A Basic Quest

How could this be happening? All I wanted was to go on a journey to change myself along with my friends. It was our first quest, a simple, easy quest any beginner adventurers could complete. Now, I'm running for my life, fear the only thing driving me to keep moving forward. How the hell could this have happened?

I'm in a small guild, nothing too fancy and not too well known: The Black Cat Guild. I had only just joined with four friends of mine. We had all only recently graduated high school and became adventurers together. There was no special reason we decided to join The Black Cat Guild, it was just the first guild we came across that was accepting new adventurers.

The four of us were as generic as an adventurer could get considering we were all only just starting out. Generic hair, generic gear, generic abilities, and yet we all had personalities that didn't go together at all, no matter how you looked at it. Some adventurers in the guild found it amazing the five of us could even form a proper party with how different we all were. Despite how different we all were, we all had just two things in common: In high school, none of us had any friends, and we all wanted to become adventurers for the same exact reason. Most people are in it for the money, to get strong and famous, to explore the world, etc. But the five of us, we wanted to change who we were, physically anyway.

The more you level up throughout your adventure, the more you can change your physical appearance, on top of obviously being able to master a variety of skills and magic. You can have extremely spiky red hair as tall as your face, you can have two different colored eyes, and even your body proportions will change to suit your level. Plus, if your born with an unnatural hair or eye color, your affinity with magic is said to be much stronger and your skill tree will start out much bigger than anyone else's, meaning you'd be able to become a prodigy adventurer in no time. It's not just gear and money that determines your strength as an adventurer, but how you look as well. And that was our goal: to level up as much as we could throughout our adventurer career so we could change our generic looks.

Today was the day that adventure was set to begin. I was sitting at a table inside the guild with three out of the four of my friends, and it was currently still bright and early outside. We had decided prior to let Kendo pick our first quest since he was the smartest and most responsible in our group, and were waiting on him to return to the table. We all knew he would pick a quest perfect for our levels and skills. It would be something easy and safe, unlike a dangerous and difficult quest one of the other three would've chosen to level up faster. Soon enough. he returned to the table with an F ranked quest in hand, the lowest ranked quest an adventurer could take. Kendo grinned, his hair slick and as black as the night, and his eyes as bright as the morning, blue sky. Other than that clear contrast, he was quite plain in the looks department; slightly muscular and tall, but nothing too out of the ordinary. "A simple goblin slaying quest! They're all very weak and there are a lot of them, so as long as we've all got each other's backs, we'll level up quite a bit from this!"

All of us smiled brightly at the thought of leveling up. "What are we waiting for then?! Let's go!" Saki hopped up, showing off her exuberance as always, her short brown hair bouncing as wildly as she did and her hazel eyes sparkling in the sunlight that was coming in from the window. She was taller than average women, but other than that her looks were also quite plain.

"Do you always have to be so loud..?" Neiji groaned before standing up. Neiji was your everyday lonerish emo, dark circles under his deep grey eyes and his nearly shoulder length black hair. He was practically as thin as a skeleton to boot, his skin as pale as the moon, and he even had the emo haircut; bangs covering one eye, which just so happened to be his right eye.

"Come on Neiji, don't be like that." Riana said, giggling a bit as she rubbed his back. Riana was the sweetest of the group, with a bit of a mischievous side. All she ever wanted to do was help people, but she was far too shy to ever ask, and because of her, back length, brunette hair, brown eyes, average looks, and unremarkable body, she was always ignored.

And then there was me, with my wavy, light brown hair, light brown eyes, and no special talents, features, or traits to speak of. I'm the guy that notices everything but never says anything about them. The only thing special about me is my love for adventure. I just sat there and smiled awkwardly, too reserved to say much before standing up myself and following everyone out. I didn't know any of my friends all that well since we'd only become friends in the middle of our last year of high school, hence my reservations. We were all basically just using each other to complete our goal, then we planned to go our separate ways, but I still considered all four of them to be my friends. If they hadn't reached out to me, who knows what I would've been doing.

And just like that, we were off, gear equipped and ready for action. We all had our own light armor and/or enchanted clothing, as well as our choice of weapons. Kendo had an earth affinity and wielded a giant hammer and a shield, the "tank" of the group. Saki, the berserker with a fire affinity, had gauntlets, purely a fighter in our group. Neiji had a dark affinity, no surprise there, and a simple magic staff, the mage of the ground who would support us from afar. Then Riana, with her nature affinity, had a nature based grimoire, and would also support us from afar with mostly healing. Lastly I, Romeo, the adventurer with no affinity, wielded a basic shortsword, who would be a pure fighter like Saki. We all decided what our group was going to need back when we decided to do this in high school, and gave everyone the best class based on their personalities and personal preferences. Since I had no preference and there was nothing special about my personality, everyone chose what they thought was best for me based on what the group still needed.

I remember the day all of us were learning about affinity in class. Whether or not if you have affinity determines if you can use magic or not, and what type of affinity you have determines what kind of magic you can use, as well as your class. The sad thing is, elemental affinity is the most basic affinity someone can be born with, especially only one kind. Combined with their generic looks, being born with a generic affinity as well was quite a heavy blow to the four of my friends, but I wasn't even born with an affinity, so I had it the worst.

Once we arrived, we completed the quest rather easily. I hung back a bit, allowing the others to take care of the more powerful goblins while I merely took out the weakest ones. There were only a total of 50 goblins according to the quest sheet. Once we had cleared all the ones that attacked us, we met in the center of the open cavern.

"Did we get them all?!" Kendo asked. "I killed ten total!"

"Yep, I got fifteen of em!" Saki grinned, wiping a bit of the goblin blood off her face.

"I also killed ten..." Neiji yawned.

"I got a couple levels from all the healing I did. Aside from that I killed two..." Riana giggled.

I stayed back to count the bodies of the goblins I had killed, my face growing a bit pale as I finished. I counted again to make sure I wasn't mistaken. "Something wrong Romeo?!" Saki yelled to me as she noticed me counting.

"There were 50 goblins, right?!" I yelled back.

Kendo quickly checked the quest sheet. "Yes! Why?!"

"Because I've only killed twelve..!" I worriedly shouted back before turning to them. Before any of them could react to my words, something pierced my left shoulder. I blinked, looking down at the tip of the kunai protruding from my shoulder. My eyes widened in fear and I yelped in pain and fell over, paralyzed. "P-Poison..!" I thought to myself as I groaned in pain.

"Romeo!" Everyone yelled, Kendo and Saki running in my direction whilst Neiji and Riane prepared their spells, but a dome of darkness, only a few yards wide, surrounded me, blocking their path. When I looked up, a goblin was at the opposite side of the dome, inside, its body hidden in dark clothing, only its glowing red eyes, pointy green nose, and disfigured yellow fangs visible.

"W-What the hell..? This was supposed to be an easy quest... Why is there an assassin goblin here?!" I thought to myself while looking over the monster. Monsters with classes, no matter the class, were always attached to E ranked quests and above, and you had to be at least level 50 to take on one of those quests. Quest ranks went from F to Z, Z being for the absolute strongest adventurers at level 1000 exactly. Every quest rank in between those two in order from lowest to highest was E, D, C, B, A, S, SS, and SSS. This goblin was dangerous, and it was after my life, and there was nothing I could do to defend myself.

The assassin goblin crept closer, drawing two daggers from its clothing. I couldn't help but tremble in fear as it drew closer and closer. I moved the little amount I could to scoot away, but my back pressed against the barrier behind me. "Stay away..." I said in a frightened, breathless murmur. The goblin made a high pitched cry before running at me, my whole body tensing up. "I SAID STAY AWAYYYY!!!"