114 – City of Adventurers #4
“What is this! I can’t put it down right now!”
“Ignore it.”
Shurtz continued reading the ledger as I ordered.
As he read through the densely packed documents page by page, Schurz’s eyes narrowed and his lips tightened.
“Profit… ! What are you all doing! Hurry up and stop!”
“Ha, but….”
The scribes in the office looked puzzled.
That’s right. It was because five guards, who had already heard the call of the mayor and hurriedly ran, were scattered around the corner of the office.
Of course, I paid attention to my hands. It was just a light concussion, so it should wake up on its own in an hour or two.
Shurz, who read the ledger quickly for about 30 minutes, said as he closed the ledger.
“Instructor. First of all, I read all the accounting data for this year.”
“How did it look to you?”
“Certainly, there are some loopholes in the ledger. I hid it, but I can see abnormal figures here and there. I received a surprisingly large amount of tax, but it is very different from the amount of tax sent from Schwarzheim that I know. Hmm… I don’t think this is all.”
Is there a ledger that records the real thing somewhere?
Mayor Roman said in a confident tone.
“It’s just a common accounting error when writing books! You can’t do me that much! I don’t know what you’re looking for here, but I’ll never tell you!”
Apart from that elated expression, this was certainly not enough to accuse him of his crime.
But it didn’t matter. Because I knew it would be like this from the beginning. No matter how stupid the mayor was, he would have kept the most important things hidden where only he could see them.
I lightly kicked the floor. It looked like a light kick, but it was a well-controlled movement that spread the sound far and wide.
Tung-
The sound spread out in a circle around me. And I felt a sense of heterogeneity as the waves of sound passed through the walls and floors.
“Here you go.”
“What, what… ? Wait, no! There!”
Fortunately, the source of the sense of difference was very close. Because I heard it right in the office.
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I lifted the luxurious wooden desk at once and tossed it into a suitable corner. When I lifted up the monster’s fur carpet on the floor a little, the safe beneath it was revealed.
“Where is the key?”
“No, there is no such thing!”
“Hmm….”
To be honest, I didn’t expect much and didn’t even ask.
From the look on his face, he didn’t seem to have the key right away. However, I couldn’t waste my time wandering around looking for a key I didn’t know where it might be. Unlike the secret safe, the key will be difficult to find using the same method as before.
But there were no problems.
I grabbed the handle of the safe and gave it strength.
Kwadeudeuk-! Kwakjik!
The safe, which I wanted to hold out for a while, couldn’t stand my strength and shattered in vain. I wouldn’t normally describe it as opening something that broke down a door, but such trivial things didn’t matter.
The mayor’s voice resounded in vain.
“No, what… It was a safe made of the highest grade black steel that could block sword swordsmanship… “
I threw the dented door roughly in the shape of my hand and checked the contents of the safe.
In the safe were a pile of papers presumed to be real ledgers, ten platinum ingots, and a thin scroll that could feel magical power.
I threw the ledger to Schurz and checked the scroll. I’m not an expert on magic, but the pictures drawn on the scrolls were familiar to me.
If I remember not wrong, this was a teleport scroll.
I wonder if there was a way to get one of his own body out.
As soon as the ledger fell into the hands of Schurz, Mayor Roman’s expression turned to astonishment.
“Oh no! That’s not enough!”
He fired weak flesh at the mayor, who was struggling with his hands as if to rush at Schurz. At that moment, the mayor gasped, his complexion turned pale, and his knees gave way and he fell to the floor.
At that time, someone entered the office, probably feeling a loud commotion.
It was Elizabeth.
“What is this?”
Elizabeth was shocked to see the messy office and me and Schurtz in it. However, the clever woman soon turned her attention to Mayor Roman, as if she had grasped the situation.
Mayor Roman, who met Elisabeth’s eyes, awkwardly tried to get up with his weak legs, and eventually crawled around and shouted with a desperate expression at her feet.
“Woe, Her Highness the Princess! Please dry them off! I have been extremely loyal to the imperial family until now, but this kind of treatment is unbelievable!”
“Hmm….”
Elizabeth evaded Mayor Roman and went back. She then approached Schurz and asked.
“What did you find out?”
“I am still reading, but… I got it roughly.”
Shurtz said without taking his eyes off the ledger.
“It seems that there was no such thing as money to be paid to adventurers from the beginning. The city’s vaults are already empty. They always took excessive taxes more than necessary, and most of them must have been passed on to other places, not the administrative offices. W? I think it must be this person.”
“W… W… aha.”
Elisabeth seemed to have noticed something about her after chewing on the initials several times. And she said, looking at the mayor, with the well-adorned smile she had shown on their first meeting.
“Anyway, the imperial family that Mayor Roman was loyal to seems to be a slightly different imperial family from mine.”
“That, that… !”
“Anyway, personal use of city property is a clear felony. A city’s assets are its strength. And the power of a city is, after all, the power of an empire. Having weakened the borders of the Empire in this way, it may be treated as treason.”
At those words, Mayor Roman’s expression turned to contemplation.
“Ba, bar, treason… !? Treason! No, that’s nonsense! Please save me, Your Highness, the 3rd Princess!”
I lightly slapped the back of Mayor Roman’s neck, who was making a lot of noise. Now that the sin was clearly revealed, there was nothing to cover it up.
“Oops!”
Leaving behind Mayor Roman, who passed out in an instant, I looked at Elizabeth.
She asked cautiously.
“What are you going to do now?”
Of course, the work to be done has already been decided.
“I need to meet the adventurers.”
***
There is no longer a market in Schwarzheim. However, it was not difficult to summon adventurers.
“Hwangmyeong, what is this all of a sudden….”
“Was the rumor that the royal family came to this city true?”
Elizabeth delivered a letter to each adventurer’s guild using the signet ring with the seal of the third princess, and soon three adventurers appeared at City Hall leading their guild members.
The guild leader of the three major adventurer guilds in Schwarzheim.
All of them were S-rank adventurers who had reached the master class.
I made sure they were all gathered in the drawing room and went into the drawing room with Elizabeth.
The 3rd guild leader widened her eyes in amazement at Elisabeth’s white hair and red eyes. Among them, a human man in armor knelt on her knees and saluted Elisabeth.
“Meet Your Highness, the 3rd Princess.”
Seeing that figure, the other 3 guild leaders, dwarves and grassland adventurers also stood up from their seats and bowed their heads awkwardly.
Elizabeth lightly shook her head.
“Wake up. And the other two aren’t citizens of the Empire, so there’s no need to show that kind of respect.”
“If the princess says so… Great.”
“Then I will. Things like etiquette are so awkward. So, why did you call us?”
I winked at Elizabeth. She nodded her head and gave me the seat right away.
As if the princess knew how to speak, they looked at me curiously as I stood in front of Elizabeth in place of Elizabeth.
The Dwarf Warrior opened his mouth bluntly.
“Who are you?”
Instead of answering that question, I slammed the blanket I was holding onto the desk. Ten platinum ingots in it. And it contained the mayor’s signet ring.
The three adventurers weren’t too surprised by the platinum bar, but they looked startled at the mayor’s ring.
“As you can see, there is no Roman market anymore.”
“Hmm… I guess so. So?”
“So, I will make a request. The content of the request is, of course, to protect this city from the undead.”
The Dwarf Warrior said with a sad expression.
“Hey. I don’t know what you’re doing, but if you come here and give me this kind of pennies and ask me to fight, is that all? Nothing is over yet!”
“What’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong? Under! That goddamn mayor treated us adventurers like assholes! A bastard who barks if you want to bark and bites if you bite! Until now, I put up with it because it was dirty even if it was f*cked up, but now the city is a bit dangerous, so you want to pamper us for free? Who do you know as an asshole and Hogu!?”
The dwarf shouted as he slammed the ax on the floor.
“The pride of our adventurers has been insulted! But now that the market is gone, please get this money and fight meekly again? Are you treating us as idiots too? Aang!?”
“Pride… Hmmm, proud.”
“Yes, pride! We are proud too!”
I said with an expressionless face.
“Does a mere grave robber have any pride?”
The reason why Schwarzheim is called the city of adventurers.
That’s because it’s the closest city to the Ionian Kingdom. Because the kingdom fell so quickly, most of its assets were preserved intact, and the city prospered greatly from the items that adventurers roamed the kingdom’s lands full of undead.
So, the word grave robber wasn’t very wrong.
But the dwarf warrior seemed to feel a genuine insult.
“What? This bastard-!”
I shot my life with sincerity.
The air in the room became chilly and the Dwarf’s mouth, which was trying to raise his voice, shut. The other two adventurers did the same.
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Elisabeth was behind me, so her life was not affected, but somehow her complexion turned pale. She seemed to have recalled the memory of accepting the previous life.
I reaped my life quickly. Then the Dwarf Warrior muttered in a shocked voice.
“You, what are you… ? With momentum, you overpowered all three of us at the same time? What would the alternative state be like? .”
This kind of overpowering was absolutely necessary.
Adventurers usually live their lives doing harsh things, so they are all resolute and proud. If someone weaker than himself said anything, he had a tendency to take it down once and for all. I heard that from a former colleague.
I opened my mouth in a calm tone.
“If you have real pride, now fight for the people here.”
The drawing room fell into silence.
The first to speak was a male adventurer in armor.
“I will.”
“What? Hey, this bastard… ! You can’t even come-“
“Didn’t we all decide to fight together if the city was really in danger? Originally, it was a situation where we had to step in. He is the man who solved it for us. I will have to repay this debt.”
“No, sir, that is….”
They seemed to recognize that I was the one who fought the undead from the beginning.
The grassland warrior also said while picking up three platinum ingots.
“There are about 3,000 children under me. If it’s one gold coin per person, the advance payment will be enough.”
One platinum ingot is worth 1,000 gold coins. Of course, as an advance payment for an S-rank adventurer, one gold coin was far from enough.
The dwarf warrior wrinkled his face, then let out a deep sigh.
“Damn it, I’m the only one who’s an idiot… Even if you take it when you receive it, you say let’s take care of Gao….”
With this, all three adventurer guilds promised to participate.
When the city comes under attack again, this time it will be able to hold out a little without me. That meant the students were a little safer.
“After….”
Now I have an environment where I can freely move around.