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Chapter 218: The Prelude

We’d spoken with Sylvie regarding funds. She was, apparently, pretty wealthy with the money she’d made as a noble. Most of it was technically in her parents’ name, which was something she really didn’t like, but she was allowed to spend as she pleased. Though, they’d always interrogate her if she ever spent a lot all at once, which was pretty antithetical to the whole “running away” thing, so she didn’t like to spend it if she had to. But she trusted me when I said this was important, which I really appreciated. Though, I figured she also probably just wanted to see a massive battle between two teams of Classers, and if she had to fund it to see it happen, so be it. Though that was just speculation on my part.

One of the first things that popped into my mind upon hearing she had so much money was to just take it and use it to teleport out of here, but that would come with several issues. First, it wouldn’t actually solve this problem, just kick it down the road. Jon would still exist, he’d still be here, attacking people in search of me, and the moment he figured out that a group of people that seemed suspiciously like Arlan, Erani, and Ainash teleported to the capital, he’d go straight there. It would be better to get this sorted now, while we at least knew what was going on.

And second, Sylvie hadn’t even offered to pay for teleportation in the first place. She said she’d pay for us to hire adventurers for this fight. We’d told her and the others days ago that we were saving up to try and pay for teleportation, and she never mentioned she was wealthy, so I had to assume she just didn’t want to, or couldn’t for some reason. Honestly, I was leaning toward ‘didn’t want to,’ considering she now knew we were actively in trouble. If she wanted to help us run from our problems, she would’ve offered to help. Seemed like she wanted to help us fight.

I looked back over at Erani, who was muttering and tracing her finger on the table, drawing figures to help with her calculations.

“We’ll want at least eight Melee-Types at the very least,” she said, “to match the four melee soldiers, three magics, plus the main enemy. With one for each, we’ll want maybe half as many Magic-Types and Ranged-Types to hold back the lines, though actually, Ranged-Types can also often be good at scouting ahead. If the three magic soldiers are hiding, then we’ll want someone to poke around for them so they don’t catch us off-guard. Classes that would be good for that would be Rogue, Ranger, Archer…We’ll definitely need specialized Classes to handle our main enemy as well. With his buff effects, we’ll want Wizards with builds to handle that, if we can find them. I think there are some paths that can increase the cost of enemy Spells by the time you reach Level 20, so if we had two of those for redundancy’s sake, plus maybe two more debuffers focused on movement penalties, we could…”

“You figuring out the optimal team?” I asked.

She looked up at me, surprised, as though she’d forgotten she was in a room with other people. “Oh, yes, I felt like that would be prudent.”

“Y’know, I was thinking we could probably just go with the strategy of ‘ask as many people as we can and win through sheer numbers.’”

“Well, sure, having more people would be nice, but when you reach double digits in numbers, you run the risk of coordination issues. Once you have so many people that each individual adventurer can’t really keep track of everyone else, you’re going to need to put them in squads that they can look out for, or give everyone a pre-assigned role that they’ll fill.”

“Huh. Yeah, maybe the path of brute force and ignorance isn’t the best.”

She nodded. “Brute force is just fine. Ignorance, I could do without.”

I smiled and took a sip of my drink, looking down at the table. Erani was still idly tracing her finger along the wooden grain of the table, using her non-dominant right hand, of course. Her left hand was still missing. I set my drink down. “So, um…How are you faring? With the arm thing.”

“Oh,” she said, looking down to where I was gazing. “Well. It’s been a good few days, so I’ve at least begun to acclimate, in terms of re-learning how to write. I just…hope it doesn’t remain uncomfortable for the rest of my life.”

I nodded and reached over the table, grabbing her hand with both of mine. I could feel how much tension had been held in her hand, slowly relaxing at my touch. “I promise you now, and I’ll promise you every day until the end of time, I’ll find a fix. You won’t have to worry about getting back to the way you were before, I’m going to ensure you end up better off. You saw those limbs the soldiers had, right? They were stronger than a normal person’s, faster, and with more flexible control. Imagine if we could get someone to create something like that for you, without the downsides. Just a limb that’s better than a normal person’s.”

She chuckled weakly. “You want me to be inspired by our enemies?”

“The best inspiration comes from your enemies. They’re doing their best to figure out what you want and to take it away. All you have to do, then, is the opposite.”

She sighed. “Maybe.”

There was a moment of silence between us, my hands still gripped around her hand. Erani’s gaze was fixed solemnly downward. It was times like these where I had no idea what to do or what to say. Maybe I should’ve stayed silent, not brought up such a bad topic. But then, I had no idea when she thought of it on her own; if, every night, she stayed up, staring at the ceiling, wishing for a way to get her arm back, then I wanted to do everything in my power to make those moments better.

I took a breath and stood, Erani’s eyes breaking away from the floor to gaze up at me.

“Alright,” I said, “let’s make the rounds, talk to some people. It’d probably be a good idea to do our recruiting sooner rather than later.”

Erani nodded and stood, and I didn’t let go of her hand yet. First, I used my grip to pull her in close for a tight embrace. That always seemed to get a smile out of her—though, if I were being honest, it always got a much wider smile out of me. I felt a pang of annoyance that I couldn’t kiss her right now, since we were in public and I needed to cover my face with Dark Plate, but I just sighed and focused on other things.

Sylvie had split off from us when we got into town, but would be coming back to meet us later in the evening so we could start to concretely offer funds with her present. But for now, it couldn’t hurt to at least introduce the offer with some people and get the buzz going.

So that was what we did, walking through the guild lobby, introducing ourselves—though, many already recognized us from our distinctive looks—and telling them about the job.

“So, we’re offering ten thousand,” I said to a man with deep scars across his eye and cheek. “In return, you’ll assist us in self defense from a certain man and any soldiers he brings along. We suspect he has something to do with the missing border guards, if you’re familiar with that bounty, so things will likely get messy and turn to combat.”

He grunted, though his eyebrows were raised slightly ever since I mentioned the payment. “What’s his Level?”

“He’s a high silver degree.”

“And you mentioned he’d bring soldiers along with him? You know what they’ll look like?”

“At least six, though there’s the possibility there’ll be more. From what I know, most of them would be in the bronze degree range, though it’s possible some of them have passed Level 20. Some of them are more total unknowns, but they’re almost certainly not any stronger than the main target.”

“‘Target,’” he grunted. “You’re saying this is self defense, but I get the feeling he’ll be the one defending himself.”

“Not at all,” I reassured him. We’d had plenty of people ask something along the lines of ‘Are you asking me to assassinate someone?’ which I supposed was fair. “I’m just fairly sure he’s going to end up attacking us, and he’s the type of person to fight to the death. So it’s closer to a monster elimination job than a typical search and rescue one, since it’s basically a guarantee we’re going to be getting into this fight.”

“And where’s your information come from?”

“A very robust recon network. Several different Divination-adjacent abilities.”

He chewed on his lip, staring at me.

“We were hoping to slot you in with our other Melee-Types,” Erani said. The man looked a little taken aback at her voice, which was under Distortion Strike’s effects, but at this point Erani was used to peoples’ reactions enough to just keep going without paying mind to how they acted. She eyed the spiked club hanging from his belt. “I’m assuming you are a Melee-Type?”

He nodded.

“Perfect. We don’t need to know your precise Class or Level, unless you have anything to tell us that seems particularly relevant. All we need to know is your degree, so we can figure out a good team composition.”

“Team composition? What, are you building an army?”

“We’re…” Erani faltered.

“Something like that,” I said. “More like the biggest group we can muster.”

He looked between us. “How many people do you have? And how many casualties do you expect?”

“We may seem like we’re building an army, but I promise you we’re no heartless generals. We ‘expect’ no casualties whatsoever, other than those of our enemies. That’s part of the reason we’re getting as many people as we can. We don’t want any tragedy.”

“And the number of people?”

“Currently, we’ve found eighteen people who are considering taking our job. That’s on top of the four of us, plus a few of our friends if we can manage to find them.” Finding Entismo, Aliss, and Boy was another thing Sylvie was trying to do while she was out. “We’d be doing this tomorrow, not today, so you have time to mull it over. We can come back to you, tell you our final numbers, stuff like that. Though, I’ll say now, those eighteen maybes came from just people we’ve spoken to today, and we started at just a couple hours past noon. We plan on asking around for the rest of tonight, plus tomorrow morning, so I’d expect the force to get pretty big. We’re taking no chances when it comes to this guy, so I’d hope you understand this is a good paycheck in return for little to no risk on your own part.”

He nodded slowly. “Well, you certainly drive a hard bargain. Let me think about it, talk to some others about how trustworthy you are. But come back to me tomorrow.”

“Great,” I said with a smile. “I look forward to fighting with you.”

We walked away, and sat back down at the bar.

“That’s everyone currently in here, right?” I asked.

“I think so,” Erani replied. “Pretty sure we’ve asked them all.”

“Cool. So then it’s just watching the door.”

It was around eleven at night by now, the sun having long set behind the horizon. Our plan was to stick around until at least one in the morning, since that was when new patrons typically stopped arriving, and then we’d retire for the night. The time of the attack in the original timeline—around seven in the evening—had come and gone without anything going wrong.

Not that I’d logically expected anything to go wrong, of course, but there was still an itch in the back of my mind that had suspected something would happen. Some explosion off in the distance, or whatever. I’d asked Index to let me know when the time had passed so I could stop worrying, and it did so without any disasters whatsoever. And that was several hours ago at this point, anyway. By this time, I imagined the three main possibilities were that Jon had either ignored the outpost with Ripley in it, that he’d confronted them and Ripley had escaped, or that Ripley had been captured. In any of those cases, the situation would be under control, as long as our fight tomorrow went as planned. And, judging by the number of people we’d managed to recruit, it seemed like it was going to go swimmingly.

I’d found that I actually kind of enjoyed the process, walking up to strangers and doing my best to pitch the job to them. There was a sort of science to the whole thing, trying to pick up on whatever cues I could, see when they were getting skeptical, see when they needed reassurance, or when they needed me to go all-in with how glorious the battle would be, or whatever. The stakes were there—obviously I wanted them to say yes—but not so high that it felt crushing to hear a no. It just meant I’d made a mistake along the way, and I would need to adjust my pitching strategy.

Another woman walked through the doors of the lobby, this one alone. She was hunched over, a scarf pulled around her face, and had two daggers in sheathes on her belt.

“Oh, she looks like a Rogue,” I whispered to Erani. “We still needed one of those, right?”

“It would certainly be helpful to have one.”

The woman walked straight up and sat down next to me at the bar, so I was flanked by her and Erani. Though, she didn’t seem to pay either of us any mind, instead looking toward the bartender and nodding him over, ordering a drink.

Once she had her mug in hand, I turned to look at her. She just gazed at the wall, ignoring me.

“Hey,” I said.

She glanced over.

“Uh, I was just wondering if you’d be interested in a job, tomorrow morning. We’d be—”

“Sorry,” she said. “Busy.”

“Ah. Well, you might still want to hear about my offer. Our reward is ten thousand eyt to anyone who assists in—”

“I’m the kind of busy that you can’t reschedule,” she said. “Not available.”

With that, she turned away from me, gazing back at the blank wall.

I let out a breath and turned back around. Occasionally there was just a non-starter like that. Best to move on and find someone who was actually interested.

A few minutes later, I heard the door to the lobby open once again. I looked over eagerly to see who it was—I hoped this interaction wouldn’t be like the last with that Rogue woman, who was still sitting next to me at the bar, completely ignoring my existence.

When I turned my gaze to the entrance. I saw a man standing in the doorway, having swung the door wide open and stepped inside. He looked around the room with a warm smile on his plain-looking face. Then his eyes went to the bar, and he locked on to me, his smile turning from warm to ice cold.

His Cleric’s robes rustled as he took another step inside, letting the door swing idly closed. His eyes were still locked onto me.

It was Jon.