We’re done in the Mercenary Guild, but I don’t feel like going straight home. And so, I look up on my smartphone if there’s anything here, and find a free outdoor market near here.
It’s free in the sense that anyone can set up a stall if they pay. The paths are pretty wide to accommodate for races with large lower bodies, so Vasilisa can enter with her cart. Apparently.
“Let’s go to this outdoor market then.”
“Very well. I will contact the others.”
“You got something in mind?”
“Not really, but it’s fun seeing this sort of thing.”
“Iris, if boss tries to make an impulse buy, make sure you stop him.”
“Very well, I will do everything in my power.”
She sounds flat, like she has no intention of stopping me. Oh well.
We look around the outdoor market while eating rabbit meat skewers. Twenty puni for five pieces of meat about the size of half my fist, and four pieces of a vegetable I think is onion. Seriously? This for twenty puni in a colony? And it’s all organic too.
According to the middle-aged man behind the stall, spiders, silk moths, rabbits, and goats are treated as the four divine beasts in this colony. But they consider rabbits to be ill-natured, so it’s okay to eat them.
I thought rabbit meat had little fat, but it’s juicy and springy like chicken thighs, and really delicious. It tastes like chicken too, but there’s an exquisite beast smell to it.
Of course, Vasilisa is also eating one, and enjoying it.
The paths in this outdoor market are all wide. They’re wide enough for two cars to pass, and this place is big enough to fit two of those amusement parks called Tokyo despite being in Chiba. It’s really big.
There’s no way we can see it all in one day, and I see minibuses slowly running through the paths.
Since anyone can set up a stall, there are once in a lifetime opportunities, and weird things for sale.
Trinkets and ornaments made of wood, as well as a lot of furniture. Something I thought was an oil painting, that turns out to be an actual one of a kind oil painting, fan magazines tied with paper, a self-published magazine with cotton swab reviews, hand-made jewelry, homemade laser pistols, what looks like homemade blades, people (slaves with marks of servitude), handmade clothes and underwear, second hand clothes, fruits you can eat on the spot if you pay, and all sorts of other things.
I can’t go to the sections where minotaurs and dryads are. Why? They’re not dirty stores or anything… Ah, yes. No dirty stores.
I only got meat skewers and a wooden cat ornament.
“It’s weird how they’re selling clothes. You’d think they’d have alchemist crafter or factory stuff.”
“Mass produced stuff is all simple. Don’t you think it’s nice to wear handmade stuff with different designs?”
“Alchemist crafter recipes are deliberately destroyed, most likely so these techniques are not lost.”
Really…?
I’m very curious about the homemade laser pistols, but I don’t know what that’s about, so I’m not buying it. There’s one that fires five lasers horizontally at the same time, but I don’t understand that one.
“Does anything catch your eye, Vasilisa? You’re not stopping anywhere.”
She’s been looking at homemade knives and clothes.
“Hn… No… Well…”
She’s peeking at a stall with leaves, fruits, and seeds.
“I see. We can go have a look.”
“Yes…”
Sometimes her demeanor changes completely and she turns meek. I can’t quite figure out when.
Also, I’m still on her cart, wrapped in her tentacles, so that doesn’t help. Is it when she’s trying to get her own way?
She looks embarrassed, but still buys dry leaves and seed worth five hundred puni. As for their use… Well, if it was illegal, Iris would’ve said something.
“I feel like we’re carrying a bit too much. We should go back to the ship.”
“Yes, but I think we should get something for the others.”
“How about six people worth of rabbit skewers? If the ones who stayed behind complain, we can have another date.”
Well, it’s more like shopping.
“Not~fair~!!!”
Kori shakes with anger with the wooden cat decoration I bought in her hand. Gimme back my cat.
“Oh, there is a streaming video of the outdoor market on the internet.”
“Hnu? Is this true? Are they perhaps highlights of today… Buhyah!?”
It seems to be a highlight corner of today, and I see a guy I recognize. Wrapped in brown octopus tentacles of a lady with silver hair and porcelain white skin, on an engine-powered cart.
Saratha puts her hand on her forehead, and Kori is even more mad. Suzuri is staring at me with half closed eyes.
Iris is giggling with her hand on her mouth, and Vasilisa tries to soothe Kori with a kind of a cold sweat.
“Genma… You really… Need to stop standing out in weird places like that.”
“No, that happens!”
“It is not fair!”
“Not~fair~!!”
Suzuri holds me while yelling, and Kori engulfs us both. I can breathe, but I don’t think I’m doing anything else today…
And gimme back my cat.
The next day, we hold a strategy meeting surrounded by couches and buried in a pillow mountain. The wooden cat sits atop this mountain.
“So, about the Mercenary Guild. There are a lot of standing quests about patrolling allotted areas, and destroying comets. The way to make money here is to go around looking for space pirates, or destroying comets to make some pocket money.”
Iris shows the homepage of the Mercenary Guild, where the quests are displayed.
Patrolling an area basically means hanging out somewhere and getting paid hourly. The further we are from the colony, the fewer mercenaries there are, and the chances of finding mercenaries go up.
Destroying comets is kind of a pain. We’d have to use hyperspace to move around and predict their trajectory so we can wait for them and destroy them. The reward depends on their size, but it’s difficult.
The one we destroyed before was among the smaller ones, so it evaded their predictions.
“Anyway, I was thinking about accepting a patrolling quest far from here and jumping there through hyperspace.”
“The homepage says they are typically in groups of one to three medium sized ships and ten small ships.”
“You should know that when I worked here before we were attacked by a group of fifty small ones. Although they were all refurbished transport ships and were beaten back by the escort.”
“Poor space pirates typically arm transport ships they have stolen. Remember, last time, none of them had proper combat ships.”
“The armors make things tricky. They’re not worth much, but have weapons that can damage combat ships.”
That said, resupplying solid ammo takes time, so they generally don’t use it. If we use puny, their laser cannons will be blocked by shields.
“Then how about destroying comets?”
“These are quests to destroy comets observed by the colony’s mechanical intelligence and artificial intelligence. It is said there are three hundred dangerous comets in Pokapoka Flower Field Prime, so they want them destroyed.”
“That’s a lot, but not all are on a direct course for the colony. Even if they come this way, it will take years.”
“They’re really fast, but if regular combat ships can’t catch up with them, it’s no good, right~? How would we destroy them?”
“Generally speaking… You move to a previously calculated spot through hyperspace, and fire a few times.”
That would take a lot of time and effort, so everyone agrees to put it on the back burner. We’re going to patrol for space pirates.
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