Rubens was still quite young, and he was considered to be a promising newbie in the knight’s order. He was also the closest to me in age and had been welcomed into the order so young because of his exceptional abilities. Reid was also gifted with incredible athletic abilities, but Rubens had innate skills that made him as good, if not better. That was probably why he’d quickly come to realize the importance of warming up before exercising, but I’d never imagined it would become such a widespread phenomenon.
Maybe radio calisthenics are a bigger deal than I gave them credit for.
“You mustn’t think about other things during training, my lord!” Rubens called out.
“Whoa!”
A sharp thud different from the previous sounds filled the air. The moment my mind had drifted off to thoughts about radio calisthenics, Rubens had knocked my wooden sword out of my hand. I was so surprised that I fell to the ground. My hands were tingling and shaking.
“I guess I let my guard down a bit,” I said.
“You mustn’t do that, even if this is only a lesson,” Rubens warned. “In a real battle, such distraction could lead to death.”
A real battle, huh? Since the mark shared borders with neighboring countries, we had to prepare for the possibility of invasion. Would I be participating in a real battle one day?
“Well, in your case, I believe you will be training in a dungeon before heading out to fight, Sir Reid.”
“A dungeon?! They’re real?!”
In TokiRella!, the game from my previous life, there had been several high-difficulty dungeons that could be explored to gather materials, level up characters, and fight secret bosses. I’d been wondering if those dungeons existed in this world, and I never would’ve imagined Rubens had the answer to my question.
“Yes, dungeons are areas automatically designated for eradication. As soon as one appears, the knight’s order sets out to eradicate it.”
“What do you mean by eradicating them?” I asked.
Rubens explained that dungeons were seen as a type of—or something similar to—living creatures. They had cores deep inside them, which spent many months generating a large amount of mana deep underground. Once the core generated enough mana, the dungeon produced an aboveground entrance. The dungeon would use the generated mana to produce mana-filled creatures—in other words, monsters. It would also create treasures and riches that humans enjoyed. The dungeon would use that as bait to lure humans in, have the monsters kill the humans, then feed on the humans.
If left alone to gain enough mana, a dungeon would not only cause accidents but could also produce a swarm of monsters, which would come to the surface in search of prey. The more mana that was stored in the dungeon core, the stronger the monsters became. If monsters were strong enough to appear aboveground, they would be quite powerful. Those monsters could lead to the loss of many lives.
In order to eradicate the dungeon, one had to travel to the deepest levels of the dungeon and destroy the core. Once that was done, the dungeon would never appear again. However, destroying the core in the deepest level would cause the dungeon to deteriorate, and the people inside would be buried alive. Because of that, if the core was particularly difficult to destroy, the knights would simply damage it and weaken it as much as possible. The damaged core would bury itself underground once more to begin storing mana. The details of what caused a core to appear remained unknown.
The Order of Valdia regularly patrolled the areas within the mark where dungeons had previously spawned. They also investigated other areas to see whether dungeons had appeared. Different countries, and even different territories within the same country, had different methods of eradicating dungeons. Some chose to send their knights, while others would put out a job request to an Adventurer’s Guild. There were many ways of handling them.
“Dungeons sort of sound like anthills,” I remarked.
“Yes, I believe you could say that.”
The first word that had popped into my mind after hearing Rubens’s explanation was “anthill.” In my mind, the core was similar to the queen ant, while the monsters were the workers.
Maybe in the future I should look into efficient ways of discovering dungeons, as well as safe ways to destroy their cores.
“By the way, what’s an Adventurer’s Guild?” I asked.
“To put it simply, it’s an organization that will take any job,” Rubens explained.
That’s what I figured.
I was still curious about the guilds, so I decided to ask Rubens about it more. “Since we’re already talking about it, could you give me some more details?”
Rubens seemed bemused as he proceeded to tell me about Adventurer’s Guilds. I was excited to hear something familiar from works of fiction in my previous life.
There were two types of Adventurer’s Guilds. The first were public guilds, which were operated by the government of the countries they were located in. The second were private guilds, which were operated by private citizens. The Adventurer’s Guild in Magnolia was public. The headquarters were in the imperial capital, and there were branch offices all over the empire.
The guilds functioned by accepting job requests in the area, which were completed by freelance adventurers. There was a ranking system that ranked jobs based on the level of difficulty. The higher the difficulty of a job, the higher the payout.
Guilds imposed fees on both those who put in job requests and the adventurers who completed them. Most guilds operated using the money made from such fees. In Magnolia, there was a compensation system that adventurers could opt into. If they chose to opt into the system, a portion of any medical fees to treat injuries resulting from job requests would be covered by the guild.
In order to opt into this compensation system, an adventurer had to prepay ten percent of their rewards to the guild. The payment was required upfront in case the adventurer failed to complete an accepted job or fled without completing it.
The private guilds in other countries operated in a similar manner, but the cost of their fees differed quite a bit. Because of that, it was important to do your research before working with any guild—otherwise, you could end up in a world of hurt with all the fees you had to pay.