“All right! Let’s eat! Time to drink!”
“Grill it! Grill it! Grill it!”
Jin and Galatt were chanting at the top of their lungs as they slapped chunks of wyvern meat down onto the grill. Leon and the guys from the Tamers’ guild, not wanting to be outdone, started grilling some meat too.
“Man, these guys really don’t know the meaning of restraint,” Agris said in exasperation. He was watching Jin and the others practically fight over the grilled meat.
“Well, they probably think this is one of those times where it’s acceptable,” I said.
I glanced at Agris’s plate—it was also piled high with sizzling wyvern meat. He wasn’t really holding back either.
Now, why was such a massive barbecue going on, you might ask?
Well, it’d all started when we’d arrived in Sagan and decided to say hello to some old friends. First, we dropped by Karina’s place. Then, Jin and the Dawnswords suddenly showed up. The timing had felt a little suspicious, but apparently, they’d heard that we were in town while they had been on their way to the guild, so they went looking for us. They said that they had something they wanted to get some advice from us about.
We had figured that we should move someplace quieter to chat, so we headed to the guild to borrow a room only to find the Tamers’ guild hanging around there. As we caught up with them, the topic of the wyvern hunt came up, and next thing I knew, it turned into a “Hey, if you’ve got wyvern meat, let us taste it” kind of situation. Even Jin and the Dawnswords quickly agreed that food came first, despite having had something supposedly serious to discuss.
And that’s how we ended up having a full-on barbecue outside the city walls.
“Wyvern meat’s supposed to be a luxury item, you know,” I said.
“Oh, we definitely appreciate it!” Agris said.
“Yeah! We’re eating it with gratitude!” Mennas and Leena agreed. Their plates were stacked just as high with grilled wyvern.
“Seriously, though, we really are thankful,” Mennas added. “And to show our appreciation, we’ll share the latest dungeon info with you! So you better be nice to us!”
“Yeah, it’s stuff the guild doesn’t even know yet!” Leena added.
“Oh right, you guys made it to the bottom floor, right? Are you sure it’s okay to tell me stuff the guild hasn’t officially heard yet?” I asked.
“Any intel an adventurer gathers on their own belongs to them. We’re not obligated to report it to the guild right away unless it’s an emergency. Dungeon info like this isn’t gonna cause a panic.”
“Exactly. It’d be one thing if the guild wanted to buy the info, but since they haven’t asked, we don’t owe them anything.”
They probably could sell it for a good amount, but that carried the risk of someone else clearing the dungeon first. Then again, the only other party who’d made it nearly that deep had already retired, and the members of the next runner-up group were apparently old enough to retire, so I doubted they were much of a threat.
“I mean, I’ve gotten pretty deep myself. You sure you wanna tell me?” I asked. After all, I’d made it to around the sixtieth floor, so depending on their info, I could catch up to them real fast if I wanted to. Jin and the Dawnswords were supposedly working on the ninety-eighth floor, and the guild had been buzzing with talk about how fast they had gotten so deep in the dungeon.
“Well, I won’t lie to you, but we won’t give you everything, of course. Besides, even if you do catch up, you’re not the kind of guy who’d just ignore us if we were still struggling, right?” Mennas said.
“Right...?” Leena echoed uncertainly.
“What’s the going rate for wyvern meat again?” I asked with a serious look on my face.
The second I said that, both of them bowed their heads. “We’re sorry! We got too cocky!” they shouted.
A party like the Dawnswords could easily afford the cost of wyvern meat, so I knew they were just playing along with me. Honestly, I was joking around too, so we were even.
“All right,” I said. “Jokes aside, I’m not planning on doing that. But if I did, then you’d have no right to complain.”
“Don’t worry. We only share info with people we trust!”
“Yeah, if you give information this valuable to the wrong person, it could get you killed!”
Since they insisted, I agreed to hear what they had to say. They mostly told me what kind of monsters showed up on each floor, what ores could be found, and general descriptions of each area. They just didn’t mention how to reach the lower levels. Basically, if these scant details were enough to help me catch up with them, it would be kinda funny.
“Okay, now that we’ve gotten through all that, let’s get to the real reason we’re here. Jin! Galatt! Get over here already! Have you forgotten why we were looking for Tenma in the first place?!” Mennas snapped.
Jin and Galatt, who’d been in a meat-eating contest with Amur, finally wandered over.
“Sorry, that wyvern is just too damn good! We got a little carried away.” After they apologized to Mennas and Leena, they turned towards me.
“The truth is... We were looking for you because we needed some advice,” Jin said with a straight face.
But...
“Yeah, I know. You already told me that when we bumped into each other outside my apartment, remember?” I asked.
“Oh, right.”
Galatt and the others were struggling not to laugh at Jin’s forgetfulness, but the second I called over Gramps, they got all serious again.
“So, what’s this about advice?” Gramps asked.
“It’s about the boss on the bottom floor.”