The following day, we went to the guild to search for a request that we could take up. Since it was the first time the siblings were participating as adventurers, we had to familiarise them with the procedures. Many of the requests surprised Sylvie as she didn’t knew of many things out in the world. She remained excited throughout our process of choosing one request that suited us.

What we picked was actually a bit too easy for our group of five. But we picked it as Sylvie had zero combat experience while Raoul’s mainly came from training, which was why we had to get them to adapt to life as an adventurer. The content requested us to cut down the trolls that had been rampaging in the villages to the north of the forest. The villager chief was the requester and believed that the trolls had came from a nearby cave. Although trolls were aggressive by nature, they don’t often go out of their way to attack the villages, which was why they were unprepared for the attacks.

Other than the reason mentioned before for introducing the siblings to adventuring life, the other reason would be that Sylvie wanted to help the villagers that were injured during the attacks. Her belief as a healer prevented her from not helping them as she knew about their conditions. Her reasoning was right and just, thus we chose it although there were better choices.

We proceeded swiftly through Taura Forest as I made used of my skills and scout ahead, alerting the party of any dangers that lies ahead. That allowed the rest of the party to be prepared for battle early and enabled us to swiftly and decisively cut down our foes before they could ambush us. With the knowledge of myself, Aston, and Chris, we crossed to the northern side of the forest just as night falls. It was a time breaking record for Aston and Chris and they were amazed by my knowledge of the forest although I spent so little time as compared to them here. Meanwhile, for the siblings who desperately chased after us, they were too tired to feel amazed and went straight to sleep after dinner. We didn’t blame them for not helping out and split the night watch among the three of us.

On the first light of dawn, Raoul was the first one to wake up among the others. I was the last night watch and was therefore earlier than him. He saw me and walked over to have a conversation.

“Er, sorry about last night. We were too tired and just dropped down and fell asleep. I should have volunteered for the night watch.”

“Nah, it’s fine. We did pretty much rush all the way across the forest. Normal parties would have probably needed three days to cross the distances we did in one.”

“W-What!? Damn! That’s fast!”

“You should probably stop shouting, you’ll wake your sister up.”

“Oh, right, sorry.”

His voice went so soft that most people might have thought that he was mumbling to himself. He really cares about his sister. I continued in a slightly softer voice too,

“You know, I know that the thing that the thugs wanted from you wasn’t a family heirloom.”

His body tensed up as I said that. I continued as he stared at me suspiciously.

“I could hear your thoughts, and you also suck at lying. And no, although I’m curious about what it is, I’m not going to steal it from you.”

He relaxed as he heard that I wasn’t going to steal it from him, and tense up again as he comprehended what I had just said. His face turned red and turned away in an attempt to hide his embarrassment. I decided that a tiny bit of teasing is fine, there’s nothing bad that could happen from it, but I shouldn’t continue too much. I need to find out where the limit is, but that can come later. I switched the conversation topic to a serious one.

“Have you ever fought trolls before?”

“Eh? No, I’d fought a few weak monsters when I was still a noble and went out hunting. Other than that, I don’t have much actual combat experiences with non-human. Well, add the normal non-human you see within cities into the ‘human race’ in this context.”

“Okay. I don’t think I need to tell you this, priorities the protection of Sylvie. Not just because she is your sister and you’re a sis-con, but because she is the healer of our team. If she were to go down, no one would be able to heal her. Also, I’m worried that there may be something that chased the trolls out of their habitats. Which would be why the trolls that generally don’t attack villages do so now.”

“Although that may be true, I doubt that there will be monsters much stronger than the trolls within this area. Even if they are, with the regenerativity of the troll bodies, I don’t think that it would be enough.”

“I may be just overthinking it but we encountered a strong monster when we went to the dungeon beside the city the other day. We wasn’t able to defeat the hobgoblin that appeared there. He was backed up by swarms of goblins but he was still too strong for a hobgoblin. In the end, we couldn’t defeat him and could only escape after I blinded him and he buried himself into the wall.”

Raoul hesitated for a moment as he tried to calculate the possibilities of danger.

“Okay. I’ll be more careful. We’ll need to be careful anyway as we have neither battle experience nor fought alongside with your party before this.”

We were then interrupted by the rustling sound of the others waking up. We had a quick breakfast of cold bread with ham as the campfire had long burned up and what remained was just warm ashes. We then proceeded to our requester and confirmed the information and gathered further details from the rest of the villagers. We then proceeded towards the cave that the trolls were supposed to inhibit.

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Author's Notes: BloodKingx, to your reply from the last chapter, yes he did. And yes, I had forgotten about it. I'm new as an author but like what maskedcerf had said "he wanted to control what happened at that time", that's what I had in mind as well for his reasoning after reading your comment.