sonovelo Chapter 365: The Sweep Operation Begins
Chapter 365: The Sweep Operation Begins
"Roger, don't run over there anymore, okay?"A child who had been ready to dash out and play was stopped by his mother, who earnestly warned him.
Seeing his mother's serious expression, the boy who had been about to clown around could only nod and agree first.
"I know, Mom."
Scenes like this have been appearing every day recently in the surrounding residences.
Everyone knew that the vacant land had found an owner.
And in just one week, from nothing, a private estate like a noble's manor had been erected.
They said many people had seen a Red Dragon there.
So parents in nearby households, worried, put their children under house arrest.
They feared that their kids—silly and reckless—might stray into that fenced-off manor and be eaten as a snack by that fearsome Red Dragon.
...
Gauss was completely unaware of the neighbors' worries.
Of course, even if he knew, he would only smile it off.
For one thing, one of the conditions under which he let Hephaestus roam freely was that the drake would not use "force" without his permission.
Even without that gentleman's agreement, children couldn't climb over the tall fence, and above and around the guild's manor there were always a group of hidden black scouts.
They perched on trunks, hovered by fences, or circled overhead.
These black ravens were like omnipresent moving eyes, watching every movement inside and outside the manor at all times.
"Finally some peace."
Gauss sat on the villa's balcony, sipping tea while looking over the Red Dragon Guild's base as it gradually fell into order.
At present, the Red Dragon Guild had recruited dozens of staff.
His family had come to Falim a few days ago, but he did not choose to house them inside the Red Dragon Guild base.
Instead, he purchased an additional property for them to live in.
"It's about time to get things running."
Gauss narrowed his eyes.
If there was a biggest difference between an adventuring guild and an adventurer party, he thought it was the difference in authority.
Take the old adventurer party he used to be part of: the number of commissions they could accept at once was usually small.
This was not because the guild staff were being difficult, but because of the regulations.
Small adventurer parties usually had only a few members; if they took on too many commissions simultaneously, the guild would worry the team would be stretched too thin, and also worry about delayed completion times causing unnecessary losses.
But an adventuring guild was different.
An adventuring guild could include personnel ranging from dozens to hundreds or more.
With that kind of manpower, the Adventurers Guild felt comfortable assigning them more and tougher commissions.
And if they caused major losses due to their own fault, the Adventurers Guild could more easily hold them accountable—after all, a guild base made fleeing impossible.
An adventurer party could come and go freely; if things went south, they could simply disband.
Outside the Red Dragon Guild base.
Several uniformed men riding fast horses stopped at the gate.
They straightened up instinctively when they saw the imposing Red Dragon sigils on the porticos and paused their jokes.
"Come to think of it, I haven't met the guild leader up close these days."
"I wonder what sort of person the guild leader is?"
"Yeah, I've never seen him either. I heard he's been handling commissions constantly; he’s a Mission Maniac."
"And he accepted so many commissions this time."
"When I picked up these tasks, the receptionist was stunned and confirmed with me several times."
......
They chatted as they entered the tidy internal roads of the base,
and arrived at a residence.
After notifying the steward, they inhaled deeply and climbed the stairs toward the second floor.
Before they reached the top, a hugely built figure happened to be walking down.
They hurriedly pressed against the wall to clear a path.
"Thank you."
The voice they heard sounded like a woman's.
Soon they realized the person was the female giant warrior who stood by the guild leader.
Unlike Gauss, who was often buried in commissions, this female giant warrior, who also worked as the blacksmith, had a substantial presence at the Red Dragon Guild base.
Many people passing the blacksmith shop would see her busy inside.
These past two days she seemed a bit less busy and had even brought along a few apprentices to help.
Although they heard she wasn't an unkind person, that oppressive physique still made the small group swallow nervously at the close encounter.
So strong...
Before being screened to become ordinary members of the newly established Red Dragon Guild, they had been adventurers too.
After nearly ten years of crawling through the ranks without rising far, they happened to hear about these recruitments and tried their luck. Fortunately, they performed exceptionally that day and were chosen by the snake-person priest in charge of screening to join the Red Dragon Guild.
Even now they still felt a little dazed.
They reached the second floor.
Following the steward's directions, they went out to the balcony.
They met the Red Dragon Guild leader.
He was a man whose looks were flawless to the point of breathtaking.
"Le... Leader."
"These are... the commissions we picked up."
The middle-aged man leading them stammered.
"What's your name?"
Gauss asked as he took the commission documents.
"Leader, my name is Donovan."
"Leader, I'm Debbie."
...
They quickly introduced themselves.
"Hmm, got it."
Gauss looked at the men and women before him.
When he recruited, he had been watching too—just without showing himself.
With his current soul strength, the basic nature of ordinary people was hard to hide from him.
For picking ordinary members for the Red Dragon Guild, aside from capability, he valued character more.
If judged by adventuring skill, these people were hardly outstanding; otherwise they wouldn't have been stuck at the bottom for ten years. But they had rich experience, were honest and steady, and were locals with families in the city.
He mostly hired locals whose families lived in Falim.
Gauss's eyes skimmed the commission slips quickly.
He soon memorized the contents, especially the precise map addresses of each commission.
Overall, nothing major.
They had picked up dozens of commissions in one go, mostly concentrated in a single region, which met Gauss's requirements.
"Get yourselves ready."
"Yes."
Gauss called his squad to assemble.
"Finally, it's time to work."
Aria stretched lazily.
She felt a bit out of practice after so many days without field commissions, but there was no choice—these days she had to stay at the base overseeing construction. She wasn't like Gauss, who shirked responsibility and ran off every few days.
Her look toward Gauss held an indescribable grievance.
Gauss pretended not to understand the meaning behind her expression.
Hephaestus flapped his wings and descended into the guild plaza.
These days, Gauss had also activated flight permissions for himself, Eck, and Hephaestus.
Now the airspace around the Red Dragon Guild base and the corridor to the city walls would not be restricted by the anti-air formation.
Most of the area outside the city’s limits also had its restrictions lifted, so entering and leaving Falim became much easier.
"Then let's go."
The red drake beat his wings slowly.
Quickly, under the stunned gazes of the ordinary guild members, he soared into the sky, flew over the city wall, and disappeared from view.
Gauss recalled the stack of commission slips in his mind.
Though it had only taken a few seconds, he had already stamped all the locations onto his mental map and, using all the information, planned a route.
The first commission site was in a village somewhere outside Falim.
Small villages and towns like this dotted the outskirts.
"A goblin tribe threatening the village, about fifty in number?"
You could say even poor adventuring guilds would look down on such trifling commissions, but Gauss didn't care.
As the saying goes, many small gains add up. These commissions carried little risk, and with his mobility, he could complete many in a single run—altogether a decent profit.
Flying over the village,
Gauss had no intention of landing to talk with villagers.
That was one benefit of having a guild, especially in Falim's outskirts: he only needed to submit the commission proof without requiring villagers' signatures.
"Locate Creature · Goblin."
Gauss had Hephaestus lower his flight over a patch of woods and then released the spell.
An invisible energy ripple spread around him.
In the woods, goblins that had been resting were suddenly filled with unease.
They instinctively felt the air change, as if some terrifying creature had arrived.
"Wah wah!"
The goblins babbled to each other, grabbed nearby weapons, and scanned the jungle warily.
"Thud thud thud!"
Just as they were alarmed,
several abnormal presences dropped from the sky.
"Ah!"
They didn't expect slaughter to come so fast.
Two dark silhouettes darted through the tribe like assassins; each movement took one or two lives.
On top of that, they found other unfamiliar, powerful "kin" attacking them.
By the time they realized they should flee, the whole tribe had been cut down to a few stragglers.
As the shadows' blades fell, even the last survivors died in terror.
A goblin tribe of around fifty was slaughtered within seconds.
Hephaestus landed and carried the group down.
Gauss used Locate Creature again to confirm there were no survivors,
then organized everyone to pillage the site.
Despite his outward calm, the Red Dragon Guild's coffers now held only three hundred gold coins, and it was time to replenish the small treasury.
Also, the Red Dragon Guild could now maximize how it processed spoils,
so...
take everything.
Gauss put everything into his Storage Bag.
The guild had hired a pharmacist, a dispenser, and an appraiser precisely to process these miscellaneous spoils.
If, back when he was in an adventurer party, a commission like this might yield one or two gold coins, now that he had his own guild, profits could easily double into several gold.
Rusty picks, corroded swords, arrows—all taken...
Even goblin corpses, after special processing of some organs, could be used as potion materials.
After clearing the camp, Gauss and company mounted the drake again and moved on to the second commission site.
Then they repeated the same process.
Arrive at the marker, use Locate Creature to pinpoint enemies, send them on their way, scavenge and package spoils, clean up, and move on.
Gauss and the others were extremely efficient; by one morning they cleared about ten commissions.
While they worked, another team member was also busy.
That was raven Eck.
It kept carrying Storage Bags back and forth to Falim.
Once it landed at the Red Dragon Guild base in Falim, it handed the materials to the steward Ivan.
He was a warlock who doubled as a pharmacist with excellent alchemy skills.
Strictly speaking, in just a week Gauss shouldn't have been able to recruit such a versatile talent, since his recruitment channels were low-tier and were supposed to fill only basic positions.
But this pharmacist had come knocking.
At first Gauss wondered if the recruit's enthusiasm hid ulterior motives, but upon meeting him he quickly understood the reason for his eagerness.
The man was a warlock with a faint dragon lineage.
Hearing the Red Dragon Guild owned a "Red Dragon," he had come to verify the truth.
But after seeing Gauss, his attention shifted from the drake to the young guild leader.
Though Gauss felt the man's gaze was slightly fanatical, after sensing him carefully he detected nothing abnormal and decided to keep this eager "superfan."
After Ivan received the materials from the Storage Bag, he quickly returned the emptied bag to raven Eck.
He turned to look at the warehouse that had been nearly empty not long ago; now it was full of various supplies, weapons, and corpses, and admiration involuntarily showed in his eyes.
Is this the man who conquered a mighty dragon?
Indeed, he was terrifyingly powerful.
He couldn't help recalling the meeting with Gauss a few days earlier.
That extraordinarily handsome man radiated a familiar yet strange pressure that made Ivan's knees go weak and almost caused him to prostrate.
When he lost strength, it was Gauss who steadied him and spared him embarrassment in front of the other interviewees.
He knew that bloodline-suppressing power implied an absolute advantage in dragon lineage.
In his perception, the shock of seeing the ferocious red drake later was far less than the impact of meeting the guild leader in person.
Could a human's dragonblood be purer than a drake's?
Ivan couldn't help shaking his head.
Before coming, he had gathered a lot of information about Gauss through his channels, each rumor so exaggerated it sounded false.
Perhaps that was the wonder of the guild leader.
After spending time with him, Ivan increasingly realized how terrifying the power hidden inside that seemingly slight body was.
If the bloodline factor explained an instinctive closeness, then the rest of what he learned about Gauss only strengthened Ivan's conviction to root himself in the Red Dragon Guild.
The leader's future was dazzlingly bright.
"Get moving, hurry up!"
Thinking this, he hurriedly commanded others to process the recent batch of materials.
Looking at the base, his heart pounded and his body warmed.
As an elder member he already had a place, but as the Red Dragon Guild grew and recruited more members, he had to seize this once-in-a-lifetime chance and stick closely to the guild leader.