CH 14

“Breaking news~! This just in!”

That voice woke me up. Blurry-eyed, I got up, opened the guild office’s door, and made eye contact with the boy who jumped in. He was Ruta, pinked-haired with a charming freckled nose and constantly zooming around, handing out mail and newspapers. The guild handled a lot of paperwork and letters, so his face was one I knew well. When I tried to receive the paper rolled up in his hands, I noticed that my arm was stuck.

“Umm… Am I interrupting something?”

When I tilted my head and looked around, wondering what Ruta was talking about while smiling, I saw Fikar’s sour expression towering over me. And then I saw my body wrapped in a blanket. A ‘princess hug’.

“… No, Fikar, I’ve told you many times, you don’t have to carry me around while I’m sleeping.”

The Adventurer’s Guild is responsible for taking care of monster rampages, so it was basically never supposed to be left unattended. That’s why the night shift was created. In this world, dawn was at 5 in the morning and dusk was at 5 in the evening and between these two times was the night shift. It was split into two halves with one person taking each half, but we lived in a peaceful time, so when Fikar went on a trip, I would sometimes sleep at the guild, alone on duty.

Ever since FIkar’s return, he’s basically just been helping me, so we worked the night shift together. He always took a break during the first half, from dusk to about midnight, but he didn’t actually use the nap room upstairs. Instead, he brought a blanket from home and lay down on the sofa at the back of the office. And in the middle of the night, he would suddenly wake up, wrap me in his blanket, and roll me on the sofa.

In addition to being spring-rolled in the blink of an eye, the sofa was hard and narrow — not all too different from the nap bed upstairs. Even like that, I usually fell asleep quickly, leaving Fikar to cover my eyes with a handkerchief, satisfied with his work. Though, when the night shift was over, there was a 50% chance of finding myself waking up in my bed at home.

Fikar, failing to carry me away, reluctantly removed the blanket while giving off an air of disappointment. Right after that, Ruta began speaking as if he couldn’t wait any longer.

“Breaking news from the royal capital! The Demon Lord has been subjugated!”

Ah, right. There was a Demon Lord in this world.

When Fikar and I started coming to the guild after almost collapsing, there were more than a few new adult adventurers. I was a beginner, but I had sort of expected this sort of thing to be the case, and Tarina, my receptionist senior, told me:

At that time, I was just a 0-star adventurer learning from the receptionists and doing office work in the guild. I rarely went into the forest because of that and all I knew were the rumors, so I had worried that I’d wandered into a terrible world, but I soon forgot about it since the town was guaranteed to be safe. Even if there was an increase in monsters, they were mostly small, so it hardly mattered.

“Oh come on, react a little more! It’s amazing!”

“I guess? It didn’t really feel like there was a Demon Lord in the first place.”

“Really? I’m crossing from town to town, know you? It was scary at night when the number of monsters increased.”

“Is that so…”

“We haven’t been attacked lately, so I thought that maybe it was finally gone!”

Ruta, full of energy even though it was only dawn, received my signature and shouted, “Off to the next city!” And he was off. Also, those ostrich-like animals Ruta and the other deliverymen ride, I wanna ride one sometime.

When I finished placing the letters on Gartis-san’s desk and pinning the announcement on the bulletin board, Fikar was standing there with a blanket spread out. Spring roll time, again.

Then Sansas-san, the guild manager for Tortea, walked in.

“Just in time. Sumire, Fikar. Sorry to bother you after your night shift, but I need you to come back this afternoon.”

Being the manager, Sansas-san was very familiar with the guild rules and national laws. His gray hair was parted and brushed in a way that made him look like an uptight man, but he was actually a gentleman full of fatherly love for his three daughters.

“I’ve been told that a reply to my inquiry about Fikar’s star-rank and the dragon can be expected today.”

The fact that Fikar had suddenly returned with a dragon — Su — had caused quite a stir in the guild.

Dragons are admired as symbols of power, so much so that dragon riders were incorporated into knight’s orders, but they were also creatures feared as magical beasts that attacked humans. They were intelligent and proud, and when they went wild, no ordinary human could stop them.

Therefore, in order to capture and ride a dragon, one would have to either join the dragon riders in a knight’s order or become a 6-star adventurer. It’s difficult to face off against a dragon without considerable preparation, so each of them had to hone their skills in the appropriate regions, get advice from their predecessors, and gain experience before going out to capture and defeat a dragon.

However, Fikar easily skipped all of that and made a dragon obey him. 

In order to use a dragon as a mount, it was necessary to register with a knight’s order or the Adventurer’s Guild, but according to the rules, you needed at least 6 stars. However, the promotion tests were increasingly difficult and it wasn’t possible for Fikar to instantly go from having 4 stars to having 6.

Furthermore, after returning to Tortea, Fikar had become a neo-NEET, living a comfortable life and not particularly interested in taking requests. From what I could gather from the quiet Fikar, it appeared that Su was only caught because she looked like a convenient mount and, if she became too much trouble, he wouldn’t mind letting go of her. If Su, who I considered to be one of us, heard this, she’d cry.

The guild administrators in Tortea had already discussed what to do in their situation, but it was decided that they should just ask the guild’s headquarters in the capital for assistance. A week after Vernal Equinox Day, a letter was written and sent, but headquarters just replied with, “Please wait while we assess the situation.” A month and a half later, after all the adventurer’s eggs had hatched and the business had died down, they finally issued a formal document. 

“It’ll probably ask to have Su registered and to speed up Fikar’s promotion tests. That doesn’t mean there won’t be any penalties, but I doubt they’ll be very harsh.”

“What are these penalties, exactly?”

“If you hide a dragon in your possession, the penalty is severe and you will be exiled from the guild, but there was no malicious intent… I think it’s fair to say that he’ll be given some guild-mandated requests to complete without pay. The details will probably depend on Fikar’s capabilities…”

“Ah, looks like he won’t be back for a while, then, since there aren’t many high-ranked jobs around here.”

“Possibly.”

Unusually, Fikar was making a blatantly disgusted face, so Sansas-san and I laughed. 

“Whatever the reason, I guess it’s just your luck to have caught a dragon.”

I said as much to Fikar, while Sansas-san patted my shoulder. With Fikar still wearing a disgusted expression and with me still dressed as a spring roll, we finished the night shift and finally got to go home.