Chapter 76 - One Gold!

A silence fell over the room as the eyes of the guild employee drifted from one beast to the next.

For a moment I was even afraid that he wouldn’t buy any of them, I mean some of them were in pretty bad states, especially those that were... toasted a bit.

"Where did you find all of these beasts?" The man finally asked as he walked over to the Grey Wolves.

"In Booksfield Forest, on our way here." I answered.

"You traveled through the forest?" He asked as his head snapped to us again.

"Of course," I answered. "Travelling by road takes too long."

The man was quiet for a moment, simply looking at us with widened eyes again.

"You do understand that there is a reason no one travels through Booksfield, right?" He finally asked.

Honestly I didn’t even know that was a thing, I mean I had only travelled through the forest, I had never even seen the road at that point.

I looked over at Erick, who only gave me a smile and a small nod.

"And that reason is?" I asked.

"That forest is filled with high-level beasts, and bandits that make most of our adventurers look like children," he answered.

I couldn’t help but smile at that, I mean the man who was now the captain of my mercenary company was one of those ’ruthless’ bandits after all, and the high-level beasts he was talking about had never really been a problem for us.

Unless the true high-level beasts hadn’t shown up yet, but either way, I was seriously starting to wonder about the skills and strength of these so-called ’top’ adventurers at that point.

"Is that so?" I asked, still with a smile on my lips.

"Yes!" The man exclaimed.

"Thanks for the warning," I said. "Now back to business, how much can I get for these corpses?"

The man spent some time analyzing the corpses again, walking from one beast to the next, inspecting what I assumed were the valuable parts of each beast.

"I can give you one gold for all of them," the man finally said.

One gold!

That was a hundred silver!

For a couple of beast corpses!

I immediately decided that we would be traveling through the forest every time we would come to the human territories.

I wouldn’t go out of my way to hunt beasts, but it couldn’t hurt to just take care of those who attacked us on our journey, right?

It was a magnificent source of income after all.

"I’ll take it!" I exclaimed, maybe a bit too quickly, but this was a very good supplementary income after all.

A couple of minutes later, Erick and I walked out of the guild again, and I was still wearing a very wide smile.

I now had a form of identification, and some more money I hadn’t expected to top it all off.

Who could blame me for my good mood?

"What are you going to do about the missions?" Erick asked, which immediately dampened my mood again.

"Do you have to bring that up right now?" I sighed.

"Of course I do," Erick smiled.

I sighed again, turning in the direction of the Forest Flute, we still had business to attend to there after all.

"You still haven’t answered me," Erick said, after we walked in silence for a bit.

"I know," I said. "I don’t really want to answer that question."

"You make it sound like doing one mission every two months is a death sentence," Erick said.

"It might as well be," I muttered. "You know I decided to be a businessman so I could decide when I want to do what, not so that I could be given a quota again."

"I wanted to set my own targets, my own quotas." I finished.

"So basically you don’t like the idea of working for someone else?" Erick asked.

"Exactly," I nodded, just as we reached the inn.

The moment we stepped through the doors we ran into Jackson, who was one of the guards we left behind in Stellor.

"Captain?" Jackson asked, surprised to see us standing there.

"Jackson," Erick nodded to the man. "How are things here?"

"We’ve been good, sir," Jackson answered. "We’ve had some small scuffles, but nothing we couldn’t handle."

"That’s good to hear," I said from next to Erick, reaching out to pat Jackson on the shoulder. "Where’s Richard?"

"He accompanied the innkeeper to the market," Jackson smiled at me.

"Oh, so Victor’s out?" I asked, I had hoped to get the business in the city sorted out as quickly as possible so Erick and I could start our journey toward Duke Charles’s city that night.

"Yes, but he should be back soon," Jackson answered.

"Fine," I sighed, "We might as well have a drink while we wait."

Erick and I walked over to one of the empty tables, and had a seat. I had to say the inn seemed much more... orderly.

"Did Victor finally implement some rules in this place?" I asked Jackson.

"Yes," he smiled. "He followed some of your suggestions about reservations, and separating the guests between those who came to eat, and those who only came for a drink."

"And we’ve also been a bit stricter on those who only come to cause a ruckus."

"That’s good," I smiled.

As soon as we had a seat at the table a familiar girl walked over to help us.

"Hello again," I smiled at the girl.

"H... Hello, sir." She stammered, a bright blush covering her face.

Who could blame her?

I’m charming as hell remember... well that and I had saved her life.

I just hoped the poor girl didn’t develop some sort of crush, that wouldn’t be good at all.

"Can we have three ales please?" I asked her, trying my best not to start any sort of conversation with her, I didn’t want to lead her on after all. My wives would have my head if they found out some new girl had suddenly fallen head over heels for me.

She only gave me a quick nod, and scurried over to the back.

"Now then," I said, looking at Erick again. "Tell me more about this Duke Charles, and his territory."

"You didn’t even do any research before starting this mission?!" Erick exclaimed.

I don’t understand why he found that so bad, I mean I was doing research now, wasn’t I?