Distant Turmoil Doesn't Threaten Our Peace

Starting the next day, Azu began swinging her sword in the backyard.

I didn't know the first thing about swords, so I left her to it. She seemed genuinely dedicated.

I wouldn't have minded getting her an instructor, but any dojo or private tutor would balk at teaching a slave.

They'd either gouge me on the price or cause problems.

Either way, it was a risk.

Elza was put to work building up our holy water stock and running a makeshift clinic.

It turned out to be surprisingly good money.

This town had few clinics, and getting healed by a Sun God cleric required a donation.

Doing it too openly would invite conflict, but keeping things to the neighborhood should be fine.

There wasn't a church in this district anyway.

And if they did come complaining, we'd just stop.

Between those tasks, I pulled quests from the guild and sent the two of them out on jobs. Labyrinth expeditions, too.

For easy quests, I'd have them work separately. For anything dicier, they went as a pair.

Elza, being a priestess, delivered consistent results. Azu's output was improving by the day.

Her daily food intake was increasing too, but that was probably just a growth spurt.

Her earnings were growing to match, so no complaints. All the meat and vegetables she could eat.

The two of them had outgrown beginner tier and were knocking on the door of mid-rank. Still on the low end, though.

But the approach of providing room and board to keep expenses down in exchange for taking the full cut of quest rewards was starting to show results.

Even excluding the brooch, the net profit from quests after expenses was approaching the black.

Azu's combat bounties were the biggest contributor.

Total profitability was still a ways off, what with Elza's steep price tag.

I worked through the ledger, thinking.

There were several paths forward from here.

One option was to duplicate the Azu-and-Elza model: buy more pairs of slaves and scale up through volume.

But the Adventurer's Guild would shut that down for certain.

It would crowd out other adventurers. Specifically, the beginners.

Killing the future growth pipeline would be shortsighted.

On top of that, gaining too much influence over the guild would breed resentment I didn't need.

Quality over quantity was the way to go.

I'd written to the slave merchant about acquiring a mage, but the reply wasn't encouraging.

Hard to come by, and they sold the moment they appeared on the market.

Elza had only come my way because selling her to me at a premium for her added value was more profitable than shipping her off to a brothel.

For the time being, we carried on like that while I gradually increased the difficulty of the quests I assigned the two of them.

Without a trump card like last time, the approach had to be steady. Minimize danger.

A light warrior and a priestess as a two-person team could handle most situations at the lower-mid tier.

I kept hammering it into them: if things go south, run.

Days passed. Peaceful at best, unremarkable at worst. The steady earnings accumulated.

Between the shop and the adventuring income, I was starting to think we were making decent money. That was when trouble blew in from an unexpected direction.

… The country we operated out of was called the Deianclure Kingdom.

If I had to sum it up in one word: ordinary.

Agriculture, ordinary. Mining, ordinary. Industrial technology wasn't behind the times, but it wasn't ahead either.

The sea was neither close nor far. The military was middling. Ambition was modest, but they'd punch back if punched.

Not a bad position as a trade route, but nothing exclusive to this country, so the benefits were limited. Just a waypoint. Spices were technically a local specialty since they were easy to transport and sell. Tariffs were low, apparently.

Monster strength, averaged out, was also ordinary.

The Ash King's castle was the sole outlier. Never mind top-rank adventurers; even heroes working together couldn't clear it.

That was why strong adventurers tended to move on to other countries.

Upper-tier quests were going unclaimed as a result. If I could get my people to that level, there'd be serious money to be made. Hard to do without a mage, though.

That was the kind of country it was.

Two nations shared its borders.

The Ambishul Empire, hegemon of the continent. And the Solar Union, the Church of the Sun God's spiritual seat.

A third country lay beyond a treacherous mountain range, but contact was scarce.

At present, our Deianclure Kingdom was in a bit of a diplomatic dispute with the Empire.

The reason, to put it simply, was a disagreement over the mutual terms of profit on ore, iron chief among them. The two sides simply could not reach an accord.

While they argued, the Empire's hardliners grew louder. On our end, the king, leader of the moderate faction, had been falling ill, and his ability to keep things in check was weakening.

As a tool shop owner, I'd been gathering information in my own modest way, and since I dealt in traded goods, I'd been keeping an eye on developments. But then skirmishing had apparently started.

Both sides were still limited to skirmishes between their respective lords' forces, but if things escalated, the sovereigns themselves would step in and it would become a full-scale war.

… When that happened, adventurers were expected to serve as de facto mercenaries.

Those kinds of quests were already posted at the Adventurer's Guild.

Adventurers were technically free agents with no obligation to enlist, but performing well meant rewards and prestige. Above all, it meant connections with the nobility.

Personal commissions from nobles were extremely profitable, or so I'd heard often enough.

The idea of getting tangled up with aristocrats wasn't exactly appealing, though.

I tossed the mercenary quest sheet onto my desk.

Azu couldn't kill a person anyway. Not an option.

Elza would probably do it if the situation called for it. That woman had steel nerves.

She'd never forgive cheating, either.

… My thoughts were going off the rails. Too much to consider at once.

Mercenary work was a no-go. If cutting off people's heads messed with Azu's mental state, that would be a real problem.

She'd finally grown into a real earner.

After discussing it with the Adventurer's Guild, they pushed a batch of troublesome quests on me in exchange for opting out of the mercenary assignments.

Troublesome how? Cheap but urgent. The kind of quest I hated.

I wasn't the one doing them, so whatever.

I called Azu and Elza to my room and dumped a pile of quests on them.

Both of them made faces. Could barely blame them.

It was work.

It took the two of them about two months to clear the backlog.

During that time, the skirmishing came to an end. The kingdom had won, surprisingly.

I expected the Empire to retaliate, but apparently they backed down and made concessions to the Kingdom.

Continental hegemon or not, the Empire was too large and apparently had more problems to deal with than a peaceful kingdom.

Then a letter arrived from the slave merchant.

A new slave had been secured.