Chapter 221: The Dramatic Buildup

Chapter 221: The Dramatic Buildup

Sylvie stared at me and Erani, standing before her on the side of the abandoned road. With our faces exposed, she was clearly taking a moment to absorb the details.

“You’re...the fugitive,” she said, eventually. “The one everyone’s looking for? That’s flamin’ awesome!”

“That’s me,” I said with a nod. “Annor is a friend of mine, and the man we’re fighting is someone who’s trying to kill me.”

“Who’s the chick?”

“My name’s Erani.” Erani held out a hand to shake. “It’s a pleasure meeting you.”

“So the two of you are, like, what, trying to overthrow the Koinkar kingdom or something? Is that why you’re being hunted?”

“That’s a long story,” I said. “But the short version is that we’re being hunted for no good reason, and are just trying to stay alive. Now, I understand it might come as a shock that you’re being asked to help an outlaw, but—”

“Wait, wait, you can’t leave it at that!”

I blinked. “At what?”

“You can’t just say ‘it’s a long story’ and then move on without telling me the long story. At least give me, like, the highlights! What’re the bad guys' secret plans? Any cool stuff happened? Have you blown up any buildings? Or, wait, cities? Killed any Dragons? I’ll have you know, I’ve killed a Dragon, so if you haven’t done that then I’ve got one up on you. And, by the way, for a pair of outlaws, the two of you don’t look nearly gruff and scary enough. If you at least had—”

I put my hands out. “Woah, let’s cool it for a second. We have a little bit of time, so if you want, I can answer your questions one by one. But first, we need you to tell us about the man you were tailing, Jon. Where is he now?”

“I’ll tell you, but first you have to at least tell me if you’ve blown anything up.”

“No, I haven’t...Well, okay, maybe I’ve blown a building up. Or, I guess, depending on your definition of what a single building is, then it’s been dozens? But with one explosion. ...And, I guess, depending on your definition of ‘blown up’ then I’ve done one more? More like ‘demolished,’ really, though it was a really big building. Though, it wasn’t really me who did it, more like bargained with someone else to—”Ñøv€l-B1n was the first platform to present this chapter.

“Okay, if all of your answers are gonna be that complicated, then forget I asked about anything.”

“Like I said, I can give you the short version if you like. But first, you did find out where Jon is, right?”

“Yeah, I did. Those two people Annor told me about basically just hung out at the guild lobby for hours on end waiting around for nothing, until eventually they left and I followed them to this old cheap inn where they met the main guy and went in to stay the night. Those two made themselves really hard to follow, by the way. Good thing you had I,” she placed a hand on her chest proudly, “the great, amazing Archer and tracker and doer-of-other-things extraordinaire, Sylvie, to rely on.”

“Right. Well, good work.”

“You’re damn right it was. I don’t know if Annor told you this, but I’m actually basically the leader of my adventurer group. Which, I guess is mainly because the rest of everyone just kinda wandered off so I’m the only one left, but being leader still means being leader. And as leader, I’ll go ahead and be the one to do negotiations with you.”

“Negotiations?”

“Well, yeah. You’re trying to get us to join you in your little band of outlaws or whatever, right? I don’t know why else you’d reveal yourself to us. Unless you just wanted to be super dramatic or something. Anyway, joining up with you guys sounds like something that’s gonna need some negotiations.”

“Nothing like that. I’m ‘revealing myself’ to you because we need help against Jon and the people he has with him, and he won’t leave us alone until either he or I is dead. And if I tried to fight him with my identity hidden in some way, he’d just shout out who I was in the middle of the town and reveal me anyway. I’m just getting ahead of the game, this way.”

“Okay, sure. But when I first agreed to this, I didn’t think I’d be helping a fugitive.” She said the word with a mock gasp, as though from the start she fully expected she’d be breaking the law. Which, knowing her, she probably saw it as an upside. “I think I need some compensation in exchange for the extremely dangerous—not to mention immoral—things I’ll be doing. Things I’ve already done, without my knowledge!”

I thought of the immense fortune she already held. “What would you even want from us in compensation? We’re running on limited funds.”

“I want...” She rubbed her chin, as though in deep thought. Honestly, I had no idea if she was just making a joke or if she actually was trying hard to think of something we could give her. I sure as hells had no idea what she could want from us. Eventually, she nodded and threw her hand out, holding a single finger up. “I want one adventure per week.”

I frowned, and looked at Erani, who was in turn staring straight over at me, confused. “...What?”

“This can count for our adventure this week. But clearly, you’re the type of people to go and do interesting things. I mean, the entire kingdom of Koinkar is after you, and no offense, but if you’re not strong enough to beat some random guy who just wandered into town, then you’re not strong enough to beat a whole kingdom. Which means you’re probably gonna go and get stronger, right? Well, if you’re going out to Level up, find special Enchanted items, all that stuff, then I wanna come along. So, I demand to be brought along on a minimum of one adventure per week.”

“That sounds...logistically difficult. I mean, if we’re ever in different towns or cities, it’ll be hard to notify you, much less actually get you over to where we are. And also, though I feel like this goes without saying, I do not think you actually want to tag along with us. Most of what we do isn’t exactly by choice. It’s a lot of danger without much reward.”

“Oh, I’m sure that most of what you do absolutely sucks ass. That’s why I only want one per week. My choice, of course.”

“Once again, that doesn’t sound like it would be easy to facilitate. Just on a basic level, what if we don’t do anything interesting over the course of a week?”

“...You think I’m a terrorist?” Erani asked.

“Yeah, I dunno. You’ve just got the feel to you.”

“Do you know a lot of terrorists?” I asked.

“Well, apparently I know at least four.”

“I don’t think we qualify as terrorists. It’s not like we’re bombing cities or whatever.”

“Didn’t you say you’ve blown up some number of buildings?”

“Well, yeah, but that was necessary.”

“I’m sure plenty of terrorists believe that.”

“Listen, are you on our side or not?”

“Yeah, I’m just messing with you,” Sylvie said, glancing at me with an impish grin on her face.

“So,” Erani said, “moving past terrorist accusations. We’ll be going into town using a different entrance from you. You go through the eastern one, and we’ll use the west.”

“Why’s that?”

“Our method of entrance is classified,” Erani replied.

Sylvie scoffed and rolled her eyes. “Okay, sure. Classified. What, some secret shadow government?”

I shrugged. “If you’d like to pretend, we can say we’re a secret shadow government. We’re just governing a body of an extremely small number of citizens.”

“Man, you people always like to throw around big words like ‘classified’ like you can just pretend they mean what you want them to mean. ‘Classified’ doesn’t just mean ‘secret,’ it means it’s being held secret by a governing body. Just because you don’t want to tell me doesn’t make your super duper special method of entrance ‘classified.’”

“Never took you as a stickler for word choice.”

“Ugh. I deal with Entismo too much to not notice when people use words wrong.”

“Also, what do you mean by ‘you people?’”

Sylvie waved a hand dismissively. “You know, peasants.”

I stared at her with thin lips, but she didn’t seem to realize she’d even said anything wrong. Sometimes I forgot she did have a noble upbringing.

“Oh, the road’s splitting up ahead,” Sylvie said. “I guess that means you two are going to do your extra secret entrance into town? You know, you don’t have to hide it from me. I’m sure you’re just, like, climbing over the walls or something stupid.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I replied. “We’ll meet with you in town.”

She gave a sarcastic salute. “Aye aye, captain.”

Getting into town was as easy as donning our Annor and Eita disguises and just asking to be let back in. Utterly uncomplicated, unlike Ainash’s entrance. She’d gone ahead of us, and through mental communication, it seemed like she had, after some difficulty, managed to vault over the walls and snuck along on the rooftops to our destination. Erani and I were left to walk through the streets like normal people.

Once we were getting close, we ducked into a side alley and changed back out of our alternate personas, going back to Light Plate for me and normal appearance for Erani. Technically, we’d be strolling through the streets openly as fugitives, but it would take some time before people recognized us, so we were free to walk around for a little bit first. And all we really needed were another five minutes before we got to the inn Sylvie had said she’d saw Jon at.

So, we got back onto the main road and began heading there. I even spotted some of the adventurers we’d hired on their own way to our destination, all getting ready for the scheduled job we’d set for half past midnight. About a dozen of them, as planned. I hoped what I’d brought was overkill; enough to end the fight in a matter of seconds, before things could get too out of hand. At least it was late enough that nobody was around here to get hurt in the collateral damage.

In the distance, I saw the decrepit building set up on the side of the road. It was a shabby old thing, barely left standing after what had clearly been years of neglect. Jon would be inside, presumably with his gang of soldiers, all hopefully sleeping soundly and unaware that they were currently surrounded by a small army of Classers.

“Alright,” I muttered to Erani, staring at the shack. “Let’s blow up a building.”