“He is our savior. He has solved every problem, relieved every woe from here to the far corners of Gamehlein and Aryuca. Our cities grow richer by the day due to his benevolence. He would not have us attempt to repay him—and we utterly lack the means to do so—and there are no lengths he would not go to to protect Omui, but still, I…I cannot find it in myself to pen these dreadful words…”
“…Sir, please. You shouldn’t think so little of him. This boy walks into hell every day only to come back and beg us for worse. You are only granting him permission, sir, to do what he already does. If you deny him, he’ll only sneak—sorry, I can’t use that word in good conscience—march off to the dungeon with all the stealth of a marching band. We may think a dungeon king is certain death, but he sees a dungeon king as nothing more than the next ladder rung on his ascent to precious treasure! He and his friends are nothing like us, sir! They are cut from a very different cloth than us!”
Yes, I know. I know we’ve written him a disgustingly long list of favors already. I know he’s fulfilled them all and trotted back in triumph. I know.
“But be that as it may, we can do naught else but measure ourselves with the small measuring stick known as justice. I care not what the boy thinks, only what is right. Nothing he says will lessen this enormous debt we owe him.”
“Sir, the two deepest dungeons are still growing. Think of what will happen if we leave them until it is too late. Please, put down your stubborn pride while you still can. You are our guild master, sir. If you refuse to write this request, you are making the decision to leave danger unattended to. If nothing else, sir—I am very, very busy right now, so it would be fantastic if you could please hurry up and write the request.”
When all was said and done, I would write. Yes. Just as I had done oh-so many times before… I knew, no matter how much the decision grieved me, that I had no other choice. I knew all too well. We could not hope to reach the lowest levels of these deep dungeons; no one could, save the boy. Whole armies, for all their numbers, could do no more than plumb a fraction of their depths.
“Damn it! It shames me to do this.”
All I had to do was lift the pen with my trembling fingers and sign the missive. I had no other choice. I knew what doing so would mean. It tortured me, but I forced my revulsion back and wrote my name in shaky letters. It was done. The task was done. And still I could not put down the pen.
“Oh come, sir, there’s no call to look like that. You haven’t forgotten, have you? He went to an ultimate dungeon and came back. He went, all by himself, to face the deepest depths of a force said to be powerful enough to end the world. He fought. He won. And he came back. We shouldn’t trouble ourselves, sir, with something that can’t be measured on our tiny measuring sticks. We shouldn’t think so little of him as to worry about him. He can take care of himself. He’s no innocent boy. He’s the dungeon destroyer.”
And then the request form was out of my hands and off to the girls who were rapidly earning the moniker of the black-haired beauties. Anything that went to them, even in an unofficial capacity, would wind up reaching the boy. I could only imagine the sour looks on their faces, yet I prayed they would not ignore this earnest plea for help.
My grip tightened on this pen that refused to drop from my fingers. All our reorganizing our equipment stores, all our broadening our training programs, all our calls for recruiting new adventurers, and still we were reduced to this.
It needed to be done. The dungeon needed to be defeated before it was too late…yet with all the equipment and training gifted to us by the boy, all the treasures that had fallen into our laps, we’d still failed in our task.
“The continent will never come together as one again. It falls to us, the frontier, to keep the world safe…and yet we forsake our duty. We push it onto this boy’s frail shoulders—and that should never, ever be allowed to happen.”
I turned to look out the window. The sight of the city below could always bring the duke to tears, and little did I blame him. This prosperity was nothing short of a miracle. How much would we lose, I had to ask myself, when I sent this boy to certain death? The boy who was responsible for all our smiles? All our continued prosperity?
The boy would never say a word in refusal. He would not complain, would not grumble, would not so much as mutter the word “no” under his breath. He would accept no recompense, save money. He simply and unflaggingly came to the guild to sell his spellstones. Even when we could not pay him, he never stopped. Not once.
“I wonder if it might be possible to ask him to sell his spellstones to us, and only us…”
The majority of the frontier’s spellstone trade was borne on the back of this boy. He even had his fingers in the manufacturing and reselling pies. It would have been so easy for him to cheat us of our guild rights and monopolize the spellstone industry himself, yet he dutifully continued to bring us bag after bag of spellstones for little reward.
I could only imagine what horrors he had experienced in his few weeks of absence. What dank dungeons did he fight in? While we’d failed to hold our own, much less make progress, what ills had he suffered? All our armies and adventurers, yet he still eclipsed us… All I could do was grant him permission to go. Never mind if it was safe enough. Never mind if he cared that it was safe enough.
No, I could not let myself get complacent and accept this cruel reality. I could not. The day should never come when I forgave myself for sentencing this boy to his death.
“I deserve to be lambasted. There is not scorn enough that could be heaped upon me. All I do is hurt this poor boy. Could you not have mercy on me? Could you, if nothing else, stop telling him I refuse to send him to these dungeons because I’m stingy? An endless stream of these sinful papers crosses my desk, and the whole time I’m listening to him badmouth me from the floor below.”
“Oh god, is he back already? I did ask you to be quick about it, sir. Now you see what I have to deal with every morning! Please, carry on beating yourself up if you must, but do it in your head. Less talking, more writing! I have dozens of these things, sir. You do not need to agonize over each and every one!”
It was not my desire to stint the boy, of course. Would that I could send dungeon-diving jobs all across the continent instead of localizing them on one single boy. I wanted nothing more than to avoid heaping more on this poor boy’s plate, but…I supposed that translated to being stingy.
Sometimes, all one could do was cry into their hands.