第７５掘：わんわんおなめんな！！ (Part1)
**Dungeon 75: Don’t You Underestimate the Doggos!!**
This is the longest one yet.
Sorry, I really wanted to get the mechanics of the Adventurer’s Guild out of the way.
Don’t you underestimate the doggos!!
***
**Side: Adventurer, Rank 7, Ovik**
I am currently an up-and-coming adventurer. Well, I suppose I’ve had a head start on those around me from the very beginning. I guess you could call it talent.
It’s said that it takes a long time for a beginner to climb from Rank 1 to Rank 4. The reason is that starting at Rank 4, the requirements shift from simple monster extermination to include bandit suppression.
From Rank 1 to 2, it’s mostly like doing chores—odd jobs within villages and towns to improve the Adventurer’s Guild’s reputation. Only after you’ve diligently completed those can you finally move on to monster hunting.
From Rank 2 onwards, as the name implies, monster hunting begins, but you’re only dealing with small fry like goblins, slimes, kobolds, and caterpies. Well, if you think you have the strength, you’re free to go looking for stronger foes, but that won’t contribute to your guild evaluation. You’ll get paid for the monster parts, but your rank won’t go up.
I think it’s well-designed. It prevents rookies who lack the actual skill—but get lucky—from achieving a rank they aren’t suited for. This rank isn’t just a measure of strength; it’s a measure of your reliability as an adventurer.
And I, in the short span of three years since becoming an adventurer, have climbed all the way to Rank 7, a high rank. It’s easy to say "Rank 7," but in reality, climbing this high is no small feat.
The bandit suppression required for Rank 4 involves dealing with people, not monsters, and it’s never straightforward. Many adventurers get stuck at Rank 4 or lose their lives there. That said, since you can’t exactly tell who is a bandit just by looking at them, the conditions for ranking up often involve even more difficult monster extermination instead. If every single adventurer were out there hunting bandits to rank up, the country would be in a sorry state, wouldn’t it?
Rank 5 is even more difficult. This rank evaluates your past mission completion rate, your reputation among others, and your character; the work itself also becomes much tougher. It often involves mentally taxing tasks, like heading into dungeons to retrieve specific items. The monsters are also on a different level in terms of strength, nuisance factor, and abilities. If a beginner were to encounter a Rank 5-class monster, the chances of them being wiped out without being able to do a thing are extremely high.
Rank 6. That’s the rank I was at until just a month ago. You’re judged on your achievements at Rank 5, and after further evaluation and the completion of specific quests, you can rise to this rank. From this stage on, you start receiving designated requests. Well, you might get them at lower ranks too, but designated requests at this level often involve classified information.
Most of the time, it’s about investigating a monster stampede. This is a common occurrence. If it were made public, the surrounding areas would fall into a panic. You can detect a stampede through daily surveys. Therefore, most of these investigations turn out to be false alarms, confirming that things are safe. Aside from that, there’s the conquest of high-casualty dungeons. This is tough even for Rank 6 adventurers. While dungeons are places where you can strike it rich, they remain sites of unprecedented natural disasters. Before you know it, monsters might overflow, or powerful monsters might appear on specific floors. You’re called in to deal with those situations.
Ah, that’s right. Aside from the Adventurer Rank, there is also a Dungeon Rank. It was created because there are many adventurers who specialize in dungeons. Generally, it’s easier to raise your Dungeon Rank because the conditions are based on specific monsters and floor completions. So, it’s not uncommon to see someone with an Adventurer Rank of 3 and a Dungeon Rank of 6. It’s hard to say which is superior, but... well.
A high Adventurer Rank means you’re better at communication and judging the situation around you. Overall, it means you have the deep trust of the residents in your base of operations. A high Dungeon Rank means you’re resistant to traps and ambushes, and your ability to handle monsters is extremely high. You could say it means you have high combat capability. By the way, my Dungeon Rank is 5. Well, that’s because there wasn’t a dungeon nearby. I raised my rank in a cleared training dungeon, which is why. Another reason is that having a higher Adventurer Rank makes it easier to get good quests and fame.
And now, I’m at Rank 7. From here on, it’s even stricter, and the opportunities are fewer. Honestly, you should consider Rank 6 to be the practical maximum for an adventurer. From Rank 7, you’re required to command units during large-scale monster suppression battles. And you can’t reach Rank 7 just by being able to command.
In my case, back when I was at my previous base, a swarm of nearly 200 monsters appeared. We had requested reinforcements from elsewhere, but there wasn’t enough time. I ended up organizing the local knights, adventurers, and volunteers to handle it. At the time, the knights formed the main force, totaling less than 100 people. With the volunteers added in, we were honestly at a huge disadvantage. As a Rank 6, I was tasked with leading the adventurers to defend one corner of the perimeter, but...
The main knight force was overwhelmed by the monster offensive, which was nearly double our size. Our adventurer group was also being pushed back, and in a pathetic turn of events, one of the other adventurers tasked with leading a unit fled. I scrambled to merge with that unit, pushed back the line in that sector, and in response, the entire force rallied, and we managed to escape disaster. My achievements that day were recognized, and that’s how I became a Rank 7.
I don’t know how one reaches Rank 8. Adventurers like the one called "The Hero of Defense," Mauve, have reached it, but that’s the kind of story that belongs in a legend. At the time, the lord of that town had taken most of his fighting force out to suppress bandits, leaving the town nearly empty. At the worst possible timing, a massive horde of monsters arrived, and with no lord to provide orders, the Adventurer’s Guild was planning to focus on evacuating the people. Mauve, the "Hero of Defense," was the adventurer who stood on the front lines to buy time for the escape. In that overwhelmingly disadvantageous situation, he rallied the adventurers, boosted morale, pushed back a monster swarm four times their size, and protected the town.
He is a person worthy of respect. I hope to meet him someday, but sadly, thanks to the Demon Lord’s schemes that occurred recently, the town he was assigned to was destroyed in a civil war. If he’s alive, I’d love to hear his stories, but information is still in chaos, and I can’t find him. Well, it’s only been three months since the ceasefire declaration. It’ll take at least a year for things to settle down.
As for Ranks 9 and 10, they are unknown. Considering the "Hero of Defense" is Rank 8, wouldn’t you have to be at a level where you can deal with a country or a Demon Lord to reach those?
"Hey, Ovik, what’s wrong?"
"Ah, sorry. I was just thinking about how I’ve reached Rank 7."
"Fufu, you’re a fine adventurer. I’ll vouch for you."
Lari, my party member, calls out to me, perhaps finding it strange that I’m spacing out at the quest board. When I was Rank 2, I rescued Lari from a carriage that had been attacked by monsters on my way back from a hunt. I was too late, and most of the people had already perished. Lari, who was a slave at the time, was one of the few survivors. By a stroke of luck in misfortune, the owner of the carriage had survived, so the surviving slaves didn’t end up without a place to go.
Generally, there’s an image that slaves are treated poorly. Well, I won’t deny that, but no one wants a broken, useless slave. That means they are at least guaranteed the bare minimum of food, clothing, and shelter. There are good and bad slave merchants; some engage in kidnapping and inhumane trading, but others buy people from families who have no choice but to sell them to survive. The latter type of merchant shows a way for one person to be sold so that the rest of the family doesn’t starve to death. In a sense, it’s not strange to view that as a charitable act. The merchant I saved was the latter, and the slaves were all people who had become slaves themselves to keep their families alive.