It finally came time for Tithe to leave the city behind him. Passing through the main gates he was still amazed at the generosity of the king with the gift he was given sitting snugly upon his back.

A backpack covered in arcane runes that allowed it to hold a space within that held far more inventory space than previously expected. This made his job substantially easier given he could now store things such as his cauldron and alchemy supplies within the pack instead of needing to carry them outside of it.

Another bonus of the pack being that the runes also offset the weight of what he was carrying so there was an extra spring to his step that would allow him to move much faster on the trail. Around his neck hung the amulet that he was gifted that resembled the coin from the castle though this one seemed to be made from real materials rather than an imitation.

“Whenever you are finished with a village, simply give us a report using the amulet. If anything needs direct attention we will deal with it.” He remembered the council member explaining when the tools were being presented.

He had his bow within the pack, a quiver with twenty arrows, a camping kit, a provisions pack that contained medical supplies and alchemy ingredients along with a few healing potions and a water skin. The rest he planned to scavenge along the way or procure within the towns he passed through.

He did however keep a short sword on his waist just in case of an emergency. Standard in both design and quality it was a tool he only planned to use if he was forced to. On the other side of his belt he had a skinning knife which he planned to use much more often on his travels.

Making it to the front gates and showing his documents and the amulet the guards examined them before he was ushered through with a brief “Best of luck out there, alchemist.”

“Thanks!” He called back before he rushed out the large gates where he was met with open fields that led to the forestry that surrounded the kingdom. A welcome return to nature given there was very little time to leave the city during their studies.

He took a deep breath of fresh crisp air and simply admired the view for a few moments before he heard a bell behind him and a “Get out of the way!” that caused him to snap back to reality and quickly hop to the right off the main path.

“Damned kids…” An older elf said as he sat on the front of the carriage that passed him, continuing to grumble about today's youth as his horse pulled him towards the southern forest.

After that brief and certainly productive interaction, Tithe pulled the bag off of his back to take out a map and examine where he wanted to go. He could have followed the southern path the elf was on towards the small town of Orin which was where his first task resided. If he kept going south after that he could hit a few more towns before making it to the border to Inis.

“Remember. Do not cross the border under any circumstances. If you are in enemy territory there is little we can do to help you,” echoed through his mind. A part of him still unsure if they truly cared about his safety in that sense or if they were more worried about the political justification Inis would have in retaliating against a state sanctioned alchemist of an enemy meddling in their affairs.

Again, it meant little to him so he closed the map and stuffed it into his backpack before he was on his way again.

Even though the war had just ended the paths had become somewhat more treacherous. With all the traffic coming to the capital bandits had started setting up traps to try and steal from those coming and going.

He had been warned by the council members to keep an eye out for such threats and avoid them any chance he could. Of course that would have been his plan from the start but using what little coin he had left to buy a sword was also a good idea.

At this rate it would take a few days to reach the next town so he at first decided to collect some ingredients for his travels. There were plenty of herbs and mushrooms in the surrounding forests that he could use to make simple fertiliser potions.

If he was to help calm the lands of decaying soil it would make sense to brew as many as he could so the process would be faster than regular dung. Thinking he could perhaps brew a large cauldron tonight he got to work.

With a pack full of leaves, mushrooms, and other tidbits of the earth Tithe continued his journey by returning to the main road. It seemed something was happening as he could hear yelling in the distance and the sounds of a fight had broken out.

It was closer to the main road where he spotted a group of bandits harassing a merchant's carriage. The guards that had been hired lay slaughtered upon the dirt path with arrows or knives embedded into their backs.

“Cowards…” Tithe muttered as he crouched behind a tree and dropped his backpack so he could grab his bow from within. Knocking an arrow he took a moment to analyse the situation. Four bandits and a leader. The four wore padded tunics while the leader had a leather chest piece and helmet. The leader and three of the thugs were human while the fourth was a dwarf which made things slightly more complicated given they were sturdy.

Preparing his arrow he solidified his plan. He had to be quick given all four of them were surrounding the carriage with what he hoped was a living merchant hiding inside.

One of the men looked quite a bit faster than the others and his dual daggers let him know he was most likely confident in his speed while another had a straight sword and the leader had a staff so a mage. The dwarf had a crossbow which threw a wrench in how he would like to deal with this.

When he saw the fire bomb produced from the leader's pocket he knew he had to act quickly if he wanted to save any potential survivors.

“No more than animals…” He muttered, conflicted as he aimed and soon he had pieced together how he was going to deal with all four of them. His father had taught him as a young man how to make a single shot count.

Pulling back the string until it was lightly touching his nose and lips he used his dominant eye to look down the arrow and align it with the target's throat, this was to kill in one shot. Holding the string in place he took a deep breath and relaxed his posture, and in turn his grip on the string.

The sound of an arrow flying alerted the leader of the bandits at least who turned his head to Tithe's direction… Moments before the steel headed arrow punctured his throat. Sputtering with blood spilling rapidly, he pierced major blood vessels in the neck.

Now it was do or die as the group were alerted to his presence. The quickest of the group shouting “Who the fuck did that!?” As he drew his daggers and raced in the direction the arrow came from while the other tried to help their leader to no avail. The dwarf on the other hand was the problem as he had already prepared a bolt and kept his vision fixed in Tithe’s direction.

That was a problem for after he dealt with the rogue. Crouching down he placed the bow back into his bag and readied his short sword. When he could hear the vague threats of “I’m going to gut you!” inch closer he held the hilt with two hands, just waiting for the opportunity to strike.

Hearing the twigs snap on the ground next to the tree he was next to. Based on the man's height he made an educated guess as he turned and thrusted the short sword forward as he turned.

The man had little time to react as the blade punctured his chest as soon as the twig snapped beneath his feet. “I missed the heart!” was the first panicked thought as he watched the man stare in utter shock at what had just happened.

It seemed he refused to die without getting a shot in as he thrusted his own dagger forward in an attempt to take Tithe with him. Tithe needed to think quickly and using his right arm he forced the attack aside, causing it to miss his chest but causing the dagger to leave a large open wound with the dagger making easy work of his tunic.

The man tried to make some form of comment but he was already suffering from pneumothorax. Pulling his blade back caused a large hole to be placed within the man's lungs and any time he tried to breathe even more pressure was placed onto the lung until he could no longer do so and he collapsed to the dirt, left bleeding out and sputtering in an attempt to breathe.

Tithe quickly had to duck back behind the tree as a bolt flew past him when the bandit fell. Crouching he grabbed a healing potion from his backpack and was quick to down its contents so he could speed up the natural recovery of the wound he had just received. It would begin to close over the wound itself but it didn’t remove the numbing sensation that he felt spreading through his arm.

“A poison!?” He thought, alarmed. A thought that was cut short by the sound of running towards him along with the sound of footsteps running away from him. He had no idea where the dwarf had repositioned in his haste to recover but he could tell the third human was coming at him from the right side of the tree. He doubted the same trick would work again so he rushed off to the next tree nearby in hopes to at least confuse the dwarf long enough to deal with his accomplice.

“Get back here!” The man shouted as he had drawn his own sword. In a one to one combat situation Tithe felt he would be able to hold his own with the training he had gotten from his father but the problem was that he had a crossbow aimed at him from the shadows.

Pulling his sword up into a defensive stance he turned to face the man and blocked his first blow that was aimed for his throat, moving the blade upwards in order to throw him off guard. He wasn’t expecting him to recover so quickly which caused him to take another blow to the shoulder that cut into him as he too hastily tried to counter attack.

He pulled away with a yell of pain, bleeding profusely from the wound which began to slowly heal itself from the remaining effects of the potion he had just consumed. He couldn’t afford to take many more blows with the limited supplies he had.

This time he watched the man's stance and when he attempted to make an attack once more Tithe quickly backed away and ran further into the forest. “He’s running!” The bandit called out to his colleague, giving chase.

Tithe stopped once more, feeling he had made enough distance to make taking a shot difficult. His heart was beating heavily and his breathing hoarse. It hadn’t been since he made his trek to the city to study alchemy that he had to deal with bandits, or combat in general for that matter but he had no choice now.

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He couldn’t just swing wildly, he needed a plan as his original went tits up after he took the wound. His right arm was still quite numb and it was beginning to spread. This wasn’t good. He didn’t have enough time to make an antidote in the middle of combat and he wasn’t sure if he even had the right ingredients to cure this kind of poison yet.

He tried his best to calm his breathing but once again he was struggling to do so which let the man easily track where he was “Not so smart when you’re fighting up close, are you?” The man jeered.

Given the man's eagerness to insult, he had to be put in a state of confidence now. Tithe would use that to his advantage as he swiftly turned around the tree to stab the blade of his sword downwards.

He ducked the initial swing of the bandit and thrusted the blade into his foot, pinning him to the ground as a loud yell of pain filled the forest. Not even a moment later Tithe saw the man's balled up fist barreling towards his face.

It was a direct hit that caused him to stumble backwards and ready himself against a tree. Shuddering he took a look as the man had dropped his own weapon but with a grunt pulled Tithe’s sword out of his foot. “I am going to make this very slow, and very painful.” He said through gritted teeth.

There was very little time to think given that a bolt was also being aimed directly at him. In thinking as fast as he could he opened up the bag that the king had granted him and held it up towards the bolt. The sound of a loud clang filled the forest as Tithe breathed a sigh of relief. It seemed to have hit the inside of the cauldron given the loud noise but Tithe was not happy with needing to take such a gamble.

That was the end of the relief as he threw the bag at the man in front of him which would cause everything from within to spread out over him “What in the bloody hells!?” He screamed. In the confusion caused by his ingredients and belongings spilling over the man he grabbed the bandits sword from the dirt and rushed to stab it into the bandits gut. He didn’t end it there, he pushed hard and moved forward to run the blade through him before dragging it through to the right which caused him to collapse and a veritable sum of organs to spill out to the moss coated roots.

Though this was a battle to the death even Tithe felt this was a bit cruel so he grabbed the blade and with one more stab through the heart ended the man's suffering. All that was left now was the dwarf who if he was lucky would have fled the scene when his comrades fell.

He pressed his back to the nearest tree and listened for any movement but it seemed either he was laying in wait, or had fled.

He rushed to the next tree closer to the carriage and peeked around but given the quietness of the world around him he was getting increasingly anxious. The numbness in his right arm had grown to the point he could hardly move his fingers and it was only creeping further with every moment.

That was when he spotted him. The dwarf was waiting nearby with his aims set upon the carriage. Ready to ambush Tithe when he would check on the victims. While he may have been in the perfect position for a shot into his back he wasn’t able to aim with his bow with only one arm.

At that, there was only one plan left, to take him by surprise and use the confusion to get in a fatal blow.

He watched him for a moment and once again fell back upon his fathers teachings. “If you want to get close to your mark you need to use the sounds of the forest to your advantage.” He got low to the ground and quietly made his way towards the dwarf from behind whose focus was entirely dead set on the cart with his aim. He needed to take a long birth around him so that there was less chance of him being see in in the dwarfs peripheral vision. Taking two steps walking would be far too easy for the dwarf to recognise so he moved at first in quick bursts, mimicking the movement of a deer. Making sure to only move when the bird's chirping was at its loudest until he was close enough to get to the ground and crawl the last stretch towards the prone dwarf.

When he got close enough to the dwarf he stood to his full height and raised the sword he picked up from the bandit into the air. This was far less of a calculated thrust into a vital artery like the others. By now, Tithe was tired and weakened, this strike was brutal in nature as he slammed the blade downward, slicing directly into the dwarves thick skull, embedding the blade within.

“And stay down…!” He said to no one in particular, kicking at the limp corpse and taking a hold of the blade to pull it from his skull, stabbing the man repeatedly to ensure that he stayed dead. Stumbling towards the carriage he called out to hopefully a living victim inside “They’re gone!” holding his numbed arm, doing his best to calculate his next move.

It was a sorry sight, the bandits had slaughtered the mercenary they had hired to protect the cart. The back end of the cart opened when he announced they were gone to reveal a family within. “You dealt with them?” A balding man with a thick moustache asked, stepping out of the cart to examine the remnants of the battlefield.

“Yeah, they’re all done for.” Tithe responded weakly as he stumbled forward. Everything ached at this point even outside of the poison coursing through him. “One of them had a coated weapon, I need some medicine to stop the flow of a paralysis potion…” Given he had time to think now he could identify what type of poison it was.

The merchant's wife and young daughter left the cart not long after. The child was quickly ushered back inside given the bodies that littered the area. “Well that is the very least we can do to repay you.” The merchant said as he rummaged quickly through the back of his cart before he pulled out a bottle of a clear liquid “In the last town we visited we bought a few bottles of antidotes that work on any illness.”

Tithe looked at the bottle as it was uncorked and sniffed at it as he was offered it. Shaking his head he had to break the bad news to them “You were scammed.”

“What do you mean?” The merchant's wife asked concernedly, ushering Tithe closer so she could help him rest against the carriage.

“There is no such thing as a cure all. All poisons are different and require specific ingredients to counteract them. This is at best some water loaded up with a few nice smelling herbs sold in the hopes you would never run into someone who had been poisoned.” Tithe explained as he splashed a bit of the potion on his arm “This is essentially a perfume.”

The two seemed distraught at the idea but the merchant asked “How do you know?” In a last ditch attempt to save the idea of his investment.

“I’m a state trained alchemist.” He explained briefly.

That was enough to let them know that the money they had spent was just gone. That was a problem for another time given he was in grave danger. “I don’t think we have anything to deal with paralysis.” He responded sadly.

Tithe leaned his head back against their cart. Holding his numb arm he took some time to think about what to do. “At least let me ease the pain.” The merchant said as he rummaged through the cart before pulling out a healing potion. A real one this time given the colour and consistency of it. “To think bandits would attack on a road so close to the capital…” He said as he filled a spoon to feed the weakened Tithe the foul tasting liquid. Funny to think that one never noticed how poor they taste during battle.

With at least the spoonful of the potion coursing through him the discomfort was slightly eased. “The war has just ended, I am sure the bandits know that the guards and knights have been spread very thin with the rebuilding of the capital. With many merchants and nobles coming to offer gifts to the new king makes it a prime target for those who want to steal.”

“Is there anything we can do to help?” His wife asked, watching as he finished off the potion one spoonful at a time.

“Given we are this close to the capital…” He mumbled as the numbness began to spread up his neck “He most likely got a hold of a Pyl Frog. They evolved to paralyse any predator that tries to eat them. Using the oils from that he coated his weapon which would cause a paralysis effect. To counter it I would need a specific plant from the area.” He began to explain to the pair who had probably never foraged in their life so he needed to explain this carefully if he didn’t want to be left in a state of paralysis for what could last upwards of three days.

Taking a deep breath he sat down on the ground with his back leaning on the cart “It is a small plant usually found in a pile of nettles. It would be easy to mistake it for one of them but it has a distinct feature of looking like a tree leaf with spikes around the edges.”

As the two struggled to think of where they would find such a plant, their child quickly rushed out of the rear end of the cart “I’ll look for it!” The energetic girl called out before rushing into the nearby forest.

“Annabelle!” Her mother called with a frustrated sigh. From the interaction it seemed this wasn’t that uncommon and offered at least a light moment of comedy for the injured alchemist.

“I’ll be sure to pack up your things.” The merchant's wife mentioned as she headed out towards the bag that he spilled over the third bandit.

“Is it not irresponsible to carry your wife and child on such a dangerous journey as a merchant…?,” Tithe asked as they both spread out to help.

“Look, to be perfectly honest… It’s selfish, I know. I want to be with my family but I also need to make a living. Trading is my bread and butter and if I can take them with me it means we can all live and see the world together.” The merchant responded, spoon feeding him the last dose of the healing potion.

It at least eased the pain, but the sweat was overtaking his face. The numbness continued to spread even through the potion. The amount of healing potions he would need to overcome a paralysis like this would put a merchant like this into a long lifetime debt. What he needed was an antidote.

There continued to be yells from her mother to come back and to not head too far off the track given the dangers of the forest. She seemed a resourceful sort, only taking her about a half hour to run back holding a handful of spiked leaves of various plants.

“Do any of these count?” She asked, holding them up to his face. She seemed to have taken his description into account as her hands contained red splotches and slightly raised bumps from digging around in the nettles to find them.

“You didn’t have to hurt yourself looking for these.” He responded, a mixture of being impressed she went through with it and regret she hurt herself for him.

“Nawh, come on mister. You saved us so we gotta do the same,” she stated while once again shoving the leaves into his face.

Tithe couldn’t help but chuckle at the forwardness of the offer. “This one looks perfect.” He assured as he took a crisp leaf with sharpened edges from the centre of the pile. “If you hold onto the rest you can sell them as an alchemy ingredient.”

He was struggling to keep his consciousness. The family helped set up his cauldron but everything had begun to become blurred by this point and his speech slurred as his very mouth began to feel numb, feeling like he was chewing on his own tongue at times. In desperation before it spread too far he tried his best to disclose the information to the family of how to blend and prepare the potion. Even then his speech was most likely difficult to interpret.

“Come on, stay with us.” Echoed through his ears as if from a distance. He couldn’t help but collapse onto the floor as his vision of the world continued to blur until he couldn’t keep his eyes open.

That was until he awoke due to a sharp and bitter taste hitting his tongue, sharp enough that he could feel it through the numbness. It jolted him awake and when he sat up in shock he felt his face with his left hand.

Vision still blurry it was slowly coming back into focus and his cheek could feel the light slaps he gave it. His right arm also felt like the numbness was fading. “You guys really saved me,” he said, or tried to. In actuality it came out quite slurred given he couldn’t feel his tongue. As his vision returned he saw the family sitting around the cauldron looking exhausted. His face coated in what amount of the potion they tried to get into his mouth as he jolted up.

“No one ever said alchemy was this hard.” The merchant jeered. Wiping sweat from his brow with a small handkerchief he then stood and began to clean up the small travel cauldron before he placed it back into the travel sack. “One hell of a backpack you got here.” He added.

“Thanks, it makes travelling on foot a lot easier,” Tithe tried to respond. Though he felt the numbness fading it would still be a day or so before everything left his system.

“Where are you heading to?” The merchant asked once they were prepared.

“Making my way to Orin.” Tithe responded, this time at least able to sound legible.

“Well, we can give you a lift. We will pass close enough to there on our way home.” The man commanded with a hearty smile “It’s the least we can do after you saved our bacon.”

Looking down to the dead mercenary on the ground nearby he said “It’s a miracle you showed up when you did… What I get for cheaping out on a merc.”

“I had noticed he doesn’t have the seal of the guild. Is there a story to that?” Tithe asked, needing some help to get into the back of the cart. Leaning on the man's shoulder he slowly climbed inside and got a seat resting on the side next to the piles of wares.

“I’m an honest merchant.” He tried to assure Tithe at first before he added “But to get an official merc from the guild at this hectic time would have taken days of paperwork and then being put on a waiting list. We just don’t have that kind of time if we want to survive on our trade.”

“The war has taken its toll on all of us in different ways.” Tithe responded, sitting against some large containers beside the young Annabelle as they took off southbound.