Chapter 148: Humanoid Road 13 – Getting a little clarity

The trio had no further issues on their travels north. Keeping a quick pace and never dwelling anywhere, only stopping to sleep or hunt, they reached the north of the island in a bit over five days. Once there, they were faced with good and bad news. The good news was that there was no city around this dungeon. The entrance to Myrlight was located at the bottom of a large, rocky crater and apparently nobody wanted to set up more than a few farming hamlets in the area. Those farming hamlets, however, supplied food to an Adventurer’s Guild outpost that was built on top of the entrance.

That building, a large wooden house with several open windows on ground level, through which officials could talk to approaching adventurers, was the bad news. The trio continued to be wary of Distance Feathers or other mechanisms by which the Adventurer’s Guild may have spread news of their existence. Should news of their current location spread, there was no telling how the Guild would react.

In this lay a bit of a problem that Aclysia now brought up.

“…Reysha… I… want to ask you something of low moral calibre,” the metal fairy spoke up, while they rested in a corner of the rocky crater that shielded them from unwanted views.

“Oh? Do tell!” Reysha’s tail waved slowly with excitement.

“How secure do you estimate that building is when it comes to thieves?” Aclysia asked.

Raising an eyebrow and smiling broadly, Reysha peeked out behind the rock and inspected the outpost with more careful eyes. “Depends,” she answered while looking at the layout. “I mean, getting in there should be really fucking easy. There’re all of those Scribe windows that I can climb in through or I could climb up the walls and get in through the normal windows on the second floor. I reckon I could even cut myself in through the roof, if I was given enough time. With how temperate it is around here; I doubt that straw layer is particularly thick.” She pulled back and leaned against the very rock she had looked past, “Getting in is very easy, but whether or not it’s safe to do so depends on who and how many are staying there overnight. What’cha thinkin’ about, Clysia?”

“I would like you to get inside and see if they have received any news of us and, if yes, what that news entails,” Aclysia responded.

“A hunt-down order?” Apexus suggested, inspecting an interesting looking rock. Its outside was craggy, grey and just what would be expected of a stone. Part of it, however, had burst off and revealed that the inside was hollow and lines with crystals. “What else would they send?”

Reysha nodded and Aclysia found it hard to disagree. None of them had particular great experiences with regular adventurers, given what they had been put through because of people in that profession. They were all wise enough to not be prejudiced against individual adventurers because of this, but they did distrust the institution at large. They had hunted Apexus when he had spared Mehily and her group. Now that he and his two women were affiliated with the murder of several thousand people on a Safe Leaf, they doubted the Adventurer’s Guild could have produced anything outside of a bounty and vile propaganda. They had the same view towards the Church.

Recently, however, Aclysia had been reconsidering the possibilities. A sign of her own psychological trauma waning and because they had met quite a few entities by now that had been good to them, she wondered if, perhaps, there were people further up the command chain that considered things more carefully.

“I understand and agree that a bounty has most likely been placed on us,” Aclysia said. “Whatever news has reached them; it is most probable that they interpreted it to place us as an accomplice in Apotho’s action. It could also be, however, that they are not inherently hostile towards us and are simply looking for more information. Aside from us, who could have provided the entire picture?”

As far as the group knew, the answer to that was nobody. Perhaps Mehily had survived, she knew much of the story and had appeared repentant. This wasn’t something they were sure about. Aside from her, everyone had been used as fuel by Apotho. The next best source about the happenings were those that had ran or lived far enough from the city that the Deathhounds hadn’t found them.

“What little information they have could cast us in a bad light, but it is by no means guaranteed that they will be inherently hostile.”

“I suppose not…” Apexus hesitantly agreed. Carefulness drove him to remain rather suspicious, but since it was his love presenting an understandable line of reason, he had to accept the possibility.

“So, you suggest I break in there and steal the communication documents?” Reysha asked, seeing where this was going.

“Steal them or, better, read them while you’re there. The less signs of your presence you leave, the better it would be,” Aclysia confirmed and lowered her head in a pleading motion. “I know this request puts you in harm’s way and it will be difficult to find anything, but I would ask you to try.”

Apexus put down the geode. “Let’s assume she finds the documents,” the slime said, “and let’s assume they mark us as neutral or even approving, what then? Do we hand ourselves over?”

“No,” Aclysia’s answer was firm and quick, since she had already thought about this. “No, I do not wish us under the influence of anyone we do not trust and I’m unwilling to risk a change of mind inside the organization ending our lives. If they are neutral or friendly to us, we can behave more lax in the future. Optimal for us would be, however, if they do not care about our existence at all. This is, as unlikely as I find it, also a possibility.”

Apexus hesitated. Through all of the last few months, he had assumed that there was someone on their trail. Being hunted several times by adventurers had made him think that way. Like Aclysia, he reconsidered. The people of this Leaf hadn’t treated him in such a way at any point. Blind trust was out of the window, but now he wondered if he was more paranoid than he needed to be.

‘Maybe the Omniverse is much larger than I thought it was?’ the thought occurred to him. He had seen the sprawling Branches and the endless Leaves attached to them. ‘How quickly can an organization that spans an endless number of worlds conceivably make decisions?’ He felt almost stupid for not considering this earlier. Like Reysha had succeeded in taking greater control of herself during trauma, Apexus felt as if he was finally able to think in broader terms than his own immediate survival instinct. He hadn’t noticed just how thick that barrier had been until this point. “I support this plan,” he said.

“Guess this outpost is a blessing in disguise then,” Reysha hummed and rolled her neck. She had been following along and agreed with what had been said. “What if I find nothing though?”

“Then we continue under the worst assumptions, behaving the same way we did until now,” Aclysia answered. “This outpost may not have been important enough to get the information. Better to be safe than sorry.”

“Roger that,” Reysha nodded. “Alright, then we start the first part of a successful break-in,” she said and laid down so she could keep watch of the building while still being concealed. “Let’s study our victims.”

Three days, the group spent looking at the building and checking on things. During that time, they spotted nine people around it. Six of them were adventurers, a party of four that had gone in and a party of two that had come out. One was still inside, while the other had left westwards. The remaining three seemed to be the local employees and none of them appeared to be fighters to the trio. Looks could lie, but they only ever saw them in work clothes and only armed with writing utensils. All of them went to their homes in the nearby villages at the end of the work day. However, the building was never truly vacated.

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Because adventurers could have come out at any hour, one of the employees was present at any given hour. There were hours of overlap, where it was two of them, and hours where they were alone. “I can do it,” Reysha decided on the morning of the fourth day. “Should be child’s play.”

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During the night of that fourth day, Reysha snuck up to the back of the house. Her most important tool for that mission were her ears. Listening for the sole Scribe currently inside the outpost  determined everything about the success of this break-in. Silently, she stood by the back door, the opposite end of the house that faced the large hole that was the dungeon entrance. She waited for steps, a tired yawn or simple, bored monologue.

She got the middle of those three options, audibly echoing from within the first floor and near the openings made for conversing with passing adventurers. The Scribe on duty was sitting on his post, drawing pictures to pass the time, completely oblivious to the Rogue now gently pushing down the handle of the backdoor. As she had seen numerous times from the other Scribes working at this place, it opened without issue.

The door was left unlocked all the time to ease shift changes. A luxury that could only be taken by people that lived in an area nobody really cared about. The outpost existed solely because this was the designated dungeon recommended to adventurers who had graduated from the difficulty of Summer Rest. There was no shop there, no inn and no valuables to steal outside of copper cards and information that was basically freely distributed. The only interesting thing there was the dungeon itself and so the Scribes never had to deal with anything but a few eccentric fellows. Nothing that warranted a bodyguard had happened in several years and so they just hadn’t employed one.

Such safety now served Reysha well, as she made her way inside. The floor was the same stone as the crater, modified by a mason to make for a level footing. Everything else was wood, parchment, or metal, in order of most to least common material used. The furniture, from the chairs to the tables, was simple brown wood and covered in all sorts of notes. Candleholders were scattered about, illuminating the inside of the house quite well. The door that would have led to the room where the on-shift Scribe was simply leaned on. It was enough for Reysha to feel secure and carefully close the door behind her.

She avoided stepping into the view through the gap and read a few of the documents without touching them. It was a series of reports. What had happened during what shift, if an adventurer’s card had been given out or updated, who had been there and other such basic things. Nothing of that seemed to be what Reysha needed to find and, more than that, it was all quite recent.

‘There has to be some kind of archive,’ she thought and looked around. There was another door, which led into a carefully sealed latrine. Heavily doubting she would find what she wanted there, Reysha retreated and looked for the only avenue of search left: the floor above. Inside the building, a flight of wooden stairs led upwards. ‘Can’t take that way,’ the redhead decided. ‘There’s no way those won’t creak. Guess I’ll have to climb in from outside.’

Leaving through the backdoor, she searched for an extended truss and an open window. Once she had found a place where both coincided, she extended her right hand in a quick motion. The ivy of the enchanted glove flew outwards and attached itself, allowing Reysha to climb up without coming in contact with the wooden walls. Silently, she climbed in.

Inside she was greeted by the smell of parchment. ‘Careful now,’ she told herself, looking at the wooden floorboards. They were sturdier than those of the stairs, but the danger existed regardless. Slowly moving through, she took a look around. Scrolls upon scrolls were tucked away in shelves Reysha thought would be better used for wine bottles. On a table lay a blank sheet of paper and, held up by a small construction of metal, was a particularly large and ornate feather. A Distance Feather, the very tool used by Scribes to communicate over long distances and, potentially, even across Leaves.

That one was only paired with one in the Adventurer Guild’s centre on the Leaf by the city located around the Stem. Reysha guessed as much but grinned regardless. A surprised giggle got stuck in her throat. If they had a stable line to the centre, all widely distributed information would have ended up here eventually. Given that it had been several months since the events in Ctania, it doubtlessly had reached this little outpost.

Now it was just a question of where. The room was well sorted, but Reysha wasn’t privy to the system used. ‘I can’t read all of these,’ she thought the obvious and tried to make sense of the badges fixed to the shelves. There were dates, but she hadn’t kept track of the way this Leaf counted its months, so those were absolutely useless to her. Instead, she looked for something that just screamed ‘urgent’. After about twenty minutes of moving around the large archival room, always listening to any sounds she or the person downstairs made, she found a shelf that wasn’t sorted by date. It was largely empty, the scrolls arranged into separated pockets. Curious, she pulled out one.

‘Economy on Lurkelia Winter Leaf stabilized. Situation ended,’ it read. Putting it back and taking another one from the same cluster, she read. ‘Investigations have shown that it was an influx of adventurers from nearby leaves flooding the markets with extra loot. All Adventurer Guild employees in the area are to stop recommending Lurkelia as the follow-up Leaf to visit. Distribute them more broadly instead.’

‘I guess these are sorted by crisis topic,’ Reysha thought and put that one back as well. Before she pulled out scrolls at random, she tried to find those that looked the newest. Finding a whole cluster of relatively new scrolls, white where others were starting to go yellow, she extended her hand. ‘And there we go,’ she thought, happy with herself. Her mood dampened when she read the report.

‘Ctania ruined – Heralry inhabitants almost completely eradicated – Investigations Pending – Do NOT send ANYONE to Ctania under ANY circumstances.’ She put the scroll away and took another one. ‘Known entity on Leaf escaped containment. Further matters are classified. Seek out your local guild master, if you wish to find out more.’ She read through a couple more scrolls, about how the investigation continued, until she came about the one that held the information Aclysia had sought. ‘Matter inconclusive and investigations at a stalemate. Beware of redheaded Warlocks.’

Reysha blinked at those simple lines of text. The realization only slowly dawned on her as she put the scroll back from where she had it.

The Adventurer’s Guild had gone through all of the paperwork that they could that was left on the Leaf. It wasn’t much.

There were sightings and developments regarding Apexus. Quest logs kept by guild officials that showed when the bounty for an odd, winged slime had been put on. A death record of a guard noted that he was eaten by the slime previously thought dead.

There were a few records about Reysha. Particularly her getting caught and escaping. That was about it.

There was almost no info about Aclysia. All the Adventurer’s Guild investigators had was a single sighting during the Stem confrontation. Nothing else about her appearances had been kept in writing, only referring to her as the Divine Quest otherwise.

None of these three individuals and the limited data available about them had led anyone to think they were in any way related to the death of an entire city. Reysha and Apexus were just another thing that occurred around that time. An odd occurrence, certainly, but nothing that could be put into relation to the deaths of thousands. It would have taken someone from Heralry, someone who had been around, to fill the gaps. The bureaucracy of a Safe Leaf simply wasn’t designed with the sudden death of everyone keeping it up in mind.

And so it was that none of their names or appearances had ended up in the communication. Everyone assumed Reysha was either dead or still on the Leaf, the same was true for the slime. Even if they thought the two had left, they had greater worries than report such a comparatively small incident.

Reysha, of course, had no idea how their lack of presence came about. All she could be sure about was what she had just read. The Adventurer’s Guild didn’t know they were connected to this case. They hadn’t been lucky in avoiding attention, they weren’t being searched for at all.

Calmly she left the building through the window and went to share this information with the rest of her party.

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