Leia felt offended.
Gritting her teeth, she said, "If you're not willing, don't come! This young lady will find another Healer!"
Upon hearing Leia's words, Linda felt utterly disheartened, yet also strangely relieved.
Perhaps he had been waiting for an opportunity like this all along, a reason to make his departure from this suffocating place entirely natural.
"What are you daydreaming for? Remember to gather on time tomorrow, or I really will find another Healer!"
With a snort, Leia yawned and turned to head back to her bedroom to rest.
"I'm quitting the party."
Linda suddenly spoke up.
"Huh?"
Leia's hand froze on the doorknob.
She seemed completely unprepared for such a turn of events.
A look of utter bewilderment surfaced in the girl's large, ruby-like eyes, as if she couldn't comprehend what Linda was saying.
Linda stood up, his height of one hundred and eighty centimeters looking down at Leia, who was more than a head shorter, her small mouth open in a dazed expression.
"You don't have to wait until tomorrow. You can contact that Healer named Felix right now and have him join the Snow Goose Adventurer Party."
With that, he grabbed a brown coat, slipped it on, and walked out the door.
"Stop right there!"
Just as Linda's foot was about to step out of the room, a sharp voice rang out from behind him.
Clearly, Leia was shaken; otherwise, her voice wouldn't have sounded like a squeaky toy whose neck had just been stepped on.
Expecting to hear a few words of persuasion, Linda paused.
Instead, what followed was a torrent of complaints and incomprehension from the young lady.
"Just because I asked you to get up a bit earlier tomorrow and head to the ninth floor together, you're quitting the party? Is that really necessary?"
Leia's face flushed red, her chest heaving with anger.
She desperately wanted to stomp over, kick Linda twice, grab him by the ear, and demand to know if he had any idea what he was saying.
The Snow Goose Adventurer Party had originally been founded by three people, and Linda was one of them. Leia had imagined every possible scenario in which someone might leave the party, but she never imagined Linda would be the one to do it.
After all, even the name of the adventurer party was something she and Linda had come up with together. How could anyone just abandon their own party and choose to quit?
Leia took a deep breath, clenched her small fists, and stared at Linda's back. In a voice that was cold, slow, but utterly resolute, she said, "Linda, if you walk out that door, don't ever come back."
"Okay."
Linda nodded.
This casual "okay" made Leia's expression even more unsightly.
She said, "I'll definitely recruit that Felix into the party tomorrow."
"Whatever."
"There won't be a place for you anymore, you know?"
"Okay."
Linda ignored Leia, who was left standing in his room wearing a dumbfounded expression like a wooden pillar.
If it had been the Leia from three years ago making that face, Linda would have offered a few words of comfort. But now, he found he no longer had the heart or the emotion for it. It was as if he were looking at a complete stranger, leaving him entirely indifferent.
Linda thought with a bitter inner chuckle that he never should have accepted Leia's invitation to found the Snow Goose Adventurer Party in the first place.
Three years as teammates, and in the end, it amounted to nothing.
Tap, tap.
The sound of footsteps going downstairs echoed through the large villa, carrying a hint of desolation.
Linda arrived at the living room.
"It's late, stop playing and get to bed."
"Still reading this late? It's bad for your skin."
Passing through the living room, he noticed that the party's other two young ladies were still awake.
The first was the mage Aiko, who hailed from the Holy Light Church. She possessed a mature and charming appearance, her breathtaking curves wrapped in a white dress, and she was lazily lounging on the sofa reading a newly released summer fashion magazine.
The other was Clrona, a pint-sized girl with pink twin tails who served as the party's Heavy Armor Warrior. She was furiously playing a game of Whack-a-Mole with a fiercely competitive expression.
Linda got along fairly well with these two young ladies—at least much better than he did with Leia.
"So late, where are you going?" Aiko put down her magazine, tilting her head in confusion as she looked at Linda.
Clrona, on the other hand, treated Linda like thin air, wishing he wouldn't come back all night. A new board game had recently been released at the store, and she planned to stay up playing it all night; if Linda were home, he would definitely lecture her.
"Nothing much, just going out for some fresh air."
Linda smiled faintly, having no intention of telling the two of them that he had quit the party.
He was genuinely afraid of seeing expressions of joy on their faces; Leia alone had already left him feeling cold to the bone.
"Oh, come back early."
Aiko only thought his expression looked a bit strange, but didn't think much of it.
Even Clrona, who was entirely absorbed in her Whack-a-Mole game, had no inkling that this was Linda's final day as a member of the Snow Goose Adventurer Party.
Linda walked out of the villa and melted into the pitch-black night outside.
This villa was situated in a luxury residential area in White Dove City. The roads were wide and clean, and the summer night was quiet, with only the occasional faint sound of chirping insects.
Unlike the shabby little rental house in the Sparrow District where they had started, which was constantly noisy and chaotic with drunken adventurers lingering nearby.
After three years of hard work, Linda and the others had bought this large villa spanning nearly three hundred square meters in the Inner City District, where every inch of land was worth a fortune.
The Snow Goose Adventurer Party now had money and a solid reputation, making them a well-known team in White Dove City.
Yet Linda felt increasingly suffocated. Every day in the party, he had to face Leia's endless interrogations.
"When on earth are you going to finish the strategy guide?"
"I'm level 23, what about you?"
"None of the top-tier adventurer parties in White Dove City have a level 15 Healer, you know?"
And so on, and so on.
Before the party became famous, Leia clearly hadn't been like this.
Linda sighed.
The original Leia had been down-to-earth, sincere, always full of drive, and pretty to boot—which was why he had been willing to found the Snow Goose Adventurer Party with her.
But the current Leia had her mind entirely consumed by how to conquer the next floor, catch up with the veteran adventurer parties, and trample them underfoot.
Wielding a metaphorical small whip, Leia drove Linda as frantically as a donkey turning a millstone. Even when Linda slaved away until the middle of the night, she still felt he was slacking off and not trying hard enough.
He was exhausted, and so he had no choice but to quit.
Linda shoved his hands into his pockets and gazed desolate toward the north.
That towering, emerald-green tree that shimmered with magical light even in the dark of night.
The World Tree Secret Realm.
It was identical to the game Linda had played in his past life.
There were a total of fifty levels of secret realms inside the World Tree, each guarded by a different secret realm guardian. Defeating these bosses would yield rewards from the Goddess of the World Tree.
All sorts of equipment, skill books, gold coins, magic potions... the higher the level, the more generous the rewards.
Take the eighth floor that the Snow Goose Adventurer Party had conquered not long ago, for instance; the harvest from that single run had been tens of thousands of gold coins, enough for an ordinary person to work from the ancient times until the present day.