The Heavy Smoker and the Reaper of the Wheat Field (1)

Autumn is the season of harvest.

That was no different in this otherworld, a knockoff medieval society where agriculture was the foundation of everything. The season when the wheat fields turned golden was a time when many jobs opened up.

“It’s pretty hectic today.”

Frang said as she looked at the streets, which were more cramped than usual.

The day after I returned from the Mages’ Guild, Frang and I came out early to find a quest we could undertake together. Since my dick problem had been resolved, we decided to work together and get along.

“It’s because it’s harvest season. I guess everyone’s busy.”

I answered while pulling Frang by the shoulder to keep her from bumping into passersby.

There were lots of unemployed people in this otherworld. Twenty-first-century Korea? People there could at least pick up part-time work. Here, unless someone inherited farmland or a shop from their parents, finding a job was difficult.

What else could explain wannabe adventurers sprouting up from every direction? Being an adventurer was better than becoming a lord’s voluntary serf or a slum-dwelling beggar who was liable to get stabbed to death at any moment.

There was even a rumor that the guild had started charging an entrance fee to filter out the endless stream of riffraff flooding in.

Apparently, the number and quality of applicants were hopeless if they held interviews, while fewer than one in a hundred would pass a test, so they had set the cutoff in an easy-to-understand way: money.

It was a pretty plausible rumor. Anyone capable of scraping together the entrance fee had at least the basic means to support themselves.

The problem was that they couldn’t conduct personality tests, so spectacular idiots occasionally slipped through.

Anyway, in an otherworld where jobs were scarce, harvest season, when extra hands were needed, was a favorable time for the poor. It gave work to people who didn’t even have proper jobs.

“I like the bustle, but I feel like I’m going to get lost.”

Frang complained on tiptoe. Since she was short, this commotion must have felt even more overwhelming to her.

“I’m here. Want to hold hands so we don’t get separated?”

“Hold hands? No. That would make me look like a little kid. I want people to see me as Nord’s lover.”

Frang said this with a pout. Sometimes she came out with things like this without warning. I felt blindsided every time.

“Okay. Still, that’s a little disappointing.”

“…Then can we hold hands somewhere with no people around next time?”

“Heh heh. As you wish.”

We headed to the Audumla Guild, chatting and flirting affectionately.

Sargadis’s roads, roughly three lanes wide, were always cramped and difficult to walk through because of food carts and street vendors. Seeing vendors who paid no taxes while blatantly blocking the road sometimes made me a little irritated.

The city’s central avenue was wide enough for several carriages to pass, but on ordinary streets, getting shoulder-checked while walking was an everyday occurrence.

Still, when I put on an imposing front with my build and equipment, the crowd moved out of my way on its own.

─Murmur-murmur.

We crossed the street and arrived at the guild. There were far more people here than usual too.

It was probably only this crowded in the morning. By lunchtime, everyone would go out to work, and the place would be much less crowded than usual.

An adventurer who didn’t go out to work during autumn wouldn’t survive the winter. Only a few months after harvest season, hellish cold would descend, and how much money the poor managed to save and hold onto during this season apparently determined whether they lived or died.

The source was, of course, Professor Brammaton’s book. I moved toward the bulletin board and spoke to Frang.

“You haven’t worked during autumn either, have you, Frang? Then let’s discuss it together and look for a decent quest.”

“Yeah. But there are too many people.”

Frang muttered as she looked at the crowd in front of the bulletin board. There really were a fucking lot of them. It felt like a crowd surrounding a busking band, inflated several times over.

“Should we wait until the crowd thins out a little?”

“Let’s.”

The two of us, fresh-faced, bottom-rung rookies, waited for quite some time far away from the bulletin board.

While we waited, I tried checking the bulletin board from a distance. Frang was a thief, while I had awakened to mana; together, we made a hawk-eyed duo. Distance was no obstacle.

─Murmur-murmur

But those damn rookie bastards were glued to the bulletin board and had no intention of moving aside.

Every time one person left, two more appeared, so all I could see was the color of the bulletin board. Fuck, had they leased the place or something?

“Hmm? Aren’t those familiar faces?”

Just as I was wondering whether I would have to force my way in, someone spoke to me from behind. It was a slightly hoarse old man’s voice.

“Why, isn’t this Mr. Gentric? It’s been a long time.”

When I turned around, I saw old man Gentric. He was the warrior grandpa who had fled alongside us during the sewer quest where Frang and I first met.

“What do you mean, ‘a long time’? It’s only been a little over a week. Don’t exaggerate.”

Gentric laughed heartily when I greeted him.

Thanks to Frang and me standing around for so long, we apparently ended up running into someone we knew. Frang smiled brightly and greeted Gentric too.

“Hello, Mr. Gentric. Do you remember me too?”

“Of course I do. Aren’t you the young thief girl who got thrown at your friend over there?”

“What? Isn’t that a rather harsh way to remember me?”

“Ho ho. My apologies. Still, it looks like the two of you have gotten quite close?”

Gentric looked at us with the slyness typical of an old man.

This otherworld was a place where the lives of commoners were valued less than an ox that collapsed while pulling a cart. In such a world, being an elderly commoner meant having spent a lifetime eating at others’ sufferance and learning to read the room.

Like any old man of this otherworld, Gentric seemed to have immediately figured out the general nature of our relationship.

So, even under Gentric’s somewhat lecherous gaze, I answered confidently without hiding anything.

“Heh heh. We’ve had a few things happen. We came to work together today, as a matter of fact. Though there are so many people that we can’t even get near the bulletin board.”

When I said that, Gentric stroked his beard and looked pleased.

“Young people are a joy just to look at. Now, let’s see. Today….”

As he spoke, Gentric turned his gaze toward the bulletin board, then soon frowned. It seemed that even a veteran adventurer had no answer to the bulletin board’s server overload.

─Bustle.

There were also plenty of people chatting nearby, so it was practically a marketplace. Some adventurers had given up entirely and gathered elsewhere to talk until a spot opened up.

“Did you hear? A circus troupe from Romania is coming here too! I’m going to save up my quest money and go see them!”

“Did anyone clean up the shit those Sekhmet bastards left behind? There are goblins all over the place, so we can’t even leave the territory.”

“That’s already been taken care of. A mithril-class adventurer came in person. Now all that’s left is the bug-eater bastard.”

“Bug-eater? Oh, the dark mage bastard.”

“I heard traces were found in his hideout, and they’re putting together a team to hunt him down.”

“Isn’t your source a barmaid? Wow, very trustworthy.”

“Shut up, you virgin bastard.”

Amid the miscellaneous noise of people murmuring, my ears managed to pick out the context of actual conversations. It felt as if a program that classified voices through multitasking had been installed in my brain.

‘Is it because I can handle mana now?’

Nefertiti of the Sekhmet Guild had also found us hiding in an instant. Apparently, finding people wasn’t particularly difficult for a warrior awakened to mana.

“At this rate, finding work today will be difficult.”

Old man Gentric clicked his tongue. Even someone with that much experience in this line of work was saying that. I began to worry that we might not even be able to go out to work today.

“Do we need to come out before dawn during seasons like this?”

Frang, who had been quietly watching the bulletin board, asked Gentric.

“That’s right. It’s fastest to target the moment when the guild receptionists finish compiling and posting the quests. But it seems you’re late today. The start of the harvest must have arrived earlier than last year.”

Gentric answered Frang, then folded his arms.

“Still, you won’t starve at the tail end of the busy farming season, since there won’t be a shortage of quests. This time of year, they ought to be right in the middle of the harvest… Why don’t you take a vermin extermination quest?”

“Vermin extermination? You mean getting rid of harmful animals on a farm?”

“That’s right. Vermin are farmers’ archenemy this time of year.”

Tsk. Vermin, huh….

This was a somewhat more difficult quest, and I began to hesitate.

Some people might ask what there was to fear from beasts rather than monsters, but adult wild boars were a hell of a lot more dangerous than goblins, who were nothing more than this otherworld’s green-ass brats.

The low-level mobs along the kobold-goblin line were opponents that even rookies could beat in a straight fight.

They were classified as monsters because they attacked first and couldn’t be used as food, but they were generally weaker than wild beasts.

If you assumed a goblin was around level 5, a wild boar was around level 15.

If weak mobs were stronger than beasts as a matter of common sense, the beasts would have gone extinct long ago. Monsters would have eaten the shit out of them and wiped them out. That was how nature’s food chain worked.

“Wouldn’t vermin extermination be dangerous for Iron-class adventurers like us?”

“No, it’s not really like that. The truly dangerous ones are driven off or caught in advance by the guards or hunters. At most, it’ll be small beasts like bonodiers.”

What the hell was a bonodier? Was it some strange insect or snake known only to country folk? As he spoke, Gentric rotated his neck to loosen his stiff muscles.

“Adventurers just go there, stay for a few days, and help with the farm work. It’s a method frequently used by farmers with a lot of land. There’s almost no fighting involved, but it’s counted as a subjugation quest, so both the farmer and the adventurers benefit.”

Oh. So it was a quest taken under a bit of a pretext. The farmer and the adventurers had reached a dramatic win-win compromise. I didn’t know who had thought of it, but it was a pretty good little trick. The people of this otherworld weren’t to be underestimated either.

“It seems fine. But won’t the competition be fierce?”

“Not at all. Farms don’t turn away extra hands. More people means less time spent harvesting, and then wouldn’t the labor costs go down too?”

Was that how it worked? Whether ten people worked for ten days or a hundred people worked for one day, the farm would spend the same amount of money.

“Besides, aren’t most adventurers originally farmers? Few people are willing to do the farming work they’re sick to death of.”

“Heh heh. That works out well for us.”

I could sympathize with that feeling. If there were a daily graduate-student quest, I would never want to take it either.

“What do you think, Frang? Farming won’t be easy, but doesn’t it seem decent enough?”

“Wouldn’t it depend on when the work is and how many days it lasts? We also have to factor in the inn fee we’d lose.”

“Ah. You’re right.”

This fucking stupid Nord. What a disgrace for someone with a university education. Frang’s sharp observation left me speechless.

A vermin extermination quest required us to stay near the farmland that had posted the request. Staying somewhere else meant losing the three copper per night we had already paid toward the inn.

I didn’t know how much the pay would be, but it wasn’t likely to be high enough to make up for losing three copper per day from our wages. Paying for the inn while sleeping rough would piss me off too.

“What? You pay your inn fee in a lump sum?”

Gentric asked in surprise after hearing us talk. Frang and I nodded.

“Yes. Why?”

“What a foolish thing to do. From now on, pay one day at a time. Otherwise, you’ll go out to work and fail to even break even.”

“Tsk…. Thank you for the advice.”

It was advice steeped in the wisdom of age.

It wasn’t exactly a groundbreaking idea, but we hadn’t thought of it. We rarely took quests that required us to stay away for a long time.

‘Even Professor Brammaton’s book didn’t say anything about paying the inn fee every day.’

I regretted the past for a moment, then reconsidered. Neither Professor Brammaton nor I possessed perfect knowledge of the world. Now that I knew, it was fine.

“Let’s first see whether there’s even a quest available, then continue talking.”

“All right.”

Thus, our opinions began leaning toward taking a quest.

I cut through the crowd and headed toward the front of the bulletin board. There were so many people packed together that it was difficult to push through, but apparently there wasn’t an adventurer there who could match me in strength. As soon as I stepped forward, the crowd yielded and slid aside.

“Excuse me. Coming through.”