“I’d rather they stay in Asteroth! You can’t be serious!”

The hairs puffed out again as Paul leant so far over the counter I thought he’d topple over the thing.

“It’s my price. I’ve already got a breastplate I quite like, so your biggest risk is…I dunno, a helmet? Greaves? Pauldron would be nice.”

“The armours are in sets! You’d be robbing an essential piece of art — diminishing its value greatly!”

He was actually taking it better than I expected. I thought I’d have to put the question to him, disconnect, then come back in a few hours and tell him it was now or never.

“Paul, right now the Asterians have your armour locked up in some dank old storeroom. Alternatively, there’s a young Asterian knight who thinks he’s the bee’s knees and he’s parading around in it like a Cheshire cat. I can get it back for you, get it here, where it belongs.”

Tren was nodding at me from behind his back, egging me on. Paul almost caught him, but he just scraped by with a look of absolute disinterest. The kid could’ve been an actor in another life.

In a real life.

“Five thousand krad per set. Final offer.”

“No can do, Paul. It’s a shame — that room used to look really cool. Now it just has {Ayari’s Bliss} and a bunch of cobwebs.”

I turned to leave, despite not intending on doing so. If it came to it, I’d try to bump him up to eight thousand per set, then buy myself something nice with that.

“Wait. Oliver, wait. I’ll do it. I can’t bear the thought of those Asterian scum placing their hands on such beautiful pieces. Come here.”

I did as I was bid, calm and stony on the outside, giggling with glee on the inside. It wasn’t every day that a gruff old shopkeeper offered you an ancient and powerful piece of armour.

We shook hands, and I made sure to shake Tren’s too, to show Paul that I valued his input just as much.

“Original offer on the krad. Two thousand.”

“Wouldn’t have it any other way, Paul.”

Quest Accepted!

‘Great King Gonar: The Smith’

Reward(s)

+4000 EXP

+5 Friendship (Paul)

+2000 Krad

If the EXP was anything to go by, this quest and Otto’s were bound to be of similar difficulty. It didn’t help that I had no idea where to find the first armour set.

“Interesting. You have any idea who Great King Gonad is?” I asked.

Paul’s shoulders sank and he looked ready to retract our handshake deal already.

“Go-narrr, not Go-nad. If you don’t recognise the name, it might be best if I have Tren here take your place. Gonar was the finishing smith on all those armours I owned. A team of other blacksmiths made the armours into the beautiful and powerful things they are, but he made them perfect.”

“So he…what, polished them up and sanded down the edges? Buffed out a few scratches?”

Tren appreciated my joke very much. Paul did not.

“Do not push me, boy. I am very tentative about our arrangement. I am starting to think I could get Roath and Purg to perform a very similar task…”

“Alllright Paul, don’t twist yourself around. I’ve got this. Just gotta find out what I can about Great King Gonad and I’ll be back with your armour in a flash.”

I finally left the store, ready to prepare for my trip.

“Go-nar,” I heard him mumble.

With two quests under my belt, I was ready for adventure. I’d originally hoped to help out with the town clean-up and rebuilding, but from what I could see, I’d just get in the way.

When I’d helped Lily with the roof beams and coincidentally met Claire, I’d thought everyone was on their own in this town, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Each house was being worked on systematically. They were stripped down to anything that could be salvaged, then a builder came and assessed next steps. The Barn had become a meeting place, with hot food being served up straight from the barn doors.

Where the animals had gone, I did not know — potentially the hot food was the answer.

Before I left, I sent a message to Claire. It was a hazardous choice, but for now it was all I could do.

[Hey. I’m helping Otto and Paul with some quests. Could really use your help. Happy to split the 5k krad two ways.]

To my surprise, she replied.

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

[Don’t need your handouts. Leave me alone.]

I wasn’t surprised at the tone of her reply. It was more or less what I expected.

[The quests are taking me to two places. Piliton’s Palace, and the Royal Botanist’s. Just in case you change your mind.]

No reply to that one. I was glad to see her online — it meant she hadn’t given up. She mightn't have kept the armour the Asterians had looted, but I had no doubt she’d get by.

Two and a half thousand krad would get her by a bit easier though, unless courier jobs were paying better than I expected.

I hadn’t even bothered checking. I immediately worried about who would deliver Marge’s bread all throughout the region once her shop was up and running again.

Better get to Asteroth and back pretty damn fast.

To assist with that, I placed some stat points into my Endurance. I didn’t envision a level up any time soon, even with the boosted EXP rates. Getting a lump-sum-payment of four hundred thousand EXP tends to do that.

Attributable Stat Points: (66)(-12)

Strength (10) (+0)

Defence (10) (+0)

Vitality (5) (+0)

Affinity (0) (+0)

Restoration (0) (+0)

Endurance (16) (+12)

Agility (18) (+0)

It was so difficult to not spend the sixty-six remaining points. The dopamine rush was right there.

To distract myself, I pulled up the map of the region. I could’ve sworn that it had increased in size since I’d done my initial adventuring, because now there was a blanked-out monstrosity in the far north-east that read ‘Kingdom of Asteroth.’ It was at least 150 miles — a massive trip even if I didn’t consider the undulations and twists and turns throughout. Not far past Cambree, there was a plateau of rock basically bordering what I used to think of as Bill’s Region. If there wasn’t a tunnel through it, I’d be needing some hiking boots.

Unfortunately, the map didn’t pinpoint anything useful like Piliton’s Palace, the Royal Botanist’s, or even where one of the sets of armour could be found. However, like what happened at Cambree, I expected something would activate when I neared the area. Perhaps not a stampede of angry miners, but something similar.

Without further ado, I was off. I took a few mental snapshots of Bill’s Yard, excited to see the progress once I got back. All I needed was a camera with a long battery life, and I could’ve set up a time-lapse of the rebuild.

The most correct route would take me about a mile south of Cambree before stretching north and reaching the massive plateau. I decided to make a quick detour anyway, just to see how things had gone since the Asterian invasion was properly quelled.

I made it into the town in record time, my boosted Agility and Endurance having no problem keeping up a sprint for the extent of the journey. The town looked normal — as it had when I’d made a few deliveries here. NPCs paced the streets in ragged clothes, carrying items in packs that hooked around their shoulders and balanced on their heads. Many arms were occupied by tribes of children — I saw one man carrying five of various ages.

Compared to Bill’s, Cambree was nice, though a little subdued. It was like a beachside town sitting a couple hundred miles from a big city — the folks there had warm hearts, wrinkles around their eyes from smiling, but if it weren’t for one peculiar industry that kept the town alive, it would simply fade away. Here, that industry was the Cambree Mines, which I rocketed up the road to find.

I’d dropped a skill token into [Dash III], which increased my dash distance, though the cooldown remained the same. I had to act sparingly with the tokens, but I was pretty confident I couldn’t go wrong with [Dash]. To exist without it was like a child refusing to graduate past crawling.

Considering the hour, I expected a torrent of miners to flow out of the entrance, calling out for knock-off time and pining for an ale. To my surprise, there was nothing of the sort — the only person exiting the mine was a woman guiding a minecart. She pushed it off the tracks, digging her shoulder into the side as the metal wheels stubbornly held onto the dirt.

“Hey, want a hand?”

I jumped behind the cart and heaved. I thought the two of us could get it rolling no problem, but the addition of my weight and effort seemed to have no effect at all.

The woman paused, bending over and clutching her stomach.

She was laughing.

It was one of those silent, wheezing laughs that is far more infectious than a great bellowing roar. I immediately smiled, then I couldn’t hold myself back.

“What are we laughing about?” I asked, cackling.

“You!” she wheezed. “You came over and, oooo, and jumped in, thinking you’d save the damsel in distress. Oooo golly, but the cart didn’t move at all!” She broke down again, laying down in the sandy dirt and curling into a ball.

She wasn’t wrong — I was rather taken aback by the weight of the cart. The part about the ‘damsel in distress’ could be contested, especially considering that her biceps were larger than my skull, but I was too entertained to take offense.

“What’s in the cart? I get that rocks and stuff are pretty dang heavy, but that heavy?”

“It’s platinum, dummy. You mustn’t be from around here. Have a look.”

She plucked a piece from the top of that cart and handed it to me. It looked as if someone had melted down pure iron ore and combined it with glass. The smoothest edges showed my face staring back at me, while other spots were flecked with native rock and other minerals.

“Wow. That’s really nice. You think I could make a javelin out of it? Or strengthen my shield here?” I shook my shield arm until the strap dangled from my wrist, and she inspected it closely.

“We could do these support sections no worries, but with crappy wood like that, there’s really no point. A kid with a pointy rock could get through that. Looks like someone already has.”

The evidence of Claire’s arrows still showed — two thin pockmarks and a proper hole where my shield had completely given up.

“Okay, sounds good. I might need to take you up on the offer another time. And I assume the mine is still producing well? No Asterians down there?”

“Pff, no Asterians since Bambuk ate them all, rest his soul.”

I thanked her for the information, handed back the platinum and continued on my way. If I stayed there much longer, my conscience might’ve conned me into dropping a few points into Strength just to help with the minecart.

There were a number of ‘roads’ leading out of Cambree — trails being the more realistic description. Nothing had any signage, so I took the one that looked like it would guide me back onto the map’s preferred route. I fought my way through fernery and fallen logs and crept past so many [Wolthairs] that I was starting to think they were blind and deaf. The trail eventually opened up to the main road.

After running for at least a couple hours, I checked my map. Now that I was closing in on the big lump of rock in the distance, I discovered it was not just a plateau.

It was ‘The Great Plateau.’

And two thousand [Asterians Soldiers] guarded its rocky gates.