Willem, the adventurer guildmaster of Karelina, had dragged me along with him to meet with Bram, the capital’s guildmaster (plus the assorted guild bigwigs who worked with him). Willem quickly filled the higher-ups in on what I’d told him, and the higher-ups went white as sheets before bringing me out to the capital guild’s massive storehouse.
The butchering of the leviathan was nearly complete, and while it seemed that they only had a few little things left to finish up, the single most troublesome person I knew, Elrand, was unsurprisingly still around. He seemed to realize that something was up the moment I and the grim-faced guild officials stepped into the storehouse, and he excitedly trotted over, apparently to greet us. He probably would have gone through with it, circumstances and social niceties be damned, if it weren’t for the fact that Moira—who was stuck to him like glue—gave him a solid whack upside the head the moment he made his move, shutting him up before he could even get started.
At that particular moment, however, Elrand was the least of my troubles. I was way more scared of the higher-ups and Willem, all of whom were currently silent as the grave...
“Well? Let’s see them,” Willem said with a very stern scowl.
“Right!” I yelped. “Oh—y-you mean, all of them?”
“All of them,” Willem confirmed.
“The thing is, I’m, umm, not sure they’d all fit in here.”
“Then start by bringing out as many as you can.”
Eeek! Willem looked pretty intimidating even on a good day, and seeing him with a glare like that on his face was downright terrifying.
“O-Okay then, I’ll start with one of each species,” I said. I started pulling dinosaurs out of my Item Box, one after another.
A very, very long moment of silence followed. Willem and the bigwigs gawked at the dinosaur corpses in a state of dumbstruck paralysis. The whole storehouse wasn’t deathly silent, to be clear—a certain individual was letting out a very disconcertingly bizarre, protracted bellow in the background—but I decided to pretend that it was perfectly quiet anyway.
More importantly...
I kept my eyes fixed on the floor, only moving them to occasionally glance at the guild officials and judge their reactions.
Could one of you say something, please? This silence is killing me! My anxiety levels are really spiking over here! Say something! Anything!
After far more time than I personally would’ve liked, I heard one of the bigwigs sigh.
“First a leviathan, and now this...?” one of them muttered.
“It seems he’s set on dropping one problem after another on our doorstep.”
“Hah hah—so these things were real all along! Who knew...?”
“Words fail me.”
“Frankly, I would have preferred to never see them at all...”
All five of them had been left clutching their heads in their hands. Willem had pressed a hand to his forehead as well, and was muttering something to the tune of “He’s seriously never going to learn to restrain himself, is he?” The prevailing mood was so grim it would’ve felt like I was attending a wake, if it hadn’t been for you-know-who, whose energy level couldn’t have been more at odds with everyone else’s.
“C-Could it be? Are these new species of dragons?! Are they really?!” Elrand exclaimed as he frantically shook off Moira’s attempts to hold him in check, then sprinted across the storehouse to the pile of dinosaur corpses. He’d started patting and prodding the deceased monsters before I knew it, already conducting a thorough external examination of them. He was, as ever, one of the most profoundly free spirits I’d ever seen.
“Not exactly, no,” I said. “They’re actually dinosaurs, not dragons... But then again, they’re not exactly like the dinosaurs I know and I guess they did have some dragon-like traits, so that might not be totally wrong, strictly speaking?”
“Oh, joyous day! I knew it, I just knew it!” Elrand bellowed. He started dancing around like a lunatic, which wasn’t doing my impression of him any favors. He really couldn’t have looked more like a crazed degenerate. “And there are so many different kinds! Why, this one looks just like an earth dragon!” he continued as he leaned in so close to a t-rex corpse, I almost thought he was going to nuzzle it with his cheek. “Oh, but now that I’ve touched it, its skin doesn’t feel like an earth dragon’s at all! And those teeth—they’re completely different too! It’s abundantly clear that despite the superficial similarities, this really is an entirely different species!”
Unfortunately for Elrand, his fetishistic ravings could only go uninterrupted for so long.
“That is enough, you fool!”
With a truly mighty thwap, Moira smacked Elrand upside the head and dragged him back to where he’d been standing when I first entered the room.
The capital’s guildmaster, Bram, sighed dramatically. “Not a minute passes that I don’t wish that maniac would pack up and return to his own guild, but alas, that’s not an option just yet,” he grumbled.
Wh-Whoa, harsh! I mean, don’t get me wrong, he’s absolutely a freak and I completely get where you’re coming from, but I don’t think that the head of a guild should be talking that way about a guy who runs a branch of your own organization! Especially when that branch is in a dungeon city!
“In any case, we’ll be purchasing all of these, Mukohda,” Bram continued. “Missing this opportunity simply isn’t an option.”
Considering they’re basically a fairy tale made flesh thanks to The Adventures of Hayden, yeah, that makes sense. Objective proof that a story like that was totally true would be really hard to turn down. I certainly wasn’t going to complain about his decision, of course.
“I, umm, would actually be totally okay with handing them over to the guild as a donation,” I tentatively suggested.
“No. We can’t accept that offer,” Bram said. “The Adventurer’s guild prides itself on its integrity. These are completely unknown monsters, granted, and determining their worth will take time. It’s possible that we’ll end up having underpaid you in the long run, but you will be paid, one way or another.”
“Okay, I guess,” I replied. I didn’t feel a need to argue the point too insistently.