The sudden turn of events stunned us for a second, but Van Drake soon regained his composure and managed to drag me behind the walls of the warehouse before the unknown assailant launched another round of gunfire.

“Damn, we’re pinned down,” Van Drake yelled, aggravated by the current set of events.

“What are we gonna do Drake? We don’t have any firearms to fight him with,” I asked anxiously.

Van Drake takes a moment to think, then replies, “Tch, we’ll have to pull back further into the forest and ambush him there. Hurry!”

We ran to the other end of the warehouse and found a locked door. Van Drake managed to kick it down and we continued our retreat. The man chased after us, spouting profanity while occasionally shooting bullets toward us. After running for some time, we noticed that we could no longer hear the man following us, and decided to take a break and discuss what had happened.

“What the hell was that!?” I yelled, unable to contain my anxiety from the sudden turn of events.

“I don’t know, but try to calm down. If you start panicking now we’re as good as dead if that guy finds us again.” Van Drake told me with a calm yet assertive tone.

I took a few deep breaths and tried to relax. Once Van Drake had noticed that I had calmed down, he began discussing his thoughts on our situation.

“So what we know as of right now is that there’s a third party that doesn’t want us to be here, and will kill us on sight should they find us. Now, I’ve had situations like this come up before during the many jobs that I’ve taken, so I can at least come up with some ideas as to why this might’ve happened.”

He paused for a moment to see if I had grasped the contents of his previous statement before continuing.

“One possibility is that this could be a raid group, and that we were just here at the wrong time and ended up getting caught up in the situation. However, the fact that the town is both quiet and relatively untouched leads me to believe that this isn’t the case.

Still keeping to the idea that the party in question is an invader, another possibility is that this town may have caught the eye of a certain noble from one of the various empires of the archipelago. A deal could’ve gone wrong, and as an act of revenge, he’s wiping out the town and its people. Although there are international laws that are meant to prevent these situations from arising, they are a surprisingly common occurrence. Furthermore, to prevent the backlash that could arise from committing such an act, these nobles will send in assassins to wipe out the village quietly. However, there is a problem with this hypothesis as well. This town is a pretty valuable producer of medical resources for Xylphas. If it were to be wiped out, the overall prosperity and commerce within Xylphas would plummet. Thus the culprit would be tracked down and punished without remorse.”

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He pauses once again to see if I have any objections to his statements. Having lived on the streets, I have some knowledge of the situations he’s described. All his statements so far were predictable reasons as to what could have led us to this situation, and his reasoning as to why those situation couldn’t be what’s happening now were also logical, so I stayed silent.

“Lastly, and the most likely reason as to the situation we’re in right now, is that we’ve gotten ourselves caught up in an underworld deal. Xylphas is a large and prosperous city, so it would be impossible for it to not have some illegal activities going on behind closed doors. From the rumors that I’ve heard, there’s a syndicate of gangs that currently conduct various illegal deals in the shadier parts of the city, and have various other connections and influence on the town that surround Xylphas. What we could have stumbled onto is a deal between gangs gone wrong, and currently one of the gangs are trying to procure the originally promised goods. If that’s the  case, we need to deal with them quickly, but also remain anonymous.”(Van Drake)

With a puzzled look on my face, I asked, “Remain anonymous? What do you mean by that? Wouldn’t it be better to make it known that we were the one’s who dealt with this matter? I heard that the Xylphas authorities pay a pretty penny for people who take care of these illegal activities.”

With a stern look on his face, Van Drake said, “Yes, it’s true that the rewards for dealing with gang activities can grant you a pretty hefty reward. However, some of these gangs are extremely dangerous, and have been running the underground of Xylphas for decades. If we’re fighting a gang like that, it wouldn’t be good for us. They would take revenge, and the Maelstrom and its crew wouldn’t be able to handle it. We may have around 200 members, but the majority of them haven’t even been on the crew for a year, let alone have combat experience. We’d be wiped out. Anyways, what we need to take care of first is that man that’s been following us.”

We agreed to first track down the man we had first spotted, eliminate him, and take his weapons. Afterwards we would deal with the situation in town and try to find the other teams. It didn’t take us long to find him. The man had gone back to the warehouse and was combing through the various medical crates that we had loaded on board. Another man had joined him since then. He was a tall, slender man with a rifle slung around his shoulder. Van Drake crept up to the tall man while I snuck closer to our original assailant. With a quick punch to the face, Van Drake disarmed the tall man while he was still dazed from the unexpected attack. Before the other man could react, I leapt at him. The man had a small frame and was half a foot shorter than myself, thus I managed to easily overpower him, pinning him to the ground before he could react. We then took their weapons, and without a hint of mercy or hesitation Van Drake killed them.

I hadn’t been opposed to the idea when it Van Drake had suggested that we kill the men instead of subduing them, because if they were to remain alive and somehow remember our faces, it could prove dangerous to not only us, but the rest of the Maelstrom’s crew as well. However, this was my first time seeing someone killed. During my time on the streets I had seen people die due to starvation and disease, but I’d never seen someone murdered in cold blood. I started to feel queasy, and soon I couldn’t hold back the feeling that was building up in my throat and puked.

I heard Van Drake murmuring to himself, “Huh, so this is his first time seeing it huh?”

After I had collected myself, we set out to deal with the situation in town.