A Slice Of Daily Life For Certain Hunters

To her, it really was just a casual remark.

As usual, they finished work and grumbled away with their companions at their regular tavern.

Amid the now-familiar scene, the woman wearing a large witch hat suddenly voiced something that had caught her attention.

“…Come to think of it, when did you two meet?”

She pointed the fork she had been using to poke at the empty plate toward the two men fighting over the last piece of meat and asked.

At that instant, the men stopped moving for a moment, and in that opening, the priestess with a still-girlish face snatched away both their prey.

“Ah!” the two shouted at the same time, and the priestess girl returned to her own seat.

With the source of the dispute gone, the two had no choice but to drink, but their mugs were already empty.

After ordering more drinks from the server, the red-haired swordsman looked up at the ceiling as if searching his memory.

“Ah, did we never tell you?”

When he turned only his gaze toward the dark-skinned scout sitting beside him, the scout also folded his arms and tilted his head.

The questioner, who had no memory of hearing it, adjusted the position of her witch hat and waved the fork in her hand up and down, urging them to talk.

“There’s nothing special about an orphanage kid and someone from the slums meeting.”

As he said that with a shrug, he skillfully spun the knife in his hand.

“Yeah,” the red-haired man agreed with a nod, trying to end the story there.

“You don’t remember, or was it really just that unimportant?”

The female mage wearing the witch hat checked with the priestess sitting beside her.

At those words, the priestess girl nodded firmly as if to say, “Correct.”

“It wasn’t unimportant.”

“Right, right. Ours was an ordinary meeting, common as it was, and we hit it off normally.”

“That was hitting it off? You suddenly started fighting, didn’t you?”

When the girl continued, wondering if that was what men called hitting it off, the two men looked away.

Apparently, when the two had first met, they had been ready to pick a fight with each other, and the girl revealed that it had even developed into a fistfight.

However, the two explained that since both of them had just become hunters at the time, they had both been aggressive toward each other because “we couldn’t afford to be looked down on.”

“Back then, we still didn’t understand anything.”

“It was obvious both of us were rookies, after all.”

As the two nodded to each other, the female mage realized something.

If her memory was correct, they had become hunters at least more than three years ago.

“Wait. You two knew each other from that far back, but you didn’t form a team?”

Considering how they met, perhaps it could not be helped, but at least by the time she had met them, they had always been hanging around together.

However, after joining the team, she learned that they had not always worked together as a fixed pair.

She had assumed they had simply met a little before she did, but hearing this now, they had known each other since the early days of their work. If they had both been rookies, they should have known each other’s abilities, and since their roles did not overlap, they should have been easy to team up with.

That was what she thought, but in reality, they only started working together about a year after that.

The reason was simply that they both thought, “Something about him gets on my nerves,” but when they were forcibly teamed up after being summoned for large-scale subjugations and the like, they came to acknowledge each other’s abilities, though the details of how that happened would be omitted.

After that, whenever a job required a scout, the swordsman began inviting him first, and since he also got along reasonably well with the scout’s younger sister, the priestess girl, they began acting together whenever something came up.

“That’s why I’m asking why you still didn’t form a team.”

“Ah, that.”

The scout made an awkward face, but they had already spent two years working together.

He agreed that it would not have been strange for them to become companions, but he said, “Precisely because we were becoming companions, there was something I had to settle first.”

“Even if I usually worked alone, I was still a hunter. I had one or two obligations tying me down.”

He spoke with a somewhat lonely expression, but then the red-haired swordsman revealed the truth with an exasperated face.

“No, in his case, he just had debts, so we couldn’t make him a team member.”

While receiving the drinks they had ordered, he pointed at the scout with the thumb of his other hand and tilted back his mug.

“And the reason for those debts was gambling.”

The priestess girl piled on while ordering a snack before the server left.

“No, that was the elf’s fault for cheating!”

The scout said that and slammed his empty mug onto the table, adding one more drink as if he might as well.

“Ah, I mostly get the reason now.”

The mage fiddling with her witch hat let out a breath as she watched the two begin making a racket.

Seeing the two in front of her, she grew a little worried that next time, they might fail because of alcohol or women, but at this point, the mage still did not know that they already had.