Chapter 35: The Tin Knight and The Mysterious Underground Labyrinth (4)
The late emperor of the Empire, known as the Iron Blood Emperor, was said to have evaluated adventurers as follows:
“The dregs of society.
“They neither take up sickles to farm, board ships to catch fish, spin looms to make clothes, nor do they lead carts to transport goods.
“Like the military, they are a group that produces nothing—merely consuming. However, at least the military follows the nation’s control and can be self-sufficient in forms like military farms if necessary. Furthermore, they function as a deterrent that protects the country from external threats and suppresses instability in public order by their very existence.
“But what of adventurers? Far from stabilizing society, they sow chaos. They stride through the streets with all sorts of deadly weapons, making the people tremble with anxiety, and flaunt their occasionally lucky gains, instilling a relative deprivation in those who labor honesty. Worse, their flamboyance misleads the foolish youth who mistakenly think their appearance is ‘cool’.
“Some might defend them by citing the heroic deeds of the few. However, I ask in return: Out of the riffraff scattered across the continent, how many adventurers are truly worthy of respect? If only one in a hundred is a gem and ninety-nine are trash, how is that different from a simple pile of garbage?
“The freedom that adventurers cry out for is nothing more than licentiousness. A society where adventurers are respected proves the incompetence of its rulers. Therefore, my words to them are simple.
“Submit to the nation’s control. Take responsibility for your assigned tasks. That alone is how you can prove that you are not mere trash, but upright citizens of the Empire.”
The Iron Blood Emperor’s disdain for adventurers was well-known, but ironically, it was also the Iron Blood Emperor who brought about a great revival in the adventurer industry.
Before the Iron Blood Emperor, the Adventurers Guild was not a single large organization, but separate armed groups rooted in each region, and there were no proper standards for request fees or adventurer ranking systems.
It was common for adventurers from different guilds to fight each other with force, and it wasn’t rare for adventurers who failed quests to transfer to guilds in other regions to avoid compensation for failed commissions.
Without cooperation between guilds, it was frequent for adventurers in region A to be idle due to lack of work while request fees in region B skyrocketed due to lack of manpower.
The Iron Blood Emperor forcibly restructured this adventurer industry.
More precisely, only those who gave up all existing vested interests and rivalries with other forces and prostrated themselves flat survived, while the rest were all brutally crushed.
Clients no longer needed to wander through various regions to find a guild to accept their requests, and adventurers had to maintain courtesy towards clients and diligently fulfill requests to maintain high ranks.
As those who were indistinguishable from bandits were filtered out, and the prevalent culture of backstabbing and stealing achievements among adventurers disappeared, the overall quality of adventurers was greatly improved.
The winds of reform were blowing, and all that remained was for the entire adventurer industry to take flight.
Or that should have been the case...
“Hey, don’t you think the guild atmosphere has been a bit strange lately?”
In response to Kumara’s words, the ranger and party leader, the mage Magia replied grumpily, “Strange how?”
“I feel like the quality of the guys has been declining recently.”
“What, are you going to sound like an old fogey saying that nowadays the newbies are terrible in both skill and mentality?”
“No, it’s not that kind of problem. It’s the overall atmosphere. Guys who clearly should be punished for their actions are getting off with just light reprimands, or conversely, those who haven’t shown much are getting promoted suspiciously quickly. How should I put this, um.”
Kumara hesitated for a moment before frowning and saying, “It feels like... we’re gradually returning to the ‘old guild’ days that the senior talked about.”
Magia replied, ruffling her long green hair, “No way, it must be your imagination. With the Empire openly watching with sharp eyes, if we returned to the days when guilds backed by various nobles fought each other in the shadows as Senior Alphaul said, we’d be crushed in an instant. This time, the adventurer profession itself might disappear from the Empire.”
“That’s why it’s more problematic. If it was just one or two guys causing trouble, we could just weed them out, but if the entire guild starts to rot, even we’ll suffer the consequences.”
Magia closed her mouth with an unpleasant expression as if imagining an unpleasant future.
In place of Magia, the party’s third member, the warrior Sitar, opened his mouth, “If the leader’s hunch is right, what should we do?”
“What do you mean, ‘What,’ we should —“
Kumara hesitated.
Magia intercepted Kumara’s hesitant speech, “What else? Just live quietly like dead mice.”
“Why do you always talk like that?”
“If we were dealing with idiots causing trouble elsewhere, we could beat them up, but if personnel management is being tampered with, it means the culprits are in the upper echelons of the guild. What can mere silver-rank nobodies do?”
“Hey, who are you calling nobodies? Silver rank is well-respected outside, you know?”
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“Even so, it’s just their own festival. If you have complaints, quickly accumulate achievements and become gold rank. Specifically, stop chattering and continue what we were doing.”
Although grumbling, Kumara once again grasped the lock-picking set.
“Seriously, though, if they made us find a hidden room, shouldn’t they just let us get the reward after that? How can the chest inside be locked again?”
Underground Labyrinth, 28th floor.
While searching for magic beasts to obtain the materials required on the 25th floor, they had found a secret room.
Moreover, there were even three large treasure chests in the room, so it was natural for Kumara’s party to have their mouths curling up.
The problem was that all three chests were firmly locked.
Kumara had somehow managed to open the two chests decorated with copper and silver, but he was struggling and unable to open the last golden chest.
Finally, with a crack, another lock-picking tool shattered, and Kumara flopped on the floor.
“Ah, I can’t do it! Forget it! I give up!!”
Magia, who had been watching the party leader lying on the floor and throwing a tantrum like a child with a look of exasperation, finally sighed.
“Sitar. Can’t you lift and move that chest as it is?”
At Magia’s words, Sitar, who had been moving the chest around, shook his head.
“Impossible. It won’t budge at all. This, it looks like a chest on the outside, but isn’t it actually integrated with the ground?”
“Then there’s nothing we can do. Let’s go back.”
“And leave the treasure chest behind?”
“We have no choice since this guy broke all the lock-picking tools.”
At Magia’s pointed remark, Kumara flared up.
“Someone might think I made mistakes on purpose! I successfully opened the other two, didn’t I!? The security devices in this labyrinth are at an extremely high level, even skilled rogues and rangers struggle to open just one!”
“Lower your voice, it’s noisy. Do we need to advertise that there’s a hidden room here?”
Sitar, who had been listening to the two’s argument, suggested, “If it can’t be done with skill, how about just breaking the chest?”
“Hmm.”
After a moment’s consideration, Kumara shook his head.
“Let’s not do that. There’s a high chance we’d damage the contents while breaking the chest, and it’s a bit unsightly as adventurers to prevent others from getting what we can’t have...”
Magia also shrugged her shoulders.
“Well, I don’t know since when this industry had such business ethics, but I agree not to break it. There’s a possibility the chest might still be here safely when we come back next time. After all, teams that can come down to this level are—“
Magia’s words about them being rare were left unfinished.
Kumara had signaled for silence with a “Shh.”
It was right after that when someone’s voice was heard from far away.
《This way! This may look like a simple dead end at first glance, but you can actually pass through the wall! The treasure chests inside are firmly locked, so they were left unopened!》
The bodies of the three tensed up.
Someone had identified the exact secret room they were in.
And then.
Click.
Breaking through the wall that seemed to have nothing at first glance, someone appeared.
Click.
The metal armor covering the entire body reflected a dull light in the torchlight.
A blue, ghostly light flickered through the slit of the helmet.
The one-handed sword and shield seemed like extensions of his very body, and even the slightest body movement conveyed an extraordinary sense of pressure and aura.
The warrior Sitar gulped.
As the party’s vanguard, he could instinctively realize the difference in skill between himself and the knight before him.
Can’t win. At best, I could only buy time.
Sitar somehow suppressed the impulse to draw his axe.
The opponent hadn’t shown any hostile movements yet, and carelessly brandishing a weapon in such a situation could itself become the spark for combat.
Although they hadn’t immediately grasped the opponent’s capabilities as Sitar had, Kumara and Magia also felt the extraordinary tension in the air itself.
After a few seconds of silent confrontation...
Kumara opened his mouth, “Ahem, it’s a face I haven’t seen before. I’m Kumara, an adventurer mainly active in the Schwartz branch of the Adventurers Guild. These are my companions. And you are?”
The knight made no reply and simply stared at them.
While the three remained on edge, at that moment, a new figure appeared from the wall side.
It was a witch with blue eyes, wearing black clothes reminiscent of a crow.
The witch opened her mouth, “Dorothea. I’m a proxy explorer for the Halder Company. We were planning to rest inside here. You? If you’re going to stay, perhaps move elsewhere.”
“Ah, it’s no big deal. We were planning to leave soon anyway.”
As Kumara took the lead and left the room, the other two followed.
As they emerged from the wall, a golden-haired girl pulling some kind of cart bowed slightly in to greet them.
After silently returning the greeting, the three quickly left the place.
They walked, and walked, and walked.
Only after completely moving to the next floor did the three open their mouths that had been sealed.
“Phew! I, I thought my heart was going to stop.”
“It’s fortunate they didn’t show any particular hostility.”
“...Secret rooms are certainly useful for avoiding magic beasts, but the drawback is that you can’t visually confirm them until someone else enters the room. We should be more careful next time.”
After expressing their individual impressions, the trio began talking about the mysterious party they had just encountered.
“That knight just now looked extremely dangerous. What’s his identity?”
At Kumara’s words, Magia shook her head.
“That wasn’t a person. It’s some kind of magic doll, though I haven’t seen that type before. The mage who came in later was likely the owner?”
“Really? No wonder his gaze felt so fierce.”
“Was it fierce? On the contrary, I felt so unsettled because I couldn’t feel any emotion at all.”
“Was that so? It might have been. Ah, but the girls in the same party were pretty. Though one of them seems to have an outdated fashion sense.”
“I wonder what the cart was for? It was covered with some kind of cloth so I couldn’t see the contents, but it looked quite full.”
“Surprisingly, maybe treasures or something?”
“Don’t say such nonsense. At best, it’s probably magic beast byproducts.”
Although they continued to babble various speculations after that, they couldn’t reach a conclusion.
After all, with just a brief encounter of less than 3 minutes, there was a limit to the information they could gather.
“Enough. Let’s go back now.”
As they were about to conclude and go up, Kumara suddenly remembered.
Huh? Come to think of it, whose voice was it that guided them to the room we were in?
It wasn’t the voice of the mage called Dorothea, so exclude that. The knight wasn’t a person but a magic doll, so exclude that. The only one left was the golden-haired girl, but there was a bit of a discrepancy between her appearance and way of speaking.
In the first place, knowing there was a secret room there means they must be quite veteran among adventurers. It means they could obtain core information from such adventurers. Halder Company. I’ll keep that name in mind, definitely can’t underestimate them.
***“Achoo!”
“Father. Are you alright?”
“No, it’s nothing. I should sleep a bit warmer tonight.”
“It’s good to drink water frequently too. By the way, Miss Adel and the two others have been in there for quite a while, but they’re not coming out at all.”
“Haha, labyrinth exploration isn’t such an easy task. Especially for beginners without experience. If they’re lucky and progressing smoothly, they might have reached about the 4th or 5th floor by now?”
“How many floors are there in total?”
“It should be 30 floors. Not only is the scale itself enormous, but the magic beasts below the 20th floor are said to be so dangerous that even silver-rank adventurers have to risk their lives, so I hope they don’t overdo it...”
***Tick.
15 hours since entering the labyrinth.
The Tin Knight’s party reached the 30th floor.