Is extermination pay an allowance for danger?

Hachiware wants a camera, counts the money on hand, and sighs. Then they murmur, a big extermination job, and tell themself to do their best.

In the last panel, they count off on their fingers: extermination, weeding, putting on stickers. How much they need, or how much they'll get, isn't drawn anywhere.

For a big purchase, first think of a big extermination job. The bigger the target, the more you get. That seems to be how Hachiware thinks. Dangerous work pays more. That's what I thought at first.

On the day of the big extermination job, Chiikawa and friends are gripped by devices with propellers and carried through the sky.

When Chiikawa gets scared and cries, Hachiware tells them they can just drop out if it looks bad, and that someone will come pick them up when it's over.

In the end, the target runs away. Usagi fires off a signal, and the device comes to pick them up. Someone says it seems it was still too early. There's no scene of receiving pay.

What was prepared for the job that looked most dangerous was a ride there and back, and a way to quit partway. Before paying more for the danger, there's a system that makes the danger itself smaller. Here, the idea that dangerous means well-paid wobbled a little.

After weeding, the Armor-san at the counter says dangerous weeds that shouldn't be in area E had been mixed in. Left alone, the whole area would have been damaged. So they say the pay will be raised this time, and set down a big bag.

It was the usual weeding, yet the bag got bigger. But the reason given for the raise isn't how much danger Hachiware was in. It's that the whole area was protected.

The pay seems to point less toward how much danger the worker was in than toward how much damage they prevented.

Hachiware, who went out on an extermination job as one of Rakko's party, is asked to land the final blow and defeats a big creature.

In the next episode, Rakko hands Hachiware a big bag of pay and says it's their share. When Hachiware refuses, saying they can't take it, Rakko replies that Hachiware is the one who exterminated it.

Everyone who fought together was put in danger. Even so, the reason spoken for the share was who defeated it. Here too, the pay is attached not to the danger but to the result.

On the day they got wrapped in caul fat, and on the day they lost at rock-paper-scissors and got thrown, Hachiware ends by saying the extermination job failed. In that panel, Chiikawa, next to them, is holding a small bag. Hachiware's hands are empty.

Even while falling into a sand pit, Chiikawa defeats a horned creature. They receive a bag of pay and look relieved.

On the same day, one who holds a bag and one who doesn't appear side by side. What Chiikawa did that day to get the bag can't be told from this panel. Whether you really get nothing on a day you fail isn't drawn either. Still, whether wrapped in caul fat or thrown, no bag shows up for it. The fear, it seems, is something the worker simply carries home.

In the episode where Chiikawa defeats the horned creature in the sand pit, and in the weeding episode after getting Grade 5, there's a panel labeled pay. Each shows a single bag tied at the mouth, and its shape and its size in the panel hardly differ. The weeding bag comes with a small sound: clink…

The share Rakko handed Hachiware is drawn in the same kind of pay panel, as a bag bulging out to the left and right. The sound that goes with it is a heavy KA-CHUNK.

Judging by the panels, there doesn't seem to be a big difference between the pay for an ordinary extermination job and for weeding. The bag doesn't look bigger when the kind of job changes. It looks bigger when a big creature is defeated, and when the whole area is protected from dangerous weeds. A drawing of a bag isn't an amount, so the difference in sums can't be known. Still, the bag is not drawn bigger just because the job is dangerous.

In the island arc, a pay multiplier appears as a number. A flyer that fell from the sky said: “Get 100 times the pay for easy extermination jobs on the island!”

On reaching the island, it turns out the pay never existed in the first place. The explanation is that the flyers were scattered because they wanted help, and an assortment of local specialties is offered in place of pay. At the feast after the fight with the Siren, someone says that, actually, they had come counting on the 100 times the pay too.

As far as I've seen, this flyer is the only place a pay multiplier shows up as a number. And that multiplier was attached not to a dangerous extermination job, but to an easy one. And for the fight with the Siren that came afterward, that multiplier was not paid. Here too, danger and the size of the bag aren't connected.

Pay goes to the size of the creature defeated and to the damage prevented. The danger is made smaller by rides there and back, by dropping out, and by the hands of friends. Lining up the scenes, that's how it starts to look.

Of course, bigger creatures are more dangerous, so the two can't be cleanly separated in the original. What rules the counter uses to decide the amount isn't drawn either.

Even so, “dangerous means well-paid” alone can't fully explain the raise for the dangerous weeds, Rakko's share, or the look-alike pay panels. Next time you read an extermination episode, try watching who gives the reason the bag got bigger, and what they give as that reason.