“Gorilla! He called you a gorilla! Aaahh ha ha ha ha he he he he hehhhhh!”
“All right, enough already. Let’s hurry up and head over to the receptionist.”
“Ah, wait…five more minutes, please. Gotta get this out. Pfff—ha! Heee haw!”
“Like hell I’m waiting! Come on, let’s go!”
I stalked over to the receptionist counter in the guild, dragging Filia behind me.
“Excuse me, we’d like to register as adventurers.”
The second I said that to the girl sitting at the receptionist desk, she explained the sitch in the flattest, most rehearsed tone I’d ever heard.
According to her, the guild had been established in order to repel the threat of monsters, and it was a nationwide organization that extended across the country. Adventurers were divided into ranks, starting from novices at Rank E all the way to masters at Rank S, and the kinds of requests you could take were limited by your rank. Basically you could only take requests that corresponded with your current level.
All well and good, but what really mattered was that when you rose up to a higher rank, you could enter areas normal people weren’t allowed to. For somebody who wanted to see the whole world—someone like me—it was critical to shoot for S-Rank!
“That’s all there is to explain. Would you like me to repeat? Yes or no.”
“Ye—I mean, no.”
“Excellent. Please write your names here on these papers.” She handed us two white slips of paper, each about the size of my palm. “Would you like me to write your name on your behalf?”
“Ah, no, that’s all right, I got it.”
“I’m fine as well.”
Welp, now it was time to write my name. Just how long had it been since I last wrote anything? With painstaking slowness, I signed the paper. When I casually glanced over to my side, I saw Filia arching her neck to peek at my writing.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Oh, nothing, really.”
When I took a quick peep over at what Filia wrote, I saw she had utterly elegant penmanship. What wasn’t she good at? Personality aside, she really was a flawless superhuman.
After we handed the papers back to the receptionist, we each received guild cards. They were palm-sized cards, each printed with our name and the letter E. The receptionist added that it could be used as a form of identification.
“Marvelous. Now, Yuri, how about we sell these monster materials?”
“Sounds good.”
Filia opened the cloth bag she kept at her waist and methodically extracted horns, tentacles, hooves, tails, wings, claws, and so forth, all of which we’d harvested from the monsters we had defeated while we were making our way through the forest to the town. One after the other, she put our spoils on the counter. There really were a lot—more than you would’ve thought could fit in that tiny bag. It was bigger on the inside, apparently, a “bag of holding” as Filia called it.
With each new material Filia presented, the receptionist went more and more rigid.
“Wha…? Where did you obtain all of these?”
I shrugged. “‘Where’? The forest.”
In the end, our materials sold for a way higher price than I’d thought they would. According to the receptionist, my home forest was known as the “Forest of Death,” and it was considered suitable adventuring fare for guild members of Rank B and up.
“I see, so you defeated monsters from the Forest of Death so easily, then that means… My goodness, you two are both very promising newcomers. I eagerly await news of your future exploits,” said the receptionist, bowing her head to us.
Our business finished and payday acquired, we left the counter and headed over to the board where people pinned their requests.
“Did you hear that, Yuri? She said we’re promising newcomers!”
“I was there, so yeah, I heard her.”
Filia was definitely in high spirits, perhaps because she’d been praised. Sometimes she seemed a little too, uh, easy to please.
“Since that Forest of Death is supposed to be for B-Rank adventurers, E-Rank requests should be a breeze for us, right?” she said.
“You might be right about that, but you shouldn’t let your guard down. I mean, I know of an elf who overestimated herself and got lost in the middle of that very forest. You familiar with the story?”
Filia turned her most childish pout on me. “Th-that has nothing to do with this, though! And I shall not be criticized by someone with such crude handwriting!”
“Weird flex, but okay.” It was the first time anyone had called my handwriting crude. “You really do try every angle when it comes to insults, you know.”
“He he he.”
“You realize that wasn’t a compliment, right?” Why did she seem a little embarrassed? Well, whatever. “All right. Let’s try one out and get used to the system. After we take a request once—”
“Yo, sweetie, you gotta pretty cute face there, huh?”
Suddenly, someone called out to Filia in a rather audacious tone. When we turned to where it was coming from, we found a few young men who looked to be around twenty years old. They slowly started approaching Filia, smirking, licking their lips.
What was up with their lanky, frail bodies, though? That was the first thing that ran through my mind, anyway. They had decent-looking faces and all, but their bodies were so thin and delicate. So many twigs in this town! Maybe they were magicians? Even still, I was of the opinion that every adventurer should be required to have a bare minimum amount of muscle—enough to at least dodge an attack or get in some basic self-defense.