Gossip: Three Heroes ~Daily Life as Adventurers~

Now that we’d entered Marveil, we started living as adventurers. We already had Adventurer’s guild cards, so it was the fastest way. At Lampertz, the first village we entered on the border, we sold off half the orcs we’d finished off to earn some traveling expenses.

After that, we stayed in the village a few days and rested. After all, until then we had been unable to rest peacefully, and all three of us were bone-tired.

Then, once we’d rested, we decided to travel to a largish city nearest to the village after getting directions from the villagers. That town, Orlova, was the place that currently served as our base of operations.

Since we’d arrived, we’d been working as adventurers the entire time. Thanks to that, we had climbed up to C-rank.

I was a little worried about what would happen for a while, but now that we were adventurers like this, we were somehow managing to make a living. Kanon and Rio had both started smiling a lot more like before, so I was really glad that we had made it to this country safely.

Adventuring puts your body on the line as your only asset, and everything is the adventurer’s own responsibility, so there are parts of it that are hard, but the three of us always help each other, and now we’re freely living to our fullest in this other world.

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“Isn’t this request good? With this we can be back by the end of the day,” Kanon said, pointing to a request. The paper that was posted on the board asked us to kill five orcs. The conditions were to bring back five orc corpses as they were, so the less damaged they were, the bigger the reward would be.

“I think it’s good too,” Rio agreed.

Orc meat was a popular food ingredient. All three of us really had hated the idea of it at first since they were humanoid like us, but orc meat wasn’t that rare in the world, and it was treated just like any other kind of meat. Like the saying goes, “when in Rome,” so we’d tried eating it, and it was actually pretty good.

In Japanese terms, it would be like high-class brand-name pork.

Aside from knowing that it’s orc meat, it would be more than edible, and now that our disgust has faded, we were eating it without any difficulty.

In this world, orc was considered to be pretty good meat, so it was really popular. In fact, there were a lot of restaurants that advertised their orc dishes on their signboards. Thanks to that, there was a lot of demand for orc meat, and it was almost like subjugation requests for them were permanently posted up in the guild.

“Five orcs, huh? We can do it, I think. Actually, since orcs are in such high demand, let’s hunt more than five.”

“You’re right. If it’s us, it’s possible.”

“Yeah.”

It’d be really hard for a normal adventuring party to bring them back without a magic bag or someone with an Item Box, but all three of us had Item Boxes. Not only that, but they were pretty much infinite in size.

We took the request paper off the board and brought it to a now-familiar receptionist.

“Now then, let’s go hunt some orcs.”

The three of us headed for a forest to the southeast of the town, where the orcs were.

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“Shh! ......There’s an orc.”

“There’s three... Let’s do it as usual, just like we talked about. It’s your turn, Rio.”

“Yep. Got it.”

Rio activated her specialty Water magic without an incantation. A water ball formed above the orcs’ heads, completely enveloping them. The orcs, who could no longer breathe, writhed in confusion and desperation, trying to escape from the water ball. Taking advantage of that opening, we......

“Kanon, let’s go!”

“Yes.”

The two of us jumped out. Me, with a longsword, and Kanon with a spear.

“Hah! Taahh!!”

“Yahh!”

We stabbed our target orcs in the heart. I took on two, while Kanon finished off one. The three orcs fell, lifeless.

This method of hunting orcs was the result of a lot of trial and error from us. With this method, we could hunt orcs without much effort and finish them off for sure, all while doing the least damage to their bodies.

“Great. Now we just need two more,” Kanon said, putting the orc she killed into her Item Box.

“Yeah. But, let’s not focus on just five — we should just get as many as we can.”

Rio, who had regrouped with us, nodded in agreement.

“Our rent is coming up soon too. We need to earn money where we can.”

I nodded. In this town, we actually rented a single house instead of staying at an inn. We had stayed at an inn at first, but when we’d calculated costs, we had realized that it would be way too expensive to continue doing that. Rio was the one who’d suggested that renting a house might actually be cheaper, so we’d decided to do it. Luckily, we managed to rent one. It was a little run down, but everyone had their own room, and the rent was reasonable enough for us to actually be able to afford it.

It was a little far from the Adventurer’s guild, and it was small, but since it used to belong to a merchant, it had a bath in it. That’s what had sold us on the house. In this world, only wealthy nobles could afford to take baths, but as Japanese people, it was pretty hard to do without them. Apparently, the bath was unusable without charging the magic stone, but Rio was good with Water magic, and I was good with Fire magic, so we had figured we’d be able to make it work somehow. And in fact, we did manage it without too much trial and error. Rio would use magic to fill the bath with water, and I’d launch an appropriately small-sized fireball into it. It was a simple method, and at first, it had been really hard to adjust the temperature. We were used to it now, though.

I liked the life I had now, with the three of us. In order to keep this lifestyle up, we needed to work hard and take requests diligently like this every day.

“Kaito, Kanon — there are orcs,” Rio whispered.

We faced the way Rio was looking, and...... “There’s four of them, huh? Kaito, Rio, let’s do it just like before.”

“Yeah.”

“Got it.”

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“Whew...”

I put the three orcs we had just killed into my Item Box.

“Let’s leave it here for today.”

In the end, we managed to bag sixteen orcs. It was a pretty good haul.

“Yeah, you’re right. I’m hungry~,” Kanon said.

Now that she mentioned it, I was too.

*Gurgle~*

As soon as I noticed that I was hungry, my stomach growled. Hearing that, both Kanon and Rio started giggling.

“Don’t laugh! I can’t help it, I’m hungry.”

“Sorry, sorry. It’s way past lunchtime, but let’s eat before we go back,” Rio said.

“Yes, let’s!” Kanon chimed in enthusiastically.

We moved to a comparatively safe area in the forest and had a late lunch. Rio took a pot out of her Item Box — our Item Boxes stopped time, so it was still hot.

“Smells nice~,” Kanon said, holding up her bowl like she just couldn’t wait.

“Today is stew,” Rio said while stirring the contents of the pot. It was mysterious how Rio managed it even though we didn’t have any pre-made roux. Rio said she did it with some wheat, or something — I didn’t understand at all, though.

“Kaito, bowl.”

“Yeah.”

Kanon already had her share served. I also gave my bowl over to Rio, and she poured out lots of stew for me.

“Well then, let’s eat.”

“Yep.”

“Yeah.”

“““Thanks for the food.”””

When I put the stew into my mouth, the mellow sweetness of the vegetables along with a creamy taste filled my mouth. Rio really was good at cooking.

“So good~. It’s really nice being able to eat hot food in places like this.”

Kanon was right. At first, we had just bought food at a stall and put it in our Item Boxes, but doing it that way cost way more than we had expected. So, we had tried field rations, but they were just awful.

Those things aren’t edible, I swear.

After that, we’d tried to cook food ourselves, and that was where Rio really showed her stuff.

“Yeah. Rio’s the greatest.”

“Aww, I’m nothing special. This is normal.”

Rio is humble and always says that, but I think she’s really good at cooking.

“Well sorr-rry for being bad at cooking.”

“No way. You helped me too, Kanon. With my arm like this, I have to leave all the peeling and stuff to you.”

“I was even awful at peeling stuff at first, too. I felt really bad about it back then. If I had known this was going to happen, I would have helped my mom more often.”

“But Kanon, you’ve been doing the laundry and stuff too!”

“Laundry is easy to do with magic. But cooking is... Why is it that anything I make turns out bad?”

I felt sorry for Kanon, but it was probably best to just leave the cooking to Rio. That would guarantee a delicious meal.

Still......

“From where I’m sitting, the both of you are really amazing. I’m completely useless at chores, after all!”

Cooking? Laundry? Heck is that? As if I could do any of it.

“That’s not something to be proud of, Kaito.”

“Hehehe... Really?”

Kanon looked exasperated; Rio just laughed.

“Ah, there is something I can do. Heat up the bath.”

“Ahahah! Yeah, that’s right! You might be the best at heating up the bath, Kaito.”

“But that’s all you’ve got, Kaito. You need to be more thankful to Rio and me!”

“Sure, sure. I’m super thankful to the two of you,” I said, and both of them laughed.

We had some tough times, too. This place was not Japan, and there were a lot of inconvenient things about life here. But, with Kanon and Rio here, I felt that I was happy. In order to protect this lifestyle, I was going to do my best as an adventurer.