Maruyama Kugane: The Invaders of the Large Tomb

Worker. This word was used to describe people who left the career path of an Adventurer.

The work given to adventurers was directly provided by the Adventurer's Guild, where the content and difficulty of the tasks were thoroughly investigated beforehand. Only the ones that were deemed suitable were assigned to adventurers and had corresponding ranks according to the difficulty of the task. In other words, work that were deemed inappropriate such as ones that might endanger the safety of the public, or the law-breaking kind of work like investigating the plant materials used in the creation of narcotics. Those kind of requests would be instantly rejected by the Adventurer's Guild.

Also, work that might damage the ecological balance of an area was also rejected. For example, the Adventurer's Guild would never issue requests involving the removal of monsters that play certain roles in an ecosystem. This was due to fear that the removal of the monster might trigger the collapse of the ecological balance in an area, which might result in hordes of other monsters leaving their habitats and causing damage to human settlements. However, if said monster left its habitat by itself and entered human territory, it would be treated as a separate matter entirely.

In other words, adventurers were friends of justice.

However, the world did not operate on that principle alone.

Regardless of how one described things, there were people who were willing to take on high-risk work simply for the reward. There also existed the kind of people that simply enjoyed slaying monsters.

These people, when compared against the adventurers that stood in the light, preferred to stay in the darkness. The "dropouts" amongst the adventurers. That was what some people called them.

However, not all workers were the kind of people that were previously mentioned.

Hypothetically speaking, if a young village boy was heavily injured and an adventurer group that was capable of performing healing magic happened to pass by, were they allowed to cast the spells to save the boy?

The answer was no.

There was a rule that strictly forbade adventurers from using healing magic on the common people unless a certain fee was paid to the adventurers.

This was because the common usage of healing magic was restricted by the temples, where patients were required to come to the temples and pay a certain fee in order to receive healing. If the adventurers ignored this system and freely went around healing people, the temples would become unable to feed themselves.

For this reason, the temples had strongly pressured the Adventurer's Guild into enforcing this regulation.

If adventurers were unable to obey the rules, then they could opt to become a worker.

Although this made the temples seem like the bad guys, this was not without good reason. Due to the influence of magic on the daily lives of people, magic could be considered as another political tool for power. In order for the temples to provide benefits to the people without becoming controlled by politics, the only source of income they could receive would be from the people. In exchange, the temples provided healing, cleansing of the undead, as well as researching and developing new healing spells.

If the adventurers ignored the regulations and used their healing spells freely, the temples would be forced to become more secular, and their initial ideologies would become corrupted.

As such, there were always two sides to a story. Without light, there would be no shadow. The existence of workers could be described in the same way. For money, they were willing to ignore regulations and often make a mess of things, however, there were also cases where they had brought benefits to the people, such as the creation of cheaper medicine.

Having said that, this was the kind of profession this man had—Hekkeran Termite.

"Hmm... what to buy?"

There were simply too many magical items Hekkeran wanted. For the time being, he should probably focus on defensive items first. After that, there was one more that he wanted due to special reasons.

"First I should deposit the money... the rest will be used to buy the magic items needed for adventuring. Eh? Got the order wrong. First buy the items, and then deposit the rest."

Hekkeran scratched his head.

If it's like that—

"As the vanguard, I need to have more magic resistance, maybe it's time for me to take out my savings as well. No, if for some reason I still need to rely on subjugating undead from Kattse Plains to make a living, it might be better for me to buy items which make me more resistant to poison, paralysis and sickness."

Magic items were highly valued in this world. Especially the ones that were useful during battle were highly sought after by adventurers. If it was a first-rate item, then he would simply give up on buying it.

For the time being, the items on his mind were not the extremely expensive ones. However, it would still require years of saving in order for an average person to purchase them. That was why he was taking his time to properly think things through.

His relaxed face, which couldn't contain the smile behind his excitement suddenly became tense the moment he sighted a group of knights currently standing by the side of the road.

The group composed of light and heavy-armored knights were standing guard at a road junction.

Due to the Temple of the Four Great Gods being in the vicinity, the amount of patrols in this area was considerably high. Although these knights wouldn't just suddenly start questioning normal people who were simply passing by, Hekkeran could still feel the gaze of the knights gathering on the weapons that he was carrying.

It might be alright for adventurers, but for workers like Hekkeran that had no backing from any organizations or persons of influence, it simply wasn't wise to get into conflicts with knights tasked with protecting the Empire.

As he had hoped, Hekkeran walked by without incident. After checking his face with the list of wanted criminals and not finding any match, the knights made no further movement.

Having made past the territory of the temple, he finally relaxed and set his sights further ahead. A huge building came into view, and along with it, the sound of cheering, battle and the thirst for blood.

That unique building was the Grand Arena, which only existed in the capital of the Empire. It was also one of the most iconic buildings in the capital.

For Hekkeran, who had seen enough blood spilled during work and had no interest in gambling, the arena was a place which held no meaning to him. However, to the populace of the capital it was one of their most important sources of entertainment. Even from where he was walking, the cheering could be heard. It seemed the arena was completely packed today as well.

"Is it the finals? The excitement is really high."

In the past, Hekkeran had brought his worker team to the arena, where they had to fight continuous hordes of monsters. Because monsters did not accept surrenders, losing would result in death. Of course, it wasn't like casualties didn't occur during battle between humans.

On a typical day in the arena, it was very rare to not see a single person die. If something like that did actually happen, the pressure exerted by the audience was strong enough to kill someone, since the events with many deaths were very popular.

Among these events, the one with the highest casualty rate was therefore the most popular one, the Grand Combat Tournament.

Hekkeran shrugged.

He had absolutely no interest in seeing such bloodthirsty scenes taking place, and had no desire to visit that place. However, events that happened in the arena were hot topics that people often talked about, so there were always reasons to go.