“I cannot believe you pulled that off,” Aria said flatly while holding out a massive glass jar she’d pulled out of seemingly nowhere.

“I told you I could,” Velik said, though in truth having to find that particular organ blindly had been a chore. He’d pulled out… he wasn’t even really sure what organs they were, but half a dozen of them were settling into the muck around the corpse before he’d finally gotten the right one, evidenced only by the system notification informing him he’d slain a level 42 swamp wraith hydra. How exactly that differed from a normal hydra was unclear, but he figured it meant something.

He placed the heart in the jar gently. Aria sealed it up and considered it for a moment, then nodded to herself when the whole thing vanished. “That’s a big one. I know an alchemist that’ll pay at least three thousand decarmas for that. I can broker the sale for you if you want, for a thirty percent commission.”

“If it’s that valuable, it seems like I should just hold onto it until I can sell it myself,” Velik said.

“You don’t strike me as the type to know the market. I doubt you’ve got anything close to my connections. I bet you’d still make more money if I sold it for you at the price I could get than if you try to sell it yourself,” Aria argued.

“Maybe if your commission was fifteen percent.”

The woman’s eyes narrowed and she snapped out, “Twenty-five.”

“I’d be willing to go as high as eighteen,” Velik shot back.

It wasn’t even that he needed the money. It was just that Aria had annoyed him and he didn’t feel like letting her have it for free. In truth, he hadn’t realized the hearts were valuable at all. He probably would have thrown it back into the swamp if she hadn’t produced the jar like she was expecting it. At first, he’d thought she just wanted proof of the kill until she’d mentioned selling it.

“Twenty,” Aria said. Velik opened his mouth to argue, but she beat him to it and added, “Twenty, and I’ll use my magic to get us both back to Eldmyrk right now.”

That wasn’t hard to agree to. He’d been in the swamp for the better part of twelve hours and while he was sure he could find his way back out on his own, he wasn’t really in the mood. “Deal,” he said.

“Excellent choice. Uh, don’t tell anyone at the guild. Technically, getting back is part of the exam. Making a deal with someone who isn’t your evaluator to transport you is one thing, but me using my magic to help is a gray area.”

Velik laughed. “I’ll keep it to myself.”

He didn’t give a rat’s ass about the guild’s rules. Truthfully, he’d had about all he could stand of the place, and the only reason he hadn’t already walked out was that he’d wasted the better part of four months getting to where he was now. He knew there was information about rare and unique classes—and dungeons, too—in their archives. Torwin had promised to fetch that information for Velik, but then the old [Ranger] had gotten himself sent out on some sort of punishment job before Velik had even shown up.

Aria pulled on some skill and a patch of starry night sky unfolded in front of her. “After you,” she said, gesturing him through the hole in reality. Bemused, Velik stepped through and found himself in a room with a ratty old bed tucked into the corner and nothing else. He could hear other people nearby, snoozing the night hours away.

That’s a nice skill. Why did we ride out here in a carriage if she could just do that?

“I need a bath,” Aria said as she followed Velik through her skill and let it fold closed behind her. Wrinkling her nose, she added, “You need one worse. I am not sitting in a carriage with that for a day and a half. Come on, let’s get cleaned up, then we can discuss your performance.”

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Wondering what exactly there was to discuss, Velik followed his evaluator out into the hallway and down to the common room, where she obtained directions to the bathhouse with assurances that they weren’t just “using dirty swamp water to fill their tubs.” She gave the innkeeper, who she’d dragged out of the kitchen where he’d been preparing the morning’s bread, a somewhat suspicious look at his attempts to reassure her, but conceded that they didn’t have a better option.

His questions about how exactly they’d gotten so filthy to begin with were brushed aside as she swept out into the streets, Velik in tow. They found the bathhouse quickly enough, which included a laundering service. The water was clean, which was all Velik wanted, but he could hear Aria complaining incessantly from the next room over that it wasn’t warm enough while the sleepy attendant murmured apologies.

By the time he was done scrubbing himself, the water was a murky brown. Fortunately, the attendants had thought ahead and provided him with a bucket of clean water to sluice himself off with and a coarse robe to wear while he waited for his clothes to be returned. He’d kept an ear on the washer lady, mostly because she was handling tens of thousands of decarmas worth of gear. Everything except the cloak would clean itself eventually, but it didn’t hurt to speed things up.

“Strangest thing,” the washer lady said when he reclaimed his gear. “The grime just seemed to fall right out of it. It’s barely even damp after I wrung it all out, too. Well, except for this…”

She handed him the Ravensfeather Cloak with its thick cowl and feathery stitched pattern, as clean as it could get but still sodden and dripping. The cloak lacked [Mending], a sacrifice he’d made in order to get a hefty boost to his mystic so that he could afford to use its other enchantments: [Shadow Step] and [Air Walk].

“Thank you,” he said, leaving a small stack of silver vitrunes behind as payment for dragging her out of her bed at such an early hour.

Freshly cleaned and in mostly dry clothes, he waited for Aria to catch up to him. Unlike his own efforts, she took considerably longer to finish up, so much so that if he couldn’t hear her still complaining inside, he might have thought she’d abandoned him while he was tending to his own business. Eventually, she did reappear, her face and hair scrubbed clean of all traces of the swamp and wearing a completely different outfit that he’d never seen before.

It's got to be some sort of extradimensional storage space, he decided. Torwin had mentioned them to Velik once, but lamented the price tag attached to the enchantments. When he’d looked them up for himself and saw prices in excess of two hundred thousand decarmas for what amounted to essentially an extra travel pack’s space, he’d decided his money was better spent elsewhere.

Given what he’d seen of Aria’s storage capacity so far, he was starting to wonder just how rich the woman was and what other surprises she might have in store for him. He’d never met anyone with class skills like hers before, at least not that he was aware of. No doubt he’d bumped into a few mage types in the guild hall, but they hadn’t stopped to explain their builds to him.

Even among the iron-ranks, mages were rare. Their skills were supposed to require a lot of planning and were finicky to merge, leaving a reckless mage stuck with no versatility to make up for all the points they’d spent on mystic and mind. Without a strong physical to back them up, it was hard to survive the rigors of combat. Would be monster-hunting mages who weren’t cautious or lucky didn’t tend to live long enough to make it to gold-ranked.

[Apex Hunter] didn’t have Aria pegged as someone who was all that stronger than him, but looks could be deceiving. In a slugging match, he’d probably win, but something told him Aria wouldn’t ever let him get close. If it came down to it, his best strategy would probably be to disappear and then ambush her before she could find him again.

“Alright, now that we only reek of the normal stink of this pisswater town,” Aria began, “let’s talk about how you did and what I’ll be reporting back to the guild. Then, the second the sun goes up, we’ll let whoever’s in charge know that the job is done, then climb in the carriage and be gone from this place.”

Velik didn’t think it was as bad as she made it out to be, but he certainly wouldn’t argue with putting some distance between his nose and the swamp. Just because he’d gotten used to the smell didn’t mean he was enjoying it. There was nothing to be done about that for the moment, however, so he focused his attention on the other part of her statement.

“What’s there to say? I went out. I found the hydra. I killed the hydra. It took less than a day to take care of.”

“And that certainly counts for a lot,” Aria said. “But it’s not all you’re being graded on. Relax. You passed. At least, that’s what I’ll report back. I’m sure they’ll argue over the finer points and people like Pevril will try to use it as an excuse to deny your advancement, but as far as I’m concerned, you did the job. That having been said, there were a few things that could have gone better. Let’s start with walking into a swamp and staying there all night…”