Despite saying as much, Cawl didn’t ask for more money for his sword and didn’t charge for the repairs on his armour and mace, and Cali even had another roll of fire silk for him. It was odd, despite the silk being a rather unconventional piece of gear, Lan felt better having the volatile crimson garment in his pocket and wrapped around his gauntlet than without it.
As he walked down the street to the Guild, Lan found his thoughts coming back to his sword. Before he left, Cawl had said it could be a Healing Blade, but they would have to do some testing before they would know for sure, something that they planned to do once he returned. Even still, if it was a Healing Blade, then he would have to be more careful with it.
Everyone knew that the heroes in the Tales would have magic blades that repaired themselves; for that alone, they were highly sought after. And that was to say nothing of what it would mean to an adventurer or others who held value in a blade.
With this, Lan turned his attention back to the streams of people around him; even though he didn’t have to worry about his valuables with them in his chest, Lan found the habit of watching for people not acting as they should be had stuck with him, and he was even able to discourage one or two pickpockets from going after other people.
[Skill Level Up: People Watching = 2 > 3]
The voice said as Lan saw the Guild banners of a man on horseback carrying a spear with silhouettes of other horse riders in the background come over the hill.
As Lan stepped into the Hall of the Wild Hunt, all chatter died as every eye turned to look at him.
Stopping, Lan raised an eyebrow as he looked around. It wasn’t the hostile looks that he was getting used to, but one more akin to quiet desperation, like seeing the last sweet roll from across the room and hoping you were fast enough to reach it.
But a different look didn’t really change much for Lan, so he started to the reception desk without paying it a second thought.
‘Hey Lan!’ hearing a voice he didn’t recognise called to him in an overly friendly way, Lan turned to find a group that he wouldn’t have remembered if not for the blond leader with a snake tattooed around his eye who smiled at Lan as if greeting an old friend, while the rest of his party made up of a Goliath woman who looked to be a Guardian, along with a female archer and mage backed the man with mixed expressions.
‘We know that you wanted to join us, and after talking about it with the girls, we decided that we will let you join,’ he said as if the matter was settled.
For a moment, Lan just stared at him. ‘Wow, how generous of you,’ Lan said in a deadpan so perfect that one would have to be stupid or just trying in order to ignore it.
‘Right?’ the blond man nodded enthusiastically. ‘We already have a job, so you can just come along with us, and we will…’
‘Oh, now I remember you. You offered to have me be a human shield for you. You even said you would bring my body back if I blocked enough hits,’ Lan laughed.
‘Oh well about that,’ The blond man tried.
‘Water under the bridge,’ Lan smiled, ‘You know what? You go on ahead with the job, and I will catch up,’ Lan said, turning and starting to walk away,
‘Uh, wait, I didn’t tell you about the job,’ The man called after him.
‘No, I didn’t miss that part!’ Lan made it a few steps before the grizzled man in Plate Armour he had tried to convince stepped in front of him with his party. At this, Lan heard the blond man curse under his breath.
‘You have been making quite the impression around here,’ The man said, looking around the Hall.
‘I noticed,’ Lan answered as he looked around, too.
‘On that note, I think I disregarded you and your ambition too quickly,’ The man said, scratching his trimmed grey beard. ‘And for that, I would like to apologise and extend an invitation to join my party.’
‘Uh, apology accepted,’ Lan said before thinking. It seemed like the right thing to say, and of all the people he had talked to that day, the man hadn’t been the worst.
‘Great!’ the older man nodded. ‘After our next job, we will get you a healing instructor and have you train up as the first combat healer. You will need new equipment. Also, you haven’t assigned any points yet, which is good. Keep it that way for now until we have a chance to talk properly,’ the man rattled off as if he had it listed already while those of other groups looked on jealously.
‘I’m sorry, what are you talking about,’ Lan cut in.
‘Your new combat class,’ The man answered. ‘With a chance like this, it would be a waste to have you do anything else but make you a healer who can also participate in a fight. Getting a healer to agree to teach someone not in the Guild will cost a great deal, but I am willing to sacrifice it for the incredible advantage you will be. Plus, our party is strong and has all other roles filled, so if you want to join, this will be the only way and the best choice for you.’ the older man said as if counselling a child from doing something dumb.
‘I never said that I wanted to join,’ Lan said, getting a look from the man as if he hadn’t considered that an option.
‘But I thought you said you accepted my apology?’ the man asked.
‘I did, but I never said I would join you,’ Lan answered, finding that man had just assumed to rankle a little.
‘I see I was a little hasty. My party, Grey Sun, is one of the Guild’s highest-ranking. You can do worse or not much better when it comes to parties. If there is no bad blood and you are still looking, then I would seriously consider my offer.’
Lan thought about it, or more so, what to say and looked up.
‘I did say there was no bad blood, and I meant it. I understand that I made a poor impression on a lot of you. Based on that, I can understand why many of you acted the way you did towards me,’ Lan said as the little chatter in the Hall died to his carrying voice. ‘With that being said, and even if you were one of the more courteous… you all left your impressions on me,’ Lan finished, making his stance clear. He wasn’t here to be looked down on nor treated as a tool to be used.
He was an adventurer.
They would see him as an equal, or he wouldn’t either.
Despite being the indirect target of his declaration, the older man smiled.
‘I heard you have been staying at “that” inn. I guess it is the right place for you.’ He said as he walked off, patting Lan on the shoulder as he passed.
After a moment, Lan started towards the desk, and as he looked around, he knew they had all gotten his message. The hopeful looks had turned to disappointment and resentment if not anger. But those were shadowed by the looks of approval that dotted the room. He recognised most of them from the inn but not all. Despite making more enemies than friends, it looked like some people were starting to warm up to him.
One person he didn’t need to worry about that with was Mari, who smiled at him.
‘Morning Lan. You are up early,’ she said as he stopped at the desk.
‘You make it sound like I am gaining a reputation for being lazy,’ Lan smiled back, and for a moment, it looked like Mari would take his joke to heart,
‘Oh no, I didn’t mean… oh, you were joking right?’ she blushed as Lan smiled sympathetically.
‘Yeah, I just thought it was about time I got back out there.’
‘Oh! That reminds me. With all the excitement when you were last in, I forgot to issue you your Reward.’
‘Right… about that.’ Lan blinked. It seemed odd to have forgotten what should have been the main reason to have gone out there, but it almost seemed like an afterthought now.
‘Well, a lot did happen that day,’ Mari sighed before smiling, producing a Keystone. ‘Please touch your tag to the Keystone.’
Obliging, Lan removed his Tag and touched it to the stone.
[Adventurers Guild quest: Silk flower collection - Altered].
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
[New Adventurers Guild quest: Silk flower high-priority collection – Due to the current shortage of the magic plant, a high-priority job has been opened for any flowers found.]
[Adventurers Guild quest: Silk flower high priority collection – Complete.]
[Reward: 3 Silver Talons, 1 Silver Piece, 75 coppers. EXP – 3810]
[Goblin Standing Order: Thirty Goblins, three Goblin Knights and One Goblin Titan slain]
[Reward – 7 Silver Talons.]
[Exp 1265=> 5075/ 6000]
Although the experience was great, Lan focused on the coin for the Silk flowers. Twenty-five copper for each when the first job had been one copper for every two. Being an adventurer’s job, Lan was eased a little because the new reward was boosted as an incentive, but it still told a dark tale about how bad the shortage had gotten.
At this point, Lan could only guess that only the best foragers were finding a good deal of them, at least inside of the range of the stolen Tear of Creation, whatever that was.
‘Lan?’ Mari tried.
‘Huh? Oh! Sorry, I was lost in thought. Also, I was wondering if the Silk flowers job was still open?’ If Lan needed any more incentive to go out, this was it.
‘It is,’ Mari nodded. ‘Although it has been raised to an E rank job, you must be a… oh!’ Mari blinked as she looked down at whatever was behind the desk. ‘It looks like the goblins and Silk flowers you brought back were enough.’ she beamed at him.
‘Enough,’ Lan repeated, ‘Enough for what?’
Instead of answering, Mari looked down at Lan’s Tag still on the Keystone as it slowly, from the point it touched the stone, started to burn up the dull grey metal, leaving polished copper in its place.
[Congratulations: You have reached the Adventurer’s Rank of Copper.]
Despite everything else, Lan stood looking at his once grey Tag.
Although he still wasn’t sure how he had ranked up. It was only now that he saw it. Drill… a metal not even worth using for nails and worth less as currency. Maybe it was a sign of what a Drill Rank adventurer was worth, or maybe it was something more poetic: a sign of finding use in something that others didn’t or couldn’t understand. Lan liked that one, but whatever it was, this was a sign that he was becoming something more useful or something with more potential.
‘I thought I needed to finish an evaluation before I could rank up?’ Lan asked.
‘That would be the case,’ Mari smiled. ‘But it looks like completing two E-ranked jobs, even if you didn’t know they were at the time, has been enough.’
At this, Lan laughed. It must have been that obvious if even Mari could joke about it.
‘Right,’ Lan said as both laughed.
With his right still holding his Tag, Lan fixed his hair with his left, bringing his shield arm into view.
‘You were wearing that the other day. I have never seen anything like it,’ Mari said, and as a receptionist of an Adventurer’s Guild, Lan believed her.
‘It’s… a bit of an experiment,’ Lan said, flexing his arm and activating the shield with a solid clunk that hadn’t changed from the first time he had done so despite all it had been through, ‘and I am the test subject.’ He finished letting the shield blades slide back into place.
Jumping at the activation, Mari gave Lan a sympathetic smile, ‘It’s definitely something I have never seen before.’
‘Yeah, me either,’ someone said from behind Lan, a voice that seemed to get under his skin long before he turned to see the scarecrow of a man with fetid water for hair and wearing a breastplate made of blood-red glass and a smile that one would give a dear friend.
With him was the large half-orc that Lan had to look up to even though he was a few feet behind the first man, and along with them was a person Lan hadn’t noticed before or hadn’t been present earlier.
The woman had golden skin like Sora and Vasha, if not a little darker than his friends. From her fingertips to her bare shoulders were rings of tattooed symbols that weren’t runes or Runica that he knew, and half of her hair was shaved and had been braided with beads through it. Aside from that, what stood out most about her was her smile. It was almost like she knew a dark secret about you and would only not share it if you made it worth her while.
Lan took the other two in for only a moment before his attention returned to the man who seemed to draw out his anger.
‘That really is an interesting-looking bit of gear. Looks handy. Say, why not let me have a closer look,’ the man said, reaching for Lan’s arm without waiting for an answer.
Before the man could touch him, a thought that made Lan want to be sick, he stepped back, his face fixing into a frown.
‘Don’t,’ Lan said coldly, the word stopping short of being a warning.
Much as their first meeting had left a bad taste in Lan’s mouth, and he didn’t understand why the man seemed to piss him off, not to mention the man’s forwardness. Lan didn’t want to start a fight in the middle of the Guild Hall, especially one he knew he wouldn’t win.
‘Come now, I only want to get a better look. You can allow that, right? And who knows, I might want… one for myself. Surely you wouldn’t deny a real adventurer something that could save their lives, would you?’ the man said, and although Lan caught the slight, he was too busy trying not to laugh at the idea that the man thought of himself as a real adventurer.
‘A real adventurer, yes,’ Lan stated. He didn’t know why, but the man just bothered him. However, that wasn’t wholly true anymore. After meeting the man again, Lan had an idea. Every time he looked at the man, it was like looking at Ganin and Lan in no way thought it was an unfair assumption.
Whatever the man’s game with the fake smile had been, it fell away as Lan stared at him.
‘There you go with that look again,’ The man said, the smile turning to a snarl. ‘I didn’t think you were stupid enough to make that face without Locke to hide behind,’ the man stepped just a foot away from Lan, his eyes burning wild with an anger that had to be deeper than Lan’s look alone.
Lan saw this, and even without his blood starting to heat, he shifted his sight without care for whether the man or the others knew what he was doing.
As the world took on a golden light and the three burst into flames, Lan scanned them.
Although the other two noticed the change, the first man didn’t seem to as he glared at Lan.
Lan couldn’t be sure, but from the look of the rest of the man’s gear, which reminded him of Locke’s, the man could be a strider, and if that was true and the man had followed a similar path correction as Locke, then Lan guessed by the size of his health that he was a few levels lower than Locke. How much he didn’t know and seeing as a level or two over him would be enough to end him didn’t change much.
With the same logic, the Half-orc was weaker than Drevin, and the woman was around the same level as Vasha or Sora, depending on which she was.
‘I hate that look. Like you think you are better than me or something. I was only going to take that armour.’ the man said as if speaking at not only Lan but everyone else who had looked down on him as he stepped closer to Lan. ‘Now I am going to kill you. It won’t be now, but I will let you know before it comes just so you can regret this moment before you die,’ The man hissed with a light in his eyes as if he was picturing it.
Lan knew he should be careful. He knew he shouldn’t provoke the man, but he didn’t care either.
‘Thank you for the warning,’ Lan said in a cool whisper. ‘In return, I will give you one back. If you are going to do something, it's best to do it while you still can.’
Although that man could kill Lan now, he couldn’t in the city where it could be tied to him, and he only could while Lan was weaker than him. Something Lan wasn’t going to let be the case forever.
For a moment, it looked like the man would just attack him, but as Lan readied to answer, Mari spoke.
‘Fighting amongst members of this Guild is frowned upon. As you can expect, any more drastic actions will not be tolerated and will be dealt with.’ Mari said in a tone that was all business and brook no compromise. ‘Unless you wish for me to get the Guild Master involved, I suggest you depart on your next guild job, Kane.’
After a moment long staring hatefully at Lan, the man, Kane, smiled and shrugged. ‘I was only trying to be friendly with a new friend.’ He said, although Mari’s expression of upset didn’t change.
Shrugging, Kane leaned into Lan’s ear. ‘There are plenty of ways to kill under the Guild's nose. But I will show you that later,’ he said before turning and leaving.
As the three left, Lan noticed that most of the Guild had been watching them, but more than half watched the three with looks that he would have thought were for him.
‘Sorry about that.’ Lan turned, taking his thumb off the rune on the shield arm, which would have used its stored power in one attack.
‘Stay away from him, Lan.’ Mari said sombrely. Although sadder, it was the same way Locke and the others acted.
‘What happened?’ Lan asked.
‘That armour…’ she started, and Lan knew the one she meant. The red armour that didn’t fit in with the rest of the man, the one that Sora had mentioned. ‘It used to belong to a young man named Zerin.’ She said, the thought bringing on a smile. ‘Zerin managed to keep the image of adventurers most of us had as children into his late teens. He believed Adventurers were meant to be heroes and acted like it, taking jobs that would save the most lives,’ Mari laughed.
‘He would spend hours standing at the boards trying to decide before leaving with an “I’ll be back”, and he always was because he was braver and stronger than a copper should be.’
Despite knowing it would come, Lan almost asked what happened next as Mari paused.
‘As I said, Zerin wanted Adventurers to be heroes, and to do his part, he asked for his father's blood glass armour. “So everyone, good and evil, would see him coming from a mile away. So that the evil knew that justice was coming and the good would know not to worry.”’ Mari paused again. The smile the happy memory had brought fading as it was replaced with bitter anger.
‘One day, Kane and his party asked Zerin to help them. Five days later, they returned with Kane wearing the chest plate and Zerin nowhere to be seen,’ Mari said, coldly detached as if reading a poster. ‘Even though the rest of the armour was found on Zerin’s body and returned to his family, the chest piece had been unbonded by him before dying, and Kane’s Tag showed no signs of Kane directly having a hand in Zerin’s death, and he says that Zerin gave him the chest plate. So there was nothing to be done in the eyes of the law.’
Mari looked up at Lan, ‘Everyone knows Kane did something to Zerin, and every day, he walks in here with that armour polished to a shine as if taunting the rest of us. As I said, we don’t know what he did, although there are many theories, but speaking not as guild representative, I don’t think he won't do it again. so promise me that you will stay away from him.’ Mari’s worried look brought Lan back to himself, only to hear creaking from his gloves between his balled fists.
‘Lan?’
‘Sorry,’ he tried to smile. ‘Don’t worry, I have no plans of going near that man,’ he said, even though he knew it was the man who would be coming after him. Lan hadn’t needed a reason to hate the man, but now…even if it hadn’t come from someone that he believed had no reason to lie to him, the story fit too well and once again brought on images of Ganin.
Lan didn’t know if Adventurers were meant to be heroes, but he knew what they were not meant to be, and he knew that that man Kane was dangerous and evil. Dangerous because of what they were capable of and evil because they would enjoy doing it, and he knew that the man’s words were not just that.
No, Lan wouldn’t go after him as promised, but he would be ready when the time came.
[First configuration complete]
[Attributes.]
[Strength: 15 > 14]
|Body: 15 > 11
|Mind: 15 > 10
|Dexterity: 15 > 25
|Perception: 15 > 20
[Charisma: 15 > 10]