Iffole Counter was so quiet late that night, it was as if the wild bustle of the afternoon had never been.
Business hours had long ended, but a lonely light still shone inside the guild office.
The space held row after row of desks, each of them piled with documents. And behind one desk, where the papers were stacked particularly high, sat Alina, her face buried into the table.
“Ahhh…I’m so tiiired…,” she said weakly, adding the quest forms she had finished processing to the pile.
Alina’s reception duties were over for the day, but she was still wearing the uniform the guild had provided her. Since no one else was around, she’d taken off her short boots, tied up her black hair, and pinned back her bangs to expose her forehead. At her side was a potion that would be familiar to adventurers. Though this restorative medicine was mainly used for treating injuries, it was also believed to have surprisingly stimulating effects.
The other receptionists had long since gone, but Alina was still at the office, dealing with a massive amount of overtime work. Yes, this was the trial that fell on the shoulders of those who couldn’t finish during the normal hours of operation—working past business hours on overtime.
Alina had gone into “serious mode” so that she could somehow get home as quickly as possible, but she was still staring at a tall pile of documents that she had to process.
“I wanna go home…,” she muttered amid the silence.
She wanted to leave. To go home. To stay there and never come out—the sorrowful cries of her heart gushed out one after another, but she firmly restrained them. She couldn’t call it a day until she was done making the totals.
In addition to taking care of the postprocessing for the documents she had filled out at her reception window that afternoon, Alina still also needed to total the number of quests made that day at Iffole Counter.
Alina had started working as a receptionist when she was fifteen, and this was her third year in the field. She hadn’t been here as long as her coworkers, which was why they’d foisted the responsibility of totaling onto her. When the office was busy during the afternoon like it had been today, this basically guaranteed overtime. The older receptionists hated the task and shoved it off on one another, leading to Alina winding up with it.
“…”
But I hate it, too. She sniffled at the unfairness of the world. Knocking back the potion, a magic drink that imbued people with energy, she faced the ungodly, voluminous mountain of unprocessed documents. With no hope or light in sight, the heartless height of the pile was enough to drive her to despair.
“There’s no end to it…”
No matter how many potions she tried to trick herself with, she couldn’t overcome the limits of her human body. The many documents she hadn’t been able to process with overtime alone these past few days hadn’t decreased in volume at all; in fact, they just kept piling up and up. Clearly, she wasn’t keeping up with processing.
“Everything…everything is that boss monster’s fault…,” Alina muttered like a spell as she flipped over a single quest form that she’d placed aside.
It was the one she’d processed for Ganz that afternoon—the defeat of the floor boss in the deepest level of the Belfla Underground Ruins, the Hellflame Dragon. It was fair to say that the creature was the source of her overtime.
No one had defeated it yet, so progress through the Underground Ruins was at a standstill. Once all the bosses in a dungeon were defeated, the monsters in it would leave, but since no one had bested the dragon, the monsters in the Belfla Underground Ruins just kept coming.
And where there were monsters, there were adventurers. That was because the guild put out reward money for defeating monsters—which was how adventurers made a living.
When a dungeon was on the verge of being cleared, adventurers would take all the quests they could while it was still possible to make money. The result was the picture of hell: The quest office would be packed like it had been that afternoon, and Alina would be overwhelmed by a large volume of extra work come nightfall.
Still, usually these periods of crunch didn’t last for more than a few days—but because everyone was having so much trouble with the Hellflame Dragon this time, her hellish turmoil had persisted for nearly a month.
“Everything…”
Alina bit her tongue.
Before the adventurers’ progress through the Belfla Underground Ruins had stalled, Alina had indeed been enjoying the best a receptionist’s uneventful life had to offer. She would complete a certain amount of work and go home on time, get good sleep at home to recover from exhaustion, and then set out for another hard day’s work the next morning.
But ever since the Hellflame Dragon created this overtime, her life had become a bleak routine of nothing but eating, sleeping, and working; eating, sleeping, and working. Even if she decided to work on her days off, she wouldn’t be free of this hell as long as the dungeon boss was around.
After she’d finally gotten a stable career as a receptionist, this endless overtime was threatening to upend the peaceful lifestyle she wanted more than anything.
“…This sucks…”
Alina understood that the work she was overburdened with wasn’t the product of anyone’s deliberate malice.
The boss, the monsters, and the adventurers who surged in to slay them were all just desperately trying to live their lives.
On top of that, the dungeons the ancients had left in this land long ago were packed with not only expensive relics but also the valuable knowledge and unknown technology of the ancients. The exploits of adventurers would eventually come back to the residents of Iffole and enrich their lives.
The truth was that the metropolis Iffole had been built purely on the strength of its adventurers. As a resident of the city, Alina had to be grateful that they traversed into hostile dungeons day after day.
And yet. That was all just a nice-sounding front. At the end of the day, no matter how much the city developed, it wouldn’t reduce Alina’s overtime.
“Agh…I can’t take it anymore. I’m at my limit,” she said in a low voice before she slowly brought out a new quest form.
Alina had been buckling down, urging herself to just hang on until the Underground Ruins were cleared.
Her overtime was really only temporary. It was like a sudden storm. All the adventurers had to do was clear the dungeon; then like the clouds parting after the rain, her stable and uneventful days as a receptionist would return. Alina had been clenching her teeth this whole time in the hopes that she could just work through the crunch, wait for it to pass.
But her overtime hell had dragged on so long. Too long. She was at her limit.
“They’re all so useless! Incompetent adventurers who can’t even defeat a single boss…!”
Then she pulled out the card that she’d been hiding in the pocket of her uniform. This thick card, shining gold, identified the holder as a first-class adventurer—something a receptionist shouldn’t have been carrying.
This first-class license, which the guild granted to only a fraction of its most capable members, was Alina’s last resort for getting rid of her overtime. She didn’t care what sort of future awaited her after using this card, so long as it would make her current workload vanish.
Still enraged, Alina filled in the quest form. “If this thing—if this thing just disappeared…!”
Solo defeat of the second-floor boss of the Belfla Underground Ruins, the Hellflame Dragon.
Suddenly, the light that fatigue had stolen from her eyes returned. No—the shine of her jade-green eyes became even sharper, showing hints of murderous intent, like that of a predator making to finish its prey.
“I swear I’ll leave work on time…!”