The Ace Adventurer

Impetia 6th, 542 F.A

The boy peered over at the group the next day from behind an opened book. There they were, two girls and the small man, eyeing the adventurer’s job board inside of the lusciously furbished guild. The building’s intricate architecture, which included an opened second floor above the receptionist desk complete with a lounging area, was outfitted with shelves filled with many of the commonly printed books from The Tillows containing information about Vulturia from ecology to customs, as well as classic story books that almost every civilized person who lived on the continent was at least vaguely aware of.

The puny man a little ways off, Hero, as the boy had heard him called, seemed disoriented. The celebrations from the past night must have taken their toll on him, having had far too much to drink at the banquet that was thrown for him. The boy imagined that it must not have been easy turning down the hordes of grateful townsfolk who had celebrated his triumph over that titan of an orc that had come barreling through their home. Their infectious joy and relief had swept over his female companions Vi and Dee, and in the end, even Hero could do naught but acquiesce to the mood of the night.

Perhaps this would be a lesson for him in the future, the boy thought as he gripped the dagger in his pocket while observing them from his table. He was half-tempted to rush over and put the knife to him right that second, but he had promised himself that he would wait until they were alone. He had no chance of winning a three-on-one battle out in the open like this, especially when his target was the man who had slain Akendorf.

“Hey Hero, it’s not that we don’t appreciate you saving the town like that, but… shouldn’t you have waited for me and Dee to contact the guild first?” Vi, who the boy thought dressed like something of a barbarian woman, asked. “They might have offered up a reward for slaying it.”

“How many people would have died had he waited for the reward, though?” Dee, who the boy found charming in an eloquent way compared to her sister, responded.

“He could have stalled it.”

“And risk a battle of attrition with an Orc, who could pulverize him in one blow? Hero might be a great warrior, but let’s not pretend that he wasn’t risking his life out there, sister. Perhaps your poor hindsight is a result of the sting of losing so much coin yesterday? Perhaps you should consider retiring before you get our party member killed, no?”

“I have a gambler’s soul, sis!” As she said it, Vi spread her arms up to the ceiling above as if celebrating. “How could anyone born in this wonderful country avoid falling victim to the most refined vice of them all? Betting it all for the sake of a wonderful future is nothing short of beautiful.”

Dee’s head fell as she failed to stifle a short burst of laughter.

“There you go again. Wonderful? Refined? Beautiful? Do you truly believe this country to be any of those things? Please wake up before you embarrass yourself any further, sister. We are the worst of the worst. The only culture tied to this country is exorbitant partying, gambling, and brothel-hopping. It’s a hedonist’s paradise, but an ascetic’s nightmare. That’s our legacy. The high families of The Tillows built a great wall to keep our depravity away from their wealth and civilization because they knew better. Perhaps indulging in your most base desires with no consideration towards potential consequences sounds wonderful or beautiful to you, but the truth is that there is no such beauty or refinement to be found in this country’s culture.”

“’There is no such beauty or refinement to be found in this country’s culture’,” Vi repeated, sticking her tongue out. “You were born and raised here. You owe every second of your life to this place. Kind of ungrateful of you to talk it down like that, isn’t it?”

“I think that children have the right to admonish their parents for doing a terrible job.”

“Hmph. Well, aren’t you a know it all?”

Dee nodded as if the question hadn’t been asked in bad faith. “Though, I suppose not every inch of The Baening is that bad.”

“Unbelievable. You’re such a city girl,” Vi said with a sigh.

“It speaks volumes that the only place worth mentioning in this country was founded by a foreigner,” Dee said, ignoring her sister. “A sanctuary within the warfare and strife that provides something that’s actually beautiful to this cesspool of a country. Art, entertainment, cuisine. Peregrine City has it all. Why can’t the other three cities exist in the same headspace as that wonderful place? Only the Rock is even remotely in the same ballpark”

“And what headspace is that? A cesspool of self-loathing like yours? Listen sis, if you hate yourself that much then maybe you should consider gambling after all!”

“The only enjoyable aspect of gambling for me is ridding your face of that foul grin.”

Vi sighed. “My biggest skeptic is my very own sister. Life has a way of playing a good joke, doesn’t it?”

The boy had almost gotten swept up listening to the girls arguing, but he hadn’t let his attention slip away from Hero, who appeared to have not given a single second of his focus to the conversation going on behind him. The pale-faced adventurer, hand clasping his mouth as if something was about to come pouring out, appeared distraught at the inner workings of his body.

“Oh wow, Dee. Our orc slaying champion has been defeated by a couple glasses of ale.”

“A more respectable vice than gambling, to be sure. Say what you will about alcoholics, they’re at least far more self-aware of their disease than gamblers.”

Vi shrugged. “The only disease I have is this tumor of a sister that I was born with.”

That the man who finally slayed the orc who had murdered so many would be so uncomely in the morning struck the boy as odd. The sight of his growing discomfort as his body bludgeoned him via alcohol-induced sickness was whittling away at the warrior’s respect that the boy had built up for him in the past day. In a sudden desperate move, Hero reached out to grab the job posting he had been reading and rushed over to the guild’s second floor. The boy sighed and followed him a few moments later.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Due to the scarcity of water within the desert country that was The Baening, most towns and cities, including that of Egelhorn, had no functioning infrastructure to carry water to and from buildings. Most of the water in the town was drawn up from public wells that were watched by guards at all hours of the day. As a result, there was a redundancy in utilizing that little water for much beyond hydration, nourishing crops and having the occasional bath.

As a result of this, despite the invention of the toilet, towns such as Egelhorn still clung to the use of more classical excretory facilities, colloquially referred to as dung towers. These are tall columns attached to multi-storied public buildings such as libraries or guilds, where citizens were free to excrete or urinate into a large cylindrical opening in the floor that extended down to a small clearing on the first floor.

The clearing that Hero had found himself in faced the outer end of the town and had to be cleaned every three days by servants of the city in order to be recycled as fertilizer for crops. While urine is something that people are free to relieve themselves of wherever they pleased due to its comparatively non-invasive scent, there is a slight stigma against public acts of vomiting within the country.

The boy thought that Hero seemed to be the type who was unwilling to desecrate towns, as he had decided to make use of the dung tower in order to finally let loose what he counted as the third round of stomach fluids that had been nagging at him for the past few minutes. He had been in such a rush to make it that, once he ran into the circular room, he hadn’t even bothered to close the door behind him. And it was precisely that mistake that caused the boy to finally corner the orc slayer in such a vulnerable position.

“Hey.”

While Hero was unleashing hell onto the walls of the hole inside the dung tower, the boy’s childish voice finally escaped his lips as he stared at the adventurer’s back from in the hallway. The echo of his gastric juices spraying across the walls of the void, however, were like crashing tides drowning out the liveliness of the shore.

“Hey, you.”

The sound of the fluids gushing through his throat had finally begun receding in intensity. Hero’s breathing returned to normal as he coughed and spat out the remaining fluids from his mouth.

“Hey, puny.”

Hero finally regained his focus and turned his attention to the boy, who had been wearing a ragged vest draped over his body along with a pair of beige shorts. He had been carrying the dark evidence of weeks of unwashed travel within the pores of his skin.

The boy reached out to his back pocket and grabbed hold of the dagger he’d prepared for the moment. His opponent was still dazed. It was the perfect time to strike, as even he wouldn’t be able to see such an attack coming.

“Huuaaaahhhh!!”

The boy’s approach was a primal one whose every movement was telegraphed by his lack of experience. He had put it all into ending the small man right then and there. His body swerved like a puppet on strings as he took his final step towards hero, plunging his knife at his back.

And in the next moment, he was greeted by a sinking feeling that had shaken the insides of his brain.

As if he were floating through the sky.

Before he realized it, the hunk of meat that he had been marking was gone, and he was now hovering above the smell of feces and stomach fluids, as a long fall down the dung hole awaited him.

“AHHHHHHHHH!!”

But before his descent could send him past the point of no return, his body was hoisted up by an unseen force, then tugged and thrown back into the hall from which he came. His body landed with a crash that was far more lenient than what he realized awaited him had he been left alone. When he glanced up, pain shooting through his back as the cold stone floors had no mercy on him despite his age, he caught a glance of Hero, his face obscured by his cloak’s hood as he wiped the remnants of last night’s mistakes away.

“Ow…”

While the boy did everything to dismiss the pain as not worth consideration in his mind, Hero casually strode over to his side as he lay flat on his back. His face eased into surprise as he had in all likeliness recognized him as the translator that had aided the orc from yesterday in getting his message out.

The boy was certainly frustrated at his failure, but the admiration he held for Hero after he effortlessly dodged his charge was beginning to swell. To be capable of remaining calm while acting nimbly in such a state while also rescuing him from falling to his death meant that he truly was a warrior on par with a sword master. If the surgical slaughtering of his Orc owner wasn’t evidence enough for the boy, this first-hand experience had fully convinced him. Hero had passed the boy’s test.

“Master…” The boy, still battling the pain shooting through his back, sat up to his knees and pressed his forehead to the floor. “Please… please teach me the secret to your strength!!”

When Hero returned to the guild board, both girls looked his way with furrowed brows.

“Did you pop a kid out while we weren’t looking?” Vi asked.

“Ahem. It is a pleasure to meet you both,” the boy said, bowing without so much as a hint of a smile on his face. “I am called Soul. I have decided to join you two in becoming one of master’s students, and so I will be accompanying you for the remainder of your journey. I do hope that we can get along from now on.”

The two girls looked over at the boy, then at each other, and almost in perfect unison, they burst out laughing against their will. Vi held onto her stomach with such animated elation that you’d have thought she was about to spill her guts out just as Hero had earlier, while Dee could only throw her head back while masking her mouth with the back of her palm as the amusement consumed her.

Soul stood silently, showering in the cruel laughter of the girls before him with an expression that conveyed nothing at all. All he could do was stare blankly at the girls before him who had taken to choking on their own amusement at the mere thought of the words he’d just uttered.

“It’s really not that funny,” Soul said finally.

“No, but… but you just… you said we were his… pffhahahaha!”

Hero went back to staring at the poster he’d taken from the board earlier as if the theatrics happening before him were a part of some kind of hallucination.

“He is! He has to be your master! I mean, there’s no way either of you are as powerful as he is, right?! What then, are you both his wives?”

“Wife?“ Dee asked.

“Hey, that one isn’t funny, you know,” Vi said while grimacing.

“Well I’m sorry if I don’t know the situation! What’s going on then?! Who are you both to my master?!”

Vi and Dee stared at each other and found themselves sighing with reluctant smiles.

“Alright fine. Yeah, you’re right. He’s a combat genius,” Vi said. “It’s like he was born to fight. To be honest, I don’t think there’ll ever come a day where he’ll meet an opponent that he can’t beat. At the very least, I haven’t seen it yet.”

“Then you are-“

“But he’s absent,” Dee interrupted.

“Absent?”

“You haven’t realized it?” Vi asked before signaling to Dee. She nodded and walked up to Hero, who was still studying the poster, then knocked at the side of his head like one would a door.

“Heroooo, do you believe that this Soul kid is working for the orcs?”

Hero nodded without turning away from the job poster.

“W-what?! Master, I am not!” he yelled.

“Hero,” Vi started. “Are you actually royalty from the Averion family?”

Hero nodded.

“Hero,” Dee said. “Are you wearing girly underwear right now?”

Hero nodded.

“Hero, would you like to kill yourself for us right here and now?” Vi asked.

Hero nodded.

“Hero, do you have a sexual preference for monst-“

“ALRIGHT! Alright! I get it already!”

Tears of betrayal streamed down the boy’s face. He had been saved by a man whose skill was undeniable. He was the greatest adventurer in the country, there was no doubt about it. However, if he were to put that aside for a moment and deal with the facts, then he would also have to accept the truth of what he was shown. The truth that, the mind of the Orc-slaying master before him was as empty as the wastelands that surrounded this town.