Volume Eight: The Guild — Chapter Sixty-Four: God Loves Mankind, and Loves the Minotaurs Even More

By the time we reached Kaler, Longbow Sunshot, Hundred-Million Ox, and I had each completed our tasks and finished handing them in, and we each received our own payment. Melody Grace and Wye Formation—Goose Formation, as we still called her—went with us to stroll through the whole town, repaired our armor and gear, and stocked up on every sort of medicine.

Kaler Town was a big place: populous, bustling, and commercially thriving, no less than a medium-sized city. Many citizens and merchants came here for help, and ordinary adventurers could find plenty of quests. Yet this lively market town sat on the eastern edge of the Kansen Plain, facing a plain rich beyond measure—an ideal hunting ground and fur trader’s haven. Most of the tasks offered there were about hunting: either bringing down a few steppe lions or skinning a handful of lizards. With Goose Formation, the staunch animal-rights zealot, Melody Grace could only look on in helpless sorrow at those high-paying hunting bounties and reluctantly take a simple message-delivery job.

That job sent us across the grasslands to Tithlo City in the Saltesas Highlands: to deliver a love letter from a woman in her sixties, wrinkled enough to count herself older than his grandmother, to His Excellency Viscount Enrique, the strategic officer quartered in the local garrison.

Before Melody and Goose went, we had already delivered three of that woman’s letters and had even seen Viscount Enrique with our own eyes. He was a young, handsome, gallant soldier. When he received those ardent letters written by a lover old enough to be his grandmother, he seemed delighted beyond reason, kissing the paper full of syrupy devotion again and again. I remember my skin prickling so violently it felt like bruises on my shins. Believe me when I say it was a scandalous love story for the ages—watching it was torment enough for the messenger.

To make matters worse, Enrique paid only ten silver for a delivery—barely enough to cover the wear on your boots across the steppe, and if you wanted to ride a public carriage back to Kaler Town you’d have to pay the fare out of your own pocket.

Faced with this unparalleled nonsense of a quest, Goose—who should have fled—was strangely delighted and set off with Melody Grace, while Niu and I took their absence as an opening to forge more armor-piercing rounds and hand them over when she returned.

In Kaler’s alchemical workshop, I sorted the materials I had gathered on the road, mixed and stirred them in the magical furnace, and tried to make as much high-energy powder as possible. Longbow Sunshot sat beside me, pulling out assorted tools and hammering on the recently purchased copper plates in a restless rhythm. Finished cartridges stood in neat rows on the table. Compared with ordinary gunpowder rounds, these were slimmer and longer, with sharper tips; they looked as if they would sting just by their shape alone. I had no wish to discover what it felt like to be hit in the backside by one of them.

Only Hundred-Million Ox was idle. He drifted through the laboratory with loose, careless steps, sometimes coming by to inspect our work, then quickly losing interest and drifting away again.

“When are you going to finish?” He had already asked it for the ninth time.
“Soon,” I gave him that answer for the ninth time.
“You said that just now,” he said, pout-stiff with annoyance.
“Oh? Is that so? I’ll say it again next time.”

I gave him a hard look. He fell silent, wandered off, and scattered the trial tools on the desk by the door into a mess. He stood at the threshold for a while, bored, then came back in, scratched at the horns atop his head in frustration, and eventually—unable to bear it—asked again:
“When are you going to finish?”

“Shut up!”

I and Longbow had finally exhausted our patience; we could not bear his constant nagging much longer. At one point I even suspected that the two great horns and the rough hide on his shoulders might be a splendid disguise, and that if we tore him apart we might uncover a very talkative halfling inside.

We pushed him bodily into a corner of the room and ordered him to keep silent until we were done, or we would be happy to cut off that absurdly long tongue of his and make it into a belt. Our warning had some effect. For quite a while afterward, Hundred-Million Ox crouched in the corner, slinking and glaring with huge, resentful eyes, then idly drew circles on the wall with his thick right index finger. The scratching made a harsh, destructive creak; I half-worried he’d carve a hole in the wall if he ever dumped his whole frustration on it.

Thankfully, he soon found a better pastime.

The workshop had been converted from a dilapidated old tiled house. It was low, damp, and badly worn, with a floor sunken below the level of the road outside. In all nature, few species can truly thrive in such quarters; humans, unfortunately, are one such odd entrant. Another, less welcome creature also shares these houses quietly, often without our knowing, without permission.

You have probably guessed what I mean. Yes—rats.

Like all dark, damp, and decrepit old houses, this laboratory housed a flourishing clan of them. They’d creep out from dark corners, and at the slightest moment they would bolt with a sharp squeak into another corner, vanishing into holes hidden behind bookcases or under the table.

At one such moment, while Hundred-Million Ox crouched in the corner, a miserable rat happened to run past him. He swatted casually. The thing collapsed instantly, legs in the air, and its little soul slipped away as a narrow white line into his chest—so that his “valorous” paladinly deed could be counted as a symbolic gain of experience.

Immediately he fell in love with the game.

He began studying every corner of the room, tracing every pattern of mouse movement. At first the rats’ speed turned him clumsy and they escaped in twos and threes. But soon the bull-knight learned their habits, and fewer and fewer got away. In time, only a mouse—if you can call it that—managed to slip past his grip.

As for Hundred-Million Ox’s warped delight in proving power by butchering tiny mice, there was no better response than to pretend not to notice. In truth, as long as he stopped tormenting our ears, we did not care what he did while waiting. Besides, with soul-force as scarce as it is, hunting rats was at least a useful way to train, gain experience, and stay healthy in spirit.

At that moment, a man, a woman, and a female dwarf passed the window. They moved quickly, and I could not make out their professions or names, but beneath each of their names the same line of tiny text was written. I read it clearly:
“VIP Club for Height-Increasing Insoles.”

It was almost certainly a guild name. Judging from the title, I would wager dwarves and Ru-kin made up most of its roster.

“So our Alliance finally has guilds now,” I said.

“Since the merge campaign, the guild system opened,” Longbow replied. “I’ve heard the Alliance guilds are close to twenty now.” As if to verify it, a half-orc warblade with a broad axe slung over his shoulder happened to pass outside the window at that moment. He belonged to a guild called the “Shanghai Elders’ Axe Art Troupe — Former Shanghai Axe Gang.”

“You know, the four people from the Last Empire we just killed were also in one guild, weren’t they?” I realized.
“Yeah,” Longbow said. “The Empire side has maybe sixteen or seventeen as well.”

A heavy crack sounded nearby, and drew our attention. We turned to see “the Knight of Knights” entirely consumed by this murderous little game. After slaughtering four or five dozen rats, he was no longer satisfied with ordinary blows and started using his skills.

Holy Collision. Judgment Light. Heavy Impact. War Trample. Even in the face of true danger I had seldom seen him spend magic so recklessly. To batter wall and floor with so many potent skills in so short a time, for that house still to stand to this day, I could only ascribe to the all-encompassing will of Darimos.

A thick pillar of black obsidian swung through a violent whirlwind. The petty mice had nowhere to run. Under the paladin’s overwhelming force they submitted and fell one by one. Watching the scene, I suddenly wondered whether cats were really the best anti-mouse defense. Perhaps keeping a bull-man at home made a better exterminator. Of course, there is a small risk your house gets torn apart—but nothing worth doing in this world is without risk, is it?

We dragged our contemptuous gaze back from him and returned to work while we kept talking about guilds.

“Now, are there really not that many? Is founding a guild really that hard?” I asked my dwarven friend.

“The requirements are still fairly many: Master and two vice-masters must be level forty-five or above, membership over twenty, guild assets over five thousand gold, plus five hundred gold in founding fees. Those are manageable. What’s truly hardest is the Stone of Conviction. Only with one of those can you apply to create a guild.” I had to wonder where Longbow got such precise figures.

The noisy clatter from Ox made it hard to hear; Longbow’s explanations came in bursts. I glanced at the now-self-indulgent bull and asked, “What is the Stone of Conviction? Where can it be found? Is it hard to obtain?”

Longbow made an exaggerated face. “What, brother, don’t you even check the home board? It’s all posted there!”
Before I could ask what he meant by “home board,” he kept talking.
“Its drop chance is very low. A server can produce at most two in a day: one for the Empire, one for the Alliance. Sometimes not even one appears. The location is completely random—no one knows where it’s located. Though some areas may have a higher chance. Old Ox, can you be a little quieter? I can barely hear my own voice…”

After rebuking Ox again for making such noise, Longbow added, “Do you remember the ‘One Who Devoted Life to Dreams’? The paladin who once stood as an invincible shield with Ox. On the first day the guild system opened, he camped on Dragonridge’s Burning Caves and kept clearing them for seven straight runs. In the end, a Stone of Conviction finally dropped. The guild he founded, the ‘Order of the Hammer of Judgment,’ was the first guild on our server.”

“What luck he had,” I said, half in admiration.

“Luck alone won’t do it,” Longbow said. “That man worked hard for his guild. Hey, Old Ox, you don’t need to use Divine Punishment: Starlight—your crowd-cleaving super move—on a mouse!”

Ox knelt there, his whole body haloed in the blinding blue-white radiance of divine magic. That poor mouse had become a corpse on the first starfall wave and never witnessed the celestial brilliance descending to the ground. When Longbow scolded him, Ox looked at us with unusual shyness; even his usually leathery face carried the faintest blush.

“What are the benefits of joining a guild?” I asked again.

“Many,” he answered. “Levelling materials from others. Help to clear high-difficulty missions. Loans if you’re short on gear money. And whenever you descend into a dungeon, you can quickly find allies.”

“Then why don’t you join one yourself?”

“There are plenty of hassles: you have to provide leveling materials for others, assist them through difficult tasks, lend money for gear, and always stand ready to run other people’s dungeons...”

“Sounds inconvenient enough.” I weighed it and came to my conclusion.
“…And what I hate most is joining another’s guild—there’s no real pride or sense of belonging. If I’m to join one, it should be one built with friends.”

“I agree,” I said. “If we made our own, even the trouble would be worth it.”

“No chance,” he laughed. “To acquire a Stone of Conviction is harder than getting struck by lightning twice in one day. I’d be better off buying two lottery tickets and hoping for luck.”

With a heavy thud, Ox at last seemed to have had enough of the rat slaughter. He set his obsidian pillar down and came to us in haste—he had probably killed no fewer than two hundred rats by then. The rat clan in this room was extraordinarily resilient; even after losing so many relatives, they kept emerging from the corners in waves and offering themselves up to Ox’s palm.

“Longbow, Jeff, you two…”

“...we’re almost done,” I said before he could finish. This time I was speaking truth: I had exhausted my materials completely and could not make more high-energy powder. If Longbow worked a little faster, with all the powder in front of us turned into armor-piercing rounds, we would be finished.

“But, Jeff...” Ox persisted.
“Look, just finish that promising pastime you have of drawing circles in the corner for a little longer,” Longbow muttered, like he wanted to kick Ox straight into the wall.
“It’s not like I haven’t waited long already...” Ox grumbled.

“We all know you’ve waited for a long time. Since you can wait this long, you can wait a little longer. Besides, even when these rounds are done, we still have to wait for Goose and the others to return.”

“But I was killing rats...” he complained.

“Rat-killing is a noble service,” Longbow said. “To eliminate plagues is everyone’s duty. And it gives experience. You’re almost leveled, right? With just a few more... seventy-nine thousand six hundred forty-one and you’ll be there. Honestly, that’s not many.”

Longbow praised Ox’s heroic extermination without pause, but he clearly did not consider that if there truly were that many rats in that crumbling hut, we should worry less about Ox leveling up and more about whether we could all survive.

“I’m only saying—” Ox insisted on having the last word.
“Shut it! Give him a lesson, then!” Our patience finally snapped. We had wanted, finally, to force the loquacious giant into silence. As we closed in on him, some of us ready with fists and feet, arguing over whether to stuff a smelly sock into his mouth or fashion a belt muzzle, Ox strained with all his might. From beneath the space where we sat on him, he somehow pushed out a hand and held a pale yellow transparent crystal up before us.

At sight of the crystal, Longbow and I froze like statues.

The Stone of Conviction. A miraculous relic infused with the force of faith; treasure of the soul, source of courage. Its bearer gathers allies into one purpose, becomes a leader all revere, and opens a path to greatness.

That was the item description.

“Where did you get this?” I said. I had never seen a dwarf’s eyes widen wider than Ox’s.
“I just… I just dropped it out right now,” Ox rumbled.
His voice was muffled and deep, since Longbow sat squarely on his face.

“Where did it drop?” Longbow was nearly frantic, and I saw in his eyes the same absurd suspicion I felt: was it true, and was there anything else here to kill besides rats?

“Besides rats? Is there anything else in this room I could kill?”

And it was true.

A soundless thunderbolt split my mind and shattered whatever pleasant assumptions about this world had survived up to then. What age is this, where one man can spend his blood and tears and the lives of brave souls against infernal flame demons for a priceless relic through vast sacrifice, while another, bored and idle, can slaughter a few mice and win the same relic with no effort at all? For the first time I truly felt that even the Supreme Darimos does not deal entirely fairly with the thinking creatures he made.

At least, from what we saw, he seemed curiously generous to bull-kin.

“Did you... can you see clearly?”

“We can.”

“Then can you take your bottoms off me?”

Only then it dawned on us that we’d almost shoved a stinking sock into the mouth of this lucky bull just moments ago. Longbow stood up, paused as if struck by a sudden thought, and then said, all of a sudden bright as a spark, “I’m going offline for a while. I’ll be back in about ten minutes.” Light unique to a Riftwalker flared from his hand. His body grew thin and translucent—his departure through the turbulent seams between planes was beginning.

“Where are you going?” Ox asked quickly.
“To buy a lottery ticket downstairs,” Longbow replied, his voice already fading as he departed.
By the time the words ended, he had fully vanished, gone from the Falvi Continent.