Extra Story: The Rookie Adventurer Horn, Part One

Extra Story:
The Rookie Adventurer Horn,
Part One

 

“Horn!” Shin yelled. He was smack in the middle of fighting a wolf. I shot off a clod of hardened dirt at the wolf, and it was a hit! The monster let out a yip, collapsed, and then Shin dealt the finishing blow.

“Your magic really has gotten stronger, Horn.”

“Yeah, and all thanks to Yuna.” It really was, too. She was the one who taught me how to use magic and gave me all those pointers. I had my troubles at first, yeah, but now I could even use her lessons in the heat of battle. There were still some things I couldn’t do exactly like Yuna described, but I liked learning it all bit by bit.

“That bear really was something to reckon with,” said Shin.

“Yes, but Shin…you absolutely can’t say anything like that in front of Yuna.”

“Psssht. You always make her sound so scary.”

When I asked the senior adventurers about Yuna again, they told me she was pretty scary when she got mad. Add in the number of monsters Yuna had slain (according to the guild employees themselves) and you wound up with someone you never, ever wanted to make your enemy.

Sure, Yuna dressed in a cute bear costume, but she was actually an outstanding adventurer…and I also knew that Yuna was kind.

When she’d seen that the orphans were in trouble, she gave them food and work, and even rebuilt their house. The reason why eggs were so plentiful in this town was because Yuna had made that happen for the orphanage. On top of that, apparently the kids working at that bakery were also orphans.

She was so amazing, even though she was practically the same age as me…

 

“Horn, Shin,” said Lah, who was doing the butchering, “make sure you keep a close watch on the outskirts of this location, you hear?”

I was lost in thought. “Sorry!” If we didn’t keep watch, animals or other monsters could come by while Lah worked.

We’d come from a village near Crimonia to become adventurers. The four of us had known each other since we were kids: Shin was the one with the sword, and he more or less acted as our leader. Then there was Lah—short for Lahtte—the hunter’s son who knew his way around a bow and arrow. Just a few days ago, he learned how to handle his bow even better from a guy, Brandaugh, in a nearby village. He was ecstatic about it. The third person, the strongest of us all, was Bru—so of course, we called him Brute. His weapon was an axe.

And last came me, a mage who could only use a smidge of weak magic…but thanks to Yuna, I was stronger. These days, I wasn’t dragging everyone else down.

We grumbled about supplies as Lah harvested:

“I hope we can get our hands on a big item bag soon too.”

“I’d like one that can at least fit a wolf.”

If we had an item bag, that’d make our job much easier…but we had a lot of work to go before we could get one. With an item bag, we could slay a monster and do the harvest in a safe spot. No more throwing out the parts we couldn’t take home anymore.

I hoped we could get an item bag soon.

 

After we finished the day’s work and headed back to report at the adventurers’ guild, I noticed a crowd gathered around the quest notice board.

“Helen, did something happen?” I asked her in the middle of reporting our wolf slaying.

“You mean on the board? Yes; Lord Cliff himself put in a quest.”

“The feudal lord?!” Shin gasped.

“Was a strong monster spotted then?” asked Lah.

A quest from the lord himself? Maybe some great and terrible monster had risen to terrorize the land…

“No,” said Helen, “it’s just normal monster slaying work.”

“Normal work?” It was almost disappointing.

Helen nodded. “All of you have been saving up because you want an item bag, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“In that case, why don’t you try participating in the quest? The reward is a little higher than usual. I think you could handle it now.”

If the pay was that high, we almost had to accept. I wanted to hear more details from Helen, but there were other adventurers waiting their turn, so instead I looked at the board. There were fewer people in the crowd compared to earlier, so I could see the quest details.

“Um, slaying of monsters by the Bear Tunnel?” Bear…Tunnel? What on earth?

There was also a map on the quest paper. It was a little far on foot, but they were provisioning a carriage for any adventurers. On top of that, they had people who’d buy monster parts near this Bear Tunnel, so we didn’t need to bring the monsters back with us. And, just as Helen said, the selling prices for monster parts were higher than usual.

“Shin,” I said, “what do you wanna do?”

“Quests as good as this never come up.”

True, but…the only monsters noted to appear in that area near the Bear Tunnel were wolves, horned hares, goblins, and… “There are orcs, though. At our current level…”

“At our current level, we should be fine. If we see one, we’ll just take off.”

“Yeah,” added Bru, “we’ll just take out the wolves and horned hares.”

We talked it through and had our plan: we’d accept the slaying quest and leave the orcs to more senior adventurers. With that, we headed over to Helen to seal the deal—the adventurers who were behind us in line were heading to the quest board. I guess she told them the same thing she told us.

“Helen,” I asked, “what’s the Bear Tunnel?”

“It’s a tunnel through the Elezent mountain range.” According to Helen, the tunnel had only recently been discovered. The quest’s goal was to slay the monsters in the area so they could make use of it.

“What’s on the other side?” I asked.

“Apparently,” said Helen, “the ocean.”

“The ocean!” I repeated.

“I want to see that ocean!” said Shin.

“Sorry. There had been a quest to slay monsters on the other side, but there were so many offers that it had to be closed.”

“Aww.” Shin groaned.

“I’d like to go too,” said Helen. “Please, just be patient. Now tell me, if you would: are you taking the quest?”

Of course we were.

“Well then,” said Helen, “we will be preparing carriages tomorrow morning. Please don’t be late.”

 

The adventurers’ guild was as crowded as I’ve seen it the next day.

“Won’t we end up competing for monsters?” Shin groaned.

“Shin,” I said, “weren’t you listening? There’s the monsters in the tunnel and monsters on the other side. We’re not all going to the same place.”

“C’mon, Horn, I know that much.”

“Anyway, let’s hurry up now. We can’t miss our carriage.”

We found Helen near those carriages, giving out instructions.

“Good morning,” I said with a nod.

“Ah, I’m so glad you came on time.”

“Mmhm. But there sure are a lot more people than I thought there’d be.”

“With such a large quest reward, are you really so surprised?” asked Helen.

Shin shook his head. “We’ve sure got to put the elbow grease into this.”

“So— Shin’s group, please ride on that carriage. The carriages go to different places, so please make sure you don’t take a different one. If you accidentally take the wrong one, you might end up being taken to a place where there are orcs.”

Shin swallowed. “Ah…”

“Shin,” said Helen, “make sure you don’t make a mistake like that, understand?”

“I won’t.” We piled into the carriage Helen told us to and found several adventurers already riding in it.

“Sure is nice having a carriage take us where we need to go,” I said.

Shin nodded. “And on top of that, we don’t need to carry the monsters we slay back to the town.”

“We’ve gotta work hard to earn that dough,” said Lah.

“Right on,” Bru grunted.

 

After being rocked around in the carriage for a few hours, we finally arrived at the edge of the woods. Apparently, we were hoofing it from here on out.

“Where are we going first?” Lah asked.

“I was thinking,” said Shin, “we might as well take a look at this infamous tunnel.”

“Same here,” I said. A lot of us adventurers were curious, actually. We all followed signs leading up to the tunnel until, after walking for a while, a bear appeared in front of us, of all things! A bear statue, to be exact. The adorable little guy held a sword!

“Do you feel like this bear looks familiar?” I said. I’d definitely seen it before. In fact, I knew exactly where I’d seen it…

“This is the same bear as the one in front of Yuna’s shop, ain’t it?” said Shin.

Lah frowned. “Why would there be a bear statue all the way over here?”

The bear at the shop carried bread, but this one held a sword.

“Well,” said Shin, “the only thing I can think of is that the tunnel has something to do with Yuna.” I mean, it was even called the Bear Tunnel. I agreed with Shin, of course.

The bear statue drew my curiosity, but the tunnel did too. Somewhere beyond the blackness of this tunnel, the ocean spread out so vast that I couldn’t even imagine it. Maybe I could see it when we finished the quest. I mean, I had to see it at least once. “Shin, let’s go to the ocean once this tunnel is finished.”

“Right on. That’d be nice.”

Bru nodded. “Uh-huh.”

But before we could vacation, we needed to save up. It was time to slay some monsters.

 

“Shin, it went over that way.”

“Right, leave it to me. Horn, I’m going to stop it.”

“Okay, gotcha.” I forged a hardened clump of dirt with earth magic. Throw the dirt, hit the wolf, it yips and falls, and then Shin dealt the finishing blow—we had a pattern, and the slaying was going well.

“Monster extermination sure is easier now that you’ve got stronger magic, Horn,” said Shin.

Next step was monster cleanup: if we left the monster corpse around, other monsters would come by, so cleaning up afterward was just good manners. We weren’t about to make enemies of our fellow adventurers, you know? We’d just harvest them and bury or burn anything we didn’t need.

“That’s thanks to Yuna, too,” I said. “I feel like I’m really getting the hang of using mana.” If I could collect mana, I’d be able to use strong magic, but I also wouldn’t be able to use it multiple times. I needed to calculate my uses of large or small bursts of magic—that was the role of a mage who ran support from the back, Yuna said.

Then, depending on how I worked with the others, I needed to figure out whether I even could give them support. Backing out was always an option. Attempting something impossible was dangerous, maybe even fatal. Getting to know my mana levels was the first step for so much of this.

 

We’d been slaying wolves and horned hares for a while now near the tunnel entrance. “At this rate,” I mused out loud, “we might be able to buy an item bag. We should really be grateful to the lord.” Honestly, I hadn’t thought it would go this well.

“Especially since he’s buying parts at higher prices than normal,” said Shin. And on top of that, those sellers were so close that carrying things was a cinch. Everything was so efficient on this quest.

“We’re going to run out of nearby monsters soon,” Lah pointed out. Everything moved so quickly—just yesterday, they started cutting down the trees in order to make a path all the way to the tunnel.

“Plus,” I said, “there are other adventurers around.”

“Hmm. In that case, let’s head that way—” he pointed out at some nearby trees. “I heard from other adventurers that we’ve still got more monsters that way.”

We listened to Shin and headed on over.

 

In the middle of our walk through the forest, Shin stopped dead. Put his pointer finger up to his lips. We stopped talking and went silent.

Just ahead, right where Shin gestured, was an orc.

“What should we do?” Shin whispered.

“There’s no way we can handle that,” I said.

“But we’ll be able to get more money than other monsters if we can,” said Shin.

“We should do it,” said Bru.

“But we decided we wouldn’t attempt orcs,” said Lah.

“Shin…” I hissed.

Shin sighed. “Yeah, you’re right…”

The discussion was over, and we were just about to leave, when…

Snap.

Someone stepped on a branch.

That moment, the orc roared and swung its giant club. Crack—it hit a tree near us.

“Run!”

We sprinted away, but the orc had already noticed us, and it wasn’t planning on letting us go. What was it that Yuna had told me? Um, uh…

You can…you can use earth magic to protect yourself from attacks!

I summoned up some earth magic, shaped it, and summoned crossed stone poles between the trees. I couldn’t make a giant wall like Yuna could, so she’d thought this up instead. If I could block off the space between trees with things similar to cords, I could stop the enemy…but I needed to make them strong enough to do that.

And there it was. The orc was hampered by the crossed earth. I’d done it after all.

“We’ve got to run right now,” I gasped out.

The orc bellowed and brought down its club. The earth wall barrier shattered.

I made more to block the orc’s path. I could keep it at bay a little, but this was bad. I might’ve used too much mana. Fatigue gripped me.

“Horn, you all right?!”

“Uh-huh.” Tired. Had to run anyway. Shin pulled my arm.

The orc stopped, lifted its club and crack—broke the crossed barrier.

“Damn,” Shin snarled, “we’ve gotta fight here.”

At that, Lah got his bow ready and fired…and the orc knocked the arrow clean out of the air.

“No way,” I whispered. How could it do that?

Shin readied his sword, and Bru his axe.

“Horn, you run,” said Shin. “We’ll buy you time.”

“But you all…”

Lah let an arrow fly while Shin and Bru swung away with their weapons. The orc blocked every single attack with his huge club—we were on the defensive now. The orc swung at Shin, he blocked, and just blocking it sent him flying. Bru swung up his axe, but the orc thrust its club and sent him hurtling away too.

“Shin! Bru!” I cried.

The orc hollered, looked at Lah and I…and rushed toward us.