The storehouse turned out to be way bigger than any of the ones I’d seen at any of the other Adventurer’s guilds we’d visited.
“I suppose this place should be large enough—so long as we only bring out the head, that is,” Gon commented. He was very right about that caveat. The entire leviathan was truly enormous, so taking anything more than its head out of my Item Box would’ve been too much, even for a space this vast.
“All right, the whole thing would still be too big, so I’ll just take out its head to start,” I explained to the bigwigs. They seemed a little agitated by that claim. It’s true, I swear! “Okay. Here goes!”
When I had put the leviathan into my Item Box, all I’d had to do was give it a little push, and the whole corpse had slid right in. Bringing items out was usually the same—I just grabbed them, gave them a tug, and out they’d come. This time, however, I actually had to pull with a fair amount of force to extract the corpse. It took a bit of tugging, but I was able to pull out the leviathan’s outlandishly massive head on its own.
Silence followed. A long, long period of deathly silence. The higher-ups and Willem had practically unhinged their jaws.
Oh, right. I guess Willem knew about the leviathan, but this is his first time actually seeing it, huh? As I studied the dumbstruck looks on their faces, a thought crossed my mind: Boy, can I ever relate! Leviathans sure are stupidly huge!
For quite some time, everyone just stood there, staring blankly at the gargantuan head.
“So? Can you butcher it?” Fel said, finally breaking the extended silence with a rather impatient question.
At that, the guild folks snapped back to reality in unison. Bram took a second longer to stare at the leviathan head, then turned to his colleagues. “The way I see it, turning down a chance like this would be a stain on our guild’s good name. What are your thoughts?”
“I’m inclined to agree, though this will be the most daunting task that we’ll have faced since we started managing this guild,” Cyril said.
“True. The way I see it, butchering this beast is the Adventurer’s guild’s duty,” Leocadio opined.
“Agreed. We should take the job,” Vivian added.
“I’m in favor as well,” Noah concurred.
Oh? It kinda feels like this might actually work out!
“Hmm. It sounds to me like they’re up to the task,” Gon muttered as he listened in on the conversation.
“Sir Fenrir, Sir Ancient Dragon,” Bram said, “we would like to accept your request. Please allow us to butcher the leviathan.”
Fel’s and Gon’s faces lit up in an instant.
“Excellent!” Gon exclaimed.
“Good. See to it,” added Fel, whose tail was wagging furiously, presumably with glee. Gon’s thick, scaly tail was actually wagging a little as well, and I had to step in and stop him before he knocked over a table.
“There’s one slight caveat, though,” Bram continued. “We’ll need you to wait for two weeks—no, ten days before we can facilitate the project.”
Butchering something that huge required quite a lot of preparation, apparently. Ten days seemed like a reasonable span of time for them to lay all the groundwork they needed to get started. I couldn’t blame them for that.
“This will be the greatest project in the guild’s history!” Bram declared. “We’ll tackle it piece by piece, little by little, and see it done!”
“Yeah!” the other four bigwigs shouted in unison.
“And when it’s done, we’ll have earned our names a place in the history books!”
“Yeah!”
I-Is it just me, or are those five really worked up about this? Great. Now I’m getting nervous.