Inside the tavern, unlike the cold, lifeless quest board at the Adventurers' Guild, the notice board here had a warmth all its own.

The best intelligence, as it turned out, only ever needed the simplest ways to spread.

Night had fallen. Adventurers who'd been grinding all day long crowded around the notice board with flagons of ale still warm in their hands.

"Banxia's Interspecies Review Guide — still as fair and honest as ever."

"What do you expect from a Lord Hero summoned from another world? The man delivers."

"If I had to write it, I'd probably squeeze out 'damn good' and call it done."

"Awesome... hell yeah!"

They pressed in noisily around the weekly-updated review guide covering pleasure workers of every race. Every line dripped with respect for the person who'd written it.

......

"When are these rough times going to end?"

Banxia drifted out of a pleasure house specializing in Forest Elves and glanced down at his increasingly lean frame, muttering under his breath.

He'd assumed his trusty weapon was already unrivaled under heaven. He never imagined the elves of this other world would be so terrifyingly thorough.

Small in stature. Bottomless in appetite.

Five silver coins well spent.

Banxia was a somewhat unusual reincarnator.

He'd been in this other world for just over a month now.

The reason he was considered unusual was that this wasn't his first time crossing over.

Originally he'd been a model young man of the new era, grinding away at a 996 schedule alongside everyone else, burying himself in hard work.

Then, before he'd managed to make anything of himself, overwork caught up with him. He died quietly, unremarkably.

Heaven was generous enough to give him a second shot. He was reborn in Tokyo, Japan, and the world even appeared to be some kind of anime crossover setting.

A wonderful world filled with cute girls and the soft glow of a two-dimensional filter.

He'd been diligently studying for the University of Tokyo entrance exams, ready to settle into a quiet, happy life with his younger sister, when,

Heaven had other plans. Along with a crowd of others, he was summoned by the Church into a fantasy world.

Standard useless-hero starting package. Cannon fodder, by any other name.

[Heaven Rewards Diligence, perseverance always bears fruit.]

[Current Skills: Basic Sword Technique lv.1 (3|100) · Basic Dodge lv.1 (1|100)]

[Remaining lifespan may be infused into skills to gain corresponding progress.]

[Infusion cannot continue when your own lifespan is insufficient.]

[Current Remaining Time: Forty-six years.]

"..."

Half a month of training. Progress: essentially zero. He couldn't take it anymore. Enlightenment arrived all at once.

If grinding produced no results, lying flat was the logical move.

Suffering first didn't guarantee sweetness later. But sweetness first? That was guaranteed to feel good.

And besides, his cheat consumed lifespan to raise his strength, but wasn't raising strength supposed to be about living longer in the first place?

It was exactly like that classic forum hypothetical from his previous life: shave off several years of your life and cash them in early to blow through those years' worth of income right now.

Sounds pretty appealing...

But that was loser thinking!

Banxia: I want it all.

No need to cut his life short. He'd enjoy everything he was supposed to enjoy, exactly as planned.

His confidence came down to one thing: the money in his pocket.

Beyond the ten silver coins the Church had tossed him when he first arrived, he'd spent the past weeks collecting manuscript fees from his partnership with the tavern, plus "appreciation fees" from certain pleasure houses that caught wind of his rising reputation and came knocking. His savings had climbed to a full fifty silver coins.

Enough for an ordinary family of three to live comfortably for half a year.

Of course, high-end pleasure houses hadn't earned the nickname "gold-devouring pits" for nothing.

In less than half a month, Banxia had burned through all fifty silver coins down to the last one.

And that was with him being relatively "frugal."

But for the sake of gathering professional intelligence, and for the greater good of the general public, he could only grit his teeth and press on.

After all: if not me, who enters hell?

"..."

Back at the inn, Banxia flopped onto the bed with great satisfaction and stared up at the ceiling, thinking.

"Income and expenses are just barely breaking even right now, but that's only because my name still isn't very big. Once the Interspecies Review Guide actually makes something of itself... heh heh heh..."

His thinking ran along the same lines as every content creator he'd ever watched in his previous life.

The early investment looked brutal, like throwing coins into a river. But once it took off and the reputation was there, what followed was a steady, endless stream.

The fortress city of Alterna, where Banxia made his home, was the only defensive city on the kingdom's border. The garrisoned troops and high-ranking adventurers stationed there were beyond counting, and their quality was no joke.

Foreign forces breaching it? Not a chance. Guards patrolled twenty-four hours without stop. Safety was not a concern.

In a place like this, money was everything.

Which also meant demand in that particular department was staggering. Pleasure houses had spread across the city like weeds.

"This era is absolutely fantastic!"

He was still savoring that rosy future when —

"Um... Mr. Banxia? Looks like you just got back?"

A knock at the door. The landlady's voice came through the wood.

"Something wrong?"

Banxia got up, mildly puzzled, and went to open it.

Outside stood a middle-aged human woman with a pleasant face and the easy, practiced smile of someone in the hospitality trade.

The words that came out of her mouth, though, were anything but pleasant.

"Your accommodation fee is a little short."

"Hm? Didn't I pay a full month of room and board in advance?"

"Oh dear. You haven't heard?"

A vague sense of dread stirred somewhere in Banxia's chest. "...Heard what?"

"A war broke out recently between the Central Nations and the demon army that's been pushing in. Refugees have been flooding south in droves.

Prices everywhere are going up. Even a small inn like ours has no choice but to adjust."

"But this is already the southernmost point of the continent." Banxia's brow furrowed. "Who flees for their life all the way down here? And aren't the inn's daily supplies sourced fresh from the villages right around Alterna?"

The landlady visibly choked.

She genuinely hadn't expected this, that a hero summoned as cannon fodder, in barely a month, would have already worked out exactly how things operated out here.

"What's that supposed to mean? Are you calling us swindlers?!"

Something enormous surged out from behind her.

The beastman shoved forward, seething. His massive goat head loomed over Banxia from above. Knotted muscles swallowed up most of the hallway's moonlight. He looked one second away from tearing the lean human in front of him apart on the spot.

"..."

Banxia tilted his head back and looked quietly at the black goat head huffing hot breath down at him.

The king of pleasure houses, for the first time in an hour, felt something tighten in his chest.

All things considered...

A strategic withdrawal was probably the right call here.

Not that he was scared. He just didn't want blood on the floor in the middle of the night.

On top of that, "beastfolk lives mattered" these days, and this particular one was "high-end talent" personally recruited by the Lord of Alterna. Picking a fight unnecessarily wasn't worth it.

And even if he went to the guards, they'd almost certainly be useless against the beastman standing in front of him, and might well end up dragging Banxia in for causing the disturbance instead.

➤ Next: A Gathering of Worthies

Chapter 2 - A Gathering of Worthies

"Ultraman, open your eyes. I am..."

"I'm awake."

"Huh? You're already awake, Banxia? I was hoping to try out that move you used to wake me up a month ago..."

Banxia silently shoved aside the flimsy woven thing draped over him and sat up in bed.

Calling it a blanket was generous. It was really just a thin sheet pressed together from some unknown dried grass, with an insulation value roughly equal to zero.

The only silver lining was that it was summer. At least he wouldn't freeze to death.

He stared ahead with heavy dark circles under his eyes, expression blank, watching the figure climb down from the upper bunk.

Marl. Class: Monk. An unlucky soul summoned to this other world in the same batch as Banxia, one month ago.

Though Marl didn't seem to come from modern society — more likely some other alternate world entirely.

Fair-skinned, with long pink hair, Marl looked like a cute girl at first glance. A mistake Banxia had made, costing him a pointless pass that went absolutely nowhere.

If this person had any redeeming quality, it was probably that infuriatingly gentle streak.

Despite sitting right on the cusp of peak-pinnacle quasi-limit vocational mastery, Marl still hadn't left the free dormitory the Church provided for summoned heroes.

A large part of the reason: looking after the handful of ridiculously weak cannon-fodder heroes they'd banded together with from the start.

A genuinely good person.

Not that it mattered, by Banxia's standards. That kind of goodwill was a complete waste of effort.

"We're heading out to gather Scab Moss. Want to come?"

"Scab Moss? Isn't that one of the main ingredients for rapid-healing potions?"

"That's right — though I'm honestly surprised you know about it."

"Heard the Forest Elf lady mention it last night," Banxia said offhandedly.

Burning through that many silver coins in just a few hours was steep, and he couldn't sustain infinite-firepower mode yet. Whenever he entered post-nut clarity, he always had to find something to do with himself. Rather than waste the precious cooldown period, he'd make a point of picking the other party's brain about the world outside.

Thanks to that habit, even though he hadn't set foot outside the city gates once, his breadth of knowledge probably outstripped the adventurers from his batch who were out there sweating and bleeding in the wild.

Speaking of which, those cannon-fodder heroes summoned alongside him were most likely fighting for their lives in some muddy ditch outside the city right now.

Meanwhile, Banxia lounged comfortably inside far safer establishments every day, pulling in silver coins they couldn't earn after completing several quests, and picking up heaps of inside intelligence that most people would never stumble across.

It was just...

You know.

...

He dragged himself out of bed and scored a free breakfast of thoroughly unappetizing black bread.

Then he got ready to head out with the trio and see a bit more of this new world.

"..."

All right. The truth was simply that he'd been cleaned out, and if he didn't figure something out soon, dinner wasn't happening either.

"We're counting on you for the vanguard~"

The one speaking in a coquettish lilt was a human woman named Junko Arimura, archer, fellow cannon fodder from their batch.

According to the intelligence Banxia had traced back through the tavern keeper, the person standing in front of him was a straightforward floozy.

Every night, a different man going in and out of the nearby inn with Junko.

And yet Junko had unerringly zeroed in on Marl's potential, keeping the monk perpetually dangling on a loose leash.

Banxia had tried talking some sense into Marl. It hadn't worked.

"U-Um... hi..."

The third member of the group was a young man with an almost nonexistent presence. Kazuya Kinoshita. Class: Warrior. Like Banxia, he'd transmigrated from modern society.

The name, the face, the personality, all of it bore an uncanny resemblance to the sleazy male lead of an anime from Banxia's pre-previous life.

No, scratch "resemblance." After a month of observation, there was no longer any doubt: this was the pathetic simp from Rent-a-Girlfriend, in the flesh.

Currently serving as Junko Arimura's Backup Plan Number Two on a stable, ongoing basis.

A leopard can't change its spots. Transmigration hadn't changed a thing.

Rounding out the roster was Marl, the monk one step away from vocational perfection.

That was the full membership of their ragtag, bottom-of-the-barrel party.

The soft-hearted pushover. The floozy. The pathetic simp.

And Banxia.

"..." He sighed.

Two frontliners whose swordsmanship barely matched ordinary people, a battle-monk whose specialty was defense, and a ranger who couldn't even draw a bowstring cleanly.

Calling them an adventurer party was flattering them.

In Banxia's mind, a proper adventurer party ran the classic trinity: warrior, cleric, mage, with a sharp-eyed ranger rounding it out if you were lucky.

That was clearly a luxury he wasn't getting. He himself didn't meet the bar for a qualified warrior.

With this lineup, if Marl had proposed any quest involving direct monster subjugation, Banxia would have refused without blinking.

What would be the difference between that and walking into a grave?

Today's objective, though, was just gathering Scab Moss from a patch not far outside the city. That should be manageable.

He'd heard Miss Slime mention this area before. Because it sat so close to human settlements, virtually nothing roamed there except the weakest goblins, no magical beasts, no beastmen.

Just goblins. The absolute bottom rung of monster spawn.

Creatures that an untrained farmer could chase off with a pitchfork.

And on top of that, they had Marl, a monk one step away from being a full-fledged professional adventurer.

It shouldn't... be a problem.

...

"We're not far from the Scab Moss patch the guild has on record."

They hadn't been out of the city long when Marl turned back and said this.

Unlike the other three, this wasn't Marl's first time past the city gates. Marl had already run a few simple commissions with other adventurer groups before.

By comparison, Marl was practically a grizzled veteran next to Banxia's group.

"Relax, handsome. Worst case, we run into a few goblins~"

Junko Arimura laughed at the young man who had been silent the whole way out.

That face, combined with a fairly well-known talent for making money, had caught Junko's attention a while ago. The archer had been quietly wondering when to bring Banxia under the fold.

Banxia didn't respond. Out of basic courtesy to temporary teammates, he just raised a hand and waved it vaguely in Junko's direction.

In his previous life and the one before that, he'd been cocooned in an ivory-tower existence. He had never set foot in a forest this empty of people.

The dirt underfoot carried the smell of unfamiliar animal dung. For the first time, standing here, it really hit Banxia:

He was outside human settlement now. This was a completely alien world.

A cold wind swept down the forest trail, and all four of them shuddered at once.

It was the middle of the day, but a thin mist clung stubbornly between the trees, squeezing visibility down so hard that past ten meters there was nothing but wavering shadows. The path beneath their feet was pitted and uneven. Their formation was an absolute mess, nothing remotely resembling an adventurer party.

Even knowing this mission wasn't supposed to be dangerous, Banxia kept himself wound tight. Every whisper of wind near his ear made him grip the cheap longsword in his hand a little harder.

He had died before. That was exactly why he valued his life more than anyone.

Junko found it quietly hilarious.

While internally mocking Banxia's pathetic jumpiness, Junko drifted closer to Kazuya Kinoshita, who had been sneaking glances the whole time, and spoke in a soft, delicate voice:

"Kazuya-kun, I'm so scared. If goblins jump out, you have to protect me, okay?"

"O-Oh! Leave it to me!"

The moment the goddess showed that much faith in him, Kazuya's confidence detonated.

Chest puffed out, Kazuya strutted past everyone to the front, picking up speed with every step.

Completely oblivious to the fact that the already ragged formation behind him had just dissolved into pure chaos.

"Kazuya, slow down. This area is close to the city, but monsters do still appear occasionally..." Marl's voice stayed gentle, a quiet warning aimed at that swaggering back.

Banxia's brow creased. He was just about to suggest calling it off, waiting for the fog to clear before pushing further,

No chance.

Under the horrified stares of the remaining three, that cocky figure stepped into nothing. Half a body vanished straight into a pit in the earth.

Before a single cry for help could crawl out of Kazuya's throat, a massive blade dropped from above like a guillotine.

A dull crack.

That head burst open like an overripe watermelon.

"TRAP — WATCH OUT!"

➤ Next: The Core of Swordsmanship