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Chapter 166: Task

“Uh…” Technically, Erani and I consisted of the entire “team” I’d be using, but with Exponential Reclamation plus all of the extra Stats I’d been getting from Recursive Growth, I was pretty much a one-man army of Mana generation, anyway. I nodded. “Yeah, pretty much. Anyway, how much Mana does it need?”

“Hm…” the man turned around and walked over to a desk, opening up a drawer to reveal a couple dozen blue crystals thrown haphazardly into it that rolled around with sharp clanks from the movement. He grabbed one of them and walked back over to me. “This is a Mana Battery, you should be able to store Mana in it for later usage, as long as you use an extraction tool. We’ll handle the extraction, but for each one of these you fill up, I can remove…three thousand eyt from the price.”

I raised my eyebrows at the figure. Three thousand per? So that meant if I filled twenty, we could teleport for free. “How much Mana does it need to be filled up?”

“One hundred thousand.”

“...Oh.” They were certainly making it worth the discount.

“It is a high requirement. However, activating a Teleportation Circle requires over one million Mana in total, so I do believe it is fair to remove half of the price in exchange for you taking care of that part. Although, Mana Batteries only stay charged for so long before they begin to leak, so I will not be able to give discounts for any more past the first ten.”

Okay, so I guess we wouldn’t be able to get it done for free. But still, half off was a great deal, as far as I was concerned.

“Yeah, I guess,” I sighed. Good gods, teleportation was costly. “Well, hand it over. May as well get started as soon as we can.”

Once we were done with that errand, we left and headed over to the adventurer’s guild. We may have found a way to get the teleportation done for cheaper, but we’d still need to work and make up the money for the other half of the cost along the way.

I’d done the math—or, rather, asked Index to do the math—regarding Mana charging, and it turned out I made a bit over 100,000 Mana in a twenty-four hour period. Now, after experimenting with the Mana Battery, I found it took conscious effort to put Mana into, so I’d most likely not be able to charge it while sleeping. But for the rest of the day, I could put my Mana/Minute toward filling it. While we walked, I went ahead and started on that.

Advanced Mana Battery is charged with 15/100k Mana.

Not encouraging to see such a massive gap between the current and maximum, but I had to start somewhere. I talked it over with Erani, and we decided it would probably not be wise for her to spend her own Mana toward this thing for now, since she had to keep Distortion Strike up while in public. But if we were ever in private and her Mana was full, then she could help. If things went well, it was possible we’d be able to charge maybe…80,000 Mana each day? At that rate, to get to that total of 1,000,000, it’d end up taking a little under two weeks to do.

So that was our limiting factor Mana-wise. The other limiting factor was money. Sure, we could get our half-off discount in two weeks, but we’d still need to come up with thirty thousand eyt while that happened. No way we’d be able to do so by just killing random Gloomspurs all day, so we’d have to take on more advanced jobs. That was where the adventurer’s guild came in. We needed to find an actual decent-paying job that we could run. For now, we were still waiting on that request we’d put up for some fellow party members to yield something—it’d be a great help to be able to take on harder, better-paying jobs, even if we did have to split the reward—but until then we just needed to find something good enough.

So we walked in and went over to the job board. Yesterday, we’d had to find something for quick money since night had already fallen, but now we had an entire day ahead of us. We could travel further out, do longer jobs…Ideally, we could get a much better haul today.

Looking over the displayed jobs on the board, I tried to sort out the ones worth doing from the ones that were obviously pointless. Monster hunting was good as long as it paid well, spending a month guarding someone’s trip to some other city for the same pay? Not as much.

It was actually pretty easy to figure out what wasn’t worth looking at, I realized, since the bad requests had gone untouched by everyone else for so long that they looked visually different from the new ones. The paper was slightly curled and torn on the edges, the ink was faded, and half the time they were partially covered by one or two other, newer requests. So I just skipped over those and looked over everything else.

But when only looking at the new requests, it was slim pickings. Seemed like the papers typically went as fast as they came, leading to there only being a few I was looking between in the end.

“What do you think?” I asked Erani. “Want to go try and clear out that area of Water Weirds? It pays three thousand, so could be a decent plan.”

“No, no, look at the detailed description. That area is half a thousand paces wide, and just as long. It’d take us days just to search the whole place. Especially since Water Weirds can hide in any body of water nearby; we’d have to thoroughly search every single puddle in the whole place.”

“Hm. Yeah. Seems like it’s more of a job for a larger group that could spread out and handle things in larger squads. Let’s see, what else…”

“We could always do this one,” Erani pointed. “Just clear out some rubble from a fallen windmill. We have decent Strength Stats, and anything too big to move I could break apart using Firebolt.”

“Hm, seems like it could work, but it’s pretty far away, right? A full day trip there and back? And it only pays twenty-five hundred, that’d probably only barely pay more than just spending a couple days hunting down Gloomspurs.”

“Well yeah, it’s a full day’s walk, but you can always speed us up with Expedite, right? Might be able to get it done and be back in a single day if we can move fast enough.”

“Sure, but if I’m spending all my mana on that, I won’t be able to spend it charging the Mana Battery. I want to get our money by the time we have all ten batteries charged, so we can leave as soon as possible. Delaying that just to get more money goes against that point.”

“Well, if we resort to only killing Gloomspurs all day every day, we’re definitely not going to get that much money in less than two weeks. Might have to resort to it.”

“Yeah.” I continued looking around on the board and sighed. “You may be right. There’re just no good jobs for small groups. We don’t have the manpower, the flexibility…”

My voice trailed off as I read one more request. This one was one of the extremely old ones—it must’ve been up there, totally untouched, for months. But it seemed perfect. Extermination job for a single group of monsters that was only a few hours away from here. We could easily get it done in a single day, and not only that…

“Holy shit,” Erani said once she saw what I was staring at. “Eight thousand eyt? Are they insane?”

The reward had been marked out and increased several times, it looked like. The original printed reward was four thousand, but at some point that had been scribbled out with a new reward of five thousand written next to it, and then once again with a new value of sixty-five hundred, until that one, too, had been marked out and replaced with the current reward of eight thousand.

I was totally baffled. Why had people not thought any of those rewards were good enough? It would’ve been too good to be true to begin with, so I had absolutely no clue why the entire adventuring population would ignore it even as the reward continued to increase. Had they all just missed it? Or was there something we didn’t know?

Well, there was one thing we for sure didn’t know. I didn’t recognize the monster name at all. They must not have been native to the kingdom’s area, so none of the books I’d read had ever mentioned them. But it wasn’t like they could possibly be that strong; the request even said they were all Levels 1 to 9. We’d gotten to the point where even Level 20 monsters wouldn’t typically pose too much of a threat to us, so I couldn’t imagine this would be an issue.

Well, monster Levels did work differently for each species. I mean, a Level 15 Shadow Panther and a Level 15 Drake were technically the same numerical Level, but one would pose much more of a threat than the other. That was because they received different Stats and abilities each Level, plus had different natural abilities, as well. Drakes got way more physical Stats per Level, plus had the natural capability to fly, so naturally they were way worse than some random half-invisible cats.

So I had to imagine it was a similar scenario with these monsters on the request. I didn’t have any idea what they were, but maybe they were some sort of massive hulking beasts with piles upon piles of Stats even at their lower Levels, or perhaps they had some sort of extremely powerful natural abilities, like firebreathing or flight or full invisibility—or maybe even all of them combined.

“Think we should take it?” I asked Erani.

“We have to at least ask around,” she said. “I can’t imagine why it would go untouched. May as well figure out what people have to say.”

I nodded and reached out, taking the paper from the board and we walked down to the receptionist.

“Hey,” I said, “what’s up with this? Why hasn’t anyone taken it yet? Is there a mistake or something? Feels like it pays quite a lot, considering how low-Level the monsters are.”

She laughed, then paused. “Oh, sorry, I forgot for a second that you were new here. I thought you were making a joke. Um, no, there’s no mistake. Nobody’s taken the request because those things are an absolute nightmare to fight. You don’t want to go up against them. It’s technically rated at that difficulty because of their numbers—really, according to their Stats it should honestly be even lower, rated at a Level that’s appropriate for just a few Bronze-Degrees—but they’re really tough.”

“Wait, their Stats are low? If their Levels and Stats are low, what makes them so hard to fight?”

She shrugged. “I’m not an adventurer, so I have no clue. All I know is that those things are nicknamed ‘newbie-killers.’ Everyone thinks they can beat them, but they can’t. Only time I’ve seen people come back with all of their party members alive is when they’re massively over-Leveled for the job.”

“Well, I mean, what could they possibly do, though? Are there similar injuries between everyone you see coming back? Like, do they spit lava or something? Or can they do something totally broken like teleport around?”

“Again, I have no clue. People come back with the same cuts and bruises they always do. Um…” she looked around the lobby floor, before finally spotting someone, and pointing. “Go ask him. I think he fought against a group of them not too long ago. Not for a job, they just ambushed him while on the road.”

I shrugged. “Okay, sure.”

We walked over to the man, who was sitting alone at a table nursing a beer. He was big—massive, even—and covered in old scratched-up plate armor. It wasn’t low-quality, just obviously worn-in.

When we got close, he spoke without looking up, “If you’re wanting me to join your party, answer’s a no. I work alone.”

“Uh, no, no, I just wanted to ask you a few questions,” I said. “Information on a job we were considering taking.

He looked up, and when he did so, I saw a gold-degree badge shining below his neck. When he saw me, he frowned. “You’re that new kid, huh? The one with the armor that hurts people? And you’re the woman who always has some Sorcerer Spell active for whatever reason?”

“Uh, yeah, I guess,” I said, surprised that he seemed to know us already. “Are people talking about us?”

“New people come into town looking like you two do? ‘Course people are gonna talk. Plus, that damned Tyrus won’t shut up ‘bout you assaulting him or whatever. Anyway, I don’t judge. Wouldn’t blame you even if you put your fist through Tyrus’s teeth, with how much racket he makes. What do you two need?”

“Sure,” I said, pulling up a chair and sitting down, as did Erani. I slid over the paper detailing the job description to show him. “We were considering taking this job, but the receptionist told us the monsters we’d be fighting are tougher than they seem. Said you’d fought them before?”

He grunted. “Yeah. Those little flamin’ creeps are bad news. Especially if they’re the ones getting the drop on you. Or if you’re trying to infiltrate their territory. When they get to decide the pace of the fight, that’s when they get you. If you somehow find one isolated, you could probably kill it no problem. The things have basically no Health, so they can’t survive a hit, no Stamina, so they can’t run for long, no Strength or even any natural weapons like sharp teeth or claws, so they can’t damage you for shit, they’ve got basically nothin’ going for ‘em.”

“So then what do they do?” I said. “People keep saying how dangerous they are, but they never say how they actually kill you. How can they be so dangerous when they have nothing they can use in a fight?”

“Kid,” he looked at me with a dead-serious expression. “It’s not about what they have, it’s about how they use it. Goblins are as dangerous as they come.”