Saying the miner’s town had an adventurer’s guild was a bit of a mislabel. It was a satellite location that most served as a relay for Alerith. It was a single person who could hand out and stamp quests. You could get a receipt, but you’d ultimately need to go to the guild in the city if you wanted to collect money. However, I didn’t really care about the quest at all. I just wanted a reason to be gone all day while we went through the dungeon. The easier the quest was to fulfill, the better.
The small town didn’t have a lot of quests, but it also didn’t have any adventurer’s, so we had our pick. What we ended up choosing was a quest given by someone named Rubee. It was to collect some salt from a nearby mountain. It was an ongoing quest, so we could do it daily. Naturally, it paid by the stone, with a max of a hundred stone a day.
This seemed like an easy job, but a stone was fourteen pounds and split by four adventurers, they could only just manage to carry that amount. Furthermore, it was a two-hour walk in each direction. The assumption was that you wouldn’t have a storage ring either this far out from the city. Not to mention, the area was in the wilderness, so there was the potential for running into monsters that had escaped from the dungeon.
Either way, it was the perfect cover for us, so I took the quest and then left. As we were walking down the path, the girls chatted jovially. Even Raissa was at ease with a smile on her face. Any other adventurers would truly look at this group and wonder what was wrong with our brains. This was a dangerous wilderness, and monsters could sprout up anywhere.
However, everyone there had dived into countless dungeons and regularly put their life on the line. Compared to the traps, monsters, and dangers associated with a dungeon, walking through the wilderness felt like a leisurely stroll, and we didn’t need to stake very much attention on such things.
“You seem to be thinking about something, Master… is it me?” Shao asked, waiting for me in the back of the group to catch up.
“I was just thinking about those Knights.”
“You don’t need to worry. Death is easy in a dungeon, even for knights. It’ll be weeks before they try to send someone, and since we left the bodies out of the safe room, monsters will destroy all the evidence by then.
“No, I mean… weren’t the knights rather easy to kill? We live in a world with RPG elements, right? They were Knights, a second-tier job-class. Even though we’re technically stronger, you one-hit killed them. In this world, where mana and status is a thing, someone that high of a level shouldn’t be killed in a single hit.”
This was something I could only really speak about to Shao. As someone from my own world, she’s the only one who’d understand why I was struggling with understanding the concept of a one-hit kill. Shao remained silent in thought for a moment, but she eventually spoke.
“I used to wonder about this too. When I fought in the gladiator matches, I would fight men many times my size. Yet, if I smashed their head in with a rock, they died all the same. I used to think it was just a matter of getting a critical hit. In the end, I discovered it was a needlessly complex process involving status ailments.”
She shrugged. “Ah… well, for example, the man whose throat I cut. He gained a heavy bleeding status ailment. But because the artery that feeds blood to the brain was also cut, he gained an asphyxiation status. Then, because his throat was cut, he also gained a can’t drink status. So, since he couldn’t drink a potion to heal himself. He quickly gains the status unconscious. Without someone to heal him, that status turned to death quickly.”
“So, it’s really something that simple…”
“Plus, these knights probably weren’t his best. He wouldn’t risk his best in a dungeon where they couldn’t be resurrected. A great deal of a Knights power is dependent on their equipment. They have a synergistic effect, so the better their equipment, the better they are. However, all of them had removed their armor at night, even the guard. They were asking for death.”
“I suppose, that’s how it was.”
Perhaps I was just overthinking things.
We gathered the salt without incident. The salt flats literally had balls of salt just lying around. After picking up enough to satisfy a few days of the request, I opened a portal and we returned to the 5th-floor of the dungeon.