Chapter 6:
The Bear Makes a Guild Card.
Class: Bear
WE CAME BACK from the training area and I had them make me a guild card. Helen, who had finished arranging for the adventurers to be treated, came back to the reception desk. I could see the exhaustion on her face. It definitely wasn’t my fault, I was sure.
“Please fill out your name, birthday, and class.”
“My birthday?”
“Yes, we need it to check your age.”
“Can’t I just tell you how old I am?”
“If you do that, your guild card won’t update, even when your birthday comes.”
Right, if I just told them my age, then I’d just end up being eighteen or whatever forever. But what would I do about my birthdate? This world had to have a different calendar from Earth, but I did have the skill Fantasy World Literacy, so maybe it’d translate. For the time being, I filled in my name in Japanese and the date I was born in Japan according to the western calendar.
“So you’re fifteen, Ms. Yuna?” said Helen.
It had worked! You had to hand it to the fantasy genre. I needed to fill in the class column next.
“My class?”
“It’ll be referenced for companion recruitment and limited quests.”
“Companion?”
I didn’t just react to the word “companion” because I’m a loner, mind you. I totally had friends. Just not…
a lot.
When I was playing the game, I was a magic swordswoman. It was the optimal choice for the sort of solo play I preferred; it gave me good options for handling enemies that couldn’t be killed by either physical damage or magic alone. It wasn’t really popular for playing in a party; swordsmen did better melee damage, and when you needed magic, you’d just recruit a sorcerer. That was why I never ended up joining a party.
It wasn’t like no one ever invited me or anything.
“I don’t need one, so can I leave it blank?”
“It’ll help if you could write something.”
“Umm.”
It wasn’t like I was a magic swordswoman right now, but I had to write something. What was my current class? I couldn’t use magic. I had no sword. Was I a fighter?
I tried my best to ignore the voice that seemed to issue from the heavens to tell me, “Your class is Bear, isn’t it?”
Name: Yuna
Birthdate: Month ** Day ** Year 20**
Class: Bear
I ended up writing it down. Helen looked at it with disgust, but I guess she wanted to get this over with, since she didn’t say anything.
“Well then, please put your hand on this crystal panel.”
It was identical to the one at the gate. These things supposedly checked your mana, which made me revisit a question that had been bugging me—was magic something unique to each person, like fingerprints? While I was puzzling that over, Helen operated the crystal panel.
“It’ll take some time for your registration to go through, so I’ll explain how the guild works in the meantime. Your guild card has your name, age, and class on it, plus your adventurer rank and the number of quests you’ve accepted. This includes information about each quest, how many times you’ve succeeded, and how many times you’ve failed. Your currently accepted quests will be recorded. This information can be accessed from any guild.”
Right, so that meant that the number of times I failed would be recorded, too. No one would want to hire an adventurer who’d failed a lot, after all.
“You don’t have records for how many monsters I’ve slain or something?”
“No, we don’t. There’s no point.”
“Huh?”
“Even if you brought in a mana gem as a trophy, we couldn’t tell whether you beat it yourself or had help from a hundred people.”
So things didn’t get automatically recorded like if you beat a monster in a game. That was fair enough—if ten thousand people teamed up to battle a dragon and only the person who dealt the finishing blow got credit for the kill, things would get ugly real quick. On the flip side, giving ten thousand people the title of dragon slayer didn’t make much sense, either.
“Next I’ll explain the guild ranking. The ranks start with F, and you rise to E, D, C, B, A, and S. You increase in rank based on your successes and failures while fulfilling quests. If you have a lot of failures, you won’t advance, so please accept quests that are within your skill level. Also, if you continue to accept quests of the same rank as yourself, you won’t increase in rank.”
“Why’s that?”
“You can accept quests up to a rank above yours. Because of that, no matter how many hundreds of F-rank quests you accept, as someone in F-rank, you won’t rise up.”
“In other words, if I complete a quest a rank above mine, then I’ll go up a rank?”
“The standard criteria is to complete more than ten quests a rank above yours. Then, the guild makes the final call.”
“What happens if I accomplish a quest by teaming up with people a rank higher than mine?”
“That’s a very specific situation to explain, but when you take on a quest, everyone must present their guild card. If someone with a high rank is in the group, your inspection rank goes up.”
“Which means?”
“The number of quests you need to complete increases. For example, if someone from D-rank were to complete quests with the aid of an adventurer of C-rank, then they would need to complete over twenty quests to rise to C-rank. If they get the help of an S-rank, they won’t rise in rank no matter how many times they complete quests.”
“What happens if they secretly do that?”
“The guild can’t do anything about that. But it’s true that there are aristocrats who use the method you spoke of to rise in rank.”
In other words, they would hire a high-ranking adventurer to help them to rise in rank. I figured hiring someone with a high rank would take more money than a normal adventurer could spare.
“And lastly, only you can use this card. If you lose it, reissuing the card will require a ten-silver coin handling fee.”
She handed me the finished silver card, and I looked it over.
Name: Yuna
Age: 15 years old
Class: Bear
Adventurer Rank: F
That was all the information on it. This receptionist lady actually wrote “Bear” in for my class. I noticed Helen was grinning.
“The quests are put up on that board. If you see a quest there that you’d like to accept, please bring the written quest to the front desk.”
The board she pointed out was surrounded by a small crowd, but there were other boards that went completely ignored.
“What about that one?”
“That board has high-ranking quests.”
“I see.”
Fina was standing outside when I left, looking concerned.
“What’s wrong, Fina?”
“I was worried about you.”
“Oh, sorry for making you worry. I got registered, so everything’s fine. Did you find any work?”
“There wasn’t any. Most of the adventurers brought their things in already butchered. They get more money that way. There aren’t a lot of monsters that get brought in intact.”
“Really?” I didn’t want to get my hands dirty butchering monsters, and I didn’t care whether they were cheaper, so I was planning to bring them in unharvested. It wasn’t like a modern-day hermit like me could butcher an animal or a monster in the first place, anyway.
I gave Fina a pat on the head and was just thinking about parting ways with her to search the town when I stopped. “Oh, right. Fina, you don’t have anything to do, right?”
“I don’t. There isn’t any work anywhere else today, either.”
“How about you show me around the town today? I don’t know how much you make in a day normally, but how does a silver coin and lunch sound for compensation?”
“You already paid me too much yesterday, so that’s too generous. A ten-year-old can’t make a silver coin in just a day.”
“Then today is special. And once I figure out the town, this job will be gone.”
I gave her a second, gentle pat on the head. I never had a younger sister, but I wondered whether it would have been like this.
“Thanks, Yuna.”
“Let’s go. Could you start by showing me the best place I can go to buy a weapon?”