Min-Maxing My TRPG Build in Another World - Volume 8 - Chapter 1

Autumn of the Sixteenth Year

Merging Parties

Just as parties can disband due to the circumstances of players, so too can players merge their parties partway through a campaign. There are times when a small party (two to three players) wants to begin a long campaign; this can be the perfect opportunity for merging parties.

Unexpected circumstances and meetings can lead to new party formations. Just because people have to drop out or it’s difficult for a party to continue on their quest as they are doesn’t mean that each individual PC’s adventure must end too.

There is an expression from my old world: “Autumn is when the skies are high and horses are fat,” referring to how the best days of fall provoke big appetites, even among horses. It came to me as the perfect summation of the autumn I turned sixteen. This season brought with it another change.

“Congrats!”

“Thank you so much!”

I’d changed out the soot-black tag that signified my status as an adventurer for ruby-red. Saying that, I was ruby-red in name only; the steel strips that displayed our names simply had simply been painted over, but to me they shone as brightly as the real things.

We were chicks that had finally emerged from our eggshells, and so to the public, we were still amateurs with pieces of shell stuck to our tail feathers. I couldn’t let myself get too carried away from simply reaching the second level.

“But my, it is rare for anyone to reach ruby-red this quickly.”

Miss Thais, who had become a close acquaintance of mine—she was the one who suggested the job at a restaurant and had seven kids, apparently—said this as she looked at the notes on my reports.

It’s true that she had told me that it usually took around half a year to be promoted, so I suppose only taking one season was rather fast. In my old world, this would be like a new employee at a listed company jumping up to manager or assistant manager in only two years.

“Well, I could probably count the number on one or two hands. It is awfully quick, even considering your good work,” interjected Miss Eve as she made calculations on an abacus while she read over some documents.

“And everyone was quick to write back their reports on your work too.”

Miss Eve placed a triangular paper placard on the desk to indicate that opening hours were over—such visual shorthand seemed pretty similar no matter the world—and was clearly working on some accounting. The fact that she could join in the conversation while constantly working through her figures spoke to her ability.

“Newbies are usually left on the bench, with the nobles favoring higher-ranked adventurers. How strange.”

“Well, I always knew that he was capable since the day he stepped in our door!” Miss Coralie said as she came out of the back, holding a small, labeled cashbox. She sat down at her station as her colleagues chuckled at her. It was easy for them to say stuff like this after the fact, but it felt nice to be complimented nonetheless.

“If word gets around that you’re well regarded, unsavory types will behave themselves. I’ll start putting in a good word for you.”

“But, wow, it really is quick... Remember that other kid? He was promoted, but his tag got lost in the shuffle. He ended up going on a rampage saying how we forgot about him.”

“Yes, it was a huge shame... But that’s no reason to get in a big fistfight in the plaza.”

Strictly speaking, the Association wasn’t a public office, but in many ways it functioned like one. Work that no one could be bothered to do was often put on the back burner, and in worst-case scenarios, documents and the like would be forgotten about. My experiences with public offices back in Japan had all been really good, where you would get the documents you needed if you simply went and waited a while, but that obviously didn’t apply everywhere.

Not only that, I supposed that the Association didn’t want to decrease the number of low-level adventurers who could sweep up all the grunt work around the city. If the city was flooded with high-level adventurers, the hiring costs would also start to balloon.

“You know, usually anyone in personnel could verify a promotion from soot-black, so it’s very strange that the manager’s stamp was on yours.”

Miss Thais waved my form in front of her as she said this and, sure enough, there was a huge seal on the bottom along with the other seals.

I supposed the one that wasn’t as gaudy as a noble’s seal—typically intricate and decorated with shields or crowns—but was still a bit too fancy to be a regular private seal belonged to the manager of the Association. The seal didn’t have any imagery that was only permissible for nobles, but the tasteful clover design was not cheap in the slightest.

Ah. Now that I think about it, the manager was the illegitimate child of a noble.

“Who knows why. Maybe she just happened to have some time on her hands.”

“How did a form on such poor-quality paper even make its way to her?”

“I borrowed her seal when I delivered a medical infusion once. It’s not that strange, you know.”

The picture behind this strange situation that these women were twittering about slowly came into view.

Family crests were often shared by creating a new crest that was themed off the main family’s one. For example, the Trialist imperial house’s Baden family had a crest that was consolidated under a horse motif. The family crest of the Mars-Baden family followed this pattern too, and the margrave’s crest featured a leaping horse whose head was turned to face behind it, so I assumed that a crest with clovers—often used as horse feed—would be related to the Baden family if but tangentially.

Although the manager was known to be the illegitimate child of a noble, no one knew whose; most postulated that she was the daughter of the former Margrave Marsheim. In other words, the older half sister of the current Margrave Marsheim.

Here she was, working in the public sector to help her noble younger brother with managing the city. It would be stranger if someone like her was unaware of the various goings on in the city.

If your average adventurer was aware of the turf wars that resulted from scuffles between big clans, then it would be natural to assume that the manager of the Adventurer’s Association, Maxine Mia Rehmann, knew them all like the back of her hand.

The role of adventurer was but a shell of what it once was, but Maxine was a bridge between the nobility and common folk; the standing protector of a pact struck during the Age of Gods which stipulated that the total dominion of any royal family and their court over the lay classes could never stand. All signs suggested she was quite the chessmaster, and each piece in her army held a treasure trove of information.

Taking this into consideration, this premature promotion was most likely a deliberate reward—a little treat that said “Thank you, little boy, for giving an insubordinate clan a little smack. Now be a dear and keep up the good work.”

Ugh, this was why being part of a society was so tiring. Whatever you do and wherever you go, people’s inner desires were so obvious. All the same, I couldn’t complain—a promotion was a promotion. As an adventurer who wanted to climb the ranks, I’d gladly receive the honor, even if my ambitions were a bit on the nose, thank you very much.

I suppose we could view this as the manager’s quite literal seal of approval. If the expectation that came with this present was to not cause any trouble, then her opinion of us couldn’t be all too bad. If we were viewed as a nuisance, then it would have been no skin off her back to eliminate us. Or she’d have taken the opposite tack from her present strategy and tried to freeze us out, encouraging us to take our services elsewhere.

“Yes, but they managed to round up a whole bunch of brigands despite being soot! Wouldn’t it be natural for her to want to dote on her capable new youngsters?”

I simply gave Miss Thais a modest smile, masking any evidence that I could sense the hidden motives at play.

“Come now, I’d hardly say we rounded them up! We just chased them off. Right, Margit?”

Bodyguard jobs were rarely given to those of Infrared (aka soot-black) rank, so Laurentius’s group had invited us on one of their own, where we encountered...a little assault. Laurentius’s group were all skilled in their own right, but despite that, as well as mine and Margit’s help, we only managed to capture five of them by the time the fray drew to a close. Still, I guess on paper even that result looked pretty damn compelling.

These three women had done a lot for us, so I had no intention of worsening their perception of us. I would do my best to play the part of earnest adventurer, and at the end of the day it was true that I was an adventurer-hopeful, whether I acted that way or not.

“Exactly, we only managed to round up five of them. ‘Excellent job’ is far too much of an overstatement in my eyes.”

“Yeah. I think we could only call it a real job well done if we could take after our seniors and hunt down a drake or a fallen god, really.”

“Ha ha ha! Silent, Goldilocks, you...do set your sights high.”

“C-Come on, you can allow yourselves to be a bit more proud! If you treat that job so coolly I’ll start to feel bad for the brigands you rounded up.”

“Yes, those sorry fools have got a real great view from wherever they’re staying.”

Why were they so awkward about our show of humility? Surely the frowns on the receptionist ladies’ mouths must be my imagination. I mean, come on—for a TRPG player, bagging a few brigands is as boring and trivial a job as smashing a piggy bank for the coins inside!

“Well...anyway. You’ll be able to take on ruby-red requests from here on out. They should have a bit more meat to them than what you’ve done so far, so throw yourselves right into it.”

“Knowing you two, I doubt you’ll let it get to your head, but do your best, y’hear?”

“We’ll be cheering you on from here.”

“Thank you so much, kind ladies. We look forward to continuing our patronage here.”

I tried to put on a courteous response with a tinge of palatial speech and was rewarded with chuckles of, “Kind ladies, he says!” Oho—had I earned the praise of my senior adventurers and my elders?

“Well, today we’ve got a little celebration in the works, so we won’t be issuing any requests for today.”

“Can I have a little browse of what’s on offer?”

“Of course, that won’t hurt.”

I thanked Miss Thais—who had dealt with my forms—again and glanced over the jobs on offer, even if I couldn’t take any of them right away. I figured that if I scouted out my options early it’d make picking out a good one tomorrow go that much smoother.

The requests were all posted on a row of bulletin boards on the left side of the main room in the Association. The frame of each board was color-coded so that adventurers would immediately know which jobs were for them. There were black, red, and yellow boards, at a ratio of about 5:3:1.

For requests that were sorted under higher ranks, adventurers could go to the reception desks and inquire about what was on offer. It was far quicker for adventurers in those markets to just go and ask than to bother with the effort of checking the postings.

Not only that, as the difficulty of requests increased, it was natural that the clients would want to keep certain intel secret. Prices could fluctuate wildly if rumors about what a noble wanted got out.

As I approached the wall of requests, the scribes who stood by the bulletin boards like wolves awaiting their prey, as well as the Association’s other literate employees hungry for some walking-around money, all cleared out of the way in a hurry; they knew I wasn’t in need of their services.

All this lurking and hovering was completely natural; reading was a relatively exclusive talent in this world. A large portion of the requests I had seen thus far had been illustrated so that the illiterate clientele could get a gist of the details and reward, or used a pool of simple vocabulary that got the message across.

These images were more than suitable for simple requests that offered equally low rewards. However, if you really wanted to enjoy the tasks that this board had on offer—being cost-effective really does add up—then you would need to ask someone literate or invest in learning those skills yourself.

Considering this, the do-it-yourself world that I used to live in, where everyone was taught how to talk, read, and write in a common language, was a compassionate one.

“These requests are starting to look like actual adventurers’ jobs, aren’t they?”

“Yeah. Although it’s mostly fetch quest stuff.”

I had quickly scanned the red-framed boards, but most of the requests weren’t that much harder than soot ones, nor did they offer much more in terms of compensation. The only real palpable change was that we could take requests from the cantons around Marsheim, but they were only a hair above chores a child could do. All the same, it was true that the material in general was feeling a bit more on-theme.

For example, there were some requests that the clients felt they couldn’t leave to bottom-rank soot-level adventurers, like delivering letters or goods outside of the city, or bodyguard jobs where the goal was more of a bluff than anything, a way to cheaply increase the size of a person’s entourage. Others were stopgap solutions, stationing adventurers in a canton to scare off groups of bandits wandering nearby.

It was a small change compared to the world of soot-black level, and if we tried we could earn slightly more coin, so it was a result to be proud of. From here on out a stroke of bad luck could bring real danger with it; we needed to be careful going forward.

“Hey.”

With the change in our tag color, I was all ready to pull up my bootstraps and attempt these requests, when someone had suddenly called out to me. The voice seemed to belong to a boy, and when I turned, I saw exactly the sort of person I’d expected.

“You’re Goldilocks Erich, yeah?”

He looked to be my age—maybe slightly younger—with black, disheveled hair and a scar across his cheek. His eyes drooped a little, and behind them lay a sharp, confident gaze that yet brimmed with a naive ambition. I felt like at any moment a text box would appear somewhere around him that read the Protagonist.

He was dressed in travel wear that looked easy to move in and made me wonder if he was about to head out on a job. Behind him was a girl, who was smiling awkwardly. Her long robe and staff, as well as her mortar-and-pestle-themed accessories, screamed “I’m a mage!” Judging from the simple wooden accessories, I assumed she was a healer.

You didn’t see this every day. Although a mage was a fixture for a party worth their salt, it was incredibly rare to see a young, novice mage out adventuring. I had only been an adventurer for one season myself, but this was the first time I’d met a mage my age in this line of work.

If I had to ballpark a figure, I would say there were probably twenty people who couldn’t use magic for every mage. I think my own sense of normalcy had been completely dulled from my time at the Imperial College—that hive of scum and sorcery—but magic was just that uncommon in a normal city.

This was especially so when you looked at the adventurer community. Putting aside the charlatans trying to pass as the real deal, magic was a rare enough talent to allow you to get by on its own.

You could earn considerable renown working as a doctor in the countryside. Many found roles as assistants to knights, and others were picked up by a magistrate and bestowed with the honor of being sent to the College of Magic, just like my good old chum had been.

It would be easier to regard anyone with the talent choosing to become an adventurer as just a little messed up in the head. Of course that applied even to me, despite the fact that I hid my skills from everyone I met.

I just need you to understand how peculiar this scene was.

I had once had a look at some of the party recruitment requests out of my own sadistic curiosity; almost all of them came from self-proclaimed warriors or swordsmen.

It was just like people who put up fliers looking for people to join their band. I’m sure most schools or colleges had them—posters that say nothing more than “I’m on lead vocals, got it?” but are still looking for people to come and help out. Just as difficult as throwing yourself into practicing something to become a renowned figure in that field, learning magic was a pursuit that required a lot of skill and practice, so this came as no surprise really.

I had decided long ago to become an adventurer alongside Margit, so we had been enjoying our time as a married couple—just joking, I should say as a “newly formed party”—so when I had read these recruitment requests back then, I hadn’t paid them much heed. But with all this in mind, it was a rare thing to see a mage and warrior standing right before me.

All the same, she exuded an air of innocence. The quality of her staff wasn’t too remarkable, and from what I could see, she didn’t seem to house an incredible well of mana or anything.

Unless she was actively using a formula to hide her abilities, I pegged her as a beginner mage who still had things to learn and was probably as capable as a student at the College—maybe slightly less.

Despite the boy’s strangely aggressive stare and his friend’s inability to hold him in line, I didn’t sense any ill will from them and I felt a sense of nostalgia spread through my heart, so I decided to respond to them kindly.

I mean, come on, they were the picture of fledgling adventurers! A two-person party of a boy and a girl, still wet behind the ears, like they’d only just left their rinky-dink village in the countryside. They might as well have been a couple of pregens fresh out of the starter set. I sorely wanted to add them to my Connections column on my character sheet.

“I don’t recall having introduced myself to you, but yes, I am Erich. Who might you be?”

“Gack, metropolitan speak, huh? Tch, someone’s up his own ass... M-My name’s Siegfried of Illfurth! I’m gonna become a swordsman on par with the heroes from the sagas!”

For a moment I wanted to say, “Siegfried? What a vulgar name,” but then I realized that joke would only work in my old world (and even then, only in a pretty tight circle of real sci-fi diehards), so I kept it to myself.

He announced his name with great gusto, but Illfurth was a rural canton not too far from Marsheim. Not only that, the name Siegfried was, as chance would have it, the name of a hero in this world too—a man from the Age of Gods, renowned as the “Slayer of the Foul Drake.” I doubted that some commoner would simply name their son that...

“Siegfried, you say? I’m Erich of Konigstuhl. And with me...”

“My name is Margit, also of Konigstuhl. A pleasure.”

As we introduced ourselves with the same energy we always did, the pair seemed to be shocked—they took a half step back.

I wondered why. Was it our palatial tongue that they were unused to hearing? From his rare name I had thought for a moment that he might be the illegitimate son of some magistrate, but that seemed unlikely. His crude diction seemed to come very naturally to him, and it was a far cry from the difficulty that a noble boy would find in trying to code-switch far below his station.

“C-Come on, Dee, you gotta use your real name...”

“Shut your trap, Kaya! I told you to call me Sieg!”

As the mage girl—Kaya, apparently—replied to Siegfried, the pieces fell into place.

I know your plight too well, young man. I know the desire to shed your hated countryside name and take on a new one as you enter the big city. To be honest, my own name sounded pretty stupid to me, but I paid it no real heed—it was a name my parents had picked out just for me, after all. But, yeah, I could see why some people would be a bit self-conscious.

A canton’s temple would have the local registry, but when you were in the city you were free to present yourself however you liked. You could pick a cool name and take it up with just a bit of mental effort. Even military commanders back in the Sengoku Era did it.

Let he who never once considered changing his boring-ass name to something way cooler during his middle school years cast the first stone.

“Wh-What the hell is that look for?!”

“My apologies.”

My eyes had taken on the glaze of a nostalgic middle-aged man. You can’t blame me—it was a heartwarming scene! This kid had come to the city with his childhood friend to make a name for himself and had decided to change his provincial name into one taken from a bona fide hero. Mm-hmm, yup, you are the spitting image of a Level 1 team and it’s awesome.

Holding the desire to become his friend secret, I asked him why he called out to us; he pointed his forefinger straight at me—I wanted to scold him for manners on the spot—but he merely announced that he wouldn’t lose next time.

“You say next time, but we’ve literally only just met. At least I don’t remember going on a job with you before.”

“Yeah, but you beat me! You got promoted before I did! I became an adventurer just this summer!”

Aha. He had become an adventurer at the same time as me, then. He had gotten his adventurer tag, seen our seniors prattling on about clans and whatnot, and decided that wouldn’t be for him—he would be the quickest of his fellow newbies to get to ruby-red.

Then he had developed a rivalry with me, with my head start on making a name, but since he couldn’t get me alone, he hadn’t been able to confront me yet. And then finally, on the day we officially overtook him, he managed to talk to me.

Ugh, this sucks—we could’ve had some fun adventures if we’d only met earlier.

“I’m gonna overtake you in no time and become the best new adventurer! Then I’m gonna become the best adventurer in all of Ende Erde! Gah! I said quit with that look! You remind me of my freakin’ gramps!”

So he had spoken to me, his new friendly rival, all for the sake of announcing this challenge. He’s your stereotypical gutsy kid who wants to make it big—how could I not look at him with a softhearted expression?

“My apologies. I meant nothing by it. My face just tends to go like that.”

“Right... If you say so.”

“Indeed. I am sorry if I made you uncomfortable. But we’re beginning our journey at the same time, so as fellow adventurers let’s get along and mutually encourage each other, shall we?”

“Mu...chu... Say that again?”

He was looking at me askance with narrowed eyes, but man, could I just ignore a fellow adventurer this fun to tease? No way. Judging from his frame, he looked to be like me, a light swordsman who favored maneuverability. We were two peas in a pod—we should totally have gotten along.

“If you like, let’s work a gig together sometime.”

I smiled as I held out my hand. I realized in this moment that although I had been involved with senior adventurers, Margit and I had been so focused about seeing what we could do on our own that we hadn’t gotten to know any adventurers of our own level.

It had been a long time since I’d had normal interactions as an adventurer. People would continually try to antagonize me or challenge me or try to use me for their own gains, dammit.

This had the same refreshing joy that you get when you down a fizzy drink on a hot summer’s day, you get me?

Even having this angry boy smack away my hand was fun in and of itself, and I was on cloud nine at this refreshing new acquaintance.

[Tips] It goes without saying that an adventurer’s status is decided by their skill, but as the trust between the Association and their clients is also on the line, adventurers are not only judged on the quality of their work, but also their character. While you can rise up from a low level if you work earnestly, if you want to reach the middle levels, greater assets than just your character or your work ethic are called for.

To the fledgling adventurer, Siegfried of Illfurth, he was a complete abnormality.

No, that wasn’t quite right—Erich of Konigstuhl was a bewildering aberration to every new adventurer in Marsheim.

The way he stood with his lean, muscular frame was like a blade at the ready or a spear with a heavy iron core. His golden hair that had earned him his moniker was more beautifully maintained than any noble girl’s hair. His metropolitan speech came off like an act, and yet it was somehow effortless. Blue eyes were said to be the jewels of any debutant, yet his glittered far more vividly than a canton festival’s prized gemstones. His slender build was similar to Siegfried’s, yet it showed no trace of weakness. His only accessory was a famous sword that had cut down countless foes.

Such thoughts pinballed around in Siegfried’s spacious and spartan brain at the sight of his peculiar comrade. As he noticed all of these differences, a tiny white-hot flare of fury sprang up in his train of thought—one he wisely tamped down.

The boy must have been born to a well-off house. He was a far cry from Siegfried’s own upbringing as the third son of a dyed-in-the-wool peasant family, so poor that even his grandfather—who should have retired by now—was forced to work the fields or chop wood just to survive.

Siegfried hated his upbringing. He hated not amounting to even a side character in the heroic sagas; it held such sway over him that he chose, as his own peasant vernacular put it when anyone sought to take up the adventurer’s life from the bottom rung up, to cover himself in soot.

And the nature of his work had ensured that by the end of every day since, the expression would prove quite literal.

Siegfried decided against taking supplies from his already impoverished home; instead he’d sneaked supplies from the local guard he’d trained under. He had been let off with an “I’ll make an exception for a penniless brat,” and so that he wouldn’t disgrace his family further, he’d made off with some leftover gear that was almost totally on its way out; his equipment hardly did a thing.

The adventurer before Siegfried looked nothing like how an adventurer should, covered in mud and dirt, too cheap to waste a few coins on the public bath. Instead, his clothes were clean, his face was spotless (even taking into consideration that he might not have headed out to work yet), and he even had an incense bag under his shirt.

The arachne girl hanging off of him like a knapsack wasn’t quite on the same level, but her clothes were well tailored and maintained. From what Siegfried had heard, his fine sword wasn’t your usual run-of-the-mill mass-produced thing, and it made his own sword, the edge of which would never come out perfectly straight no matter how much he honed it, look like a pathetic sight. It made Siegfried’s jealousy rise ever more. What the hell was this?

What’s more, despite Siegfried’s bellicose attitude, Erich had managed to brush off this antagonism with all the coolness in the world. Siegfried was only more frustrated that he couldn’t even hate the guy properly—now how was he supposed to let off all this pent-up frustration?

“Dammit... This won’t help me in the slightest.”

Siegfried muttered to himself in a voice so small it almost didn’t make it past his teeth; his fellow adventurer, always one step—no, so many steps—ahead of him, walked out of the Association building with a light tread.

No human feeling was quite so loathsome to Siegfried as envy; it was a commonplace failing back home, and one that cheapened the spirit of the whole canton.

A hero, he reasoned, envied no one.

What would jealousy gain him? He might as well have been chewing gravel—it wouldn’t fill his stomach or cause the barren fields to grow thick with wheat. If he was going to stew in his own grasping insecurities, then he was obliged to spend that time doing something useful with them, like training his sword arm or getting on with some side job.

Back in the canton, even if each individual earning was small and a generation’s work might not secure a bigger harvest or land of their own to grow it on, they could eventually buy hoes with better blades to them.

Siegfried knew that this future was his lot. The family wasn’t rich enough to send even their oldest child to the private school run by the local village head and they were still unmarried. Despite this, Siegfried’s father didn’t put his effort into his work, but into idle complaints about the local landlord’s cut of his yield as he drowned his sorrows in booze.

I won’t be like him. That was the thought in Siegfried’s head as he had fled from his canton; now here he was, cursing himself for this faint whisper of envy.

After all, he knew that he was blessed in his own way.

“You okay, Dee?”

“I’m fine. And Kaya, how many times have I told you to call me Siegfried? Or at least Sieg!”

Yes, he was blessed with a partner, despite her continued failure to remember his new name. By his side was the fledgling healer from Illfurth, Kaya.

In normal circumstances, someone of her social standing wouldn’t be in a place like this. Kaya was the daughter of a healer who worked a circuit of the local cantons. Kaya was a mage in her own right, and more revered than the village head or even the magistrate—and yet she had tossed aside her future to come along with Siegfried and shore up his dreams. When Siegfried was as blessed as this, what right did he have to even dare to be jealous?

Especially since Kaya had come of her own accord, without Siegfried even asking her to.

“Find us a job.”

“Ah, yeah, got it. Want me to read some out?”

Just how many adventurers were out there struggling to find stalwart allies? A simple glance at the bulletin board, with the sorry state of all of its party recruitment requests, was enough to remind him of how lucky he was.

What Kaya read out wasn’t great. Siegfried’s fellow village-deserters weren’t all so lucky to have someone who would daub themselves in soot with them. It was only a lucky few who could form a fixed party. You needed to meet the right complete strangers, then prove you were capable enough to earn their lasting trust.

Yet here Siegfried was with a mage in his party, of all people. With such a vanishingly rare ally, what business did he have envying anyone?

“Hey, Dee? How about this one? It’s a request from an herb wholesaler—they want someone to help count inventory. Looks like they want somebody literate and familiar with herbs.”

“Sure, why not? But unloading stock, huh... Seems tough for so little.”

All the same, a full day’s work between the two of them would net them two librae. That said, two-thirds of the work would be Kaya’s. If Siegfried were to attempt the job alone, he wouldn’t be able to take the job at all, and he would have to subsist on jobs that were worth half or even a quarter of the pay.

Hence the presence of the clans. By borrowing the might of senior adventurers, they would introduce better jobs (in exchange for a cut of the pay, of course) and you could meet other adventurers through the clan.

It was pure luck that Siegfried had avoided being roped into one; if he had left his canton a moment later or earlier, his fate would have been different. If he had joined one, perhaps he could have afforded a higher class of gruel—possibly even the occasional stew with some meat in.

But that was the envy talking again; he had to look ahead. Bitching or pleading or praying for a beautiful moment of schadenfreude wouldn’t rescue him—only a clear view of what was in front of him could do that.

That was the whole reason Siegfried had neglected his duties at home and left for the wider world.

As his childhood friend stood on her tiptoes to grab the request paper, Siegfried reached up and got it for her. In that moment, he felt eyes on his back, and he turned.

A group of adventurers were loitering over by the wall. It didn’t look like they were waiting to use the Association’s services or checking the bulletin board for fresh requests. They were quite plainly sizing up Siegfried and Kaya. It wasn’t a pleasant stare. It was the sort of look you gave produce, not people.

“Great... Wonder which clan these bastards are headhunting for.”

Siegfried grabbed the request with a violent tug to assuage some of his anger, then kept Kaya close to him as they left the building at a brisk pace. He might have been a gawking hayseed, but he knew that, here or back in the canton, Kaya’s fame painted a bit of a target on her head. The clans were incessant in their pursuit of her. Time and time again some new creep or pack thereof would turn up; the ordeal of fighting off the especially pushy recruiters had already cost Siegfried two chipped teeth.

Kaya had worked her magic and reaffixed his broken incisors, but the memory of the pain wouldn’t disappear so easily. The only bread they could afford was the hard stuff, and so Sieg had to maintain constant vigilance or risk undoing her hard work.

Siegfried could sense that the clan recruiters were desperate in their own way—the presence of a mage in a clan’s roster could vastly alter the whole clan’s standing. Of course, Kaya’s own skills were important, but the fact of the matter was that having any mage was a draw for clients.

But joining a clan was out of the question. It was only the clan’s leader who saw any recognition—even if your standing within a clan rose, it was only the greatest of adventurers who made it into the sagas. Siegfried needed to make it on his own, as part of his own party—no, as their leader. It was only the feats of the few most exceptional heroes who were sung of. Four intrepid souls against a fallen god, freshly immortalized in song by Marsheim’s most famous poet in “The Defanging of the Serpent-Devil,” the talk of the whole city—that was the dream, the only height worth aspiring to.

If their feat had been achieved by a noble with their own army, or a leader who had the might of the clans behind them, then the only names of note would be the front-runners. The names of those who had perished defending their allies or taken the fall for someone else’s aims during the epic battle wouldn’t even feature as a footnote.

Over the years, there would surely be many young souls who would vow to become heroes themselves just from this tale alone. Siegfried wanted to become firewood to stoke the blazing hearts of children. Joining a clan wasn’t an option.

On top of that, their target was Kaya anyway. It was almost a guarantee that she would be taken away from Siegfried and loaded with a pile of backbreaking requests. As for Siegfried, he would be saddled with all the grunt work, and the time he could have spent working toward becoming a better adventurer would be wasted.

What the hell would fixed lodgings and a gaggle of ragtag adventurers get him?

The hero-hopeful clenched his fist as he reaffirmed his resolve to never let them hold his fate or take Kaya for themselves.

It would be fine if he could just form a party he could trust. He just needed one or two more people that he could leave to watch his back and, if possible, a scout who could survey the road ahead. If he was being honest with his desires, it would be awesome to have one more mage and someone with a miracle or two in their back pocket in the team.

If he could achieve that, then he could fight as Saint Fidelio had in the story he’d heard yesterday. Siegfried would be a bit different from his namesake and most revered hero, the Slayer of the Foul Drake—that Siegfried had fought all his battles with nary a comrade or childhood friend in sight, start to finish—but to even dream of someday doing deeds on the level of the Goddess of Calm Tides’s chosen soldier was an ambitious undertaking.

Siegfried ground his cowardice between his teeth as he took his friend’s hand and dashed from the Association building.

I’ll protect her from their evil invitations. Kaya had long been burdened by her own people-pleasing tendencies. She was a kindhearted girl who had practiced her smiles in the reflection of the local pond, and since she had come along with Siegfried on his quest, he had a responsibility to protect her from any unwanted and distasteful strangers. In return, she would cover for his faults, and together they would take on grand adventures side by side. And, though he dwelled on it less, one day he hoped to put a ring on her finger—nothing fancy, but precious nonetheless.

He didn’t want just to protect her—he wanted to be with her. He’d promised that much as he dashed out of their canton that night, kicking the dirty sign that read Illfurth on the way out.

“All right, let’s do this.”

“Yep, let’s give it our all, Dee!”

“C’mon, I said call me Siegfried, dammit!”

Although the pair had some time to carouse, the day’s work was simple hard labor. Not only was the storehouse of the wholesaler (a supplier for Marsheim’s local herbalists) unnecessarily large, the shelves were stupidly high (to keep the herbs dry, Siegfried presumed), and the pair had to make countless journeys up and down the ladders.

That night in bed, after giving muscles he hadn’t even known he had a brutal workout, Siegfried groaned in pain as he clutched at himself and swallowed down the pain, reasoning that this was foundational work for future sagas that were to be told for generations.

And besides that, there was another small reward to consider. The wholesaler had directly given the pair a new job collecting the wild-grown herbs he couldn’t cultivate—a request that usually would only be available to ruby-red level adventurers.

Siegfried’s earnest toil and Kaya’s plant lore had impressed their client, so despite his aching muscles, Siegfried slept the sleep of the just that night.

[Tips] “To cover oneself in soot” is a provincial Rhinian expression, referring to the act of becoming an adventurer. Although such aspirations are all well and good, many beginner adventurers who lose heart take inspiration from the lowest rank to air their grievances.

A lot of regulars had started asking whether I was going to be adopted, maybe since I’d become a familiar face there. Even though Fidelio and Shymar were madly in love, the two of them didn’t have any children. Folks must’ve thought Fidelio’d fished up a capable son to cement their transition from simply an item to an honest-to-goodness family.

Naturally, they tended to be taken a little aback when I flashed my tag and gave the boilerplate “no, legitimately, we’re just coworkers” spiel.

It was no real shock to me, though; the name “Goldilocks” might have carried some weight in certain circles around here, but I was hardly a household brand among the normies. Or perhaps they had taken one look at my small frame and decided that adventuring wasn’t the job for me.

What I wouldn’t give for another head of height and some homegrown beef on these bones. If things had been going to plan, I would be nearing 180 centimeters tall by the time my long bones were done growing.

It’s not that I disliked the idea of being all secretly skinny-ripped, but to be frank I longed for the sturdy frame that my old teacher Lambert had. Now there was a textbook Tough Guy; just looking at him made me feel like anyone would feel safe leaving him watching their six.

Like, come on, tell me you wouldn’t find it in you to charge a block of pikemen with nothing but a firm grip on your zweihander if it was him leading you. The magistrate had recruited him personally because he was just that obviously beastly. I’d made myself an absolute fiend for meat and worked my body to the bone in the hopes that I’d come out even a little bit like him, but my results were pretty unremarkable.

To put things in Hollywood terms, I was shooting for a Dwayne Johnson look, but I topped out around Chris Evans, which just didn’t cut it if you ask me. Go big or go home, you know?

Ugh, pleeease let me be a reliable frontliner—190 centimeters tall, 120 kilos, and at least an 18 in STR.

“Then why are you pouring EXP into magic proficiency?” I hear you cry, and, well, you might have a point.

“Whatcha thinkin’ about? Is it icky?”

I felt a soft sensation on my head—the now long-familiar weight of a sprightly alfish body sprawled amid my locks. Lottie had come out to chat. I supposed she’d been waiting to show herself until the last customer saw themselves out—not that anyone would have seen her if she didn’t want them to.

“I was just thinking that I wished I was a little bit taller, and that it’d be pretty damn nice to have a cool scar like that young adventurer I met the other day.”

“You were?! Naw, a scar wouldn’t suit you at all!”

Lottie’s disappointment was palpable in the face of my honest desire.

A scar wouldn’t suit me? Hmm, was it possible to swap out some points in APP and put them toward SIZ...?

“Heads up, you got some customers coming. Ooh, they smell.”

“How do they smell?”

My query floated in the air just as the door opened and was answered as soon as the customers came in.

“Excuse us.”

They were a mage in a low-hooded cloak and an entourage of two others. One of the henchmen had a nose that veered way off course in a couple directions. Let’s just say that all three were familiar faces.

The lady mage in front was the poor soul whose face Margit had so rudely introduced to the pavement. I assumed she must have gotten fixed up, because she looked pristine—not even a scab left on her.

One of the men behind her was the unfortunate mage who had tried to tear-gas me shortly before I’d open-palm slammed his head into a wall—hence the nose. Clearly he couldn’t afford his boss’s iatrurge and just didn’t have the mojo or the skill to do the reconstructive work it would’ve taken to erase the mark of his brutal ass-beating himself. Poor fool might as well have been walking around town with the word CHUMP written in tall, friendly letters on his forehead.

The other man was the backliner who had been caught up in said tear gas attack. I suppose it was thanks to the Baldur Clan’s infamy that he had managed to swagger around with his sword so brazenly out in the open without being stopped by the local guard.

“This establishment is for travelers and merchants. If you want a drink, I suggest you take your money elsewhere.”

The master had a firm “no adventurers” policy (exempting his own comrades, naturally), and as I borrowed the saint’s fearsome reputation, the mage in front quickly put her hand in her breast pocket.

My fingers itched for a weapon; I snatched a fork off the counter—with some effort, even a wooden fork could kill—but I pumped the brakes on my instincts as I noticed that none of them seemed to be spoiling for a fight.

For the love of the gods, I thought, you’re a mage—please don’t do anything sudden and suspicious just because you’re not holding your staff. I was moments away from hucking this at your windpipe.

It was exceedingly common for mages to unleash their magic through potions or charms, and I knew for a fact she knew some Imperial College ornithurgy—let her get off an incantation and she might go airborne, and then things could get really screwy. So, like, it had to be just common sense among mages to refrain from sudden and unexplained movements, right? Because let me tell you, if you’re not thinking about how all your wizard nonsense puts people on guard, it’s kinda on you if they attack first and ask questions later.

“Good gods, I’ve just come to deliver a letter!”

She was oddly cautious—well, I suppose that’s natural; she had been on the brink of death the last time we’d talked like this—and pulled out not a small staff or formula-engraved talisman as I’d expected, but a wax-sealed letter.

The crest of a crow with an eyeball in its mouth belonged to the Baldur Clan’s boss, Nanna Baldur Snorrison. It was the symbol of the entire clan, but it was also proof that whatever received the seal was approved by her personally.

However, my experiences with my former employer still lingered in my heart, and the fact that a former Imperial College student would go so far as to affix a wax seal with her crest honestly pissed me off. Was she looking down on me?

She had a long name, but she wasn’t a noble—she wasn’t even a magia—yet here she was, publicly using her crest on a letter. If that didn’t reek of arrogance then I didn’t know what did.

You didn’t hear the palatial tongue out in these parts much. The value system was different here. It would be a waste of time to air my gripes with a mage who was nothing more than a messenger pigeon, so I bit my tongue and decided to take the letter.

In all honesty, I didn’t want to be involved with a clan of outlaws; I wanted to take after the black goat in that old nursery rhyme and simply dispose of the thing without even reading it, but I knew that choosing to ignore it would result in more faff down the road, so I put this desire aside.

The fact that the three messengers didn’t leave despite my receiving the letter indicated to me that they’d been asked to secure a response before departing.

Come on, you three—this is an upright inn and restaurant! It’s bad for business for three suspicious-looking, no-good adventurers like yourselves to just plant themselves right by the door.

I said I’d call them once I’d read the letter and kicked them aside—metaphorically, of course—then coaxed them out of the way and into some seats while I opened the letter.

The letter’d been enchanted with a self-immolation spell to keep it safe from all but the intended reader’s prying eyes. This was a common technique in the School of Daybreak—basic day one etiquette. More powerful forms of this magic would combust the curious reader along with the letter itself. Some would skip right past lethal consequences and go straight to transmutations that would leave the reader praying for death. However, these were a bit too grotesque for daily use, so this was a more reasonable choice.

What would Lady Agrippina do? Well, her techniques were far too complicated for me to completely understand, but I suppose she’d tamper with the fate of anyone other than the intended reader by making them unable to read again. Worst case, she’d slam-dunk them into some eleventh-dimensional garbage bin, forever exiled from the material plane. But that’s just me spitballing; the long and short of it is that she’d do something so beyond the pale I don’t want to dwell on it.

Forgetting the past for now, since Nanna had made no effort before or since to hide her research chemical habits, I wouldn’t have put it past her to send something that would explode into a toxic gas cloud filled with Bacillus anthracis, but there was just a normal letter inside.

As I was about to sit down and read the damn thing, I heard a voice from somewhere around neck-height.

“I know they showed up wearing their best tough-customer act, but you could show a little decorum and not telegraph how badly you want to shoot the messenger, couldn’t you?”

My partner leaped toward me as usual, having sensed something was amiss from the inner garden.

Chalk up another loss for me. It seemed that Margit hadn’t had a lot of time to spend on self-improvement, so she’d been making an effort to invent opportunities to polish her silent movement on me—never mind that it already shone like a jewel. She could already stalk her quarry in the wooded highlands with the best of them, but her urban stealth was only getting better.

The number of times I didn’t notice her unless I was concentrating had been on the rise recently; if I wasn’t careful our final score would start to tip fully in her favor. My sensory skills as a swordsman were reaching their limit, so maybe it was about time I looked into some kind of twenty-four seven watchdog spell.

“It’s a letter from the Baldur Clan. Delivered personally by some of their higher-ups.”

“Oh my. It seems they esteem you quite highly! Quite a feat for an adventurer who’s just shaken off his soot.”

My partner snickered at me as I fought to parse the letter’s peculiar handwriting.

“News gets to them quick. It’s only been two days since we were promoted.”

“They’re skilled at this kind of stuff. Their intelligence network within their turf is on a whole other level. Our information networks essentially boil down to the friends we take tea with.”

“Let’s just be grateful we take tea with heroes immortalized in story and song then, yeah?”

The content of the letter was an innocuous congratulation for our promotion, closing on the surprising suggestion that they hold a feast to celebrate.

Although it wasn’t written to spec for basic courtly protocol, the writing was elegant—fitting for a former student of the Institute. All the same, there was something odd about some of the flicks and curves in the letters that seemed sloppy. Poor gal wasn’t getting the shakes, was she?

All the same, I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was looking down on us. It felt like she still saw us as pawns—just pawns in need of a light and judicious touch.

The whole proposition was in keeping with etiquette, but you couldn’t ignore that this was a great big swinging-dick power move, showing off the quality of Baldur’s informants. Ever since silencing the Exilrat, everyone aside from Miss Laurentius was walking on eggshells around us, but it seemed that our psychonaut friend had caught the scent of her former life on us and decided we still had some utility to her.

“Right, I’ll send a polite letter declining her invite.”

“Aw, why not take her up on her offer?”

You serious? I looked at my partner and saw that she had a devilish grin; she followed up with an old huntress’s expression: “A beast’s easier to butcher when you know where the offal is.” In less gruesome terms—no better place to gather the intel you need to control a foe than right in the midst of their operation.

Hmm... Yeah, she had a point. It wouldn’t be a completely bad thing to meet face-to-face and get a read on the situation. It beat staying completely in the dark about what Nanna would be doing behind my back.

Of course, I had no intentions of getting buddy-buddy with her, but an adventurer needed ties.

“Fine. We can take her up on her offer, but I’m not eating or drinking a thing, got it?”

“I won’t tell you to open your heart to that extent. I only have a passing acquaintance with poison myself, so I won’t be partaking either.”

All righty then, how's about I get myself a little revenge while I pen my reply?

I could sense no one else nearby, so I snapped my fingers, and with that (plus a little space-bending magic) I opened up our box of equipment.

Inside was a selection of supplies from my former employment that I could instantly summon into my hand as needed. This time called for some parchment made of high-quality sheepskin that a noble wouldn’t turn his nose up at upon receiving, a bottle of enchanted ink of an equally high quality, and a gryphon-feather quill that I had used often.

They were all important items, but it was a common pitfall for TRPG newbies to realize “Oh crap, I forgot to buy them!” after penning their early character sheets and beginning a campaign. Once I had prioritized buying potions and ended up without something so basic as paper, so I ended up borrowing a scrap from a fellow PC’s notebook.

You couldn’t afford to be lax just because it was easier to scrounge up such basic items in real life.

Back to the task at hand: I don’t want you looking down on me, failed student-boss lady. I’d worked myself right to the bone for a count; I’d even trained her future retainers. You’re not gonna intimidate me with a well-penned letter and noble bombast, no way.

“What nice stationery. How much did it set you back?”

“Charged it to the expense account. My employer didn’t keep her purse strings tight when it came to stuff like this.”

For a textbook bourgeois pig academic turned actual aristocrat, she really had no attachment to money. She would buy me the necessities, no matter the cost, and wouldn’t even balk at my requests. Her approval of purchasing this stationery set for me came with the tacit expectation that I maintain at least a minimum of decorum when sending letters.

Whatever the case, the ink and parchment were of high enough quality for a count to send a letter to the Emperor himself. You better brace yourself...

I quickly penned my response, then was ready to seal the letter—I didn’t want her to know I could use magic, so I didn’t bother with a spell to ward against nosy interlopers—when I realized something important.

Oh yeah, I don’t have a wax seal...

Letters had always been sent on Lady Agrippina’s behalf, so she had given me her signet ring to affix the seals, and I had simply used glue when sending letters back home—this was a complete oversight.

Aw man, if I don’t cinch this, then I won’t be able to make the exact impression I want to.

“Hey, Margit? You don’t happen to have a signet ring with a cool crest on it, do you?”

“Are you honestly asking if a huntress would put pointless equipment on her fingers? If you want to make one, I can lend you some fangs or something else I put aside.”

Her slender fingers were, just as she said, completely undecorated. Rings would alter how a bow or dagger would feel and handle, so Margit wasn’t a fan. She preferred to cover other parts of her body in jangly jewelry—that she was skilled at keeping silent—in their place, however.

Hmm, yeah, I could make one on the spot. My Woodworking and Dexterity were enough to whip up a pretty top-of-the-line eraser stamp in five minutes or so. Unfortunately, my artistic vision was holding me back. Even if I could copy artwork or writing well on a technical level, I was not an “ideas guy” in either life; it seemed to point to some kind of basic, persistent poverty of my soul.

This was pure conjecture on my part, but I think this was why conceptual skills, which seemed so technical on the surface, ran such a steep XP cost—mess with those and you’d be tinkering with the literal essence of your being. It was similar to how I didn’t really value my facial features or voice—attributes that would change as I grew older—but didn’t want to mess with my height values now that most of my long bone growth was done with.

Who was it that said “You can’t buy class with money”?

“Aha, that’s it.”

I know exactly what to do to surprise her with my “class,” or shall I say my pride...

[Tips] In this age, a house’s honor is more important than matters of blood, so adoption is a common occurrence. The magnanimity to adopt a child of another race should they happen to possess unique talent is a must in the Empire.

However, when it comes to walking examples of the natural history of humanfolk, such as methuselah, the question of their ability to provide offspring is another key metric by which judgments are made as to whether they fall within the clade. All the same, there are tales of mensch who have sired and spawned children with drakes, so it goes without saying that exceptions are more common than not.

We were invited under the auspices of a celebratory feast, but smoke was the only thing that entered the mouths of all present.

In the base of Clan Baldur—it seemed one step removed from descending into ruins or the site of a haunted house—Margit, the head of Marsheim’s most lawless clan, and I sat together.

In an effort to show that she bore no murderous intent, Nanna’d convinced her bodyguards to sit this meeting out for once.

It was something that I had practiced countless agonizing times working under Lady Agrippina—even being taught increased my proficiency rapidly—and so my letter in court process palatial writing seemed to have quite an effect.

Nanna’s time as an Imperial College student meant that she had received education under the expectation that she was to serve under a noble as their bureaucrat or become a noble herself. I could never forget the sight of poor Elisa being lectured by Lady Agrippina in the correct way to hold a spoon or walk or any of a million other aggravating, arbitrary social signifiers.

Everything that nobles did, from the way they ate soup to how they did their buttons, was annoying as hell to its core.

Mika, for example, spoke to me in a casual and colloquial way, but they were hugely talented in palatial speech. I figure it came down to their master forcing them to drill down on every single excruciating difference in gendered dialect rules so that they wouldn’t slip up.

I knew just how much of a damn chore courtly writing was, even putting aside all my firsthand experience dealing with the convoluted stuff. To put it in more familiar terms, it’s not exhausting in quite the same way as an online job application, but it’s damn close and leaves you begging for death at about the same volume. Though, man, I could write a killer cover letter this time around. But, hm, yeah, how do you condense work experience like mine into two pages tops, double-spaced?

Forgetting my homesickness for a second, I actually worked one last little vengeful angle just to get completely under her skin.

I had made a perfect facsimile of the wax seal that she had used on the letter to me.

The wax seal in itself was a cornerstone in protective seals; they were also imbued with another type of protective seal to prevent the crest’s misuse.

Of course, Nanna had enchanted her own eyeball-plucking crow crest to prevent reuse, but little did she know that I had once served a count. I had a whole slew of other shrewd methods up my sleeve.

When I started my work penning letters for the madam, Lady Agrippina had drilled into me that this particular method of misusing someone’s seal was all too possible.

Perhaps now she had mistaken me for the sort of guy with an illusionist on call, or who’d pull strings at the Snoozing Kitten to get Miss Zaynab to bail me out.

I think that Nanna now fully understood the two other forms of revenge I had employed in my reply, aside from the actual writing itself. Hopefully now, as I let the untouched food grow cold and the cold cups of booze grow warm at this awkward “celebration,” she realized that I was an even more troubling foe—one with connections to her former life.

Never mind a strong foe—it’s infinitely trickier to deal with one who knows your past. Especially when they can make use of your current unsavory reputation. Just having that fistful of ominous implications on me kept her at a safe distance. No one wants to pull any big moves against an opponent with a powerful hand and multiple stacks of chips.

Nanna couldn’t deny the powerful counterspell I held in the palm of my hand.

Yes, the ace up my sleeve was a connection with not only my former employer, but the biggest name in the School of Daybreak, the pervert supreme, Lady Leizniz herself. Now, what do you think would happen if a little bird told the lady that a former student of hers had pivoted to slinging junk, hmm?

To be frank, it would probably run a pretty steep cost for me too; not quite mutually assured destruction, but still not a strategy I’d like to fall back on.

I had to hand it to Nanna—she had guts for not canceling on me for another “important matter” after learning of this connection to her old life. She might have fallen, but she’d aspired to become a magus once. Not only this, she hadn’t been pushed out of the College for lack of talent or a broken will; no, she had chosen to plow ever onward into the realm of forbidden magic and so had been ousted by the faculty.

I was already used to dealing with people who’d kill me on a whim or in the midst of a tantrum. But it was also important to note that there was a benefit in having such people around.

I internally reappraised Nanna. Here this mage was, taking hit after languorous hit from her water pipe, not eating a bite or drinking a drop herself, completely unfazed by my credentials despite not knowing why I would have them. It was clear that she wasn’t just a small fry who had gotten by in Marsheim by grace of magic’s rarity.

“But my... It is rather quick...”

The first words in a while since we’d been seated crossed Nanna’s lips with a puff of smoke. Appraising one another in silence as the food grew cold was to be expected from those who had experience in the world of nobles, but I’m sure that Margit beside me was feeling incredibly awkward throughout the whole thing. I’ll buy her something nice later for putting up with this, I thought. Maybe some new jewelry.

“For someone...to be promoted this quickly? There have been...maybe four...in the time...since I became an adventurer.”

“Well, that’s hardly out of the ordinary for such a short span.”

“Oh my... You’re saying I look young? How delightful... Although I couldn’t achieve...immortality or invulnerability...you know.”

It seemed that the borderline-skeletal mage had taken my words as a socially obligatory compliment. Y’know what I mean: standard “you don’t look a day over forty-five” patter.

“It took...forty full moons for me...to be promoted. Well...it happened after...I started dispensing my medicines.”

“Medicines?”

“Hee hee... Yes, legal ones...of course.”

I usually turned my nose up at hearing my seniors boast of all their achievements while drinks were on the table, but it wouldn’t hurt to hear of Nanna’s exploits. She wasn’t just a senior adventurer; she was a kingpin, standing at the top of a genuine local monopoly.

Not only that, she didn’t wish to merely blow her own horn. I was here on her invitation; any information she fed me on her own initiative, she’d chosen to share for a reason. If it was difficult to kill me, then she could at least try to get me to like her. It was a logical move.

Nanna didn’t begin her rise to infamy through selling illegal drugs from the get-go. Before she became an adventurer who was a cut above the rest, she had first concocted and sold regular old potions to earn a living. I wondered if she really needed to become an adventurer if she had such a steady gig going, but apparently it was more suitable for her to get her start as an adventurer due to taxes and initial investments and what have you.

Nanna had used her reputation as a mage to fish for requests from herb wholesalers and apothecaries, where she would make pipes and use her connections to obtain cheap ingredients to make her own high-quality potions. She used her earnings to purchase more facilities and materials and increased the scale of her operation. I...feel like I’ve done this myself in various other worlds.

Mimicking the methods used in Cyrodiil or a postapocalyptic Las Vegas, she had pooled together her earnings to create a new potion.

“It was a special concoction...to treat athlete’s foot.”

Nanna had puffed out her chest to illustrate just how impressive her feat was, but I honestly didn’t get it.

“Ohh? You don’t see the importance of it?”

“I’ve, uh, never suffered from it.”

“That’s a surprise.”

I wondered if “athlete’s foot” meant something else here; so I could only cock my head to the side in confusion. By my side, Margit flexed her legs covered in carapace, which were impervious to bacterial contamination. Nanna sighed another plume of smoke.

“Athlete’s foot... It’s what results when adventurers...well, when anyone treks over wet fields... Not only that...it’s an occupational hazard even nobles suffer.”

Nanna explained the condition with complete exasperation, but it seemed that I had heard her correctly. It was athlete’s foot just as I knew it—a promulgation of fungus on the foot in suitable conditions when adventurers, merchants, and even nobles wear shoes for too long, and so she had managed to make a killing selling a potion to cure it.

Lower-class people who bought shoes at secondhand stores, received them from others, or even stripped them from corpses rarely ran short of fungal infection vectors. As for nobles, they preferred well-fitting leather shoes, which didn’t exactly breathe well. No Rhinian was exempt, aside from those too impoverished to even buy shoes.

All the same, I didn’t quite get its importance.

Hold on. Maybe it’s because father had been a mercenary. He had given us all a wide selection of shoes and had made sure we rotated them out on a regular basis.

Perhaps he had suffered from athlete’s foot in the past, had learned of the importance of keeping one’s feet clean and aerated as a preventative measure from his fellows, and had drilled this custom into his children. I remember one of my coworkers in my sales job complaining to me in an izakaya that it’s particularly bad in humid summers.

But anyway, I supposed it made sense you could make a mint selling folks an easy remedy for an endemic disease.

“But...there’s a limit...on how much you can do with normal sales.”

“Why? I’m not saying it was as life-changing as a hair-growth potion or a slimming potion, but you must have made quite a profit, no?”

“It pains me to admit...but...if you want to perfect your magic...nowhere is as good as the College.”

Nanna complained that the facilities and tools were all expensive, and attaining them would be a real effort. It was a different kind of exhaustion that had filled her and led her to her narcotics. It was no real surprise to me. It was true that my connections allowed me to use alchemical tools and labs, but it would cost more than a fortune to get facilities with the same supplies for yourself. This was especially true when factoring in the trial period to verify the effects of a new creation on a representative sample. An unimaginable budget would be necessary for that. You would need a still, a mixing machine, a centrifuge, a microscope, many cauldrons, and a vast array of glasswork that you’d churn through on the daily—and that was just what I could come up with off the dome. Then would come the odd jobs like hiring low-rank adventurers to catch the rats and other vermin that the work would inevitably draw.

However, students at the Imperial College got special discounted rates and bespoke equipment, which made the overhead of any project far more manageable. A normal income wouldn’t even be able to buy one test tube sufficient to the needs of someone so devoted to their studies that they’d crossed into the realm of outright heresy.

I assumed that all of her items had been specially ordered or custom-made. These items could be dozens of times more expensive than the stuff the door-to-door merchants sold to the College’s workshops.

This was compounded by the fact that there were very few skilled craftsmen around here who could polish lenses, so the order would have to come from another region—at that point you might as well be buying gems, or, barring that, a damn manor.

Jeez, talk about terrifying. To think of how much money went down the drain just to buy enough magical equipment to match a high school lab in my old world... I can see why all but the most successful researchers are all penniless.

“So all of this is just for the sake of continuing your research?”

“Of course... In the past...I innocently pursued a potion...that would make you healthy just by drinking it...and...that could give everyone an imperishable body, just like methuselah.”

Nanna spoke in a quiet voice—almost incoherent mumbling. She reached her hand out toward the table and picked up a glass of wine that had remained undrunk.

“What color...does this look to you?”

“A deep red. By its fragrance, I imagine it’s a southern wine. Probably a good bottle.”

“Indeed... But is your red...truly the same as my red?” Nanna placed the cup to her smoke-wreathed lips.

Red, like most other colors, was just a specific wavelength of light. My experience of “red,” the perceptual reality, the qualia, was a product of the interplay of my own biological mechanisms for gathering sense-data—my “werkwelt.”

“There was this kid...who started at the College at the same time as me... They were colorblind... You know, that illness...where you can’t differentiate certain colors?”

“I know of it. I heard the most common condition is being unable to differentiate between green and red.”

“Yes, yes... They were a good kid... We were so close... But herbs and potions are identified by their color, aren’t they? So...I wanted to help them. I tried many things...to try and cure that condition. But...then I realized something.”

“And that was?”

“I realized that the world...in the end...it’s nothing but impulses in our nervous system.”

Consciousness, in short, was but a biological process, picking over a werkwelt derived from the broader sensory reality it inhabited—the “umwelt”—to build a private and heavily distorted picture of the body’s circumstances: the “merkwelt.”

Even in a world where the existence of the soul is common knowledge, the fact that we can only use the specialized holes in our meat suits to observe the world holds fast.

So this was the truth behind the magus-hopeful’s ouster from the College.

“If you drink this...you can recreate the sweetness on your tongue...the tartness...everything can be recreated with magic. Even without a scrap of grape ever entering the picture.”

“Yes, that’s technically possible, but...”

“In other words everything...is perceived from the inside of this flimsy sack of meat... All just a dream.”

Man, this turned super philosophical for a story that was supposed to be about your origins as a gangster.

Even an immortal and imperishable body has afflictions it hungers for relief from.

What would happen if there was a potion that could provide perfect happiness? If someone created a potion that could provide happiness and nothing else for the soul? If you had a potion that, from the first drop until your dying day—no, it would provide a happiness that death couldn’t even encroach on—could change every impulse into pleasure?

Nanna’s conclusion was that this would be sufficient for people, and thus followed her fall.

“But, well...the potion as it is...remains incomplete... I mean...I have to wake up from the dream...and I remain chased by the painful desire to do things... How dreadful, no?”

Nanna was still in a nightmare. Madness had festered in her empty head and tainted her reasoning. She was pursuing a panacea that would conquer all human feeling, burn away the veil of sense, perception, and thought, and abolish the illusory material world, delivering all souls into sweet oblivion.

She was straight-up an evil mage. If she had been the type to live in a tower outside of the city, stealing away innocent citizens and experimenting on them, some pack of intrepid souls would surely come bashing down the doors to shut it all down.

I could sympathize with her exhaustion with the world and herself, but I couldn’t approve of it one jot.

But people turned a blind eye to what she was doing.

“You see...I want someone...who isn’t interested in my failed potions...”

After all, while she was making her illegal drugs, she was keeping Marsheim flush with medicine and potions.

“You know I won’t take it sitting down if you ask me to be your guinea pig, right?”

“No, no... First of all, people who can use magic are no good...they’re difficult to use...”

Nanna laughed, telling us that in order to achieve her goal of granting happiness to all humankind, she needed to create something that worked on normal people first.

I thought the conversation had sidetracked into spiritualism from business, but she’d looped back quite naturally. I wondered if her conversational cul-de-sacs were just a side effect of her party favor of choice, or if she was just like that. Well, best not to probe.

Madness is contagious. Ideas have the power to proliferate, as evidenced by her clan of avid believers.

All the same, I felt uneasy about actively not broaching the subject. The most terrifying plots were the ones you couldn’t see in motion. You can more easily put up with a pain you know is coming. Just like how a battle-worn soldier will scream in pain from jamming his pinky, it’s difficult to come up with a stratagem against a plot that came creeping up on you while you’re kicking back for the night.

A happy medium was called for...which was easier said than done, really.

“So what do you want from us? Well, I can assure you that you’ll get a good price from two ruby-red adventurers who have just shaken off their soot.”

“Yes, just as I expected...you catch on quickly... Don’t worry, you won’t need...to get your hands dirty... The job is approved by the local administration.”

I knew this wasn’t going to be a simple celebration, but Nanna’s request was far simpler than I had envisioned.

The Baldur Clan contributed enough to local society that the shot-callers were willing to turn a blind eye, and among their legal activities was the sale of medical goods, plain and simple. Even if you put aside the endless quarrels in the region, people still got sick and injured in their daily lives. Those cantons with no resident doctors or iatrurges needed a steady influx of medicine from the magistrates to the local village heads. The provision of even basic medicines, like salves, bandages, and palliative infusions, made all the difference. Because of this, people were keen to encourage the flow of goods so that they could stock up in preparation for times of emergency.

Now, the Baldur Clan wasn’t particularly bellicose, nor was it composed of fighters who could take a battle head-on, and even among the other clans that worked under their umbrella, there were no people of real martial talent. You might get the occasional berserk tweaker, but this was merely a temporary state your average Setting Sun initiate—someone who’d really put the work into their mind-over-matter act—would laugh off.

Their mage was the backbone of the clan and their most valuable asset. Production would fall hopelessly behind if she left the city willy-nilly, and she’d need bodyguards anyway.

If they were just going to tough it out, then it would be a cheaper and safer option to just employ more people. Just like how the Heilbronn Familie held on to Manfred the Tongue-Splitter as a useful freeloader, Nanna wanted to hire me as personnel for some more rough-and-tumble work guarding caravans running one of her largest shipments of medical goods.

The daily wage was three times higher than the going rate for ruby-red jobs—two librae each per day. Not only that, we didn’t have to do the boring parts of keeping watch or chores, and we’d get a stipend for food and drink.

“Why the sudden desire to employ a strong arm?”

“You see...the local powerhouses...they’ve misbehaved awfully of late.”

Them again? I never heard anything good about them, and this just made my impression of them even worse.

According to Nanna, some of the local bigwigs and their guards had been using some of her nasal medication, which meant that her operation hadn’t suffered too much, but recently there’d been an uptick in incidents. Although medicines were valuable in and of themselves, rumor had spread that Baldur caravans could be moving the less-than-legit stuff too, resulting in armed robberies. The damage had grown severe enough that she had turned to me, someone with whom she had fought with in the past. That was how much the clan’s master surprisingly cared about the deceased and injured among her lot.

The city itself was heavily patrolled, but public safety wasn’t so tightly enforced in the frontier. This had gotten even worse as of late, and the regions lorded over by the local bigwigs had all but collapsed socially.

To make matters worse, these powerhouses, who should usually bend the knee and ask the government to keep things in line, were putting up illegal checkpoints of their own in order to further pad out their profits.

If this continued, business would stagnate. Even if most of the profits came from Nanna’s illegal drugs—they were just a mite pricier than the legal stuff—it wouldn’t be good for Nanna’s athlete’s foot remedies and sleeping drafts to fall short of their noble clientele outside of Marsheim.

All of this had led to Nanna’s conclusion that she needed a sword arm to make sure that the delivery would be made no matter what.

“You cut down...a stone lantern in one strike... And that ogre who was...so bored of life...took a shine to you. You can deal with...twenty or thirty bandits...on some provincial warlord’s dime, no?”

It didn’t seem like she was lying. She was possibly the most cynical person I’d ever met and had a penchant for pretense, but I didn’t think that hiding unsavory information was a trait I could add to the list.

This request was from a businesswoman looking to protect her profits.

I asked if I could check the goods; she gave me the all clear. Nanna most likely had pegged my familiarity with potions during our previous encounter; she didn’t seem to be planning to trick me into complicity by hiding illegal goods among the rest of the shipment I was to guard.

“An honest sort, aren’t you... You can bring a few extra hands...in case they choose to hire on more of their own...”

“So I take it they just don’t have the clout to get legitimate support?”

“Exactly... I wouldn’t bare my fangs at the Empire, even for show... If their knights got involved...a few adventurers or mercenaries wouldn’t do any good...”

Yeah, there were few adventurers crazy enough that they would risk their lives for a day’s wage of fifty assarii. One’s own life was more important than fighting off a trained soldier. You can’t do anything if you’re dead, so it made sense to run from a fight you couldn’t win. There were those who put themselves into the heat of it for valor, but they were an obvious minority.

An adventurer with their own knowledge of the trade who could act on their own was far more desirable.

Fine, I thought, maybe I should open my heart just this once, if only to improve my job prospects.

“All right, I’ll help you out. I wanted to get some experience with some gigs outside the city anyway.”

Bodyguard jobs were an adventurer’s bread and butter. It would benefit me to become adjusted to it sooner rather than later, ideally with a client I had a read on.

Should the results of this request go awry, I was fully ready to go full Shadowrun and send a letter to Berylin for the betterment of Marsheim. There was nothing wrong with wanting to keep a clean house, after all.

“Why thank you... You newbies nowadays...you’re all so full of life...”

“Have you given this spiel to anyone else?”

“Of course... The younger they are...the more they seek to learn. There’s...a mage girl... She knows her potions...so I thought to ask her...”

“Tell me more.”

“What...?”

She seemed shocked to see me suddenly leaning in, and let slip that the mage girl she’d mentioned was one and the same as my cute fellow adventurer that I met the other day’s partner.

Kaya of Illfurth, if I remembered correctly.

No. This wasn’t good. I couldn’t let my fellow Level 1 adventurers be led down a path of evil.

“Can you withdraw your offer to her?”

“Huh? Why? She...a friend?”

“Something like that.”

I liked that kid—Siegfried, or whatever his name had been before. He hadn’t shouted about how I didn’t deserve to be doing well—just announced that he would overtake me.

He was a hot-blooded youth, full of healthy vigor. It was refreshing to see, considering my own cumulative age, and I couldn’t help but look down at him with affection. I hadn’t managed to take on the same kind of traditional by-the-book roles as he had, but it really lit a fire under me to see such a suitable friend play the part of hot-blooded pregenerated youth.

I had started to feel something was lacking in my life. I had irreplaceable friends, the cutest little sister in the entire world, and a partner by my side who I could trust to protect me while I slept. All the same, I didn’t have a friend, or should I say a rival, pursuing the same path with the exact same ambition as me.

The only real “partners” I’d had in this regard had been one-shot bosses. I suppose Miss Nakeisha, who I’d crossed blades with many times now, was the closest I had, but our battles had overwhelmingly been about buying time or eventually fleeing, not winning. She wasn’t really the kind of rival that I envisioned.

It would be incredibly fun to have a friend of my own age to train with as a fellow adventurer.

I wanted to get to know him.

“Hey, Margit... I know this would be fun with just the two of us, but...”

“Yes, it won’t be long until we can widen our nets. I did go on joint hunting missions back home, so I don’t mind really.”

I had nothing in my heart apart from endless gratitude for my partner for agreeing to my selfish demands. I’d said I wanted us to enjoy ourselves on the battlefield, just the two of us, after all.

“Nanna, this request is something you’ll need doing every now and then, yes?”

“Yes... If you could...it would be very helpful... You won’t have to go to the farthest reaches... I suppose there might be times...where you’re on the road for twenty days... How does that sound?”

“Great, then I’d like to invite some fellow new adventurers with me. You don’t mind, do you? I think more people will be safer for everyone.”

Plus, you know, it just feels right for our first mission where we get to know other Level 1 adventurers to be one where we protect some caravans.

[Tips] Nanna Baldur Snorrison was born in northern Rhine and was once a student of the School of Daybreak in the Leizniz cadre. The reason for her expulsion stemmed from her scorn for base reality and her pursuit of taboo spiritual affairs. She spurned her teacher’s warnings and eventually fell into despair from her research into the depths of the soul.

The societal effects of the drugs she produces have led to accusations that she has a hand in countless deaths, but due to the power her organization holds, she has remained untouched.