Midday walked with careful steps, doing his best not to do anything that might upset his unexpected visitor. This was not at all what he expected upon stepping foot outside and calling for help, and he was torn between considering the encounter incredibly lucky or horribly unlucky. Anyone who willingly became a head guard at the plantation was, in his eyes, almost certainly an awful person. It was a job that allowed those who had it to be as cruel as they wanted and face no repercussions for doing so. The kinds of people that sort of thing attracted could be nothing but trouble. Even so, Mulberry almost certainly knew the answers to the questions that had been on his mind ever since obtaining the Elvanerean Ring. He decided to try his luck.

“So, umm, are magic rings like that Umbrella Ring of yours common in Neighborhood 3?”

“Fairly common.” Mulberry grinned pridefully. “Every slave assigned to my Neighborhood gets a Raincoat Ring upon arrival—which is basically just a weaker version of the Umbrella Ring. I’m actually wearing that ring right now as a supplement to the umbrella.”

“I see…” Midday was slightly taken aback by how talkative Mulberry was showing herself to be. It almost felt as though she were going out of her way to spoon-feed him all the information he wanted. “Are these Raincoat Rings easy to obtain?”

“Fairly. Raincoat Rings are just dungeon loot, you know. You can get them as an uncommon drop from an optional boss in Hyetal Canyon. We just buy them off the delvers who run that dungeon professionally. They’re expensive items, sure, but we only have a few dozen slaves in my Neighborhood anyways—so the upfront cost is a nonissue. Such a nonissue, in fact, that we actually have a pretty large surplus at the moment. So many that we’re not even sure what to do with them all.” She paused. “My boss and I have been giving them out left and right as of late in exchange for favors. It’s a wasteful practice, no doubt, seeing as we could always just upgrade them into Umbrella Rings instead, but the process of doing so is awfully annoying—so we don’t bother.”

“Upgrade?”

“Yeah. You can combine Raincoat Rings with a few other components to get the more powerful Umbrella Ring as a result.” Mulberry chuckled. “You’re awfully curious about these rings, aren’t you? Do you want one?”

Midday stopped dead in his tracks and turned around. “What?”

Mulberry took a silver ring out of her breast pocket and held it between her fingers such that Midday could examine the item. There were a few tiny blue gems in the shape of raindrops embedded into its polished surface. “There’s a certain individual here at Neighborhood 8 that I would prefer to survive the upcoming month. You can have this ring if you agree to protect them with all of what little might you probably have.”

Midday looked at the head guard with wide eyes, stunned at the unexpected prospect of obtaining a special-grade item. All he had wanted from this conversation was information about the Elvanerean Ring, but here he was being offered something far better—at least on paper. He failed to see how a ring that kept rain away could compare to a ring that allowed him to obtain agricultural treasures with ease, but a magic ring was still exactly that: magical. It was a hard opportunity to pass up on.

“Just so ya know, I’ve already given out a few of these rings to other people on this street and I intend to give out a few more before I head back to the airship for the night. You wouldn’t be alone in this.”

“I see…” Midday frowned. It made no sense to ask someone as weak as himself to serve as a bodyguard. With a few weeks of nonstop Devil Peppercorn feasts under his belt, he expected, he would rise to be at the very least above average among the slaves of Neighborhood 8, but that was, again, several weeks away and Midday was still weak as ever at the moment, currently only having achieved marginal improvement over how he had been upon finding the Elvanerean Ring. As such, it struck him as mighty suspicious that he, a skinny husk that barely qualified as fodder, was receiving this kind of offer. Even so, the allure of obtaining a magic ring was impossible to resist in its entirety. “And just who would I be protecting?”

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“A talking frog named Solomon. He lives in the ‘old growth’ section of the forest—so you would be living there for the next month… or at the very least until the fog clears.”

Midday tensed up. “Living there? In the old growth?”

“Uh-huh. Living there.” She stopped for a moment before continuing. “Your daily quotas won’t be an issue. They’re canceling those as of tomorrow evening.”

“R-right.” Midday looked down at his feet for a moment, thinking about the poor soul who had been forced into doing his work for that day, and then back up to Mulberry. He decided in the back of his mind to try and get Netari to cancel that unfortunate individual’s burden as soon as he got the chance to ask. “So what exactly would I be protecting this frog from? If Solomon has already been living there on his own and is still doing fine, I doubt he needs the help.”

“This upcoming month will be unusually dangerous. The important thing here is that you make up your mind within the next minute. Siempre has me on a tight schedule. For that matter, hurry up and start walking again.” She gave Midday a push and, with that, the two started moving.

During their walk Midday thought deeply about the prospect of going into the old growth—which was the ultra-dangerous portion of the forest where Romulo did most of his XP grinding. He knew from listening to Romulo’s stories that it was by no means rare to come across indexed monsters in that area—which meant that they were dangerous enough for The Coalition to have given them severity ratings.

For reference, the highest severity indexed monster Midday had ever encountered in the flesh had been a grizzly bear, which was considered a textbook example of a severity 1 threat. He still remembered the simultaneous senses of terror and awe he had felt as the gigantic beast had come up to the stream he and his father had been fishing at to catch some salmon, and the thought of possibly running into something even stronger was off-putting to put it kindly. Not even someone like Romulo could reliably go up against indexed monsters in direct combat; the giant had to rely on things like pitfalls or poisoned carcasses to take down anything that dangerous.

Even so, a magic ring—no matter how useless it seemed—was too good to ignore. In a worst-case scenario, he reckoned he could sell it to one of the upper-class slaves for a hefty chunk of change and, more likely than not, he felt that the ring would eventually prove itself to be capable of more than the limited uses that were currently coming to mind.

“So how many people are you planning to recruit for this?” Midday frowned as he walked. With enough manpower, he reckoned, the old growth might become manageable.

“Maybe a dozen? That’s how many rings I brought, but I don’t have much time. Siempre wants to be back in the airship by the end of the hour, and I have no idea how long this conversation with Netari is going to last.”

“I see… Are any of the people you’ve recruited thus far strong?”

“By your standards? Or by mine?”

“Umm, I guess by mine?”

“Of the seven people I’ve already recruited—yourself included—three are level 15.” She chuckled softly, the subdued laughter almost sounding nervous in tone, before continuing. “No idea what their Abilities are though. In any case, that probably sounds pretty good to you, no?”

“Good enough, I suppose.” Midday frowned. There were not very many level 15 individuals in Neighborhood 8, and most of them belonged to the Weekly Fight Club. They weren’t the sort of people you could just bump into by chance, which led him to think that perhaps Mulberry had done some research prior to her visit. If that was the case, however, it made very little sense to only find a few competent people and leave the other spots on the team up to chance. If Mulberry had looked into things in advance, it was only logical that she would have preselected every member of the crew. As such, Midday wondered what she was playing at.

“So do you accept?”

Midday sighed. “Sure.”

“Good answer.” Mulberry gave him a tap on the shoulder. “Take your ring.”