They arrived outside the town around mid-afternoon. Its walls were just a wooden stockade, but the gate had been built out of stone, just big enough to let a wagon pass under it.
It was a sizeable town with over a hundred buildings. A carriage had passed them on the way there, and there were roving bands of adventurers chasing after slimes in the fields around the town. The market would probably be lively at this hour.
Approaching the gate, there were two sentries stationed atop. There wasn’t anyone to meet them down below.
“Hail!” the female guard shouted. “State your business!”
“They are unusually on-guard,” Jyn remarked, before replying to the guard. “We come from Fort Stave! We are looking for a Temple to Maximine!”
“What for!” the guard shouted back. Her companion brandished a crossbow.
Jyn turned to Kalender. He couldn’t just say “A goddess told me to!” They’d look at him crazy. Probably.
“Hey, to be sure, is it normal to receive messages from a goddess around here?”
“No,” Jyn replied. Oh well. He’d have to make up something.
“Uhh—Inquisition said so!” he shouted such dangerous words. Even the guard was taken aback.
“Do you have proof!” the guard shouted down.
Kalender took out a small, gold plate with engravings on it, and raised it up. “This proof enough?” he asked.
“Stay still!” the guard ordered. She whispered a few things, probably a spell, probably something along the lines of {What the heck’s that}.
After a few moments, the gate opened. They went through, and that same guard was waiting for them.
“I-inquisitors, how can we assist you?” she asked.
“Huh.” “There seems to be a misunderstanding.”
Kalender just managed to make a sound before Jyn took the initiative to explain that they weren’t agents of the Inquisition per se, but they were still advised to go to this town in particular to visit the temple.
“A-ah,” the guard stammered. “Still, that is a mark of trust by the Inquisition. Please, let me assist you somehow.”
“Well, we really just need to see a Temple to Maximine,” Kalender explained.
“I do not know of a Temple to Maximine, in particular, but there is an out-road leading to a row of temples and altars further west.”
The guard also told them about a few resthouses if they needed to stay the night. The pair thanked her and followed the wall westwards until they reached another, smaller, wooden gate. There were the makings of fortifications and fighting positions there, wooden they may be, but there were all of four guards playing cards and another two standing sentry over the gate.
The gate itself wasn’t impressively-sized, but it’d definitely fit a horse-mounted knight through it. It opened, and a group of novice adventurers came in. They wore secondhand armors and padded cloths, and wielded chipped blades and clubs. One of them had a bandage wrapped around her arm.
Kalender and Jyn looked at each other. The adventurers had come from the direction of their destination.
Jyn walked up to them. “Excuse me, did you come from the direction of the temples?”
The adventurers looked at her, then to each other. “You all go ahead, I’ll entertain her,” one said. The rest nodded and trodded along.
“Are you going out to the temples?” the adventurer asked.
“We are. Did it become dangerous there?”
“Yeah. Just recently, too. A bunch of low-leveled undead.”
“Undead? All the way here? Why haven’t the knights been dispatched?”
“The thing is, there aren’t a lot of them, and they’re all low level, so a bunch of kids with sticks could handle one. The knights definitely know, but I guess the undead are too weak. They just issued a general notice.”
Strange, but doable. “Do you know anything about the wall guards? The ones at the southern gate seemed tense.”
“… Ah,” the adventurer scratched her head, “Let’s see—some of the undead are Unalive, so the guards ask a bunch of questions to throw them off and figure ’em out.”
“What?” Unalive could only be created by necromancers. “The knights are ignoring that?”
“Oh, the knights are definitely looking into it. The Unalive are low-level, too, though, so no one’s really panicking.”
Jyn thanked her and came back to Kalender.
“What’s an Unalive?” It sounded pretty ridiculous to him, but it is what it is.
“They act as they were when they were alive,” Jyn replied. “Only a necromancer can create them. Depending on the necromancer’s abilities and intentions, the appearance and behavior of the Unalive can vary. At the highest levels, they are indistinguishable from the living.”
Jyn started off towards the gate.
“Huh? Hey, wait!” Kalender went after her. She stopped and turned to him, asking him, “Why?”
“We’re going now? Are you sure? Do you remember my level?”
Kalender’s voice, face, and posture were pleading. Jyn was stumped. She’d grown too complacent in Kalender’s abnormal capabilities with magic that she’d completely forgotten he was still as green as grass—a mere Level 1 mage, for all intents and purposes. He’d even have difficulty killing a slime like this.
“Some days of basic training should be in order… Alright. Let’s look for a resthouse in the meantime.”
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They asked the nearest guard about any decent resthouses, and he pointed them to a major road that led to the Adventurers Guild. “There should be a bunch around that area,” she said. They thanked her and went that way.
Though it was a “major road,” this was still just a small town. Three people shoulder-to-shoulder would just barely fit through the remaining space, the rest taken up by carts and stalls on the left and right. At the least, the harvest in the area looked plentiful, as workers excused their way through the road, balancing crates of flour and fruit on their shoulders.
As they went down the road, the number of armed and armored people, mingled with the townsfolk, increased.
“That one should be the Guild.” Jyn pointed at a three-story building, built out of cut stone like a small fort. Adventurers went in and out—sometimes walking, sometimes flying out the door, followed by an angry receptionist in full battle dress. The Guild itself was in the corner of a plaza-like space, an intersection of several larger roads, one of which was a main road that could fit a marching column with no problem.
There were a lot of resthouses in sight, just standing in front of the Guild. “Let’s go around and ask about pricing—meet back here?” Kalender suggested. Jyn nodded, and they split off.
They settled with a resthouse right beside the Guild, called Windchimes. It would cost them 15 Notes a night—which was expensive, but the other options were fully-booked. The ground floor was an eatery, and the kitchen counter was also the reception.
“Do you have a room with two beds?” Kalender asked. The owner smiled and nodded, poring through a logbook.
“I’m sorry, it looks like we only have one room left. There’s only one bed.”
What was I expecting? “That’s fine. 15 Notes also gets us breakfast and dinner, right?”
"Yes, though the serving sizes in this town are small for active adventurers, so keep in mind that you might need to order extra on your busier days.
“We also have free self-service laundry and a hot water connection.” The owner pointed along and past the counter. “The laundry service is down the hall just past here, leading out behind the building.”
The owner squinted at the logbook. “Ah! As an apology, we will be making it 12 Notes a night for this particular room. It’s quite noisy until late at night, since it’s actually directly up against the Guild next door. You know how late they work.”
The owner showed them to their room on the second floor. Not only was it up against the Guild, but it was also facing the street—not one, but two sources of noise.
On the other hand, it had a bed, a wardrobe, a table, and a wooden bathtub in the side opposite the bed. The owner showed them the portable privacy screen, which unfolded like an accordion. They were essentially thin rectangular wooden frames with silk stretched over them.
After they thanked the owner, she left, leaving the two alone.
“This is quite expensive…” Jyn complained. “The other resthouses go for 8 Notes a night.”
“Don’t worry about it too much. It’s not like we’re staying here for a month.”
“I suppose…” Jyn sighed. “Let’s train at the earliest. The Adventurers Guild sponsors a training area of high quality, but we must pay 20 Notes per hour. The Knight HQ here is likely to open its training field to the public for free, but it will be crowded, we might not even get our turn.”
At her thrifty insistence, they went to the Knight HQ.
They left the resthouse and followed the main road to the town’s actual plaza. Jyn had expected the Knight HQ to be there, but it was just the town guards’ barracks and the lord’s mansion.
Inquiring with a passing sentry, they finally found the HQ not far from the plaza. It was a three-story rook-like stone structure, maybe 10 meters in diameter—not too large, but this place was an administrative center more than a military one, most likely. Not all HQs operated the same, after all.
Right beside it was a huge field where grass never grew, the busied shouts and heaves of adventurers fighting against their seniors and other knights overpowering the haggling going on in the nearby market street.
There weren’t any fences, and people were just going in and out wherever and however the pleased, so they entered the field. People crowded around one-on-one training sessions, some of which seemed more like a senior hazing their junior before she could be inducted into an adventuring party.
There were 16 such practice stations spaced evenly in a rough grid throughout the field. People milled about, looking for ones which didn’t have as many people as the others. A pair of knights did the rounds, but other than that, the adventurers mostly sorted themselves out.
“You’ve been in there for too long!” “Fine, fine!”
One particular station had an adventurer facing off against a knight, who was wielding a pole tipped with a blue ball. The knight raked the pole across the floor and “bounced” the ball up to hit the adventurer, who did her best to parry and cut at the ball.
“Anti-slime training,” Jyn explained. “The knight should have a Polearm Proficiency skill that helps her perfectly simulate how slimes move.”
“Cool.” Kalender nodded.
They went around the stations, looking for one with a queue that didn’t look like it would take all afternoon to deplete.
“There.” Jyn pointed to an empty spot. It was strange that no one was using it.
As they approached it, they heard a voice.
“Wait! That’s instructors-only!”
They turned around in time to see a woman in a tunic and trousers come to a stop, holding a hand up, and panting for a few moments.
She looked up. She had a pair of glasses and green hair. Why green? She had a complicated ancestry. “I’m the quartermaster here—and that place is instructors only! Unless one of you’re one?”
“Instructor?” Jyn thought for a moment. “Do you mean a Certified Knight Instructor?”
“Oh? Any combat proficiency instruction certificate will do. Can you show it to me?”
" ‘Show’? Don’t you have a confirmation stone?" Jyn asked.
“Ah, that’s the old one. Give me a moment.” The quartermaster gave Jyn a rock. She put a smidgen of MP into it, and it glowed blue.
“Great!” the quartermaster continued. “Now, do you have a permit?”
“A permit? Forgive me, it’s been some years since I was issued my certificate and I haven’t used it in its capacity for a while. I didn’t know the procedure had changed.”
The quartermaster sighed. “Fine, fine. It’s not like anyone’s used this area for the past year. Still, you’re a Knight? I don’t think I’ve seen your face around here.”
“We just arrived in town a while ago. My name is Jyn.”
“I see. Mine’s Lens.” They shook hands. “And this—man? That’s rare…”
“Rare?” Kalender blurted. “Ah, sorry, name’s Kalender. I did notice that there aren’t any men around here, though.”
“Yeah.” Lens chuckled. “Why didn’t you join the Knights, anyway? All the men go there—better pay for you there than any other place with the same danger.”
“T-there’s a bunch of complicated stuff, I’d rather you don’t ask about it,” Kalender replied.
“Ah, sorry, sorry.”
“Actually, wait, did you say men get paid better than women in the Knights?”
“Yeah? Wait, did you become an adventurer without knowing that—actually, y’know what, I won’t ask.”
Jyn leaned in to Kalender to whisper, “The kingdom likes to incentivize all the stupid, danger-prone men to leash themselves to a controlled, military environment where they can’t do any lasting damage to anyone other than themselves.”
Lens noted the air of enlightenment emanating from Kalender’s face. Whatever Jyn said, it made total sense to him. Big boys liked big playgrounds and all.
Jyn and Kalender thanked Lens after she showed them all the equipment and magic tools available for instructors’ use. There was even a special defense barrier to let an instructor and student go all-out against each other without killing anyone, but for today, she just wanted to let Kalender experience swinging around a wooden sword with actual mass. Her lessons back in the Carmine Test were all just empty air, after all.
Kalender got the hang of it surprisingly quickly, so Jyn went straight to banning him from using Interpersonal Bubble and attacking him, making him dodge, parry, and whatever else he needed to do to not get bruised.
She went easy on him to keep him focused on the fundamentals, but not so easy that he could get away without using his lessons.
The first lesson she beat into him this time was to move his feet more. Raising his arms and throwing them around could only get him so far. In actuality, there was a second, hidden lesson: how to read your opponent.
Ordinarily, Kalender’s Interpersonal Bubble would make that easy for him, but it was an all-around good idea anyway to keep him from depending on it. After being exposed to Kalender’s any-chant talent, Jyn easily imagined encountering an enemy that could somehow seal their skills—a bullshit situation that she would rather they be prepared for than not.
“T-time out.”
“It hasn’t even been 15 minutes.”
“My body’s fine, but my brain’s not catching up!”
The practice of the sword involved both mind and body. Good luck, Kalender.