The shock of this revelation was still running through Vandal, but his expressionless face couldn’t show it. Lina peered into his doll-like features, offered another apology, and then let the matter drop.
“Lina, can you ring these up for us?” Kasim cut in.
“Sure, hold on. Let’s have a look ’ear—heh! Hold on, these are from Goblin Soldiers and a Goblin Barbarian! How did you fight these off? You’re still Grade E, right?!”
“Actually, it wasn’t—”
“Festa, we can get into that later. Cash first.”
“Okay, hold on . . .” Lina wrestled with the calculations in her head and then counted out bronze and silver coins. It seemed like the guild branches in places like this were more part-time affairs, so they didn’t ask too much from their staff. If the only adventurers in the village were these three kids, Lina probably only had something to do for the guild every few days.
Vandal, however, was preoccupied with something else. How does the guild tell goblins apart just from their ears? The bounty parts from goblins were their ears, which even Vandal could tell belonged to goblins. However, he couldn’t pinpoint their previous owners any more precisely than that. Something like a Goblin King was so big, it didn’t even look like the same race, and so he could differentiate those. But Goblin Soldiers and Goblin Mages were the same size and shape as normal goblins. The main differences were located far from their earlobes, mainly in things like equipment. Vandal could never have told them apart by their ears.
Maybe they were using Appraisal magic, Vandal considered. There might be special skills taught to guild staff, such as Monster Appraisal or Bounty Parts Appraisal.
“That’s bounty parts from ten Goblin Soldiers and one Goblin Barbarian, for 400 baum. Then you’ve got 380 worth of magic stones, for a total of 780 baum,” Lina said, finishing up the exchange just as Vandal had been about to ask about the ear thing.
Seven hundred and eighty baum. If one baum was worth 100 yen, that would be a few weeks’ salary on minimum wage. It hardly seemed like an amount worth risking your life for, but he recognized that was just his perception as a former Earthling from Japan.
“That’s a split of 260 each! Yes!” Festa was fist-pumping.
“We can coast on this for a while.” Zeno simply looked relieved. As it turned out, 260 baum was pretty good.
“How much can you buy with that?” Vandal asked.
“With 260 baum? You could make it working in the slum, if you got a good rate, in . . . what, twenty-six days, maybe?”
Twenty-six days to make twenty-six thousand yen—surely without a safety net in terms of injury or sickness, either. And it was day labor, too, so there were no guarantees of when you would get work. Thinking about it that way, 260 baum might actually be a pretty good reward for a day’s work, even with life-risking involved.
“We can only get by on this much because the old man here lets us stay for free,” Kasim explained.
“That’s right.” The old man in question suddenly returned. “Even if they’re leering at my daughter, we need adventurers around or we’d be finished.” Then he turned to Vandal. “I’m sorry about before, missy. If you wanna stay in the village, that’ll be on the house too. Hope you can forgive me.” He had a much more pleasant look on his face now—like a totally different person—which was all well and good . . .
“Old man! I’m not leering at Lina, I swear—”
“What’s that, Festa? My daughter not good enough for you? And stop calling me old!”
“Please, Dad, cut it out!”
“. . . Sorry, but I’m actually a boy,” Vandal finally managed to say.
For some reason, this comment was met with five loud exclamations of surprise.
Vandal had heard of culture shock. The shock of coming into contact with a vastly different society and culture. But the shock I’ve received from Ramda human society is something else entirely, Vandal thought. For a start, he hadn’t expected to be blatantly ignored. It was also the first time he realized how much he looked like a girl. The ghoul kids often got it wrong, but he always assumed that was because male ghouls had the whole lion thing going on. None of his other friends and allies ever got his gender wrong.
In reality, it had been other clues that gave it away, such as Sam calling him “young master,” his title of “king,” and his behavior. They certainly hadn’t all immediately presumed he was male and especially just by looking at his face.
I’m still only seven years old, he thought. I’ll hit puberty, get a proper manly voice, grow some more hair, get big muscles, and then no one will get it wrong again. That was how Vandal tried to recover from this shock to his system.
While doing so, he was playing an important role in the village: creating buzz.
“Wow, this is a dhampir? I’ve never seen one before!”
“Oh my, you look like a doll! Are you sure you’re eating enough?”
“I touched a dhampir!”
“Hah! I poked him!”
“You brats! That’s rude!”
It felt like he was in a petting zoo. The Reclamation Village didn’t have a lot going for it in terms of entertainment, and so getting to see a dhampir for the first time was causing a stir. A steady stream of visitors poured into the General Store’s cafeteria.
It was better than being treated like a ghost, perhaps. Vandal was polite and chose to engage with the villagers, meaning they didn’t hold anything back.
“You’ve had tough times too, huh.”
“It’s not easy, but keep going!”
Luckily, the villagers also all seemed to like Vandal. Vandal assumed they had sympathy for him, as former refugees themselves. But there were actually two additional reasons.
The first was that Vandal’s expressionless face and dead eyes made the villagers think he must have been through hell and back. The second was that Vandal was someone they could sympathize with, without it costing them anything. If he had been a helpless orphan, they would have sympathized, but there wouldn’t have been much they could do for him. Most of the villagers were young, and while they could work, they weren’t well off. They might not be paying taxes, but that was going to change in just two years. No one would be willing to commit to taking in a child.
However, Vandal was planning on becoming an adventurer. If even half of what Kasim and the others said was true, he could handle at least a few goblins with ease. In that case, a little sympathy, some kind words, and maybe a free meal was all the commitment they needed. It was still far more than he would have gotten in an apathetic big city, he was sure.
“It’s true! He lopped off the Goblin Barbarian’s head from behind with a single attack!”
“I mean, I don’t doubt you, but that still seems pretty hard to believe.”
“You’re definitely doubting me! Please, believe me, Lina!”
“Festa, we saw it happen, and we still don’t believe it. You’re asking too much of Lina.”
Festa and the others were chatting nearby. From Vandal’s perspective, killing a Rank 3 monster meant so little to him, it didn’t seem worth speaking up to confirm it. After all, only yesterday he had completely destroyed a Rank 4 Goblin King and a thousand goblins. After that, killing a Goblin Barbarian was hardly anything to write home about.
As it turned out, the small guild output run by Lina wasn’t able to register new adventurers. They could only buy bounty parts and other materials. Vandal would have to go to a bigger guild branch in the city to register. Borkz had told him that 200 years ago, it had been possible to register even in a small village. That meant the centuries since had not only been hard on the Heartner Domain but also on Olbaum’s adventurers’ guilds.
“This is the dhampir child you say saved you, Kasim?”
At that moment, two men came in. They were both older, a rarity for this village where most people were thirty or younger, perhaps a few years into the real prime of life. The man in front was dressed like the other villagers, but the one behind him had a dyed cotton robe and a necklace with a design Vandal didn’t like.
“Mayor, Father, you finished your discussions?” the general store owner asked.
“Yes, all done. Before that, though, we need to thank this boy.”
The mayor turned to Vandal, taking his hands, and giving a bow. “Thank you so much for aiding Kasim and his party. Even though you wish to become an adventurer, it surely took courage for one so young to distract those goblins.”
Apparently, the story in the village had become that Vandal caught the attention of the strongest goblin, giving Kasim’s party a change to fight back and wipe the monsters out. Vandal was smaller than other children his age, and the villagers didn’t know much about what a dhampir could do. This modified version of events was far easier for them to believe than the idea of him so easily slaying the commander of a group of goblins.