It had been a blink-or-miss-it moment, but his ears had caught the whistling wind, even if his instincts didn’t allow him to react in any way. One moment, the two were focused on the package, and the next, a dagger had stuck itself firmly into a rotten wooden board, while a line of blood traced itself upon Meira’s cheek.
Danger. Palpable, real danger. Sharper than just a crazy bastard shouting at ghosts in the subway. Sharper than a bunch of drunk teens mucking about by the gas station past midnight. Perhaps he should have ignored that sensation, let it pass over. He’d done that plenty of times before, where it’d make more sense to walk away and ignore strange things rather than risk getting stuck beneath months of legal bullshit and fees.
Now though?
He watched the earth-carving swings, the mud and refuse that trailed upwards in the wake of Meira’s strikes. He watched the cloaked man retreat immediately, springing further back down the path, to where C and the slime laid. This was a world of brute violence, wasn’t it? A world of brute violence and…
The High Elf picked up the package. It was heavier than expected, and the weight of the object was off despite its uniform shape. He grasped the handle of the thrown dagger as well, wiggling it out of the wood, examining the blade itself. It glistened in the daylight, a clear fluid clinging to the metallic surface. What was that substance? And, why wou-
This time, his ears caught the whistling wind and he responded properly, Cassius dropping head-first into dirt as a second set of blades flew past where his back had been a blink ago. It pieced itself together too easily now. One for a decoy, to pull the armed adventurer away. Perhaps the knife throw was meant to miss purposefully, knowing that if it had caused actual injury, Meira’s decision-making would have leaned towards rapid escape instead. Perhaps she was known well enough around those parts that they accounted for her berserker behavior.
It didn’t matter much though.
A second individual stepped out, their countenance covered by a mask as they drew a longer blade that glistened with the same poison.
Cassius scrambled to his feet, holding the package to his chest and feeling his heart hammer against it.
Would they leave if he gave up the package? Would they kill him either way, for having been the one to discover it? Should he run, and fundamentally end up running away from the one person who could protect him? Or should he try to fend this assailant off, with nothing more than a knife the length of his hand?
The blood rushing to his head was making him dizzy. The stress compounding, the possibilities twisting.
And just like that, the initiative was given to the masked assassin.
So Zeroth, how does this whole temporal kinda thing work, now that I'm in the future? Are we just progressing normally, or is this more of just 'Esfir has the opportunity to interact with the other Runts before Auguz's training starts' kinda thing?
Grim topics indeed, but it served well enough to get a grasp on Meira’s character. Cassius followed her from behind as their conversation dwindled down, his gaze briefly caught by the swishing and swaying of her tail before being redirected back to his surroundings. She considered herself one step above mercenaries, so she disdained the idea of monetizing her violence for a private group’s interest. She thought little of treasure hunters too, so she wasn’t someone entirely driven by profit at the risk of her own life. Her work pertained towards slaying monsters that would prove a problem for the local populace, or in patrolling such wretched places like these in order to provide some form of protection for the living and dignity to the dead.
Fundamentally, a decent sort. He supposed if she wasn’t, he’d have been lead to an alleyway and gutted by now. Or just knocked unconscious and shipped off to a slave merchant.
That was enough to send a message then.
“Status.”
The translucent window emerged once more, and he glided through the messages from C and Slime that he had missed. Nothing of importance, and nothing that he would be able to change now. Oh well.
The Adventurer’s Guild exists, and Meira, the woman I left with, is part of them. Slimes are categorized as monsters, but are thought of as useful for cleaning up corpses. The city’s name is Neir, the country’s name is Cethaim. King Selm is the top of the hierarchy, and nobles manage territories beneath him. There are no ongoing wars of note. A convenient excuse for our appearance here is a ‘teleportation’ spell. You can make money as a treasure hunter in ‘dungeons’ here or pick up odd jobs as an adventurer, but if both of you finished school, you would likely be able to get a job inside the city.
Also, my name is Cassius.
He pressed 'send', and in that moment, as the High Elf wiped away the screen, something stuck out to him. It wasn't something in the air, nor something that he could hear, and certainly not something that stuck out to him as something he could see, but rather...an anomaly. The presence of something misplaced, even here amongst the destitute and decrepit. Nothing more, perhaps, than just a bad feeling, except a weighty enough impression that his golden eyes turned towards a lump of nondescript garbage piled up in the space between two half-collapsed shacks.
"Meira."
He kicked the pile, and the mess spread out further. The carcasses of cooked vermin, scraps of decayed vegetables, rags too soiled and damaged to be worth even cleaning. A litany of trash designed to be too disgusting to interact with, but organic enough that the vermin would take care of it so that you didn't need to.
And within the pile laid a package of something, wrapped up in a leather of unknown origin and bound with a thick cordage that seemed to suck up the orange light of the afternoon.
It was a creature designed with murder in mind, a great wolf formed from shadow and mist, cleaving through the air with a bladed tail while shards shot out in rapid succession, so powerful that they sunk in the dirt entirely.
And it spoke too, a thoughtful rasp that didn’t match its savage attacks.
“Adapa,” Otis spoke, springing up from the dive-roll he executed to avoid the arrows, “record.”
The Door remained present, a perpetual escape route that would be a death sentence for any enemies to enter, and his Personal Barrier would ensure that he’d be able to absorb at least a few hits if he had to. Information, then, was what he wanted. The arcane tome opened up beside him, burning with that heatless flame, as Hildegunde’s own bullet cracked through the air.
“Only if we leave,” the Strigidae replied, chambering his firearm with ensorcelled bullets. “Watch your eyes.”
The trigger was pulled, and essence-imbued steel flew through the air, the heat generated by air friction triggering a particular reaction mid-flight as it exploded in a blinding flash of light. It was only a distraction, a pause that’d allow him to break up the flow of combat as he aimed his gun skywards next, sending a second bullet upwards past the canopy. That one exploded too, a burst of brilliance to serve as a signal.
“Best to surrender now!” he called out to the shadow-wolf. “Wouldn’t take much longer for Alto to arrive. And amongst the student population, there’s at least ten who have Ethos specialized in hunting and tracking, so it’s a waste of effort to try escaping.”
Lies, all of them.
If conflict could be won with empty threats though, that would be for the best.
He was beginning to see what it was then. The Guild existed as a job board, perhaps similar to Upwork or Craigslist, while adventurers were fundamentally freelancers whose trade generally involved violence or travel. Adventurers leveraged the reputation of the Guild in order to get work, while the Guild got a cut of the profits in return. No doubt, there was some sort of vetting service at play, and perhaps more famous adventurers would find themselves working directly for specific employers, but that’d be the gist of it. In the meanwhile, those who eschewed from working with the Guild were still considered adventurers, but spent their time more as treasure hunters, digging through ruins for the gold of dead kings or the like. He had heard of treasure hunters breaking into pyramids; greed and sacrilege were commonalities of humanity, after all.
And, of course, with treasure hunting came sudden deaths. Flammable gas, decaying structures, and perhaps monsters too. Or maybe you just run out of money, after coming across such worthless things as just rusted armor and dry bones, and you end up starving to death instead.
“But people who’d do such things are optimists. There’s only fortune to be had.”
And those who weren’t optimists were snakes, in their own way. Those with a clearer view, indeed, ended up as…
“I was in finance,” Cassius replied. He paused a moment afterwards, trying to figure out how to explain that to someone who didn’t live in a world of global trade and public companies, where the profit of a single company could be worth more than the GDP of a nation. “There are people who give money to businesses, in exchange for the future possibility of getting that money back at a greater or lesser amount depending on how that business develops. My work is in finding out which business is most worth giving money to, before others notice it too. Or do the reverse, and know when to take the money back before the business crashes and burns.”
They shared in the bitterness, perhaps. It was only here that Cassius let out a laugh, like a crack emerging in a frozen lake.
“Fundamentally, I help make more money for people with too much money, so they can spend it on vanity projects. Does that make sense?”
The country, Cethaim. The city, Neir. A feudal ruling system, with a King Selm and the nobles that likely managed the cities or provinces. School had stopped teaching medieval history after the eighth grade, but media had kept the knowledge alive regardless. No war though, so it must be a time of peace.
And regarding the cat-eared girl’s response to his own story…
“Too many possibilities,” he echoed.
That was an apt way of describing the difference between where he came from and where he now was. Amoeba the size of basketballs, possessing human intellect. Heads-up displays invisible to all others, yet capable of assigning numerals to vague values. And, of course, mercenaries that hunted monsters while taking the form of lanky youths. It was fictional, and perhaps it was made even more fictional by how ‘C’ had predicted all this through his own consumption of media.
“I’ve no problem with testing. As for the other one, I’ll help him out afterwards, if he wants work.” The elf retracted his hand. Her grip was solid. He felt the calluses, formed by the hilt of that two-handed sword. “And mine…Cassius.”
He blinked, eyes flickering upwards briefly as he reconsidered his thoughts, his words.
Ah, no. It made enough sense. In this feudal, miserable age, where there were no cars, no internet, no central heating, no plumbing, no good food, no entertainment, there was nothing to distract from the mind-numbing nature of ‘work’.
If he died and returned to a world with more possibilities but less quality of life, and if there was no guarantee that his modern education would mean much to aristocrats and those who had wealth, why should he be so eager to delve back into an office job?
Why indeed?
“If you’ve got nothing else to do but patrol, would you mind telling me about your life as an adventurer?”
The answer was direct, without hesitation. Trust was built upon the impression of being straightforward, without any attempt at bullshit or deflection, after all. He matched her gaze, holding it briefly as he recalled everything that C had mentioned they ought to figure out. The Adventurer’s Guild existed, and with a positive enough impression, he’d be able to get a reference from someone who was associated with them.
“I’ll tell you more if you tell me about this place and yourself. The other one in the shack was worried about demonic kings and wars.”
If she agreed, of course, the elf would begin speaking himself, his gaze turning towards their surroundings once more as he followed her patrol route through the winding corridors made by the shantytown’s residents.
“Where I came from, everyone is of one race and you spend perhaps a quarter of your life in schooling before you’re expected to obtain a profession, where you would spend the remaining three-quarters of life contributing to society and the betterment of your family through work. If you’re lucky, you’d have opportunities to travel and relax, but for most, they need to work hard just to pay for food and rent.” Unless one was fortunate enough to be born with wealth, connections, or talent. Or lucky enough to have risked it all on an investment that paid off. But even that could be lost with a surprise medical bill, a downturn in the economy, pandemics and technological advances blasting apart preconceptions like a double-gauge shotgun. “So, for many, the space between the end of the first quarter and the start of the three quarters is where they find an opportunity to enjoy their lives while they are young and fresh.”
That wasn’t his own experience. He didn’t have the space for such a whimsical adventure, even if he had booked that flight and flown on that plane. He lifted his gaze towards the sky, one so desperately blue, one so uncaring for the desolation of those beneath it. Was Heaven real in this world? Was Heaven just another person’s Earth?
“That’s what I did, but instead of enjoying anything, something I don’t quite understand happened to me, and when I woke up, I found myself in that shack with the other guy.” The elf turned back to his companion. “The distance between where I am and where I was is uncrossable, so now, I suppose, I’ll have to find work.”
His palm turned towards her.
“And a knowledgeable guide would work wonders there. Especially if she’d work for free.”
Estylwen,
Izurich,
Creative Chaos,
HereComesTheSnow,
Damycles,
OwO,
Simple Unicycle,
Asura,
Irradiant,
Th3King0fChaos
