Ch 219 – Guild Contract
"Wait, you created the Guild already?" Valorie exclaimed in surprise as both Deacon and Bonehead caught up with the twins just as they were standing outside the banquet hall entrance that Valorie and Leon had been trapped inside for the past several minutes while Leon worked on deactivating what was, in his own words, the most complex trap he'd ever seen.
While Valorie had been shocked upon receiving the Guild Invite notification from the System and had immediately turned around to face Deacon and Bonehead with wide eyes, Leon remained focused on disabling the trap his twin had inadvertently triggered with her hyperactive brain and short attention span.
Half an hour ago, when both he and Valorie first entered the banquet hall, Leon had immediately noticed the wispy cloud-like lines of mana spreading across every surface of the hall like some kind of magical web.
Observing the lines going across the room, he eventually found their focal point. In this place, all the cloud-like lines converged, beneath the massive golden chandelier encrusted with red rubies hanging from the ceiling near the middle of the hall, directly across from the middle door.
A few minutes into him disabling the traps within the hall, his twin's attention span reached its limit, and she stopped staring at him to wander around until she spotted a golden key glinting within the chandelier high above them. With her attention shifted onto the swaying key, Valorie notched an arrow and fired it at the tiny chain holding the golden key dangling from one of the chandelier's lower arms.
While Valorie had successfully grabbed the key as it fell and landed in her outstretched palm after her arrow cleanly severed the chain holding it, upon her doing so, the slight difference in weight of the chandelier triggered the hall's trap.
As the walls of the hall began to groan immediately after and push inwards, as the twins lurched towards the entrance way, they found themselves unable to move, or rather, they were unable to move anything below their waist, no matter how hard they struggled.
If not for the fortunate fact that Leon had already been crouched down on the floor and positioned right beside the trapped hall's focal point when his sister triggered the hall’s trap, and if not for his newly discovered innate ability to somehow instinctively locate trap focal points and other hidden mechanisms, they would have been in quite serious trouble.
Just seconds before Deacon and Bonehead peered into the banquet hall’s middle entrance way, he'd barely managed to halt the trap before it could press them into a cube like a trash compactor, with the once large banquet hall becoming similar in size to a janitor’s closet.
"What's going on here? What happened?" Deacon asked as he took in the sight of the twins, whose foreheads were beaded in sweat, and with Leon crouched on the ground.
"I found us the key we needed," Valorie announced proudly with a wide smile as she held up and showed off a small, golden, ornate key that was approximately the size of half her palm, pinched between her thumb and forefinger.
Nice, Deacon mused to himself as he quickly Identified the key.
Item Name:Manor's Main Entrance Key
Type: Tool – Key
Rarity: Unique
Description: A small golden key that is required to exit the Mutant Manor Dungeon and claim it as territory.
"Sweet," Deacon said appreciatively before tilting his head slightly to look past Valorie at Leon, who was still crouched down on the compressed marble floor with a single finger placed firmly atop a grey brick while his eyes remained closed in deep concentration. "But uh, what exactly happened in here?"
"We may have accidentally triggered a trap that immediately froze us in place and started making the walls and ceiling close in on us like we were being crushed," Valorie explained casually for her twin brother who was still in such deep focus attempting to fully disarm and reverse the trap that he didn't even acknowledge their arrival, though she noted he was being quite successful in his efforts as the walls and ceiling of the nearly empty banquet hall were slowly but steadily beginning to recede backward toward their original positions.
"But we're totally good now, though!" she added with a confident smirk and an enthusiastic thumbs up, clearly not feeling even slightly guilty about what she'd done. "Leon's doing his whole disarming thingy, so it's all fine."
"We didn't trigger the trap," Leon corrected as he stood up from his crouch with his hands returning to rest at his sides, having successfully disarmed the trap and caused the ceiling and walls to return to their original positions.
"You," he clarified while pointing an accusing finger at his twin sister, "triggered it entirely by yourself with your complete inability to sit still and wait patiently for more than a single minute before shooting arrows at literally anything that catches your eye and looks remotely interesting."
"This is slander of the absolute highest order, and I will not stand for it," Valorie hissed indignantly as she glared at her brother, who calmly walked past her without even acknowledging her protest as he made his way out of the banquet hall that had very nearly squashed both of them flat.
Completely ignoring his twin sister's attempts to drag him into some benign verbal sparring that would end up with him having to become her servant for a week, Leon walked directly up to Deacon and asked in a more serious tone, "Are there the only requirements asked of us in the Guild Contract?"
"Yes, that's everything," Deacon confirmed with a nod.
After both he and Bonehead had thoroughly searched through the Manor Lord's personal office and during the time he'd spent pilfering through the corpses of the many Bubonic Retainers scattered throughout the Central Hall in hopes of finding the Manor's Main Entrance Key hidden within one of their bodies, he'd taken the time to carefully read the Guild Contract to which all members would adhere.
The Guild Contract, an agreement one must sign before entering a Guild, once accepted by a member, would become permanently inscribed within their soul.
As such, if any of the contract's rules were broken by any means other than formally requesting permission to leave the Guild from either the Guildmaster or a high-ranking Officer and receiving their approval, the offending member's soul would either shatter and die or they would end up in a state where death would be a mercy.
It was an admittedly rather extreme form of enforcement in the eyes of those who had never actually joined a Guild before, aka non-climbers and those who’ve never entered Guilds, but Guild Contracts were made to protect both the Guild and its members.
Knowing this, Deacon came up with four rules that would make up the Guild Contract that everyone within the Guild would have to agree to and adhere to:
Rule 1: All members within the Guild must keep the location of all Guild Bases as well as all Guild Members' private information, such as Name, Race, Level, Class, and such else, completely to themselves unless they are explicitly given direct permission by the Guildmaster or Guild Member in question to share such information.
Rule 2: There is no formal hierarchy within the Guild structure; no member is beholden or subordinate to any one specific person, rather all members are equally beholden to each other as a collective whole.
Rule 3: No member shall take any action — whether it be political, financial, or malefic in nature — that would directly or indirectly harm the interests of the Guild or damage its collective standing and reputation unless such actions are first disclosed to and discussed with those who hold Officer rank or higher within the Guild.
Rule 4: When called to action by the Guild, or if another Guild Member is in need of assistance, all Guild Members are required to answer their call and provide help to the absolute best of their abilities if they are physically and practically able to do so.
Rule 5: Explore to your heart's content and push yourself to be the absolute best at whatever you choose to do.
By creating the contract with these rules, the binding between soul and Guild Contract would prevent members from revealing any sensitive information about the Guild to outsiders unless given explicit permission. This would prevent Guild Members, whether intentional or not, from divulging any information if manipulated, coerced, or forced. Which was protection for the Guild.
While the above was protecting the Guild along with its members, within the rules of the contract, this protection came with the reciprocal guarantee that if any member found themselves in need of help or assistance, the Guild would answer their call.
"Is there an issue with the contract?" Deacon asked while looking slightly confused by Leon's question.
"Not at all, the terms are perfectly reasonable," Leon said while shaking his head, and at almost the same moment, Deacon received a notification from his Guild Panel informing him that the Guild had gained a new member. A second later, another notification appeared announcing yet another new member, bringing their total membership count to five.
Offering Leon his hand for a handshake, the two clasped hands and shook firmly. While doing so, Deacon mentally accessed his Guild Panel and raised both Leon and Valorie's ranks from the default Member status to Officer rank, which was the second-highest rank in the Guild, just below Guildmaster, and would grant them access to almost all of the same privileges he currently possessed as the Guildmaster.
"Oh wow, you gave us Officer rank too?" Valorie said with genuine surprise in her voice as she quickly caught up to the group and the four of them began making their way back through the twisted corridors toward the Manor's Central Hall.
"Like I said before, no hierarchy here," Deacon reminded her. "We're just a group of close friends who want to explore together and have fun while doing it."
"So, are you planning on choosing this manor as our Guild Base?" Leon asked, knowing that creating a Guild required activating a Guild Waystone and that once activated, those Waystones could not be stored in spatial storages. They needed to be placed somewhere safe and defensible to prevent them from being destroyed or taken over by members of other Guilds.
"Either as the main Guild Base or alternatively as the Guild’s Storage House," Deacon shrugged noncommittally. "I have a second Guild Waystone stored away, so if you don’t want this place as the Guild Base and you'd prefer to have something built from the bottom up, it isn’t an issue at all."
“You are the Builder of the Guild,” Deacon reminded him.
Humming thoughtfully to himself for several minutes as he went over what he’d seen throughout the Manor, Leon finally nodded as he came to a decision.
"This place is good," Leon answered thoughtfully. "It definitely needs a heavy renovation, but its foundations are solid, and while it has been a dungeon, which makes this a challenge to work with..." he trailed off slightly as he looked around and a small smirk grew across his face, "I can make this into our Guild Base."
Leon's answer caused Deacon to immediately shoot Bonehead a knowing and rather smug look, to which Bonehead scowled. During their time pilfering through the corpses of the Bubonic Retainers in the Central Hall, they'd made a bet about whether Leon would rather use this manor as their Guild Base or as a Guild Storage House.
And now, as the loser of the bet, he had to burn all of the skin magazines he brought with him from Floor Zero.
“We also found a lot of hidden loot,” Valorie brought up as she walked in the middle of the group with her head tilted back and arms crossed behind her head. “Some were really weird – like an artifact called the Farmer’s Hoe, like what the hell was that doing in the Head Butler’s room?”
And just like that, Bonehead’s frown vanished, and he rushed to drop on both knees in front of Valorie and clasped both hands together. “Oh, great bow goddess,” he begged. “Please bestow upon me thy hoe.”