Ah, if only she could go back in time and stop her younger self from making such a foolish decision. As good as the salary was, it came with not even a tenth of the time off she needed to live a decent life.
“Yes, yes, I received your request,” said the guildmaster. “But I never said I’d grant it, did I?”
Needless to say, the guildmaster’s attitude provoked no small bit of anger in Melissa.
“Excuse me?! Did I hear you correctly? Well in that case, if that’s your attitude, maybe I’ll simply quit!”
“You can’t quit!” the guildmaster told her. “Without you, the whole front desk will fall apart! All those juniors of yours you worked so hard to teach will be absolutely swamped! You don’t want that, do you?”
“Nh...” was all Melissa could say.
“If you were the kind of irresponsible woman who was capable of putting her own convenience above her subordinates, you would have quit long ago, wouldn’t you?”
“N-Nh...” Melissa had wanted to quit many times before, but just like the guildmaster said, she had always found herself unwilling to abandon her precious junior receptionists. “You... You... You scheming old fox!”
“Bwa ha ha!” The guildmaster laughed, now completely relaxed in the face of Melissa’s invective. “Rage all you want, but you’re getting promoted whether you like it or not! Now quit complaining and move up in the world already!”
If Kanata had heard Melissa say the word “fox” she would surely have begun searching all around for signs of a fluffy tail. But alas, the only one here now was the small but cunning guildmaster.
“My apologies for the delay.” At last, the old man in charge of the conference entered the room and took his seat. The meeting was finally about to begin. The young staff members who had been scurrying around providing cups of tea and reading materials to all in attendance finished their jobs as well.
In that moment, Melissa wished for nothing more than to accompany the servers out of the room. She had heard that the city where they were holding this conference was home to a famous café that served the most delightfully fluffy pancakes. How she wished she could try the tea there and come straight home with arms full of presents for Lily and Bella, before taking a long vacation and spending the whole time asleep.
Alas, such a fantasy amounted to no more than escapism.
“It’s useless!” the guildmaster said. “You’re staying here with me to cross wits with all these wicked old devils! You’ll gain experience and move up in the world before you know it, mark my words!”
“Stop reading people’s minds!” Melissa demanded. “And shut up about moving up in the world!”
† † †
“Our next topic,” the conference chairman said, “concerns requests that were deemed unfulfilled due to the reward on offer being too low. It seems that in the past few months, the backlog of these requests has shrunk by more than half...”
Melissa, as it happened, knew some things about this subject. The Adventurers’ Guild received some requests with a reward offer so low that they weren’t even worth putting up on the guild’s bulletin board. Some of these were in fact quite dangerous, but most were posted by impoverished farmers or people living on the outskirts of the kingdom, where assistance from the crown was hard to come by. The kingdom’s resources were not without limits, and it was loath to underwrite requests to the Adventurers’ Guild that came from small villages or outlying settlements unless there had been substantial loss of life. Needless to say, there was certainly no hope of the army getting involved in such situations either. Money makes the world go round, it was said, and with no money, the people in these situations could do nothing but deal with the damages as they came.
The guild, of course, wanted to help these people, but with the adventurers themselves unwilling to take such low-paying requests, there was nothing they could do. Some staff members would discreetly ask the adventurers under their purview to handle some of these requests, but it was never enough.
“Strangely enough,” the chairman continued, “it seems as though this vast quantity of requests was in fact completed by a single adventurer. Does anyone know anything about this affair?”
Melissa gave a meaningful look to the guildmaster of the Royal Capital branch, sitting beside her. He nodded once in response, and raised his hand. “I believe our Melissa Straud has something to report,” he said.
“Huh?!” Melissa, who had expected the guildmaster to explain the situation himself, sprung to her feet, acutely aware of suddenly being the center of attention. She cleared her throat, preparing herself to speak. “I’m Melissa, from the front desk department of the Royal Capital branch. I can vouch that this high-quantity request clearance was performed by Miss Kanata Aldezia, an adventurer under my management.”
“I see,” said the chair. “But the volume of requests in this case is truly incredible. Did this adventurer really complete all of them by herself?”
“Yes,” said Melissa, “the report is correct. Miss Kanata personally cleared all of the requests herself. Well, to be precise, she has a number of magic beasts in her service as well. Fundamentally, however, she cleared them alone.” Melissa had confirmed it with her own eyes, and written the report herself. Kanata’s balls of fluff didn’t seem to be especially useful, outside their role of keeping Kanata in a good mood. For being a Beast Tamer, she didn’t seem to use her beasts in battle at all, but Kanata never showed any signs of doubting her choice of Profession.
“But this whole thing is strange, from the very first request...” the chairman said, pushing his pair of tiny spectacles up the bridge of his nose as he looked over the paperwork. “You say that the Church had been neglecting the sewers in the Royal Capital’s Undertown to the point where the filth had turned toxic, but this adventurer cleaned it all in a single day? A job like that would take a team of thousands months to complete! I’m sure you can understand why we would suspect a forged report in such a case.”
“As the person who oversaw the completion of that request, I can testify to its veracity,” said Melissa. “The details are included in the report.”