Huh? Did I...hear that right? They feed you to monsters if you don’t do your work right?
“Now listen up, ’cause this is important.” That voice like tumbling rocks grew even lower than before as the man glared at me. “If you take a request, make damn sure you do a proper job,” he growled.
“I-I will...” was all I could say. I was leaning back so far I almost toppled off the stool and barely got my balance back in time.
“If you get it, then get goin’.”
“Yes, sir.”
Adventuring was scary. The man behind the desk was scary too.
Dozens of requests were pinned to the wooden wall he’d mentioned earlier. The sheets of parchment were stuck up in a sloppy mess. Some of the requests covered others up, while parts of the wall were left bare. It was strange. Why couldn’t people put them up nice and neatly? I almost felt sorry for the state the wall was in, with pinholes sprinkled all over. I tried reading some of the request forms at eye level.
“Ex-ter-mi-na-tion... They want something killed. Some kind of snake monster? It appeared in a cave and they want someone to get rid of it.” I could read most of the letters, but I felt like I was missing something. It didn’t say how big this snake was, and I wouldn’t be able to find it because I didn’t know the name of the place written in the request. Still, I did learn something: The big letters at the top of the forms were headings. I looked up at the wall and read as many of those headings as I could see.
Extermination. Extermination. Escort. Survey. Missing person. Mining. Extermination. Unloading ship’s cargo. Guarding. Transporting stone. Survey. Escort. Delivery.
Some of it was just your everyday manual labor, but it seemed like adventurers would take on all of these. They really were jacks-of-all-trades. I read through the requests one by one, struggling with some of the harder words.
I knew extermination, escort, and guarding jobs were out of the question for me. I’d never even fought with kids my own age and won before. Manual labor was probably out too. I thought maybe a survey job would be doable, but the request details were about researching rare monsters and where they lived and...stuff like that. It sounded really hard. As for the delivery job and searching for a missing person, there was no way I could do those. I didn’t know anything about this town and its streets.
This wasn’t good. I couldn’t find anything that I could do. Did people even make requests that a kid could handle? Doubt was creeping in, but I kept looking for anything I might be able to take on. I’d helped out lots with farmwork back home. Something like that would be perfect.
“Hey, kiddo. You a newbie? And you can read, huh?”
A voice from behind startled me. I whirled around to see a strange man standing there. He was tall and had dark brown hair with one very noticeable tuft of white in the front. He wore battered metal armor and had a longsword hanging from his hip. This guy was definitely an adventurer.
But...what’s up with him? My eyes went wide in surprise as I looked up at his face. I was pretty sure it was still morning, but the man stank of alcohol. Judging by his bright red face and the way he was clutching the back of his head with his right hand, he was probably drunk and nursing a headache too. The man who lived a couple of doors down from us back in the village would get like this after just a few sips. And this adventurer’s eyes were all red and puffy like he’d been crying for days. I had no idea what was going on with him, and it made me a little uneasy.
“I-I, um... I just joined the guild. And I can read, more or less.” I answered what I was asked, nothing more.
The man was still wincing at his headache, but he grinned. It didn’t make me feel any better.
“You don’t say? Not every day you meet a kid your age who knows his letters. Let’s see...” Swaying unsteadily, the man walked closer until he stood beside me and pointed to one of the sheets on the wall. “Go on, then. Can you tell me what this one says?”
The man seemed to doubt I really could read. The request he pointed to had a picture of some lizard-like monster drawn on it. According to the heading, it was a survey job.
“It’s about a survey of great lizards in the swamps. They want to know roughly how many there are, where they build their nests, what they eat, and they also want you to bring back some droppings. And it says to be careful because they’re known to attack people.”
I managed to read it. But this work wasn’t something I could handle, especially because of that last part.
“Huh. All right, how about this one?”
“They’re looking for someone to guard their fields from bears and boars. The job takes twenty days.”
This one was easy to read, but again, the work was impossible for me. What would I do against a bear or a boar?
“Too long. What’s this one say?”
The next one he pointed to was a little trickier. I could read the words, but I couldn’t really picture what they were describing.
“It’s a request for the extermination of some, um, big rats in the...” I paused for a moment, puzzled. “Water paths under the ground?”
“Gotcha. They want the dire rats cleared out of the sewers. They’re about twice the size of cats, those things.”
“Sewers? What are those?”
“Hm? They’re underground waterways. They run under the town and carry dirty water and such out to the sea.”
I’d never even heard of anything like that. This town was amazing above and below the ground.
“They only run under the Central District, though. Anyway, what about the bit underneath?”
“Under... Oh, I think it says...per-ma-nent. You have to collect tails as proof that you’ve killed them. The reward for each one you kill is—”
“Tails, huh? Yeah, yeah, I remember now.” The man nodded. “Color me impressed, kiddo.”
Something funny was going on here. But before I could figure it out, the man pulled out one of the request’s pins and thrust the loose sheet of parchment into my hands.
“This one’s for you.”
“Huh?”
“See ya, kiddo. Don’t wander too far from town.”
I was so surprised I couldn’t say a word, so I just took the parchment. The man grinned, turned away from me, and went to the reception desk. He waved at me lazily over his shoulder with his right hand, and with his left he held another sheet of parchment from the wall.
What just happened?
“Fooled by a fool.”
“Wah!” I yelped, startled by a voice that came from behind me, right by my ear. Could people stop doing that?!