Part 3

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Volume 2

Chapter 3

— 3 —

“This is… something.”

The power of Ringo’s lightning magic was so amazing that I found myself muttering out loud.

Its power was likely increasing as Ringo levelled up after defeating the monsters. She was now able to consistently defeat everything in two hits, and Wild Zlimes in just one hit, all from long-range. With that rule-breaking strength, she swept through the monsters on the plains one after another.

I had thought that continuously using such powerful magic would immediately exhaust all of her MP, but as of now there wasn’t even a sign of exhaustion on Ringo’s face.

I don’t think there’s any chance that she had infinite MP, so it was possible that lightning magic had no MP cost. It was getting more and more outrageous.

And, the result of having such a ridiculous partner…

“…Souma.”

“Roger ma’am! Wild Zlime Jelly, get!”

My current role was to retrieve the drops from the monsters Ringo defeated.

If you want to laugh at my pitifulness then go ahead. But I’ll tell it to you straight: if I can earn money without exposing my life to danger, then I’ll willingly hide behind anything, even a girl!

“…Next?”

Fortunately, Ringo didn’t criticize me for that. Rather, she seemed to be quite enthusiastically defeating monsters. Due to her expressionlessness it was impossible to tell from looking at her, but her eagerness showed through from how she was urging us forwards.

But well, regrettably for her, the amount of monsters available for us to defeat was slowly diminishing…

“…Wait, there’s way too few monsters. Could it be that the monsters aren’t respawning?”

Normally, field monsters respawned after some amount of time. But right now it felt to me like their numbers were decreasing monotonically.

It would be huge if that were the case. The problem wouldn’t just be that we wouldn’t be able to farm in this field. If Nekomimineko becoming real has affected the behavior of monster spawns, then there was no telling what kind of miscalculations that could lead to in the future.

I was worried for a moment, but I immediately shook my head.

That would indeed be hard to believe. Through all the fighting in Ramlich, the behavior of monster spawns were frighteningly faithful to the game.

“In that case, this is all expected behavior, something that could happen even in the game?”

Pondering for a bit with that postulation, I hit upon one possibility.

How could this have slipped my mind. As long as this was Nekomimineko, there was only one possibility for monsters to stop spawning.

Beside me, perhaps due to having nothing to do, Ringo was staring at the sky. I hastily yelled out to her.

“This is bad! We need to return to the town right away!”

“…Souma?”

Not even waiting for her confused reply, I grabbed Ringo’s hand and started to run.

“We have to hurry! If I’m correct, very soon there’s going to be a mass spawning event on these plains!”

 

Thus, we dashed to the bounty hunters’ guild.

Of the three main guilds, this was the only one that we hadn’t visited yet.

To put it simply, the bounty hunters’ guild was something like an adventurer’s guild that you often see in games, where one could fulfil various requests for money.

Because of how it worked, for a reason completely different from Hisame’s, it was also called the saving grace of Nekomimineko.

–After all, the requests in the bounty hunters’ guild were all generated completely randomly.

Randomly, “destroy” and “collect” requests came in to the bounty hunters’ guild.

There were no restrictions on guild rank, nor even the need to join the guild, and one could freely decide what requests they would like to accept after reading descriptions such as “destroy three Zlimes by July 9th” or “collect two Zlime Drops by July 10th”.

Destroy requests were cleared by defeating the given number of monsters and reporting that by the deadline, and collect requests were cleared by giving the specified amount of monster drops to the guild by the deadline. It was a simple system, and since the requests were randomly generated, it didn’t contain any of the bad characteristics of Nekomimineko.

It was a system so well-loved by Nekomimineko players that it gave birth to a saying, “getting grilled? Hunter’s guild”. Well, you could also say that the normal quests were just way too abominable.

That was not the only way in which the bounty hunters’ guild was kind to players. In addition to normal requests, there was also a special event called an extermination fest that occured during mass spawnings, which was very juicy. My aim right now was exactly that.

Whether normal requests or extermination fests, neither meant anything unless I stepped into the building. While I was worried that there might be someone strange waiting to ambush me inside like at the other guilds, this was a situation in which there was not a moment to lose. I promptly pushed open the doors and peeked inside.

(…Alright!)

I didn’t spot anyone that I needed to be wary of.

Slightly relieved, I entered the guild. From the looks of it, the extermination fest hadn’t yet started.

“I guess I’ll go take a look at the normal requests until the mass spawning starts. If there’s anything simple then I might as well accept it later.”

For destroy requests, it was required to rent a special crystal from the counter. To do so, half of the reward must be placed as deposit.

The deposit was returned at the end of the request, but with my current finances it was hard to say if I even had enough for the deposit.

(Mm. I guess I should just sit and wait, huh…)

Taking into account my current strength, I didn’t really want to fight anywhere with strong enemies.

The place we were farming at, the Deus Plains, was the weakest area, so obviously requests in other areas would be more dangerous. They weren’t worth it knowing that the mass spawning and extermination fest were happening soon.

Just then, the clock struck noon.

And, at the same time…

“The mass spawning prediction, is here!”

Out of breath, a man that seemed like someone from the guild rushed out and stuck a new piece of paper right in the middle of all the requests.

Seeing that, everyone in the guild burst into surprise, filling the room with commotion.

“No way. Are you serious…”

I was no exception.

“Could this mean that luck’s actually on our side?”

I involuntarily asked myself.

Even having predicted that a mass spawning, and thus an extermination fest, was going to happen, the notice still surprised me.

The paper that was put up.

It’s contents were…

“A mass spawning of Golden Wild Zlimes in the Deus Plains is predicted.”

 

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