At first, everyone just looks at me dumbfounded. What's so confusing? Never heard of a dragon before? Or never seen a small girl in the Guild before? There was one sitting right next to me!

“Ahem!” the panther girl at the entrance is the first to break the silence with an audible and exaggerated cough. She looks at me and points to a sign on a wall that reads “NO SHOUTING.”

Is that the only thing you care about!? A dragon appeared for who you’d be no bigger snack than a single sunflower seed for a human!

Aren’t at least some of you supposed to be excited at a chance to fight such a mythical, Ragnarok-scale creature? Fame and glory and all that?

Several dozen people do get up from their chairs. That’s when the water wave hit me in the back, gushing in through the front door, and flooded the hall of the Guild. Though the water doesn’t harm me, my little body is still thrown around by the current, along with everybody else in the building, as the water level rapidly rises. Within seconds the water is at the level of the closed windows.

Finally, I manage to swim up to the surface to get some air and see that I am less than a foot from hitting the ceiling of the hall. Are we seriously going to drown inside a building? Finally, the glass of the windows does give out under the building pressure and cracks. All at once, the windows shatter open and the water gushes out of the building as rapidly as it came in, along with most of the adventurers.

“Freeze!” I cast my spell and freeze the water in one of the windows, blocking the exit before the current pulls me out along with everyone else. Luckily my mana regeneration is acceptable, which is why I could afford to waste all my mana on the dragon. It only takes me thirteen seconds to recover enough mana points to cast one of my signature spells after all.

I fall to the ground, coughing up some water and look around me. The hall looks like a tornado went through it. At most, I see about two dozen motionless bodies on the floor. One of the bodies lays on the roof of the glass booth, with one arm hanging down at the side of the glass wall. Speaking of which, everything got destroyed with but a single exception—the glass booths stand perfectly as they were, with all the paperwork and employees still inside, completely unaffected by the dragon’s attack.

Is this some sort of not-so-subtle message that come hell or high water, the bureaucracy of the world will survive? Challenge issued and accepted! Though I’ve got to give the Guild some credit – it really went out of its way to protect the backbone of its system. Only two booths were ravaged—the ones that had its glass door open at the time of the flood.

“R three hundred sixty-three! R three hundred sixty-three!”

“Are you for real!?” I shout at the nameless, faceless voice.

“Ahem!” the panther girl stands at the entrance, with messed up hair and ruined mascara, smeared across her face. She points at the sign that has ‘NO SHOUTING’ written on it. The sign barely hangs on the wall, still attached only on the top-right corner.

How much is she getting paid here for such maniacal devotion to her job? The same goes for all the workers in the booths, who continue to process the adventurers inside their respective booths as if nothing happened.

I check my hand—good—I still have the paper. It should have been completely disintegrated during the flood. My best guess is that my [Foolproof] passive also applies to the items I carry and clothes I wear, preventing them from damage. I mean, it only makes sense, otherwise I’d find myself running around naked after every major spell cast. And a small girl running around naked in this world is just asking for trouble.

Still, with most of the line dealt with, this should go much faster now. And since I’m likely the only one who has kept my line number, it’s only a formality before I get to the registration. Might as well grit my teeth and be patient for just a little longer.

I know, I know—at this point, I’ve already decided to be the one to bring down either this Guild or at the very least its bureaucracy, but after going through that much trouble to register here, I’ll be damned if I don’t finish what I came here to do in the first place.

I go to the entrance and take a fresh number from the stand to apply for a Quest straight after I register at the Guild.

I salvage a chair from a pile of rubble and hop on it. As the numbers are called by the nameless, echoing voice one by one, meticulously, without skipping a single one, despite there being at most something like thirty people left alive here, I wait patiently with my hands on my knees and my legs hanging down, swinging them back and forth to kill time and listen to the screams of death and horror coming from outside.

I’m glad that my spell was such a success and I managed to create such a strong and competent dragon! Now, I’m guaranteed to become famous throughout the entire kingdom once I slay it!