Ruins Guard Duty Request (1)

“Three dungeons? It's a hidden-dungeon bargain sale.”

It was truly a dangerously generous event.

Sargadis had plenty of ruins, but dungeons were rare. In fact, even the ruins being excavated weren't all that impressive. If this had been an archaeological hot spot where incredible artifacts turned up, there would have been an archaeological branch here at least.

And I would have been pushed aside by those people and failed to find any decent material for a thesis.

Wouldn't I have kicked the bucket in no time, like a level-seven newbie getting stomped to death by a Crimson Balrog?

That had been one of my criteria for choosing the city where I would work as an adventurer. Somewhere reasonably safe, with material for a thesis. Sargadis was a carefully selected backwater in a prime location.

In twenty-first-century terms, it was like ‘a provincial city in Gyeonggi Province, thirty minutes by car from a new town, where redevelopment had been abandoned halfway through and the place was packed with eighties- and nineties-style houses.’

“Bargen… what?”

“Ah. It's just a word from my country, so don't worry about it.”

“Really?”

Dorka brushed it off without much interest and looked out the inn's door.

“Anyway, they say the ruins are nothing special, but the dungeons are dangerous. Both of them are packed with monsters, and apparently one of them is even trying to spill out. That's why all the adventurers went out to work.”

“Really? What kind of dungeon is it for things to have gotten so serious?”

In this world, the term dungeon referred broadly to places where monsters appeared.

Ruins weren't considered dungeons. That made sense, since in ruins abandoned for anywhere from decades to centuries, all the monsters inside would have died off too. They had to eat to survive, after all.

There were two main types of places called dungeons.

One was a lair formed by a gathering of monsters, and the other was a secret base built by deranged lunatics. Goblin lairs were the representative example of the former, while a black mage's hideout was the genre's iconic example of the latter.

“A dungeon? They say it's a goblin lair and a black mage's hideout.”

“That's a complete gourmet set menu.”

The side-dish lineup was incredible. Better than my breakfast.

“…But if that's the case, isn't Sargadis dangerous?”

“The adventurers will take care of it. Even if they come near the city, the lord's army is here too.”

People sure expected a lot from the soldiers of a backwater town. Relying on the soldiers here was like expecting a rear-area support unit to crush North Korea.

“Why don't you stop sleeping in and going to the bathhouse, and go pick something up while you have the chance? I've never seen an adventurer wake up at lunchtime and eat breakfast when a dungeon has been discovered.”

“Heh heh. I'm just naturally unique. Besides, the protagonist is supposed to make a late entrance.”

“You have to appear in the opening to be the protagonist.”

That was brutally accurate. People here were surprisingly good at delivering hard truths.

“Dungeon. Dungeon. Dungeon….”

I muttered while sipping my soup.

A guy who got utterly destroyed by a few dozen katydids was going to explore a dungeon?

There was no bullshit more ridiculous than that. Was this telling me to die with my master's degree?

‘I should just go to the bathhouse and then finish up a cost-effective request.’

Surely, with everyone distracted by the dungeon, some incredibly lucrative requests would have been left unattended. Thinking that, I took another spoonful of soup, then suddenly remembered what Dorka had said earlier.

“…Dorka.”

“Huh? Why?”

“No, it's nothing. Um, what was the name of the adventurer guild that discovered those supposedly unremarkable ruins you mentioned earlier?”

Dorka, who was carrying over a large chunk of bread, blinked at me.

“Audumla.”

Fuck me. I should've slept longer.

***

It was around lunchtime.

I finished every last drop of soup, even went to the bathhouse, and then reluctantly reported for duty at the Audumla Guild.

“For fuck's sake.”

As expected, a huge wall poster had been put up on the guild bulletin board.

[###Wanted: an adventurer who can decipher these characters###]

Yep, this was our pathetic little company, too embarrassing to show anywhere in the world.

While everyone else was finding dungeons and building their track records, this place was going its own fucking way, sitting around after discovering some worthless ruins. How about giving me a choice for once? Fucking Smalludumla Guild.

Other adventurers beside me were grumbling about it too.

“No, seriously. What kind of letters are shaped like this? Even if I wrote with my dick, it'd look better.”

“Could this be something worshiped by heretics…? What was it called again? Anyway, isn't it that?”

“Can't we just scribble down whatever and spend the reward money? We're not getting promoted to Silver anyway.”

The level of the conversation beside me made me want to kill myself.

This was why adults told you to study hard and get a good job. Things had reached the point where I was worried about social perception before income or benefits.

I consciously blocked out their voices and turned my eyes to the string of characters on the poster.

‘Hieroglyphs.’

They were characters modeled directly after the shapes of their subjects. They were a type of writing closer to pictures, like the characters in Egyptian murals.

The meanings were… bird, food, conduct a ritual, enjoy?

‘What the fuck is this?’

I furrowed my brow.

Even with my abilities, hieroglyphs were extremely difficult to decipher. Hieroglyphs were fundamentally full of abstract nuances.

I could understand that the first two characters at the beginning each meant “bird” and “food.”

But I couldn't tell whether they meant feeding a bird or were a metaphor for a caterpillar, the bird's food.

The people who used hieroglyphs had probably agreed on their meanings ahead of time in spoken language, since they were familiar expressions to them. But as a third party with no one to ask, I felt thoroughly screwed.

That was also why hieroglyphs had never become the mainstream form of writing.

The only successful hieroglyphic script I knew was Chinese characters. And even those Chinese characters suffered from the same limitations as hieroglyphs.

That was why Chinese assigned both a “pronunciation” and a “meaning” to every character. Once things got that far, it was hard to call them hieroglyphs anymore. In the end, even adding pronunciations and meanings wasn't enough, so the number of Chinese characters proliferated into the tens of thousands.

They even handled foreign words that were difficult to translate into Chinese characters by simply transliterating them. Who the hell sees the characters 咖啡 and reads them as coffee? It was a massive cultural shock.

Anyway, there was no point trying to interpret the meaning using only the characters here.

I had never seen these characters, even as someone from Carmine. They must have belonged to some primitive people whose written records were practically nonexistent. Deciphering them without comparative material or traces was almost impossible.

Anyway, why did they handle things in such a shitty way? Were they planning to assassinate me by giving my muscular body cancer?

‘…Doesn't this guild have anyone who majored in archaeology or linguistics?’

Of course not. I quickly abandoned that hope and went to the reception desk.

There were two male receptionists handling the desk today, and I had never seen either of them before.

“Excuse me. I'd like to receive the reward for the sewer reconnaissance request I completed last time.”

I might as well take what I was owed. Three coppers was thirty thousand won—the money for two value-for-money half-and-half chicken orders with extra pickled radish.

“The sewer reconnaissance request? What's your name?”

“Nord. Here's my plate.”

I took the plate hanging around my neck and showed it to him. The receptionist checked my name with his gloved left hand.

“Mr. Nord…. Ah, yes. Since the request itself is considered to have had a problem, you're eligible to receive the reward.”

Naturally. They had sent three Iron-class scrubs and one Bronze-class scrub into a sewer crawling with murderous bugs. If anything, we should have extorted compensation from them instead.

“Here's your reward: three coppers.”

─Jingle-jingle.

I took the three coins and put them in my wallet. At the same time, I tried to ask my question casually.

“By the way, about the writing posted on the bulletin board. It isn't all of the writing excavated from the ruins, is it?”

“Pardon? Ah, yes. I heard they copied only part of an inscription from the ruins.”

I knew it.

What the fuck were they thinking, bringing back only part of an inscription and then asking someone to interpret it? Were they planning to find someone who could decipher it and drag them to the ruins?

While I was inwardly groaning in disbelief, the male receptionist looked at me as if I were something strange.

“But how did you know that was only part of the writing, sir?”

Oh, shit. What was I supposed to say?

I felt cold sweat trickle down my back at the unexpected question. If I handled this poorly, they would discover my qualifications.

And the moment they found out I had a master's degree in archaeology, the guild master or one of his lackeys would come flying over with their ass hairs streaming and ask, “Hey, wanna join our guild?”

“Ahem. What's so surprising? It's simple.”

I used the quintessential civil-servant “Uh… um… uh…” speaking style. It was extremely effective for buying time to think of an excuse. Why not give it a try sometime if you get the chance?

“If it were just a few lines of graffiti scribbled in the corner of a wall, would they have copied it on purpose and come looking for someone who knew its meaning? It must have been written somewhere blatantly suspicious, or they must have brought back only part of a very long inscription.”

“Wow, your powers of deduction are incredible. That's right. They say those characters were densely written across the entire ruin in an extremely suspicious way.”

The male receptionist at the desk exclaimed in surprise and admiration at my words.

After dealing only with adventurers for whom thinking was harder than turning a rusted millstone, he apparently couldn't help being impressed by the deductive powers of a twenty-first-century elite university student (dropout).

There were plenty of incredibly intelligent people here too, but compared to Earth, the proportion of such people seemed seriously low.

That worked in my favor. If all the other adventurers had been professional, intelligent mercenaries who treated me as defective because I couldn't keep up with them, I would have wanted to die.

Anyway, the receptionist continued excitedly.

“From what I heard, almost every wall was covered in drawings like that, from the very mouth of the cave all the way to the ruins inside.”

“Covered in them? Wait, is that really true?”

Imagining it made me fucking terrified.

The adventurer team that had copied those drawings had boldly entered a cave like that, explored it, and come back out.

Were they fucking fearless, or what? To a modern person, it would have felt like an abandoned psychiatric hospital with eyes and human faces drawn all over the walls in red marker.

Fuck, I respected them. The adventurers who explored that place had smashed straight through every horror-movie rule and returned alive.

Or maybe those bastards had already been possessed by ghosts. What if Sargadis had a zombie outbreak soon?

“That's impressive. If it had been me, I'd have been cut at the entrance… I mean, I would've sensed something ominous at the mouth of the cave and run away immediately.”

“Below Silver tier, that would be the wise choice. In fact, the adventurers who first discovered the ruins returned without exploring them and only reported the discovery. Of course, they still receive a reward for doing that: one copper per person.”

“…One copper per person?”

“Yes. One copper per person.”

For fuck's sake.

See? This was why it was a good thing I hadn't taken a job here.

Even if a mountain of gold came out of the ruins, the system was set up so that the discoverers wouldn't get a single crumb.

No wonder money-hungry adventurers crawled inside without reporting to the guild to increase their own shares, then keeled over and made the whole situation worse.

If they treated adventurers like that, imagine how they treated junior receptionists who belonged to the same organization. If I took a job at the guild, I'd obviously be treated like a free translation machine while they talked behind my back.

‘How far are you planning to entertain me, you shitty little company?’

Even thinking about it now, this was a disgustingly primitive and stupid way to operate. But when I thought about how stupid the executives and owners of small companies on Earth could be, things were the same there and here.

Human beings become stupid when profits are involved.

Even if they were lucky enough to have the capital to start a company, the ignorance of small-company owners didn't disappear.

People who didn't know the first thing about management ignored the opinions of the people doing the actual work and did whatever they pleased, so only the people below them ended up dying.

It might be better to prepare to cut ties with this shitty Smalludumla Guild at an appropriate time.

I couldn't work five times as hard at a small company and get paid 2.2 million won a month when I had the qualifications to enter a large corporation, could I?

“Ah, right. There's a decent request related to those ruins. What do you think?”

“A request?”

I had been mentally trashing the place so intensely that I felt repulsed just hearing the word request.

Since they were ruins, it seemed like I might be able to find material for a thesis by going inside. Even so, this deep-rooted aversion kept bubbling up. It was the quintessential trait of a small-company employee.

“It's a commission directly from the guild. We're looking for people to guard the ruins and prevent theft or damage until someone comes to analyze them the day after tomorrow.”

Was it basically taking a shift on guard duty? It sounded boring. I wasn't very interested, and I was just opening my mouth to decline when—

“The reward is ten coppers, and we're offering major promotion benefits to Iron class and below.”

“I'll do it. I've been waiting for exactly that request.”

Once again, human beings become stupid when profits are involved.

And I was just another human being who couldn't help it.