Minute Mage: A Time-Traveling LitRPG

Chapter 176: Alliances and Accusations

Once we finished sorting out the paperwork, we headed back out into the main guild lobby. In order to receive the first half of our payment, we’d need to find the other party we’d be working with so we could officially sign up for the job, so that was goal number one.

We’d come up with the idea to kill the Young Dragon ourselves on the way to town, and, while it was certainly dangerous, the reasoning went like this: regardless of whether or not we took on the Young Dragon, we wanted to team up with another group of adventurers just so we could take on the better-paying jobs, and this would effectively kickstart the process. At the end of the day, we needed thirty thousand eyt—plus ten fully-charged Mana Batteries—to get to the capital. And killing this Dragon would instantly bring us halfway to that goal.

I was sure any party would be thrilled to receive a sum of sixteen thousand as well, so being able to advertise that we had a job exclusive to us that would pay out so much money to anyone who helped us complete it would also draw in more people.

Once we were back in the main lobby, we approached the receptionist once again. We’d previously asked her to put up a request on one of the boards advertising us as a group looking to team up with other adventuring parties, but even she had said that it most likely wouldn’t get many takers. And judging by the sheer number of similar requests on that board, I agreed. We’d need to get our names out there some other way.

“Hey,” I said to the receptionist, “so we’re looking to find a new group of adventurers. Preferably through a much faster method than just putting up one of those team requests.”

“Well, feel free to approach people and ask,” she said. “But you’ll probably get turned down a lot. Most people don’t bother teaming up with outsiders unless there’s clear reason to do so.”

“That’s the thing. We do have a monetary incentive here. We’ve got a job we want to complete, but we just need some extra hands. If we can find another team, there’s sixteen thousand eyt in it for them. Do you think more people would bite if I approached them with that?”

She shrugged. “Maybe you could find someone if you spent today asking around.”

“Yeah, well ideally we find a method that doesn’t require me spending hours cold approaching random people.” I sighed, taking a moment to think. “Maybe…could we just make a job request?”

She frowned. “Is the job not already on the board?”

“No, it’s an exclusive one. So we wouldn’t actually be advertising what we want the people to do. But, I mean, the job board gets a lot more eyes on it, right? So maybe if we have the request on there with the payment stamped on it, it’ll get more attention?”

“I suppose that’s within the rules,” she said. “Who are you looking for?”

“Just…” I looked over at Erani. How many people would we need?

Index? Any idea?

“You’ll probably want at least three more people equal to your Level to safely take down a Young Dragon of Level 22, but it’d be best to have more.”

“A team of at least three silvers,” I repeated. “The reward will be given to them to split however they want, so bringing more people will mean each individual gets less, though.”

She nodded. “Got it. So just a request for help from a group of adventurers of that strength, reward of sixteen thousand, and…no specifications for what the job will entail?”

“Just say it’ll be combat. And let them know that they’ll be working with us. I guess you can just transfer over the information you had on the original request for a team we had up.”

“Sounds good. I’ll let you know when someone accepts.”

Once we were done with that, we left the guild lobby, and left town once again. Since we weren’t getting paid for the Goblin job just yet, we’d need to find the money for sleeping arrangements tonight. So that meant more Gloomspur hunting.

Hunting down the Gloomspurs once again reminded me of a brief moment in the Goblin base, back in the previous timeline. When we were infiltrating, the Goblins had thrown these globs of purple goo at us, which landed on the ground and quickly grew, molding themselves into Gloomspurs. At the time, I hadn’t had a spare moment to think about it, instead having to react to the set of enemies that’d just spawned in directly on top of me. But now, it left me curious.

A while ago, Ainash had mentioned something about purple goo. When we’d first been trying to hunt down Gloomspurs for spare coin, she’d said that she’d seen a couple packs before, and they had left behind those same globs of purple goop. But when we’d returned to try and find the pack, that purple goo was gone. And I knew for a fact that it wasn’t an issue with Ainash getting turned around or forgetting where it was; I would trust her sense of direction with my life—and literally had in the past on several occasions.

So now, I was left wondering if that goop was how they reproduced, or something. Maybe that was their equivalent to an egg, and the Goblins had gone out and stolen some to use as a weapon. Once again, I was struck with the ingenuity of their species.

Regardless, Erani and I exited town and roamed the fields in search of Gloomspurs. We were doing so without the assistance of Ainash, since she was currently out preparing to recruit those Goblins tomorrow—she’d told Erani through their link that she was ‘very busy’ apparently—but considering how easy the Gloomspurs were to kill, we weren’t slowed down very much by the lack of assistance.

Since we were starting at an actually reasonable time, rather than the middle of the night like we had the day before, we could move at a more leisurely pace with our hunting, knowing we’d be able to pay for a room and food with the amount of time we had to dedicate to hunting. So, since we had the spare time, Erani suggested we should take a few moments to examine the Gloomspurs and see what that purple stuff actually was.

Once we found a pack of the things, we simply stuck back and watched them as they wandered the wide fields. As they meandered along the grass, they continued billowing out that toxic smoke at every turn, leaving the signature path of destruction behind them. In fact, now that I was watching them more carefully, it almost seemed like they were trying to kill as much grass as possible.

The three Gloomspurs in this pack seemed to take turns with their smoke; one would breathe out a cloud, killing everything nearby, then it’d stop and the pack would walk on a short distance into a fresh patch of grass, and then the second would breathe out to kill everything, then the third, and then they’d cycle back to the first. And they never used their toxic breath on a patch that’d already been killed.

We continued watching from afar for about ten minutes before something interesting happened. Right after its ‘turn’ killing the grass, the front one suddenly began to cough. It was a strange sound—one I’d never heard come from the now-familiar monsters—as it yakked up something that seemed caught in its throat. Over and over, until something came out. A glob of purple goop.

As I watched, the glob seemed to slowly shift as though it had a mind of its own, rolling over itself and sticking against the deadened patch of grass, gradually moving around. Eventually, after some time, it found its way to some living grass, and seemed to move with haste from there. It quickly moved so that it was fully embraced by the grass, and then spread itself out thin, so that as much of its ‘body’ was touching the grass as possible. Then the grass died. And the goop moved over to some adjacent living grass, and killed that, too. Slowly, it rolled around as the other Gloomspurs watched, killing more grass in the area and slightly increasing in size as it did so.

Finally, once it’d grown from the size of my palm to the size of my full outstretched hand, it stopped, began shaking, and, just like I’d seen before, began to quickly grow in size, taking shape and forming itself into yet another Gloomspur.

“Woah…” I heard Erani mutter as we witnessed the ‘birth’ of another one of these creatures. “I didn’t think it would work like that.”

“Yeah,” I frowned. It was certainly strange. And with the Gloomspurs that able to easily create new members of their species, I certainly understood why the town had such a problem getting rid of them for good. Really, I imagined that at this rate, if you left the things alone for a few minutes, they’d double in size.

“Hey!” A voice shouted from behind me. “What are you two doing?”

I turned to see a man in chainmail approaching us, sword in his hand. Glancing around, I spotted a couple other people walking down a nearby road—several other witnesses—so I couldn’t imagine he was here to try and murder us, or something. Though I still took a step back and raised my hands, getting in a fighting stance. Erani took a step back, too, and subtly put her hand on me so I could quickly buff her with Expedite if necessary.

“What’s the issue?” I asked.

“You know what you were doing,” he spat. “That’s blatant farming.”

I paused, not sure what he was saying. “It’s what?”

“Don’t play dumb. You were obviously trailing those Gloomspurs to wait for them to reproduce before killing them. Guild’ll have a frenzy with you.”

“Is that…against the rules?”

“‘Course it is!” he shouted. “If they let everyone catch a couple ‘Spurs on their own and just wait for ‘em to make a half-dozen more, there’d be no point in trading teeth for coin, since they’d have no way of knowing you actually removed a ‘Spur from the wildlife or if you just grew one to kill on your own. Farming is clearly against policy. You can’t turn trophies of farmed monsters. They’ll kick you out of the guild and you won’t be able to turn in jobs anymore. Anywhere.”

I raised my hands and shook my head. “My bad, man. Didn’t know. As long as we don’t turn in the trophy of the one that we ‘farmed’ then it’s no issue though, right?”

“Well, yeah, I guess, but—”

“Great. So we’re just going to go kill the ones that were there when we found them and take them, and I guess you can have the other. Sound good to you?”

At the mention that he’d get to claim the other one, he seemed to calm down a bit. I understood why farming would be a problem, though. It’d certainly been something that came to mind when I saw how quickly and easily the things basically created free money. Probably pretty difficult for the guild to be able to tell when someone was turning in fraudulent monster trophies, but I imagined they operated off of a combination of the honor system and the ‘I’ll pay you if you snitch on your buddies’ system. And getting blacklisted from the entire guild just to try and make some easy cash seemed like deterrent enough for most.

But regardless, we just continued on with our mission of killing the local monsters and collecting their teeth.

Once we’d gotten enough for another night’s room plus food for today and tomorrow, we took a break. It was currently around four in the afternoon, and my XP had risen slightly higher from the kills, up above 2000. But I had something much more important in mind. Something I needed to do before midnight.

“So you’re just gonna walk down to the outpost?” Erani asked.

“Pretty much,” I responded. “With Expedite, it should only take me, what, six or seven hours at most? At worst, I’ll get there around an hour before midnight. And then I can just grab the Arcane Spell Crystal and rewind back to before I’d taken the Crystal, and come back to meet up with you. If there are any problems, just tell Ainash and she can tell me.”

“I guess that leaves me with some free time, huh?”

“Guess it does,” I chuckled. “Don’t have too much fun without me.”

“As if. I’ll probably just pass the time looking for more Gloomspurs.”

“Well that’d be nice too.”

“So you know what Spell you’ll be investing your Upgrade into?”

“Not particularly. But that’s what the six hour long walk is for, right?”

She rolled her eyes. “I cannot believe you. How have you not decided yet? I’d have decided the order of Upgrades the moment I realized I’d be getting their Crystals next.”

“Why not take some extra time to decide?” I shrugged.

She just shook her head. “Well I’m looking forward to seeing what you’re offered.”

“Believe me, so am I.”