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The cold wintry wind blew through the city of Kugutfulm, carrying with it a lonely sound.

On a street that was at quite a distance from the Adventurer’s Guild’s branch was a new and artistic building of the McGregor Adventurer Support Office.

Gemel was currently in that office.

“…This is too much.”

A young man in a suit was being glared at by the giant Gamel from across a big desk. The man with smoothly combed hair leaned back into the leather-covered chair and folded his arms.

“Too much, you say?”

The suited man remained arrogant and dissatisfied even under Gemel’s overbearing glare.

“Yes it is! It’s four f̲u̲c̲k̲i̲n̲g times what I paid to my previous manager!!”

Gamel spoke and slapped the desk.

This McGregor Adventurer Support Office that opened up recently here aided the adventurers in office work and intelligence gathering… In other words, they were a management company.

Given how rare it was, they seem to have gone through rough times until they were understood, but the Adventurer’s Guild acknowledged their cooperation, and work started sporadically coming to them as of late.

It was hard to say that they had established themselves solidly just yet.

And yet, they were acting quite-self importantly.

They built a flashy building on the main street, and this man who was their representative had quite a high-handed attitude too, and the remuneration he asked from Gemel who came to request work was also absurd.

All of that pissed Gemel off. He’d been constantly annoyed as of late. He was unable to work as he wished lately, and their party assets only continued to decrease. There were still no designated quests for them, so they were subsisting on the subjugation quests alone. But that was far off from the glorious activities they wanted.

As of late, the guild had warned that his attitude toward clients was bad, so sometimes he was even denied some quests, which only served to irritate him further. Gemel thought there was no need to lower his head to a client who didn’t pay well, but the guild’s opinion turned out to differ.

The party Seventh Dice was gradually falling from “a party with bad behavior but good at work” to “a party with just bad behavior”.

It wasn’t that he decided a manager was necessary to break out of that situation.

It was just that the cumbersome routine tasks and duties were adding to his irritation and he was the one who could no longer endure it. Even the house they were renting as their base (which they may need to vacate and find something cheaper) was in a mess and he wanted something done about it.

And thus, he came to search for a manager, but the other party was extremely arrogant.

“So you want someone to judge quests for you and get designated quests for you. In other words, you want a first-class manager.”

The representative of this office, Ivar McGregor waved his finger at Gemel in a condescending manner while remaining seated.

“So I’m demanding the appropriate price for what you’re lookin’ for. Looks like the adventurer manager’s work still has a ways to go in this country. But still, or rather, exactly because of that, I’m not budgin’ on this. If you wanna drive a bargain, go somewhere else. We don’t do cheap work. And you even want ‘em to clean your room for you? Take your sleep-talking somewhere else and never come back!”

If Gemel had a sword he might’ve drawn it. It was a miracle that he held back on punching Ivar.

“Don’t f̲u̲c̲k̲i̲n̲g get carried away! You’re just handymen with no other skills but parasitizing us adventurers…! This damn place will fail soon enough! When that happens, I’ll hire you as a cleaner!!”

Gamel slammed the door shut as loudly as possible and left the office behind.

When the uninvited guest left, Ivar heaved a sigh.

“That must’ve been tiring, representative.”
“I can’t allow myself to get tired by that much. Those types are everywhere. Ruffians who have more pride in strength than actual heroes. Among adventurers, I mean.”

A young employee who held her breath in the office’s corner showed appreciation towards Ivar while still looking frightened.

“That guy must’ve been the one that the rumored manager worked for.”
“Indeed.”
“I did talk to him a few times, and he seemed to be doing authentic training… Good grief, why was he selling his work short like that? That even lowered our value down now, dammit.”

Ivar remembered the man who was said to have worked for Gemel.

He estimated that the reason Gemel valued managers so lowly was that he only knew that man.

Universally, managers for adventurers were mostly used in minor regions, and it was the same in this kingdom too. Ivar had brought the manager concept in.

Ivar remembered talking a few times with him who worked as a manager in this city before he came.

“I wonder if he was from Maltgartz.”
“He had to be. I heard he got the adventurer qualifications there so he could work as a manager. In Maltgartz, the adventurer work is mainly done by the officials, so the kingdom is big but the Adventurer’s Guild there is weak. So manager work was created to take over the work that the guild should normally do…”

Ivar, who was also doing authentic training, poured his complex feelings into his knife and cut off the tip of his cigar.

“People who don’t know their value and undersell themselves are, at the end of the day, incompetent. But well, I guess he just picked the wrong time. If he started when the adventurer managers were already widely accepted, then perhaps…”

He lit the cigar with the ‘lighting pot’ (a small, pot-like magic item that simply put fire on the things you put inside) and puffed off smoke.

It then fleetingly melted and disappeared into the air.

“Agh, dammit! Why do only valuable people die so prematurely? What was his name again?”
“Well, I don’t know.”
“It feels weird… the way I forgot about it…”

He couldn’t really mess up his hair so he just settled with doing the grabbing gesture emptily.

He was supposed to be good at remembering faces and names because of his work. However, his name that Ivar even remembered saying before had completely disappeared from his memory.