Sacred Moon Calendar, year 1000, the twelfth of March. This was the fifth day since crossing over and since becoming a spy.
Spring had already reached Kaze's middle city district.
As for the lower city district, that was another matter entirely.
The Lord Hero Candidate, who had spent three days lying in a sickbed, now stood at Seraphia's side in vigorous health.
Injuries on the order of a comminuted fracture that had smashed the spine, plus massive internal haemorrhage, brought to a state no different from an ordinary person's in only three days. Set in the world of her previous life, it would have been an outright medical miracle.
And during the recuperation, in order to accelerate his recovery, food had been bought that differed from the ordinary kind, food supplied specially to Extraordinaries. Two days of Shu eating it, and part of the initial start-up funding the Church had given him was already spent.
Shu was plainly the sort of child from a poor family who, faced with a sudden large outlay cutting sharply into the savings in his hands, immediately lost any interest in continuing to convalesce.
So Seraphia and Shu now stood together at the Adventurers' Association near the outer edge of the bottom district.
The Adventurers' Association building was not nearly as imposing as Seraphia had imagined.
It was more like a stone-built transfer house wedged forcibly into a street corner, with a wooden colonnade out front to block the wind and a stone platform for carriages to pause at. The Association insignia hanging on the outer wall swayed lightly in the wind, its corners already worn old.
Kaze City's Adventurers' Association seemed to differ from other places in its choice of site.
This was Shu's account; before being selected as a Hero Candidate, he had already formally registered as an adventurer.
The Association's front entrance here still faced the middle city district, with a complete flagstone road laid before it. But the other side of the building lay almost flush against the edge of the lower city district.
Beyond that high wall, the look of the streets had changed completely.
The lighting grew sparse, cracks began to appear in the flagstones, low houses were crammed together, and wind blew out from deep in the narrow alleys carrying damp, coal ash, and some indefinable smell of rot.
At the rear of the Association was an iron gate wider than the front entrance.
It led to the bottom of this city.
Shu and Seraphia set other matters aside for the moment and walked straight into the building's interior.
Once they pushed the door open and went in, the warmth came at them a step ahead of everything else.
But it was not a warmth that let a person relax.
All manner of smells were mixed in the air: medicinal herbs, the grease used to maintain weapons, sweat, and a faint tang of blood. Several queues stood before the counter, some people carrying damaged armour, some with sealed cloth sacks on their backs, and some simply leaning on their weapons, their faces written all over with the exhaustion of wanting only to get their money in hand quickly.
The commission board on the wall was very nearly papered over.
Smoothed flat, curling at the edges, torn down and patched back up again and again, sorted and fixed in place with pins of different colours.
Seraphia swept her eyes across it at random. The types of commission on it were fairly monotonous.
Commissions centred on gathering particular resources were the most numerous, running from herbs and ore to the products of special creatures, and even including commissions requiring the collection of monster fragments.
Because the Corruption Sickness takes effect only on intelligent races possessing reason, leaving a sheltered city for the wilds is an extremely dangerous business for most people, and so the gathering of resources out in the world had all been contracted out to adventurers.
Besides these, there were commissions to explore dungeons, that setting so very common in Japanese-style Western fantasy.
In the specifics, though, there did seem to be some differences, and since Seraphia had no relevant knowledge, she was not entirely clear on them.
Generally speaking, people had to be sent on a regular schedule into areas designated as dungeons, to sweep out monsters and suppress the core; otherwise the range a dungeon covered would expand and the number of monsters would increase, raising the risk of inhabited areas being attacked.
More unusual was a long-term commission to patrol the lower city district. It stated emphatically that if a monster were encountered, additional payment could be obtained after killing it by presenting the monster's remains as proof.
Shu noticed Seraphia's gaze resting on one spot. His eyesight was not as good, and only after narrowing his eyes and studying it carefully did he register the commission she had seen.
Shu's expression changed. Instead of that mild, lukewarm look of his ordinary days, a trace of coldness crept over it.
"This commission... heh. In other places, an Adventurers' Association would generally be at a transport hub node inside the city, convenient for people of different stations to post commissions in the first place, and convenient for adventurers coming and going between places... here, it feels rather more like..."
"A 【gatekeeper】."
As Shu hesitated with the words half-spoken, Seraphia supplied them for him at the appropriate moment.
Anyone with eyes could see how it stood.
This city's administrators did not want to spend too much money or manpower maintaining order and stability in the lower city district, and so had chosen to contract the safety of the lower orders' quarter straight out to the Adventurers' Association.
After all, in the Kiden Federation the so-called federal government was only a decorative frame. Each city-state was in fact controlled by a coalition of several financial conglomerates, cooperating and competing with one another at the same time. All of them offered a great many benefits to draw in capable Extraordinaries as fresh blood, and anyone with talent, prospects and a future would never consider working for the federal government.
Hence, in this country where no actual government existed, the law was for the most part a set of provisional ordinances hammered out between conglomerates at a negotiating table.
To keep from being torn apart and swallowed by their own covetously watching kind, every conglomerate had to preserve its own strength.
When the conglomerates were unwilling to put in the effort and the federal government lacked sufficient armed force, the work could only be paid for by the federal government and contracted out to adventurers.
【I keep feeling every bit of this country's premise is a mirror of some country back on Earth. Though exactly which one is very hard to guess.】
"The payment feels reasonable, and we wouldn't have to go outside the city so soon... because there are basically no supply posts outside the Kiden Federation, and if we go out to carry out a mission there's a great deal of equipment and supplies to buy. It could spend all our money in one go..."
Because Seraphia had not told Shu about the money she was carrying, Shu was making his plans treating the start-up funding the Church had given him as the shared property of them both.
Miss Angel had no intention of puncturing that, however. She was a cute-looking girl now, after all, and as compensation for the half of herself she had lost, taking slight advantage of somebody else at a time like this could surely be forgiven?
"I have no objection."
Seraphia shrugged. By her duties, whatever commission he took, she had no obligation to help with any of it. Watching him earn money, and then eating his food, drinking his drink and using his things, would do nicely.
This long-term commission did not need to be taken down from the board; one only had to indicate at the front desk that one wished to accept it.
The Adventurers' Association's front desk had a cute young woman in black tights and a stern-faced, severe middle-aged man, both wearing uniforms of a standard pattern, though on the woman's side it was a very jaunty and cute skirt.
Over on the side of the desk clerk in the black tights there was a mountain of people and a sea of people; over on the middle-aged man's side you could have netted sparrows at the door.
This was the disparity of the world.
Shu did not look like a person who cared about this sort of question, however, so he walked straight over to the man and stated that he wished to accept the federal government's long-term commission.
The man handled the business strictly by the book, then said one thing mildly.
"First time? Down there, so long as they can still speak and communicate normally, don't be in a hurry to strike. But the ones that can no longer speak, just bring the remains back."