Chapter 175: Secrets and Disclosure

Chapter 175: Secrets and Disclosure

Erani and I walked into the city and straight to the guild lobby. It may have felt like a full day’s worth of time had passed to me, but because of Time Loop, we’d in reality pretty much just taken the job, walked out of the city, went to the forest, and then instantly come back.

It was around noon now, and I had one last use of Time Loop remaining. I planned on saving it until the end of the day, that way I could go to the guard outpost with Bon, Jannin, and Poppins, take their Spell Crystal, use it to Upgrade a Spell, and then activate Time Loop to go back as though nothing had happened. Same as I’d done before.

But for now, we needed to go negotiate. Technically, we hadn’t subdued the Goblin threat—at least, not in this timeline—but that didn’t mean we couldn’t get paid. Because what we lacked in results, we had in information.

On the way back to town, once we got close enough to start seeing others on the road, Erani had to switch Distortion Strike back on. Currently, Erani could keep the Spell active for around two hours before she’d totally run dry on Mana, so to keep safe, we took breaks every hour for her to regenerate her Mana and ensure we never ended up in a position where she was seen without it. Which worked just fine, since we had to take breaks every hour anyway so that I could re-equip Dark Plate, which hid my own identity. All we had to do was talk a ways off the path and away from any people while we did this—or, if we were in town itself, we could just walk into some random establishment and ask to use their bathroom.

Being forced to constantly take time off to refresh our Spells was irritating, and I honestly felt quite limited in how and where we could act in public, since most of our actions had to be based around that hour-long time limit before we needed to find another private spot we could spend some time.

But regardless, we eventually made it to the guild lobby and walked up to the receptionist’s desk. Over our walk, we’d discussed exactly how we’d go about negotiations, what we’d say, what we’d ask for, and how we’d ask for it. In the end, I felt like we had a solid plan. Though there were certainly unsure about some aspects of it. For example...

I walked up to the receptionist.

She looked up at me. “Hello, how can I help you?”

“Yeah, uh, who do we talk to if we want to negotiate pay? And how would we go about doing that?”

“Well, I’m not high-up enough to discuss pay with you, if that’s what you’re asking. But I can call a manager down, if you’d like. We have a small team that decides things like the payments that go on job requests.”

I nodded. “Perfect.”

She left her desk and disappeared through a door behind her, leaving us alone at the counter.

I turned to Erani. “Think this is gonna work?”

“I at least think it’s worth a shot. If we can end up getting enough out of them to pay for our room tonight, then I’d say it was worth it. And if we get them to fulfil any of our other requests...”

“It’d be pretty nice,” I agreed. “Let’s just hope these manager people aren’t total hardasses.”

“Hey,” I heard a voice from behind me. “Where’s the receptionist? I wanna accept a job.”

I turned back and saw someone, a man I’d seen around in the lobby a couple times before. “She’s just running an errand, grabbing someone for us. Won’t take more than a minute or two, I’d imagine.”

He sighed in exasperation, then paused, looking at us. “Wait a second, you two are those people that were asking Thorne about the Goblins, right? Didn’t you just head out to do the job?”

“Yeah,” I responded, “but we decided it was too dangerous and came back.”

He laughed. “Man, Thorne gave you a whole flamin’ speech! You sat and listened to a gold-degree talking about how you shouldn’t go out and do it, totally ignore his advice, go out anyway, and then instantly run off at the first sign of danger. Flamin’ idiots.”

I sighed. “We just wanted to see for ourselves before we wrote the job off entirely. No need to throw insults, man.”

“It’s not an insult when it’s just true,” he laughed. Then he turned to look back at the rest of the room. “Hey, Doria, y’know those silvers with the massive egos? Thought they could clear the Goblins? Well here they are! Ran off within the hour!”

I heard laughs at the man’s declaration, but just did my best to ignore them. They had no idea that we only left because of the Young Dragon that would’ve destroyed their town if we’d continued, so from their perspective, I was sure it seemed pretty humorous. A couple foreigners coming in town and thinking they were hot shit, taking on the things that were famous for killing newbies, and then losing before the fight even began. But I couldn’t correct their assumptions without giving away the fact that the Dragon was there, and I refused to give that information—our only bargaining chip—away for free.

After a couple minutes of me ignoring the laughs and shouts, the receptionist came back through the door. She smiled apologetically. “Sorry for the wait. We don’t actually have any managers in-house right now.”

“Oh. So we’ll need to come back another time?”

“Not necessarily. We do have the owner of the guild branch here, so I went ahead and asked him if he’d like to speak to you, and he isn’t busy right now. So if you’d like, you could go meet with him.”

“Uh...” I glanced over at Erani. She shrugged. “Sure.”

“Great!” She led us back through the same door she’d just come through, behind her desk, and walked us down a hallway that was lined with office doors. Eventually she stopped at one of them, a little placard set on the wall beside it that read Vanvol Lighthammer. “Here we are. Just head through there, he’s ready to see you.”

So we opened the door and stepped through, into a large, plain office. With its bare walls and floors, a set of windows on the back wall shining light inside, I’d have thought it wasn’t done being decorated yet. However, despite the overall lack of anything in the ten-pace-square room, it certainly didn’t look poorly made. The floors shined, the walls didn’t have a speck of dirt on them, and the desk—the only object in the room—was perfectly set, straight and center, with a comfortable-looking chair to go with it.

In the chair, a muscular man with short, straight hair sat. He was already looking at the door when we entered, so his eyes immediately met mine, catching me slightly off-guard.

“Hello,” he said in a deep voice. “Come. Sit.”

“I’m telling you I went through a lot to get this information. I spent a lot of resources. And it is your place to pay money to those who risk themselves to save people. I am not holding anyone hostage in the same way that any other adventurer in this Empire is holding the populace hostage. If they stopped working, the people would get overrun and die, so you pay them to ensure they continue to help. This is exactly that situation.”

He sighed. “You certainly make a point. However, I cannot pay money to receive this information when I have no idea whether it is actually important. Who’s to say you aren’t lying to me? Or you aren’t mistaken about this supposed danger?”

After a moment, I took a breath and leaned back in my chair. It was clear he didn’t want to pay us like this. Which I totally understood; at the end of the day, he had no idea if this information was actually worth what I was asking. Even if he used a Truth Stone, that would only be able to ascertain if I thought it was worth eight thousand. I could think the information was worth that much and just be mistaken. So we were effectively at an impasse here. He wasn’t going to take the deal as it was.

But I knew he most likely wouldn’t bite on this going in. I had to at least try, and I also got a good amount of information about the way he negotiated from the interaction, too. Namely, he liked to shut down my offers the moment I brought them up. He barely even listened to what I had to say before he said no, most likely to try and decrease my confidence and make me more likely to just tell him what I knew and leave, defeated. But I was much too confident in what I knew to be coerced into giving it up for free just yet.

“Okay,” I said. “How about we make a different deal?”

“And what’s that?”

“You pay us nothing for the information up-front. We tell you right now for free. However, you cannot tell anyone else about what we tell you. You can’t create a new public job asking people to take care of the problem, and you can’t change the existing job to warn people about it. Instead, if you decide that this threat is genuinely dangerous and worth paying to take care of, you have to take down the Goblin job and make an exclusive deal with us.”

“No. If we do that and your news actually is worth sending in a team over, then you can just demand however high a sum you want. And even then, there’s a significant chance you simply do not know what you’re talking about and—”

“And if we don’t know what we’re talking about, then there’s no issue, right? It isn’t dangerous after all, so iou just don’t make that deal with us, keep sending people to go out and kill the Goblins, and they’ll find and deal with the problem on their own, right?”

“Perhaps. But there’s still the problem of—”

“And we won’t be charging you a ridiculous sum, because that sum will be pre-negotiated. We can decide on it right now, before the deal is made.”

“It is unreasonable to negotiate pay for a job when I don’t even know what that job will be.”

“How about fifty thousand?”

“Did you not just hear me? I cannot negotiate for this. It’s impossible. Besides, if you were able to take care of whatever is causing this issue, why wouldn’t you go and do that and then ask for pay like everyone else does?”

“We can’t take care of them. We’d need the help of at least one other team of adventurers. Which is why we need a pay pre-negotiated—we need to be able to advertise that pay to another adventuring group before doing so.”

“That doesn’t answer how I’m supposed to negotiate pay for a job whose difficulty I don’t know.”

“You have a basic idea of the difficulty. It’s something that would need two teams to complete, so it would need to be enough to fairly compensate two bodies when split in half. And if the number we settle on ends up being too much for what ends up being an easy job, you can simply refuse to hire us and, as you said, wait for someone else to go clean up the mess.”

He sat and looked at me for a few moments. He reached his hands up so he could rest his chin on his interlocked fingers. Second after second ticked away, with him just staring at me. And then he opened his mouth.

“Twenty thousand.”

And I knew I was in.

“Forty-five,” I responded. “Remember, we need to be able to pay ourselves and a separate team.”

“And I need insurance that, if this is something that needs to be dealt with, but is not as pressing as you make it seem, that I will not be bankrupted over only a mid-sized threat. Thirty.”

“Remember, we’re only getting half of this. And, if we are to take care of this threat, we would also be, by consequence, taking care of the Goblins. Which means, after spending our day and many of our resources on the Goblins today, and then spending yet another day—or even longer—on this second job, we would take home fifteen thousand on our side. Eight thousand of that goes to the original Goblin job according to its original pay, which only leaves seven thousand for this other job. That seems hardly reasonable. Forty thousand seems to be a decent middle ground, no?”

“That may be true, but I simply cannot devote more than thirty to this project. If you need more, request a better cut from whatever team you get to help you.”

“Even then, thirty thousand just isn’t fair. Again, if it’s easy enough for someone else to take it out without issue, then you don’t have to pay us at all. If you must, though, the lowest I’m willing to go would be thirty-two thousand, but only if you give half up-front. That way, if we split half and half with another team, we get eight thousand now—the price of the Goblin job—and another eight thousand upon completion. While I maintain that this would be you extremely underpaying us, I suppose I would be fine with that since it’s an exclusive job. But I absolutely can’t go lower.”

He sat and looked at me for another stretch of time, then closed his eyes. After one long exhale, he opened them, and said, “Fine. I agree that if I decide this needs a dedicated job, we will go directly to you and we will pay you according to those terms. However, do not expect to see this money anytime soon. It could be days, even weeks. I will need to think this over and discuss it with multiple people before I can have my answer as to whether or not we will need your assistance.”

“That’s absolutely fine,” I nodded.

“So then, what is this threat that you say lurks in the forest?”

I looked at him. “The Goblins aren’t acting of their own free will. They’ve been enslaved and forced to expand as relentlessly as possible.”

“Enslaved? By whom?”

“By a Young Dragon. Level 22. Extremely aggressive. In fact, I have it on good information that if this thing knew your town was so close by, it would attack immediately.”

A moment of silence passed by, and then he stood, placing his hands on the desk. “Let me get you a Truth Stone to verify that, and then we will get to drafting that job contract. Thirty-two thousand, you said? Expect for us to be ready to move you out by tomorrow at the latest.”