the Empire’s western defenses and the gateway into the satellites beyond, Marsheim was a bustling city. One look at the billowing plumes of smoke rising up were enough to gauge its thriving economy—fuel was often the first thing to be cut when times got tough.

But perhaps more illustrative was the amount of traffic going in and out. Of the four main gates, three were teeming with activity: I spotted both personal traders hauling their own luggage and bigger companies with multiple wagons of cargo. On top of that, the Mauser River that ran to the city’s north was filled with ships going to and fro.

Fortune lives but in the land of yonder—it was as if the old maxim had come to life. Just thinking that I was about to go there had me quivering in excitement.

Berylin had been a glorious city, to be sure, but it had been a statesman’s glory—a polished work of political art. It had been carefully planned out to have everything it needed and nothing more, with every extra edge sanded down.

Built to exemplify the nation’s ideals, the prosperity of the capital was a calculated exercise in splendor that felt like a sterilized version of true urban busyness. Defined by pure pragmatism, the meticulously laid-out design left no room for anything outside the creators’ initial intentions.

Except for the College.

Magus in-jokes aside, the leisurely city of Marsheim subscribed to a different notion of luster. They’d built a wall in a place rife with potential, filled it with the bare minimum to not break down, and let the people figure out the rest. This relatively laissez-faire approach had given rise to harsher competition, and a desperate vitality pervaded the town; a shop making money hand over fist today could go under by tomorrow.

“Someone’s having fun.”

I’d frozen in my tracks, sucked up by the city’s atmosphere, until Margit pulled me back to reality. If she hadn’t hopped on my back as she always did, I would’ve probably been stuck here staring until my legs gave out.

“Hee hee,” she laughed. “A painting of fruits may look tantalizingly sweet, but it won’t fill your stomach. I don’t think we’ll be able to see the city for what it is from so far away.”

“I know,” I said, my tone a bit pouty. I’d already given up on being in the saddle when I was with her, but looking like a dolt still embarrassed me.

But I couldn’t help it. No matter how old a man got, deep down he was just a boy who’d learned to act like an adult. How was I supposed to hold myself back when looking out at a sight like this?

“Shall we? To our new home.”

“...Yeah!”

My childhood companion knew me all too well. She nudged me along to let myself loose with a smile and the unspoken pledge that she’d be watching over me.

I figured that it was too late to feel ashamed now. I was nearing fifty inside, but I had the body of a fifteen-year-old—no one could blame me for enjoying myself like any other kid.

Grabbing my horses, I ran down the slope toward a new land of adventure.

[Tips] The westernmost lands of the Empire are oftentimes referred to as “Ende Erde,” or “the ends of all earth.” Unlike the rest of the nation, the oversight of the region is lax, and even the area surrounding the state’s capital isn’t considered completely safe.

However, the lenient regulations also facilitate easier business, and it is said that there is no better place for the penniless to find success. The liberties enjoyed in the region are well-known, to the point of having inspired a popular folk tune: I walked into Marsheim with the clothes on my back, and rode into Berylin with a filled money sack.

I thought to myself that the whole city of Marsheim looked like a terrace farm.

Those farms were constructed in steps along hillsides, sort of like a drawer with its bottom compartments pulled out, each one above pulled out incrementally less than the one below. Marsheim, meanwhile, revolved around a castle on a hill, with several layers of walls erected around it. Following the uneven geometry, tall stone semicircles—none perfectly round or regular—rippled out from the center, giving it the same general visual feel when seen from above.

The city’s history was palpable in its design. Embroiled in petty skirmishes since its conception, these lands had been kept well-fed with blood even after the Empire’s founding led to a major city being planted here.

In other words, this had very recently been an active war zone, and would become one again if relations with our western neighbors ever broke down. History books spoke of the horrors that abounded while the rest of the nation enjoyed peace: cities were burned, cantons were abandoned, the earth was salted, and at times, magia came to poison the lands whole. There were few records of Ende Erde that took place in times of peace, even relative to the Empire’s bloody history. With all the violence that had plagued this region, I could understand why we’d come to consider this the ends of all earth.

Funnily enough, though, the city down in the distance wasn’t actually as old as these historical tales would suggest. The citadel at its center had originally been founded to serve as a bridgehead for the margrave to quash local uprisings and fend off invasions.

You see, Marsheim had originally been located a little ways east, and there was an amusing anecdote about the current central fortress: Marsheim Castle and the hill it lay upon had appeared in one night.

Looking at the land from afar, it was clear that the surrounding area was a massive plain—the kind that, ordinarily, wouldn’t have a giant hill on it. Presumably the ease of navigating the open land was what made it such an alluring killing field.

Thus an idea was born: how great a strategic advantage would one gain if they could plant a castle in the middle of it?

The margraves of bygone years had clearly asked themselves this question often, as the books were filled with records of their many attempts. Naturally, regional rivals had not taken kindly to the notion; not only had they interfered, but they’d taken it upon themselves to try building their own forts on the field. Every attempt eventually spiraled into a bog of unending skirmishes as local actors built and tore down one another’s strongholds.

For the longest time, the peoples of Ende Erde sustained the uniquely human cycle of burning untold manpower and resources to produce a pile of worthless rubble. That is, until one margrave was struck with genius: if the long building process was what left the would-be castles vulnerable, then why not build the thing beforehand?

The margrave poured everything he had into this all-or-nothing gambit. He gathered a mountain of dirt and gravel, amassed as much raw material as he possibly could, and swallowed his pride to beg the lords of other imperial states to lend him a team of oikodomurges numbering in the double digits.

With everything in place, the crew had marched to a key point on the plains and thrown together a castle on a hill for all to see.

When I’d first heard the story, I’d immediately suspected that it had been the work of another fellow reincarnator. Of course, I didn’t actually believe that the castle had been propped up in one night: that absolutely had to be the result of hyperbole building up over the years. While it was more likely that they’d started with just the hill and a simple encampment, that was still a huge strategic benefit in and of itself, and would surely have improved the Empire’s position significantly. Waking up to a mound of alien soil appearing out of nowhere would probably have been enough to make insurgent leaders pop a blood vessel in anger.

Whatever the truth of its origins were, the newly built hilltop castle had quickly become the linchpin of western defense. More and more facilities had piled up around it, until it was eventually such a grand city that the margrave acknowledged its influence by dubbing it the new state capital and rechristening it Marsheim.

Although we hadn’t bothered to stop by, the old city of Marsheim was still around, albeit rebranded as Altheim. It remained a large urban center with around eight thousand citizens, but none of its former glory remained. Nowadays, it was merely a pit stop for the denizens of Ende Erde on the journey toward the center of Rhine.

All this thinking about the city and its rich history had me feeling giddy. The castle atop a hill, the series of towering walls rippling forth from it, and the mosaic patterns of discolored stones betraying the repairs of yesteryear all blended together to mold a fitting metropolitan character. Even the mishmash of heights and colors in the buildings around town spoke to the practicality that pervaded this remote urban center: who the hell wanted to waste their money making things look neat and uniform?

Another thing that caught my eye was the composition of the crowds around the main gates. Mensch could be found in all but the most extreme corners of the world, but I was pleasantly surprised to see a diverse mix of demihumans and demonfolk with traditional clothes and cargo to represent their cultures. Even among the mensch, many stood out sorely from the mostly homogenous traffic that I’d seen in Berylin.

Whoa, is that a lorelei?! I spied a person-drawn carriage filled with water, with the passenger submerged up to their waist. My curiosity was piqued: I’d heard that the Mauser River was the lorelei’s ancestral home, but traveling on land like that seemed terribly inconvenient. I couldn’t help but wonder why they hadn’t just entered the city via its waterways.

Speaking of rare sights, was that a vierman guard processing visitors at the gate? I’d almost missed them because their silhouette was similar to a mensch’s from afar, but upon closer inspection they had the characteristic split at their shoulders, giving each side of their body two arms. I’d never seen one back in the capital; I’d heard they came from the same southern region as arachne, so maybe this one was foreign born. In any case, I was a bit jealous that they could keep a steady grip on their spear even while filing paperwork.

The colorful medley continued, with zentaurs pulling carriages, callistians hauling cargo, and audhumbla mercenaries standing around in armor. Each seemed content to make the most out of their own endowments, and in turn, those around them seemed content to accept those differences for the sake of better results. In that sense, it reminded me of one of my last job’s few redeeming qualities.

Berylin’s hustle and bustle had been great in its own way, but this unfettered display of vivacity had my heart pounding in the same way flipping through the setting pages of a new supplement did. The sweetness of painting over arachnid reaction with knowledge was a nectar only a change in scenery could provide—and it seemed like I wasn’t the only one savoring the taste.

Margit had played the calm adult before we’d crested the hill, but now she’d fallen into an awed silence. I could feel her shifting around on my back, though; she was looking around just as excitedly as I was.

“This is amazing,” I said.

“It... It truly is.”

I tried talking to her just to check in, only to be met with an uncharacteristically dazed response. She’d told me she’d gone to the Old Town near Konigstuhl before, but Innenstadt was a totally different city. I couldn’t blame her for being rattled.

Castor dutifully marched on in spite of our astonishment, and the flow of traffic became clearer as we got closer to the outer walls. Those dressed like merchants went to the southern gate; those traveling light with at most a bag or two—probably Marsheim citizens—went to the northern gate; those armed and in armor, like mercenaries and adventurers, went to the western gate.

Like Berylin, each gate probably served its own purpose. It just made sense: city guards had different protocols depending on who they were processing.

Steering us toward what looked to be our entrance, I found that the line leading into town was much longer than it’d seemed. People in lighter travel gear intermingled with fully geared fighters, but the whole area was enveloped in an ominous air. I noticed that there were far more guards here than at the other gates—all veterans, judging from their posture.

The people in line earned their daily bread by spilling blood, and their attitudes showed it. They were ready to fight anytime: if someone cut in line, stepped on another’s shoe, or even just looked at someone the wrong way, violence could break out.

This was why the security was so much tighter; no one wanted to see a small argument turn into an all-out brawl. Well, not that it mattered to me so long as I played the part of a respectable model citizen.

“Hey, bud.”

Suddenly, a voice called out to me from below. I looked down to see a giant bald man. Carrying a hefty chest of armor on his shoulder as though it were a light bag of groceries, the man was, to put it bluntly, terrifying.

Put charitably, he was a walking omen of misfortune; more realistically, he looked the part of a disreputable musclehead. The man had two heads on me and his chest was thicker than a pair of children put together. His jagged facial features were—in my nicest words—the spitting image of criminality. As rude of me as it was to say, one look from him would send an average kid into a fit of tears or running for the hills.

“You got some nice horses. What’re their names?”

Yet despite his appearance, the man opened up with a perfectly respectable question. His wicked face curled into a happy smile as he looked the Dioscuri up and down. Neither of my horses seemed to mind; they didn’t sense any ill intent in his gaze.

“The one we’re on is Castor, and the other is Polydeukes.”

Though the guy looked exactly like the kind of two-bit villain who would get beaten up by a main character, I couldn’t think of him as a bad person either. His body language was mild mannered, and his admittedly crude speech didn’t stray into the realm of vulgarity. Honestly, he just reminded me of the friendly old men at the racetracks back on Earth.

“Never heard of them. Those foreign names? I like them though—they got a manly ring to ’em.”

“They’re brothers, so I named them after twin heroes of a faraway land. I believe the language is similar to those spoken near the Southern Sea.”

“Ooh, heroes, huh? I like that. Makes ’em sound all gutsy. A stallion’s gotta have guts.”

The more the man nodded to himself, the more the image of a horse-racing fan solidified in my mind. Until now, the people who’d called out to me about the Dioscuri had only done so with unsolicited offers to buy them in mind—at laughably low prices, at that—so this was a refreshing change of pace.

“They got a bit of heft on ’em, but it’s a good heft. I bet they run real good, huh?”

“Yes, they do. Whether they’re carrying cargo or pulling a carriage, you won’t find any better horses in the whole Empire.”

“Heh, I bet. Nice necks too. Nice and manly.” While a horse’s speed was most noticeably determined by their build, experienced riders also tended to pay attention to their necks. “You got some good horses. You could be a merc or an adventurer and they’d do you good. Take care of ’em, you hear?”

“But of course. I treat them as I would any good friend.”

“Yeah?” The man grew even more pleased—as evidenced by his increasingly scary expression—and laughed from the bottom of his heart. “I like you, bud. You’re a good kid.”

Still cackling, he reached out to grab my shoulder with his thick arm. Sensing something unpleasant was to come, Margit jumped off onto Castor’s butt; and as soon as his hand made contact, he began shaking me back and forth.

Whoa, wait, what?! Why’s he so strong?! Is he trying to shake my head off?!

“You’re still a kid, but hey, look at that! What color are you, bud? I’ve never seen you around, so you musta just come to town, huh?”

“Uh...” I rubbed at my aching neck. “Color?”

In an instant, his hearty smile turned into blank confusion.

“There’s only one thing an adventurer means when he asks about color, yeah?”

Oh, that’s right. Now that he mentioned it, the Adventurer’s Association tiered its members by color. The bottom level was soot-black, and from there it went up to ruby-red, amber-orange, topaz-yellow, copper-green, sapphire-blue, and lapis-indigo—the ranks went up with the frequency of light that made the color. If I recalled, the very top was sandalwood-violet, but that color was an honorary tier reserved for the Emperor. This meant that the adventurer-bodyguards-turned-crooks I’d cleaned up before had been chumps just one level removed from total know-nothings.

The system was admittedly a bit...familiar. Memories of Alpha Complex washed over me in a wave of ruby-red laser fire and the stink of ozone, but it was probably just a coincidence or an in-joke left by someone who shared my past.

That game’s system was fun to fool around in, but I couldn’t say I’d appreciated how fleeting life had been. Say the wrong thing? Dead. Take the game seriously? Dead. Carefully follow the intended path and prepare all the necessary items? Dead. I wasn’t exactly deranged enough to enjoy being met with doom at every turn.

Anyway, the fact that the man had brought up the tiering system in the first place pointed to his being a fellow adventurer; considering how plainly strong he was, he had to be at least past the beginner levels. If the world was so rife with powerhouses that people like him were considered novices, then adventuring wouldn’t have been seen as a fool’s career to begin with.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “We’re actually planning to sign up once we get into the city.”

“That’s right.” Shrewd as ever, Margit reclaimed her position on my back only after the localized earthquake was over. “At present, we don’t have any rank or title to our names.”

“Huh.” Thoroughly surprised, the man’s small eyes went wide and he scanned us up and down. “So you’re telling me you’ve never gotten into a fight as an adventurer?”

“I guess so,” I answered. “But it isn’t as if I’ve never been in combat at all.”

I wasn’t technically lying. Sure, I’d gone through hell and back, but I was a total newbie as an adventurer. I could announce that I was a brand new Level 1 Fighter without a hint of shame, and any gatekeeper would let me in with a thumbs-up.

“No experience, eh?” His voice carried the hint of impression as he mumbled to himself with his chin in his hand. After a moment of thought, he looked up and said, “If you’re gonna be adventurers, go down past the main road and the Association’ll be across from the Adrian Imperial Plaza.”

It was kind of him to give us directions; it saved me the effort of paying the city guards to tell us the way. Wandering around an unfamiliar city was far more dangerous than it had been in my past life, so knowing the path to our destination made a world of difference. Looking lost was an easy way to get marked by pickpockets, and I didn’t want to get wrapped up in a bloody fight before we’d even signed our paperwork.

“Thank you for the information. It would’ve been hard for rural kids like us to find our way around.”

“Gotta say, you look too done up to be from the country. Well, at least on the outside, I guess.”

The man’s contemplative expression vanished in an instant and he resumed his scary but jovial laughter. Maybe it was just because he was so close, but the thunderous guffaw physically shook me to my core. On top of his overwhelming presence, he stood at full alert, his armor chest was well-worn, and he carried some kind of large polearm wrapped up in cloth; the man gave off the energy of a frontline commander in spades.

Truth be told, he seemed strong. I wasn’t astute enough to judge exactly how strong without seeing him battle ready, but my instincts told me that he would at least make a joke out of the daemonic ogre I’d faced after saving Lottie in the lakeside manor.

More and more, it seemed like the lawless lands of Marsheim really did breed stronger fighters. Those with apparent talent congregated in prestigious cities, but the harsh conditions of the frontier were enough to polish the diamonds left behind in the rough.

“Once you finish signing up,” the man said, “come on over to the Snoozing Kitten. It’s on Hovel Street with all the other inns.”

“The Snoozing Kitten? That’s an awfully cute name for an inn.”

“Sure is. But a tavern’s worth ain’t in its name—it’s in its food, its booze, and how good its rooms are. Ah, and Hovel Street’s one street north from the Association, all the way west. The walls’ll make you turn a bit, but you’ll figure it out.”

Something told me that he wasn’t just recommending his favorite inn to us. Good-natured though he seemed, some ulterior motive hid out of sight. I didn’t want to sound haughty, but he was a good example that the simple were not necessarily the stupid.

“If you head there around sundown, you should catch a guy named Fidelio there. Just ask around at the bar and you’ll find him.”

“...Fidelio?”

“You heard me.” He smirked. “Plenty of guys with that name, right?”

Plenty of guys did indeed have that name. It was a word from the Orisons that meant “truth,” and had enjoyed popularity since ancient times with parents who wished for their sons to grow into honest men. I had even known one in Konigstuhl.

But we’d just heard the legend of a hero with the same name. It was all a little too timely.

“And what business might we have with this Mister Fidelio?”

“I’m just saying that he’s a guy you’ll wanna talk to at least once if you’re trying to get anywhere in this line of work.”

Hm... From what I could glean of the man’s character in our conversation, this musclehead didn’t seem like the type to throw newbies into a criminal scam, but I had a strange tingling in my spine.

Was this excitement at a twist of fate? Or were my alarm bells going off?

But I just couldn’t sense any bad intentions from the man. I’d learned my lessons about trusting pretty faces and first impressions in Berylin, but that was exactly why I felt confident in my ability to pick out the evil that hid behind perfectly set smiles.

This wasn’t a skill given to me by the future Buddha’s blessing—it was one I’d built up over my time as a player. It was an intuition that I’d honed outside the world’s system, and it was telling me that this evil-looking man was kind at heart.

“Excuse me for being forward,” I said, “but why did you think to refer us to this inn?”

“Heh, come on, bud. Ain’t it obvious? Things’ll be more fun that way.”

As the man burst into wholehearted laughter, all I could think was that we’d rolled our way into a peculiar encounter. But just then, an angry voice yelled at us from behind. The line had advanced forward without us, and those behind us were getting impatient.

“Hansel! Quit cajoling the kids and move your fat ass!”

“My bad, Necker! Couldn’t see you down there!”

“Shut your trap—it’s you, not me! I forget: was it your mom or your dad who’s the giant?”

Class was an alien concept to the two quipping men, but it wasn’t hostile; they were clearly friends. Where those from other cities would draw their swords at such slander—insulting someone’s parents in the Trialist Empire was a quick way to find a fight—it seemed like this was part of daily life out here.

On Earth we’d said that when in Rome, do as the Romans do; here, we said that to know the land, one must drink from its wells. It sounded like I’d need to brush up on my banter if I wanted to stick around.

I might have already managed to run into foreshadowing for a newbie adventurer’s trial by fire, but I wasn’t too torn up about it. I wondered why. Maybe it was just that he was good with his words, or maybe there really was something else in store.

Plus, y’know, I felt bad second-guessing a guy with a name as cute as Hansel, regardless of how badly it fit him.

As we moved ahead to catch up to the line, I turned and asked one last thing. “By the way, would you happen to know of any good stables around here?”

[Tips] The Adventurer’s Association was founded in the Age of Gods as a joint venture between many competing deities. In the modern day, however, only a vague symbolic solidarity remains.

Pure bedlam—such were the only words I could muster in the face of this unfamiliar hustle and bustle.

People packed the streets, salesmen shouted at their stalls, and eye-catching articles of every sort lined the shops; but that went for Berylin too.

What the capital lacked was the utter frenzy in the air.

It felt like everyone here was desperate, almost. The pace of traffic was rapid, as if those walking by couldn’t spare a second to think about bumping shoulders with oncoming pedestrians; the collisions, in turn, gave rise to all sorts of noisy arguments. Many people were so poorly kept that they would’ve gotten a scolding from the guards had they been in Berylin.

On the other hand, the merchants pushed their products with manic zeal and the townspeople all seemed to be driven by some unyielding purpose. The overwhelming drive that pervaded the streets had our rustic minds spinning. Though I’d been born too late to experience them in my past life, I imagined this had been the same hubbub as the mining towns of the industrial revolution.

“Hold on tight, Margit.”

“As if I would even think of letting go. I’m afraid someone might step on me if I did.”

The hands around my neck were squeezing more than usual. I couldn’t imagine how Margit would fare when she was shorter than a floresiensis. Floresiensis, goblins, and children were deftly swimming through the sea of people, but anyone unaccustomed to the city was sure to get trampled. No wonder Mr. Hansel had told us to stick together as we’d bid him goodbye.

“Um,” I said, “I guess we should start by heading to the stable.”

“That sounds good. It doesn’t seem as if we can get around with these two in tow.”

Being hit with the ordeal of getting around after a smooth entry process was giving me whiplash, but we carried ourselves toward the stable Mr. Hansel had recommended. Every city was home to places to check in horses, but it was hard to gauge how well-kept an establishment was without firsthand experience. Listening to a local’s advice was the best way to find a good one.

Still, I couldn’t get over how night and day the experience was inside and outside the walls. When we’d gotten to the gate, I’d shown the guards a writ of identity I’d gotten in Konigstuhl, as well as a Berylinian citizenship slab—which, come to think of it, was valuable in its own right—I’d gotten from Lady Agrippina. That had been it: they’d let us in without any further questions.

I supposed I could understand the lenient security after looking at the chaos within the city. That they let in anyone with an ID and no apparent criminal history must have been what allowed the city to grow. Besides, it saved me the hassle of getting papers-please’d for hours on end, so I was happy to benefit. It was ever best to strike while the iron was hot, and nothing could cool fiery excitement harder than wasting the first day of a trip doing paperwork and collapsing in bed before doing anything of note.

That said, the laxity also meant I needed to stay on my toes: there were probably a good deal of people happy to break the rules in ways that wouldn’t draw the guards’ attention.

Getting back to stables, there were two kinds: those inside the city walls and those outside. Obviously, the ones inside boasted higher quality. They needed a license just like any other business within city limits, but the regulations around horses were especially strict, because they were considered military assets. After all, a battle could easily be won or lost based on the number of horses involved.

The stables operating on the interior were thus superior by default. But because the markets of the Empire weren’t so ludicrously competitive that service providers had to shave every penny off their prices to see business, that also meant the fees involved were a sight to behold.

“Welcome, welcome— Oh! It isn’t every day we get customers as young as you.”

The place we’d been sent to was the Seal Brown Stables, a business operated by a zentaur couple. Thankfully, they broke the stereotype of zentaur-equals-barbarian that Dietrich had implanted in my brain.

“Oh my, what impressive horses!”

“Wow, these are Ostenbruts. I never thought we’d get real warhorses all the way out here.”

The husband and wife proprietors were, well, small. Not on absolute scales, mind you: they were still at least two meters tall and easily eclipsed me. But compared to the enormous Dietrich, they looked seriously tiny.

Maybe they traced their heritage to ponies. I knew that some horse breeds were just naturally smaller even without human interference, so it followed that the same was true of zentaurs—but it was still a tad surprising to see zentaurs running a business in the city as opposed to doing physical labor.

“This is a wonderful stable,” I said.

“You think so? Thank you kindly. But sweet-talking us won’t get you any discounts.”

All the horses being kept were clean and cared for; I couldn’t spot a single one that looked like it was being neglected. Not only was the facility clean, but each individual stall was free of manure and had fresh feed and bedding, eliminating any source of bad odor.

“We like to run a business where we can hold our heads high. But that means we have to ask: do you have proof of ownership with you?”

“Oh, of course. I have some papers.”

I handed over the documents I’d received from Lady Agrippina and the husband looked over them—as was expected, he was literate—until he was satisfied. He then neatly folded the pieces of parchment back up and returned them.

“Sorry to be so distrustful. There’ve been lots of incidents lately, and we ran into serious trouble when it turned out one of the horses we were caring for was stolen. We got lumped in with the thief and it was a whole mess, so we’re trying to be extra careful.”

“Ah,” I said, “that must have been an ordeal. Don’t worry, I understand where you’re coming from.”

This was an era where horses were worth small fortunes: two as impressive as Castor and Polydeukes were effectively the same as high-end sports cars. If a pair of condos on legs came marching along, that was a perfectly sound reason to be extra cautious.

“Still, you two really are young. I’d like to say you’ve got a good eye for your age to pick out our business...but we aren’t exactly in the easiest spot to find, and I doubt you just wandered here on dumb luck. Did someone send you our way?”

The proprietor asked the question after he brought out the final contract written out on a wooden tablet. Not having any reason to hide the truth, I answered that Mr. Hansel had sent us.

“Ah, that bald oaf? Should be fine, then. He’s a regular of ours—see, that one’s his.”

He pointed at a remarkable mare. She had a chestnut coat and her gentle eyes were closed tight as she leaned on the door to her stall for a leisurely nap.

“He left her behind today because of something about a carriage, I think, but she’s a good horse. And Hansel spoils her like his own child.”

“So that’s why he recommended this place,” I said.

“I’m pretty sure he just hates seeing horses get mistreated. He’s a weirdo who’ll kill people but not touch their steeds, so if yours caught his eye, he probably wanted to make sure they got the care they deserve.”

Huh. I could kind of relate. Chopping off bandit heads was easy, but to this day, I felt bad about hurting the horses they rode. They felt more like innocent bystanders swept up in human schemes than real coconspirators.

“But that still doesn’t mean you’re getting any discounts,” the man concluded.

“That’s too bad.” It really, really was too bad. The total list of costs that he’d brought out had nearly made my eyes jump out of their sockets.

Their services included luxuries like regularly taking the horses to graze outside if we didn’t plan to take them out ourselves, and the price reflected that by reaching numbers akin to Lady Agrippina’s inns. The cheapest stables wouldn’t even charge half this amount.

“Goodness,” Margit said. “What a stately total... At this rate, they’ll be getting better lodging than we will.”

“Yeah... But it’s actually on the cheaper side for the quality. At the worst places, it’s hard to tell if you’re looking at a horse or a sick mutt.”

Clean facilities and full meals necessitated prices like these. An average horse drank more than twenty liters of water a day and ate over ten kilograms of food. It wasn’t like they could just be let loose to graze for themselves, so it genuinely did seem like the contract was cheaper than it could get away with being.

“Even so, thirty librae a month is quite the sum,” Margit said. “That’s nearly four drachmae a year.”

“It’ll be a little cheaper if you sign for a renewing contract,” the owner said. “Twenty-five librae a month. I figured you’d be able to afford it since Hansel sent you our way...but if not, there isn’t much we can do. We don’t accept tabs, and we don’t accept horses as collateral either.”

Ah, it appeared that he’d seen through our finances to some degree—though that wasn’t exactly hard when we had two warhorses out in plain sight. It also didn’t help that he was right.

“Fair enough,” I said. “We’ll take the renewing deal. I’ll pay for half a year up front.”

“Thank you kindly. If you could just sign here...”

As much as it pained me to put down the money, this was a necessary expense. Plus, them carefully confirming my paperwork helped solidify my impression that this was a business I could trust.

With horses being worth small fortunes, managing to steal even one represented a huge payday—especially for fancy breeds like mine. Shadier stables ran scams where they’d sell off good horses and replace them with worthless jades that they pushed onto the original owners.

The Seal Brown Stables were home to several high-grade horses and were still in business despite coming out the gate with aggressive prices; the only explanation was that they were well trusted in the community. It wasn’t an unreasonable amount to pay for a place to keep our adventuring companions safe.

“Let me see... So six months will be one drachma and fifty—”

“Erich? Just a moment, please.”

The proprietor had written in the period and total price, and I signed after confirming that the math was right. But just as I reached for my wallet—we kept our big coins in the space-bending box for safekeeping—Margit pulled out the joint purse around my neck.

“These two are our assets, aren’t they? Don’t you think we should pay for them together?”

“Huh? But I’m technically their owner.”

“Isn’t it a tad late to be saying that now? Your fate and mine are one and the same, and these two are both of our companions. I’d say it’s only natural that each of us pitches in to house them.”

If Margit was going to go this far, then I didn’t have any real reason to refuse; we ended up paying with our joint funds. I couldn’t have been more grateful. Truly, nothing was as hard to come by as a thoughtful partner.

“Aw, you two are making me jealous. You’ve got a good woman, mister.”

“Did you say something, dear?”

“No, darling. Nothing.”

Quickly moving on from how I’d blushed at the husband’s teasing, I was glad we’d found a dependable place for the Dioscuri. In an age where money didn’t guarantee service, services that offered fair value for their prices were precious. The zentaur couple seemed nice, and I was happy to keep patronizing their business in the future.

As a cherry on top, the brothers managed to catch the proprietor’s eye, and he offered to introduce them to good mares if I was so willing—which, of course, I was. Commoners tended to breed their horses with other people’s and then share the foal. Owning both a stallion and mare was a major investment, and it wasn’t healthy to breed multiple generations within a single house. Rich nobles with large pastures could get away with it, but everyone else got around inbreeding by lending horses to one another.

Back home, Holter had sired children for the magistrate’s mare with the promise that our family would receive a new horse once Holter was too old to work. The Dioscuri weren’t going to be fit for battle forever either, so I was grateful to receive the offer. I’d been hoping to keep their bloodline going in the back of my mind, and this seemed like a great opportunity to let my trusty steeds find brides.

The husband and wife saw us off with smiles and a promise to let us know if they found someone who might be interested. Done with that, Margit and I once again returned to the mayhem of Main Street.

Anywhere and everywhere I looked, there were people. What was this, a New Year’s sale?!

Navigating the crowds in the heat of early summer had me working up a sweat. It was hot enough that the arachne on my back was starting to feel refreshingly cool in comparison.

“Say, Erich?”

“What’s up?”

“Do you think I’m allowed to walk on the rooftops?”

Bewildered by the non sequitur, I followed Margit’s pointer finger to see sirens hopping from roof to roof, flapping their wings to soften their landings. And it wasn’t just them: smaller peoples like stuarts and jenkins boldly scurried along routes that would get them hunted down by the city guards in the capital.

Uh... Is that allowed?

I stared dumbfounded for a moment, but then noticed that the guards at a nearby corner didn’t seem to care. Apparently, the rooftops were fair game in Marsheim so long as you didn’t scatter shingles all over the place. I wasn’t sure whether it was expressly allowed, but the town was at least hectic enough not to care about enforcing a ban.

“I’d prefer if you stayed with me,” I said.

“Is that so? Well, then,” Margit giggled, “I suppose I’ll have to stay by your side.”

I was a grown-up inside, so I wasn’t going to say I’d be lonely or anything. Frankly, I just had no confidence in our ability to reconvene if we got separated. Although I’d enchanted her earring to receive my Voice Transfers, that wouldn’t be an instant solution when neither of us knew the landmarks around town. Considering the worst case, I just didn’t want to risk getting lost.

“Sorry to make you suffer the crowds.”

“Hee hee, I don’t mind. How could I ever say no to you?”

As she snickered in my ear, I clasped her hand to express my thanks and set off. We walked past three layers of city walls—each could be closed in times of emergency to delay an attacker’s advance—until the main road ended and we found ourselves at the Adrian Imperial Plaza.

The plaza was a modest little clearing with a small fountain and a few unmaintained flower beds. It wasn’t exactly a tourist attraction, and was honestly a few steps shy of a nice place to rest. Truthfully, I could’ve believed that it was just a roundabout to connect other streets to the main one.

Even so, plenty of people were passing by and it was enough to tickle my heartstrings. Dull light shimmered off armor; obvious weapons were stuffed into bags to comply with city law; foreign tongues entered my ear from every direction. As the clearing directly in front of the Adventurer’s Association, Adrian Imperial Plaza was a hotbed of adventurers waiting for their party mates.

Some were green and others were more grizzled, but they were all geared up without exception. These were my coworkers; these were my rivals.

Nice. Now I’m getting excited. No matter how old I got, quintessential scenes like this were sure to perk me up. I couldn’t help but want to jump in right this very second.

While I could have spent my whole day just soaking it all in, the excitement won out and I marched over to the Association’s doors. The building was fairly large. Its exterior design was simple, but the stone bricks gave it a certain gravitas. Though it was only two stories tall, it was built wide enough to retain said gravitas.

Subdued walnut wood was used for the windows and pillars, and it paired well with the somber gray stone. Amazingly, the windows were paned with luxurious glass sheets that were totally clear. I couldn’t even imagine how many gold pieces had evaporated trying to put together this many pieces of glass without shivering.

But what drew my eye most of all was the giant sign hanging out front. The words “Adventurer’s Association” were written in graceful lettering on a slab of wood that, from what I could see, hadn’t been pieced together; it must’ve been a single giant slice of an ancient tree. Signs were the face of an organization, and it was evident the Association had shelled out.

The road here had been long. At one point, I’d thought that it wasn’t possible at all. But here I was, ready to fulfill my promise—ready to hold my partner to hers so that we could do as we willed.

“Are you ready?” Margit whispered in my ear.

I nodded without a word. Not wanting to clog up the entrance like a fool, I picked myself up and headed in.

Opening a door as heavy as its size suggested, I entered a space much more subdued than what one might expect from a den of adventure. One contiguous plank formed a long countertop at the back of the expansive hall, home to eight counters in total. This time of day evidently didn’t see much business, as only three of the eight were manned; the others just had a hanging plaque that read “Closed.”

Small tables of varying heights—probably the product of a diverse clientele—were lined up in front of the counters. It seemed that we were expected to write out our paperwork there and then take it to the clerks once we were done.

In which case, the handful of people sitting around on foldable chairs by the writing station were probably scribes looking for illiterate customers. They got up as soon as they took a look at us, so I was certain about my guess.

The right side of the hall had a few coffee tables and couches, but the handful of adventurers gathered there were just killing time. Nobody was drinking to a job well done.

I figured that was only natural. Loud drunkards would be a bother for the white-collar Association employees trying to work, and letting a bunch of rough and rowdy adventurers commingle with alcohol was just asking for trouble.

In which case, the seats and tables had probably only been set up so parties could discuss jobs or wait their turn at the counter. The idea of an adventuring guild-house was inextricably linked in my mind to that of a pub, and I couldn’t deny that I was a bit let down.

On the left was an array of large partitions.

Actually, upon closer inspection, they weren’t partitions at all: each big enough to count as its own wall, the screens were grouped together based on the color of their edges. Most of them had black borders, with the next most numerous group being red, then orange. Much like the College’s job bulletin, these were quest boards filled with tasks that needed doing.

Apparently, the walls hadn’t had enough space to fit all the requests, and the big boards were the Association’s solution. Curiously enough, the colors seemed only to go up to yellow; maybe one had to go up to the counter to ask about higher-ranking jobs.

As expected, the loiterers had been scribes, and I declined their services by explaining that I could read and write. I had the chops to pen letters on behalf of a count, and I would be damned if I let someone sell me writing services.

Now, if the tropes continued, then this would be the part where we’d be greeted by a pretty young girl manning the front desk...

“Hm? Do you need something?”

...but all three of the women at the desk were well along in years, with stout and hearty builds.

Naturally so. No sane person would sentence a pretty young girl to the fate of dealing with savage adventurers. Being able to snap back at any audacious clients was basically part of the job description, anyhow.

“If you have a request, tell me what kind it is and I’ll get you the right form—no, we don’t take letters. Are you working for a merchant somewhere?”

“No, we’re here to become adventurers.”

“Heuh?”

The clerk froze in the middle of reaching for some kind of form and let out a funny sound. I guess she’d really confused us for some merchant’s messengers. We’d come straight here without changing out of our travel wear, though, and I didn’t think we looked all that proper.

“You and the little lady on your back?”

“Well, yes.”

“I could’ve bet my heart that you were here to hire bodyguards or something. Wait, if you shooed off the scribes, then you must be able to write. Why would you want to work a run-down job like this? I’m sure you have plenty of other ways to put bread on the table.”

“You want me to put in a good word somewhere? I think there’s a tavern on the charcoal street that’s looking for servers.”

“Oh, you know they wouldn’t take a boy there. Hey, you. Are you any good with your hands? I can help you get a job if you’re interested in apprenticing under a woodworker.”

As soon as we got to the issue at hand, the other two receptionists snapped out of their bored stupor to join in. They barraged us with talk about how we should find better jobs that weren’t so dangerous and provided cute uniforms and what have you; no matter the country or world, middle-aged ladies were ever prone to worrying about the young.

Margit and I politely declined all their offers—boy, we sure were getting a lot of those today—and received an application form. The paper was made of cheap fibers as opposed to parchment, making it rough and discolored.

The contents of the form weren’t anything to note. Name, birthplace, and next of kin were standard; other than that, there was a small section for skills and possessions that might be relevant to work.

“Um,” I said. “Is that it? Don’t you need a writ of identity or, well...anything else?”

“Huh? No, no—not while you’ve still got your soot. It’s not like you’ll be getting big jobs anyway. The Association would fall apart if we had to vet every black and red member, and what would people do if they couldn’t even become an adventurer?”

“But you’ll have a lot more to write if you climb the ranks. Amber adventurers can get jobs straight from us, so you’ll need to have your family registry and writ of identity then.”

“Yup, and you’ll have an easier time getting promoted since you’ve got a good background. Oh, but pipe up if you ever want help with your work. Lots of people will group together if they hear others are looking to join hands.”

The receptionist corps gave me three answers for one question, and nothing could reassure me more. I didn’t have to lift a finger, and an endless font of relevant knowledge came rushing my way.

The official badge we got for signing up would only be effective within Marsheim so long as we were at the black or red ranks, and it wouldn’t be accepted as proof of identity even inside the city. These plaques were handed out to anyone who took the time to write down a few words, and their only use was for the Association to sort its bottommost recruits.

Yet taken the other way around, that meant that the higher tiers did serve as identification, just like my wooden Berylinian citizenship card. With one of those, we could travel to any city with an Association branch and be treated just the same way we would be here.

Furthermore, adventurers of every sort received discounts on tolls into and out of cities, but those at amber-orange and above were entirely exempt. This exemption didn’t extend to personal travel, but that was still a major privilege.

The tiering structure of the Association was better viewed as a measure of dependability than of raw competence. We’d need to select our jobs carefully: it wasn’t just about completing a bunch of quests, but also about how reliably we completed them and how good of an impression we left on our clients.

None of this really mattered in the early stages. Like I’d mentioned, there were too many small fry for the Association to keep close eyes on us all. They’d only pay us any mind if we proved ourselves first; but once we did, the scrutiny would scale with our notoriety.

Having a sponsor or a good reputation made it easier to climb the ranks—of course it did. If the Association handed out high ranks to everyone with a talent for violence, people would immediately use their authority to commit crimes and thus damage the organization’s optics. If we wanted to make it to the top, we’d need to build trust, either through social standing or personal character.

“Let’s do our best to get promoted, shall we?”

“Yeah, let’s.”

“After all, what would be the point of our journey if we stayed petty handymen forever?”

“Oh, yeah? I didn’t think you were the type to care about that sort of thing.”

I’d been staring at the bland metal chip in my hand, engraved with an unembellished number, and feeling its heft as though it were my own soul. But Margit’s comment struck me as a bit out of character, and I looked up at her curiously.

For her part, she’d been listlessly toying with the worthless trinket, but then looked up to meet my gaze. Upon locking eyes with me, she smiled a predacious smile, pulling the corners of her lips far back to unveil two ferocious fangs.

“My, didn’t you know? I’ve always been on the hunt for greater game.”

I’d seen this menacing smile hundreds of times before...but even now, as my first adult summer was beginning, it sent a chill down my spine.

[Tips] Adventuring has spawned many legends and sagas that capture the hearts of children everywhere, but can hardly be called a path of honest living.

Our adventurer sign-up process began and ended with paper—not a single cryptic orb or blood-drawing plaque with numerical stat values in sight. Stories of days past nearly unanimously exposed their heroes’ talents in places like this, but obviously, such technology would twist the basic structure of the world just by virtue of being.

Think about it: automagical appraisal removed the need for any and every kind of testing. Even assuming there were only a handful in existence kept as national treasures by the world’s superpowers, they would certainly be used for imperial service exams. The incompetent would vanish from the upper class’s ranks in an instant.

Or, rather, I suppose the things would be smashed to bits as soon as one got in the way of a powerful oligarch trying to pass down the family title. Many were the ambitious souls trying to put their children into seats of power, and they would not let a nuisance of that magnitude sit in one piece for long.

It appeared that the metrics that made up people were filed away under labels that only the gods could access. I’d assumed as much, since even my blessing only let me peek into my own stats. At one point, I’d looked into whether a sufficiently leveled Keen Eye would be enough to see through someone else’s power level, but quickly realized that accurately knowing my own was already a privilege greater than I could hope for.

But thanks to this way of the world, my self-introduction as a Lvl 1 Fighter—just a figure of speech, of course—raised no red flags. Margit had also turned in her forms saying she was a scout, but she didn’t seem quite as inexperienced as me on paper thanks to her experience as a canton huntsman.

With our paperwork settled, we could get right to questing...but didn’t. You see, the considerate ladies running the front desk were kind enough to give us a lesson on all things adventuring first.

One major piece of news was that not everyone operated in fixed groups. In my mind, an adventuring party was composed of three to five unchanging members; in reality, it was a much more flexible affair.

After all, spell-casting mages and miracle-working priests weren’t exactly easy to find.

While capable individuals were sometimes kept on a fixed roster, most people signed up for jobs as needed and simply got to know a few regular teammates as time went on. The usual process involved core units of two or three hiring a few helping hands depending on what the job of the day entailed, just the same as day laborers. Temporary partnerships could become more permanent if those involved really hit it off, but the industry practice was to pass talent around to different groups as they were needed.

That was fair enough. It was plain to see that one would need some kind of divine intervention to put together a full party right off the bat. If society had figured out a rational way to work things out, we might as well follow suit.

Still, I had to admit that I was a bit disappointed. My expectations were being subverted at every turn.

“So, what do you say? We’d be happy to let others know if you’re looking for a helping hand.”

“Or on the other hand, we can point you toward parties that are recruiting instead.”

I glanced down at Margit, and she agreed with my wordless message by shaking her head. The two of us were lucky enough to be a fighter—slash mage—and scout; our composition was solid enough for us to get by on our own. We didn’t need help badly enough to justify the trial and error of headhunting, and it didn’t seem like a great idea to introduce more variability when we were still getting our feet wet.

The clerks here seemed happy to help us search for teammates, so it seemed safe to come back and ask for assistance only if we ended up needing it. Besides, the bulletin boards in this building also had a section for advertisements, meaning we could look through those in case we wanted to browse.

We probably wouldn’t be getting jobs outside the city for the foreseeable future anyway. I wanted to see how far the two of us could go on our own.

“Oh, to be young.”

“Aw, I remember being just like them when I was their age.”

“Please. At their age, you were three times fatter than her.”

“Pff— Ha ha!”

The ladies teased us as middle-aged ladies were wont to do. Though we weren’t newlyweds, signing up as a pair was close enough that I decided to just resign myself to the inevitable jokes.

“Oh, wait. If you two are here to become adventurers, does that mean you’re staying in an inn?”

“You really shouldn’t go to normal lodges if you have weapons on you.”

“There are places set aside for people in bloody lines of work.”

Moving on, they started telling us about the establishments adventurers often used. The Association came down hard on anyone who caused a scene in the official building or in the plaza outside—in extreme cases, people could be demoted—and so most chose to gather in their own taverns of choice instead.

Being the rootless blades of grass that we were, adventurers didn’t tend to settle down in one spot; if they did, it was almost always a pub where housing, food, and drinks were available for purchase. Marsheim was home to several such businesses explicitly geared toward adventurers.

On the flip side, those who wandered to the civilian-centric establishments were terribly unwelcome. I couldn’t blame them: the owners were civilians themselves, and nothing could be more terrifying than letting an armed, trained combatant right into one’s own house.

The ladies listed several different options where we wouldn’t get glared out of the inn, saying that which one we chose would depend on our finances. Youth came with the privilege of being taught by one’s elders—no comment on mental age—and I couldn’t be happier to take advantage of it.

Miss Coralie, the first clerk we’d talked to, recommended the Snowy Silverwolf inn as the best place to start. Although the prices were fairly high, the owner was a former adventurer with a reputation for their soft spot for newbies, to the point of offering discounts on a lot of the services provided.

On the other hand, Miss Thais—the one who’d suggested the restaurant job—said that the Buck’s Antlers would be a better spot if we wanted to start saving for the future. This was an ultra cheap motel with several large commons full of bedding, but they had separate wings for men and women and boasted good security for the price. They even opened up a steam bath once a week for no extra charge, making them very popular with beginners.

Lastly, the clerk with woodworking connections, Miss Eve, gave us the name of a location that was less a suggestion and more a goal. The Golden Mane was a tavern renowned for its epicurean quality. One night in their cheapest room without any extra bells or whistles cost fifty assarii—which, mind you, was a tiny room with two three-layer bunk beds. That alone sounded like a scam, but they changed out their sheets every two days and cleaned the rooms every three days; in terms of hygiene, they were almost weirdly attentive. Add to that the fact that Wine God priests stopped by to enjoy the food and drink served in its pub, and it was clear why some adventurers considered staying a night one of their life’s major goals.

All this was wonderful intel; nothing could be as important as a dependable inn. Finding a place where we could let down our guard and rest easy was a must if we wanted to get by in this unfamiliar land.

Seeing as we weren’t particularly strapped for cash, we would probably go for the Snowy Silverwolf. That it wasn’t too far from the Association was a big plus.

I wanted to see the place for myself, though, so our next destination was settled. But just as we started for the door, the string of subverted expectations came to an end.

“Heya, greenhorns. Heard you two are new to adventuring?”

“Signing up together and all is nice to watch. Real cute.”

A baptism by trope came walking right toward us in the form of two adventurers stopping us on our way out. One was a mensch, and the other was a cynocephalus—probably of the gnoll variety.

But clichéd as they were, they were not the kind of two-bit punks that littered wishful storytelling. Their clothes, though plain, were of respectable make; their daggers—small arms were hardly enough for law enforcement to react out here in the borderlands—boasted similar quality. Yet in spite of their neatly tailored appearances, they carried themselves with the assurance of veteran fighters.

Not too shabby. I bet they could hold their own against the watchmen back home.

A dull-orange tag peeked out from their shirts; they were heads and shoulders above us. If my read on the social power dynamics of these tiers was right, then I’d need to start investing in bootlicking skills to sustain a conversation with them.

“What pleasure might I owe two veteran adventurers?” I asked.

Yet this was no failed utopia governed by broken overlords. I met my seniors with the gracious courtesy of a smile.

“Ah, nothing major. Seeing you rookies just brought back old memories, see?”

“Yep, we’ve all been there, y’know? And so we figured, hey, why not help the kids along and show them the ropes.”

However, the two men showed no signs of caring and continued coming on strong. I could sense that Margit was on edge beside me, so I put a hand on her shoulder to convey that I would handle this.

Today was our first day, and causing a huge ruckus just wouldn’t do. Even if an incident did unfold, I wanted to make sure it didn’t wrap us up in it.

“Ebbo! Kevin! Quit picking on them!”

“You better not do anything to those two!”

But before I could say anything, the ladies at the counter stood up for us. The men’s reactions betrayed that the mensch was Ebbo, and the gnoll was Kevin.

“C’mon!” Ebbo said in a hurt tone. “Who do you think we are?”

“Look, we’re not gonna hurt them, okay?” Kevin then turned to me with a deviously toothy smile. “Hey, pal. We’ll teach you a thing or two and even treat you to dinner. What do you say to just one meal?”

Well, I supposed I’d take the opportunity to learn about the...ways of adventuring. Whether I bit the bullet now or put it off, I’d have to get around to it eventually, anyway.

[Tips] Personal combat in Marsheim can be punished with no more than ten librae in fines or one month of hard labor. This is an extremely heavy sentence compared to other cities and speaks to the city’s long history of violence.

Taken in reverse, however, this also means that anyone willing to swallow these terms is free to pick fights.

The two adventurers brought us a long ways out to a pub that was closer to the city walls than anything else.

Big outer walls tended to cut off sunlight, and the shady nearby areas were naturally prone to lower-income people in pretty much every city. They weren’t totally shunned, per se, but the denizens of these unpaved streets wore dirty rags and lived in buildings that were only a step removed from slum houses.

Dangling a sign labeled “The Inky Squid” out front was a pub that fit its surroundings all too well. To call it well kept would be undue flattery, and the clientele out front pointed to this being a tavern for adventurers. That two men were napping in the dirt absolutely wasted was a nice touch to bring the outskirts atmosphere together.

Despite this air of villainy, our walk to this point had been surprisingly unnoteworthy. The adventurers leading the way had only asked about our place of origin, our experience in battle, and other normal subjects. We hadn’t suffered any outright bullying, nor had the men made any inappropriate remarks toward Margit.

But what I had noticed was a heavy, analytical gaze. They’d eyed us from head to toe, watching our slightest movements, as if they were trying to put a number to my value. What they were interested in was what we were worth.

They beckoned us through the door and I obliged, only to be met with the pungent odor of alcohol. Strong, sour fumes of cheap booze lingered in the air.

This was a bar fit to open its doors to the ends of all earth.

Cleaning was an unfamiliar custom here, evident from the sticking sensation on the soles of my boots and the liquors lining the shelves without rhyme or reason. Tables and chairs were strewn throughout at random, as though no thought had ever been given to how the space ought to be used.

The patrons, for their part, were no paragons of dignity either: for most, I couldn’t even guess at when they’d last bathed. Anyone used to the tidiness of the capital would have immediately backed out and pretended they had seen nothing.

Booze and puke and grime mingled together into a noxious haze. One thing was for sure: I would never choose to stay in an inn like this.

That said, this wasn’t bad. No, it wasn’t bad at all. Margit was grimacing—she might have been a working huntress, but that had made her one of the most well-to-do young ladies in Konigstuhl—but I didn’t hate it.

Because this is exactly where an adventurer belongs.

“Boss!”

“We picked you up a fun kid!”

That, and because I’d never imagined I might see treasure lying around in a pile of waste like this.

“Hrm?”

Filtered through a layer of drink was a grunt somewhere between scratchy and husky in tone. The woman’s voice was deep enough to push some buttons for those with the right ear for it, but it came slipping out of a mouth bookended by two menacing fangs.

Her red-brown hair was loose and unkempt, and the rust-colored eyes peeking out from below it were dimly lit with equal parts lethality and lethargy. She sat cradling a sword in the very back of the tavern, on a couch obviously reserved for her. Yet despite the sofa’s impressive size, the towering ogre made it look like a tiny chair.

This made for my third encounter with an ogre warrior.

Yet my initial impression was that she wasn’t as impressive as the first two I’d met. Miss Lauren, the first of their kind I’d ever met, had been several cuts above in both strength and looks. This ogre was pretty in her own way and was probably far from being weak, but I didn’t get the same instinctive “Oh gods, she’s strong” that I’d felt during that festival many years ago.

I could guarantee that it wasn’t because of my own growth either. Even if I were to meet her again as I was now, I was sure that the overpowering aura of strength would still whittle away at my will.

But here, I sensed no such genius.

On a shallower note, Miss Lauren had been fairly attentive to her appearances. I’d later learned that ogres partook in makeup as a way of honoring those strong enough to take their heads in battle—the logic being that it would be rude to give the victor a sorry trophy—and she’d set her hair with oil and worn perfume. The woman in front of me, on the other hand, seemed uninterested in such preparations.

“Ah...a mensch,” she said. “What’s he like?”

“Looks real to me, boss.”

“Yep. Not a normal freshie, at least. We could throw a whole house of grunts at him and I think he’d do fine.”

As expected, our two guides had enough insight to see my strength for what it was. Though, honestly, I’d confirmed as much when my Overwhelming Grin did nothing to dissuade their advances.

“Is that so? Fine, have him get ready.”

The ogre scratched her head so violently that a few strands of metallic hair fell to the ground. She was, well...a bit of a waste. If she’d put in any effort at all, she would’ve been beautiful. It was a shame.

Margit must have read my mind, because she deftly worked her legs to pinch me in the back. I gave an apologetic little squirm and then shifted gears by asking the two men what the big idea was.

“Hm, how do I put this? Basically, when we find a promising rookie, we’re supposed to bring them back here.”

“Yep. Boss-lady’s orders.”

The half-assed explanation was paired with a gift haphazardly thrown my way. I caught it and found that it was a plain and worn wooden sword. Although it was a training weapon, it had a metal core running through its length that meant a solid hit could very well break someone’s bones.

“Them’s the breaks. Welcome to Clan Laurentius.”

“C’mon, new guy—the yard’s this way.”

Putting their hands around my back, the two adventurers pushed me along with wicked grins.

Yeah, figures.

The desk ladies at the Association had been kind enough to also fill us in on independent organizations put together by adventurers themselves. Perhaps because the practice originated with immigrants from the north, adventurers called these sorts of groups “clans.”

The major benefit to banding together in an association larger than a single party was that it made it easier to facilitate cooperation when it came to big jobs. Also, mixing and matching within the clan made forming temporary parties for one-off gigs easier, meaning finding work was more reliable for the individual members. Apparently, lots of adventurers signed up with clans on top of founding parties as core members.

The whole scheme was kind of like a university club—tabletop culture had also done something similar. TRPGs could only be played in numbers, and so people had formed groups to do so: some made organizations big enough to host conventions, while others just had a few regular friends in a private group, but in the end, everyone was simply getting people together in their own unique way.

Alas, the actions of people were the same no matter the world, for better and for worse.

The Association ladies had given us a stern warning not to associate with clans willy-nilly: some were out to take full advantage of naive rookies.

They’d given us the names of a few in particular to watch out for, and while Clan Laurentius hadn’t been mentioned, that was probably just a matter of relativity. Every organization that pulled in new recruits like this was the same.

They wanted a sign-up fee and a cut of every job. Or if not that, then they wanted to extort us for something we had. Any attempt at refusing would see us brought to a secluded place for punishment and a threat that they’d make it so we could never make it as adventurers. The Adventurer’s Association could try and make its processes as smooth as it wanted to; it would never outpace the eternal constant that was the fundamental inefficiency of human malice.

Honestly, people really never changed. Maybe I’d let my guard down too much. Staying so long in the patrolled streets of Berylin must have left me desensitized to the reality of danger; I probably should’ve spent more time in seedier scenes.

I supposed it was too late now. As someone who actually did have a pretty penny to my name, I’d just have to learn this lesson going forward.

For now, though, I’d just have to clean up the mess I’d made. At least this bit of common sense worked no matter where I went.

“Goodness,” Margit sighed. “Why must everyone be so hotheaded?”

The targets of her exasperation seemed to include me for some reason, but for the time being I asked her to stay out of range as I checked the grip on my wooden sword.

In adventuring, letting others look down on you was a quick way to put yourself out of work—and I’d known as much before I’d even set off.

[Tips] “Clans” as they pertain to adventuring are a cultural construct local to the western reaches of the Trialist Empire, but similar organizations exist all over the world, albeit under different names. In Marsheim, clans evolved from immigrant adventurers from the north cooperating beyond party lines, and this influence of northern culture led to the naming scheme.

In the present, the scope of clans grows with each passing day.

Information on clan culture had been hard to come by in the capital, but I knew that these kinds of groups existed everywhere. Where there were people, there were social structures; where there were social structures, there were rulers; and rulers demanded tribute for the service of their protection. In exchange, the subjects of said protection enjoyed relative safety and the help of their fellow subjects in order to get ahead.

The scheme was so timeworn that there wasn’t anything particularly interesting to note.

“I dunno how to put it,” Kevin said. “The boss-lady’s tired, I guess.”

I’d been led into a courtyard neat enough to give me whiplash from the chaotic mess indoors, and the gnoll adventurer began talking to me as I rolled up my sleeves. He was sitting against a probably empty barrel and lackadaisically propping his face up with one hand in a way that got under my skin. He had a wild virility that I couldn’t replicate as a mensch, and it made him look strong just by standing there.

“I mean, you know how it is. Ogres are, well, y’know.”

“Battle-crazy?” I asked.

“Yeah, that.”

Simple as the wooden sword was, it wasn’t bad. It wasn’t bent out of shape and the metal core was properly calibrated to mimic a real blade’s center of balance. Though I personally would have preferred it to be a touch shorter, it wasn’t so long as to become unwieldy. Besides, I couldn’t really complain when the whole point of Hybrid Sword Arts was the idea of using any and everything that came my way.

“But y’see, the boss-lady’s strong, but it’s just too much for her. Y’know?”

“As in, there aren’t enough people to fight?”

“That too, but it’s more like... I think ogres just have some kinda hunger that we can’t really get.”

The man’s musings carried great weight as he fixed his eyes on the ogre preparing for battle.

Her massive, baggy shirt could easily have made for a floresiensis tent, but now she’d tied it tight just under her chest. She pulled up her pant legs to her knees and then took a few coils of rope from around her belt to tie them up too. Finally, she pushed back her disheveled hair and fastened it into a somewhat-neat bouquet of coppery luster.

Put together, she was remarkably beautiful. Though the sharper contours made her look even sterner, the thin wrinkle encasing her upturned eyes helped to create a powerful air of dignity. A thin but high nose added to this pride, and her giant canines—long even for an ogre—overpowered a pair of lean lips to heighten the intimidation factor all the more.

The woman was a literal femme fatale; if she put on a touch of eyeliner and dressed in Japanese garb, she could play the part of a yakuza matron. It was such a shame that she spent her days drinking on the couch of this run-down tavern.

Evidently, Kevin felt the same way: scratching at his splendid gnoll mane, he let out an indescribably sad sigh.

“‘Not enough—it’s not enough.’ That’s all she ever says when she’s drinking. But she still knocks us around like a bunch of twigs, so I just don’t get it.”

“Isn’t that normal, though? I’m sure there are parts of gnoll culture that mensch like me can never understand.”

“Fair enough. You lot don’t have any clue how bad it is to be in the thick of it.”

To be “in the thick of it” was a reference to sexual heat, if I recalled. Demihumans with mating seasons had it rough.

“But I came along for the ride because I look up to her strength,” Kevin went on. “So I’d be lying if I said I’m all right with how things are now.”

“So you toss her any new adventurer who looks like they can handle themselves in the hopes that it’ll lift her spirits.”

“Pretty much. Used to be that we’d be the ones going in to fight, but we couldn’t keep that up. No way.”

The man’s nonchalant laughter irked me a bit. Just a bit, mind you. It was just that he was a tough gnoll, and he’d said himself that he couldn’t keep up with his boss; that meant he was well aware of what would happen to a mensch in the same position, considering we were about as squishy as walking blocks of tofu.

“Hey, don’t say I didn’t give you a choice,” he said. “Half of your cash and a tenth of your pay—that’s all it takes to call it quits here and have the boss-lady keep any other goon off you.”

But then again, I supposed that knowledge was the whole reason this protection racket existed to begin with. The two choices on offer were an impossible fight and a steep shakedown. If I dared not to take either, then they’d reduce me to dog food on the spot, or worse, ruin my most key selling point as an adventurer—my reputation.

That would be a fatal blow. My opponent might have been an ogre, but adventuring was a trade embroiled in blood; turning tail and running would brand me as a coward anywhere I went.

“I want the boss-lady to let off her steam, but it’s not like I’m a fan of seeing kids get the daylights beat outta them—okay, not that much of a fan. Anyway, lemme ask you one last time.”

How many fresh recruits could stand their ground after seeing an ogre swing a sword so huge that it had to have been a custom order? Of them, how many of those courageous souls had gotten away without being made to know their own recklessness?

I didn’t blame those whose spirits had crumbled when faced with the terrifying sound of wood ripping through air. In fact, I imagined a great many had thought to themselves that ten percent wasn’t a bad cut to have this icon of violence backing their efforts.

“You sure you don’t wanna quit?”

But meager as it was, I had my own pride to uphold. I had the two masters I’d studied under and the friends I’d adventured with to honor...and most of all, my life was the product of the enemies I’d felled. To shamefully back down here would be to throw dirt on all of their memories; I could accept that I was inexperienced, but I would not do them the disservice of claiming I was weak.

“A pretty lady’s looking to dance,” I said. “I’d have to have nothing between my legs to turn her down.”

And I wasn’t going to let anyone get that idea in their heads either.

“Heh, have it your way. Knock yourself out, greenhorn. We do know a priest just in case, so we can patch up your broken bones if you’ve got the coin for it. Well, if we’re not picking them up off the ground, that is.”

Turning my back on the jeers, I took my place in front of the waiting ogre.

Now that we were face-to-face, it felt like I was up against a solid wall. The size differential was so intimidating that I again couldn’t blame anyone who would want to back out at this point.

Still, it was far from despair-inducing. The GM of fate had thrown me into some real bullshit in my years; she would need to be a few notches more monstrous to make me ball up my character sheet.

I’d spent a whole lot of time and effort helping Dietrich just because I’d felt like she was wasting her talents, and here was a woman who reminded me of an old, old acquaintance. It only made sense for me to show her a little kindness.

No words, no greetings, no customary ogre salutation—the fight began with an unannounced attack. The sudden strike came from a relaxed position and swept up; despite looking lazy, it was a precise attack that required all four limbs to be in perfect sync.

I stepped around the uppercut by turning to my left and letting it fly past parallel to my body. Seeing it zip by close enough to take a few strands off my bangs wasn’t very good for my heart.

I returned the favor by stabbing with the wooden blade in my right hand. My aim was her left leg, which she’d made the fulcrum of her swing. The step she’d taken toward me put her within my range, despite her being twice my height.

Still turned sideways, I poked at her without moving my core: instead, I flexed my arm and powered a jab with my shoulder and pecs. Though I looked to be using nothing more than my arm, I was pushing off my back leg to drive my attack.

The demonic gold of her irises flashed as her eyes went wide. But then, she reacted brilliantly: kicking up her left leg, she knocked away the tip of my sword.

Steeped in booze or not, a gem was a gem—she had good instincts. Even if I’d been using a real sword, she’d diverted the course well enough that it wouldn’t have broken skin.

Finally, some life showed in those listless eyes of hers.

What came next was a counterattack that began before her foot was even back on the ground. Grabbing the blade of her upturned sword with her other hand, she brought her weapon down pommel first. Using the handle-side of a sword as a blunt weapon was traditionally meant for armored foes, but it could also be a smart way to sustain pressure off a missed attack.

Nice. Looks like she’s starting to get serious.

I ducked under the strike and dipped into her guard with the intent to slice from right underneath her; unfortunately, she immediately kicked at me, and I had to back off.

But all this did was prove to me that she wasn’t comfortable fighting in close quarters. She stood with both hands gripping her gargantuan blade, and my landing turned into another step that propelled me right back into her reach.

Ogres were about three meters tall; mensch were anywhere from half to two-thirds their height. All I had to do to understand how annoying it was for her to fight me was imagine myself facing a goblin. Being bipedal naturally meant our legs had to work harder to swing at things placed significantly lower than ourselves, and even then, we couldn’t put as much power into a strike as usual.

And if I could imagine that, then all I had to do was fall back on my old motto: Do whatever your enemies would prefer you didn’t.

Rather than trying to block the tornado of wood whirling around me, I parried the rushing blade and gained ground. With my Strength, a solid hit would crush me no matter how expertly I tried to catch it. Mass didn’t care about skill, and I was content to deflect and dodge.

By the time I’d parried, evaded, and counterattacked a dozen or so times, the crowd began to show some excitement. The clan members who’d stayed inside were starting to file out to watch.

On the whole, they’d probably thought that the duel would only last a few seconds and hadn’t bothered. But that the piercing sound of clanging wood hadn’t been cut short by a mensch boy’s screaming must have piqued their curiosity.

Watch to your hearts’ content, but this show won’t end the way you’re hoping.

I mean, my partner had sat herself down to watch with a bit of jerky she’d gotten while I wasn’t looking. I couldn’t let this end in a boring way.

The swings were faster; the technique more precise; the attacks more alluring. Despite being a single sword-wielding system from head to toe, the ogre threw in relentless kicks and punches. Until now, her strikes had been at the level where I arguably could’ve survived a hit, but any of these would splatter my mensch body like an overripe fruit.

Yet this was no childish frustration taking hold and steering her away from moderation. No, this was her body remembering its duty and pulling her toward her ogre instincts. Things were heating up in more ways than one, and I was happy to oblige.

I bided my time in an obnoxiously clingy range until I finally found the opening I was looking for: a massive swing meant to throw me off. She probably wanted to regain space and bring the fight back to her favored spacing, but I wasn’t so easy.

Arcing death rushed at me from my left, and I stood with my sword ready to catch it. Just as our weapons made contact, I leaped parallel to the ground and her blade both, using the connecting point as the fulcrum for my jump. Skating the length of my sword across her attack, I avoided the strike and held my ground.

It was a risky stunt and I could only afford to be so dramatic, but I’d figured—correctly—I could pull it off. Being able to gauge whether any given trick would succeed was my favorite part of fixed-value builds. Nothing was more embarrassing than talking a big game and whiffing, but when a set of snake eyes was the only thing that could stop me from showing off, I was more than willing to indulge.

The sword zipping by nearly pulled me off-balance, but I managed to catch my landing and place the point of my blade just below her right armpit before she could recover from her follow-through. Ogres boasted natural armor in their alloy-infused skin, but this underarm section of the torso was thinly protected, and one stab between the ribs would prove fatal.

She knew the truth just as well as I. Frozen at the end of her arc, she stared down at me without so much as lowering her blade.

I gave her two pats on the side to convey a wordless message: Satisfied?

After a few seconds of delay, the members of the crowd began to murmur. Not a single one of them had imagined their boss might lose, and as such, it had taken them a second to process what they were seeing.

Mixing into the perplexed voices was one heavy sigh. It was a long, long exhalation that smelled of spirits. After her deep breath, the ogre threw her weapon aside and turned her back to me. She walked over to one corner of the yard, grabbed a pot off a stack of similar pots, threw off its lid, and dumped the contents right on top of herself.

The pot had been full of plain water, probably as a firefighting tool. Once she was done dramatically showering herself, she scooped a handful of what remained and took a big gulp. Carelessly slamming down the fragile breakable, she scooped up her soaking hair and shouted.

“Kevin!”

“Wha— Yes’m?!”

“Get me my swords!”

Tasked with an order, the gnoll scrambled back inside, and the sounds of him rummaging through clutter could be heard until he reemerged. He’d brought with him a pair of wooden swords: one was about two sizes smaller than what the ogre had been wielding thus far, and the other was even smaller than that.

He gingerly offered them to his boss. She took them and, in an instant, her whole demeanor changed.

Aha. The classic ogre longsword wasn’t actually her weapon of choice. She’d been competent, to be sure, but not serious. Those blades, on the other hand, were the real deal—that was what she’d built herself on. They were the arms that she knew better than the back of her hand.

Two swords was an odd choice. I’d never seen anyone dual wield before. It matched up poorly against shielded foes, so the style was practically unheard of in the western half of the continent.

But if that was how she’d made her name as an adventurer, then it had to be real...which meant using one unfamiliar blade was going to prove difficult.

“Here you are. Looking for this?”

Before I could do a thing, though, Margit sneaked up on me with a small shield from gods-knew-where in hand.

“Thanks. You know me too well.”

“You’re very welcome. Finding this was a paltry errand if it means you’ll put on an even more terrific show for me.”

I thanked her for the thoughtful gesture with a courteous bow, and she followed suit by pinching her skirt for a curtsy. I really was lucky to have such an understanding companion.

The ogre waited for us to finish our little exchange, but once Margit had scurried off, she appeared before me with both swords in hand. She brought the handle of the longer one in her right hand up to her forehead—an honorable salutation for when a warrior’s hands were full. Though the custom’s origins were different from those on Earth, I found it funny that the meaning and motions were familiar to me.

“Allow me to apologize for the dishonor of striking without so much as an introduction, newcomer. My name is Laurentius—Laurentius the Free of the Gargantuan Tribe. Will you do me the honor of naming yourself?”

She spoke in an artless, masculine Rhinian, but her respect came through in spades. The spirit of liquor was gone, replaced with the dignity of an ogre warrior.

Hiding my surprise that she hailed from the same tribe as my old acquaintance, I mimicked her salutation and introduced myself.

“Erich of Konigstuhl, son of Johannes.”

My introduction was a short one, and it would stay that way until I earned a name for myself through my own exploits. But I had no need for shame: mine was a name worth announcing with pride.

“Very well, Erich of Konigstuhl. I can see you seem ready to go, but let me say this as a matter of courtesy. I have already lost once—whether the first bout was serious or not, I know nothing can be more shameful than to ask for another chance. But I still ask: will you accept another duel?”

I answered with a thrust of my sword.

Talk was cheap. The only conversation worth having was one with our blades.

[Tips] Ogre society places emphasis on tribal relations; no ogres possess family names. However, warriors are given epithets that also double as delineators of class. The Gargantuan Tribe that Lauren and Laurentius hail from has five tiers. In ascending order, they are the Bold, the Free, the Unyielding, the Valiant, and the Stalwart.

Martial skill sufficiently honed seems to the outside observer a dance.

“Whoa?! How the hell did he dodge that?!”

“The shield... Did you see his shield get yanked away, or was that just me? How come he didn’t get hit after that?”

“You dumbass. He kicked away Boss’s sword while he was flying back!”

“What kinda mensch can do that?! You sure the kid ain’t a goblin or something?!”

“Don’t you pin that kinda crazy move on size! I’m a goblin, not a damn alf. Anyone who tries that should be dead to rights no matter how big!”

Some could follow the action, others could catch glimpses, and others still saw nothing at all; varied as the responses were, everyone was watching with clenched fists.

This was a performance of sword and shield—ah, a correction. The swords were not real, but simple replicas. Though perhaps such a distinction was meaningless when the blurred wood still represented death in one blow.

Swordplay with two weapons was, at least in the western reaches of the Central Continent, a rarity. The only swords seen in battle were great zweihanders or longswords paired with shields.

To wield a sword with one hand was already a challenge, even on one’s dominant side, requiring a high baseline level of strength and stability just to swing. Logically, it followed that to wield a sword in each hand was difficult beyond imagination.

Further, the reward was to have a weapon in one’s clumsy off hand at the cost of a protective shield. It was little wonder why the style never caught on, with how few the benefits seemed. Without two-handed leverage, a swordsman would struggle to knock away enemy shields; without a shield of one’s own, they would struggle to defend themselves; and when facing off against a greatsword with two arms’ power behind it, blocking would become a tremendous challenge.

As an art, it offered mediocrity in every field, save perhaps for appearances. Arguably, a grand enough display could intimidate an opponent.

It was obvious why the Empire and its neighbors saw few dual-wielding swordsmen in their lands...but these flaws were only the surface layer of the craft—a surface layer that only pertained to those who did not have the build for it.

“Graaah!”

A husky shout set the air atremble, numbing the ears of all who heard it. Two blades flew about alongside the battle cry, though not in unison: the right longsword launched a pinpoint strike only for the left to cover any opening caused by a shift in posture.

The shorter blade constantly flickered to just where it was needed to support its longer companion. Fluid trails of steel blended into unbroken arcs of raw motion—each an attack, defense, and the connections in between.

Dual wielding was an exquisite skill that went beyond merely doubling the number of swords. By manipulating the two weapons in tandem, one could create an unceasing barrage of offense. The right had the power and precision to tilt, crush, or slice through shields; the left had the freedom to take opportunistic jabs and cover openings.

Most who had crossed these blades had been unable to see through the unfamiliar maneuvers and cracked in a few exchanges. Of the few who hadn’t, most had been overwhelmed before being able to come up with a means of fighting back. An art of swordplay built on a sound foundation in a land where its methods were unknown threatened death at first sight even in its most basic form.

Oh, those pitiful souls. They would never know that this skill had been honed solely to challenge one lofty champion.

“Huh? No, wait—no way. How’d he dodge that?!”

“Wait, what happened?! I couldn’t see anything ’cause the boss was in the way!”

“I’m pretty sure the brat just kicked off of Boss’s sword!”

“The hell are you on about?! I swear I saw the sword go straight through him!”

Yet the little warrior with his sword and shield did not flinch as he navigated the maelstrom of blades. He parried and dodged at every turn, and when a blow connected, he rolled off the momentum and avoided more lethal follow-ups. The timing of his footwork was perfect down to fractions of a second, leaving the afterimage of boy and blade intermingling; his shield was placed so immaculately that it hardly raised a sound as it gently guided the dual blades away.

He had yet to take a clean hit and showed no intentions of sullying that record. Harder to pin down than a mirage, at certain angles it almost seemed as if the blows passed right through him. At this point, it would have been easier for the onlookers to believe that this performance was some kind of scam.

The members of the crowd knew just how strong their leader was, and a curious tension was palpable in the air between them. Here was a fresh adventurer who’d just gotten his badge, unveiling unthinkable talents...but he was still mensch. The slightest mistake would cost him his life. The two halves blended together to create an indescribable suspense that hung over all the spectators.

That is, all but one.

One young arachne was leisurely sitting on a barrel and hogging one of the best sight lines in the yard for herself. In her hand was a bit of unattended jerky she’d helped herself to; it was far too salty to call good meat, but it would do as a snack while she watched the others clamor.

Everyone else was losing their mind, but she knew one simple truth: the boy with the sword and shield was still totally composed.

Forget lethal blows—he had yet to even take any real punishment. Despite all his seemingly painful tumbles across the dirt, he’d clearly dispersed most of the impacts throughout the ground itself. He probably had a few bruises and scrapes, but nothing that would leave a mark.

Besides, all she had to do was look at him. He almost certainly didn’t realize it, but his lips were curled into a grin wider than the crescent moon. The boy was a certified battle junkie in his own right, even if he would never admit it.

The arachne maiden had seen this boy proudly march into danger to unveil the fruits of his labor time and time again. His actions in combat seemed almost like a statement of his efforts: it was as if he didn’t like fighting itself, but rather his own sheer prowess.

Truthfully, he worried her sometimes. The boy had agreed to this duel on the grounds of “cleaning up after his own messes,” but it seemed to her a sugarcoated excuse to indulge his bloody instincts. Surely they could have found a way to escape or avoid the fight, but he had taken the initiative to take the shortest path toward conflict. What could she call this behavior if not battle-crazed?

On the other hand, how was the ogre faring? Well, she hadn’t suffered any clean hits either, but one look at her tightly pursed lips was enough to glean the truth—that she had yet to break down the boy’s defenses clearly left her at a loss.

Rather, the figure dancing in her eyes was no fleeting mensch adolescent: it was an infinite vacuum, an unknowable leviathan channeled through a sword and shield. The skills she’d polished were simply not enough: not her masterful dance of doubled blades, nor her perfectly executed feints, nor even her parrying technique capable of diverting ogre greatswords.

The boy’s weapon crissed and crossed, leaving shallow traces worming over the surface of her skin. Each mark fueled the ogre’s sense of incompetence, which, in turn, fueled her rage.

None of the hits had been substantial enough for either duelist to justify a break in combat, but a warrior had her pride. Yes, these scratches would have been nonissues had she been armored, but the very idea that she’d suffered damage became mental baggage for her to carry.

“Well, aren’t we having fun?”

The mumbling girl was positively enraptured as she watched her childhood companion fight on. As a huntress, she understood the ego involved in matters of life and death—the satisfaction of proving one’s skill by triumphing over a challenging rival. It was a joy unknown to those who simply preyed on the weak. Hunting rabbits was a facet of the job, of course, but it would never compare to bringing down a wolf in a hard-fought chase.

Today, the boy had found a foe whom he could enjoy himself against. Good for him.

“Whoa?!”

The yard quaked as the crowd erupted in unison. A powerful blow had destroyed the boy’s shield and scattered the bits to the wind. Finally, the tides had turned, and it would be their boss who would take home the victory.

“Oh, Erich... I see you were enjoying yourself a smidge too much.”

Yet it was not meant to be: the shield was not the only thing twirling through air. Half a beat later, the shorter sword in the ogre’s off hand went flying.

Amid the endless whirlwind of violence, the boy had slipped his blade into the tiniest of openings. Like a silent serpent, his blade had slithered over to strike at the pommel of the ogre’s weapon.

Having been partially disarmed, both parties jumped back and locked eyes. They stared one another down, gauging the situation...until they lowered their weapons in unison.

The spectators’ excitement turned to confusion at once. They could go on, couldn’t they? Why were they stopping? They both had their main arms remaining, right?

Only the huntress and a few other silent members of the crowd knew the truth. For a swordsman, loss of equipment was akin to loss in battle. While they would have fought to the end had this been a true duel to the death, there was no escaping the label of defeat in a more sportsmanlike setting.

In this fateful moment, both of the competitors had lost.

[Tips] Dual wielding is a style of swordplay that, as the name suggests, revolves around the use of two blades. The benefits it provides are heavily outweighed by its prerequisite skill, and there are few practitioners of the craft.

Of the limited schools of dual wielding found in the western reach, the main tradition is to use one’s right-hand weapon for primary attacks and one’s left-hand weapon as a supplemental tool.

There’s nothing more embarrassing than losing because you got cocky.

Pulling my stinging left hand back, I placed the wooden sword on my forehead as a show of respect.

If you’ll allow me to defend myself for a moment: I hadn’t been sandbagging. Okay, sure, forgoing spells pretty much entirely defeated the point of my build at a fundamental level, but my master in magic had been the one to ban their use. Could you blame me?

Besides, once she’d switched to wielding dual blades, I had hardly been able to consider my opponent’s skills “wasted.”

Truth be told, I’d made light of her: Was a dual wielder really anything to worry about? I’d wondered. There simply weren’t any practitioners around these parts. Not only did it match up poorly against polearms and war axes, but Sir Lambert had warned us that he’d seen many a fighter try it in the past only to later discover that it was all style and no substance. When a man who’d survived the horrors of war had written it off, it was hard not to be skeptical.

Yet oh, how wrong I’d been.

Gods, was Miss Laurentius a menace. Her technique was perfectly tuned to her inherent strength and made for a terrific final package. In her main hand she wielded what would ordinarily be a zweihander—at no loss of power—so expertly that she’d not only intercepted my attacks, but parried them. Meanwhile, her off hand had been precisely scooping at my shield to peel away my defenses.

This was not two swords strapped onto the back of brute ogre strength. It was an unwavering understanding of sword logic, internalized as her own skill.

But it wasn’t only her swordplay that impressed me: her footwork was brilliant. Always occupying positions that had been just too uncomfortable to get a good swing at, her honed movements could surely let her deflect the brutal violence of ogre greatswords even with her relatively small weapons.

So this is her full strength. I wondered how things would have turned out had I been using my own buckler, casting spells, and wielding the blade I knew best. Argh, it was at times like these when Lady Agrippina’s assignment truly got under my skin.

If only I hadn’t had these bags of sand weighing me down, I was sure our battle would have made my heart soar even higher.

That said, I felt like my performance was less real sandbagging and more an instance of prioritizing style. I’d given it my all as a swordsman. While I had to admit that I’d tested out a bunch of different ideas, since it was my first time against a dual wielder, I had no reservations in saying that I’d done my best.

Plus, I managed to Disarm her at the very last moment. Not that it mattered when I had lost my shield first, but still.

This world really was a combo-oriented system: even with my double Scale IXs, I still couldn’t breeze my way through fights. The road to the summit looked long, and I’d have to treat this defeat as a stepping stone on my way to the top.

“A splendid performance, Erich.” Miss Laurentius the ogre swordsman returned my salute and, unbelievably, said, “It’s my loss.”

“Huh?”

What the hell is she talking about?

Ignoring my befuddlement, she put out her left hand. Looking closer, her pinky and ring fingers were bent in a worrying direction.

Oh, shit. I thought I’d managed to cleanly knock out the handle, but it looked like it had snagged on her hand.

“My fingers are out of their sockets,” she said. “They aren’t broken, but this is proof that you scored a clean hit.”

Apparently, my Disarmament had dislocated two of her fingers. On my side, I’d let go of the shield in time to avoid a similar fate.

My worries seemed unfounded, though: she grabbed the wayward digits with her other hand and forcefully jerked them back into place. They made a gruesome sound...but maybe ogre joints were as tough as the rest of their bodies?

“But I was the first to lose my arms,” I said, “and my left hand is paralyzed and won’t be in usable condition for some time. Surely it must be my loss.”

Yet no matter what damage she’d taken, the truth was as I’d just said. Had the duel continued, I wouldn’t have had the option of switching to a two-handed style or trying to pick the shield back up. I couldn’t even feel whether or not my fingers were properly attached to my hand.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she argued. “The pinky is the fulcrum of grip: I wouldn’t have been able to swing a sword properly with it twisted, and I know you wouldn’t be forgiving enough to let me pop it back into place in the middle of combat. We’ve already seen how things end with one sword apiece—I don’t intend to shamelessly ignore the truth.”

“But it would take time for my sense of touch to return. I’m not deft enough to cross swords with you while compensating for a paralyzed left half.”

Our back-and-forth of “No, I lost!” went on for a few more rounds until the crowd managed to push past their confusion to suggest that we both accept defeat. Even with their suggestion, we still couldn’t work out a solution.

After all, no warrior wanted to acknowledge a draw.

There were, of course, situations on the battlefield where a fight would fizzle out without a clear victor. However, this was a one-on-one duel in a sterilized environment where one good hit marked the end of combat. How could I ever accept a draw in a situation like this, especially when the order of who’d lost their off-hand equipment first was so clear?

Swordsmen were stubborn creatures, and that was doubly true for a prideful ogre. Truthfully, wins were easy to unhand, but losses were worth clinging to until one’s dying breath; the path of the blade was tread upon off the lessons of defeat.

After a long debate, we were no closer to an agreement and were not in a condition to run the duel back.

“...Fine, then.” With a sly grin, the ogre slicked back her wet hair and said, “Let’s settle this another way.”

“Another way?”

I cocked my head, confused at how a duel between swordsmen could be settled without crossing swords. Miss Laurentius almost began to speak when, suddenly, a stray thought stopped her in her tracks.

“Wait... Excuse me. Did you say Erich of Konigstuhl?”

“Uh, yes. As I said in my introduction.”

The color drained from her face. Ogre skin naturally shifted to the hue of a clear blue sky when happy or excited, and a dark navy when less so.

Placing a hand on her chin, she began muttering to herself inaudibly. Had she noticed something wrong? I could swear I heard the clattering of dice somewhere, but this wasn’t about to turn into cosmic horror, was it?

“Would you happen to know a Lauren from the same Gargantuan Tribe as me, by any chance?”

Miss Laurentius squeezed the words out like they’d gone through a press, but all they represented for me was a nostalgic name. Not only did I know Lauren, but I’d just been reminiscing on the memory. How could I ever forget the woman who’d egged me on to try the helm-splitting challenge—and who’d indirectly ruined my brother’s ability to stand on even ground with his wife? Even now, Elisa loved to gaze into the big pearl I’d won for her whenever she had some time to herself.

Oh, of course! Miss Laurentius had said she was from the Gargantuan Tribe too; they must have hailed from the same place. Fate was a funny thing.

I answered by telling the helm-splitting story from my childhood, but that only worsened her complexion. I wondered what kind of history they had.

“L-Let’s drink!”

“Huh?”

“We’ll settle this duel over drinks!”

Suddenly, she grabbed my shoulder and began pushing me back in toward the bar. I tried to stand my ground so I could get a read on what was happening, but my heels did little more than kick up dust.

“Kevin!”

“Yes’m?!”

“Bring my liquor! The special stuff! Tonight’s tab is on me!”

“Wha— Huh? Booze? You want me to get booze?!”

“That’s right! And not the usual cheap crap! Ebbo, go get us fish! Don’t make the old man cook—head out and find us meat, and lots of it! I’ll even pay for a whole cow!”

“Yes, boss!”

The clan leader tossed the money pouch tied at her belt—a “pouch” only by ogre standards—at her subordinates, and the lowlier adventurers all scrambled off to see to their tasks. Those who were still around rushed to clean up the interior as soon as their boss barked at them.

Huh? What’s going... Just, huh?!

I was absolutely stumped. Things were moving along without my understanding; the whole situation had taken on a bit of an absurd cast, from where I was standing.

As I was thinking, Margit hopped onto my neck with her trademark pounce. Hey, wait, I’m sweaty. Can you wait?

“Why not take up the offer?” she said. “Drinks aren’t free every day, you know.”

“Sure, but—”

“I suspect our host won’t be budging anytime soon.” Wriggling around, she plopped her chin on my shoulder to face Miss Laurentius behind me. “Isn’t that right?”

For some unknowable reason, my earring jingled, and I felt a cold shock run straight down my spine...

[Tips] Ogre culture places emphasis on producing strong children.

I’d forgotten what good liquor tastes like, the ogre thought as the burning spirits wetted her eye.

Born in the west, Laurentius’s first bath as a newborn was a tub of water in an encampment tent, just like so many others of her kind. If anything about her was different, it was that she considered herself a failure.

Although she’d grown tired of counting the years around fifty, she’d charged through over eighty lines of defenders in over twenty wartime battles, not to mention how she’d participated in north of sixty duels. After the tribe council had bestowed the rank of “the Free” upon her, she’d taken eighteen more heads.

Those had been good days. She had become a warrior—as only women could be warriors, none would dare demean an ogre by calling her a warrioress—relatively quickly, and her life had been smooth sailing around the time she’d gotten her title.

Alas, she had not been alone. The woman who’d knelt beside her on the day of the ceremony as the new warriors were sworn in had been the worst possible match.

Her name was Lauren—nowadays, Lauren the Valiant. Precious few warriors ever reached the penultimate title of reverence within their tribe, and she was one of them.

The two ogres had been born to the same generation, and they’d trained as if they were in direct competition with each other. When was it then, Laurentius wondered, that she had found herself no longer able to keep up?

She lost in strength; she lost in height; she lost in honors; she lost in fight.

Realizing that she had hit a wall, Laurentius had studied a dual-wielding style under a foreign master. Yet just as she’d felt as though she was gaining ground, her rival had brought home the head of a foe sung about in songs and legends to earn a new title—she had now lost in rank, as well.

With nothing to lose, she’d put everything on the line to challenge Lauren to one final duel...only to be utterly trampled. Heartbroken, she’d slammed her fist into the ground until it bled as if to ask whether her life had amounted to anything at all. But what stung more to this day were those three jolly words: “A fine fight.”

A fine fight? What part of the fight had been fine? Had she possessed the resolve to throw away her final bit of decency as an ogre, Laurentius would have liked to grab her opponent by the collar and ask these questions burning within her soul.

Leaving only the bitter taste of defeat in her wake, the indomitable Lauren had then leisurely ventured off to tour the lands.

Laurentius had followed, as if to give chase—or perhaps to escape the eyes of her people. She could no longer remember why she’d chosen the same destination.

So too was it difficult to answer why she’d forgone the life of a mercenary and instead settled into adventuring. Was it fear? Or perhaps it was the unsightly clinging of a woman who could not bring herself to forsake the path of a warrior in its entirety. Regardless, it wasn’t as if she could put bread on the table through any means but violence—but come to think of it, her days of impoverished adventuring were a distant memory.

The color of the tag dangling at her neck meant nothing to her, but it was now a vivid blue. At some point or another she’d realized she had lackeys, and after leaving them to their own devices, she’d found herself leading a clan. It had been around then that money began to flow whether she worked or not.

Of course, she still did work. But it had been a long time since news of a worthy foe had spurred her to pick a fight. Instead, she merely tossed around her henchmen to keep them sharp and played with whatever young blood they picked out as offerings. These were comfortable days spent under a film of rust.

And all at once, the stagnant mire had been blown away.

The sensation of wood on her side struck her like lightning; her fingers popped out with the passion of an embrace. The long forgotten euphoria of drowning in pure battle, so native to the ogre soul, once again washed over her. After all this time of pushing it away, of fleeing from it, the taste of combat sat indescribably on her palate—a thousand words would not do a fragment of the experience justice.

Here was a liquor worth a drachma per bottle, and not even it could match the rich flavor enveloping her. Defeat was so frustrating, so painful...yet so sweet. It was in that moment that she’d realized that this was simply an ogre’s fate.

Her only regret was that the duel had not been one of mortal stakes. Wood was lacking: life could only be lived at the end of steel. Worse yet, she had been plenty capable of dealing a death blow, despite encountering no such danger herself. That left a sourness not even the finest whiskey could wash away.

But what vexed her most of all was her opponent. The boy awkwardly lapping at his drink in the next seat over hadn’t gotten to show his full power either.

“Hm? Do you not like northern liquors? This is a personal favorite of mine.”

“I’m sorry. My tongue isn’t fully mature yet, it seems.”

The fault lay with her: she hadn’t been strong enough to draw out his true strength. She had no intention of making excuses about her weaponry; the boy, too, had been using a wooden sword and had wielded it to perfection.

Yet whether she made excuses or not, it was disappointing that she hadn’t gotten to see the depth of his skills. Her heart stirred, yearning for a duel to the death.

Amid their mock battle, she’d noticed a curiosity about his movements—a hesitation borne from unconsciously seeking opportunities for a tool not in hand. As with any good warrior, he must have had an ace up his sleeve that he’d wished to use.

Laurentius downed her drink with the hope that she’d get to see what he was hiding one day—even if it meant being on the receiving end.

“Not enough...”

Yet as of now, she was far from satisfied. It was such a shame that she’d managed to heighten her mood so much without any means of appeasing this burning excitement.

“More, Boss? Just say the word.”

“Huh? Ah, sure. Thanks.”

The subordinate dutifully waiting on her poured out another cupful of golden liquid, but the wobbling liquor was not where her heart lay.

Alas, she couldn’t indulge in what she truly wished to sample. The fleeting pleasure was simply not worth the consequences—rather, she was already in a serious predicament.

To begin with, ogres were a battle-hungry people. The rational parts of their minds had kept them from tearing themselves apart by only the slimmest of margins; it followed that the entirety of their culture was centered around violence.

One practice of their brutal culture was the spit trade.

There was no cause that could arouse more single-minded passion than vengeance, and in the olden days, ogres had boasted a terrifically depraved custom: they’d gone around purposefully leaving survivors to generate vengeful fighters. Everything from their proud introductions on the battlefield to their tribal rallying cries was a message to those they left behind, shamelessly coaxing them into taking revenge.

But nothing could withstand the power of a grudge. In the distant past lost even to oral tradition, the ogres’ hubris had brought ruin upon them. The famed eighty-two tribes once spoken of in reverence now numbered only thirty-one.

Recognizing that arrogance would be their downfall, the ogres abandoned the distasteful practice—though not entirely. The long-standing tradition of singling out a future foe lived on in the form of a kiss.

An ogre’s lips were sacred, second only to the hand that held her sword. It was with her mouth that a warrior announced her names: her tribe’s, her ancestors’, and her own. When the end approached, her final tribute to her mortal opponent was ever a compliment of words.

To allow another to touch such sacrosanct grounds carried far more weight for ogres than it did for other peoples. Its meaning was as clear as it was absolute: This is my prey. Touch it and you die.

A worthy opponent was, in some ways, a being more precious than one’s own parents. It followed that ogres defended their claims with great intensity: at times, they were known to take the lives of their own flesh and blood over an unrespected mark.

The gravity of the custom led ogres to send letters home on the rare occasions they traded spit. From there, the news would be redirected to absent members of the tribe and further to contacts in other tribes, until all the ogres of the land could be sure to know of their stake. Only by a radical stroke of misfortune, then, would an ogre lose her chosen mark.

Laurentius could vividly remember her surprise when she’d heard Lauren had found a foe worth claiming. At the time she’d wondered what kind of unimaginable monster could pique the interest of the godly warrior.

It was strange to think that that monster was now sitting right beside her.

As fun as this episode had been, Laurentius could not escape the lingering fear encroaching on her heart. An ogre’s spit trade was not something to take lightly: though their duel had only been a casual one, the fact that she could have broken the boy was reason enough to draw Lauren’s ire.

What would happen if the Lauren let loose her blade in a fit of fury? The thought caused Laurentius’s gut to shrivel away. And if she dared to sample more than his taste in battle...

As a reward for managing to dig up the critical memory in time despite her drunken haze, Laurentius knocked back her drink and washed away the sour feeling.

The boy placed an empty glass down at the same time. Although the spirits were strong enough to knock a mensch out cold by now, he still looked perfectly sober. The ogre didn’t know whether to praise him for drinking well or tease him for acting tough for his age.

“Anyway.” Laurentius took a sip from her freshly refilled cup and changed the subject. “Are you sure you don’t want to join my clan?”

The boy had turned down this offer once already, just before they’d sat down at the bar. Since they’d both insisted on their own defeat, he’d argued, it would only be fair that he at least not be forced to join.

For Laurentius, this clan had been built around her without her own knowing, and she didn’t really care about it. The only reason she played her part as leader was because she would feel bad about shooing away all those who’d gathered under her.

As much of a bother as it was, she’d always sobered up and represented the group whenever her subordinates needed her to. Every so often, they’d get a request specifically because of their manpower, and she’d have to sort herself out to lead them as a general. A few of her more ambitious men even asked for help with their training, and she’d taught them a thing or two in her spare time.

However, none of that was why she’d invited Erich. You see, if he was one of her subordinates, then no one could blame her for overseeing his practice routines, could they?

Unfortunately, he shook his head flatly.

“I have a promise to keep.”

“A promise?”

He squinted down at the girl drunkenly curled up on his lap. She’d tagged along when Laurentius announced they’d settle the matter over drinks, only to conk out pretty much immediately. Despite having been chosen by the most frightening of ogres, the boy seemed gentle now as he played with her hair.

“We decided to set off and become adventurers together. I want to see how far we can get with just the two of us, at least to start.”

Laurentius’s eyes drooped down as well. Though the ogre considered herself a failure, she smiled as she watched the pair. “Then I won’t get in your way.” 

[Tips] Spit trades are a traditional means of signifying a claim among ogres. The ritualistic kiss signals to one’s battle-starved sistren that they are not to pluck the fruit while it is still unripe.

By the time eight bottles of whiskey were opened and emptied, my stomach could take no more and I gave up.

I couldn’t help it—we just weren’t built the same. Ogres towered at over three meters tall; that was anywhere from fifty to a hundred percent bigger than a mensch, and the sizes of our guts scaled similarly. Physically speaking, their capacity to drink was in a different league. I’d put back as much liquor as my liver could process, making sure to expel as much of the fluid as possible—from the right direction, of course—but I’d never stood a chance when my opponent could do the exact same thing.

That said, things ended inconclusively because I had at least not passed out. That didn’t sound like a very workable ruleset to me, but I was just counting my luck that I hadn’t been made to puke to fit in more booze.

I had no interest in acting like a Roman patrician, after all. Besides, hurling didn’t magically undo everything: the stress would constrict my stomach, the bile would burn my throat, and my brain would take the act as a signal that something was wrong and actually make me start feeling sick.

As painful as it was to leave this duel unsettled, Miss Laurentius was gracious enough to say we ought not force ourselves to the point of disrespecting our own food and drink. So we came to a compromise: to prove that I wasn’t secretly plastered, I would need to show that I could still wield a sword.

Even with my Heavy Drinker trait, putting on a one-man show of swordplay with all this alcohol sloshing around my body proved quite the experience. Worse still, I tried to excuse myself after a quick performance, only to have Miss Laurentius join me in a drunken craze. Unsheathing her two real blades, she spun around and around, drawing arcs of glimmering steel; though her movements were largely the same as those from this afternoon, it was clear from the gap in polish that these were the weapons she’d entrusted with her life.

We danced, the tips of our blades just barely not crossing. For how long, I could no longer remember: I could believe that it had only been a few minutes, but the indescribable high and the fatigue seeping into my muscles told me it might have been a few hours.

What a strange day.

In part as compensation for my performance, Margit and I were given a room on the second floor for free. It was a simple bedroom, but staggeringly clean when weighed against the chaotic mess that was the first floor.

The sheets might not have been laundered, but they weren’t terribly stained, and they weren’t so bad that lice fell out as soon as I picked them up. Taking a cursory sniff, the bed didn’t even smell. Evidently, they’d pulled out their finest lodging for us.

Not that I’d ever make this our main inn, though.

Having long since fallen asleep for the night, Margit got put into bed first. She’d been snoozing on my lap from about the beginning of the drinking contest until I’d gotten up for the sword-dance. After that, she’d woken up for a short while to watch my performance, though her eyes had remained plainly droopy. But once everything was over, she’d reached her limit and gone straight back to sleep—and was thus my excuse for slipping out of the party.

Actually, maybe this had all been a part of her plan to help me along: everything from overdrinking at the outset to sleeping soundly now.

I mean, she was a huntress, and far warier than me for it. We might have gotten friendly with the denizens of this tavern, but there was no way she’d let her guard down like this when we still weren’t sure how much we could trust them.

Margit’s breaths were deep and peaceful—her weakness to alcohol was as unfeigned as ever—as I undid her hair and the first buttons of her collar and skirt to make her more comfortable. Freed from its confines, her adventurer’s badge slipped out. Tied on simple string and completely black, the little metal plaque had no value...except to prove we were adventurers.

Man... We really made it. As reality settled in once again, a paralyzing sense of joy tingled in my brain.

I removed the flat plank of wood on the windowsill and looked up at the sky. Much time had passed: the moon was high among the stars. Tonight’s moon was a waning crescent, slowly approaching novelty—once, I had called this form kin.

Ha, I smiled to myself. Took long enough to finish my character sheet.

[Tips] Character creation is a process in which players write out the details of their avatars on character sheets. This is not limited to stats and skills, but also includes personal history, like why a PC might have ended up in a position to partake in the campaign to begin with.

On my first morning as an adventurer, I was greeted not by the refreshing light of dawn, but the depressing dark of rain. Was it just me, or was fate really trying to piss all over my new beginnings?

My childhood companion was not enjoying the shift in weather, nor was she liking how long the spirit of liquor was overstaying its welcome. Still, we went downstairs to find the remnants of last night’s chaos plain to see.

Rather, the breakfast being served was made up entirely out of leftovers. No one would serve meals this hearty in the morning otherwise. Then again, maybe the cultural influence of non-Rhinian peoples in the area meant full meals were acceptable after waking up around here.

“So, basically”—Ebbo sat across the table from us, wetting a stale loaf of black bread in tomato soup as he tried to push past his hangover—“pretty much every clan has a tavern they rope off for themselves. I mean, you can still spend a night in one even if you’re not a member, but it won’t be the friendliest place, is all I’m saying.”

From what I could gather, Miss Laurentius must have ordered him to teach us about how things worked around town. The boss herself, meanwhile, was loudly snoring on her VIP-reserved sofa. As I’d already remarked, the description of a “waste of beauty” truly did fit her well; I had half a mind to run a comb through her hair, wipe down her face, and put a proper coat of makeup on her.

Wait, no. Years of diligently serving a noblewoman must have warped my instincts when it came to tending to others. In my last life, the thought of waiting on a slovenly lady had belonged strictly to the realm of fetishistic daydreams, but here it just felt like work. Forget Miss Laurentius’s sloppiness, this was all the fault of one unsalvageable scoundrel who was so damn lazy she couldn’t be bothered to put on clothes after she bathed.

Curse you, Lady Agrippina! You’ve ruined my common sense!

I needed to pull myself together. Looking after myself was going to be enough of a challenge; pampering someone else was out of the question.

“I know it’s rich coming from me,” Ebbo went on, “but we’re a pretty fair place considering how big our clan is. We don’t take all your cash as an entry fee, we don’t haze the newbies, and we don’t make anyone run off and pick losing fights.”

“Do others actually do that?” I asked.

“’Course they do. These tags on our necks are the only thing between us and a pack of gangsters, okay? Just so you know, half of all your cash is us being soft—other places make dumb kids take out loans to prove their loyalty. Here, you pay whatever you can and the boss won’t say a thing as long as you buckle down and do your job.”

Put that way, I could see his point. Sellswords hired by the day weren’t exactly dependable, and putting a bunch of them together would see ethics evaporate faster than spirits.

“I won’t talk any dirt, but there’re a few you gotta steer clear of. Around here, the main ones are...”

The first was the Exilrat: composed of the vagabonds who camped outside the city walls, they were known for having a large workforce that did honest work. However, the leadership took a sixty-percent cut, making the whole system a nightmarish cycle of poverty.

Next, there was a half-abandoned district in the northern parts of the city—as a former Berylinian citizen, the thought that a whole district could be abandoned was shocking—that had been seized by the Baldur Clan. Though they were roughly the same size as Clan Laurentius on paper, they represented a different kind of danger: rumor had it their leader was a mage who dabbled in less-than-reputable substances.

But the most notorious group had to be the Heilbronn Familie. Made up of dyed-in-the-wool criminals, their recruitment policies were horrific. One had to either pay all their savings, endure a harsh hazing ritual, or...

“...kidnap someone and put them down with your own two hands—or so I hear. No doubt about it: those guys are nuts.”

“Why in the world is a group like that allowed to roam freely?” Margit rightfully questioned. Her head must have hurt, as she was rubbing her temple with her left hand and restlessly poking at a plate of beans with her right.

“To begin with,” I added, “why would anyone want to join them?”

“Well, duh. It costs too much to stamp ’em out. And as for the recruits, well... I don’t get it, but some people just wanna walk around town like they own the place.”

This time, the answer came from Kevin, who walked over with a shockingly large number of skewers in his hand. He’d probably been reheating them in the yard; they dribbled with oil as he bit into one and continued explaining.

“Lots of dumbasses think that if they join up with a real killer, then people’ll start licking their boots. Not that it’ll give ’em the balls to pick a fight with us, though.”

Many adventurers acknowledged that our craft was one step shy of thuggery, but this crossed the line into completely literal territory. It didn’t even have the ritualistic chivalry of an established mafia; this was closer to an upstart cartel.

“Basically, the lord won’t lift a finger as long as we stay in our lane. The margrave’s not gonna go wasting cash on wanderers and immigrants who don’t pay taxes anyway, and trying to police a bunch of adventurers and mercs is a hassle. They’d have to start razing the whole town to get a response.”

“Plus, the lord’s not gonna let his precious little personal army get hurt on patrol, yeah?”

“Pretty much. Unlike us, a dead soldier costs money, I think. They’ll let the Familie slide so long as they don’t start messing up the city. Dodging trouble unless you have to deal with it is a big part of being a bigwig.”

In short, evil was permissible on relatively small scales.

I supposed I could understand. There really wasn’t much benefit to rounding up a gang of crooks. One could argue about the public good all they wanted, but we lived in an age where “out of sight, out of mind” was the baseline of criminal policy. The only way a local lord could justify the expense was if it directly impacted their own reputation.

Put another way, nobles were managers trying to create profitable territories; they had no time for unprofitable ventures. Just look at the magistrate who’d appeared in Fidelio’s saga. Unlike virtuous heroes, policemen and patrols had to be continuously paid to keep the peace.

Things had been different in the capital on account of its diplomatic nature, but that logic went out the window on a wild frontier where discord and growth went hand in hand. At the end of the day, there was no stamping out the bedlam of the borderlands; it was understandable why the authorities would prefer to just wish it away.

Rather, it was likely that the government was earning money in the form of bribes, and the exchange probably came with a nifty set of pawns for its troubles. Adventurers or not, there were plenty of ne’er-do-wells willing to take care of problems under the table for the right price.

So long as the human condition persisted, it seemed our tales would ever remain the same. No world was free of evil, so the rule was just to keep that evil to an acceptable margin.

What a mess.

“Thank you very much for the information,” I said. “We’ll keep away as best we can.”

“They do say the wise court not danger,” Margit agreed.

“You do that. If you ever see a group with matching tattoos or bandanas, stay on your toes.”

I intended to take the warning to heart, but I did find it a little funny that these groups were basically color gangs. The authorities had cracked down on those by the time I’d gotten into secondary schooling, and it was a curious twist of fate that I found myself experiencing a similar thing a lifetime later.

Boy, is the world dangerous... Now it’s starting to feel like an adventure.

“Well, just make sure not to stand out too much, yeah? Making a name for yourself is good and all, but these kindsa scumbags are always looking for wide-eyed kids to screw over.”

Chewing on a mouthful of bread, I thought back to yesterday. I’d forgotten all about this amid the commotion, but Mister Hansel, the bald adventurer we’d met at the gate, had also pointed me in someone else’s direction. Was this “Fidelio” another unscrupulous clan hustler?

Seeing as I had two knowledgeable adventurers already willing to explain things, I asked Ebbo and Kevin whether they knew the name; their reaction was one of genuine surprise.

“Fidelio of the Snoozing Kitten? You mean Saint Fidelio?”

...Oh? ‘Saint’? Now that’s a bit too coincidental to be a fluke.

“He’s famous around these parts as a wandering priest and an adventurer. I think he got his start, uh...running a confessional?”

“The hell, man? C’mon. I’m pretty sure he was a holy knight.”

As it turned out, this Fidelio was indeed the Fidelio whose legend we’d heard on our way here. I mean, he was a saint and a lay priest—there was no mistaking him. Though admittedly, there was a lot of wiggle room between the kind of priest who listened to his adherents’ sins and preached absolution and the kind who professed his faith through hoofsteps and spears.

All my information came secondhand from Miss Celia, but when I’d asked her about religious hierarchies, she’d explained that there were two broad types of clergy.

The first was the monastic priest: this referred to those who lived in cloisters and exclusively dedicated their days to worship. When most people thought of priests, this was the image that came to mind. They offered salvation to the masses in the name of their god, and their foremost priority was to teach their ways to all who wished to learn them.

On the other hand, lay priests forwent home and shelter to travel the lands with nothing but their chosen deity’s blessing. Sometimes derided as “castaways” by society at large, they lived in service of faith without staying in any one place for too long.

These lay priests might reject churches to uphold their gods in idiosyncratic ways, but make no mistake—they were not self-identified by any means. They still had to be accepted by their divine master; it was only that they felt the rules and restrictions that came with organization impeded their love of their god.

Some packed their things to proselytize in faraway lands, while others went around local towns teaching anyone who would listen. Others still left their sheltered temples behind to fulfill a mandate of slaying the apostates who spat in the face of their religion. The reasons a priest might forsake their monastery spanned a kaleidoscopic spectrum, and their only unifying trait was their vagrancy.

Yet that wasn’t to say monastic and lay priests were at odds with one another. Some of the former group would posit that true faith could only be attained by cutting oneself off from the outside world, and some from the latter would insist righteous teachings were only righteous when brought into reality, but they represented the minority.

But tangents aside, it was just my luck to make a connection to someone so incredible right off the bat. The saga we’d heard hadn’t mentioned it, but apparently he was a sapphire-ranked adventurer. He was at the third tier from the top—or second from the top, if you ignored the honorary violet title. With that kind of background, I doubted his epic accolades were fabricated.

“Wait, what kinda priest was he again?”

“Like, what god? Beats me. I just know it’s not the God of Trials or the Night Goddess.”

“In the poem,” I piped up, “it said he worships the Sun God.”

“Huh? Hrm, if you say so.”

The pair didn’t seem too well-informed on Fidelio even though he was one of their rivals in the business. Or perhaps it was just that the saint outclassed them to such a degree that they weren’t competing for the same kinds of work.

In fairness, it was a staple of storytelling to alter a hero’s faith. Poets loved to tweak details, and it wasn’t like the minstrels who performed the works all had perfect memories. I’d have to meet the man in person if I wanted to find out the truth.

“Anyway, I haven’t ever heard a bad word about the guy—in fact, he sounds like a genuinely good person. He’ll go around taking cheap jobs if he thinks they need doing, and the crazy bastard can’t be stopped if word of injustice gets to him.”

“Doesn’t have a clan either. He leads a party, but since none of them deal with any of the clans, they don’t really factor into the power balance around town. Er, well, the folks on the street really love ’em, so I hear you can’t even get into the marketplace if you piss ’em off. Guess they’re pretty big in that regard.”

“Yeah. Speaking of... No matter what you do, you do not wanna piss Fidelio off.”

That the man didn’t assert himself into politics but was still not to be trifled with was, to me, the epitome of a badass. I asked whether there were any stories of what happened when people crossed him, and was met with the kind of tale that wouldn’t make it into poetry.

Legend had it that on the night of righteous ruin, Fidelio cut down one hundred wicked men.

Around the time he had begun to make a name for himself, a shady clan tried to meddle in his affairs. Whether they’d attempted to leech off his profits or take him under their wing was uncertain, but they’d offered him some deal that had greatly offended him. When he refused, they’d broken into his go-to tavern to kidnap and defile the owner’s daughter.

Furious, Fidelio summoned his partymates and led them on a raid on the villains’ base. He marched in through the front door with nothing but a shield and spear in hand.

By the end of the night, he had made an example of every single one of the clan’s members, destroying their reputation so thoroughly that they fizzled out of existence.

What a heroic tale.

Above all else, it ended in the coolest way possible. After annihilating the corrupt, he then marched to the castle, slammed a sack full of gold coins at the foot of the gate, and shouted, “If you must take my private battles to be a crime, then so be it! But know that it was I who relieved you of the guilt of your criminal negligence! Offer a prayer to God that my service comes with this tip!”

How cool could he be? He’d gone to pay his fines up front because he’d known unauthorized combat would elicit punishment.

At the end of it all, he’d taken the ravaged girl as his wife; to this day, he cherished her dearly, as well as the tavern he’d come to settle down in.

“He’s... He’s so cool.”

Oh my gods, was this right up my alley. The last vestiges of drunkenness vanished as the excitement of the story took over.

“You never do get tired of stories like this, do you, Erich?” Margit said with a sigh.

“Oh, come on! There isn’t a man alive who wouldn’t like this one. Right?”

I turned to the other two and they agreed with me. Maybe men’s heartstrings were just built to be pulled by tales like these.

“Well, you two are free to go see him, but keep your guard up.”

“Yup. You can never know if someone’s really a good guy in this line of work.”

Their slapdash warnings tacked to the end went in one ear and out the other; our plans for the evening were set.

[Tips] Many clans dabble in wrongdoing at levels that won’t force the government to intervene. While most pay small bribes to have minor crimes overlooked, some delicately tiptoe around felonies that would ordinarily be punishable by death.

The discomfort of rain drumming on my hood soaked in.

I’d almost put up a barrier like I always did, but then had an epiphany. It would be strange if my mantle was dry and my boots were free of mud.

“It’s so slippery,” I said.

“Honestly. All this cobblestone means so little with how much mud there is. Are you sure you won’t fall with only two legs?”

Marsheim’s streets were dilapidated. Not only were there gaps in the stone pavement, but no one bothered to clean off the dirt brought in on travelers’ shoes—a serious concern due to the rain. Margit was less than pleased to navigate this slipping hazard with a hangover, but she still managed to expertly scurry about; I, on the other hand, had a real challenge in keeping my balance without the extra limbs.

Ugh, it really would be strange if we showed up somewhere else completely clean. I unfortunately couldn’t just go around meticulously separating mud and water so it’d only touch my clothes without affecting my body. But at the same time, I didn’t want the cold to numb my fingers in the event of an emergency; it was a choice between conserving my mana and staying ready for action at a moment’s notice.

“Well,” I said, “I have a trick for keeping my footing.”

That said, my stability was too important to skimp out on. It was a simple solution: I placed Unseen Hands right where I’d step so I didn’t have to make contact with the ground. This was the same old tactic that let me jump around midair. For how simple it was, the thought of guaranteeing solid ground beneath me was a godly power as a swordsman. This had certainly been one of my smartest ideas, if I do say so myself.

“And what a trick it is,” Margit marveled quietly. “You’re making me jealous.”

I offered to do the same for her, but she said that they felt gross to step on and turned me down. Not being able to directly feel the ground was viscerally unpleasant to her, both as a huntress and as an arachne.

I could sympathize. I’d feel just as uncomfortable if I had a lousy sword at my hip throwing me off-center; there were probably lots of instinctive maladies that came with expertise and physiology that others just wouldn’t understand.

“But I must say... Perhaps we should consider our work carefully on rainy days.”

“Looks like it. I’d like to just laze around at an inn unless we absolutely have to go out.”

Even with the sun hanging high behind the clouds, few people could be seen on the streets. The thought of diligently working through poor weather didn’t occur to anyone around here.

Barring the agricultural sector, the idea that a worker was to do their job through hell or high water had been a very modern concept on Earth. In an era like this one, angry clouds were reason enough to put business on pause for a day.

It was just plain inefficient—not to mention dangerous. Without the luxury of rubber-soled boots, physical labor was a safety hazard. Almost everyone was cooped up indoors working on side jobs unless they had serious extenuating circumstances to force them outdoors.

As for us, we were sloshing through the mud to find an inn.

As hearty a welcome as we’d received at the Inky Squid, it wouldn’t exactly make for the most pleasant place to stay long-term. The establishment was an ultracheap motel with rooms as cheap as five assarii a night, and while Miss Laurentius had ensured we’d gotten a room that was barely passable, we were not renting it out.

I’d lived a life and a half in what I considered relatively well-off conditions, and what I’d witnessed in that room was an affront to my hygienic code. I refuse to elaborate—just thinking back to it makes my skin crawl. By my standards, a massive commons that cost a libra and thirty-five assarii a month was no way for a person to live. I would not under any circumstances welcome lice, bedbugs, and especially roaches as roommates.

While I could admit that perhaps I’d just grown up in an overly sanitary environment, I simply didn’t understand how others could bear to live like that. Trekking through a muddy forest or smelly sewer for work was one thing, but in my everyday life? Please.

Margit and I had only needed to exchange a single glance to agree that our environment would have tremendous impact on our quality of life. We’d turned down the Inky Squid’s offer in an instant.

We’d made our way to what the locals called Hovel Street. It was a terribly windy path on account of its running along the city walls, and it shrank and widened with no regard for the pedestrians who might walk on it. Not even the name was planned: apparently, the dwellers here had started calling it that one day and it stuck. The palpable laissez-faire attitude coming from the government was very apt for a borderland town.

For better or for worse, the capital had itself put together to become what I would categorize as a lightly sterilized fantasy city. But the frontier was something else: rough-and-tumble fantasy settings pushed all the right buttons for me. Even when it came to TV, I’d been a fan of the grungy stuff where infighting and betrayal took up most of the screen time and dragons didn’t feel all too strong.

Looking back, I’d never gotten to see the ending to that story. A shame, really—the wick on my candle of life had run out before I could finish my favorite books and movies. For one short moment, I almost felt like I could understand Lady Agrippina’s fixation on unearthing all the world’s stories before they vanished.

Well, in her case, finding all the stories wouldn’t even be the end of it: she’d still run into a wall if an author died or simply gave up on writing. Waiting was a tremendous ordeal when it was the only choice available, and no amount of money could bring back a dead poet.

On the off chance she developed interplanar far-sight to peer into alternate universes where the author was still alive, that still left the issue of motivation. Not even she was broken enough to solve that.

I digress—shaking off the emotional toll of inconvenient circumstance, I finally found myself before our destination.

Despite the pelting rain, the tavern was noticeably fancier than those in the vicinity. It boasted a roof free of broken shingles, and while its windows didn’t have glass, they were closed up with properly matching boards. Old cobblestones peeked out from beneath the mud: whoever was in charge had taken the time to clean the steps outside their front door.

Up above was a sign that read “The Snoozing Kitten” in fanciful lettering, accompanied by a curled-up cat carved into the wood itself.

Here we were, at the inn Mr. Hansel had recommended—and perhaps at the home of a real hero.

Part of why we’d set off from the Inky Squid was its quality, but to come clean, the bigger reason was that I’d let my frivolous desire to see an epic hero in the flesh take hold. Could you blame me? I’d never gotten a chance like this in Berylin. This was no different from hearing that your favorite author visited a local café and suddenly getting the urge to go.

Yet I also couldn’t deny that seeing the place made me hesitant.

“The business seems rather well put together,” Margit said.

“It does,” I echoed. “It does, but...”

“But it doesn’t seem like it would cater to adventurers.”

Both of us had reached the same conclusion. As nice as a well-maintained exterior was, it clashed with the image of an adventurer-focused lodge where property damage was part of the cost of doing business.

To begin with, I’d had my suspicions ever since our talk with the ladies at the front desk, where the inn’s name hadn’t come up. If this was a famous adventurer’s main headquarters, then one would think every kid signing up would come straight here and crowd up the place.

This is just a normal inn for merchants and travelers.

“Still, we won’t learn anything by standing outside. Shall we?”

“Yeah, let’s.”

After I’d fallen silent for a moment, the hand I’d been holding all this time suddenly jerked me forward. Letting one doubtful thought stop me in my tracks was a bad habit of mine, and I was grateful to have someone to put my mind back on the rails before I could freeze up for any length of time.

Shaking the rain off my mantle and calming my pounding heart, I pushed the door open.

My entrance was met with a cute bell chime. The sight that followed had me stunned—my best description was that I’d walked into a fashionable café.

It was a long, narrow space with about a third of the room reserved for a giant wooden counter; a mere eight seats lined its length. Other than that, five square tables that seated four each were lined up parallel with the bar. The place clearly didn’t have a high capacity.

Every square inch of the countertop had been polished, and I couldn’t spot a speck of dust on the walls. None of the furniture was broken or wobbled, and looking past the bar stools to the liquor cabinet on the far side, I noticed that the bottles had even been neatly sorted.

But what drew the eye most of all was the three hanging lights on the ceiling. They radiated a mystic incandescence only found in the biggest shops of bustling cities, and it was only midday. The warm glow of just one of these trinkets could trade for a fully built house out here in Ende Erde.

My expectations had been off the mark in more ways than one. The vulgar pub full of adventurers I’d imagined vaporized in my mind, replaced with images of a café off a small road that turned into a speakeasy come sundown.

I thought to myself that it would have been the perfect spot to enjoy a cigarette and paperback, completed with an order of coffee. Of course, all three of those were fanciful luxuries that cost a fortune each to procure here.

“Why, hello—welcome. I haven’t seen you two before.”

Before I could finish soaking in my surprise, a woman came out from the back of the store and called out to us. She wore a standard waitress uniform of an apron and a triangular bandana, but her equally triangular ears, peach-pink nose, and velvety black coat were markedly feline: she was a bubastisian.

Bubastisians were immigrants to both the Empire and the Central Continent as a whole, having spread out from the same southwestern continent as their distant animal cousins. Their frames were close to mensch’s, but with a healthy dose of feline litheness mixed in; their heads, meanwhile, were big cat heads with a bit more of a human touch.

“Hang your cloaks up on the wall for me, if you’d please. The airflow is good around there, so they’ll dry right up.”

While she didn’t end her sentences in a hackneyed “meow,” the construction of her mouth made her roll up the beginnings and ends of her words in a way that struck me as very catlike. Her palms had pronounced paw pads, and she pointed toward the wall with a clawless—or, at least, sheathed—finger, at which we obliged by hanging up our outerwear and taking a seat at the counter.

“This isn’t exactly a typical hour for customers, so don’t expect perfect catering. Is breakfast food okay? Imperial or royal style? Oh, we can do nomadic eastern dishes too.”

“Oh, um, I’m all right. I’ve eaten breakfast, so may I just have some tea?”

“I’d very much appreciate something light to nibble on.”

I only asked for tea because I felt awkward coming into a tavern without ordering anything, but Margit ended up getting food. She hadn’t been able to eat much this morning; last night’s leftovers had proved too heavy for her.

“A cup of tea will be three assarii, and... Oh, excuse me, miss. Do you have a hangover? I have just the thing for that.”

The feline waitress hurried off—curiously, while her body language epitomized the word “pitter-patter,” she didn’t make a sound—and into the kitchen. Flames were much more hazardous to deal with here than on modern Earth, and even the best chefs couldn’t afford to do their work near a wooden countertop like this.

“I quite like the atmosphere,” Margit said.

“It’s nice,” I agreed. “Calm and homely.”

We were the only patrons at this hour, so we looked around the quiet eatery and leisurely chatted away. The surprising interior had made me completely forget about my original goal of finding Fidelio.

“You know, I think I may like this sort of ambience. I’ve never been to a place like this—neither at home nor in the Old Town.”

“I saw one tavern kind of like it in the capital. If I recall, the owner was from the northern isles, and so were most of their customers. They had a lot of different beers, I remember.”

“Is beer the drink of choice for northern peoples, then?”

Our conversation went off on a tangent about the tinge of foreign charm we felt around us and went on until the waitress came back. She had two mugs and a small plate in hand.

“Sorry for the wait. Here’s yours, mister.”

The woman handed me a plain yet fragrant cup of red tea. Pretty much every imperial citizen had a variant of this a few times a day, and I could tell from the color and smell that this was dandelion-based as opposed to chicory.

“And for you, miss.”

Meanwhile, Margit was given a drink I’d never seen before. The creamy white made it seem like heated milk, but there was an unfamiliar tartness cutting through the soft and sweet scent.

“Mm...” Margit took a moment and asked, “Ginger and honey?”

“That’s right! This is just the thing to get the spirit of liquor to pack its things. My husband swears by it.”

That was a nice tidbit of information. I rarely ever got hungover, but I’d make a mental note in case I ever got a bunch of trashy booze thrust upon me. Honey was a touch expensive, but it could always be repurposed as a calorie-dense travel food, and ginger was easy to come by. Maybe we should keep some on hand going forward.

“And fish?” Margit said.

“Mhm, pickled river fish with a side of pickled ginger. It’s reeeally sour, but one bite will blow any drunkenness away. My husband swears by this one too.”

Tiny little fish lined the plate alongside slices of ginger. It certainly wasn’t for everyone, but I could definitely see it working wonders for someone slogging through an alcoholic stupor. The brine had eliminated the characteristically pungent odor of freshwater fish, and I was tempted to ask for a plate myself.

Wait, “husband”? If the stories are true, then—

“Shymar, you forgot the lemon.” Suddenly, a man’s voice rang out from the kitchen. The light sound of footsteps drew closer until he slid into the light of the main room. “I’m always telling you this is what pulls everything together, remember?”

“Oh, I’m sorry darling. I just can’t help but end up leaving it out. It’s a nightmare if any of the juices splash on my nose while I’m squeezing it.”

There was nothing remarkable about the man’s dress: cotton undershirt, hemp pants, and a canvas apron worn to the point of fringing. He typified the average innkeeper.

Further, he was a normal mensch, through and through. His features were a tad undefined for a Rhinian, with shallow-set eyes and a nose that wasn’t quite high. His gentle green eyes drooped lightly and paired well with the untamed curls of his almost-reddish chestnut hair. Put together, his features inspired relaxation in those who looked at him.

My snap impression was that of a genial man running a tavern...but one look with a trained eye was enough to spot the truth.

Everything from his posture to his gaze; from the contour of his build, hidden beneath his clothes, to the calluses on his hand as he held up the plate of sliced lemon; every little thing spoke to an unwavering strength that seeped from his every pore.

His meaty shoulders spoke to a spear swung sideways, and perhaps a shield readied for the occasional thrust. The tree trunks he called legs conjured the vivid image of him marching alongside cavalry. His body was living armor—not the kind worn in the name of ceremony, but the kind forged in the fires of necessity. Although clerical garb would certainly have suited his face alone, the overwhelming might radiating off the rest of him created a totally different air.

Perhaps most striking of all was that, no matter how humbly he dressed, the virtue he carried himself with was palpable. I saw now why the Father God had blessed him with the privilege of His miracles.

And so too did I see that the legends had not been romanticized or exaggerated, but were the unequivocal truth.

This guy is ridiculously strong. Behind his calm demeanor was an absolute alertness; vitality bubbled forth from his entire being to the point where I couldn’t imagine a world in which he might fall.

I’d risen to my feet before I knew it.

“Pardon me. May I take it that you and Saint Fidelio are one and the same?”

No, it wasn’t that I’d simply stood up; I bowed in the face of this legendary adventurer the people worshiped as their saint. Glancing over, I noticed that Margit had come to the same conclusions as me and stepped off her stool to offer a curtsy. Even the slightest bit of martial experience was enough to realize the man’s strength. Anyone who couldn’t was blind or a fool—quite possibly both.

“Aw, shucks.” Yet our show of reverence only made the man scratch his cheek and put on a weak, awkward smile. “I’m not so great that you need to bow like that. Besides, this place isn’t really an adventuring sort of business anyway. Here, why don’t we all relax and take a seat?”

Although the saint was used to dealing with his grandiose reputation, he didn’t seem to like it. In a departure from the brutal legends of his deeds, the man beckoned us over with a tender smile.

[Tips] Bubastisians are a demihuman race who can trace their origins to the Southwestern Continent, known best for their feline heads and coats, as well as their limber, flexible bodies. Highly adaptable, they are known to grow and shed fur as needed to adjust to local climates. They spread out from their initial homelands thousands of years ago, and have settled down in various spots around the world.

Though the prevailing bubastisian stereotype trends capricious and aloof, as individuals they vary greatly, as with any group of people. They can be surprisingly loving at times, and some can even be described as being quick to emotion.

“I usually don’t come out until evening, you see.” Saint Fidelio sat down on the other side of a four-person table as he made his disclaimer. “But it doesn’t look like we’ll have much daytime business with the rain, so... Anyway, let me introduce myself properly. My name is Fidelio—Fidelio of Eilia, an adventurer and lay priest of Sun.”

His simple introduction consisted of a name and birthplace, suggesting that he didn’t come from a privileged background. He then took a beat to sip on the cup of tea he’d been served.

“By no means am I worthy of being called a saint.”

These words were no mere modesty. Rather, they came from an unshakable pride...and a strong sense of self-admonishment.

“My rank as an adventurer is sapphire-blue. This also feels like more than I’m due, but it does mean I’ve walked farther along the same path that you two are on.”

As expected of a man whose rivals warned never to anger and whose admirers wrote sagas about, he was ranked third from the top—second in practical terms. The man was a bona fide hero.

Adventuring ranks were more a gauge of trustworthiness than strength. While the lower tiers only represented a passing connection with the Association, the upper ones were outright assertions on the reliability of one’s character. A sapphire adventurer could likely go anywhere in the local region, country, or even abroad. It probably even matched up to the ring I’d gotten from Lady Agrippina.

All this to say, the man wasn’t just strong: he’d earned respect among his community.

Another note was that humility in the Empire was not considered a virtue except in the presence of social superiors; that he’d played down his own fame spoke volumes. Perhaps that was why the Association trusted him so deeply despite lacking the luggage of a clan. They didn’t want anyone throwing their weight around and ruining their public image.

“And this tavern isn’t suited for adventurers. I happen to have a long relationship with the owner—”

“He’s my husband, after all.”

“Well... Anyway, I only get to stay here because of my personal connections. We usually only serve travelers and merchants.”

A PDA-infused comment came flying in out of nowhere. It seemed that in spite of the tragic past between these two, their marriage hadn’t been one spurred on by guilt or responsibility; the depth of their love was self-evident.

“Most of the time,” he went on, clearing his throat, “we ask that adventurers find another place to stay...but considering how you know my name, I assume you were sent my way by someone, weren’t you?”

I told him of our meeting with the bald adventurer we’d met at the gate. Upon hearing Mister Hansel’s name, the priest scratched his curly hair with a defeated sigh.

“He’s a friend of mine. We aren’t officially a fixed party, but we do work together often enough...and he has a bad habit of sending young adventurers my way as soon as he takes a liking to them.”

“Oh, you shouldn’t bad-mouth a friend who trusts you like he does. Honestly, he should stop by for drinks more often.”

“In his case, it’s less about trust and more about curiosity. And it’s better that he stays away: I don’t want him guzzling down all of our good liquor. All he cares about is volume, and he still took my Arman and—”

“And drank it with ice—I know, I know. I’ve heard that story a hundred times, darling.”

Despite his grumbling, the hero’s words were overflowing with fondness. If I recalled, Arman was one of the premier apple brandies, famed as a sipping drink for its impeccable fragrance when lightly warmed. For someone to toss in ice and chug it down was a crime worth a hundred complaints. In fact, anyone but a best friend could expect to be met with blades—especially when both parties were adventurers.

“Looking at you two...” He cleared his throat again and looked us over. “You might be beginner adventurers, but I can tell you’re experienced otherwise.”

Just as we’d seen him for the powerhouse he was, one glance was all he needed to tell we hadn’t been born yesterday.

Right he was: at the very least, I was confident I had laid enough groundwork to proudly proclaim myself a Lvl 1 Fighter. Both of us had the basics under our belts, and I was glad we weren’t being taken for amateurs. But going by the standards of a world built by a put-up-job-hating sword, all the daily training until one came of age was the minimum to get to the start line—I was best off considering myself a Lvl 1 character.

“I spent some time training with my canton watch, and a little more playing bodyguard.”

“And I trained as a huntsman in the same canton. Spending my days among boar and deer has left me with some familiarity with bows and knives.”

In the presence of a living legend, we were babes fresh out the womb. Unlike our host, we shared our backgrounds with due humility. It struck me as odd that he tilted his head at our statements, but I thought we were being perfectly reasonable.

“Hrm... Then I guess what he wants isn’t for me to train you, but to just teach you the ABCs of adventuring. Neither of you seems to use a weapon I could teach anyway.”

Oh, that sounds great. Miss Laurentius had, by way of Ebbo and Kevin, taught us about clans and turf, but we hadn’t gotten anything about actual work. I’d known all along that Mister Hansel hadn’t referred us purely out of the goodness of his heart, but by the looks of it, all he wanted was for us to climb the ranks quickly so he could toss us some kind of job. I was all for it if it meant we were going to benefit—especially if it meant studying under an expert who could tell our weapons of choice by sight alone.

“But he sure does have a knack for awkward timing,” Mister Fidelio went on. “We’ve finally gotten my last group of students to set off on their own, so...”

“Oh, what are you talking about?” Miss Shymar said. “I know you liked having them around.”

“Not at all. Your father always looks grumpier when we have adventurers in the house.”

“My dad is my dad. Or what? Are you trying to say that you feel everything the same way he does?”

“Well, no, but...”

As the man trailed off, his wife came out from behind the counter with a fresh tray of tea to cut off his train of thought.

“Don’t pretend you didn’t care about them, darling. I liked them too—those four were the sweetest kids.”

“But they had a habit of getting full of themselves, and quickly too.”

“Hee hee, but I happen to remember a certain someone giving long, passionate sermons about faith to a priest who wasn’t even part of his sect. And I’ll have you know I loved having the little mage around to help with chores. All our laundry, done like poof!”

The missus of the inn giggled at her husband as if she were watching a small child mull something over. Then she poured us another serving of tea each, raised one finger, and addressed us.

“Excuse me, you two. Would you happen to be any good around the house?”

Margit and I looked at each other: the answer was yes. I’d served as the servant of a lazy master who’d forced every manner of household chore on me; I didn’t need to ask to tell that Margit had undergone bridal lessons alongside her training as a hunter—when it came to needlework, she was several levels above me.

“Like this big oaf said, we were looking after a party of adventurers until last winter. They were four young kids, and one of them was even a mage! I really appreciated having the extra help around.”

She took a seat by her husband with catlike grace, not letting out a sound. Naturally pointed upward to about the tip of her head, her tail swayed happily behind her; every so often, it playfully grazed against Mister Fidelio’s neck. He didn’t budge, but I could tell he was fighting the ticklishness, and it revived memories of my parents’ pet cat back on Earth.

“Come on, darling. Why don’t we let them stay?”

“But Shymar—”

“It’s not like this is the first time we’ll be housing students of yours. Besides, you’re already set on looking after them, aren’t you?”

“I haven’t necessarily decided yet. I have my own work to do, and I have that long trip planned for the summer, remember?”

“That’s all the more reason. Are you really going to make me and my dad run the inn all by ourselves with his bad knee?” Miss Shymar stressed the last point, and her mister sat silent in response. “Besides, no matter what you say now, I know you’re going to end up taking care of them eventually. Don’t think I don’t remember how you turned the last batch away, just to let them walk all over you after a few more pleas. I mean, you even let them drag you out on an adventure with them!”

An adventure with an epic hero?! That’s so unfair... I wonder if I can get a personal lesson too.

“If you can promise to work your very hardest in the mornings and evenings,” the woman said to us, “I’ll cut down the cost of a room from fifteen to five assarii. You’ll stay with us, won’t you? I know it must be hard with only the two of you.”

“Oh, Shymar... You’re always like this. You don’t have to take in every stray that turns up on your doorstep, you know?”

Mister Fidelio’s furrowed brow betrayed genuine concern, but Miss Shymar just laughed at him.

“But isn’t that why you’re here now?”

Unable to overcome his wife’s strong will and mischievous teasing, the man could do nothing but sigh in response.

[Tips] The Snoozing Kitten is an inn for layperson travelers run by a father-and-daughter pair of bubastisians. Though once known as the headquarters of Fidelio the Saint, the man himself solemnly warned those in the know not to spread that knowledge in the wake of a certain incident. Nowadays, his connection to the establishment is no longer a public topic.

Although the business is said to be incredibly welcoming, most adventurers and mercenaries are turned away at the door.

The room we were shown to as our new home was a simple but comfy two-bedroom chamber. Both beds were spacious enough to accommodate larger races, and while the mattresses weren’t quite fancy enough to have springs, they were thick and pleasant to lie on.

Although the sheets were faded, that was proof of regular washing, and they faintly carried the pleasant scent of soap. The pillows were plump, and they didn’t look like they’d flatten instantly upon being used; they must have been stuffed with some kind of down. The thin summer blankets felt fresh too: maybe they hung them out on sunny days, because they were nice and dry without the slightest hint of moldy stink.

If this was ordinarily fifteen assarii, then it was a steal. A room like this would’ve cost half a libra in the capital.

They also offered two lockable chests and a wardrobe—though we were the ones who had to haul them in—for long-term guests, and I could even borrow a table and candle stand. The candles themselves would obviously come out of my own pocket, but I was just glad to have a way of dealing with paperwork if the need arose.

“On the days you help me run the place, you’ll get a meal each in the morning and evening. Oh, but I guess I can treat you to lunch too if you do a good job. Otherwise, you can buy a meal for four assarii—but it’ll be whatever we’re making. If you want something specific, you’ll have to ask about it then and there.”

The missus—she told us to call her that—showed us around the Snoozing Kitten and explained how things worked. The building was a rectangular U shape, with a small laundry station, steam bath, and manual-flush toilet in the inner courtyard.

In total, there were sixteen rooms across three floors. None of them were commons: they only had private spaces for parties of two to six. I thought it was a fairly bullish business strategy, but the missus explained that half the rooms were constantly full; counting the long-term rentals, they never dipped below two-thirds capacity. Spring and fall regularly saw them booked out, and the busy travel seasons even saw groups of three or four lay sleeping bags on the floor of two-person bedrooms.

“In the busiest season we ever had, our guests had to start pitching tents in the courtyard! But, well, that got in the way of laundry, so I don’t think we’ll do it again unless the situation is just dire.”

Considering how clean and well-kept the rooms were, I thought the popularity was deserved. For those who stayed semipermanently, they had a separate mess hall from the bar at the front; we were directed toward that for future meals. When I asked why they’d bothered dividing the food services into a cafeteria and pub, the missus laughed and answered that it was just personal preference.

Preference, huh? Funnily enough, I felt like that was a better reason than any other she could’ve given.

We were then shown into the missus’s pride and joy: the kitchen. It lived up to expectations and was decked out with all sorts of equipment. They had an iron bread-baking oven like the ones found in specialized bakeries; all three of the stovetops were built for large-scale cooking. On top of that, they had three smaller stoves too, perfect for fine-tuning smaller portions.

The kitchen was free to use for motel-style guests who only paid for lodging, though firewood naturally had to be supplied oneself. The facilities were well maintained, and I imagined that some guests must have chosen the inn solely for access to its cooking ranges.

The island enshrined in the middle of the kitchen, incredibly, had a polished iron top. The flat surface looked to be perfect for laying out a huge helping of ingredients. What was more, a closer look unveiled the crest of the Hearth Goddess—protector of homes and arbiter of household chores—etched into the metal. Sure to never rust or stain, the table would have made any housewife go green with envy.

“What do you think? It’s a nice place, isn’t it? My old man put in a lot of work building this place from the—”

As the missus proudly wrapped up her tour, an unfamiliar tongue overlapped with her final statement. Unable to catch what had been said, I turned to see an older bubastisian with a cane looking our way.

Owing to his age, his black coat was starting to gray; yet his face was still sharp and evocative of big cat species. Though he was starting to lose mass, he remained a big man and easily filled out a neatly tailored set of clothes: his pants were quality cotton, his undershirt was free of wrinkles, and his apron was dyed an even black. A ledger hung from the apron via a metal hook, confirming that he was the owner of the Snoozing Kitten—which also meant he was the missus’s father and Mister Fidelio’s father-in-law.

His features were solemn for a feline, giving off the impression of an honest merchant—but they also gave off the kind of idiosyncratic confidence a man would need to separate his restaurant and bar for no reason but his own preference.

He spoke the words of a different land—no, just of a different people, all without dropping the bit of straw in his mouth. In turn, his daughter replied in the same language.

Bluntly put, it sounded like they were meowing at each other, but with a noticeable human cadence. As a Rhinian, and perhaps more importantly, as a mensch, I had a tremendously difficult time parsing anything. I couldn’t so much as glean from their tone whether the conversation was peaceful small talk or an impassioned argument.

I supposed I’d just have to accept that there was too big a gap in how our ears were structured. Although most of the sentient races had similarly shaped ears on the outside, that didn’t necessarily hold true on the inside; that was even more true of vocal cords. Bubastisians spoke a language—technically many languages that changed according to region—that included sounds that simply didn’t track well with my ears.

Then again, maybe I ought to be glad I could hear anything at all. Aquatic peoples and some rabbit-based demihumans had no vocal cords to begin with, meaning they didn’t even try to engage in verbal communication.

I’d already tried and failed to learn catspeak a lifetime ago. Adding a “meow” to the ends of my sentences wasn’t quite going to be enough.

I quietly watched over the pair’s indecipherable conversation until it came to a close and the man shifted his forceful gaze toward us. His golden eyes glowed dimly, looking down on us with palpable discernment.

“Pleased to meet you, sir,” I said. “I’m grateful to have the opportunity to stay here. My name is Erich of Konigstuhl.”

“And I am Margit, also of Konigstuhl. I’m most pleased to make your acquaintance.”

Whatever their conversation entailed, we decided to introduce ourselves. First impressions start from there, after all.

The innkeeper twirled the straw in his mouth a few times and stared at us with a scrunched-up face. Eventually, I felt the unusual sensation of a giant paw on my head, and he said, “Cut corners and I’ll shoo ya out,” before quickly walking off.

So...does this mean we passed?

“That’s my dad, Adham. As you can see, he’s a grumpy old man, but I promise he’s nice. Look past his mean side for me, won’t you?”

After giggling at our confusion, the missus rolled up her sleeves and put some pep into her step. Just as she did, her husband came in from the yard with a giant wooden box in hand—a box that was full of vegetables.

The crate was so big that I doubted I could wrap my arms all the way around it, and it was completely stuffed with carrots. Yet in spite of the obvious weight, Mister Fidelio hoisted it around like a small packet of letters.

“All right, you two,” the hero said. “We’ll get to talking about adventure, but before that, there’s work to do.”

If this was the price an adventurer had to pay in order to learn from those who had come before, then our first quest was set: we were going to peel some vegetables.

[Tips] Motels are simple inns that provide only rooms and few other active services. Catering to the common traveler, they tend to have public kitchens for guests to prepare their own meals in. However, it is far from uncommon for locations like these to serve food on account of being hybrid businesses that are part motel and part inn.

Peel. Then peel some more. Peel with the whole of your body and mind.

My time helping the caravan chef this past spring had left me more than used to this. The trick was to get a good angle of entry to start, and then to keep the blade peeling all the way through. That way, I could coil across to pull off the outer layer as if the carrot had been built to come apart like this all along.

That said, it was amazing to see a blue-level adventurer hunched over a crate of vegetables with a kitchen knife like this.

“While you’re new,” Mister Fidelio said suddenly as he tossed a smoothly peeled carrot into a basket, “your ‘work’ will just be a bunch of odd jobs. You’ll fix some broken shingles, look for somebody’s lost pet, or clean out the gutters. And you’ll carry stuff—there’s a lot of carrying. The weirder requests will be things like snooping to see if somebody’s spouse is cheating, or following up on an unpaid bar tab.”

“I’d figured as much,” I said, “but that sure is dull.”

That said, it wasn’t like I’d signed up with nothing but sagas in my mind; being told the truth wasn’t enough to deter me. Hearing this straight from a reliable source also helped to further knock down my expectations so that my future experiences wouldn’t come as a shock.

Hey, wait. This carrot has a rotten spot. I guess I’ll have to bore that out so we can salvage the rest of it.

“Villains like the ones that show up in songs are hard to come by,” our teacher explained. “Obviously, monsters don’t run wild near cities often, and the authorities wouldn’t let anything dangerous settle down in their own backyard. You won’t ever see a mystic beast run rampant in a forest within walking distance from the city, for example.”

“Because anything that threatens public safety will be dealt with right away?”

“That’s right. People wouldn’t be able to live if picking herbs for supper came with that kind of danger.”

Monsters popping up as soon as one left city limits was a convenient contrivance thought up for games; this world was much more real, in both the good sense and the boring sense. If economic webs were under constant peril, society would never have been built in the first place.

No bandits camped near cities; no monsters flowed endlessly forth from some well-known nest; no cantons were at constant risk of imminent eradication. In the event that such dangers did crop up, the lord would surely be forced to use his knights to resolve the matter. Letting business stop, even for a day, could have far-reaching ramifications—particularly in this remote region that saw high international traffic. Poor performance could throw dirt on the whole Empire’s image.

An adventurer’s place was to do the work that was just a few touches too tedious for the client to do themselves, all for the price of a few coins. We were just chosen over random day laborers off the street because we had a sizable organization willing to vouch for us at the bare-minimum level.

...With that in mind, the thought of a whole canton being left to fend for itself against a limbless drake was even more staggering. What kind of absolute buffoon had been running that place? Surely, the magistrate must’ve gotten his position through nepotism. I could only imagine how hard life had been for the poor people living under him.

Looking back, I was thankful that my beloved Konigstuhl had been run by a competent magistrate. He hadn’t been the friendliest person, but at least he’d been loyal to his duties.

“Once you reach ruby-red, you’ll have more opportunities to leave town. Your quests will include delivering letters or verbal messages to nearby cantons, or filling up slots in an escort formation.”

“What about bandit hunting?” I asked. “I’ve heard there are a lot of them in the area.”

“Mm... That might be a bit of a stretch.”

Apparently, the raiders around these parts were foxy enough not to have any fixed territory worth noting. Most were like the rest of the highwaymen I’d encountered thus far: regular folks who didn’t shy away from making a quick, illicit profit. Leaders of marauder and strongman groups in the region deliberately obscured their activity, with the worst of them going so far as to operate whole caravans as cover for their wrongdoing; the ghastliest tale of such tactics saw an entire canton wiped out without any chance to retaliate.

The depths of their knavery nearly drew a growl out of me. I knew they were putting a lot of thought into evading strong adventurers and imperial patrolmen, but the thought that such groups were still out there now made me sick to my stomach.

“That’s why only the most boneheaded groups have related Association quests in the first place. Any crook who survives a single season out here will learn not to stay in one place.”

Yet in exchange, the government always bought bandit heads at a premium in the borderlands. Even a dead criminal could fetch five librae, with live captures going for ten to twenty; that was two to four times as much as usual. And if they had an official bounty on their heads...

“Once, I got forty drachmae for one bandit. It was originally supposed to be a five-drachma bounty, but the official investigation found him guilty of so many crimes that the total sum blew up before I knew it. You can imagine my surprise when I went to collect my fee.”

Forty... Wait, forty?!

I almost fumbled my carrot in shock. In the corner of my vision, I could see that Margit’s hands had stopped moving too.

Wow. That was a decade’s work for the average farming family. Put to American dollars, that was like three to five hundred thousand greenbacks. While it was easy to imagine that the bandit must’ve been a formidable foe, that was a ludicrous sum to earn for one feat.

Aha. So that’s the kind of accomplishment that gets poems written in your name.

“Ah,” he went on, “but there are a few bounties that are always active.”

Glossing right past his prodigious payday, the saint nonchalantly reached for a new carrot as he began listing out infamous crooks whose evil knew no bounds.

Edward of Phimia, aka the Canton-Crusher, was a villain of the highest degree. Known for massacring entire cantons, he was active across a massive region to this day. He was a goblin who employed his own kin as the main officers in his operation, with undercover moles spread far and wide; his network allowed him to continue his murderous campaign free from prying eyes. He was so thorough that it had taken five years just for a single person to survive his destruction—until then, people had feared him as an unnamed and unknowable menace.

The deserter knight Jonas Baltlinden was just as infamous, having led his old crew into a life of crime until their numbers had ballooned to the triple digits. He had the manpower to fight imperial patrols head-on and win, making him a champion for the forces of evil. Once upon a time, he’d controlled his own fief somewhere on the frontier; unable to bear the tyranny of the lord above him, he’d revolted and taken to terrorizing the populace for his daily bread.

Perhaps the oddest of the bunch was the Femme Fatale: a codename for a prostitute—or perhaps a group of prostitutes—who targeted merchant caravans. Nothing of their true identity was yet known, save for their modus operandi of tearing convoys apart from the inside out. Said to be titillating beyond compare, they used their beauty to seize all that caught their eye, leaving only a campground populated with corpses. With so little about them certain, their dreadful means of murder had turned into something of an urban legend.

“Any of them would command a price of fifty drachmae at the very least—dead or alive, of course. But if you caught them alive, I wager they might even be worth as much as the Ashen King.”

“The Ashen King?!” For once, Margit completely lost her cool.

The legendary Ashen King was the leader of a wolf pack that had wreaked havoc across the southern stretch of the Trialist Empire for years. He had neither been a massive phantasmal beast nor an accursed mystic mutant; it was precisely because he’d been a normal wolf that his reign of terror had earned him an undying epithet.

The most well-known fable was how hedge mages had poisoned livestock to become walking traps, only for the royal wolf to completely ignore only those animals. The economic damage he’d caused had been so great that the crown itself had put a hundred-drachma bounty on the beast.

To this day, the Ashen King’s drab gray pelt was worn as a cloak by the incumbent head of House Baden. The name lived on in infamy, passed down to scare children away from the forests at night, and in the tales of the heroic adventuring party that had finally ended the lupine terror.

On the other hand, I’d heard the tale also served as the greatest shame for the huntsmen of southern Rhine. That they hadn’t brought down the beast themselves and had let a crew of outsiders—to be accurate, though, the scout of the party had been a hunter—take their kill was pointed to as a failure of their craft.

Mention of the Ashen King was sure to stoke equal parts ambition and dread in any hunter; to have the villains of the region be likened to him left Margit’s heart pounding. For all the care she put into her ladylike image, she was a huntress at her core. Why else would her girlish dress sense be crowned with the daggered fang of a wolf dangling from her neck?

“Still, it’s too early for you two. You might be strong, but adventuring isn’t war—don’t push yourselves too far. The ‘adventure’ part of adventuring is about looking for fun in your work, not being reckless in the pursuit of glory.”

Mister Fidelio’s warning was mature, respectable, and exactly what an adult ought to say to a pair of young kids just getting started. Unfortunately, it was hard to tell whether the message was getting through to Margit, whose predacious instincts had completely taken hold.

“Oh, and one more thing. Some people are only ‘adventurers’ because they want to use the title as part of their schemes. If you want to get promoted doing honest work, you’re best steering clear of them.”

“Do you mean clans?”

Mister Fidelio looked surprised that I knew what he meant, so I explained how we’d run into Miss Laurentius’s crew. His face scrunched up as if to say, Oh...those guys.

“Do you have some kind of bad history with them?” I asked.

“Not really. They’re... Well, they’re not the most savory group, but I’d say they’re one of the better ones. Actually, when you consider that they make their money from fulfilling requests, you could even say they’re the cream of the crop.”

We’d already heard as much from Ebbo and Kevin, but criminals were happy to abuse the privileges given to adventurers: namely, that we could be publicly armed without causing a scene.

As with any urban scenario, ill intent lurked around every corner and in every alleyway. I didn’t need to be told not to deal with shady rogues; I wasn’t planning on it anyway. My dream was to be an adventurer, not a mobster. At that point, I might as well have just stayed in Berylin to wait on nobles for the rest of my life.

“Work earnestly, and you can expect your first promotion in a little under half a year. It might come sooner if you happen to get wrapped up in something big, but the Association doesn’t want to incentivize newbies to go chasing for miracles, so they try not to make any special exceptions. Take my advice and take it easy.”

With yet another warning, our first carrot-peeling quest came to an end.

“Wow, things sure are quick with three sets of hands! And look at how pretty these are—you two did a great job!”

The missus came over in high spirits and placed yet another wooden crate on the kitchen table. As it turned out, our next quest was to peel and chop a different kind of vegetable.

Looking back, I’d been cutting a whole lot of ingredients and not a whole lot of people lately. That was a good thing, of course, but it was such a profound departure from my experiences thus far that I was worried it would throw my senses out of whack.

We went about our business as the young couple of the house—relative to the official owner of the establishment, at least—began tossing things into a pot. Judging from the ingredients, today’s main dish was going to be a milk-based soup. It was a widely known recipe in Rhine, and while it lacked the viscosity of Earth’s cream stews, I loved the uncomplicated sweet flavor.

The peeling continued until just before noon. Our hosts said they’d take care of the rest, so we got a chance to rest until lunch was ready. Their bread-baking and seasoning processes were the lifeblood of their industry, and they didn’t want us sneaking a peek while they were working.

Kind as they were, they had a clear line that wasn’t to be crossed. That was fine by me: in the realm of business, this sort of attitude was more agreeable than one-way charity. Ours was an employment relationship, and having defined boundaries made navigating it much easier.

Margit and I found a bench under the eaves of the courtyard, where we sipped on water and watched the dribbling skies. Plain as distilled water was, it tasted incredible after a long session of labor. We still needed to unpack our luggage and move in, so our first real drinks here would have to wait until nightfall.

“You know...” A quiet voice tugged at my attention, and I glanced over to see my childhood companion holding her cup with both hands, staring at the surface of her drink. “I didn’t realize the frontier would be so rife with game.”

Filtered through the shadow of rainclouds, the sun bounced off her amber eyes as a dim, deep gold. The emotion burning on the other side of those irises was excitement—more than that, hunger.

As was a matter of course. To hunt was a huntress’s purpose; how could she resist her own enthusiasm, confronted with marks on par with the most hallowed game ever to be hunted?

Ah, but I shouldn’t mislead. The biggest reason she was so motivated was the same as mine: because both of us had grown up in the same rural canton. To forgive those who attacked similar communities and raided the caravan lifelines that supplied them was too great an ask for us. These killers were the bane of our parents, brothers, and sisters; what wealth our friends and families built through their daily toil, these animals tore down through violence. Just the thought that they might be living in comfort was unbearable.

Trying to imagine our hometown being subject to such atrocities was enough to unhinge my mind. Villains of their grade were best off hanged on a highway by their own entrails until they rotted to the ground—anyone raised in the countryside knew this feeling well.

“Want to go after them one day?”

My tone was teasing, but the question was earnest. She looked up and met my gaze. The corners of her lips pulled all the way back to unveil her disproportionately long fangs.

Her face was as cute as ever; her smile, though, was hideously frightening. That was all the answer I needed.

Suddenly, I felt like I could smell blood. Staring at her long, long fangs resurrected memories of that moment on the twilit hill when they had sunk straight into my earlobe, as if to enshrine our oath.

“Erich?”

I’d lost myself for a moment in sentiment, until Margit tugged me out of it by the hand. I looked down to realize that the smell hadn’t been a memory-induced hallucination at all: a small bead of blood oozed out of my left thumb.

“Aw, man... I must’ve cut myself.”

In all likelihood, I’d cut myself while peeling veggies. Maybe it had been when I’d nearly dropped that one carrot upon hearing about the forty-drachma bounty.

The cut was invisibly thin. It’d probably opened up when I first grabbed my cup; before that, it hadn’t bled or even hurt, and had been impossible to notice.

Still, this was seriously embarrassing as a swordsman. Cutting myself with my own blade wasn’t just a blushing matter; this represented seppuku levels of shame. If the guys in the Konigstuhl Watch ever heard about this, they’d never let me hear the end of it. Thank goodness no one knows me out here.

Figuring I ought to treat the wound, I reached for my waist pouch to get something to sanitize it—until my hand jerked suddenly forward.

What followed was a warm sensation that sent an all-too-familiar shiver across my spine. I glanced over to find my thumb squarely inside Margit’s mouth. She stared up at me, unblinking, as she rolled her tongue across the wound. Again and again, beyond any reasonable doubt that her work was done.

For a short while, my entire world was dominated by the warmth of her tongue and the golden glow of her eyes. The pitter-patter on the eaves above felt unreal, as though everything beyond the knuckle of my thumb had ceased to exist.

Yet the eternity of surreality ended in but an instant. Her lips pulled away with the faintest of smacks, leaving behind a thin silver thread that stretched and stretched, desperately trying to bridge the widening gap. Eventually, it snapped.

My cut no longer bled.

“This will have to do for now,” she said.

The huntress smiled; I smiled back, the usual sweet chills zipping down my spine.

Maybe all that these eyes behold are but prey to be hunted...

[Tips] Marsheim’s central square is ordinarily home to a lone bronze statue of the original Margrave Marsheim. However, when a big catch is dragged in, it becomes the scene of a grand spectacle.