Chapter 225

Chapter 225

“What? Why? I’m pretty sure it’s not that difficult to open a guild... Can’t you just stamp on the paper?” Siegfried grumbled in disbelief.

Creating a guild was something anyone could do as long as they had money, so Siegfried was confused about the issue.

“Don’t tell me I can’t make a guild because I’m a king...?”

“No, that is not the reason.”

“Then?”

“You are King Siegfried van Proa of the... P-Protein Kingdom...?”

“Proatine. It’s the Proatine Kingdom.”

“Ah, I apologize. Proatine... I have never heard of it before, that is why I made a mistake...”

“...”

“Anyway, it is impossible for Your Majesty to establish a guild right now.”

“That’s why I’m asking the reason. What’s the reason?”

“You have been blacklisted by the Mercenary Guild...”

“Mercenary Guild? Blacklisted...?” Siegfried tilted his head in confusion. “Me? Impossible...”

“It says here that you recently hired the Mercenary King Grimwood... and stabbed him in the back like a coward...”

“Ah!” Siegfried finally realized. It was indeed despicable of him to hire a mercenary only to stab him in the back, but Siegfried had something to say about that.

“Hey, still... Do you know what kind of a person Grimwood was? He ate people whenever he was bored, you know? So why am I blacklisted for getting rid of someone evil like him? Does that even make sense?”

It was true that what he did was despicable, but Grimwood deserved to die. He was an immortal being that wreaked havoc whenever he was bored, and he would slaughter countless people for his enjoyment.

Siegfried wasn’t expecting the Mercenary Guild to reward him for his services, but he didn’t expect that they would blacklist him for it...

“I agree with you, and it seems that the executives at the Mercenary Guild agree with you, too. In fact, they seem to be praising you for what you did.”

“But they decided to blacklist me?”

“That’s... Well, the requests that Grimwood had accepted went up in smoke after Your Majesty killed him, so...”

“...”

“The Mercenary Guild faced quite the backlash because of it, and both their and Your Majesty’s credit suffered a blow as a result...”

Pros and Cons.

There was bound to be a downside for every upside. It was good that he was able to get rid of both Grimwood and Magnus at the same time, but he never imagined that he was going to get into trouble with the Mercenary Guild because of it.

He thought that there wouldn’t be any issues because Grimwood was quite infamous, but...

“So I can’t make my own guild?”

“We have a policy of not approving requests from Adventurers who had lost their credit, so...”

“...”

“I would advise that you go to the Mercenary Guild and restore your credit with them first if you wish to establish a guild.”

“All right...” Siegfried grumbled in response and went to the Mercenary Guild.

***

“Owner punk! Did you get rejected?!” Hamchi cried out outside the Adventurer Guild.

“Yeah... I believe that’s what happened...” Siegfried replied while sulking.

“Then, are you giving up on establishing your own guild?”

“I want to... but I really need a guild.”

The reason that Siegfried needed to establish his own guild was because of the debuff Loser’s Shame.

It was an extremely scary debuff inflicted on the guild members of the losing guild. This debuff made the losing guild’s members receive fifty percent additional damage from the victorious guild’s members for an entire year.

In short, Siegfried absolutely needed this debuff to be able to put an end to the Genesis Guild, and the only way he could cast this debuff on them was through waging a guild war against them.

It went without saying that it was going to be impossible to wage a guild war without a guild, which meant that the Genesis Guild members were going to keep coming after him no matter how many times he killed them.

In other words, their fight would be an endless battle of attrition.

“Then, what are you going to do now?” Hamchi asked.

[Alert: You have accepted the Quest: ‘Rescue Operation’!]

[Alert: You have accepted the Quest: ‘Special Forces’!]

Siegfried looked at Keres and asked, “Which one should I do first?”

“I suggest that you start with rescuing the noble child. Here are the files related to it,” Keres replied as he passed a stack of documents to him.

“I guess I’ll go and rescue the kid first...” Siegfried replied as he accepted the file.

He was walking out of the Mercenary Guild while tilting his head in confusion,?‘I can get cancer during the quest? What does that mean?’

The warning on the quest details was kind of strange for some reason...

***

Siegfried suddenly stopped in his tracks after suddenly thinking of something, ‘Hold on. Why should I do these in the first place? I mean... I really can’t be bothered...’

Then, his brain started running at lightning speed to come up with an ingenious idea.

“Kyu??What are you doing, owner punk?”

“I’m thinking about how I can pass the work to someone else.”

“Kyu?”

“I mean, there’s no need for me to do both, right? I can just ask someone else to do it for me.”

“K-Kyu...?”

“I’ll just do one and ask someone else to do the other,” Siegfried said with a shrug.

Then, he went to a Mercenary Guild branch in another city and placed a request. He requested one of the two remaining Mercenary Kings—Mercenary King Dreyfus—to take on the Rescue Operation quest.

Of course, it cost him quite a lot to place a request for the Mercenary King, but money was no longer an issue after he gained a massive amount of gold from the Dragon’s Treasure Chest.

“Lalala~” Siegfried nonchalantly hummed a tune as he skipped through the streets.

“...Your genius frightens me, owner punk,” Hamchi said while shaking his head in disbelief at his owner’s ingenuity.

***

“Ah! Lieutenant Colonel Sieg!” Lieutenant General Overlock—no, General Overlock warmly welcomed Siegfried.

“You should have told me that you were coming! I would have prepared a grand welcome for our war hero! Hahaha!”

“There is no need for that, General, haha... Ah, please say hello. This is Major Carell, do you remember him?”

Carell immediately ran up to General Overlock and greeted him with a salute.

“Loyalty! Major Carell greets the general!”

“M-Major Carell...? I thought you fell in battle...?”

“His maj—I mean, Lieutenant Colonel Sieg saved me from the clutches of death and gave me a new lease on life, sir!”

“Really? Haha! Amazing! You are truly amazing, Lieutenant Colonel Sieg! You have never ceased to amaze me!” Overlock exclaimed while looking at Siegfried with passionate eyes.

“Hahaha...”

“Anyway, thanks for coming! I got promoted, thanks to you!”

“Really?”

“We were able to find out how to control the Cryptids after studying the Mother you caught for us, and the war has become much easier for us now! We’re using the monsters to fight the monsters! How amazing is that?! Haha!”

Siegfried suddenly remembered how he had used Grimwood to fight Magnus.

‘I got into trouble for that... tsk...’

That was the sole reason he had to take these annoying quests in the first place...

“I was able to get promoted because of that, and this is all thanks to you, Sieg!”

“Congratulations, sir.”

“Haha! Thank you! Now that I think of it, what brings you here?”

“That is...” Siegfried explained why he came all the way to the Arachnid Temporary Outpost.

“Hmm... I see... so something like that happened...”

“But what is this special mission?”

“That’s...” General Overlock looked around before whispering, “We have a spy in our barracks...”