I woke up on a pile of rotten cabbages, the smell permeating every inch of my body. Arvell wasn’t doing any better, having woken up on a pile of rotten apples. A sharp beam of light landed on my face, the sun’s rays glaringly hot on my skin. I rubbed the sleep away from my eyes and shook Arvell awake. We climbed out of the filth we used as a mattress and walked out of the alley. As we headed toward the Drunken Tiger, I noticed that the townsfolk were giving us a wide berth as they passed. They held their noses in repulsion. Suddenly, a ground-shattering thought struck me, forcing me to come to a stop.

“Arvell, how in the world does Sparks eat with her mask on all the time?” I asked, stupefied.

“With it off, obviously,” Arvell muttered, as if he’d met an idiot who didn’t know he was an idiot yet.

“Well, yeah, I know that. I mean, it’s quite a hassle to take it off and put it on repeatedly. Why take all the trouble? Her face must be scarred horribly for her to cover it.”

“Or, she could possess a beauty beyond any man’s dreams. And she covers it up to prevent any trouble brewing from the wrong kinds of people.”

“Ah, Arvell, I didn’t know you were such a hopeless romantic. Are you going to woo her and be the first to take her mask off?” I drawled, raising my eyebrows.

“Only if she joins my cult.”

We reached the Drunken Tiger and entered, still naked. The patrons shot disapproving glares, again. A fat matron greeted us in the dining hall and bowed toward us, even though the stench emanating from us shriveled some of the flowers on the tables.

“You must be our esteemed patron’s companions. She instructed me to meet with you and let you know to stay here until she gets back.”

I agreed. Arvell and I made ourselves at home in a quiet little corner, waiting for Sparks to come with the supplies. We waited. And waited. Soon, the sun began to set and many of the patrons had returned for the night. I began to have unpleasant thoughts. Had we been deceived? Had Sparks just took off, leaving us here to fend for ourselves? If that was the case, we wouldn’t survive a second night with the cats and dogs. A familiar figure made its way toward us, her iron mask giving off a silver glint. Wasn’t it golden before? I guessed the mask to be some kind of enchanted item with an extraordinary background. At least, it was extraordinary relative to the things you’d find in this backwaters region. She threw the bag at my feet and I was like a rabid dog on a squirrel as I rummaged through it. I expected Sparks to actually get me used rags for clothing, but was pleasantly surprised to see that she got me real clothes, albeit a little torn. In addition, I found a small wooden hunting bow.

“You only bought five arrows? Seriously?” I whined, taking out the measly projectiles.

“We are going to venture into a dungeon, not fight an army,” she retorted, tapping her boots with impatience.

“Still, you could have at least gotten twenty for efficiency’s sake. Wait, you're not broke, are you? Is that why you only bought five?” I asked, a sinking feeling coming from the pit of my stomach.

“Details don’t matter.”

Those three simple words tore my mind asunder. I thought she was rich from selling all those relics and that’s why I stuck to her like a leech. If she was as impoverished as me, why was I hanging out with her? More importantly, I sucked in a cold breath at the thought of how she could spend the vast amount of wealth we’d stolen in a matter of a single month. It was supposed to last at least a decade. The power of spending was strong in this one. Nonetheless, I knew Sparks would be quite adept at navigating the next dungeon we planned to visit. Hopefully, we could locate some treasures in the depths of that ruins quickly and I could scram promptly with my share of the items.

“We leave right now.”

“Okay, but have you arranged some horses for our journey?” I asked, standing up with Arvell.

“We can walk,” Sparks replied, refusing to directly look me in the eye.

“You are that poor?” I questioned with incredulity pasted on my face.

I shook my head in exasperation as Sparks led us out of the inn and we headed out of the perimeter of town--walking. Red Hollow was a rural establishment in what was called the Copper Tusk Mountains. Legend has it that a human immortal formed the mountains from the body of an primordial boar, hence where it got its name. The mountains curved upwards like tusks into the sky and during the afternoon, when the sun was at its zenith, the rocks glimmered with a light maroon color. At the precipice of the mountain range, a coniferous forest dotted the landscape, harboring wild beasts of all sizes. There was a relatively safe dirt trail that led out of the Copper Tusk mountains to the coniferous forest from Red Hollow, which was located within a valley in the mountain range. The moon’s reflected rays broke through the tree-tops by the time we entered the coniferous forest. We decided it best to not travel through the forest at dark and set up near a small clearing. Sparks found a comfortable spot near an oak tree and dropped the bags she carried, looking at me.

“Somebody needs to stand guard while the others rest,” Sparks voiced, tapping her boots on a low-lying branch.

“I’ll do it,” I readily affirmed, finding a bush to lay under. The reason I volunteered so eagerly was to calm my agitated nerves. Even though I’d been an opportunistic vagabond--also known as an adventurer--for most of my life, I couldn’t help but feel nervous before every new, certainly dangerous undertaking. It took me a long time to figure out that living one’s life on a knife’s edge never prepared them fully for the thought of dying a horribly miserable, painful death. As Sparks and Arvell settled in for the night, I tuned my ears to the sound of the night. The howls of distant wolves mixed in with the flapping of winged creatures. The occasional growl broke the quiet din of the blackness. All of this combined to provide me with a soothing drone, allowing my shoulders to relax and the tremors in my hands to mostly disappear. My eyelids grew heavy and I took a moment to blink, only to slip into a deep slumber.

I woke up to the rough texture of sand in my mouth. Forcing my bleary eyes open, I saw Sparks sitting awkwardly near me, uncomfortably close to my body. She was kicking dust into my mouth, which apparently lay slightly ajar in my sleep.

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“Stop that. What are you doing?” I spluttered, spitting the sand out of my mouth.

“I was trying to wake you up, you halfwit. While you kept ‘watch,’ some bandits ambushed us and now we’ve been captured,” Sparks furiously whispered, her hands tied behind her back. I surveyed the material bounding her hand and found it to be a type of Erlin vine. In the cities to the west, these vines were known as “The Poor Man’s Manacle.” As suggested by its namesake, bandits and thieves liked to use these vines in the substitute of ropes because it was ridiculously cheap and its relative strength barely passed. The more you stretched these vines or struggled against them, the tighter they’d bind.

“Where is Arvell?”

“When the bandits crept in at nearly dawn, Arvell was the first to wake and he took off screaming into the eastward direction,” Sparks replied, wriggling her arms to test for weaknesses in the vine. “Four of them went after Arvell while they left one bandit here to guard us.”

“Why didn’t they try to take your mask off?” I asked doubtfully. In Sparks’ current guise, she gave the appearance of a man and if the bandits knew who she really was, more trouble would come.

“One of them tried, but couldn’t take it off,” Sparks said, letting out a cold laugh. She met my eyes and flicked her head toward the direction behind me. “At least something good came out of your utter stupidity.”

I followed her gaze and my eyes brightened instantly, my mind whizzing into gear as it thought of a dozen insidious plots.

“Horses,” I murmured, scrunching up my eyes to see them clearly. It seemed the bandits brought horses with them, being better supplied than us. There were two, tens of feet away, that were tied to a wide ash tree, grazing on the few grasses sprouting out in the clearing. If we could steal them, we could be on our way to Sparks’ next raid dungeon without having to ever walk.

“Hold still. I’m going to chew through your Erlin vines,” I explained to Sparks.

“Chew through these bounds? What kind of animal are you?” Sparks asked, disgust seeping into her tone.

“The kind that’ll set us free.”

The trick with Erlin vines wasn’t to struggle against them, but to cut away at the individual fibers until it was weak enough to be broken free. I planned to use my teeth for the job. I scuttled behind Sparks furtively and looked at her bounds. She wore fine silk gloves, with glistening silver trims. It looked quite expensive, which further confused me. She wore such nice clothes, but couldn’t even afford a horse? Putting the thought to the back of my mind, I began to nibble through the fibers with my teeth. While I was hard at task, the bandit who stayed behind approached us.

“What is that fool doing behind you?” he snarled, extending his pointer finger toward Sparks.

“He is still incapacitated,” Sparks lied, her voice calm and steady.

“What? He wasn’t in that position before.”

“He rolls around in his sleep.”

Every suspicious accusation by the bandit was met with an iron wall of Spark’s specialty deadpan logic. However, the bandit didn’t take kindly to this and his expression turned unsightly. He pointed at Sparks and made a swift motion.

“Roll him where I can see him. I don’t like not knowing what he could be doing,” the bandit ordered, suspicious of the whole ordeal.

“Oh, sure. I’ll use my bound hands--which are behind my back, mind you--to move him, because clearly I can,” she drawled, sarcasm evident. Even though Sparks was masked, I could feel her rolling her eyes.

The bandit snapped at her impatiently before striding to the back, where I was chewing the vines. At the present, I stopped and pretended to be sleeping. He stood there uncertainly for a few moments before he knelt down, trying to pick me up and move me. Just as he picked me up, cradling me like a baby, Sparks struck like a vicious tigress. She, in a moment of awkward brilliance, used the Erlin binds as a garrote on the bandit who hefted me up. However, the scene looked strange since her hands were bound behind her and she was trying to strangle the bandit. The bandit dropped me and began to struggle against her, trying to relieve the pressure on his neck from the vines.

Falling on the ground, I rolled up and began raining down punches on the bandit. Being attacked from both sides, the bandit let out a final scream of anger before silenced by my knuckles. Afterwards, we freed ourselves and ran towards the horses, bridling them up and jumping on. Sparks wanted to escape and go to our next job immediately, but I refused, wanting to find Arvell first.

With an exasperated sigh, she gave in and we headed east, the direction Arvell fled. After travelling for a mile, we came to a river cutting through the forest. Now, this would be normal if not for the body gradually floating through the current. He wore the same grey robes as Arvell did.

“Arvell?” I called out to the body.

The body, on hearing my voice, began to convulse violently and struggle in the water before he, incredibly, grasped a protruding branch and pulled himself out. The body was Arvell and he wore a relieved look.

“Thank the moon that I found you. If I pretended to be dead any longer, I think I actually would have died,” he uttered in a heavy breath.

“What were you doing in the river?” Sparks asked.

Soon, Arvell explained how the bandits chased him to an embankment up a little north of here. Because he was old, the bandits intended to murder and loot him since the elderly could not be sold easily on the slave markets. He dashed to the river and jumped in, pretending to drown in the water. The bandits, too lazy to pursue him any further, left him for dead.

“Thankfully, the fact that I didn’t know how to swim helped in my pretending.”

“Get on my horse, Arvell. We need to finish up this dungeon job quickly. The sooner we get treasures, the sooner I can get away from you freaks,” I said, shaking my head.

“Well said,” Sparks nodded with approval.

Afterward, we travelled through the forest for a day before reaching its boundary. On the forest’s side, lush vegetation coiled around the wide trunks of coniferous trees. The other side had a severe lack of any life, namely white sands and dunes could be seen in the distance. This abrupt transition from a forest biome to the desert did not bode well in my mind.

“The dungeon is in a desert?”

“Perhaps,” Sparks replied.

We travelled across the sands for a couple hours in the hot sand, which was terrible for the horses, before standing at the base of a particularly huge dune. Leading the horses up on the precarious slope, we reached top. When I look down from the great height, my eyes almost popped out of its sockets. Below us, there was brick tower collapsed on the ground, the white sand almost burying it. However, that was not the cause of shock, but the massive army around the collapsed building. Rectangular formations of pikeman and swordsman in the blue and green colors of the Arnolid kingdom stood erect while large swaths of sand dunes were cleared for the encampment.

“This must be it,” Sparks remarked.

“Why are there troops here? And so many,” I said in irritation.

Perhaps, it would be better to leave. This large group would complicate matters, especially in terms of loot distribution.

“Let’s go find another dungeon. Dealing with them will prove be difficult,” I urged Sparks, turning the horse around.

“I don’t think we have much of a choice,” Sparks said, motioning toward the bottom of the dune. At the base, a cavalry unit of blue and green spotted us and began rushing towards us.

“Damn, I hate the army.”