by Kumo Kagyu
“Hmph.” At length, Cow Girl wandered away from Guild Girl. She didn’t want to get caught up in this, and it didn’t look like she would be able to get that signature anytime soon.
Bored, Cow Girl let her gaze drift toward the wall. He was still sitting there.
She had once said, “We’d better hurry or all the work will be gone,” but he had replied, “Goblin slaying isn’t popular.” Farmers posted the jobs, so the rewards were meager, and as they were seen as low-level quests, the more experienced adventurers wouldn’t take them.
So he waited for the reception area to clear out. There was no hurry.
And…he never said it, but Cow Girl thought he was waiting so new adventurers could have their pick of the quests first. Not that she would suggest this to him. He would just say, “Is that so?” like he always did.
“Hmm…” If she was going to be stuck here anyway, maybe she should go wait with him?
She shouldn’t have hesitated.
“Ah…” Someone else approached him before she could.
A young female adventurer. She wore priestess vestments over her delicate frame, the symbol of the Earth Mother hanging from her sounding staff.
“…Hi,” she said shortly, standing in front of him. She looked uncomfortable as she gave a small bow.
“Yeah.” That was all he said. Whatever he might be thinking was hidden inside that helmet. He didn’t seem to notice Priestess was even more flustered by her inability to elicit a proper response from him.
“I bought some equipment. Just like you told me.” She rolled up the sleeves of her vestments. A set of brand-new mail clung to her slender body, the chained links glimmering faintly.
“Not bad.”
Someone who didn’t know any better might take the scene the wrong way, but his words held no hint of innuendo.
He finally turned toward Priestess, looked her up and down, and nodded.
“The rings are a bit wide, but it will be enough to stop their blades.”
“Mother Superior was very displeased with me. She wanted to know what servant of the Earth Mother would wear armor.”
“She probably doesn’t know much about goblins.”
“It’s not that. It’s a violation of the Precepts…”
“If it will interfere with your miracles, maybe you should switch faiths.”
“My prayers will reach the Earth Mother!”
“Then there’s no problem.”
Priestess puffed out her cheeks angrily. Both of them were silent for a moment.
“Not going to sit?”
“Oh, I-I will! I will sit!”
Blushing, she hurriedly lowered herself into the chair next to him. Her little behind made a cute buhmp as she sat down.
Priestess laid her staff across her knees and clasped her hands, as if trying to shrink into the seat. Apparently, she was quite nervous.
“Hmph.” Cow Girl let out an unconscious grunt, but it wasn’t as though he had never mentioned this girl. She was an adventurer he had been partied with for about a month now. He didn’t actually say that he had found her on her first adventure and taken her under his wing—but Cow Girl had put this together from the bits and pieces she got out of him.
On the one hand, she had always been worried about him out there by himself, so she was glad there was someone with him now. On the other hand…did she have to be so young?
Cow Girl came with him to the Guild Hall every day, but this was the first time she had seen Priestess in person. She was so slim she looked like a strong hug would break her in half. Cow Girl looked down at her own ample body and gave a little sigh.
Priestess never noticed Cow Girl watching her. Instead, still blushing furiously but seeming to have worked up her courage, she opened her mouth.
“A-about the other day…”
The high pitch and quick pace of her words must have been due to nerves, surely.
“I-I think destroying the whole cave with that fire mixture was too…too much!”
“Why is that?” He continued to sound as if none of this surprised him. “We can hardly leave the goblins to themselves there.”
“Y-yes, but what…what about the consequences? What if the whole m-mountain came down?”
“I’m more worried about goblins.”
“I know! I-I’m trying to tell you that shortsightedness is the problem!”
“…I see.”
“A-and another thing! I think the way you get rid of…of the smell should be a little…a little more…!” She started leaning off her seat as she talked.
His tone suggested he was growing annoyed. “So, have you learned the times to attack?” Priestess swallowed, caught off guard by the sudden change of subject.
Cow Girl, innocently eavesdropping, giggled to herself.
He hasn’t changed a bit since we were young.
“It’s…early in the morning or in the evening,” Priestess answered, while trying to show with her face that she wasn’t letting him off that easily.
“Why?”
“B-because those are evening and morning for goblins, respectively.”
“Correct. High noon is midnight for them. Their guard is tightest then. Next question: How do you attack a nest?”
“Well…if possible, you build a fire to smoke them out. Because it’s…it’s dangerous…inside the nest.”
“Right. Only enter when you have no time or no other choice. Or when you want to be sure you’ve killed every last one of them.”
He interrogated her as she struggled to come up with answers. “Items?”
“M-mainly potions and torches.”
“Is that all?”
“A-and rope. There’s always a use for rope…I guess.”
“Don’t forget it. Spells and miracles.”
“Y-your items can often substitute for spells and miracles, so you should save your magic for when you need it.”
“Weapons.”
“Um, you should have…”
“No, you shouldn’t. Take them from the enemy. They have swords, spears, axes, clubs, bows. I don’t need any special tools. I’m a warrior.”
“…Yes, sir.” She nodded like a child who had been scolded by her teacher.
“Change your weapons, change your tactics. Doing the same thing over and over is a good way to get yourself killed.”
“Um, may I…write this down?”
“No. If they took the notes from you, they’d learn from them. You have to know everything by heart.” He spoke calmly while Priestess labored to commit his words to memory. It truly seemed like the back-and-forth between teacher and pupil.
Did he ever talk this much? Cow Girl shifted uneasily as the question rose in her mind.
She couldn’t understand why it left her so restless. She wanted to get that signature as soon as she could and go home.
“All right,” he said, standing suddenly. Looking around, she realized the crowd of adventurers was just shuffling off to their business. There was much to do—prepare equipment, stock up on food and supplies, gather information.
Priestess hurried to keep up with him as he strode toward Guild Girl with hardly a glance at the departing questers.
“Ah…” Cow Girl had missed her chance again. Her voice, like her outstretched hand, hung in the air.
“Oh, Mr. Goblin Slayer! Good morning! How nice to see you again today!” Guild Girl’s voice and face carried all the brightness that Cow Girl’s lacked.
“Any goblins?”
“Why, yes! Not too many today, I’m afraid, but there are three quests involving goblins.” As he stood there calmly, Guild Girl picked out some papers with a practiced hand. She seemed to have prepared them in advance.
“The village by the western mountains has a medium-sized nest. The village by the northern river has a small nest. And there’s a small nest in the southern woods.”
“Villages again?”
“Yes. They’re all farmers, as usual. I wonder if the goblin
s are targeting them.”
“Maybe.” He had taken her joking words in dead earnest. “Has anyone else taken on any of these quests?”
“Yes. A group of rookies are in the southern woods. That one is a request from a village near the forest.”
“Beginners,” he murmured. “Who was in their party?”
“Let’s see…,” Guild Girl said. She licked her thumb and began paging through a sheaf of papers.
“One warrior, one wizard, and one paladin. All Porcelain rank.”
“Hmm. That’s fairly well-balanced.”
“They were here earlier… Just three people? They’ll never survive!” Priestess’s panicked squeak contrasted sharply with his measured assessment. “I mean, we had four, and…”
She went pale and trembled slightly. She gripped her sounding staff tightly.
Cow Girl looked away, the uneasy feeling growing sharper within her.
Why hadn’t she realized it sooner?
He meets an adventurer on her first quest…an adventurer…
She should have understood what that meant.
“I tried to explain to them…I really did. But they insisted they’d be fine,” Guild Girl said uncomfortably. She obviously knew Priestess’s story.
But at the end of the day, adventurers were responsible for themselves.
Priestess looked up at him imploringly.
“We can’t leave them! If we don’t help them…”
His answer was immediate. “Go if you want.”
“What…?”
“I’m taking out the mountain nest. At the very least, a hob or a shaman should be there.” Priestess looked at him vacantly. There was no guessing at the expression hidden behind his helm. “In time, that nest will grow, and then things will be worse. I have to nip it in the bud.”
“So…so you’re just going to abandon them?!”
“I don’t know what you think I do,” he replied with a steady shake of his head, “but this nest has to be taken care of. As I said, you can go to the forest if you want.”
“B-but then you’ll face the mountain nest alone, won’t you?!”
“I’ve done it before.”
“Ahhhh!” Priestess said, biting down hard on her lip.
Even from where she stood, Cow Girl could see Priestess shaking. But her face did not suggest fear.
“You’re impossible!”
“You coming?”
“Of course I’m coming!”
“You heard her.”
“Oh, thank you both so much!” Guild Girl said, bowing her head to them in gratitude. “No other experienced adventurers ever take on goblin quests…”
“Experienced, my foot,” Priestess muttered sullenly, glancing down at her Porcelain tag. She looked like a pouting child.
“Ha-ha-ha… Well, you know… So, both of you are going?”
“Yes,” Priestess said with a grudging nod. “Over my objections!”
He was always prepared, so with the administrative work done, they were set to depart immediately.
They were going to pass by Cow Girl on their way to the door. There was no other way out of the building. What should—or shouldn’t—she say? Confounded, several times she opened her mouth as if to say something.
But in the end, she said nothing.
“I’m on my way.” He was the one who, as always, stopped directly in front of her.
“What? Oh… Yeah.” She gave a sure nod. There was a long pause before she managed to squeeze out two more words: “Be careful.”
“You, too, on the way home.”
Priestess nodded as she went past, and Cow Girl answered with an ambiguous smile.
He never looked back.
Cow Girl went back to the farm on her own, pulling the empty cart, and tended to the animals without a word.
As the sun climbed slowly but surely into the sky, she lunched on a sandwich in the pasture. And when the sun had slipped back toward the horizon, she ate dinner at the table with her uncle. She couldn’t quite taste the food.
After dinner, she went outside. A cool wind born from the night brushed against her cheeks. When she looked up, she could see the whole vast sky with its many stars and two moons.
She didn’t know much about adventurers or goblins. She hadn’t been in her village when goblins attacked it ten years earlier.
She had been at her uncle’s farm, helping with the birth of a calf. At her tender age, she didn’t realize it was just an excuse to let her play.
It was sheer luck she had avoided the catastrophe. Just luck.
She didn’t know what happened to her parents. She remembered burying two empty coffins. She remembered the priest saying something, but all she knew then was that her mother and father were gone.
She remembered being lonely at first, but she no longer felt it.
And there was always the if. If she hadn’t fought with him that day. If she had asked him to come with her…
Maybe things would have been different. Maybe.
“Stay up too late, and you’ll have a hard time tomorrow morning,” a rough voice said over the sound of footsteps in the underbrush.
She turned and saw her uncle, with the same concerned expression he’d worn that morning. “I know. I’ll go to bed in a little while,” she promised, but her uncle shook his head with a frown.
“He has to take care of himself, but so do you. I let him stay here because he pays me, but it would be better if you kept away from him.”
She was silent.
“I know you’re old friends, but sometimes the past is just the past,” he said. “He’s not the same. He’s out of control.”
You should know that.
Cow Girl just smiled at his admonishment. “Maybe. But still…” She looked up at the stars. At the two moons and the road that stretched beneath them. There was still no sign of him.
“I’m going to wait a little longer.”
He didn’t come back that night.
It was noon the next day when he returned. Then he slept until dawn.
The day after that, showing no hint of fatigue, he joined Priestess in venturing to the southern woods. Cow Girl heard later that the rookies never returned from the forest.
That night, she had that familiar dream again.
She never had apologized.
“Help us! You gotta help us! Them gubbins done come down to our village!”
“Filing a quest? Please fill out this form, sir.”
The farmer clutched the paper so tightly it crumpled, and Guild Girl pulled out a fresh sheet. This was nothing unusual at the Adventurers Guild. She dealt with half a dozen people like this before breakfast.
Adventurers were busy during the day, so they mostly visited the Guild Hall in the morning or evening. Those filing quests, however, were not so predictable.
The battles among the gods had gone on so long that monsters were a familiar part of the world now. When a village was attacked, a nest of terrible creatures would inevitably be found in some nearby ruins or the like. The man before her that afternoon was just one more in a parade of people who showed up at their wits’ end.
“If this goes on, gods know what’s gonna happen to the poor cows! And our damn fields? The gubbins’ll light ’em up…”
The farmer’s hand quaked as he wrote. Each time he made a mistake, Guild Girl was ready with a new quest sheet.
Yes, each time—each time monsters appeared, each time they attacked a village, the adventurers would come. Be it dragons, demons, giant eyes with their unholy names, or sometimes even a crew of heartless outlaws.
All who stood among the age-old enemies of those who have words: the Unpraying.
Granted, this was a dubious term, since it included priests serving the Dark Gods. And most numerous among the Unpraying were—you guessed it—goblins.
“We ain’t even got no young ladies for ’em to carry off!”
Guild Girl narrowed her eyes, trying to make sense of letters that
crawled like worms across the page. They were hardly legible. This was the most talented scribe the village could muster?
Somehow it was always these tiny frontier farm towns the goblins went after. Were the goblins really targeting the villages on purpose? Was it just because there were so many villages—or so many goblins? As far as Guild Girl was concerned, such questions were above her pay grade.
“It looks like the paperwork is in order. Do you have the reward with you?”
“Sure enough. Say, is it true the gubbins take a girl sometimes and get to know her, then eat ’em?”
“There are cases where that has happened, sir.”
The farmer was noticeably paler as he took out a sack. Guild Girl accepted it without a waver in her perfect smile. It was terribly heavy…
The sack was filled mostly with copper coins, a few silver ones shining among them. There wasn’t a single gold coin in the bag.
Guild Girl took a set of scales from underneath the counter. The value of the coins would be measured against an established weight.
“All right, I’ve confirmed the amount,” she said after a moment. “You’re all set here.”
She doubted whether the reward would even come to ten full gold pieces. Barely enough to hire a few Porcelain-rank adventurers at Guild rates. Take into account the processing fees the Guild charged for acting as an intermediary, and the farmers might actually be in the red.
But that mound of coins—some covered in dirt, some in rust, new and old pieces thrown in together—had meaning.
Someone who didn’t understand that meaning could never become a Guild receptionist.
“Don’t worry, sir. Some adventurers will be by within a few days to slay your goblins.” No matter how she felt inside, her smile never faltered. The farmer nodded with relief.
He was probably picturing a monster hunter in resplendent armor, gallantly fighting off the goblins. Guild Girl knew better. She knew that was not who would show up. The adventurers who would find their way to that village would be Porcelain-ranked. Total beginners.
Most of them would be wounded in the battle. If things went poorly, they would die. There was even a chance that—worst-case scenario—the village would be destroyed.
So, while it might have been simply to make everyone feel better, all rewards were paid at the end of the quest.