As the Zi left the town, I breathed a sigh of relief and thought to myself

“We won.”

The Yad had held his part of the bargain, he spread the word that the Zi were the ones to burn the town. There had been some calls to point to my matchmaking business as the problem, but the Yad was quick to make sure that all of the blame lay solely on the Zi. Though I would need to do something about that in the near future.

It was slightly anticlimactic, as they were given no chance to fight back. However, I couldn’t risk them finding out more about the smuggling ring.

Still even if they had been forced out of the village, this wasn’t the end. I had a feeling that they would eventually return, but at least I had maybe a year until they would return. This would give me enough time to make a plan to make sure that no Zi would ever come back to this town.

Qaton and I returned back to the Zi to discuss what would happen to the Zi.

Even days after their departure from the village, its inhabitants still had a burning dislike for them. No one wanted to buy or sell anything from them, even their landlord had kicked them out in their mistrust of them.

This meeting with the Yad was to figure out how to extend their absence for as long as possible. During said meeting, we told the Yad to spread the news that the Zi had burned down those buildings in their investigation because they believed that the owners were connected with illegal activities. The Yad also mentioned that he would communicate with the king to tell the Zi government to pause the investigation for a while, so they can fix the behavior of their task force.

The Zi that they sent would deny this obviously, but there wasn’t any evidence connecting the smuggling group or myself to the crime while they had the weight of the Yad’s word against them. So, I had nothing to worry about on that front.

With our business with the Yad finished, Qaton and I went back to the compound. Qaton and Darat had some things that they needed to discuss, since they hadn’t talked since Darat had given Qaton his ultimatum.

We found Darat working as if nothing else was wrong, but I could tell that he was conflicted. On the one hand, he should have felt relieved that the Zi were gone and weren’t able to threaten the smuggling ring any longer. But on the other hand, his revenge was stolen from him and he wasn’t able to avenge Halel.

Darat made the first move, he asked Qaton what had happened. Qaton responded by explaining the whole plan to Darat, from our meeting with the Yad to their departure at the hands of the townspeople. When the plan was explained to him, he seemed slightly impressed. But that feeling was nothing compared to how apologetic he looked for his rash behavior.

As they made up with one another, I thought it would be a good idea to take a walk around the village.

I wouldn’t want to pry into their relationship anymore than I already did.

As I passed by the various burned buildings, I noticed how crestfallen their owners seemed to be. What they had lost in the fires could never be brought back, whether it was a merchant’s stock of goods or a vendor’s storefront.

I reminded myself that while I was directly responsible for their misfortune, I couldn’t let feelings of guilt consume me. A milder course of action wouldn’t generate the same response and would fail to generate the ill will needed to make the Zi leave.

“Right?”

I still wasn’t sure of my decision, I had to ponder more deeply on it.

After I grew tired of walking, I retreated back to the base. The meeting with the rest of the group would happen in a few more hours, so I passed the time by resuming my clerical work and refilling my supply of matches. When the time had finally come for the conference, Qaton beckoned me to join him in the meeting room.

As Qaton explained what we had done to the rest of the smuggling ring, I received more and more curious looks for my part in the Zi’s expulsion. His success seemed to have united the group in stark contrast to the previous meeting’s chaos. So while he seemed to have almost all of the group’s members on his side, Ishata and her supporters’ dislike for me was apparent all throughout Qaton’s speech.

Due to the recent events, Qaton was able to finally make a resolution in regards to my status in the group. While I wasn’t a full member yet, I was allowed to keep my post as the group’s steward. In addition, I was also allowed to continue my matchmaking business and was to use it to spread the group’s reach to other towns.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Now that the matter of my status was resolved, another matter was also called into attention. Apparently, some of the Alham trade was being disrupted by an unknown party. There were whispers of another gang trying to get some Alham for themselves. While the veracity of these claims were still unknown, it could spiral into a bigger threat if it was not taken care of quickly. This is the reason why some of the group’s members were sent to various locations around Spania— to investigate the source of these disturbances in the Alham trade.

After the decision to investigate had been made, the meeting came to a close. I still had something I needed to discuss with Qaton alone. I called him into the warehouse and made sure that there was no one around.

I wanted to ask for his opinion on whether I did the right thing. At that moment I had all kinds of justifications and excuses for why my action was necessary but the feeling of guilt I had from the destructive nature of the plan would not dissipate unless I confided in someone else.

I asked Qaton very plainly, “My actions were just?”

This lacking kind of speech was typical of how I spoke to Qaton, so while it made it harder to communicate with others, he always managed to glean the meaning beneath my words.

“No choice, no other option,” he responded.

While he purposely spoke simply in order to communicate with me properly, his feelings were still clearly expressed. The fact that Qaton also thought that my plan was the only option seemed to have eased my worries.

With that issue settled, I was able to continue my regular routine in peace. I went to bed that night feeling satisfied with how the events of the past few days had turned out. While I was drifting off to sleep, I remembered something that I forgot about in the chaos of recent events.

I forgot to look over those documents that I stole from the Zi.

Before the fire in my testing facility broke out, I was investigating the base of the Zi. In that building, I happened upon some important-looking documents which I promptly stole. They still were on my desk at the storage room. Despite my urge to sleep, my curiosity got the better of me, so I got up from bed and made my way outside to the warehouse.

The documents were right where I had placed them a few days ago, so I took them and inspected their contents thoroughly. In contrast to the papyrus sheets that the smuggling ring used, I held five pieces of animal-skin parchment in my hands.

I tried to decipher their contents but my pitiful grasp of this world’s language left me unable to do so. I was however able to tell that the first of the five pages was some sort of official order sent by an authority figure. The rest of the pages seemed enigmatic in their purpose, although they must have had some vital significance, otherwise they would not have been in the Zi’s possession.

Putting it off for another time, I went back to sleep and continued my regular routine the next day. While I hoped that the next few months would be peaceful enough to let me expand my business without disturbances, I knew that this probably wouldn’t be the case.

Although, I was sure that no matter what challenge would come my way, I would be ready.

Zi

A month later…

“We’re running out of supplies, we might not make it to the next village at this rate.” my comrade warned.

“We’ll see a caravan eventually, so stop complaining and get back to steering the wagon.” I ordered, my voice raised.

With a defeated sigh, my subordinate resumed leading the cart on the dirt path. The rest of our group looked weakened by the heat, with the faint hope of a traveling merchant being the only thing keeping them from going insane.

Why were we in this predicament, you ask?

It was those scheming rats from the town of Murgi that did this to us.

We were tasked by our king to investigate some Alham which seemed to be going missing on some trade routes. Apparently, our kingdom had gained permission to inspect this affair and sent us, elite soldiers from one of the kingdom’s special Alham-coated regiment, to rectify this issue.

After many months, we had finally tracked down the source of the disruptions to the northern coast of Spania. More specifically, a town which went by the name of Murgi. It was a rather quaint settlement, with only around two thousand residents living within its borders. The fact that it was a small village made them more suspicious of outsiders, which made its inhabitants quite hostile towards us.

From the way the trade seemed to be diverted, it seemed like it was the responsibility of a smuggling ring which dealt with Alham rather than a single individual. Despite this, while investigating the town we happened upon a young man that seemed to be associated with the disturbances we were trying to look into.

This happened when after we had heard a tip about mysterious men who came late at night with crates, we came to look into this info for ourselves. The merchants who had come to deliver the shipment, had unfortunately escaped. However, we managed to question one of the couriers and they told us the residence of one of their main contacts, a man who went by the name of Halel.

We were certain that he had ties to the group we were investigating, so we examined his home and then eventually took him captive to extract information from him using his own language. He eventually escaped, and we had to kill him to make sure that his knowledge about how much we knew didn’t spread to the smuggling ring.

After that, we happened upon a person which would continue to vex us all throughout our inspection. He was a young man, no older than around sixteen or seventeen whose features looked vastly dissimilar from the townspeople. If I were to guess where he would be from, he probably was from the Far North. We first found him stealing some coin from one of the townspeople, and in an attempt to make ourselves seem more trustworthy to the village people, we took chase.

When we eventually had him cornered, we suddenly found ourselves waking up with the boy nowhere in sight. To add insult to injury, rumors spread that we had murdered one of the townspeople and we were forced to wait until the heat had dissipated until we were able to investigate again.

There was no way that the boy and the Alham smuggling ring weren't linked. The town of Murgi was a normal, rural town that you could find anyway. One oddity is a feature, two is a pattern. So when we had heard about a meeting which involved a new “match” business in addition to other established merchants, we knew it had to be either related to the boy or the Alham ring.

When we were observing their meeting late at night, one of our men had seen a glimpse of the same foreigner and we could finally connect the business with the boy. The next day, we had heard rumors of a boy with the same description frequenting a certain property that we had searched previously. At this point, we were definitely sure that the youth was our main lead on the group we have been looking for.

So to scare them and to cause panic within their ranks, we set fire to the house that the boy had been using with the same matches that he sold. Hopefully, by doing this, we would be able to finally find where they were located in their moment of weakness. But instead, they used that moment of chaos as an opportunity to cause more fear and panic by setting random buildings ablaze then blaming it on us.

With the village’s hate for us at an all-time high, we were forced out of our residence by our landlord and were denied the chance to buy any supplies from the angry merchants. So we were forced to leave the village, and base somewhere else temporarily.

The final straw was when our government had ordered us to return back across the sea to receive punishment for the actions that we had been falsely accused of. We had no choice but to give up on the smugglers for now, since they forced our hand. We didn’t even get a chance to fight back, for those deceptive rats had made sure that it was a one-sided battle.

So after we departed from the town of Murgi, we made a promise to ourselves. We would come back to that wretched town, and when we did, the boy and the smuggling ring would pay for their crimes towards us.