Jack, son of Milo, ran into his father’s work room with sweat dripping down his young face.

“Dad! Joshua fell into a hole. Come quick!”

Milo dropped what he was knitting and shot to his feet, the chair scraping against the floor as it slid back.

“Lead the way!” Milo exclaimed as he followed his son out his workshop and into the paddocked front yard.

Even at fifty-three, Milo was up and kicking. Despite the nine years he spent as a [Slave], he was now a Level 38 [Senior Tailor] that could knit together stunning pieces and tailor them to fit anyone.

After a few minutes, Jack led him over to an open field sandwiched between adjacent farmlands. A massive crowd had gathered around a wide hole, gawking and chattering amongst themselves. Basically everyone in the village was here.

When Milo arrived, everyone looked at him expectantly.

Milo felt a deep sense of pride and satisfaction on the inside.

He wasn’t a stuttering wreck anymore. And he wasn’t just a confident talker.

He was a leader.

“Everybody, please move back from the hole. The surrounding earth could continue to give out,” Milo warned as he gestured with his hands.

Hearing this, everyone took several paces back.

Standing a few paces away from the hole with his hands on his waist was a tanned, muscular man.

“Tanzi, where’s the child?”

Milo asked, his voice strong and deep.

Tanzi frowned and didn’t reply. He simply gestured to the hole.

Milo expected the worst. He crouched over the edge of the dirt hole in a low squat and saw something that caused a tingle to run up the back of his neck.

At the bottom of the hole was a small child with an expressionless face, a river of blood silently leaking out the back of their head. And beneath this child’s head was a thick slab of hard, blue, glistening stone.

All of Milo’s thoughts ceased as he laid his eyes upon this scene.

The child would have died upon impact.

Standing over the child were two men with torches. Milo knew these men. Fathers and hard workers alike. But as he made eye contact with the men down below, they exchanged not a word.

Milo sighed and stood up.

He subsequently took charge of the situation, his orders sounding dull and pained in their tone.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

This event was sure to affect Kirkstead for the next while.

They lowered down a rope, dropped down a bag, and had the corpse stuffed inside. One of the men strapped the bag to his back and the pair climbed up. They dropped the bag beneath the tree.

Everyone was shocked when they saw them emerge from below.

Both men were covered in dust from head to toe and one of them—had drops of blood on their back and shoulders. If it were any time other than now, everyone would have laughed in unison. But it was not one of those times. Quite the opposite.

As the bloodied one of the pair left to wash off, Tanzi and Milo asked him what he saw down below.

“It looked like a library to me…I can’t believe it.” The man exclaimed. He drew long gasps of air in between sentences as he dabbed a towel across a face that wouldn’t stop dripping in sweat. “How long do you think it’s been down there for?”

Milo and Tanzi looked to each other at the same time.

Just as the two were about to investigate further, the shrill cry of an old woman ripped across the area.

“No! My child…” A hunchbacked woman with thinning white hair that looked more like damp seaweed, untied the stuffed bag that contained the dead child.

Milo bit his tongue and grimaced.

Joshua’s auntie lived on the other side of the village from where the incident occurred. To the village that had been rebuilt around Milo’s side of the village, it would’ve been about an hour there and back. Milo had been preparing to deliver the news to her in a more gentle manner. But he didn’t expect her to get here this fast. It had only been half an hour.

Why hadn’t anyone warned him she was coming?

Loud enough for anyone to hear, Milo felt a sinking feeling in his stomach as mutters from the crowd reach his ear.

“Did you guys see her? She just appeared out of thin air!”

“Wait? Am I seeing right?”

"Where did she come from?”

Milo pursed his lips, his mind straining in difficulty as he tried to determine what to do in this situation.

Dealing with her was difficult since the day she and her nephew got here.

When they first met and Lady Freya bought the initial plot of land, he could only get three words out before the gaunt old lady declared that no one was to disturb her and her nephew. Otherwise, they were to “meet the might of her staff”. Curious as he was about her identity, and why the hell she had her tiny nephew muling around an entire fricking bookshelf on his back, he didn’t prod her any further than what was necessary.

What was she—a witch? If so, it would be the worst thing that had happened to him since the sleepless years he spent waking up in the middle of the night to the sound of his crying children.

Magic wasn’t rare. But it was common enough for people to not bat an eye when they witnessed it being cast. Now that Milo was potentially dealing with someone that could blast a hole in his stomach with a simple ‘abracadabra’, he was hesitant to step forward and explain everything.

Five years ago, Milo embarked upon his seasonal trip to Greenlodge. Just down the street from Bill’s Tailoring Emporium, Milo witnessed a homeless man single handedly kill three men with a fireball—and escape. No one had caught him. News of this event had spread everywhere and this made Milo very wary of magic-based classes. If someone was a warrior, you would know they were going to use their weapon.

With a mage, they could literally do anything. You could blink and you’d find an icicle shooting into you from behind.

Situations like these where the outcomes were uncertain made Milo nervous.

Milo approached the tree under which the boy’s auntie was weeping over his corpse.

“Lady Freya, I…”

Milo’s words went right back down his throat as the old lady turned around and stared into his soul with teary wide eyes. They sucked him in and he completely froze. The entire world closed in on him and he couldn’t breathe. As the air was sucked out of him, it felt like his eyeballs were going to explode in their sockets. No matter how hard he tried to move, his muscles were locked tighter than the rusted metal hatch that led into his house’s cellar.

After some of the longest moments of his life, Freya finally let him go of whatever magic she had put him under.

Milo fell to his knees gasping for air. He could barely keep himself upright. Maybe if he wasn’t a [Senior Tailor] with all his free attribute points dumped into dexterity and agility, he wouldn’t be struggling so much at this current moment.

“You best be glad that this incident was nobody’s fault,” Freya spat between gritted teeth.

Milo’s took a few moments to regain his strength, but once he did, his face hardened.

He did not take threats lightly.

The leader of Kirkstead was someone who would never back down. And he was that leader.

Besides, the whole village was here. And Milo represented the entire village.

Standing tall and with his shoulders back, Milo explained eloquently, “I sympathise with your loss, but I hope that you can understand that by the time help arrived, Joshau was already dead. It is simply a tragedy that no one could’ve expected.”

He resisted the urge to bite back at her. But he had learned that lesson plenty of times the hard way back as a stock broker. He had lost a lot of customers on a blitz of cocaine-induced rage. One time, he had even stood on the office’s front desk and…

It’s best that he didn’t remember that day.

He felt strange that he hadn’t a single urge to have it in this life. Regardless, he would never be able to acquire anything like it in this world, so there was no point in thinking about it.

But he often found himself overthinking about the drug. Just…silently reminiscing the past with a strange feeling churning in his stomach.

Auntie Freya’s sagging cheeks jiggled as she shook her head at him, “I…I’m taking my boy with me. And—”

She screamed for everyone to hear.

“I’m leaving this place forever!”

Milo covered his ears as he winced in pain. What was in the old lady’s voice for god’s sake?

With no one stopping her, Auntie Freya picked up her nephew’s dead body and—as she did earlier—disappeared into thin air.

Milo could feel the beginnings of a headache. A powerful magician was mad at everyone. A boy was dead. And…

Milo peered into the hole in the ground.

Something was in there.