The temporary adventurer camp known as Black Tide was always crowded.
Some people arrived from distant lands, using the camp as a springboard into that chaotic region brimming with both danger and opportunity.
Others returned, dust-caked and exhausted, from the former Blackwater Town area—bringing back more or less supplies and manpower. And what came back wasn't only the living: there were also bodies wrapped in burial cloth, stacked on flatbed carts.
When the adventurers who hadn't yet departed caught sight of those piled corpses, the excitement on their faces instantly faded, as if they were looking at their own future.
That was the cruelty of adventuring—people died quietly every day.
And people only sang praises for the stories of the great adventurers who made names for themselves. These bodies didn't even deserve a bard's few lines.
Yet even so, they were lucky.
Compared to those colleagues who died in the wilderness, left to rot—mangled beyond recognition, eaten as food by monsters, or even tortured and abused before death—being kept intact, and having a chance for their remains to be delivered to family, was already something to be grateful for.
Out on the wilds, there were professional "corpse collectors" who roamed around.
They weren't philanthropists risking their lives for free.
They did it because retrieving the body gave them the right to loot the dead adventurer's spoils.
Someone might wonder: if you find a corpse in the wild, you can already take the ownerless property on the spot—why go to the trouble of hauling the body back to town?
There was a reason.
A lot of an adventurer's wealth wasn't carried on their person. It was stored in a guild account or somewhere similar.
And with the dead person's body and identity badge, the collector could claim a portion of the inheritance, depending on the deceased's rank. It might not be much, but corpse collectors didn't mind hauling a few extra bodies.
Still, "picking up bodies" in the wild wasn't easy.
First, adventurer deaths usually happened in battle—against other adventurers or against monsters—so corpses rarely lay undisturbed. If it was murder, the killer would loot everything and often destroy the body to prevent it being recovered and used as evidence. And monsters, of course, wouldn't spare a corpse—many had a taste for human flesh. Or rather, they ate anything.
Second, the areas where adventurers died were usually dangerous. Entering them meant taking massive risks—sometimes you'd fail to retrieve the corpse and get yourself killed instead.
So none of the "profitable" wilderness industries were simple. Everyone worked with their neck on the line.
The more Gauss experienced, the more deeply he understood that.
Adventuring was a brutally cruel profession.
"Wow… so many people died."
"Maybe they got careless?" A young swordsman swallowed hard and said to his childhood friend from the same village. "We have to be extra careful out there. This place is dangerous."
"Relax—we know what we're doing. We're partners. We've come this far together."
His companion answered solemnly.
Gauss flicked them a glance, then quietly looked away again.
Just being careful wasn't enough to avoid every danger, he thought. Still, he could only wish them luck.
Under those burial cloths were faces frozen in death—many not much older than those boys. They'd been living people too. Maybe they'd once said something like that here, in this very camp, to their own companions.
No matter how mentally prepared you were, no matter how solid your armor and weapons—armed to the teeth—you could still die on the road.
After taking a lap around the camp and gathering some information, Gauss returned to the Red Dragon Company's lot.
Ivan had already negotiated purchase prices with several merchant guild representatives, and now baskets of goods were being hauled out one after another.
For an adventuring company like Red Dragon, the merchant guilds wouldn't offer low prices.
One reason was obvious: compared to a normal party, their hauls were larger and more likely to contain valuable items. Another reason was trust—an adventuring company's reputation meant they were less likely to mix in fakes or junk.
Solo adventurers were different. After one deal, they might disappear to who-knew-where, so they often maximized profit short-term. That made guilds prefer stable, long-term partners like adventuring companies.
When the guild reps saw Gauss—the company leader—return, they put on flattering smiles, introduced themselves quickly, and left without lingering.
"Looks like a good haul. Nice work."
Gauss praised Ivan and the others, who were all smiling.
"Yes. The buyout price came out higher than we expected." Ivan nodded. "Also, Captain—I managed to buy a batch of mana clay. Another company cleared out a nest of mud golems."
Ivan had been keeping an eye out for mana clay the whole time.
Gauss's clay magic wouldn't boost their top-end combat power, but it did give Red Dragon more tireless, fearless laborers.
"That's great news. See if you can contact that company too—ask if they've got more stock."
"Already on it." Ivan answered immediately. Then he sighed. "If only we could learn clay magic too. We could take some load off you."
Gauss's team had once bought a blank spellbook, hoping he could write his clay magic and experience into it, but it failed—no one could learn his clay magic from it.
Gauss's expression turned a little complicated.
He suspected his clay magic couldn't be taught because it had been granted directly by the Adventurer's Manual.
Most spellbooks and skillbooks weren't that mysterious: a caster who knew the spell could buy a special blank book of the right tier and spend effort "copying" the skill into it.
But the cost was steep. Beyond the price of the blank book, the writer lost some of their own "experience" with the skill, and might not recover it easily later.
A skillbook wasn't just ink and diagrams—it carried the creator's hard-earned understanding and refinement.
That was why spellbooks were expensive, and higher-tier ones were rarer and more costly. Common spells were cheaper; niche spells were pricier.
Gauss would have liked to teach clay magic to a loyal subordinate—free labor was valuable.
But like Ivan said, he'd tried and failed.
His written "clay magic" ended up as meaningless paper.
He tested copying a minor cantrip he'd learned normally; it was difficult, but possible. Still, after that test he stopped. He had a gut feeling that repeatedly burning proficiency to copy spells caused some subtle harm.
He didn't lack money. There was no reason to lose a watermelon just to pick up sesame seeds.
His priority was his own growth.
"No big deal. I'm enough."
Gauss waved it off. Clay magic did take effort—the more clay creatures he split, the heavier the mental load. But he wasn't normal; his Intelligence was high enough to handle it.
The Red Dragon Company rested at Black Tide for two days.
Then, once supplies were topped up, they set out again—this time to hunt their third target: a marsh beastman clan.
…
"Run!"
A four-person party sprinted across muddy wetlands, firing arrows backward as they ran.
Behind them, a pack of upright, beast-shaped figures clung to their trail like ghosts—marsh beastmen.
They'd clearly stumbled into a patrol.
Even if most of the beastmen were individually unimpressive, the party knew one thing: somewhere behind them was a dangerous leader, strong enough to match professional adventurers.
Worse, the entire swamp seemed to be waking up.
"Don't fight—keep moving!"
Meva locked onto the nearest beastman, fired, and cleanly punched a bolt through its eye.
But there was no joy in the kill. She frowned and shouted the real problem:
"More and more of them are gathering!"
Everyone's stride tightened.
If they got surrounded, it was over.
They were all professionals, though. Their bodies were tougher than normal humans, so even in mud they could keep decent speed. They'd only entered for reconnaissance, so they weren't too deep.
After several minutes, they burst out of the swamp and onto firmer ground.
But when they reached the old tree where they'd tied their mounts, they saw only snapped ropes.
The horses were gone.
"We're in trouble." Laevin, the leader, knelt and studied the ground, then inhaled sharply. "Someone sabotaged us."
"They wanted us dead out here!" Meva added.
The signs were clear: the ropes had been cut cleanly from range—an arrow shot. There were fresh splinters in the trunk and faint blood marks on the ground. The mounts had been wounded and bolted.
They connected it instantly to recent bad blood: a crew of all-rogue adventurers. The day before, that crew had tried to buy an old map Laevin purchased. When Laevin refused to sell it at their preferred price, the talk turned sour.
The next day, the map vanished from Laevin's inner pocket. By the time they tried to track the rogues down, those people were already gone.
Now, in the swamp, beastmen had locked onto them as if enraged, chased them relentlessly, and the moment the party tried to fall back to their mounts—this happened.
It didn't feel like coincidence.
"Just run!" Laevin barked. "Head the opposite direction—get as far as possible!"
No time to dwell. The howls were getting closer.
Without mounts, they had to keep moving.
But two legs couldn't beat four.
When mounted beastmen arrived, the pack rapidly gained ground.
"Focus the riders! Fight while moving—don't stop!"
Laevin forced the party into a fighting retreat.
Meva fired constantly, thinning the chase.
Laevin and Sasha cut down anything that got close, while Elvin the priest kept tossing quick heals to patch wounds.
But in a chase like this, the cruel truth set in: their retreat speed kept dropping, while the shadows behind them grew.
They couldn't kill them fast enough.
"Meva—take them and go! I'll stay and drop the riders, then catch up!" Laevin roared, cutting down another beastman.
"Don't be stupid!" Meva snapped, driving a bolt through the neck of one lunging from the side. "If we split, we die faster!"
She was right.
This wasn't the kind of situation one person "holding the line" could fix. Stopping meant death, and even if Laevin bought seconds, the rest wouldn't escape far.
And then—
A voice, familiar yet strange, spoke as clearly as if it were right beside them.
"Looks like you need help, Laevin… Meva."
"??"
"Who's there?!"
No one answered.
Instead, a bright blue light flared ahead of them.
Boom!
A glowing orb ripped through the air like a cannonball and slammed into the pursuing beastmen.
A crater bloomed on the ground. Flesh tore. Beastmen screamed.
And that was only the beginning.
Second. Third. Fourth.
A skyful of magic missiles—curving as if guided—cascaded into the pack.
Explosions stitched the swamp edge with fire and light.
The blast-wind stung Laevin's face. The glare forced him to squint.
But he didn't flinch away. Professional instinct held.
He and Meva both stared toward the source.
Within that star-scattered blue brilliance, a blurred figure drifted forward—slowly, unmistakably emerging from the storm of spells.