Teto and I left the management of the «Empty Wilderness» to Service Doll Baretta whom we had watched over from the moment of her excavation to her repair 一 her evolution to a new race to be more precise. We then went to the frontier town of the Gard Beastkin Nation after a long time and followed our usual routine like delivering potions and medicinal herbs.
Besides that, we also took requests as A-rank adventurers.
We were often called out to support other regions who didn't have enough battle power ever since our feat of reaching this nation's breadbasket region in a short time with the «Flying Carpet» during the time a dungeon appeared there before.
"It's also fun considering I get to increase my teleportation destinations."
"It's fun no matter where we are as long as Majou-sama is with Teto!"
Our usual practice was to accept one urgent request a year and go out to other places. I had registered the coordinates of almost all the regions 一the main 17 towns 一 of this Gard Beastkin Nation over the ten years we had traveled through it with «Flying Carpet».
On the times we didn't have any urgent requests, Teto and I would often watch over the growth of junior adventurers in the frontier town being the high-ranking adventurers we were, deliver potions and medical herbs, or tidy up the remaining miscellaneous requests.
There were many types of urgent requests we had accepted such as,
1. The subjugation of an A-rank monster - Thunder Dragonbird (鳥竜) 2. Subjugating monsters that B-rank adventurers failed to eliminate 3. Regeneration treatment of a heavyweight warrior from the Gard Beastkin Nation introduced by Prince Gyunton in secret 4. Supervising an A-rank Adventurer promotion exam 5. Carrying out relief duty in the southern region where a landslide had occurred due to heavy rain 6. Elimination of a kidnapping organization that had sneaked into the Gard Beastkin Nation 7. Mediating a conflict in a beast tribe 8. Searching for and subjugating a Devilkin, Rougarou 一一 a monster from the Kobolt species that gained intelligence through evolution 9. Capturing a wanted person who had been spotted in the Gard Beastkin Nation and had a bounty on him. 10. Protecting a venue in the Gard Beastkin Nation where the meeting among guilds of each nation took place.
In the beginning, people looked at me and Teto who rode a super strange thing like a «Flying Carpet» with suspicious eyes.
We were a duo of young girls in the Beastkin Nation where humans were in the minority and using magic unfamiliar to them.
The «Flying Carpet» with which Teto and I used to gallantly travel to solve emergency requests in no time when everyone had given up on any hope of completing them became synonymous with us. Bards turned our deeds into poems and were spreading them all over the Beastkin Nation as we speak.
As a result, our party whose name we hadn't decided until then became the «Flying Carpet» party and our popularity soared to the level where we would be immediately recognized no matter what city we appeared in.
From this perspective, it must be a fitting stardom as an A-rank Adventurer.
But life wasn't always rosy and we witnessed many painful and sad moments over the years.
The A-rank monster Thunder Dragonbird, whom we were rushing to subjugate, had flown unrestrainedly in the sky and spewed out violent lightning, reducing three villages to ashes and causing around 150 deaths.
Teto and I had seen the devastated appearance of the villages scorched by lightning.
Among the casualties was one person who could have at least exchanged some moves with the monster but he wasn’t able to delay the monster that roamed freely in the air and manipulated lightning. He was killed as if he was just trash.
"If only we could have arrived earlier......"
"You did what you could, Majou-sama."
In fact, the casualties were quite small compared to the norm when an A-rank monster appeared. Because they were the same monsters who could kill more than a thousand people together with a town in the worst-case scenario.
Besides, real life is often different from stories.
There were no such fairy tales as wandering heroes defeating the monsters before they could harm the populace in their wake before me. Requests are often made after casualties already happened.
It wasn't just in the A-rank monster subjugation, the other requests I dealt with had the same scenario.
The wanted person with the bounty on his head and the werewolf Devilkin that were to be eliminated, while both had different outward appearances, they were the same kind of bloodthirsty killer who caused casualties. We quickly subjugated them.
They would have made even more victims had we not defeated them. It was necessary to take them down before they started killing again.
In the request where we had to handle the failed subjugation, the B-rank party who had taken it had half of its members wiped out while the rest barely made it out alive.
My recovery magic had healed the wounds on their bodies, but it couldn't cure their pain of losing comrades or their fear of the monster.
I realized that behind a request for adventurers lies someone else’s hardship or sorrow and it just kept increasing in scale with the rank.
That being said, the preparator behind a tragedy needn't have to be a monster.
We witnessed the scene of a kidnapping organization transporting the beastkin they had captured and illegally turned into slaves from the Beastkin Nation to the other nations and arrested them.
The hand of that kidnapping organization wasn't just limited to the Beastkin Nation, their net was cast wide even in the other nations. Their deed of preying on people showed us the darkness of mankind.
However, not everything was gloomy in the quests for high-ranking adventurers.
The heavyweight warrior we had treated in secrecy had received his wounds from the attacks of the southern neighboring country's soldiers.
He was a strong warrior, extolled as second to none in this Beastkin Nation. He acted as the pivot during the surprise attack where he was guarding the royal family and managed to pull the enemies away from them but was later ganged up on by enemies and tortured.
That warrior, whose strength rivaled other active A-rank Adventurers in the Beastkin Nation, had a strong will as he lived through it all until help arrived despite being tortured by his enemies. But the price of it was his sorry state where he lost not only his arms and legs but even his ears and tail which were the characteristics of a beastkin.
Regeneration magic healed and grew new parts by taking the nutrients from the body so it took quite a lot of food to bring him back to his original condition.
However, his limbs that once used to bulge with muscles didn't have even minute traces of their past and had become extremely thin, maybe because there was too much to regenerate.
"I'm grateful for your help, young ladies. I would be able to protect my comrades again due to your grace."
He would have to go through rehabilitation given his feeble appearance.
I felt the warrior's strong resolve radiate from the words of appreciation that had come out of his mouth, despite him knowing that the painful memories of the torturous experience he received at the hands of the neighboring country's people would continue to live on in his head.
In another request一一
We had been invited once to supervise an A-rank promotion exam in the Beastkin Nation and there we noticed the subtle contrast in their characters as adventurers compared to the adventurers in the Iska Kingdom.
The Beastkin Nation was a place relatively populated with demihumans like Beastkin, Elves, Dwarves, and Dragonewts. Each one of them used a technique or fighting style from their respective races.
And among them was a particularly young beastkin warrior who was the very definition of a rare prodigy. He had taken the shortest time to become an A-rank candidate among the participants and yet he was already able to use «Body Hardening» and had a high level of swordsmanship.
His techniques, which he had learned from his warrior father, the experience he had cultivated in his practice as an Adventurer, and the fact that he had reached this stage faster than the time Teto and I took to reach it made me realize the possibilities that lie within mankind.
Then in the landslide that had happened in the southern region, we quickly rushed to the place carrying relief supplies in our «Magic Bag» and helped out in town reconstruction.
That disaster was undoubtedly a painful incident, but the sight of people who had endured this and yet stood up once again to build up their place made me feel hope for the future.
If we felt the strong spirit of the populace in this incident, then it was the strong bond between people that we felt next.
The next patriarch of a beast tribe, whom we were requested to act as a mediator in their confrontation, and the daughter of the current patriarch had fallen in love and, despite the various obstacles they faced, they never let go of each other's hand.
The Grand Masters, who are the foremost executives in an adventurer guild, discussed countermeasures against the damage caused by monsters or dungeons irrespective of their nationality in the joint meeting of adventurer guilds from different nations, which is held rotationally among the participants' nations.
One could say the adventurer guild was an organization independent of their nation but the Grand Masters weren't saints either, since they had their status linked to the territory of their nation and had their respective ideologies, things they want to do, their interests, or even their racial ranks.
Nevertheless, they went through the meeting to achieve the ideals of the organization and worked day and night to come up with countermeasures to minimize the damage as much as possible.
Teto and I who returned to our home in the «Empty Wilderness» through teleportation magic after getting tired from going through such numerous requests,
«Welcome back, Master, Teto-sama.»
We were greeted by Baretta.
And it was this scene, the piece of mind that I have people waiting to greet me, that continued to soothe my heart each time I saw a painful or bitter scene.
It was this small bit of happiness that I continued to feel over these ten years.
