༺ Midnight Negotiations (1) ༻
“Do you happen to know a woman going by the name of Luna?”
Inquired the guard who called me up on the street. I was scared until just now, thinking if he was trying to interrogate me. I even had the thought of being arrested for doing something illegal without realizing run through my mind.
But, hearing Luna’s name from the guards’ mouths made me utterly dumbfounded.
“Luna? The girl with pink hair and twintails?”
“That’s right. Bronze-tier adventurer from Sodomora’s Mars Guild. I heard that she formed a party with you, Hassan of Samaria. Is that correct?”
“That’s true, but…just what the hell is going on…?”
“I don’t have enough time to explain all the details. First of all, I need you to come with me to the guards’ office.”
Following his words, I headed to the guard’s office located in the west gate area, wondering whether to call it an escort or a watch.
Luna was probably the last person in the world to have anything to do with these armed soldiers. Then, just how on earth could Luna’s name come out of their mouths?
I wanted to ask them about some details, but no matter how many questions I mustered myself to ask, they just answered with the same, “Go and check the details yourself.” and shut off my prying attempts.
Just as I started worrying about the possibility that I had fallen into the guards’ trap in disguise, I arrived at the guard’s office in no time.
The guard’s office is similar to a local police precinct with bases in certain areas of the city, such as the west gate, the north gate, and the south gate. Their scope of work is also similar to the modern counterpart back on my homeworld.
Creeeeaak— Clank—
Screak —
When the office’s iron door was opened, and I entered through, tough-looking musclemen with armor and weapons turned their unruly gazes toward me. One of them asked the guard who came with me.
“Is he the one?”
“He is the Samarian, yeah. I found him in front of the library and brought him back. What is the victim doing now?”
“She became quieter after I gave her some food. All the beef jerky I had kept as snacks is all gone now.”
After speaking till here, the guard pointed to the prison cell in the corner of the office with his chin.
When I moved my gaze following the chin gesture, the scene of a petite body entered my eyes. Her back was facing the cold wall and her small body was curled with her head buried between her knees.
The way she was sitting on the floor while hugging her knees made her look like a large egg. However, those distinctive twintails didn’t leave a doubt as to who she actually was.
“Luna, what are you doing over there?”
Why was Luna locked up in a cell? God damn, I couldn’t help but scream in surprise at such an unexpected situation. Then perhaps because she had heard my voice, Luna slowly raised her head.
“…Hassan?”
“Yes, it’s me, Luna! What are you doing here? How could you end up locked up?”
“Hassan! L-listen! I got swindled! All the money I had left, every single bit of it was swindled! I’m broke now!”
Luna’s face was flushed, a shade of crimson colored all over her small head, as she shouted at the top of her lungs. All of her leftover money had been swindled? Just what did that mean?
Anyway, it was my first time seeing Luna so angry. She was crouching inside the prison cell, but whenever she recalled what had happened to her, she started fuming again as though she was not able to control the overflowing anger inside her.
“Deer! Be careful of the deer!”
After turning away from the upset Luna, I couldn’t help but question the guards in the guard’s office about just what in hell had happened to her.
“Well, sir. Why is Luna locked up like this?”
“She was too upset and uncontrollable when she came to us to complain, so we decided to isolate her for a while to let her calm down. The only room that we could use inside the office was the prison cell, and you know the rest.”
“Still, how could you lock up a person, moreover a victim, like a mere criminal?”
“You should see how much strength such a petite body of hers could produce. Although she looks a little calmer right now, I had to go through heaps of trouble just to contain and isolate her. Why don’t you go inside and try to comfort her?”
Clank— Clank—
“Hiik!”
As the guard tried to open the prison cell, Luna began to tremble again, perhaps still anxious about what happened to her.
Looking at a human acting like an abandoned animal that trembled out of fear somehow was pitiful yet funny. But real pet abandonment is still an atrocious crime.
Anyway, I carefully walked through the open door of the prison cell.
“Hey, what the hell’s going on?”
“M-my money. It took my money and ran away with it…!”
“What? What do you mean? Who ran away with your money?”
“A-A deer ran off with my five silvers!”
A deer ran off with her five remaining silvers? Damn, the more I listened to the story, the more I couldn’t wrap my head around it.
Perhaps because Luna and I both were too overwhelmed by this sudden situation, we had problems explaining and understanding each other and coming to an understanding of the current circumstance.
Therefore, I thought the first thing I needed to do was to calm Luna down, who was crying so pitifully. So I went beside her and started patting her on the back. I also grabbed Luna’s palm with my other hand to examine her condition.
Sweep— Fiddle—
Familliar letters showed up in my mind after I touched her small wrist.
[Stats] Name: Luna Knox Dotty
Level: 8
Strength: 2
Agility: 5
Stamina: 1
Condition: Desperate》Bad Meals Lover: 227
Blessing: Curse of Knox》 Curse of Erebor》 Mild Deppresive Anger
Depressive Anger?
Among the several curses in her status, seeing an additional word, “Depression Anger,” that newly appeared made me wonder deeply. Just what happened to her to make her upset to such a terrible extent?
So I pressed the red spot floating on Luna’s pinky finger with my thumb.
To be exact, it was the lesser surge point. It was located around 2 cm above the pinky fingernail.
I remember pressing this part is effective when someone is in a state of shock.
It would be nice if I could feed her with a clear mind pill. But seeing her tremble and shiver, I deemed that perhaps there was no need for a pill or any external medicine.
“Ugh…Ugh…! Ouch…!”
『Luna’s Mild Depressive Anger 》has been healed.』 『Task points + 10』 『Current task figures: +67』
Oh, it’s working.
“Huft…”
I asked Luna, who was sighing aloud.
“How is it? Don’t you feel much calmer now?
“Well, first of all….”
* * * * * *
So, this morning.
After going our separate ways, Luna reportedly had a busy day cleaning and repairing her newly acquired hut.
It took more than half a day to clean up and tidy the abandoned cabin that had already existed for decades.
“After I finished with all the cleaning, I was so worried about the holes in the walls and the dilapidated ceiling that I couldn’t just stand still. So I was going to buy some wooden planks to repair them. But I didn’t have enough money….”
Luna hesitated as she recalled what had happened to her back then. We were sitting at a table in the corner of the office and talking calmly.
“It’s because I only had about five silvers left, so I was running around looking for lumber with it. I found someone who told me that he would sell the cypress planks I wanted for just five silver.”
Thus, Luna headed to the south gate, where a middle-aged man piled up a lot of boards.
Naturally, Luna wasn’t familiar with the geography of the south gate because she was usually active in the west gate area, around the slums of Sodomora.
Since the southern gate faced a long forest, so she had some suspicions, but the idea of selling wood planks in the woods wasn’t really that far-fetched.
The story continued; Luna and the seller walked out from Sodomora’s south gate to enter the forest together.
Like its name – Deer Forest – many deers with long necks appeared around the forest.
While Luna was amazed by the picturesque view, suddenly, those deer flocked around her and licked her palms, shoulder, and face while acting cute.
“But then, one of them bit my moneybag and ran away! That man also ran away with it! I’m sure the deer was cooperating with that man to lure me in and snatch my bag!”
Luna raised her voice again as if her anger had yet to subsidize.
So, to conclude Luna’s words, there was a man, the main mastermind perhaps, he sided with a deer to lure Luna into a secluded place so that the man-animal duo could snatch her money.
“Was it really the deer, the one that did the stealing?”
“I told you already, didn’t I!? Anyway, I tried to chase after them, but they were so fast that I couldn’t even chase them for long. I lost all my money. So I rushed to complain to the guards but they locked me up like this…”
“This lady went on a rampage. Although she looks like the naive and pure Kore, she isn’t an ordinary girl in the least. As expected from a bronze-tier adventurer.”
“Oh, I understand.”
I felt like I could roughly figure out how out of control Luna had been before she got confined in the prison cell.
So, with a complicated state of mind, I was racking my brains to come up with something to speak. At that moment, the guard with a bronze helmet, who had been present from the start, decided to speak up to me.
“Hassan of Samaria, I think this case is definitely related to the deer swindler of the South Gate. I often hear complaints and rumors of a deer that robbed people’s moneybags.”
Shit, just which son of a bitch came up with this deer swindler trick, huh? These sonuvabitch robbers from this outlandish world were really creative in finding a way to cheat someone’s money out of them more efficiently.
However, even though I was lost in my own train of thought, the guard never stopped his speech.
“The damage done by him has exceeded 100 silvers already. When the damage goes over 100 silvers, that person can be treated as committing a serious crime. But he’s such a sneaky bastard that we can’t catch his trail at all. Hassan, I heard that you’re strong enough to catch a lion with your bare hands. Is that true…?
Lion? While thinking along the lines, ‘what lion,’ I remembered dragging the witch— Nemea’s cat, out of the underground waterway with my party not long ago. That was truly an incredibly huge cat we caught.
As Marco blabbered around, the cat seemed to have turned from just a very big cat to a full-fledged lion in their eyes.
“Uh, how do I explain this? Um, that’s a very complicated situation we had to go through….”
I couldn’t just go and lie to the police guards who maintained public order and captured criminals, so at that moment, I was trying to explain the reality behind that falsified piece of information.
“Since you can capture a lion with your bare hands, it will be easy for you to catch a trivial deer. Why don’t you take a request from us and show your loyalty to your party member?“
“Request?”
When I heard the word request from the guards, I became so shocked that my mouth opened wide; my jaws almost touching the ground. It wasn’t mandatory to only submit a request or a quest through the adventurer’s associated guild when you wanted to avail the services of an adventurer.
For example, city guards like them and government offices, charged with maintaining public order, or temples in general were capable of legally requesting the adventurers for individual quests.
According to Elfriede’s colleagues, quest requests from public institutions were both cheap and extremely difficult most of the time.
The quests commissioned by the temple, for example, were the lowest-paying service among all the forms of individual requests, because these ‘services’ were derived from faith, and thus couldn’t really be refused.
Even though it often felt like forced labor, which required one to do hard work at minimum wages when hearing of such requests, adventurers still were eager to receive such quests requested from public institutions or temples.
The reason for that stemmed from the fact that… The adventurer who was commissioned from such a public and governmental body or a temple would always be deemed highly skilled by everyone.
Moreover, I think it also provided a significant amount of positive scores in terms of contribution to the guild. These scores greatly affected the ranking systems of adventurers and served as a great boost for their future.
To make it easier to understand, it was a quest that would give me a small compensation but in return would help me in racking up a lot of experience for upgrading my adventurer rank.
When I was a slave, I also used to wonder if someday I would be able to become an adventurer who would be requested by a public institution like those famous adventurers.
Should I say that I was a bit bewildered by the fact that I could suddenly fulfill that dream of mine just like that? Somehow all of this felt surreal to me.
“What do you think? Will you do it or not? A compensation of 50 silvers is still quite a lot of money.”
The guard with the bronze helmet covering his head asked me again. The metal scales on his armor were clunking loudly with the slightest of movements. Under the barbute helmet, his blue eyes peeking through, showing faint traces of deep fatigue, were staring at me.
I was really scared for no reason, even though I didn’t do anything wrong. It seemed to me that the guard station somehow had a certain aura surrounding it that would stimulate the innate fear and uncertainty in any individual who was brought inside the building, even if they didn’t do anything wrong.
Soon, the man wrapped in that bronze barbute helmet added some more words.
“We can’t give more compensation because we don’t have enough budget. If you finish this well, in addition to your guild contributions, you will also have the opportunity to form a connection with us, the west gate guards, and come to us for anything as much as you like in the future.”
Successful completion of this work would create a small connection with the government offices, including getting contribution points. Plus there was next to no reason for me to refuse such an incredible offer.
However, some things in life didn’t require such reasons to exist.
“My, my money… Deer….”
My companion, Luna, was shocked to the extent that she had become absolutely devastated. I couldn’t just sit still and do nothing.
Moreover, she had been robbed of 5 whole silvers, dammit. If it was me in her place I couldn’t even imagine being able to fall asleep at night. I would probably be screaming at the top of my lungs with unquenchable anger.
“All right, let’s do this.”
“I like your answer, it’s pretty cool. Then I’ll provide you with some information about the deer swindler and the locations of some of his hiding places. I don’t really know how good your skills are Samaritan, but I’d still be vigilant if I were you, Samaritan.”
“Be careful?”
“That swindler was originally a famous bronze-tier adventurer before becoming the thief he is now. He was also a prominent hunter. Perhaps that’s why he is able to get away without leaving any signs or traces. Since he can tame wild animals like deers, he is probably also blessed with some kind of blessing from a god.”
Oh my, he was someone who had a blessing, huh?
Seems like I really should be careful with this.
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