"This is today's hunting assignment."
A staff member from the Adventurers' Guild pinned a notice to the bulletin board listing how much bounty could be claimed here for killing certain monsters.
Not many people bothered to look.
After all, unless a particular monster was spreading out of control and the guild raised the bounty a little to stir up adventurers' enthusiasm, these monster rewards rarely changed much.
At that moment, a rather skinny-looking boy stood in front of the board, studying the posted bounties.
"...Goblin, 10 copper each..."
Goblins were small male humanoids with pointed ears, dark green skin, murky eyes, and thin limbs. They were not especially strong, and they lived in groups.
They preferred meat, though they would occasionally pick berries. But their low intelligence and the vile nature ingrained in their blood made them infamous creatures incapable of any productive labor. From birth to death, their lives were bound up with stealing and plundering.
They did not merely steal food. Even reproduction, a process normal creatures should be able to carry out on their own, was something their race could not accomplish within their own kind. They could only propagate by abducting females of other races.
Among those, they especially favored humans, whose physiques were closest to theirs. As a result, many villages had long suffered under goblin raids and abuse. They looted grain, tools, and women alike, threatening the survival of human settlements and merchant caravans. Their record of atrocities was extensive, to say the least.
As for their actual combat ability, in Gauss's memory, these little green monsters were about as strong as he remembered from his previous life. Ordinary individuals were not particularly powerful one-on-one; in a direct fight, a normal farmer with a weapon could handle one.
But precisely because of that, goblins usually made up for their lack of individual strength with numbers. They excelled at ambushes and group attacks, and once their numbers grew large enough, they could become a terrifying disaster.
Worse still, these filthy creatures bred with the same rampant fertility as rats or cockroaches. The females who bore goblin young often produced several at once in a single birth.
Goblin offspring also had an extremely high survival rate. In less than a year, they could grow from squeaking, rat-sized newborns into fully mature adults capable of reproduction.
Once grown, goblins continued to be driven by their primitive urges, abducting females for the next cycle of breeding.
It could be said that this was a race impossible to wipe out completely, like original sin given form in nature.
And because goblins were so fond of harassing humans, especially small villages, humanity understood this monster race better than almost any other. Even village children who had never learned to read could still rattle off a few of their traits with convincing familiarity.
"Very fitting for a Japanese-style Western fantasy setting," the boy thought, recalling the information about goblins in his mind.
He was a reincarnator. It was only yesterday that his memories had fully awakened. Before that, what he had mostly retained were certain instincts and bits of experience from his previous life—things like how to make adults like him more, or how to hide his abilities and protect himself.
That was how he had managed to grow up safely as an orphan until the age of fifteen.
And it was also because he had turned fifteen that he had to leave the orphanage and begin surviving on his own in this world.
In this world, orphanages basically belonged to various churches or states.
But those powers only raised children who could not yet live independently until the age of fifteen.
Because in this world, fifteen already meant adulthood.
Their money did not come from nowhere, after all.
Wakasha withdrew his gaze from the bulletin board.
He had decided. His first prey would be goblins.
But before that, he needed to make some preparations.
First of all, as a weakling who was basically just an ordinary person, his ideal target would naturally be a goblin that was close by and alone.
But in reality, that idea was basically a fantasy.
There was no environment near town where low-level monsters could survive.
The town guard's frequent extermination sweeps, together with the steady flow of adventurers, had plowed over the surrounding area again and again. Within several kilometers of the town, things were quite safe.
So if he wanted to kill monsters, he could only leave the town's directly controlled territory and try his luck on the outermost edge of the nearby Chalk Forest.
Before setting out, he planned to buy some "expensive" gear he had never purchased before.
Trying to kill monsters without proper armor was too risky, even if his targets were only low-level monsters that ordinary people could theoretically handle.
He only had one life. He had to be extremely careful.
The goblins in his memory were weak, but real knowledge came from practice. He had never actually killed a goblin before, so naturally he had to treat the matter with the utmost seriousness.
Life was only given once, whether for him or for a goblin.
Any living thing had the instinct to survive.
This was real killing, not some grand adventure.
But he felt conflicted about what exactly he should buy.
He only had 36 silver and 82 copper on him.
This was the savings he had accumulated over more than ten years. Ever since he had become capable of remembering things and moving about on his own, he had started saving money.
Helping the local fruit seller uncle peddle produce, delivering meals to the blacksmith working at the forge, and so on.
Each job earned only a little, but over time it had added up to a respectable amount.
Still, for an adventurer, it was nowhere near enough.
Wakasha tightened his grip on the money pouch hidden inside his coarse linen clothes. Through the fabric, his fingertips could feel the hard outlines of the coins pressing back against them. That was all the confidence he had built up over more than ten years.
He slowly walked along the town's stone-paved road, his eyes passing over the shops lining both sides of the street, until they finally stopped at a blacksmith's shop with a sign that read "Anvil and Flame."
Several polished wooden handles were stacked near the entrance. A few rusty old suits of armor leaned in the corner by the wall. The clang of the blacksmith's hammer rang out one after another, and waves of hot air drifted through the cracks of the door, carrying with them the smells of iron filings and coal.
He took a deep breath and pushed the door open.
The inside of the forge was even hotter than outside. The walls were blackened by soot, and the iron furnace in the center burned red-hot. Now and then, sparks flew out and landed in the ash on the ground, where they went out instantly.
A burly man, bare-chested, with dark, rough skin, was swinging a hammer down onto a glowing chunk of iron. Sweat ran down his broad shoulders and dripped onto the anvil, making faint sizzling sounds.
"What do you want?"
The man stopped what he was doing, wiped his sweat with the rough cloth draped over his shoulder, and let his eyes fall on Wakasha's thin frame. His tone carried a hint of impatience, but there was no sign of him driving the boy away.
He had seen plenty of young men like Wakasha before. Most were fresh out of orphanages or rural villages, coming to buy a cheap weapon in the delusion that they could become adventurers and make a fortune. In the end, most either came back in disgrace... or never came back at all.