A Gentle Noble's Vacation Recommendation

The relationship between Lizel and the guild hadn’t changed much even after the incident in the royal palace library.

If Lizel had used the royal family to his advantage to do something that went beyond an adventurer’s position, things might have turned out differently. But all he’d done was calmly assert his rights as an adventurer. The guild understood that, and they also knew the fault lay on their side.

That said, if you asked a certain employee whether the Lizel he’d faced in the library really had been an adventurer, he would say, “He definitely wasn’t an adventurer.” Covered in a noble air that an adventurer simply shouldn’t have, he’d looked anything but.

After feeling, just for a moment, as though he might kneel and swear fealty right there, that guild staffer had been at least a little awkward about seeing Lizel again. His worries turned out to be baseless.

“Only slimes show up here.”

“Slimes are those things similar to aquatic elementals, right? Jelly-like ones.”

“Ah—well, they’re more… sluggish than that, y’know?”

“Sluggish?”

“Sluggish.”

Lizel and the others were exactly the same as always, chatting away about things that made people do double takes, completely at odds with the aloof aura that set them apart from everyone around them. The guild staffer, who had been worrying about what to do if he let himself be overawed by that previous image and ended up treating Lizel like some high-ranking noble instead of an adventurer, now realized that, right, this is what they’re actually like.

They looked like they were having a serious conversation, but the content was just weird. Fundamentally harmless.

“Letting yourself get pushed around by a bunch of adventurers? Still got a long way to go,” the staffer at the request counter thought, nodding to himself while roughly rubbing his jaw-beard as he stood there like a guardian statue. The adventurer in front of him, who was in the middle of submitting a request, burst out laughing, thinking he’d spaced out. He got his head grabbed in a claw hold and told to shut up for his trouble.

“There are all kinds of slimes, right?”

Paying no attention at all to that staffer’s gaze, Lizel looked up at the slime-related requests.

He had yet to actually encounter any slime-type monsters. He’d read about them in books, and he was sure they were quite interesting monsters.

According to Eleven, their outer appearance was “sluggish” jelly, gathered around a core. Most were round lumps about as high as an adult’s knee, but the largest confirmed individuals were apparently up to two meters tall—quite big.

“In terms of ways to attack, they’ve got a lot, yeah.”

“The books mentioned changing shape to match their target exactly, or blowing themselves up core and all.”

“Those things disguise themselves so well you seriously can’t tell ‘em apart from the real deal. Like, where’d the half-transparent body even go?”

“Well, they’re monsters that only appear in labyrinths, so it makes sense that they’re special.”

Monsters you only saw in labyrinths often had strong quirks.

Slimes didn’t just change shape into their target; somehow, they could even take on the appearance of the person their opponent feared or disliked most. Their combat ability didn’t scale up to match that, of course, but their attack methods tended to follow their form, so it was like fighting a weaker version of the real thing.

On top of that, as Lizel had mentioned, there were those that self-destructed, those that specialized in magic, and those that used ricochets off walls to deliver brutal body slams. They were an unusually individualistic type of monster. But basically they just oozed slowly over the floor, so if you didn’t want to fight them, you could often just sprint past.

“If they start causing friendly fire, that’d be a mess.”

“They don’t talk or make expressions, so you can tell which is which at a glance. ‘Cept I’ve heard there’s some boss somewhere that can completely become its target.”