The next day Marcel went to the guild hall to cash in his contract. When he arrived he was greeted by a surprisingly large gathering of people in the hall. It was uncommon for people to be filtering this early in the morning. Adventurers were, by nature, not particularly morning people.

Of course according to the festivities that went on during the nights in the guild hall, Marcel wasn’t hard pressed to come up with the reason for that.

Now though a group of almost a dozen people were crowded together near the entrance of the hall. They were all clad in adventuring gear, spouting armor and weaponry.

Whatever their mission was, it was probably a big one with so many people evolving. And probably a high level one.

Marcel didn’t want to give them more than a glance, but his eyes settled on a familiar pair standing in their midst. At the same time Will's eyes settled on him. Mesmeranda turned around, and they had a long second of awkward eye contact, before Marcel nodded and kept walking.

He was halfway to the front desk when Will had caught up with him.

“Marcel, wait,” he laid his hand on his shoulder.

He turned towards him. “Hey Will.”

“Listen, this is not what it looks like. We just want to put this mission in between you know covering the rent and stuff. We wanted to ask you as well, but they had a minimum level of ten, and you know…”

“Will. All good,” Marcel interrupted the poor man. “Honestly, I understand. It’s fine if you take on missions without me while we’re on this sort of break. We’re a party, not married.”

Will breathed a sigh of relief. “I know, I know. It just felt a little weird.” Then he chuckled. “It almost felt like i was trying to explain a break up or something to you.”

Marcel laughed. “Well that’s what I felt when we had this sit down conversation.”

There was a short beat of silence. They type that arose quite naturally in conversations like those. There wasn’t really more they wanted to say, but they felt like the other expected them to. It was Will who broke the silence.

“Well how is the leveling going? Did you manage to raise your skills a little?”

“Quite good actually, I took a solo mission yesterday.”

“A solo mission?” Will raised his eyebrows. “One of the dangerous ones or one of the scum jobs?”

“A scum job actually, but I’ve gotta find a way to pay the rent. You know how it is.”

“Aii, I do.” He nodded.

They exchanged a few more pleasantries after that. Marcel asked about Mesemranda, more out of politeness than out of genuine interest, and didn’t go deeper after hearing she’s good. When finally the last ebbs of the conversation came to a halt, the two men walked opposite ways.

Marcel went towards the front desk, ready to cash in his contract. Will return to the group of adventurers that were almost ready for their departure.

“How did it go?” Mesmeranda asked him.

Will shrugged. “Fine honestly. He wasn’t mad or anything.”

“Well he’s got no right to be. We’re a party, it’s not like we're married.”

“Funny, he said the same.”

Mesmeranda made a face. “Whatever. I guess it’s good that he’s not mad though, I must say I felt a little bad after cutting him off like that.”

“He understood it was for the best. He’s doing solo quests now. Guess he is trying to level.”

“Good luck with the kind of quests they give to solo adventurers. He’s either going to hit a wall with the scum jobs, or he’s gonna get himself killed taking on a quest a grade above him.”

“I think he might be tougher than he looked.”

“Well whatever,” Messy scrunched her nose. “Is it just me or did he smell a little?”

Over the next month Marcel took on a variety of solo missions. As many as he could in fact. Most of them didn’t even take him out of the city, and after searching a little, he found there was no lack of the type of quests Will had called “Scumjobs”.

When he had adventures together with the twins as a party they sometimes needed to wait two weeks or more to find a fitting contract, which is why they had only done four missions together in their two months, now he had one free almost everyday.

He couldn’t fault anybody for not taking these missions, he himself hadn’t considered them in the beginning. A lot of them involved dealing with small plagues. A lone wolf ripping into a shepherd's flock. Somebody had captured a goblin and didn’t know what to do with it. Sometimes even just catching a runaway horse.

While some of those quests turned out surprisingly interesting, and others unsurprisingly boring, in the end they all paid like shit. Which was the other reason nobody considered taking those quests.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

For the standard adventurer it simply wasn’t worth it to travel to some hamlet a few miles out of town for a handful of coppers. Sometimes the trip itself almost cost that much. Which was one of the main reasons why Marcel needed to take on a mission almost everyday.

He hadn’t lied when he had talked to Will. He truly needed to scrape by and make rent. He had had a close brush with homelessness in his old life, and he didn’t need that again. If it came down to homelessness or working back in the stables though, Marcel wasn’t sure what he would choose. Homeless didn’t have to deal with the smell of horse manure at least.

On the wealth side it was an upwards battle and Marcel struggled everyday to scrape by. On the side of his skill and level development though, he had made rapid progress.

The missions were rather small. They didn't usually involve that much combat. But he did a shitload of them, and in between he used every single minute of free time he had to practice his skill.

By now his stats had taken quite a leap.

“Marcel Houst [Warrior of Rhea Level 7]”

Stats:

Str 10

Dex 6

Int 4

Wis 6

End 7

Vit 5

Per 5

Especially [Water Tentacle] and [Spear Proficiency] had taken huge leaps. The two that lacked behind mostly were [Aquatic Restoration], and to a certain degree, [Rhea’s Boon]. Even then he had only been able to train those skills because he had found a sort of loophole.

It wasn’t common to fight in water, a fact that Marcel had been painfully made aware of in his first few missions. None of the places they had taken missions as a party had involved any sort of wet element really.

The skills he had marveled at when he first got them had started feeling a little useless to Marcel. They had quite literally saved his life the night the goons had decided to jump him, but left him hanging quite a lot afterwards.

He had found a way to still make some sort of use of them at least. And that was by taking more of the missions that involved him wading knee deep through the water.

A surprising number of quests were situated underneath the city in the sewer system. And Marcel had gone down there for almost a dozen missions by now, eradicating giant rats left and right.

No matter how many missions in the sewers he took though, everytime he returned, there was at least one new one. It got to the point that Marcel started wondering if there were more and more of these turning up now that people saw someone was finally taking care of the problems in the sewers.

His fears were somewhat confirmed when he talked to Fredrik while picking his fifth giant rat mission for the week.

“Another one in the sewers?” Freidrik picked a lint off of his fancy clothes. “Don’t you have enough of the smell down there by now?”

Marcel shrugged. “Money doesn’t come from nowhere.”

“I must say, I’m kinda impressed with your tenacity

Marcel wasn’t detoured by that though as he made his way out towards his next quest in the sewers.

A few days later he walked through the forest. Despite the tough front he had put on in front of Fredrik, he needed some change of scenery. He had picked a mission that wanted him to kill a special dear that had apparently stolen something from a farmer that was quite valuable to him.

The old man hadn’t specified what exactly that was, but since he was paying almost half a silver, way above the standard rate for those missions, Marcel hadn’t asked twice. After all the things he had gone through recently, tracking and hunting down a deer to retrieve whatever small trinket it had swallowed shouldn’t prove too difficult.

In general the man had been rather vague about the whole thing. He had been around the age that people back in Marcel's old world would’ve been put into caregiving facilities, so Marcel hadn’t wanted to push too much. All he had to say was that the deer was apparently rather big, totally black, and that Marcel would know it when he saw it.

When he got the information Marcel had been about to call the whole thing off, but there was almost a week of rent for him involved.

Half a silver wasn’t too much for adventurer standards all told, but for a simple track mission it was almost ludicrous. The only reason Marcel had even gotten the mission in the first place was because Fredrik had taken some pity on him and saved it up for him.

“I didn’t want you to take another one in the sewers. That’s just hard to watch.” The man had said when he slid over the piece of paper towards Marcel.

“Thanks,” Marcel said after eying the money the quest contained.

“Don’t sweat it. See it as an insurance against you stinking up the place.”

The walk through the woods came easy to Marcel by now. All the hiking through dark sewers had trained his legs quite a bit. The extra points in Endurance didn’t hurt either.

Still when the midday sun hit its hardest, Marcel decided to take a break next to a small stream running through the woods.

It was proving unsurprisingly hard to track down a deer in this forest.

Marcel took a hearty bite out of his sandwich while pondering these thoughts. He couldn’t believe he had actually managed to find a substitute for peanut butter in this world.

It was a butter made out of a different nut, and not even half as common as peanut butter in his world, but it was almost exactly the same in terms of taste and texture. Together with some of the local jam it was simply heaven. It was one of the few delicacies he allowed himself, and it brought him some sort of comfort.

While he was enjoying his sandwich, a noise down the stream caught his attention. It was a gentle rustling of the bushes. He put his sandwich down immediately hoping it might be the black deer he was looking for.

What came out though, made his mouth drop.

The first thing he saw was a tall male body emerging out between the trees. He wasn’t wearing anything, presenting his bare muscles packed torso to the world. When it took a few more steps, out of the underbush, Marcel's brain caught up.

Sitting underneath the human torso was a pair of legs that were distinctly not human. They too were packed with muscles, but they were definitely horse legs. Following immediately behind them was another pair, connected to the first by the rump of a horse.

Marcel had heard of centaurs before. He was no stranger to Greek mythology. He had once almost played one in a dnd campaign even. But this thing still took his breath away, simply because its size was mind boggling.

The centaur was almost four meters tall, far taller than a human torso on a horse should be. It strode confidently to the water, the forest floor being squashed in its passage. Marcel didn’t dare to breath. He pressed himself as low to the ground as possible. Luckily, it seemed that the thing didn’t spot him while it was going for a drink.

It took a few seconds for Marcel's brain to catch up. When it did, two details about the centaur sprang up.

One was that the underbody, the part that was distinctly not human, was covered in a thick and shining black coat. The other one, that there was the distinct branding of a fireplace poker on the things back.

He muttered a curse under his breath.