We took a little detour before heading out of the city. Ted was working right next to the guild, after all, and I was still without a weapon.
"A big iron stick?" the dwarf asked me with a chuckle. "I got some rusty rebar pulled out from the foundations we are remaking. Literally the roof of Chasm City; you don't find any better stuff around!" He gave another chuckle. "That's a joke, by the way. It's just normal, old, weathered rebar that needs a good ol' round of smelting at a forge. But I got more than I know what to do with, if that works for you?"
I nodded.
"Help yourself, then," he said with a shrug.
The pile was indeed full of rusty bars of metal, not too thick but deceptively heavy. I pulled one out, easily two meters long, and swung it around a couple of times. It was as unwieldy as it looked, but my massive Strength made me six times as strong as I would be without stats, making the bar heavy but not impossible to swing.
It was no problem. I had no illusions of being a dexterous or even decent fighter. What I needed was a big stick to whack the monsters, sharp if possible. This one wasn't sharp, but it was free and there were lots of spares.
After all, "it won't last too long before it gets all bendy if you bonk tough monsters with it," Ted explained. "When it happens, just toss it away and come to me. I'll give ya another."
I felt Elyra stir. I knew what she was about to say through the bond, and beat her to it. "I can't take these for free, you know?"
Ted looked at me. "Why not? They're useless as they are right now."
I smiled. The dwarf's eyes glinted. "I can make the useless into useful."
His expression told me all I needed to know. "Fine," he said. "I'll deduct a fee but I'mma still pay you, ya hear? You know where to find me. And, lad… don't die out there. Looks can be deceiving. The world is as beautiful as it be deadly."
We parted ways, and he reiterated his invite to come find him once we were done with our hunting.
I hoped he meant at the warehouse where he stored his stuff and not the address on the piece of paper he gave me. I wanted to ask, just to be sure, but Vespera urged me not to. Buck was watching us, sporting a rather incredulous look on his face as if he couldn't believe we were talking to Ted of all people.
I had no idea the dwarf was this famous, even if I took into consideration the strange club of three-lettered folk.
"At this point, it would be criminal not to check it out," Vespera whispered in my mind.
She had me. I needed to see what was going on. The demon was also quite sure that Ted would be okay with meeting at the warehouse to see if we could coax the spent rebar with magic into becoming something useful beyond simple whacking sticks, and that was that. I now had my source of disposable weapons, and had a way to quickly settle the temporary debt from taking the first one with the strangely influential dwarf.
"Are you a member of his club?" Buck asked me when we were well out of earshot, in another lithos block entirely.
"The three—"
The man shushed me, looking around. "Don't say it out loud!"
His face was slick with sweat. I frowned. "Are they big shots or something?"
Buck shook his head in disbelief. "You are not in, then?"
"Not yet."
"You have no idea how lucky you are. Or how screwed, since you look like you don't have any idea about jack shit at all. But the guy seems to like you, so who knows? Maybe you are the next big shot in town."
"Is that why you accepted to go hunt together?"
I said it as a joke, but the man took it in all seriousness. "I had no idea back then but trust me, if I knew… it's an opportunity and a risk, but you know I'm a reckless asshole. Fuck. I need a drink."
This brought my attention to the fact that he was perfectly sober and had not drunk a single drop of alcohol all day. Perhaps he was not as reckless as he claimed to be.
"Maybe we could buy him a drink?" Vespera joked in my mind. Perhaps if I was still pretending to be Sol the hauler, I would have considered it as a strategy to befriend the man and keep him hooked on his self-sabotaging vices.
Instead, I was actually hoping his dry streak would last.
"It will not," Elyra stated with a finality I did not expect from her.
Vespera hummed, as surprised as I was. "She's right, you know. He got a scare. A bad scare. I wonder what it was."
"Maybe it's just that he doesn't drink before a hunt?" I offered.
However, Vespera was too perceptive to be fooled by that. "He wasn't planning on hunting until we approached him. Shit, spacer boy, did you not notice that he didn't even check us out with his usual lascivious expression? Something happened to him, and it's got him rattled. We are just adding fuel to the fire with this whole three-letter business, but…"
"Keep him talking, I want to know more," Elyra finished for her.
I did. Buck talked. "People sometimes try to change their names so that they can get in. They always sniff them out, but that doesn't stop people from trying. Sometimes the System even recognizes the change, but somehow that dwarf always knows it's disingenuous."
"How long has the club been around?" I asked on Elyra's behalf.
"Long enough that there are many adults going around with idiotic three-letter names because some parents thought they'd be buying their kids a golden ticket to the club, a few decades back."
It was crazy to think about, but I didn't find it too hard to believe. "And is he the head?"
Buck shook his head. "He's high up, but the true high-ups are not up, but down."
He looked at the ground we were walking on. I understood at once. Chasm City.
We crossed the main gates and we were finally outside. Never once did Buck check his map, I noticed.
"Have you ever been there?"
"Mm?" the man asked. He had been distracted by something, and he had to blink back to the present.
"To Chasm City. Have you ever been there?"
Buck laughed. "Think them chasmers would ever let us in without a guild job to do? Nah."
"But what about people who rented rooms underground? Like, what was his name…" I pretended not to remember, and it was cute how both Vespera and Elyra immediately scrambled to tell me, only to then realize I was doing it on purpose. "The hawk-on-the-shoulder guy."
"Vandril," Buck said. "That's different. Underground guild rooms for upper dwellers are still part of Perseverance's End."
◈◈◈
It only took us a couple of hours to reach the hunting spot. During our trek we saw several other workers, both alone and in parties, confirming my hunch that everybody had their hunting spots and that we were simply roaming around the wrong places.
"That's our target," Buck said after we crested a small hill. There was a huge tree in the middle of a field, surrounded by small brambles. "According to the map, that's a spawn location for wolves. If we circle around and only approach the bushes, they should spawn three at a time. I can take one, can you deal with two?"
"Girls?" I asked, not looking behind me where Vespera and Elyra projected the strange kind of bored presence we saw in most other sentient slaves.
Elyra was the one who replied. "We can," she said, managing to sound spiteful and bored.
"Good job," I told her through the bond.
Vespera chuckled when the compliment made the angel squirm.
"Then it's settled," Buck said, still looking at the map his token projected in his mind. "We will circle around the tree and challenge the wolves three at a time. Map says if we approach the tree, a boss will spawn. We don't want that."
I nodded. Buck didn't waste time and immediately approached the first bush, and the wolves appeared in a flash of magical particles. Two were to the side of the thorny bush, while one was in front of it.
Vespera leapt forward, claws at the ready. She was upon the first wolf in moments, while I squared up against the second. I had to trust that she could handle it, just like I could trust Elyra's ability to keep track of two fights happening at once and deploy shields where needed. She was the support. I was the tank, but in a fight like this, I could also be the fighter or whatever it was called.
A beam of piercing light erupted from Elyra's halo, hitting the wolf charging at me. It blinded the monster, coming from straight ahead, giving me an opening. I lifted the rebar above my head and swung down with all my might.
You have defeated a level 4 [Wolf].
It was… surprisingly easy. Beside me, Vespera was wrestling with the other wolf. A bit bigger than the one I challenged, it was quick and nimble, but she was faster. Her claws of darkness tore it apart, and soon a second System message told us that our part of the fight was over.
We looked up just in time to see Buck's sword pierce through the last remaining wolf. No defeat message from the System, however, because we were not officially a party.
"Good," Buck said as he bent down and quickly extracted the core from the dead wolf with practiced ease. "This covers the daily interest. A couple more and I'll be able to pay for food and a night at the inn for a change."
He looked at me. "You up for it? It was a good fight, but you never know…"
"I'm up for it, no worries," I said.
He slapped me on the back. "That's the spirit! Hells, I missed this. Beats hunting alone for sure!"
Of course it did, I thought. He was fighting one third of the monsters but getting half the spoils. We had cut him a rather good deal, hadn't we?
I gathered my two cores, doing a much messier job at it than he did. He watched me, not offering to help, hands on his hips until I was done. Then we moved onto the second spawn point, and then the third, after which we took a rest.
Nine cores lay on the ground before me, and Buck was salivating as he looked at them. Strangely enough, though, he was letting me carry them in my backpack. He did not even want his cut, claiming that since all cores were different not only in level but also in other factors that couldn't be told at a glance, it was better that I carry them all until we could get them appraised at the guild. There was a fee to be paid unless we also wanted to sell them to them—in which case the fee was the lower-than-market rate—but it was how parties usually handled things.
His face was almost disturbing. He was grinning, something I had never seen him do. "I think I'm gonna treat myself tonight."
"Drinking?" I asked.
His eyes snapped at me. "Got a problem with that?"
I put my hands forward placatingly. "None, it's none of my business."
His gaze lingered for a moment, eyes narrowing. "That's right," he said. All friendliness was gone. "That's none of your fucking business."
I watched him during the next fights, and fortunately the adrenaline of battle helped him work whatever was going on with him out of his system. By the time we were done, he was back to normal. Happier even, given how many cores we managed to gather.
I was half a mind to increase our gains even more by using [Matter Reclamation] on the dead wolves, but I refrained from doing so, just like I did not use [Resonance Castling] because I didn't want to tip my hand. He had done the same, showing only basic skills that could have been anything, and letting his sword do the heavy lifting.
It was when I and the girls all lowered our guards, thinking the danger was over, that he walked towards one of the dead wolves.
"Relax," he said when he noticed I had tensed up. "I just want its teeth. They don't sell for much, but not everyone gets invited to the three-letter club, you know? You gotta make do."
He looked at the central tree. It was twisty and ominous, especially the way its trunk caught the golden late-afternoon light of the sun and seemed to swallow it all.
I nodded towards it. "Thinking about challenging the last encounter?"
"Hells no, man," Buck said quickly. "That'd be suicide. The dryad is a riddler. We even know what he asks but, it's no use. The question makes no sense. Didn't stop many workers from thinking they had it, and they all died. Nope, we are not touching the tree's boundary with a ten-foot pole."
Right as he said that, our guild tokens began to beep angrily. The sound startled me because I had never heard it before and had no idea the token could even do that. Buck, however? He went white as a sheet. The reason was soon clear. As I touched the token, a window appeared in my vision, filled with big, angry red letters.
ANOMALOUS BEAST TIDE ACTIVITY DETECTED. BTNO AT 97%. TAKE SHELTER IMMEDIATELY.
"Shit," someone muttered. I wasn't sure whether it was me or Buck or both.
We heard the distant rumble of the approaching horde, screeches and the thunder of heavy feet making the ground tremble and quake. Above, the sky was quickly being blotted by avian creatures of all kinds, some of them easily a hundred meters or bigger.
"We'll never make it to the city in time," I said.
Buck swallowed, looking behind us at the tree.
"You can't be thinking—" I began, but he did not wait. He stepped inside.
A shield began to rise from the ground as the bark of the tree unfolded and changed. It rose quickly, with the inevitability of an indestructible magic wall, sealing him inside. We were close enough to feel the rush of air when it closed up completely and cut the tree off from the rest of the world.
"Motherfucker," Vespera growled.
Except, mere moments later, the shield dropped again. Buck was dead.
I looked at the girls. The choice was between weathering the beast tide, no more than a minute or two away, or the unknown danger of the tree's dryad. It or he or she, whatever it was, had killed Buck so quickly we hadn't even seen it happen.
"We vote," I said.
"The dryad," Vespera said.
Elyra nodded. "I agree."
"The final decision is yours, Sol," the demon told me.
It wasn't. Two in favor out of three. I didn't even need to come to a decision myself. For some reason, the idea that we were a democracy surprised the girls, in a pleasant way I didn't have time to properly enjoy. We stepped in quickly, and the shield closed up into a dome above us.
I froze. Literally. I could not move. Behind me, the girls were close to the boundary, also frozen, but thankfully they had not been left outside like we had when Buck had decided to betray us.
The shield flickered and shimmered, different from the watery glass of Elyra's own shields. Outside, the sky became grey and the beast tide washed around us, parting like a great wave. We couldn't make out the monsters, however, all of them blurring into a muddy image. The grey sky was the same, a perfect average of all the possible states it could assume. We were outside time, it seemed.
The tree finished its slow unfolding, and out stepped a skinny, androgynous man only modestly covered in leaves and nothing else. His eyes shone red, pale and evil.
"Well, well, well, what do we have here? More people come to challenge the great tree? You will have to answer the Dryad's riddle first, I fear."