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Translated By Arcane Translations
Translator: Simzy
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“Since we’ve met like this, shall we have lunch together?”
Amon, smiling, invited the woman before him to lunch.
Overwhelmed by the situation, the woman accepted Amon’s invitation.
The two took seats in a corner of the brokerage, which also served as a bar, and ordered their lunch.
Upon her saying that this was her first time coming to this brokerage, Amon decided to order for her as well.
“Two Dwarf-style Mini Hot Dogs, please.”
Why they were called “Dwarf-style” was unknown, but Amon, not wanting to understand the chef’s naming sense, had never asked.
A woman(?) in the kitchen, with masculine, bulky muscles, took the order and began cooking.
Turning his head from the chef, whom he could never get used to seeing, Amon focused on his guest.
“From experience, this is the most universally liked dish.”
Other foods had strong preferences depending on the race or country, so they were not suitable for serving to someone you just met.
Like eel jelly soup, or synthetic meat and grasshopper-topped pizza…
Compared to those, the Mini Hot Dog was just a normal synthetic meat sausage in a bun, so it couldn’t really be disliked.
While the food was being prepared, the two introduced themselves.
“I’m Amon Parfumrose. Ah, the last name is the name of the orphanage.”
“I’m Cathy Ilya. Ilya is the last name, not Illia.”
She slightly lowered her head, partially closing her red eyes.
She was polite, perhaps because of what she had done to Amon earlier.
After introducing their unusual last names, the two finished their introductions.
Soon, the ordered food arrived.
Cathy’s eyes widened at the hotdog, which was the size of two normal hotdogs.
“You can leave it if you can’t finish it.”
With those words, Amon took a bite of his sandwich.
The clean smell of synthetic meat assaulted his nose.
It was an unfamiliar taste to Amon, who ate real pork once a week.
However, since there wasn’t much difference between synthetic meat and real meat in sausages, he didn’t feel any particular aversion.
It was delicious enough to forget that it was made from insects.
The sausage was synthetic meat, the vegetables were also a mixture of synthetic dietary fiber, and even the tomato was GMO(Genetically Modified Organism).
The taste of each individual ingredient was, frankly, garbage, but the chef had somehow managed to combine them well to achieve this taste.
While Amon savored the hot dog with relish, Cathy also took a bite.
“…!”
She was surprised once again.
Amon could understand her feelings.
Bronze-rank mercenaries, or in other words, rookie mercenaries, rarely ate at the brokerage.
They would order alcohol and snacks, but never a meal.
The reason was that the menu was the same as the food outside but much more expensive.
They believed that it was a trick to scam newcomers, so they tried to eat outside the brokerage.
However, once they had been mercenaries for a while and had a bit of money, mercenaries ate every meal at the brokerage.
Why?
Because it was delicious.
People often misunderstood, but establishments targeting mercenaries paid a lot of attention to quality.
For mercenaries who didn’t know when they would die, fleeting pleasures like appetite, sex drive, and the need for sleep were very important.
They tended not to save money, acting as if there was no tomorrow. Instead, they didn’t compromise on quality.
Meals always had to be delicious, prostitutes always had to be attractive, and beds always had to be cozy.
It was true that mercenaries with little money couldn’t afford this, but once they had some money, they would never compromise in these areas.
For this reason, the food at the brokerage was of considerable quality.
Not only was the price acceptable, but the taste was also exceptional for the price.
Especially because there were many drinkers and picky gourmets among the mercenaries, the fact that they were satisfying their palates was a guarantee of its quality.
Munch, munch.
Having finished his explanation, Amon took another bite of his hotdog.
Cathy, having heard Amon’s explanation, looked at the bite mark on her sandwich and opened her mouth.
“I’m sorry, I must have been out of my mind earlier.”
“?”
Amon tilted his head.
She then told Amon her circumstances.
“I’m talking about how I picked a fight with you earlier. Actually, I thought that I had to harass you like other mercenaries to prove myself.”
According to her, this was her first time at the mercenary brokerage.
She was not yet a mercenary, nor did she have any connections.
She had to leave home for family reasons and had chosen mercenary work to make a living, a common story in cyberpunk.
When she came to the mercenary brokerage, she bought drinks for some adventurers to learn about mercenaries.
Mercenaries just needed to be good at shooting guns and handling swords.
Instead of worrying about the details of a request, they should focus on increasing their firepower.
Mercenaries would be looked down on everywhere, so they should never appear weak.
The cactus-haired man, who was telling her the story, pointed to Amon, who had come to work at the brokerage, and said,
“Just don’t be like that idiot.”
With those words, the cactus-haired man and his companions giggled.
According to the cactus-haired man, Amon had come saying he would become a mercenary, but had never done any request.
He only did safe work like being a delivery boy for the brokerage, so he had no achievements compared to other Bronze-rank mercenaries.
“He came here to kill, but he doesn’t have the guts to die himself.”
With those words, the cactus-haired man downed his drink.
Then, as if he had remembered something, he turned to Cathy.
“Oh, right. Ma’am, how about you take him down a peg while you’re at it?”
The mercenary rule he had told her: never show weakness.
He convinced Cathy that the best way to put that into practice was to step on an idiot like Amon.
Just as the cactus-haired man had said, the mercenaries at the bar were harassing Amon, who had just come to work.
Therefore, Cathy had no choice but to blindly believe the cactus-haired man.
‘I’m sorry…’
She was sorry to a person she didn’t know, but she had to pick a fight with Amon to survive as a mercenary.
She blindly believed that this was a rite of passage.
And the result was what was happening now.
The cactus-haired man, who had boasted about giving her tips, had fled the brokerage with a clown nose, and the mercenaries who looked down on Amon couldn’t do anything when Amon actually pulled out his sword.
On the other hand, Amon was calmly eating a sandwich as if this amount of harassment was nothing, and was giving her tips that only veteran mercenaries would give.
It was clear who was in the right in this situation.
“I’m really sorry. But… I know it’s shameless, but could you teach me about mercenary work?”
Cathy lowered her head deeply.
Her black hair hung down freely.
Amon, looking at the top of her head, was at a loss.
“What do you mean? A hot dog is a tip…”
Of course, he had learned this while doing errands when a veteran mercenary told him to try it, but this didn’t mean that Amon was on the level of a veteran mercenary.
Nonetheless, Cathy’s mind was made up.
“No. That’s how I could be sure.”
Looking back, the cactus-haired man’s advice was useless.
He only talked about strange macho behavior as the norm in the mercenary industry, but didn’t tell her how to handle certain requests.
On the other hand, Amon had given her practical information from their first conversation.
In addition, she had clearly seen the sword that Amon had used when threatening the cactus-haired man.
Being somewhat knowledgeable about equipment, she knew how good the sword that Amon was using was.
‘No wonder the mercenaries who seemed strong didn’t bother him.’
Thinking about it, only the common thugs without any decent equipment or implants were harassing Amon.
The mercenaries with good equipment or nasty implants had never touched Amon once.
Perhaps they recognized the sword hanging at Amon’s waist.
She hadn’t been able to recognize it until Amon pulled it from its sheath.
Only after he drew the sword did she realize its value.
It was definitely not a sword that a bronze-rank mercenary could carry.
It was a very good sword, at least one that a platinum-rank mercenary or higher would use.
‘He might be a retired or runaway megacorp ninja.’
In this world, the performance of equipment was equal to the user’s skill.
The fact that he was using equipment like that was a guarantee of Amon’s skill.
It wasn’t unusual for ninjas to retire or disappear due to various scandals and become mercenaries, so her thinking was natural.
Therefore, she couldn’t let Amon go.
It would be much more helpful to learn mercenary work from Amon than from a mediocre bronze-rank mercenary to survive.
At least she was sure of that.
She begged Amon.
“I want to survive as a mercenary.”
She didn’t know about the other mercenaries, but her goal was simply to survive.
She didn’t want to become a legend quickly.
She simply wanted to eat safely and make a living.
It was absurd that she had chosen such a dangerous job with this mindset, but she was serious.
Her earnestness reached Amon.
The kind-hearted Amon couldn’t bring himself to coldly refuse her request.
‘She seems like a good person…’
In the mercenary industry of this cyberpunk world, someone who admitted their mistakes and apologized was in the top 1% of personalities.
He recalled the people he had met in the games and the mercenaries he had met in this world.
“I won’t apologize for not having enough information. Isn’t that why the reward was so high?”
“After all, weren’t we just using each other? There’s a saying, ‘Yesterday’s friend is tomorrow’s enemy.'”
“You know, it was just business. Let’s just forget about me shooting first.”
Shit.
Among those bastards, Cathy could be in the 0.1%, not just 1%.
Cathy’s personality passed.
Amon did some calculations.
Would it really be okay to take her along?
The conclusion was that it was better than he had thought.
She wasn’t asking to be taken to a dungeon, nor was she asking to be taken on a dangerous mission.
After all, what Amon was doing was relatively safe errands.
What she was asking was to observe Amon doing his errands from the side, and to see how to build a mercenary’s foundation.
It didn’t seem like Amon would lose anything by having her tag along.
In the end, Amon couldn’t refuse her request.
“Okay. Then let’s go together.”
Amon thought that surely nothing could go wrong with an errand.
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“Shit. I shouldn’t have thought that.”
A string of foul language escaped the mouth of a devout believer.
As he hid in a large garbage bin in an alleyway, a voice mixed with machine sounds could be heard in the distance.
Rat-tat-tat!
“Come out, you little bastards!!!”
A gang member yelled and fired a gun into the air.
Amon, forgetting even the filth, leaned against the garbage bin and sighed.
‘That damn bastard. He only caused trouble even when he died.’
Amon recalled how the situation had reached this point.
Originally, it was a simple errand.
When a mercenary obtained an item, they would contact Amon and deliver the item.
Amon would check the item and deliver the reward to the mercenary.
It wasn’t his first time doing this kind of errand, and it was a very safe errand that the mercenary brokerage owner had vouched for.
However, there was a prerequisite for the safety of this errand.
The mercenary had to not be an idiot.
The problem was that this mercenary was an extraordinarily exceptional idiot, defying all odds.
‘What the hell is that bastard doing!!’
The mercenary was a bronze-rank mercenary.
One of the “youngsters” the brokerage owner often mentioned.
He was an idiot who firmly believed that all a mercenary needed to do was shoot a gun, without any training on the basics.
How he had interpreted the mission of bringing an item, he had gone and started shooting up a gang.
It was supposed to be a simple “transaction.”
It was a really safe transaction where he just needed to receive the item.
The client was from the aboveground world, and the gang was from the underworld, so the mercenary only needed to be a bridge between the two. It was a very simple transaction.
Even the parties involved were normal people.
The client had given the mercenary a credit card for the transaction, without any intention of cheating him out of his money, and the gang was also planning to deliver the item quietly.
It was just that the mercenary was an unimaginably exceptional idiot.
Whether he had suddenly developed a sense of justice, or held a grudge against the client or gang, or had interpreted the word “transaction” in a bizarre way on his own…
Or maybe he had suddenly become greedy for the credit card and item he had been given.
Even though it was an item he could have paid for and received, he had needlessly started shooting in the middle of the gang’s territory.
And then he had died.
His thoughts would never be known, having been instantly riddled with bullets.
The problem was that the trouble caused by the mercenary didn’t end there.
The gang, furious to the point of reaching their boiling point, judged this to be the will of the mercenary brokerage and used the mercenary’s signal to lure Amon.
Pretending to be a mercenary who had completed the request, they called Amon.
He thought it was a safe errand and had gone to deliver the reward, only to find the head of the bronze-rank mercenary hanging from the front of a car, with the gang members aiming their guns at him.
“You goddamn bastards! That’s what you mercenary bastards are like!”
Those were the words he had heard when a gang member, whom he was meeting for the first time, had fired his gun at Amon and Cathy.
Through the head of the dead mercenary and the words of the gang member, Amon had been able to grasp the situation.
‘Damn cyberpunk…’
Amon repeated the curse word he had said countless times today.
Misunderstandings were a common occurrence in cyberpunk.
It was an everyday thing to have human relationships completely twisted because of one idiot, but it seemed that he had become too complacent due to peace.
Explanation?
Would dialogue be possible with a gang that was holding guns and gone mad?
The mercenary who had acted impulsively had died alone like that.
That wasn’t a cyberpunk way to resolve the situation.
Misunderstandings weren’t resolved through dialogue.
The only ways to resolve misunderstandings were through fists, blood, and money.
Of course, Amon didn’t have that much money, so the only options left were automatically fists and blood.
‘Should I kill the gang?’
It wasn’t impossible.
If he put his mind to it, he could eliminate the five gang members in this alley.
But that would cause the brokerage to become enemies with the gang.
‘I have no choice…’
Blood was out of the question.
What was left was fists.
‘The boss will somehow work things out with the gang leader.’
Forgiveness was easy, as long as they didn’t die.
You couldn’t bring back the dead, but cripples could somehow be restored.
Even if bones were broken and the lower body was paralyzed, as long as they were alive, misunderstandings could be resolved through dialogue later.
That was another way to resolve misunderstandings in cyberpunk.
Amon, having made up his mind, turned his gaze to the side.
Next to him, Cathy was holding a handgun and trembling.
She hadn’t even disengaged the safety, and it seemed she hadn’t had proper gun training, given the fact she even had her finger on the trigger.
‘So she really was new to being a mercenary…’
How had such a girl become a mercenary?
Amon thought this as he grabbed her handgun.
Cathy was startled by Amon’s touch.
Amon whispered to her.
“Could you lend me your gun for a moment?”
Amon’s eyes, full of confidence, gave her trust.
She relaxed the hand holding the gun.
Amon nodded and took the gun.
“Stay here quietly.”
With the promise that it would be over in 15 minutes, Amon peeked over the trash can.
He then climbed the wall next to him as soon as he confirmed that the gang members weren’t looking at him.
He created a foothold by sticking a dagger into the wall, and then disappeared through the window of the abandoned building on the third floor.
“!!!”
While Cathy was surprised by Amon’s actions, Amon quietly checked the chamber in the shadows of the abandoned building.
‘One magazine of a handgun.’
That should be enough.
Recalling the bat-like principle of non-lethality in the back of his mind, he jumped over to the building on the other side.
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