The staffer seemed impressed with us—after we’d finished our conversation, he murmured, “I must say, your party clearly has the kind of luck that is necessary to succeed as adventurers. In fact, you remind me of the kinds of adventurers who seem almost blessed by the gods. They appear only rarely, but they invariably make discoveries that push the front line even deeper into the dungeon.”
“Oh, really?” I asked.
“Indeed. I don’t know whether it’s due to prowess or sheer luck, but such adventurers tend to find themselves in extraordinary situations over and over again. Of course, that also means that they frequently end up in dangerous situations, so many never return from the dungeon. Please be careful and don’t rush.”
Estelle and I both nodded.
“Thanks for the advice. We’ll keep that in mind,” said Estelle.
“Yeah, we’ll be careful,” I said.
This staffer must have seen a lot of different adventurers over his career, so his words had a lot of weight.
★★★★★★★★★
Three days later, Estelle and I headed back into the dungeon, accompanied by a guild investigator. He was really competent and gave us a lot of helpful advice outside of combat. By the time we reached the fifteenth floor boss room again, the reptila had respawned, but we easily defeated it and led the investigator to the stairs beyond the boss room. The hidden passageway opened just fine.
In the end, we earned the cash reward we’d been hoping for, and we used that money to upgrade our equipment before heading back into the dungeon. From the sixteenth floor onward, we started running into ripper hares, plus more wolflike monsters. Starting on the eighteenth floor, stronger forms of goblins, like goblin leaders, began showing up too. All of those were monsters we could defeat without too much trouble, but based on the advice the guild staffer had given us, we worked slowly and carefully and made progress over multiple expeditions.
Eventually, we arrived outside the boss room of the twentieth floor. Estelle cracked the door to take a peek, then took a deep breath.
“If we survive, we may become heroes together, Sai,” she told me with a shrug.
“So what I’m hearing is this is going to be a really dangerous battle?”
“Mm-hmm. I saw what looked like a goblin general. Based on the information I’ve gathered, the boss monsters in this room are supposed to be goblin leaders led by a few goblin captains, but...”
“...there’s a goblin general in the mix, huh? I’m assuming from the name that it’s pretty powerful.”
“That’s right. It also happens to be wielding a powerful-looking sword, so in a sense, your luck is holding, Sai.”
This is the fourth time, so I guess I can’t chalk it up to coincidence anymore. Man, I really didn’t think my blessing would be this effective.
“Well, think about it this way, Estelle: The potential rewards for victory have improved, right?”
“Yes, assuming that we successfully slay the goblins.”
Estelle and I exchanged a glance and a laugh, then opened the door to the boss room.
★★★★★★★★★
Estelle and I were once again waiting in a conference room for the same guild staffer. This was the third time we’d come here as a party of two. Normally, we would have chatted to kill time, but at the moment, Estelle was silent, so I kept my mouth shut too.
After thirty minutes, the staffer finally appeared. “I apologize for the wait. The necessary procedures took more time than expected.”
“Oh, it’s all right,” said Estelle. “We’re sorry to have put you through all this trouble.”
“Thank you for your patience. Now then, the guild has confirmed that your party defeated the boss of the twentieth floor and reached the teleportation device on the twenty-first. Congratulations.”
“Thank you,” the two of us said in unison.
The group of goblins had been a real challenge, but since we’d known in advance that we would be able to teleport outside the dungeon after defeating them, we hadn’t had to conserve our mana. I’d fought on the front line and distracted the goblins while Estelle blasted them with the full might of her magic. We’d easily vanquished the weaker goblins, and then I’d used my own magic to help Estelle take on the goblin general and captains. In the end, we’d gotten a valuable sword, but that wasn’t why we had dropped by the guild today.
“Thus, I officially declare that this contest, mediated by the guild, has ended with your party’s victory. The guild has contacted your opponents to notify them of the results of the match, but it seems they have refused to concede. Before departing the town where they were working, they abandoned a quest they had accepted without completing it. I will therefore finalize the process on my own authority.”
“They abandoned a quest? Isn’t that really bad?” I asked.
Given that Broze currently had the equivalent of a negative rank, I was kind of curious about what consequences he would suffer.
“Yes, but he probably has no intention of continuing to work as an adventurer,” said Estelle, sounding exasperated. “If he’d worked hard despite his weaknesses, I would have been willing to reconsider my opinion of him, but now... I suppose there’s no point in thinking about it further. However, he comes from the knightly House of Puri, which has no hereditary land—rather, they’ve achieved success through business. That being the case, the situation that Broze has ended up in probably spells disaster for his family...”
The guild staffer nodded and then gave us some additional info. “There is no excuse for his actions. His status as an adventurer will be revoked along with his adventurer card, and he will be banned from the guild permanently. In addition, he apparently threatened that his household would file a formal complaint with the guild. The House of Puri has already been added to the guild’s watch list, but if they proceed with the complaint, the guild will blacklist them.”
He went on to explain that if the House of Puri got blacklisted, they would never be able to do business with the Adventurers’ Guild again. That meant they would lose the ability to purchase materials that adventurers had gathered and also that the guild would refuse to allow them to commission adventurers for escort quests between towns. In addition, the guild was in charge of assigning jobs to day laborers, so being on their blacklist would be even more painful for a mercantile house. You could work around the blacklist by hiring bodyguards yourself or gathering employees of your own, but the House of Puri would be at a huge disadvantage compared to their competitors who still did business with the guild.