#010
“Haah…”
I rubbed my face. I felt like I was breaking out in cold sweat. I desperately hoped that only my encounter with Carlisle hadn’t been real and was truly a hallucination. If he too had been looking down at me knowing all about my antics… I didn’t think I could bear the embarrassment. (The reason Carlisle particularly bothered me wasn’t because he was the same sex… No, there was of course another reason, but… since there was no need to dig up what I had deliberately buried, I tried hard to ignore the thoughts that were trying to surface.)
Walking in a dazed state, when I came to my senses I had already arrived at my destination, the guild building. This place was originally a luxury boutique hotel for tourists, but after monsters appeared and the tourism industry collapsed, it transformed into a guild building with a somewhat ominous atmosphere. (The original guild building had been on the forest outskirts, but it had moved here at some point.)
The basement was a restaurant, the first floor was a lobby and offices, and above that it still operated lodging business as before, but the people who mainly used the restaurant and guest rooms were now hunters and mercenaries instead of tourists.
As I entered the building, I was still surrounded by Muchi’s gang. When I got annoyed and asked why they were following me in the midst of all this chaos, they acted dumbfounded saying they also had business at the guild. Well, they were guys who did hunter work after all. But then they should just come by themselves instead of surrounding me, damn bastards.
“Why did you come to the guild? Tell us your business, pretty beggar farmer.”
“Did you come to make a commission? If you tell us, we might take the commission without guild fees.”
The guys surrounding me chattered away while subtly blocking my path to the counter. While babbling about taking commissions cheaply, one guy was waving what looked like a contract in front of my face and another was trying to put a pen in my hand. Only then did I snap to attention.
‘Right, I need to get it together. This isn’t the time to be spacing out like this.’
I can’t get swept away by thugs like these. If I got entangled with guys like this, it wouldn’t end with just being robbed of what I had. I didn’t have anything right now, but because I had nothing, I could end up being stripped to the bone. I pushed the guys away and walked straight across the lobby to the reception desk.
“Hello, Uncle Elmer.”
Guild staff NPC Elmer, who was manning the counter, glanced at Muchi’s gang with disdainful eyes, clicked his tongue quietly, then turned his gaze to me.
“…What brings you here?”
Though it was better than when he looked at Muchi’s gang, his gaze toward me wasn’t particularly friendly either. If his gaze toward Muchi mixed annoyance and disgust, his gaze toward me mixed faint contempt and displeasure. Though the types were slightly different, they weren’t much different in that they were both looks one gives to trash.
If I hadn’t known that the situation had become completely messed up, I would have felt frustrated and annoyed by now too. I would have thought I was being treated coldly for unknown reasons continuously after Eira, Kevin, and Rosie. Elmer would have been especially disappointing since he was set to be a close friend of my late uncle and had welcomed and looked after me like a nephew from the beginning. But now that I knew the circumstances, I thought it was fortunate that Elmer wasn’t sprinkling salt and chasing me away.
“Um. Well, I was thinking of making a commission.”
I put aside my thoughts and brought up my business first. Elmer pulled over a ledger from one corner of the counter with a blunt expression and opened it. Then he clicked his pen and scribbled my name without even looking at me, asking again.
“Commission details?”
“I’m thinking of going to gather at the Wanderer’s Plains… uh, I need an escort.”
“Date?”
“Tomorrow for one day.”
The sound of scratching the rough paper surface stopped. Elmer finally glanced at me.
“Tomorrow? Isn’t that too rushed? Today is already ending. There might be hunters returning during the night, but that’s not certain, and even if they return, they’ll want to rest for a day or two, so we might not be able to find people.”
“Ah…”
Come to think of it, that was true. Not only was this my first time making a commission to the guild, but I’d been so frantically driven from the moment I woke up this morning that I hadn’t thought about the schedule being too tight.
“Can’t you postpone the date? Is it urgent business?”
“Yes, well, it’s a bit…”
I couldn’t postpone the date. Eira had said the temporary antidote’s effect only lasted three days. I was planning one day for gathering and one day to return and go to Eira’s house, but since you never know what might happen, I needed about a day’s leeway.
“Hey, Elmer. What do you mean there are no people? That’s hurtful. We’re right here, are you ignoring us?”
Sure enough, it was Muchi again. Like before, he put his arm on my shoulder and leaned his full weight against me. His lackeys were also standing behind him, radiating delinquent energy.
“What ignoring? You guys are on standby anyway because you have set work.”
When Elmer spoke bluntly, Muchi went “Ah, that’s right? I thought…” and mumbled.
“Still, one day should be fine. This Rich guy will keep waiting here and the emergency contact network will be operational. It’s been well timed since I was getting antsy with no work for three whole days.”
“Well… I don’t think the conditions will match with you guys.”
Elmer still had a reluctant reaction. He clearly didn’t want to connect Muchi and me. Though he found me disagreeable, he didn’t seem inclined to push his friend’s nephew to trash like Muchi.
Naturally, I also had no intention of commissioning Muchi. Somehow this bastard seemed like he would push me as a sacrifice when facing monsters and run off alone after robbing everything I had in that gap. The fact that he persistently clung on even after I’d already refused once was more ominous. It seemed like he needed a toy to play with out of boredom.
“Why the conditions? Ah, well, didn’t they say our pretty boy’s farm got flooded and he became a beggar? But now that spring has come, well, it doesn’t feel like spring weather, but won’t there be some way to come back to life somehow? How about trying to cultivate a field somehow even on that palm-sized roof?”
Muchi, who had been grinning, snapped his fingers exaggeratedly as if he’d realized something.
“Ah, is that why you’re going to the Wanderer’s Plains? Are there seeds there that grow on their own when you sprinkle them on the roof?”
At those words, the lackeys standing behind Muchi burst into raucous laughter. At least these guys seemed to enjoy life. Where exactly was the humor in what he just said? I naturally sighed, but right now I was in a life-or-death situation. I didn’t have the luxury to get worked up over every piece of nonsense from these neighborhood thugs.
More than that, when talk of conditions came up, I realized I still knew nothing about the guild’s commission payment system. That made sense since I had always received commissions from my side, never made them.
“The commission fee… how do I pay it?”
I asked carefully. The money I had on hand was only 50,000 rual. But anyway, since you don’t pay the entire commission fee upfront, once I made the contract I could figure out the rest somehow later. Since medicinal material prices seemed to have jumped too, if I swept up as many valuable things as possible from the Wanderer’s Plains and sold them…
“Come to think of it, this is your first time commissioning the guild. First, the commission fee is paid after the commission is safely completed, but to establish a contract you need to put down a contract deposit. You want escort while gathering at the Wanderer’s Plains for one day, right?”
Elmer turned a document toward me and began explaining in a business-like manner.
“The time would be departing here at sunrise and arriving here before sunset, and since the Wanderer’s Plains is D-rank, it’s not that expensive.”
As expected.
I breathed a sigh of relief inwardly. But my relief was premature. Elmer pointed to a number in a table drawn on the document.
“The guild-assessed commission fee is 300,000 rual.”
“…What?”
My mouth fell open. What? 300,000 rual?
“So the contract deposit is 20% of that, 60,000 rual. But you have to entrust the remaining 240,000 rual to the guild. When you safely complete and return from the commission, the guild will pay the hunter, and if the commission isn’t properly carried out, we’ll refund it to the client. And separately, you have to pay 10% of the commission fee each as a guild service charge. So the total money you, Raon, need to pay the guild right now is 330,000 rual.”
“……”
I was at a loss for words.
No matter how much prices had skyrocketed, isn’t this too much? You said it was D-rank. You said it was cheap. You even have to entrust the entire commission fee to the guild? (Of course, in uncertain times like now, that seemed natural if it was natural…) Anyway, the reality was that I couldn’t even pay just the contract deposit. Same with the service charge.
If the first commission cost this much, shouldn’t the quest reward be more than the minimum amount I had to pay? Wasn’t the quest reward only 10,000 rual? There would be more quests in the future, but how exactly was I supposed to clear quests?
Author: Hyacinthus B
Hyacinthus
