Chapter 12
#12화 Newbie Adventurer Bern (10) - Manners Depend on the Other Party
Bern's face went cold.
Normally, to speak with Lucidra, it was enough to be strongly aware that he was addressing her and think it over, but this time he had even let it slip out unconsciously.
“You should really think before you speak.”
Lucidra said indignantly, as if she had been wronged.
[Why, what, why? You think devil worshippers or witches who rave about sabbats and the like do it for no reason? There aren't many techniques that are this easy, fast, and efficient for gathering mana. If it's a type like that woman, who naturally has little mana to begin with, her mana could multiply severalfold in an instant.]
“The problem is the method.”
Bern teaching Blanca a siphoning technique under the banner of boosting her combat power? It would be sexual harassment beyond any excuse.
No matter how commonplace lewd banter was in the adventurer trade, using it on a fellow party member was a different matter.
[Tsk. Well, even siphoning doesn't necessarily have to involve sex. Directly touching the other person with your hand—more precisely, with your skin—and stealing their life force and mana, or absorbing the soul and vitality of someone you've defeated, all of that also counts as 'siphoning.']
“Hmm. That side sounds fairly good. How about 70%?”
[This is one of the sources that earned me the title of Great Demon, you know? That's nowhere near enough. Obviously you need to give me 100%, plus an extra reward!]
“Come to think of it, 65% seems like it would be enough.”
[No, you're going to strip a person bare and still keep some for yourself? And why is the percentage going down!]
“Besides, this is something I'm doing to strengthen Blanca. If you take everything, then even if she learns the technique, it would be no different from not learning it at all. 60%.”
[Even so, this is too much! Honestly, even if you took 100%, just teaching it would still leave me at a loss!]
“There's no need to teach the knowledge or method itself. If necessary, a type that can be used like a tool would be good too. That would reduce the risk of the secret leaking. 55%.”
[No, it's easy to say that! That's not something you can just whip up that easily!]
“Understood. 50%.”
[Stop! Fine, I'll do it! Isn't that enough!]
“I'm glad this turned into a mutually satisfying deal.”
[You demonic bastard....]
Bern was briefly puzzled.
If you put it in human terms, it'd be like another race saying, 'You human bastard!' I wonder if that even counts as an insult.
Roughly ten minutes later, a small ring suddenly popped out of Bern's shadow.
For something he had said couldn't be made that quickly, it had been fairly fast.
[I crystallized part of my essence. If you wear it while killing monsters or humans, it will absorb some of their vital energy and bestow it on the owner. If you're touching the target with the hand wearing the ring, the absorption speed goes up.]
It seemed making the ring hadn't been all that easy, as Lucidra's voice sounded a little drained.
“Does it raise the total reserve, or the current mana amount?”
[Both. If the user's vessel is empty, it fills it; if it's already full, it enlarges the vessel itself.]
“I see.”
Bern was genuinely impressed.
In other words, it meant an RPG character could level up and raise stats by killing monsters, at least in terms of mana.
When ordinary adventurers can slaughter a hundred goblins and still not gain any meaningful stat boosts, that performance was basically cheating.
“Any side effects, or anything to be careful about when using it?”
[No one but that woman can use it. The terms of the deal were, after all, 'a means that could help that woman.']
Bern nodded.
Lucidra would also see her power wandering here and there as more than merely unpleasant, but as a serious threat, so it was a restriction she could fully understand.
[...But, you know. Why are you so fixated on her?]
“Fixated? Me?”
[Aren't you? In terms of pure talent or ability, that Blanca girl or whatever she is isn't all that impressive. Wouldn't it be better to take a weak one and raise her up, instead of just shooting up on your own and then hanging around with someone at your level whenever you feel like it?]
Lucidra couldn't make sense of Bern.
For now, he was still being treated as a 'capable newbie,' but once this goblin incident was properly known, Bern's value would soar even higher, and there would be plenty of people willing to recruit him under much better conditions.
So why was he clinging to Blanca and doing this much for her? How much had they even gotten along?
In response to her question, Bern answered as if it were only natural.
“Because that's exactly the one thing a crown prince can't do.”
[What?]
Lucidra's words were flooded with question marks.
Bern gave a bitter smile.
A crown prince stands at the center of great power and authority, and precisely because of that, his actions are heavily restricted.
He can't just step outside the palace whenever he wants, and even if his heart is moved, it's hard for him to show favor to someone.
The mere fact that the crown prince favors or is close to a particular person gives politics all sorts of openings to exploit.
But an adventurer isn't like that.
If there's something he wants to do, he does it; if there's someone he likes, he helps them.
That was the dream of a crown prince, and that was Bern the adventurer.
“Well, there is such a thing... hm?”
Bern tilted his head.
His keen senses picked up a presence frantically running toward the room he was staying in.
-Hyung! Are you there? Hyung!!
The voice shouting while pounding on the door was one Bern remembered.
When Bern opened the door, Renya said, sweating profusely.
“Blanca noona is in danger, Hyung!”
Bern's eyes narrowed.
***
“Blanca, you know. Don't you think you've been going a bit too far lately?”
There's a saying among adventurers.
The very moment it seems like luck has come your way is the most dangerous moment of all.
It was also a proverb with quite a few real-life examples, so it was hardly just simple paranoia.
Luck makes people's hearts soar, and for adventurers who always live alongside danger, that kind of exhilaration is fatal.
But.
Even so, wasn't this too fast? Blanca let out a long sigh.
“I don't know what you're suddenly trying to get at, Karina.”
Unlike Blanca, whose light-blue hair and outfit left only her face exposed, the red-haired woman exposed her shoulders and upper chest and curled her lips in a sneer.
“Honestly, I was pretty pleased when I heard you'd been hired as a guild receptionist. As an old teammate, it was nice to see you finally settle somewhere and find stability instead of just taking abuse wherever you went.”
Then Karina went on.
“A chance came along once in a while. You quit the receptionist job that other people couldn't even hope to get, and then snatched up a rookie who had only just shed his greenhorn image. And then you even went and made fake achievements out of bogus reports. Blanca, why did you become so ugly? Because of you, we can't even hold our heads up either.”
Karina's voice was full of hatred and contempt, with no attempt to hide either.
With a sinking feeling, Blanca turned her gaze to the other people around Karina.
Two warriors. One thief. One mage—not a priest, but at any rate someone who could use healing magic.
Every single one of them was a face Blanca knew.
Amusingly, only one of them was awkwardly averting his eyes, while the rest were all staring at Blanca with looks mixed with suspicion and dissatisfaction, as if they were siding with Karina.
“Karina is right. No matter how desperate things get, if you keep spouting that kind of nonsense, it drags our reputation down too.”
“I've never made any nonsense claims.”
“Ha! Then you expect us to believe that just two people wiped out hundreds of goblins?”
“The guild even sent an investigation team to confirm it.”
“Well, you were in the guild for a while too, weren't you? How do we know you didn't pull some shady trick behind the scenes?”
Blanca frowned deeply.
Their words were nonsense. The Adventurer Guild wasn't something that could be fooled so easily, and those words could even be taken as questioning the guild's competence and fairness.
If an ordinary adventurer were caught spouting this kind of nonsense in the middle of the street, the guild would have every right to punish them for it.
But they weren't ordinary adventurers.
A rank-3 adventurer party rare enough to count on one hand even across the entire Eastern Branch, and one whose promotion to rank 4 was all but certain in the near future.
Unless they had openly defied the guild, they were too valuable to punish lightly for talking like that on the street.
All the more so if it was a quarrel among old teammates.
“Whether you believe me or not is your business, so do whatever you want. I'm leaving.”
“Wait, the conversation isn't over yet.”
Thinking it would only tire her out to keep talking, Blanca tried to turn away, but she had no choice but to stop.
Because several ice spears had appeared in midair, surrounding her and blocking her path.
Blanca's gaze turned cold.
She turned around and looked at the red-haired mage.
“Don't cross the line, Karina.”
“You're the one who crossed it first. After getting kicked out for lacking ability, are you still going to smear the party's name even after you're gone?”
Blanca gritted her teeth.
If it had been the Blanca of the past, she could have melted that little ice stunt with fire in an instant.
Back when they were in the same party, fire and ice often competed with each other, and as a bonus, the party members would joke that, judging by their hair colors, the magic they were meant to learn had been swapped.
But the Blanca of now had to take even this light provocation as a serious threat.
She could melt those ice spears right away, but then Karina would respond with even stronger magic. In the end, Blanca would be the one pushed back.
“What do you want?”
“Now we're talking.”
Karina's smile deepened.
Her attitude was as if watching Blanca force herself to endure the humiliation was unbearably amusing.
“Well, we can't exactly make a scene out here, so why don't we move somewhere else first? Let's have a talk after all this time, okay?”
Just as Blanca was reluctantly about to agree to Karina's uncharacteristically gentle tone, that was when...
“Hey! Over here! Hyung!”
A man whose voice alone sounded frivolous, and who looked utterly without presence—a textbook third-rate bootlicker, and not even a proper one at that—was huffing and pointing in the direction of Blanca and Karina.
Right after that, Blanca felt a sudden floating sensation.
“…Huh?”
Her vision spun wildly.
The feel of a firm arm holding her body.
Realizing that she was being carried princess-style, Blanca blankly looked upward, then muttered.
“Bern?”
“Ms. Blanca, are you all right?”
“Why...?”
Why are you here, why did you interfere, why do you have such a hard expression on your face.
It was a 'why' loaded with many meanings, but no answer came back.
Bern simply checked Blanca over in silence, and once he confirmed that there was nothing seriously wrong, he carefully set her down on the ground.
“What is that?”
And seeing that, Karina couldn't believe her eyes.
The ice spears she had floated in the air to block Blanca's path were still right where they had been.
And yet that young man named Bern had casually pulled Blanca out, and Karina couldn't see even the slightest hint of how he had done it.
Karina turned her eyes to her companions.
She thought that if anyone had seen what that young man did, it would be the warrior types—especially her companions, who could reinforce their bodies with mana, since physical ability mattered to them.
But they couldn't answer Karina's question.
They hadn't been able to see exactly what Bern had done either.
They had gone on guard and signaled the anomaly to Karina with their eyes, and Karina was flustered.
She'd heard he was fairly skilled, but even so, the very best of rank 3 hadn't even been able to catch his movement?
But Karina was a veteran adventurer too.
She quickly calmed herself and erased the ice spears.
Having realized the other side might be far above what she'd expected, she judged that talking would be more profitable than fighting.
“Bern, was it? I think there must be some misunderstanding here. What just happened wasn't really an attempt to do anyone harm. I was just trying to have a conversation, that's all.”
And then, Bern replied.
“Can't you even tell the difference between a conversation and a threat, you moron bastard?”
At the rough profanity, utterly unlike Bern's usual self, the atmosphere around them froze cold.