That afternoon, the two swordsman officers from Castle Ironfist, acting on the queen's orders, went to the tavern to inquire around and recruit commanders capable of magic—mages, sorcerers, alchemists, or the like from the Mage Guild of the Kingdom of Bracada.
In short!
Any powerful spellcaster capable of serving as a commander, or one who had studied the relevant command tactics or defensive arts, would do.
However, the offers made by those two swordsman officers, Ris and Donald, were simply far, far too low.
They actually wanted to recruit a spellcaster with the ability to command and lead troops into battle for a mere five hundred gold coins, while also requiring them to follow the queen across the sea to another continent—to the Kingdom of Erathia?
So naturally, there was no surprise in the outcome. Their offer was too low, and the mission was far too dangerous; the risks were completely out of proportion to the reward. Naturally, no one in the tavern responded.
Even the tavern owner—the information broker responsible for making introductions, the middleman—could barely be bothered with the pair's request, leaving them to suffer one rebuff after another in the tavern.
In the end, just as the two were at a loss and preparing to grit their teeth and raise the offer, a certain troublesome little girl with nothing better to do, having eaten and drunk her fill, skipped over to the dejected pair and said something.
What exactly she said to them was unknown to outsiders. In any case, under the strange gazes of the two men, the tavern owner, and the many knights and sorcerer gentlemen inside the tavern, she simply skipped out of the tavern.
The next day...
As the first ray of morning sunlight pierced the thin mist over the sea and fell