I wonder if there are any good missions… wondered Renya as he entered the guild hall. When he saw the crowd gathered in a corner of the room, he stopped.
He was currently, in a word, broke.
After earning his pay, his coffers had been reasonably well-off. The purchase of the house had done significant damage to it. His habit of buying interesting foods and ingredients finished it off. He was also carrying debt, and though his contract forbid people from knocking on his door demanding payment, he’d prefer to have a solution to this problem sooner than later. For the time being, he wasn’t yet at risk of falling into poverty. This was primarily because Shion and Rona had been funding him with their savings from before they had met. It wasn’t a permanent arrangement, and he needed to find a way to make sure it didn’t become one; he had no intention of becoming a professional sugar baby.
The two girls had brushed it off, telling him to think of it as them paying rent. Agreeing with their proposal, however, would infringe upon Renya’s masculine ideals. The male ego could, at times, prove to be quite troublesome.
In any case, he needed to make some money. He had considered opening a store, but after being neglected for so long, the store space at home was a filthy mess, broken and cracked in various places. Frau was currently working double time to clean and repair the place. The cleaning was fine, but the repairing raised a question: where was she getting the necessary materials to do the repairs? Upon asking the fairy, he learned that she had developed her own methods for acquiring funds.
“Frau leveled up, so Frau can make manastones now.”
Apparently, after continuously receiving mana from Renya and compressing it in herself, Frau had gained the ability to crystallize the stored mana. That did not explain what exactly a “level” was, and how it was “upped,” but Renya did not dwell on the question. The manastones were neither large nor very pure, so they didn’t fetch much of a price. Nevertheless, selling them allowed her to earn some pocket change. It could be said that it was actually Renya doing the earning because he was providing the mana. Renya, however, felt that since Frau was the one making the manastones, the earnings belonged to her.
“The crystallization process involves a big loss of mana, so Frau tries not to do it too much.” Frau hung her head a little as she spoke. In a way, her business was slightly sketchy, and she seemed a tad ashamed to admit to Renya that she was effectively trafficking his mana.
“I see. Well, since I can’t even afford to give you an allowance right now, I’d say go for it. As long as it doesn’t interfere with daily life, make as much as you want.”
“The mana Frau gets from Master is both Frau’s food and Frau’s bond with Master. So Frau only uses a teeny tiny bit, and only when Frau is really in trouble.”
Renya patted the smiling fairy on the head. As he did, a question occurred to him.
“By the way, what did you do after locking all of us inside? You said the house was surrounded, but I don’t think anyone showed up.”
“There were visitors,” she said before pausing. Then, after what appeared to be a moment of contemplation, she continued, “But they went bye-bye right away.”
Renya frowned. Was it just him or did Frau just say something odd? What was “went bye-bye” supposed to mean, exactly? He glanced at the fairy. The sight of her beaming smile convinced him that he was probably overthinking things. This was, after all, an alternate world. Maybe the wording had a different nuance. Whoever they were, if a little girl managed to convince them to leave peacefully, they couldn’t have been that much of a menace.
As Renya pulled himself out of his thoughts, he found himself at the corner of the room with the crowd of people. They were gathered before a bulletin board where guild missions were posted. Everyone’s attention seemed to be focused on one particular mission. He peeked through the crowd and read the specifics. It was an extermination mission that was taking place at the forest northeast of Kukrika about a half day’s walk away. The forest was fairly large — many times the size of Kukrika — and contained the entrance to a dungeon known as the Forest Maze, which supposedly led to the Miasmal Forest. Strangely, the mission itself was rather nonspecific and only involved hunting down monsters that thrived there; it made no demands as to what species. So long as they killed monsters and brought back manastones, they would be rewarded accordingly.
“Not every day you see an extermination mission with no specific target,” said someone in the crowd.
There were ongoing missions for the extermination of a number of dangerous monster species. These monsters tended to pose a constant threat to humans that often stemmed from excessive fecundity or deadliness. Missions of this nature had no time limit, and adventurers did not need to register beforehand. Anyone who could prove that they had killed some of the designated species would be rewarded. The inverse implication of this was, of course, that no matter how rare or dangerous a monster might be, killing it would produce no reward if there was no corresponding mission.
Meanwhile, the mission this time did not specify what species of monster to kill. Anything that lived in the forest was fair game. Judging from the murmurs in the crowd, this was very unusual. The novelty, however, was lost on Renya, who had no sense of what was usual to begin with.
“You think the Forest Maze is close to an outbreak?”
“No way. That place has a low rate of monster spawning relative to its size. There has never been an outbreak at the Maze on record.”
“Were there even any tough monsters in that forest?”
“This might be a good chance to make some quick cash, you know? You just have to kill whatever you see, after all.”
As various adventurers pitched in with their own thoughts, Renya found himself entirely uninterested. The whole matter seemed sketchy to him. He was about to look for a different mission when he heard something that made him stop.
“This reminds me, it’s almost forest octopus-hunting season. Might be worth giving that a shot along the way,” said a middle-aged adventurer with the aura of someone who had years of hard-earned experience. He was stroking his chin with a grin on his face.
“Hey, you,” said Renya as he grabbed the man’s shoulder. The intent look on Renya’s face made the man lean back a little before he answered.
“Y-Yeah?”
“Did you just say ‘season’? Do you mean that thing’s edible?”
“What, you don’t know? All right, listen, my good man.”
The adventurer was then kind enough to tell Renya all about the forest octopuses. Apparently, they were a subspecies of the sea-dwelling octopuses. Like their aquatic brethren, they were eight-armed mollusks, but they happened to live in forests. This was surprising to Renya firstly because octopods existed in this world and secondly because some of them lived on land. Furthermore, forest octopuses could stand and walk on their eight arms. They primarily fed on small animals and, possibly due to their terrestrial nature, their meat was firmer and less watery.