“The guild is fundamentally neutral when it comes to fights between adventurers.”
“In that case, you’re on my side.”
“And what makes you think that?”
“I haven’t joined yet, so I’m not an adventurer. I’m just a regular person. Since I was attacked by adventurers as a normal citizen, aren’t they the responsibility of the guild that’s in charge of them? You’re not saying you’re siding with multiple adventurers who ganged up on one normal girl citizen, are you?”
“Well…”
“In that case, you’re on my side as an average citizen.”
Granted, I wasn’t a resident of this town, but he didn’t have to know that. The man scratched his head and hesitated. “So what do you want?”
“I guess just to register with the guild and for them to be deregistered.”
“I’ll approve your registration, but I can’t kick them out.”
“They’re bowing their heads and pleading for you to let them quit because they’re weak. And you won’t let them? Is the adventurers’ guild really that tyrannical?”
“What? You guys wanted to quit being adventurers?!” the swole dude asked the handful of still-conscious adventurers on the ground. The men assumed ambiguous expressions and declined to answer.
“That’s what they said. Someone as weak as me can’t become an adventurer, according to them. They said if they got beat by a weakling like me, they’d quit being adventurers.”
“Did you guys really say that?”
Several of them nodded.
“Well, I’ve learned that these guys are idiots,” he said, “that’s for sure.”
“Right. Good. In that case, can you do the needful?”
“I’m going to ask again: Do you guys really want to quit? If you’re not going to answer, then just leave your guild cards behind and get out of here.”
“SORRY!” the injured adventurers shouted, hanging their heads low.
“Could you forgive them?”
“On one condition.”
“Why not? Just tell me.”
“I want a guarantee that the guild won’t stay neutral if the other adventurers ever try anything with me again.”
“I got it. If they give you any trouble, the guild will take responsibility.”
“Well then, I have nothing more to say.”
Chapter 6:
The Bear Makes a Guild Card.
Class: Bear
WE CAME BACK from the training area and I had them make me a guild card. Helen, who had finished arranging for the adventurers to be treated, came back to the reception desk. I could see the exhaustion on her face. It definitely wasn’t my fault, I was sure.
“Please fill out your name, birthday, and class.”
“My birthday?”
“Yes, we need it to check your age.”
“Can’t I just tell you how old I am?”
“If you do that, your guild card won’t update, even when your birthday comes.”
Right, if I just told them my age, then I’d just end up being eighteen or whatever forever. But what would I do about my birthdate? This world had to have a different calendar from Earth, but I did have the skill Fantasy World Literacy, so maybe it’d translate. For the time being, I filled in my name in Japanese and the date I was born in Japan according to the western calendar.
“So you’re fifteen, Ms. Yuna?” said Helen.
It had worked! You had to hand it to the fantasy genre. I needed to fill in the class column next.
“My class?”
“It’ll be referenced for companion recruitment and limited quests.”
“Companion?”
I didn’t just react to the word “companion” because I’m a loner, mind you. I totally had friends. Just not…
a lot.
When I was playing the game, I was a magic swordswoman. It was the optimal choice for the sort of solo play I preferred; it gave me good options for handling enemies that couldn’t be killed by either physical damage or magic alone. It wasn’t really popular for playing in a party; swordsmen did better melee damage, and when you needed magic, you’d just recruit a sorcerer. That was why I never ended up joining a party.
It wasn’t like no one ever invited me or anything.
“I don’t need one, so can I leave it blank?”
“It’ll help if you could write something.”
“Umm.”
It wasn’t like I was a magic swordswoman right now, but I had to write something. What was my current class? I couldn’t use magic. I had no sword. Was I a fighter?
I tried my best to ignore the voice that seemed to issue from the heavens to tell me, “Your class is Bear, isn’t it?”
Name: Yuna
Birthdate: Month ** Day ** Year 20**
Class: Bear
I ended up writing it down. Helen looked at it with disgust, but I guess she wanted to get this over with, since she didn’t say anything.
“Well then, please put your hand on this crystal panel.”
It was identical to the one at the gate. These things supposedly checked your mana, which made me revisit a question that had been bugging me—was magic something unique to each person, like fingerprints? While I was puzzling that over, Helen operated the crystal panel.
“It’ll take some time for your registration to go through, so I’ll explain how the guild works in the meantime. Your guild card has your name, age, and class on it, plus your adventurer rank and the number of quests you’ve accepted. This includes information about each quest, how many times you’ve succeeded, and how many times you’ve failed. Your currently accepted quests will be recorded. This information can be accessed from any guild.”
Right, so that meant that the number of times I failed would be recorded, too. No one would want to hire an adventurer who’d failed a lot, after all.
“You don’t have records for how many monsters I’ve slain or something?”
“No, we don’t. There’s no point.”
“Huh?”
“Even if you brought in a mana gem as a trophy, we couldn’t tell whether you beat it yourself or had help from a hundred people.”
So things didn’t get automatically recorded like if you beat a monster in a game. That was fair enough—if ten thousand people teamed up to battle a dragon and only the person who dealt the finishing blow got credit for the kill, things would get ugly real quick. On the flip side, giving ten thousand people the
