Chapter 148 -- Dragged Off To The Adventurers Guild

The next day it was time to return to the surface. As a celebration for conquering the dungeon Fer insisted that breakfast would be Dragon steaks. I had my own Dragon steak with a bowl of rice since I still couldn't face steak on its own, not for breakfast anyway. It still tasted really delicious, of course. We took a short break after eating then it was finally time to leave the dungeon.

"Shall we return to the surface now?" I looked around, making sure we hadn't left anything or anyone behind. I didn't want to have to come back down here again to collect any lost property or missing children.

"Umu, let's go." Fer said, still licking his muzzle, chasing the last vestiges of gravy from his third Dragon steak. Dora-chan flew over and hugged my back while I held Sui firmly in both arms as I straddled Fer's back. Goodbye dungeon, I thought to myself as Fer poured magical power into the Teleportation spell drawn on the wall and everything went black. After a moment of falling in the darkness we were suddenly standing on a magic circle drawn on the floor of a small room, maybe 4 tatami mats in size and surrounded by stone walls.

I looked around, puzzled. "Where's the exit..." I said as I climbed down from Fer's back.

"Last time I did this," Fer said, "a door opened when I left the magic circle." Oh? As we stepped out of the complex pattern on the floor one of the stone walls moved aside with a grinding noise, letting bright daylight flood in. It had been ten days since we had seen real daylight and I blinked, it seemed too bright for a moment before my eyes adjusted.

"Right then, will we head back to the inn?" I said as we walked out of the small room. I had reserved our room back at the inn before we left for the dungeon, it should still be waiting for us was my thinking. However when we exited we discovered the doorway was right next to the dungeon's entrance where, of course, there were lots of people around, the guards at the gateway, Adventurers waiting to enter the dungeon, Merchants and stallholders and we were suddenly the centre of a lot of unwanted attention. Please don't stare like that, please don't point at us, please please please don't shout at us...

I hurriedly put Sui-chan in her bag. "Let's get out of here, quick." I said to Fer and Dora-chan as I started to push our way through the crowds forming around us but it was too late.

"H- Hey, wait a minute." One of the knights on guard at the dungeon entrance stopped us. "You lot, where did you come from? That doorway wasn't there before!" Ummm, you see... I was frantically thinking of an excuse that would let us get away when...

"It's the way out from the dungeon's final level." Fer announced in a loud voice to the whole crowd. "We defeated Behemoth." Oh Fer, why did you have to say that, I was going to talk our way out of here. Well, once I came up with a good excuse... Fer's announcement that we had defeated Behemoth spread through the crowd and the noise level increased even further.

"Q- Quick, call the Guild staff!"

"No, get the Guild Master here!"

"Yeah, go and fetch the Guild Master!!!"

"Hurry, hurry!!"

The entrance guards told us to stay where we were until the Guild Master came to speak to us. I thought of asking Fer to just push past them so we could leave, they weren't going to be able to stop him after all but I knew that would cause us more problems later if he did. I sighed as I resigned myself to the situation and we settled down to wait, trying to ignore the crowds around us and their shouted questions while the guards attempted to maintain some kind of order and prevent us from being mobbed. After a while, I heard a familiar voice ringing over the noise of the crowd.

"Mukouda-saaan!!!" Elland-san, don't shout my name so loudly, please? Everyone can hear you...

"Mukouda-saaan!!!" I could see the tall Elvish figure of Elland-san now, forcefully pushing his way through the crowd and waving his hand while continuing to call out my name loudly. The guards stepped back respectfully as Doran's Guild Master broke through the final ring of interested onlookers.

"Ha ha, Mukouda-san, I knew you could do it!" Elland-san said as he grabbed my hand excitedly and pumped it vigorously, nearly throwing me off my feet. Hey, Elland-san, that hurts.

He looked around distractedly for a moment. "Ah, where's Dora-chan?" The Pixie Dragon had carefully tucked himself out of sight behind Fer's wide back, having been warned by the sound of the Guild Master's voice that it was time to hide. "Anyway, I tried to follow you into the dungeon several times..." Eh, were you actually trying to follow us? I shuddered to think of how much trouble that could have caused us...

"However the Deputy Guild Master always stopped me and I eventually gave up trying to get away from him." Elland-san said with a sad look on his face. Ah, Doran's Deputy Guild Master, was that the overweight bald man I had seen once in passing at the Guild's offices, that time Elland-san had dragged me off to his house to cook Dragon steaks for him? Good job, Deputy Guild Master, good job.

"Anyway, that's all in the past." Elland-san clapped me on the shoulder. Ouch. "I want to hear all about it from you so let's go to the Adventurers Guild straight away. Come on, let's hurry." We weren't going to make it back to the inn right away, it seemed as we were led off towards the main offices of the Adventurers Guild by Elland-san.

* * * * *

Soon after we were seated in Elland-san's room at the Adventurers Guild. "So, what was the dungeon like?" Elland-san asked eagerly, paper and pen to hand.

"What was it like?" I echoed, thinking hard. There was a lot to describe, but... "You also went to the last level and saw Behemoth, right?" Elland-san had been a member of the only party of Adventurers before us to reach the thirtieth level of Doran's dungeon, surely he knew what the dungeon was like from personal experience?

"Yes, I reached the thirtieth level," Elland-san said, "but the drop items and goods from treasure chests you collected will be different from our time exploring the dungeon." He leaned forward eagerly. "So what did you get?"

Ah, drops and treasures, yes but we had collected so many of them. I hadn't sorted through our haul and I had no idea how much in total we had collected never mind the quantities of each type.

"Oh I see, the drops and such would change over time." I said. "But there's so much..." Should I ask Elland-san if I could unload everything from my Item Box onto his office floor so he could count them himself? Would there be enough space for everything? Some of the boss drops like the skins were huge...

"Yes, that's true. I'm only interested in getting an idea of the sorts of drops and such, especially in the last levels." Elland-san looked at a sheet of paper on the table. "From my own records and from the reports of other Adventurers the dungeon drops are mostly skins up to the twenty-first level and skins are still commonly dropped up to the twenty-sixth level at least." As Elland-san said we had collected a lot of skins, thinking back. I nodded in agreement.

"You see, I would like to buy all those skins for the Adventurers Guild." he went on. "This is a Dungeon City and there's a great demand for monster skins locally as material to make armour with. In addition skins from dungeon drops are especially prized as they're stronger than skins taken from monsters subjugated on the surface." Oh, I see. Well, we had plenty of Ogre, Orc, Troll and Minotaur skins and if the Guild wanted to buy them all I'd be happy to sell them.

Elland-san looked at another paper. "Treasure chests can be expected to appear from, let me see, the 20th level onwards but was that your experience? Then if you defeat Spriggans sometimes you could expect a few chests to contain gemstones and magic items. I'd like to buy them too."

Elland-san, you've faced Behemoth, you know a lot about this dungeon. I sometimes forgot that the over-enthusiastic Dragon-obsessed Elf sitting across the table from me had been an S-ranked Adventurer in his time and now he was the Guild Master of this Dungeon City. I gathered my thoughts. Let's see...

"There were a few treasure chests and we got the contents of all of them. There were also some Mimics," Elland-san nodded to indicate he knew what a Mimic was, "and one of them dropped a jewel box." There were a lot of gems in the treasure chests and since I'm not female they don't hold any real interest for me. If the Guild wants to buy them then I'll gladly sell them all to you. Magic items, well I was going to hold on to the Ring of Magic Recovery I was currently wearing but I'd have to think carefully about the other items before offering them up for sale.

"Treasure chests were more common on the 26th level and afterwards." I told him. "Although we didn't really explore a lot of the forest areas in the 26th and 27th levels. Let's see, the 28th level was the swamp and we didn't stop to collect any drops other than from the boss at the end. The 29th level was a desert, of course and the widest and most difficult level for us to deal with." The forest levels were a lot better than the marsh and desert levels but they had still been a pain to get through. Field levels in a dungeon are not fair.

"Huh? Wait a minute, what did you say now?" Elland-san blurted out, obviously surprised by something I had said.

What had I said? "Ummm, I told you treasure chests turned up more from the 26th level onwards?"

"No, not that!"

No? "I said we didn't explore the forests in the 26th and 27th levels too thoroughly, is that it?"

"No, no no! After that!" Elland-san was getting more and more excited for some reason.

Was it this part? "I mentioned the 28th swamp level and how difficult it was to get through the 29th level desert?"

"Yes, yes, there! That part!" Elland-san frantically scanned one piece of paper, snatched up another from the table and then another. "Swamp?! Desert?! There's no-" He dropped the papers and stood up, starting to mutter to himself as he paced back and forth. What was wrong? After a few seconds Elland-san returned and dropped into his chair, sighing heavily before explaining what had caused his confusion. It turned out, when Elland-san and his party of Adventurers had reached the final level they hadn't encountered a swamp or desert level in their travels through the dungeon. Every level between the 26th and the 29th had been forested areas. It had taken them more than a month to get through those four forest levels. The very few high-ranking Adventurer parties that had made it beyond the 25th level in the past had only encountered forest levels too, according to the Guild's records.

"What happened to you after arriving at the 26th level? Tell me about it, tell me everything." he demanded, taking up his pen again. I looked at Elland-san's serious expression and sat up straight as I answered his questions in as much detail as I could remember about the levels, the monsters and the bosses we had encountered while he made copious notes. We spent quite a long time doing this and the shadows outside his office windows were starting to darken before he was satisfied. Finally he put down his pen and shuffled the bundles of papers on the table into some sort of order.

"That's enough for today, Mukouda-san." Elland-san said. "I'd like to thank you on behalf of the Guild for this information. Knowing what Doran's dungeon is really like, how it's changing is important to us, especially in the deeper levels where very few have ever been." He bowed his head to me. "What you have told us today could save the lives of Guild members in the future." I felt embarrassed at his words and humble too in some way. I was only a member of the Adventurers Guild because it was the best place to get monsters disassembled to feed my contracted beasts, why was the head of the local Guild bowing his head to me, a mere C-ranked Adventurer? I coughed.

"Oh, we haven't decided yet what dungeon drops we're going sell to the Guild and it's getting late." I changed the subject. "I'll come back again soon and we can sort that out then."

Elland-san nodded, his eyes still fixed on the piles of paper on the table before him. "Please do. I'm going to be busy for a while with the information you have provided us with today, Mukouda-san. I look forward to you coming back soon."

An Guild assistant came to collect us when Elland-san called and they led us to the front door. Thus we were finally able to leave the Adventurer's Guild and return to our inn.

Later, I found out, an announcement was made by the Guild that Doran's dungeon had been reclassified as a high-difficulty dungeon due to the newly-discovered fact that the last few levels were known to have changed over time and might change again in the future.

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