Chapter Forty-Two - The Inspector

Cornelius had been with the administrative wing of the Adventurer’s guild for... about seven years? An administrator ought to know how long he’d been administrating, but the years sometimes blurred by.

It was simple, honest work. He was responsible for tabulating results, ensuring that the quality of returned materials was consistent, and occasionally he oversaw training and some guild chapterhouses.

The guild was large enough that it needed regular inspections in order to keep things nice and neat. Otherwise, some members might try to abuse the system, or clients could start making demands that didn’t conform to guild regulations.

The guild was, in the end, an interesting place to work, with strange people doing their best to help the citizenry against monsters and alchemical creations and even humble bandits. There were heroes in the guild, members that rose up and became legends in their own right through great deeds and accomplishments, and when Cornelius could help some of those heroes, he felt like a little bit of a hero himself.

Recently, a little team out in the boonies past Five Peaks had been making a name for themselves. Three adventurer’s guild members and one extra non-member assistant. Nothing too unusual there, except that the team were doing really well.

Too well.

They’d taken out entire bandit forts, wiped a colony of rabid sword-swans, captured a bandit lord and protected a little town from an entire force of goblin savages.

If they were older, more experienced, then maybe it wouldn’t have risen as many suspicions. But the team was made up for a pair of rejects from Five Peak’s academy, and an older adventurer who had never made a name for himself and only took odd low-risk jobs.

Something didn’t add up.

So he met the team in Treescore as they were preparing for another mission. This one might well have been their most dangerous. A clutch of wyverns had settled into the mountains to the north-west of the town and were beginning to threaten the cattle and citizens of the little town.

Wyverns weren’t a joke.

Cornelius wasn’t unfamiliar with a difficult mission or two. Before joining the administration team, he had five good years of adventuring guild work under his belt. He made a point of staying in shape, and had had a few adventures with teams on inspection runs to keep sharp.

Which is to say, he knew what went into preparing for the kind of work they did.

The team he met was anything but prepared.

Two of the members, both young women from Five Peaks, had the kind of gear he expected to see on adventurers that never tackled anything rougher than a goblin. The third member, the older more experienced adventurer, had good armour and a good sword by his hip, but it was all the kind of gear that either the exceptionally talented and rich, or foolish and rich carried.

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Swords didn’t need filigree on their blades to work well.

The fourth and final member of the little group bothered him the most.

She was a child, maybe in her early teens. Cornelius made a point of avoiding children. They were loud and annoying and irrational. This one seened no different.

“So, how many of them are there?” the girl--the others called her Girl, which he imagined was a nickname of some sort--asked.

“There’re supposed to be a clutch of them,” Feli Simmers said. She grinned down at Girl as she hoisted her pack back on. The team was carrying a lot of food. More than they needed by far, but perhaps they had a trick in store.

If Cornilius had to kill over a dozen young wyvern, he would certainly try poisoning some meat to kill them without getting close.

Perhaps the team wasn’t as unprepared as he thought. Their success had to come from somewhere. There was no faking the multitude of reports they’d been receiving from the team’s activities.

For the moment, Cornilius decided to assume that the team was under equipped because they decided not to fight the enemy head-on, which was wise in this case, and being light on their feet would serve them better than having too much gear. The child was likely something like a team pet. That had happened often enough. Precocious orphans joining teams on adventures for a little while.

They reached the edge of the mountains to the north of Treescore and found a trail leading up the edge of the rocky terrain.

By mid-day, Cornelius was beginning to suspect that something was wrong with the child.

Did all children eat that much? For that matter, why did she not have boots on?

Also, why were the members of the team praising her for every little thing and occasionally pausing to... pat her head? It was bizarre.

“Alright,” Jean guy, the team’s nominal leader, said as they reached a sort of plateau on the side of the mountain. He cupped his hands over his eyes and searched the surroundings for a moment. “The villagers said the wyverns were around here.”

“Is it those birds?” the girl asked while pointing.

Cornelius followed her pointing finger to a flock above. “No, those are pigeons,” he said.

“Oh. Is it those birds?”

This time, she was pointing to what was very clearly an entire roost of wyverns resting next to a cavern on the mountainside. They were hard to make out against the rocks around them, their grey scales blending in with the stones around them.

“That’s them,” Feli said. “Think we should get closer, or do you want to... you know, do your thing from here?”

What thing, Cornelius wondered.

“Yeah, I can grab them from here. I can’t eat all of them, right?”

“Leave the heads,” Guy said.

“Pardon, but what exactly is the plan here?” Cornelius asked.

And then the sky above them ripped apart and from the screaming void came an uncountable number of fleshy tendrils.

The wyverns screamed.

Cornelius screamed too.

***