My Girlfriend is an S-Class Adventurer

As Kyor and Luke stared at each other, everything seemed to slow down for both of them.

The two had met very briefly almost a year ago, during a single night. Still, this was long enough for them to learn that they should respect each other, or rather, fear each other.

For the half-wolf, this black-haired man in front of him was the first person who made him wonder if he could land blows. Later he did, but in the days following that event, he wondered if he really earned it. Luke remembered vividly being in a fierce contest with Kyor, and when he finally managed to immobilize him and thought he could beat him, in the last moments he found several holes in his immobilization. With the skills Kyor had shown, he could even reverse the immobilization and pin the half-wolf, but he looked at the audience for a second and suddenly gave up on winning.

Yes, Luke understood that that was just a silly tournament, so he forgot about it for a while, but now with Kyor's sudden return to his life, he began to reflect on that as well.

Now, for Luke and Kyor, they were like rivals who didn't know each other, who didn't know what the other was capable of. Almost a year had passed, so both were surely much stronger.

"What are you doing, boy? I asked you to accompany me." Erick Smakusa said to Kyor, who slid his gaze over Luke to Ayumi.

Then Patriarch Smakusa sat down on one of the thrones and Kyor stopped to his right.

"Everyone is here, right? So, let's start the meeting." Thomas Landford said, and stood up from his throne, this time he pulled out a piece of paper from inside his military jacket, whose shoulder pads had little golden strings on them.

"What will be the agendas for today's meeting?" Mr. Ballard asked, with a dismissive smile on his face as he looked at Nico, Amanda and Ayumi.

Even to Luke it was clear that in the Council there were two groups that had divergent interests, and their members were feuding within the Circular Hall, not to convince each other, but to convince the neutral members, Jimbe Collalto and Thomas Landford.

In recent years, Thomas Landford had sided with Ayumi in most of the Council's conflicts, but that ceased to be a fact a few months ago, since it was revealed to the world that she had hired a certain half-beast. In Thomas' paranoid mind, Luke Lange was fully capable of being the beast that killed his entire family.

So, when Thomas stood up, and the Patriarchs of the Smakusa and Ballard Families smiled a little, everyone knew that something good was not coming.

"Khum! The first agenda of the day will be about the closure of the Guilds of the Lower City and the Middle City." Mr. Landford said as he read the paper in his hand. "You all know why we need to discuss whether this is possible, right? Guilds are expensive investments that need to make a minimum profit every day, otherwise we'll have to allocate more of our forces to Dungeons every time."

Ayumi nodded, as she heard him say. "Certainly maintaining the guilds is not something cheap. When I bought the rights to the Dungeon area in Vasconcelos, I spent almost a hundred thousand gold coins. Hiring staff, structure, fostering local trade, advertising, and all kinds of attention that a Dungeon needs is certainly not something cheap."

Rujierd Daren stood with his arms crossed, and also shook his head affirmatively as Ayumi spoke. "Maintaining a Dungeon is not something cheap, even less so without many adventurers to advance it. Still, there are other ways to exploit its resources."

"The problem is that there are three of them in Oukiwa. This is the city with the most dungeons in the entire world. Our only luck is that they are all of the Mina type." Ayumi clarified.

At that time, Thomas Landford clicked his tongue and looked at her coldly, "Mrs. Strogueher, this is not our problem. You and Mrs. Sallow who handle the investments in the south, Mr. Ballard and Mrs. Hangen handle the north, while Mr. Daren and Mr. Collalto are in the west. I don't see any problems in the other regions like there are in Oukiwa."

The blond-haired Elf noticed Thomas' strategy to make her angry, so she decided to spit out a fact:

"You are right, we all have our problems, but we are still one nation and we must cooperate with each other for the prosperity of Broteforge, no?" She asked, running her eyes over the faces of each of the leaders in that room.

Almost everyone nodded, with only Erick Smakusa remaining. "Prosperity? The creation of the Council has only created intrigue among the Noble Families!" He said with his arms crossed.

Nico Sallow saw this reaction as the reaction of a teenager when he sees that his parents have started fighting. So, she leaned forward a little and supported her face in his hand.

"If by intrigues you mean relationships, I will easily point out that our intrigues are one of the factors that keep the Broteforge Empire solid and unshakable as it is to this day." she said.

Next, Ballard surprised everyone with his assent about the Council. "Ms. Sallow, you and Yamazaki are right, the Council has been great and for that reason has been maintained for a few generations. However, being good at the moment does not mean that it will necessarily be good forever. There are many factors that make up the economy of this Empire, in addition to the religious, political and cultural factors..."

Erick Smakusa rose from his throne and began walking to the center of the hall, where Thomas was standing. "I agree with you, Mr. Ballard. There are so many factors that make up a nation that it is impossible to put each of them into topics, not in the dimension we are in today. Exactly for this reason, we should dismiss the Council, modernize it, and everyone will take care of their territory individually." He said, finally stopping beside Thomas.

"That doesn't make the slightest sense." Ayumi remained determined not to give in to that idea. "In the past, there have almost been two internal wars in the Broteforge Empire. The first one was between the Collalto and the Hangen, the Collalto dominate nature and respect it as one living thing, one entity, but the Hangen have long had a strong connection with manufacturing, so they didn't care much for the region they dominated."

"And the second was between the Sallow and the Strogueher." Nico pointed out. "The two Strogueher and the Sallow used to be a single family in the past, but everyone knows that the two brothers who commanded it created an enmity, which almost became a war twenty years later."

Luke's eyes widened, because he had never heard of that, although he was quite curious as to why Nico Sallow had genetic traits like hair and eyes so similar to Nathalia's.

"That's in the past. Can you guys understand that?" inquired Erick, putting both index fingers to his head, as if he was calling them idiots. "Ballard has lost influence in Suzano, Collalto hasn't been to his crops in over a year, Hangen hasn't returned to Forge Hill either, and I haven't set foot on one of the Parato Islands in a long time."

"Sigh... do you want a vacation, or do you just want to divide the power of the Empire into nine like it used to be? I mean, don't you guys understand that even if you prepared for years you couldn't win a war to overthrow the Emperor, right?" Hangen spoke up, looking at Thomas, Erick and Shanks.

"War? Who said anything about war? That's a slander!" Patriarch Smakusa accused.

"What do you want us to think?" Ayumi asked him. "Some arguments that come from you actually make sense, because you point out obvious problems of every nation. The real problem arises when the three of you show yourselves to be more concerned with your own business than with the population."

"What do you mean? What are you talking about?" They asked.

"Let's be honest? Mrs. Hangen, Nico, and I completely entrust the Northeast and North to the Cardinal Kingdom, they are pretty sprawling, but there is order in the regions they are present, and no crime goes unpunished. They have Seculars in their Dungeons, Sensory Mages as allies, and even ways to talk to the Flak Kingdom across the Sea, of course, before the war on the Hati continent.

"The way you're talking, it's look like you and she are friends, Ayumi." Erick tried to use the Strogueher Matriarch's words against herself. "Isn't that the least bit suspicious, my dear colleagues?"

To the Patriarch of the Smakusa, had Rujierd Daren or Jimbe Collalto begun to distrust Ayumi at that moment, the meeting would have been quite profitable already. In his mind, he thought he could make people suspect that Ayumi was up to something, for trusting a portion of land that wasn't even hers to a foreign Kingdom.

p However, when Erick looked at the other Council members who weren't on his side, he realized that none of them had changed their expression. 'Wait... have they not even considered that Ayumi might actually be up to something? That's impossible.' Erick Smakusa thought, incredulous.

At that moment, Luke fell in love with Ayumi once again, because as he saw her sitting on that throne with a calm expression, despite being accused by the man with the power to start the war between Melki and Broteforge, he realized how fucked up that Elf was.