Chapter 24: Chapter 24: Two fours are a cursed number, because that is eight and eight looks like two frog eyes!

Beni is missing.

 

It is later in the evening and Hineni has returned back to the adventurer’s guild. But the elven man is nowhere to be seen.

 

“Beniiii~!” calls Sockel, peeking into his office again, despite having looked there only two minutes ago. They had checked out the rest of the guild, assuming that the man was perhaps simply upstairs or in the washroom. But no, he’s just not here. “It’s not like him, but maybe he went home?” asks Sockel. “The poor guy had a panic attack earlier, after all.” She thinks for a moment, rubbing her tired eyes. “I had no idea that he was so stressed.”

 

Hineni stares around the office. It isn’t ransacked or anything of the sort. If they had threatened Beni and forced the elf to rat him out, would they come after him again for telling him about it? Is this their handiwork?

 

“Frogs…” mutters Hineni beneath his scarf, his whispering tone creeping through the fabric covering his mouth.

 

Sockel turns from the office door to look at him. “Frogs?” she asks.

 

Hineni nods, lifting his gaze to her, peering through the slit of space between his hat and his obscuring covering. “I think the frogs took him, Sockel. This is bad.”

 

She tilts her head. “Are you okay? Do you need to sleep?” she asks. “You aren’t making any sense.”

 

Hineni shakes his head. “Remember the trouble-makers that I told you about, after I came back a few days ago?” She thinks, nodding. “’Frogs’. They’re cultists of a rival god,” he explains, before going on to tell her about the entire development of events that had led up to this situation.

 

“Sorry for bringing you into this,” apologizes Hineni. “I didn’t think it would get this bad.”

 

She frowns, standing there with crossed arms, leaning against the doorway to the office that is marked with several indents in the wood, where knives had once been thrown with marksman-like precision. Tsking once, she turns her head and heads into the office, rummaging through the drawers in Beni’s desk. Sockel comes back out a second later, carrying a small key and one of the daggers that Hineni made a few days ago.

 

“Come on,” she says, taking a serious tone that he’s never heard from her. She reaches up to the top of the window of her counter and pulls down a shutter, closing it for the first time that he’s ever seen. “His house is just around the corner. Maybe he just felt sick and went home?” she suggests. But from her tone, it doesn’t really sound like she herself believes it.

 

Hineni nods, watching the odd elven woman take the lead. There’s something different about her demeanor, something more serious and professional about the way she’s holding herself as she tucks the dagger into her belt.

 

Maybe a few hours of sleep really can work wonders.

 

---

 

The two of them, Hineni and Sockel, stand outside of Beni’s house. It’s a simple town-house that looks exactly like all of those that it sits next to. It’s plain, but well kept and not ugly. It looks like a solid, if not entirely unique, home. But there’s nothing wrong with that.

 

Sockel opens the door, looking inside. “Beni?” she calls. “I’m here with the owl-guy. We’re coming in, okay?” She steps inside and Hineni walks in after her, closing the door behind himself as he looks around the room.

 

It’s adequately furnished. In his eyes, it looks like a perfectly normal house, while another, more old fashioned person might say that it lacks a woman’s touch, he finds it… an interesting take on the bachelor lifestyle. Especially the several extremely detailed statues of women of varying sizes that are scattered all around the rooms.

 

Extremely detailed.

 

Beni was a bit of a… uh… connoisseur of fine art, for a lack of better terms.

 

Hineni blinks, having caught the word in his thoughts. ‘Was’.

 

“Is,” says Hineni to himself, looking around the room. But, he can’t help but think that it isn’t too late for Beni. Not because of any signs of a scuffle or anything obvious like that. But because of the smell in the room.

 

Sockel comes back out from another room. “He’s not here,” she says, looking around for any signs of a clue. Her ears twitch. “Ugh, Beni is such a fucking creep. It stinks like gunk in here.”

 

Hineni shakes his head, heading over to the middle of the room, by the couches. There’s a wet spot on the rug. “It’s not gunk,” he says, pointing at the sludge with his glove. “This smell… it’s frog.”

 

“Frog? Really?” she asks. “What do frogs even smell like? How do you know?”

 

“I’ve smelt a lot of frogs,” says Hineni. This is a perfectly legitimate thing to reply with, after all. “They’ve been here. Look,” he says, pointing at the spot. “I think they took Beni.”

 

“Is he dead?” she asks, getting right to the point.

 

Hineni blinks, staring at her for a moment, before looking back at the spot. “They didn’t kill me when they had the chance.” Not at first, at least. But he was only there for three days and Obscura had essentially incapacitated all of the cultists. So who knows what their true intentions would have been, hadn’t she intervened, had he been there on the fourth day? The frog day. ‘Frog’ and ‘four’ both start with the letter ‘F’, you see, and they both have four letters.

 

Hineni’s eyes shift around the room, paranoid, wide.

 

It makes perfect sense.

 

“Come on. Let’s go. Maybe Obscura knows something,” he says.

 

The two of them leave, heading back to his house.

 

---

 

“They took the Beni,” says Hineni, as he looks at Obscura. She’s floating upside down in her human form, her hood dangles downward. Despite the light present in the room, despite the angle that she finds herself in, somehow, her face isn’t as visible as it should be. Hineni realizes that he has taken on another one of her mannerisms. “Beni,” he corrects himself, shaking his head.

 

“Please,” says Sockel. “Beni’s my friend. Is there anything you can do?” she pleads.

 

Obscura slowly floats there with crossed arms, drifting around at an angle as she seems to be thinking. “The Beni fed my HINENI -!” she croons, saying his name very loudly for some reason. “- to the bad-frogs,” says Obscura. “Now the bad-frogs have come to eat the Beni. Four!” she hoots.

 

Sockel leans in towards her, apparently not too phased by her status as a deity. “Beni’s a weirdo, but he’s not a bad guy!”

 

Obscura’s head snaps her way. “Four!”

 

“It doesn’t matter how many letters his name has!” argues Sockel. “That doesn’t make any sense!”

 

Obscura drifts around, spinning back around and landing on the ground on her taloned feet. “Obscura does not care for the Beni,” she says, sounding indifferent to the man’s fate. “But sock-elf cared for her Hineni when he was ill,” says the owl-goddess, tilting her head at an angle.

 

Hineni thinks that he’s figured it out now, the sock-elf thing. Back when he was sick and needed to be healed at the adventurer’s guild, someone had to come here and get his clothes. That was Sockel. She had already met Obscura back then, who had given her the three socks along with his clothes. He thinks the third-sock thing was a miscommunication of biological matters, but that isn’t important. Obscura was apparently just as confused about the bodily workings of a human as he was about hers.

 

Though, he can’t tell if Obscura is calling her that because she was literally an elf that had gotten his socks one time, or if she just doesn’t know how to say her name. Then again… didn’t he do it too?

 

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The owl-goddess nods. “Mighty Obscura will look for her Beni.” Sockel’s tension loosens, her shoulders falling slack.

 

“Thank you,” she says, sighing, apparently relieved.

 

“The cloister?” asks Hineni. He doesn’t assume that the frogs would use the same location twice, honestly. But he wouldn’t know where else they could be.

 

Obscura shrugs. “Frogs are dumb, dumb! Dumb frogs!” She clicks with her mouth, spinning her head in a circle. “They aren’t clever like Ob~ scu~ ra!” says the owl-goddess, pridefully, puffing out the feathers on her body.

 

“Should I go with you?” asks Hineni.

 

She shakes her head. “Hineni is strong. But he is slow. Snail slow! Snail Hineni!” She floats up into the air. “Obscura goes now. Bye.”

 

He had assumed this would be the case and grabs her hand, pulling her back down towards himself. “Be careful,” says the man. He pulls her in. They kiss. Rhine opens the door.

 

“Ew! Gross!” exclaims the boy.

 

Hineni turns his head around, glaring at him. “You’re sweeping today.”

 

“Huh?!” asks Rhine. “I hate sweeping!”

 

By the time Hineni looks back, Obscura is gone and his hand holds nothing but empty air. The man sighs, letting his shoulders fall now too as he stands there for a moment.

 

No, there’s no time to be sad about her being gone. There are other people here. “Sockel,” says Hineni. “You can stay here if you want. I don’t know if you’re in danger or not,” he says.

 

She frowns, crossing her arms. “The guild, though?”

 

Hineni shakes his head. “They might be inside of it already. They could be anyone, anywhere. Do whatever you think is right for you,” says the man, picking up the broom and tossing it to a scowling Rhine. “Sweep. Then meet me in the forge when you’re done,” says Hineni. “We have work to do.”

 

---

 

There’s a problem, of course, with Beni being missing. Beni is the one who approves his sales of weapons. He has access to all of the money that the guild has available. Sockel can only pay him with the coins that she has in her till. Without Beni, he can’t sell his weapons at the comfortable conditions that he’s already arranged.

 

Sure, if the man ‘disappears’ there would be a new appointee eventually. But that new person has no obligation to take on their verbal agreement. It could be that whoever they are would give him a much worse cut, or even more dire, that they want nothing to do with him or his weapons. What if the new appointee is one of the frogs?

 

He’d be out of business. He’d have to find somewhere else to sell his weapons, but his chances in the tower-quarter are slim. The competition is too rough there. Here, in this district, he has the entire quarter to himself.

 

Like it or not, they need Beni.

 

And even more importantly, he needs Obscura to be stronger. He had severely underestimated the danger, even after being kidnapped himself. Maybe he really is just too dumb and naive to be the companion of something as wise and significant as an owl-god?

 

Hineni looks around the forge, trying to find something to redeem himself for his foolishness. He grabs a bar of copper, getting an idea, but it needs to be light, practical. The man digs around, looking for an old sack that he has somewhere around here. It’s not actually his, but his father’s, like just about all of his crafting materials. Still, it’s not like it can go bad.

 

There.

 

Hineni pulls out the bag and looks inside. It’s full of little, lumpy nuggets of an odd, very light, silvery metal. Aluminum. Good for dishware and such things. But not for weapons apart from anything decorative. Too dinky.

 

But it’s perfect for this. Hineni takes some of the aluminium chunks and brings them to his bar of copper. While the smelter heats itself up, devouring wood by what might be cartfuls, Hineni makes his plan out as a rough sketch at his workbench. By the time everything is ready, Rhine comes in, having finished sweeping outside.

 

“We’re making knives,” says Hineni. “Rhine. If you’re going to work for us, you’re going to have to carry a knife with yourself from now on. Always.”

 

Rhine blinks, staring at him. “Really?!” asks the boy excitedly, leaning in. Apparently, this is something he’s more happy than worried about. Ah, to be young.

 

Hineni points at the heap of materials. “Copper. Aluminum,” he explains. “We’re melting them together to make an alloy,” says Hineni. “Get a mold ready for an ingot,” he instructs. Rhine nods and starts with the task. “Together, they make an aluminum-bronze,” explains Hineni.

 

“Is that the level six caster of metals?” asks Rhine.

 

Hineni shakes his head. “It takes the magic-enhancing properties of the copper and dilutes it with the lightness of the aluminum,” explains Hineni. “It’s light. Discrete. It’s the level-five thief of metals,” says the man. “We’re going to be carrying them ourselves all day, after all. So they need to be out of the way.”

 

Rhine rubs his lip with the back of his thumb. “Are we going to be carrying them for as long as we’re carrying this metaphor?”

 

“Boy,” scowls Hineni. “Make the molds.”

 

“How come we need knives?” asks Rhine.

 

“Because the more that people use our weapons,” explains Hineni. “The stronger Obscura gets.”

 

Rhine thinks for a moment. “Really?”

 

Hineni nods. “Yeah. That’s the gist of it.”

 

“Huh…” Rhine stares for a moment and then shrugs, returning to his work. Hineni meanwhile, watches the fires inside of the smelter rise and grow, tickling the insides of the stone walls. He should have thought of this sooner. Of course, if the weapons he makes make Obscura stronger, then there’s no reason that he himself can’t carry one around. The boy, Rhine as well. Hell, he’ll give one to Sockel too.

 

Hineni narrows his eyes, thinking.

 

If he can’t sell his weapons right now because Beni is missing… then maybe he can just make them? Maybe he can just give them away? Sure, they need money. But worst case, they’ll eat frogs for a few weeks. Right now, his priority is the safe return of an important person and the person she is looking for. By making more weapons, by getting them into as many hands as possible, he can help her be safe.

 

And if he has to eat a few frogs for that and to give away a few of his weapons for free, then Hineni is more than willing to do that.

 

“Rhine,” says the man, looking at the blue-haired caster. “Make more molds,” he says. “We’re going to be working through the night.”

 

 

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