This is indeed the Labyrinth City Purgatory; gold and silver treasures everywhere you look; adventurers and rogues seeking fame; there are few cities that have grown so quickly as this. Several parties formed of a majority of Yara Beastmen went back and forth around the town square.
The struggles and riches gained from the Labyrinths within are a great temptation to almost anyone.
It was still early in the morning. The sun had yet to rise. I walked past one of the Guild halls within the city Guild Branch.
The training field there is open to all adventurers, free of charge. There, you can see a mass of different species present, a Yara Beastman with bushy hair equipped with full plate armor, an old woman with a cane wearing a robe, a young boy and cat girl warrior carrying swords, a female human thief practicing her knife throwing.
I'm always for studying different fighting styles. That said, in the Labyrinth city, there are many such combat enthusiasts.
Even if you were to guess just at a glance, there had to be more than sixty people gathered in the training field.
It seems that they all have come to accept a quest from the guild to challenge the Labyrinth. When I had spoken with one of the adventurers on the matter, I received an invitation to participate. Apparently, quite a few of the present adventurers had seen our training session the other day when we arrived in the city, and we received an official invitation to use the training ground.
When thinking about it, I suppose that it would be possible.
After all, seeing our party, since I'm an Extinct species, I'm being grouped in with the Lords. Regardless, the combat strength of our present group is quite high, even if I was simply an Ogre, that fact would remain such.
Currently Dhammi-chan has strength, she has power similar to that of Redhead, and both are able to defend themselves properly. The issue lies within the lack of overall speed that Dhammi-chan currently has.
Well, while I was doing some training in the Training Ground with the group, several adventurers stopped their own training to watch. After several minutes, some of them came over to offer to spar with us. After pondering this for a moment, I thought it would be a good idea to allow some of our members to practice against the adventurers, while building up our reputation as well. Since I'm an Apostle Lord, an extinct species, most of them probably took me as a powerful lord class as even I received several challenges.
After some quick thinking, I thought to make a game out of the unique atmosphere. Though I left Dhammi-chan out of it since there were no individuals willing to go against someone that beautiful, even the other women were intimidated.
Well, I suppose it's fine for now, but Dhammi-chan won't be gaining any experience from this situation. I'll have to manage something later for her.
Since being able to fight against a multitude of different opponents is a rare opportunity, it will be good to gain some experience for the future. I decided to make things more interesting and set up a reward system.
If you managed to defeat Wind Lord-chan or Fire Lord-kun, you would receive a thousand gold. If you won against Illusion Lord-kun, you would win a Silver Plate, worth ten thousand gold.
As soon as I said that, the gathering started to get lively. The eyes of the adventurers changed, and all of them are fully motivated by money.
Although I do know how easy it is to manipulate some people with money, there is a time when it just feels too easy.
I charged an admission fee for each bout.
I also added a special reward that if someone would be able to defeat all three, they would receive a prize of one hundred thousand gold coins.
Well, to make the long story short, even though the three that I had participate on our side had become exhausted, they never once lost a single bout. Our training methods paid off, no matter who the opponent was, each of them knew exactly how to deal with the attacker's movements and defeated them.
After all of the minor fighting, some of the higher ranked adventurers thought that it would be amusing to challenge me. I charged triple the fee and let them all come at once. It was over in an instant.
This was quite the profitable venture, not only did we get in our morning training, but also managed to earn quite a bit of money too. It's killing two birds with one stone.
By the time training finished, it was close to noon.
After the bouts, I received numerous invitations to various clans and organizations, but since I'm the leader of a mercenary group, I rejected them all.
For now, I decided to stop our advertisements since, for one, we are already on a mission, and two, none of the jobs have any real benefit to us. We went back to the inn and used the bath house there.
After, I went through the several items and counted the money gained from the event earlier.
After counting the money, I gave each of the Lords some spending money, should they head out for their good work.
I wanted to see the town a little more and let everyone do their own thing for the day.
Ah yes. incidentally, I went to go and check out the Labyrinth as well. Although I didn't actually head in, the building was a giant gray tower that towered into the heavens. It's pretty spectacular.
Tourism is also a pretty big thing in this town.
The back alleyways are pretty lawless, just to mention. There are some people that go missing and no one really seems to bother caring about it. Though while most people would avoid the back corners of the city after hearing something like that, I went in to try and lure some fools into attacking me. Since I'm more human-like, there will be far more people who will try to attempt something.
As if on cue, several thugs jumped me, their skills were meager and couldn't even damage my skin.
I grabbed one of them and pulled his head off, leaving the others in a daze. Within seconds, the rest were also dead. I gathered up their items and ate the bodies while on alert.
After that, I used some acidic body fluids to eliminate any evidence that anything happened.
Some of the items that the thugs had were quite nice, but I didn't gain any abilities from the thugs. I obtained a magical ring, a magic potion, some velvet garbs, though the rest was memorabilia.
On the bright side, they had a lot of money on them. Although they tasted bad, I decided to forgive them because of the amount of wealth they brought me. Being able to eat five people though did please me.
After hunting for thugs in the dark depths of the city, I went looking around for some good shops. First, I went to a store that dealt with magic items that came from the Labyrinth.
After that, came several purveyor shops for adventurers, and I purchased several decent items at an affordable price.
While I was doing this, some shops had items that seemed to interfere with my Item Box, though I just needed to take several steps back before I could put things inside again.
With the accessories taken care of, I went to several material shops to purchase magic medicine, materials, and metals.
I managed to purchase several different magical metal ingots other than mithril as a souvenir for the Dwarves back at the settlement.
Incidentally, I ended up gathering quite a large quantity of many different materials for Alchemist-san.
I managed to clear out a good deal of the magical shop's wares, and he had to close for the time being to resupply. Well, once the shopping was done, I just returned to the inn.
Auro and Argento have grown considerably during the time I've been gone. They simply spent time playing around. I gave them a new toy to play around with, but since they're rough, it won't last long.
After that, I went to test some of my abilities in private. I spent some time testing out abilities to see what I would be able to use, and how to secretly use my Item Box if I were to go in to the Labyrinth.
Though, after several minutes, the Tomboy Princess stormed in, and I had to end my tests there.
The evening went by rather fast. That night, it was quite intense, since Dhammi-chan and Redhead weren't pregnant yet, they were quite frustrated and were quite insistent on the matter. Though... I won't say that I put up much resistance. Since I already have four children, I suppose two more won't hurt...