"That's a relief," the leader smiled, after telling me not to worry about retrieving their bodies on my own. The Guild Bureau—that was some organization some chubby adventurer, who was my hero, mentioned back in the woods—would take care of retrieving them for the deceased's families and stuff. "But anyway. Let's forget about that. Why collect the head, you ask? Well, aren't you an adventurer, too?"
"...Oh!" I jumped. No way. They found me out when I did nothing? After a second, I asserted they didn't. And so, I was happy to ask the man whether I could be an adventurer, too, calling him a sir. Taking enthusiastic steps toward him, my eyes sparkled a thousand stars, and I insisted. "Say, can I become like you, too, sir? You think I could become an adventurer, too, sir?!"
"Ah," the man replied, perplexed, and left it at that.
After what I'd just heard, it was only natural I reacted that way, really. Were people not hyped about adventuring? I still had no paths to take in life, so I'd gladly take that one. Besides, when I brought up the topic to my old advisor, he said he didn't think it was half-bad.
But the leader simply ignored me. "Let me finish first," he stepped back. Like a manual, then, I was happy to see he didn't mind giving me a more or less detailed answer to a related question: the question regarding the orc head. "You collect the heads in order to trade them for silver coins. Right? You do." Turning to his friend, he whispered some words. "I don't think I understand the kid, though." But I ignored that. I was just really happy to hear about adventurers.
On the battlefield, on the human side, there were thousands of people. However, these thousands could be divided into two categories. The soldiers, and the adventurers. The soldiers were all the same—they all had the same dress code. Going from top to bottom, they wore helmets, breastplates, gauntlets, and everything. That was about the overall of their category… and that was it.
A sentence could describe them all. Wasn't that boring? Thankfully, that wasn't like the adventurers at all, I'll have you know. They were completely different. It was like they were from different worlds. My old man taught me a lot about the world every day. It wasn't like we were having classes together, with me as a student and him as a teacher, but he spoke a great deal of both useful and useless information, sometimes with no end. He was my advisor: I had him talk to me about the soldiers.
There was very little to say. Aside from talking about the army—that was to say the corpus the soldiers formed—you could barely speak a word about a regular soldier. They had no character. Now, that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. I just meant that soldiers weren't as entertaining. Talking about adventurers, now, as opposed to the soldiers, you could tell them apart. In so many different ways. So, in a few words, I liked them. In a way, everything about them, to the most minute detail, said 'I am free to live,' and I liked that.
After a long moment of silence, the kid who liked contact turned to his leader and spoke the same words his leader did. "You're telling me this like I'm understanding him, hehe." Maybe I was being too enthusiastic.
Calming down, I also manage to calm down the awkward smiles put on the group's faces. After I chased all the stars from my eyes and my urge to be jumping around happily, the kid they saw vanished at once. Taking on a stern expression, I formally apologized for being so childish and asked them about the orc head again.
"So you wanna collect it, don't you? Ah, well, but then you must already know, right?" I told him I indeed knew, but I wanted him to tell me anyway. If I said I didn't know, I was afraid they'd aim their sword at me and basically be rude people. I insisted I wanted to have him tell me like I was a teacher interrogating a student. Would he have the right answer? If he didn't—no passing grades for him, I'm afraid.
Though he was quite reluctant to explain the essentials of his business with the orc head, after I used a tiny fraction of my Intimidation skill on him, he became more docile and decided to explain at once. He even called me his boss, for some reason. What about the orc head anyway? I was eager for information.
Scoffing, I joked with them. "I'll collect 'your' heads, ha-ha!" But it was obviously just that—a joke. That concluded our business together. Using Quick Pace again, I left them all behind and appeared closer to the frontline. It was to get back at it, now.
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