Chapter 20: Chapter 16: Coffee Calamity

Chapter 16: Coffee Calamity

 

---

“I’ve never seen someone do…. what he did. It was unnatural. Inhuman. They were already dead—" (The prisoner, at this point, began sobbing, and it was only after several minutes of patient waiting that the following could be coaxed from him.) “Why didn’t he stop? They were already dead— Why didn’t he stop?”

---

 

The man, portly, of middling height, and sporting a whimsical mustache that turned up at the tips, shrugged his shoulders and turns his palms upwards as he apologized to Logan.

 

“We ran out soon after you left… sir,” the street market chef said, hesitating on the “sir,” as if unsure if it should be included but wary not to.

 

It wasn’t every day that someone approached him to buy five hundred Axel Hound Gyros, and he couldn’t imagine the use anyone would have for so much food, nor how they would transport it—the strangely emphatic man hadn’t brought a cart with him.

 

“Damn it Mikey!”

 

“How is this my fault? I’m not the one who ran off and stumbled into some magical, mind-bending memory-wiping old woman without squirreling away a stockpile of delicious sandwiches first. I experience the flavor the same as you do, and I’m not used to having real tastebuds. If anyone should be getting upset, it’s me!”

 

The vendor took a step backwards, recoiling as his odd customer thrust his middle finger into the air in an aggressive gesture that he didn’t understand.

 

“I-I’m sorry! The huntress has most likely already left town and won’t be returning for another few weeks I suspect, but I can offer you qortle gyros, fried sworp legs, and lyerm links if you wait a moment for me to prepare them!”

 

Logan, realizing what he’d done, yanked his hand out of the air, flushing with embarrassment and giving the man an apologetic smile. Huntress?

 

“That sounds fantastic, I’ll take everything,” Logan said offhandedly, cursing Mikey in his mind.

 

“E-Everything?” The vendor glanced at the two large qortle legs, each four feet long, spinning slowly on their spits.

 

“I’ll be back in a few hours,” Logan said, tossing the man a small, brown drawstring pouch that clinked as it landed in his hands.

 

The vendor stood, arms before him cupping the bag, baffled at the exchange. He peaked inside the bag; the glint of silver and gold coins twinkled back at him as he looked up, dumbfounded, at the man walking away.

 

---

 

Logan replaced the candle, a small, bulbous ceramic jar that he could’ve seen being used for hanging plants back on Earth, filled with a dark blue wax and a conspicuous beige wick unlike those he was accustomed to, back onto the table in front of him. He thanked the proprietor standing behind the table, a young, brown-haired woman in a tan and yellow sundress with a broad brimmed hat, then turned to leave.

 

He felt eyes on him, and crossed the busy street, hoping to lose himself in the flow of foot traffic.

 

He’d felt it all day, the disturbing sensation of being watched. He could’ve sworn that there was someone following him, a man in brown drab cloths and boiled leather light armor that he’d seen standing or shopping nearby more than once.

 

Logan walked briskly in the stream of pedestrians, then slipped out of the flow, dodging into an alleyway.

 

The walls were tight on either side, giving only three or four feet in width to move between the buildings. He didn’t want to fight his pursuer; his confidence against mostly-dumb monsters was high, but he was way to confront a stranger of unknown power. The huntress lingered in his mind, a reminder that he was still a naïve babe on Tiris. If it came down to a fight, then he wouldn’t hold back, but he wondered if he wasn’t just being paranoid.

 

Logan rushed through the alley, stepping over a vagrant slumped against a wall. Sparing a moment, he knelt to deposit a few coins and an extra shirt and pair of pants that he’d picked up for the armory. He didn’t know why he did it, exactly. Maybe I can be better this go around.

 

Emerging from the alley, he found himself in a district of the town less cluttered with stands and street vendors. Though there were far less people than the bazaar, individuals and groups still moved along the sidewalks and between the shops. It reminded him of many commercial district city blocks he’d spent the majority of his life around. It wasn’t unlike where he’d worked before he died at the hands of…

 

Emerging from the alley, Logan looked around at the shops before him. There were far less people here than in the bazaar he’d left, and he hoped that he’d thrown off whoever had been watching him.

 

Logan turned onto the sidewalk and used his inventory to change clothes in an instant, making him, hopefully, unrecognizable from behind. Can’t be too careful.

 

He ducked into a general store and bought his share of the shopping list that he’d split with Huck. Torches, lanterns, oil, rope, a net, a flint Firestarter, and various other supplies that Huck deemed important for forest expeditions.

 

He stepped out of the shop, glancing around him for any lurking watchers. In the clear.

 

Across the street under an awning of the outdoor seating area of a coffee shop, a man approached a cloaked figure sitting in a booth facing him. The awning cast shade over the pair, and due to the distance and the cloak he couldn’t make out the other person’s face as they raised a stout ceramic flagon that could’ve been a mug to their lips. He recognized the man, however. It was Cunic, a street chef that Logan had purchased kebabs from earlier.

 

Logan had stopped at his cart after placing his order for the gyros, but the cart was empty and the man who operated it was missing.

 

I guess he was here all along. I’ll ask him if he’s opening today, don’t have much time left here in Tarik, could be now or never.

 

Logan began to cross the street, his foot a step from leaving the sidewalk, when he paused. Cunic was bowing, trying to supplicate the cloaked figure, his face clearly distraught.

 

The other person was speaking too softly to make out, but Logan could hear Cunic’s voice, its quivering, pleading tones travelling across the short distance.

 

“Y-yes of course. I’m sorry for bothering you,” he said as he wrung his hands, bowing repeatedly.

You are reading story Imprimis Son [A Fantasy LitRPG] at novel35.com

 

“Not to bother you on vacation, to be grateful, y-yes Huntress. I will remember, yes Hunt—“

 

Cunic cut off with a yelp as the cloaked figure turned their head slightly, presumably looking at him under the brim of their hood.

 

“Not to call you that. Yes ma’am, have a good vacation, ma’am.”

 

Cunic turned and practically ran, scurrying in all haste away from the seated woman, the huntress, as she sipped her steaming drink.

 

The huntress! On vacation? I should talk to her, Logan thought as he stepped into the street, his eyes fixated on the woman in the booth, ask her how she—

 

Logan froze, rooted in place as if the air around him had become cement. He strained against the overbearing pressure that weighed on him like all the water in the ocean’s depths, crushing and suffocating him. He felt locked to the spot, as if massive roots had grown around his limbs and bound him tight.

 

Logan watched, unable to turn away or even blink, as the woman lowered her hood. She was beautiful… beyond beautiful. Her skin looked as if it’d been polished, every pore perfected, the surface of her face smooth and lustrous. She looked serene, ageless, almost unreal: like a remembered dream.

 

Logan couldn’t help but be reminded of the pictures of models on magazine covers—after several layers of makeup and hours editing, their “perfection” couldn’t compare to the woman lounging in the booth across the street, idly sipping her coffee and fixing him with a lazy stare. Despite the circumstances, Logan felt a little self-aware, and he could feel his face beginning to grow hot.

 

The supernatural pressure that’d arisen from seemingly nowhere, though he presumed it must be the huntress’s doing, increased in intensity, compressing his body as if he were being constricted by blood pressure cuffs from all sides.

 

Water rose in his vision, but he couldn’t blink it away as he stared into her eyes, a pair of penetrating green emeralds that spoke of bright forest leaves bursting with life. Her hair was straight and smooth, a light birch-brown that was pulled back behind her ears and disappeared under her robe.

 

A subtle breeze whispered then, which he somehow felt upon his cheek amidst the onslaught of the huntress’s attack, and with it came the realization of what he was seeing as he looked closer at the woman.

 

Her hair was tucked behind an ear; an elegant ear, pierced by a spiraling dull-gold rod beginning in the bottom earlobe and travelling all the way up through the helix where it split into two intricate leaves that lightly hugged either side of the top, which ended in a lightly pointed tip.

 

“She’s an elf! An ELF!” Logan thought to Mikey. Luckily, he didn’t need to be able to move his lips to talk to his bodily companion.

 

“Are those the ones in anime with the pointy ears that are always weirdly underage, helpless, and enslaved? Doesn’t seem like an elf to me, bucko,” Mikey said, making the sound of sucking in air through his teeth; an impossible sound considering he had no access to air nor the teeth to suck it through.

 

More shocking even than the pointed, ornamented ears were the thin brown tendrils, like veins or roots, just above the surface of her skin, snaking out from beneath the cloak and running up her neck. They were just barely visible, tracing her collar bone and disappearing under her hair and cloak.

 

Her lips, full and light caramel, drew into a knowing smile. If Logan hadn’t been forced to hold his breath since the pressure took him, it would have caught in his throat.

 

She set the too-large mug onto the tabletop and rose, an elegant motion that made her look a queen rising from her throne. She gave Logan a final, lingering look, then turned away and strode in the opposite direction from him, pulling her hood up to cover her as she went.

 

Several moments passed, though they felt like an eternity to Logan, and he was released from the pressure. It retreated in an instant, like a tablecloth yanked from a table by an expert hand.

 

He panted for breath, hands on his knees, face to the street before looking up at where the huntress had sat. She was long gone, completely out of site. He knew intuitively that even if he did attempt to chase after her, she’d be impossible to find.

 

“What—the fuck—just happened,” Logan thought into the shared space of his mind.

 

“What you would’ve referred to on Earth as a ‘Baddie,’ I believe,” Mikey said, an image of him holding a mug and giving Logan a sultry smile appearing in his head.

 

“Right. The force, the pressure, the… thing—whatever it was that she did to me. I was completely powerless. Can lots of people do that? Because if so, then I am so utterly fucked.”

 

“She seems exceptionally powerful, Master Logan. Perhaps it is something to do with her race, or, species, but I am unsure. I felt it through your senses… it was somehow familiar, as if I should know of its source but can’t quite discern it. And she didn’t feel hostile, in fact I felt a certain sense of alive-ness, like new growth after a forest fire.”

 

“I felt that too… hopefully we don’t encounter anyone else like her until we figure out what the hell this thing is, though.”

 

Logan straightened and looked around him.

 

No one following me this time, that’s something at least.

 

Trying his best to shake off the experience, he took a roundabout route back to the main bazaar plaza and retrieved his order from the gyro stand. The food tab of his inventory bulged, and he appraised his encumbrance meter with a critical eye.

 

Still in the green, let’s go, he thought, relieved.

 

Logan made his way back to the inn, taking care to alter his path of return, walking several blocks in different directions to throw off any potential tail. The near-certainty that he’d been followed earlier awoke buried feelings of suspicion in him which he could only assume were traces left behind from his dea— Logan’s mind blanked and refocused, like a phone being locked and reopened.

 

A half hour later, he arrived in front of the inn.

 

Thinking back to the encounter he couldn’t help but flush with self-conscious embarrassment, not only at his inability to retaliate or free himself, but at the huntress herself. Her smile lingered in his mind as he pulled open the door to the Firestone, ascended the stairs, and plopped down onto his bed for a much-needed nap.

You can find story with these keywords: Imprimis Son [A Fantasy LitRPG], Read Imprimis Son [A Fantasy LitRPG], Imprimis Son [A Fantasy LitRPG] novel, Imprimis Son [A Fantasy LitRPG] book, Imprimis Son [A Fantasy LitRPG] story, Imprimis Son [A Fantasy LitRPG] full, Imprimis Son [A Fantasy LitRPG] Latest Chapter