Chapter 147: The Bear Goes to the Adventurers’ Guild

Chapter 147:
The Bear Goes to the Adventurers’ Guild

 

AND SO I ENDED UP heading back to that wide thoroughfare—the adventurers’ guild was on the same road as the trade guild. If I’d known the troubles I was going to face, I would’ve just gone to the adventurers’ guild to start with, but hindsight is twenty-twenty.

“Um, could you wait here, Fina?” I asked when we got to the front of the guild. I remembered getting in a fight with other adventurers when I’d come to the guild before. I doubted any adventurers would try anything if I had a kid like Fina with me, but you never knew.

“I’m okay. I can go with you. And I actually don’t know about being alone…”

Hmm. Several groups of adventurers were eyeing us. All right, leaving Fina behind was more anxiety-inducing. I took Fina inside. Whatever happened, Fina was my priority.

Gazes piled up. The reactions were mixed. Some folks knew me, and some didn’t.

“What’s that?”

“A bear just walked in here.”

“Is that the bear from the rumors?”

“What? What rumors?”

“Pssh. You don’t know?”

“They’re rumors, but I hear there’s somethin’ to ’em.”

(There was some shuddering. I’ll admit it: it was pretty nice to see.)

“Why’re you terrified of that adorable bear?”

“That’s…”

“It’s just a normal girl in a cute bear outfit.”

“And a kid?”

“Aww! She’s cute.”

And so on, a whole chorus of buff adventurers in little chairs. Word about me had spread after last time. Fina gripped my bear puppet anxiously.

“So yer saying that’s the rumored bear. How about we talk to her?”

“Better not to get yourself involved.”

“I don’t want a trip to the sky. No, I mean the literal sky, man.”

“If you’re gonna mess with her, you’re on your own.”

“What’s with you? Even you’re wussing out?”

“You don’t know about the bear warning?”

“The bear warning?”

“Ha! Guy doesn’t know about the bear warning. Nah, that girlie is dangerous.”

“You wanna see the clouds, I’m not stopping you.”

A bear warning? Sounded like a sign you’d find in the mountains or something.

You know, it’s still weird to me that people find a girl wearing a bear onesie so dangerous. Okay, yeah, I had given the adventurers who tried to mess with me a trip to the sky, but—they’d tried to pick a fight with me! They had it coming, you know?

“Do not mess with her. The adventurers that messed with her in the past? Dead.”

“I’m pretty sure I heard they got eaten.”

“Nah, nah. She minced them. Alive. Helmut says she did it with a cheese-grater. Rusty one, too.”

“That don’t mean she didn’t eat ’em, too, ya fool.”

Uh? All I did was set them up for a cordless bungee jump, I hadn’t…hmm. Maybe the stuff from Crimonia was mixed up in there?

There’d been an adventurer who had called me “bloody bear,” hadn’t there? So maybe the Deboranay incident had gotten mixed up with all that. I’d beaten Deboranay’s face swollen, so maybe over time that had turned into me making him mincemeat? Or maybe the rumor was that the adventurers had been smushed when I gave them a taste of cordless bungee jumping?

Either way, they were just rumors. And why was I eating people? I wasn’t a literal bear. Why would I bother to put my mouth on some crusty adventurer?

Still, this was way too much commotion just because I’d come here in a bear onesie. At this rate, I wouldn’t be able to ask about the mines without hassle. While I was wondering what to do, a back door opened and a woman came out, one with light-green hair—and long ears.

“You’re being too loud,” she snapped. “Please keep it down.” Her name was Sanya. She was the capital’s adventurers’ guild master and an elf. She’d really helped me out during the king’s birthday celebration.

Being the guild master, nobody wanted to mess with her. “What has gotten into you lot?” she asked, looking around the guild. “I’m doing work here. If you keep up the racket, I’ll throw you out, and—Yuna?”

“Uh, it’s nice to see you again,” I said sheepishly.

“What are you doing here? Did you come for work? And that girl there—she was with you before, yes? Fina?”

Fina bobbed her head slightly. I was impressed Sanya remembered her after only meeting her once. I don’t think I would’ve.

“I see,” she said. “So you’re the source of the commotion.”

That seemed a little blamey, but okay? Jeez, all I did was come into the guild. I wasn’t like, the root of all evil or something. Sure, the bear onesie had maybe caused the teensiest bit of ruckus, but what had I done? Nothing. This time.

“Don’t make such a fuss about a girl in a bear outfit walking in,” Sanya roared.

“But guild master…” one of them whimpered.

“People are saying a ton of things about her,” another protested.

I almost wanted to know what those people were saying, but…

“It’s true,” said Sanya in a commanding voice, “that the adventurers who picked a fight with that bear girl were sent flying through the air. And it’s true they were accomplished adventurers. And it is true that I happen to be her acquaintance. So please, for all of our sakes, don’t throw a little panic party every time she comes in. Consider that an order from your guild master. And please know that if you bother her, you may have to deal with someone even more frightening than me. By which I mean that you will. By which I mean that I could not help you, nor would I bother trying.”

Jeez, Sanya went off on the adventurers like a true guild master, but… Who was supposed to be more frightening then Sanya? She didn’t mean the king, did she? If so, things would really pop off.

Sanya turned to me now. “So, Yuna, what’s up? Did you want work?”

“I came here to ask the guild something…before all this happened.” I looked around the room. Asking about the mines wasn’t my top priority anymore—things had only barely settled down.

“Ah. Then you can ask me.” Sanya looked out at the murmuring adventurers and sighed. “Both of you, come with me.” She led us behind the front desk.

The guild master’s office was as spacious as I expected. There was a hefty desk by the window in the back and bookshelves laden with all kinds of documents lined the walls. There was a table at the center of the room and chairs sandwiching it. It looked a little like a conference room. Instead of taking her own seat at the back, Sanya sat down in one of the guest chairs in the middle of the room. She looked at us for a moment before urging us down.

“Any seat you like,” she said. Fina and I took the ones closest. “What was it that you wanted to ask the guild?”

Finally. I told her everything.

“A mithril knife,” she said slowly, rubbing her temple. “You need a mithril knife…for this child to harvest the black tiger…that you killed protecting the students, who…” Sanya shook her head. “Well, fine. I suppose if you need to harvest a black tiger, you really can’t do it with a regular knife. And you came all the way here to the capital for that?”

Yep—and she didn’t know about the bear transport gate either, so here I was again looking really weird. Ah, well. “I heard from the blacksmith that a golem appeared in the mines.”

“Yes, it did. According to the miners who witnessed it, they dug into a giant cavern and awoke the golem inside of it. They all escaped, but barely.”

“And now that golem is going wild in the mines?” If it was just one, I felt like an adventurer should be able to defeat it like normal, or at least block it off from the mine proper. Weren’t there tons of ways to deal with it?

“It is. It attacks anyone who ventures into the mines, but at least it never leaves.”

Kinda reminded me of a dungeon-crawler game. Monsters never left dungeons in those things… Or maybe the golem was protecting something? In games and novels, golems tended to appear as guardians.

“Haven’t adventurers gone to slay it?”

“Several have tried, but…” Sanya paused. Sighed. “It seems to be a difficult one. Apparently, there isn’t just one golem.”

“Are there multiple?”

“Of this we are sure. Multiple golems have been defeated, yet there are still more. We don’t know how many.”

Maybe the golems were infinitely spawning? In the game, I would’ve loved to get some XP grinding them, but when infinite respawn occurred in real life, it was just a nuisance. Oh, and trouble for all the people living nearby, of course.

“On top of that, the normal golems give way to iron golems deep within the cavern. Much more difficult.”

Yeah, I guess it’d be a pain to fight one of those in a cave. You couldn’t really use elemental fire magic in there, and you couldn’t rely on physical earth magic either. As for wind magic, would that even cut through iron? Using water was out of the question, and ice would run into the same issue as earth magic. Really made you wish you had a mithril sword, but… I mean, that was kind of the problem, you know? Ugh.

“So…if I were to go to the mines, would I be able to get my hands on mithril ore?” Eyes on the mithril, Yuna, not the golems.

“Hmm, I’m not sure. That would be in the trade guild’s jurisdiction.”

Oh, come on. I had to go to the trade guild now? Was I just running in circles?

What was going on here? Maybe it’d be better if I gave up on this for a little while? It wasn’t like I was in a big hurry to get the black tiger harvested. Also, since I had the bear transport gate, I could come to the capital whenever I wanted. Maybe it’d be best for me to come back when the golem slaying was over.

Ah well. I hadn’t been able to get the mithril even after coming all the way out to the capital. Not much I could do about it this time. “Fina, let’s give up on this for now. We can have a look around the capital, then go home.”

Yep, that was that. We were done. This was over.

But the moment I stood up from my seat, there was a knock at the door.

“Come in.” Sanya answered…and indeed, someone came in.

“Huh? Is that you, Yuna and Fina?”

“Ellelaura?!”

Ellelaura, Noa and Shia’s mother, entered the room.