Chapter 98 - Concluding after Reporting (1/2)

Ch. 98: Concluding after Reporting

“So, did you tell the guild girl that you’ll take the exam?”

It was currently night time.

As Loren told Lapis what happened during the day while they were having dinner at the bar in the guild, Lapis asked him that question.

As she sat across from him, with a plate of sausages and a glass in front of her but not touching either of them as she listened to Loren’s story, Loren put down his glass and slowly shook his head.

“I told her that I’ll talk about it with my partner first.”

“That’s good. I’d say you handled it pretty well.”

Even though Lapis praised him, Loren wasn’t sure what he did well.

All he had done was postpone his answer until after he had asked for Lapis’ opinion, but Lapis continued as she poked the sausage in front of her with her fork.

“In these cases, if you don’t have the materials that are worth basing your decision on, it’s best to avoid answering immediately. If that isn’t possible, make sure your replies can be interpreted in different ways, while not saying anything that could be used against you, and try to buy time to ask for someone else’s opinion.”

“You just want to make things complicated, don’t you?”

If he were to do that every time something similar happened, the conversation would go nowhere and only time would be wasted.

As he glared at Lapis while thinking that, she stuck her fork in one of the sausages, and averted her eyes in the most natural way as she brought it up to her mouth.

Seeing Lapis take a bite out of it, letting out a good snapping sound as she did so, Loren slightly regretted not giving a definitive answer earlier, and started pouring himself another glass.

“Anyways.”

Seeing that Loren’s focus turned from her to the bottle of alcohol, Lapis continued the conversation.

Although he wanted to question her further, he had a feeling it wouldn’t go anywhere, so he decided to listen to what Lapis had to say.

“So, the adventurer’s guild wants us to take the rank-up exam, am I right?”

Loren nodded slightly.

After seeing him do so, she made an unexpected suggestion in a confident manner.

“Then how about we tell them that we’ll do it if it’s the rank-up exam for silver?”

“Jumping past iron? Does that mean anything?”

“Not really. But if the guild wants us to rank up so badly, I thought maybe we could take advantage of that and try to push some demands that usually wouldn’t go through on them.”

As he thought he could understand why Ivy had made sure that Lapis wasn’t with him when she came to talk to him, Loren asked her another thing.

“You think it would go through?”

“Most likely not.”

Although she was the one who proposed the idea, she easily denied it.

As Loren sighed, not sure what she wanted to do, Lapis swung her fork as if it were a baton and continued.

“If they refuse, we just act like it can’t be helped, and then ask them to waiver the rank-up exam for iron this time.”

As she said they should make new demands without giving up, Loren looked at Lapis with a frown, not sure if he should be exasperated or impressed.

“You know…”

“If that’s not possible either, we ask them to waiver a portion of it. Since they are the ones who want us to take it, trying to take as many freebies we can is the smart way to do it.”

Lapis way of thinking was pushing demand after demand, anticipating that the other party would give in somewhere.

She didn’t seem satisfied with just the fee being waivered, but Loren thought maybe she was being a bit too greedy.

“What about when you can’t come to a compromise?”

The guild should have a firm line that it couldn’t cross, so if they couldn’t come to an agreement, the whole thing might be cancelled.

If that happened, they would be losing the perk of not paying the exam fee, but Lapis responded coolly.

“Then we decline taking the exam itself.”

“But then…”

“Loren, I don’t think there’s an advantage for us to become iron rank right now in the first place.”

“What do you mean by that?”

If they became iron rank, the amount of rewards they receive would increase.

Loren thought that was a good enough reason, but on top of that, there were more information you could access, fellow adventurers would look at you differently, and you would be raising your status slightly.

The cons would be the jobs getting more difficult, and the responsibility coming with it increasing as well, but Loren thought it was a trivial matter compared to the pros.

That was why he couldn’t understand why Lapis said there were no advantages.

“Well, we’re supposed to be copper rank adventurers, so we’ve been taking jobs for copper ranks…but I think that for some reason, we’ve been doing things that are well out of a copper rank adventurer’s capability every single time.”