“Why did you cover for me back there?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes you do,” she said. “The pocket watch. You gave her five whole silvers for it, plus the door.”
Pyre was silent for many seconds, then she sighed.
“To sate my own curiosity. Artifacts like that aren’t always good things. If it had a potent curse on it, I didn’t want it to be following us around.”
Akemi hummed. About as selfless as she expected. Which was to say, not at all.
Something Akemi could respect, obviously.
But pitching in for the door was another matter entirely.
“That doesn’t explain why you paid for the doorway I destroyed. Or breakfast this morning. ”
A light blush colored Pyre’s cheeks, the same color as her springy red hair.
“Just drop it, Akemi. I’m not letting your lack of funds get in the way of our mission. That’s all.”
Akemi grinned.
Plenty more pastries on her, then.
“Any more unnecessary errands you want to drag me on before we leave?”
Akemi grinned smugly.
What Pyre was blissfully unaware of was this: Akemi did not care about wasting her time.
Like, not at all. Such was the blessing of living without a conscience.
But luckily for her companion, she was out of opportunities for time-wasting.
“No. I’m done torturing you for now,” she said, and watched as Pyre’s face brightened considerably. “I was thinking we could take a loop around that piss-smelling fountain in the center of town and discuss how we take down Mr. Viscount, Accountant-style.”
Pyre hastily grabbed her sleeve, nearly making Akemi topple over.
“Be quiet. We can’t talk about that, not here,” she whispered harshly through clenched teeth. “We can’t have them hearing us.”
They were in a congested walkway, flocked by pedestrians and the occasional dark-robed figure on horseback. The men on horseback in particular seemed to set off alarms in Pyre’s head.
Akemi couldn’t have blamed her: the men were alarmingly tall, like sasquatches, and didn’t reveal a centimeter of skin, except at the ankle, which looked… blue, almost?
“Even if they wanted to listen, it’s loud as hell,” Akemi said, dropping to a whisper regardless. “This city’s got the soundscape of a heavy metal concert.”
Pyre sighed, and grabbed Akemi’s collar, bringing her as close as physically possible.
“The first thing you need to understand,” she whispered, her eyes still pinned to the men on horseback. “Is that you do not understand anything about this place.”
—
Under the impression that she was going to get more information, Akemi let Pyre drag her to a nearby tavern. It was a place called Deadly Good Beer, a name which was confirmed by the several unconscious bodies they stepped over on their way to the corner of the room.
If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
“Don’t say anything until we’re out of earshot.”
“Anything.”
“You are so annoying.”
Akemi grinned.
In the far back of the bar were three stalls, like the kind you might keep horses. They had curtains hanging above them, as a sort of adjustable modesty screen. Sitting outside each stall was a little man in heavy armor, a mirthling, whose arms were crossed defensively, trying and mostly failing to give off an aura of intimidation. The mirthlings seemed to be guarding whatever was going on inside of the stalls.
As they approached, Akemi got a good idea for exactly what that was.
“Oh, faster, faster, goddamnit! I thought you heroes were supposed to be good at this!”
As the errant bed-thumping continued, a laugh escaped Akemi, her eyebrows flying upwards as she looked towards Pyre. For what felt like the hundredth time since meeting the woman, she was utterly surprised.
“Jeez, you take all your accomplices here on the first mission?”
Pyre ignored her pointedly, approaching the third stall, which was vacant. She held out two silvers to the mirthling guarding the door. Being closer to it now, Akemi could see what lay inside of the stall—a bed, with terribly wrinkled sheets, and a mangled wooden dresser for clothes.
“Two silvers gets you ten minutes.”
“That’s all we’ll need,” Pyre said.
The mirthling grunted. “Aight. Happy snogging.”
Pyre scowled at the insinuation, but it didn’t stop her from tugging Akemi inside and whisking shut the curtain.
“Happy snogging,” Akemi repeated smugly.
“Don’t even think of coming near me.”
Akemi laughed, and flung open the dresser. She figured it was always worth checking for lost valuables. After all, the lustful tended to leave things behind.
Dust plumed her unpleasantly in the face.
Gross.
In its wake, she found an abundance of nothing.
Well, nothing except for a small collection of short, broken steel pipes sitting at the very bottom of the closet. They stuck out from the restaurant’s exposed plumbing like unwanted weeds from soil. It would be wrong to call them valuable by any means, but she felt the strange sensation that they could be combined into a very satisfying end product.
An unfamiliar sense of craftsmanship welled up inside her.
What the hell is this feeling? The most complex thing I’ve put together is a stool from IKEA.
Tutorial Tip! You’ve encountered a crafting material for one of your Craftable skills.
Ah, right. The Spike Trap.
“Are you even listening to me?”
Akemi turned towards Pyre, who was glaring at her from the bed. The other woman had, for the first time, pulled her hood down, exposing a full orchestra of red curls. Her face was softer than Akemi expected. It had no lines; no wrinkles. Looked no older than twenty-four.
In all ways except her “clap if you can hear me” middle school teacher personality, the woman was the perfect picture of youth. It was an uncanny contrast.
“Nope,” Akemi said, very unapologetically. “Not a bit. One second.”
Akemi stuffed as many of the steel rods as she could carry into her inventory before joining Pyre on the bed. She gave the other woman a wide-berth, not wanting her to accidentally start a bedsheet fire with that flame-burning tendency of hers.
“We only have five minutes left,” Pyre gritted. “Now, listen. I’m only going to say this part once, and I can’t repeat it outside these walls,”—she gestured forcibly to the curtain—“yes, I know what you’re thinking. Pyre, that’s a shopping mall dressing room curtain. But you actually can’t hear a single thing outside them. They’re completely magically reinforced noise-canceling.”
“Um, what? I can quite literally still hear that couple ramming each other just next door.”
“It’s a recording. There’s these rats that can perfectly mimic human speech. Yes, that implies that they made a rat sit there and watch. We don’t have time to get into the details.”
Akemi very desperately wanted to get into the details, but she held her breath.
“Here’s what you need to know. Grimguard is one of the rare remaining villain-led cities. Hence why the Coterie has been allowed to exist here for so long. The villain who leads the city is called Viscount Dimitri. He’s a… Well, the simplest way to put it is that he’s a bat.”
“We’re talking… the ones with wings?”
“Yes, the flying sort. But a humanoid, too. They’re called chimeras. Picture a very big bat with legs and arms and hair everywhere. It’s gross.” Pyre shivered. “He’s gross. I cannot say I enjoy the … biodiversity … on this planet. Every new city I travel to, I find a new, worse version of Bigfoot.”
“Sounds awfully discriminatory.”
Pyre rolled her eyes.
“Point is, it’s not just him. All his soldiers are chimeras, too. And they have very keen hearing. But they have a difficult time hearing underground, in basement taverns like this, or in the sewer system,” Pyre trailed off, her eyes gleaming. Something apparently brilliant had occurred to her. “The sewer system. That’s perfect. I know our way in.”
Akemi frowned deeply.
“I don’t like what you’re implying.”
The mirthling’s head peeked into the stall from behind the curtain.
“Time’s up!” he called out.
“Wait, let’s get two more minutes,” Akemi said, throwing her hand up. “I’m still wondering–”
“No,” Pyre said, already getting up. “And before you give me that look, I’m straight out of silvers. Which is very much your fault, door-destroyer.”
Akemi laughed.
"Alright. Fine."