Although I received quite a few dark looks as I recovered Carmine and we made our way out, there was one person in particular that caught my eye. It was none other than Bernard, the undefeated champion. He had a downright hateful glare leveled in my direction, and for the life of me, I didn’t know what I had done to cause him any grief.

I wrapped my arm around Carmine and hastily pulled her out of the arena. I had no interest in seeing any more of the gladiator matches. Actually, after seeing how the last one went, I already had a feeling we needed to work on strengthening Carmine up. I’d never even assigned her a second job. Now that I knew her Paladin was completely defense-oriented I desired to get her an offensive job leveled up in time for the next battle.

I ended up getting a bit more attention than I would have liked, plus Carmine had revealed her appearance which she had carefully concealed up until this point. Thankfully, Lord Reign wasn’t there, and even if he was, he had no reason to recognize Carmine, so it was probably fine.

The group of us returned to the house, and as soon as I entered, Raissa was there with her wagging tail. Wait, was she waiting at the door for us to come home? She was sitting in front of the door in a kneeling position when we walked in! Ahem, anyway, it was as good a time as any to start preparing for our next fight.

“Master… while you were out, I collected this.” Raissa rolled out a map.

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I realized it was a Traveler’s Guild map. It had merchant paths and various other notes that were useful for anyone traveling to and from the city of Alerith. If we were normal Bandits, it would have been extremely useful. However, I didn’t want to destroy the lives of normal people. Rather, I was looking more toward dismantling the nobility’s sources of wealth.

Even though the map only had minimal use, Raissa’s wagging tail suggested she needed a head pat. I made sure she got one, and she closed her eyes and grinned happily. This was the future mother of my child. I didn’t know how I felt about that.

“Hey, boss…” Drake spoke up. “If you want to hit them hard all at once, then you’ll want to strike tonight.”

Drake had previously not been part of the conversation, but he happened to overhear us as he came down to get a drink.

“Why’s that?”

“Ah… tonight is when the gambling guild does their money exchange. They send out the gold and then get back coppers and silver. The exchange isn’t done in the city but at a hidden location outside.”

‘How do you know this?”

“Ah…” he blushed, “I’ve been betting on the events. Got to pass the time somehow. I heard that they exchange every fourteen days. Since boss keeps giving us a gold piece instead of 10 silver, I’d come and have them break to 100 coppers every day for a week, and found that they weren’t able to break it the day before, and were the day after.”

“You just randomly did that, huh?”

“Th-that… I mean… it used to be my business, yeah? They always say the man who knows where the money moves has all the cards. Or something like that.”

“Then, where are they meeting outside of town.”

“That… is a closely guarded secret.” His face lowered slightly, but then he glanced up again. “However, I know someone who will be there!”