Duskbound

Velik was a quarter mile from the coliseum, still solidly in Gold Town, when he sensed someone following him. Whoever it was, they were making no effort to hide their presence. Footsteps jogged down the street behind him, coming his direction, and at first, he suspected a member of the city watch. It was hard to think of anyone else who'd have a reason to chase him down in the middle of a random street in an affluent neighborhood late at night.

Then he saw who it was running after him. Haven't seen him in a while. Please don't be a fan of the coliseum. I'm not interested in talking about it.

"Velik," Jensen said as he approached. "Hi."

"Hi," Velik said guardedly.

Torwin's former apprentice didn't look much like how Velik remembered him. Gone were the various trinkets, the leather, the gauntlets, and the bow. His hair was combed out and tied back behind his head, and his face didn't have so much as a speck of dirt. Even his nails were trimmed and cleaned. Instead of any sort of armor, he was wearing clothes that Velik didn't have words for, but which were far more common in places like Gold Town than they were in the poor parts of the city.

"Saw your fight back there," Jensen said.

Damn it.

"What fight?" Velik asked, hoping to deflect the conversation but doubting it would work.

"The one where you disintegrated that flesh beast. Was it… you know… Was it the same as the ones up north?"

Velik was not a good liar. His best defense against probing questions was to shut his mouth and scowl at whoever was trying to pump him for information, but in this case, Jensen was kind of an ally, and if he'd learned anything from those stupid etiquette classes—which was debatable, according to his instructor—it was that burning bridges by being surly and rude had a tendency to come back and cause him problems later.

"I don't know," he admitted after a heavy pause. "It was similar. I think its regeneration might have been stronger, but that might have been a level difference or because I wasn't using a real weapon to fight it."

"You're going to follow up on it?" Jensen asked. Discover hidden tales at My Virtual Library Empire

"When I can. It's out of the country, and I'm still tangled up in some guild business. If I bail on them now, the last few months of work will have been for nothing, so I want to get that taken care of before I go. Hopefully it'll only take a few days."

Knowing his luck, it wouldn't be that quick. Completing a gold-ranked assignment could take a day or two, or it could take months. For that matter, it could be a week or more of traveling one way just to get to wherever the problem was. Bronzes and silvers tended to work at the local level, but there weren't enough golds that they always had that luxury. The only thing he was sure of was that he wouldn't be leaving the country, as the monster hunters guild didn't have a license to operate outside of Ghestal.

"You need help getting out of the country?" Jensen asked.

It was suspicious and concerning that he'd latched onto that. Velik knew he wasn't politically savvy, but he was smart enough to recognize when someone wanted something from him. "I wouldn't say I need help," he said slowly. "It's just Slokara. Might be a bit of a pain to get across the border, but I'll manage, somehow."

"Maybe we could help each other."

There it is. What do you want, Jensen? Would it kill you to just say it instead of hedging the whole time?

"Help how?" Velik asked.

"You remember my class upgrade? Well, I'm trying to put together an expedition, but I'm hitting some unexpected snags." Jensen paused for a minute. "Maybe not so unexpected. My father doesn't want me doing something so dangerous, so he's leaning on every potential investor I can find. Without some startup capital, I'll never get out of the city."

"You want me to fund your expedition?" Velik asked, surprised. He had a lot of decarmas, but that was more on a personal level than a business one. Maybe he could buy out the general store at any of the frontier towns, but he doubted he could afford to finance the kind of project Jensen was talking about.

"What? You? Gods no. No offense, but I doubt those champion seeds were worth that much. No, you see, I've got a potential investor who just loves the coliseum. Guess who his favorite gladiator is."

Velik groaned. "I don't like where this is going."

"He wants to meet you and gush over how amazing you are. You could probably just wear the gladiator mask and preserve your identity, though I doubt he'd go running to the guild to tell them you've been participating in illegal underground monster fights. And he wants you to hire onto the expedition as muscle to protect his interests."

"That explains what you get out of it," Velik said. "Where's the part where this helps me?"

"Simple. We haven't set a destination yet. We'll just pick some place in Slokara, preferably close to where you need to go. Then you can cross the border with the caravan and not have to worry about things."

That would make the checkpoint easier to handle, not to mention giving him some legitimacy for being in the country if the local authorities decided to hassle him. But it also meant traveling on someone else's schedule. Their pace would be much slower than what he could manage on his own, and he had no idea when Jensen's expedition was even leaving. It could be months away, still.

"I'm going to need some more details before I agree to anything," Velik said.

"Well, we haven't really set anything in stone yet. Acquiring funding is the first step, and the investors get a say in things, so we have more of an outline of a plan with a lot of decisions yet to be made. But ultimately, I'm the one who decides where the expedition goes, so if I say Slokara, then we head south."

Somehow, Velik doubted it was that simple. If other people were involved and throwing money at the project, they were going to want a say in where it went, how long it stayed, and—irrelevant to Velik—what happened to whatever was discovered and brought back. Maybe in the future, When Jensen had enough cash to fund the whole thing himself, he could make every little decision, but that didn't seem to be the case today.

"Okay, here's what I'll do. I'll meet with your investor and tell him that I'm willing to sign on, but only so long as the expedition goes to Slokara. I don't know how long I'm going to be out of the city doing this guild stuff, but I'd prefer to leave as soon as possible once I come back. I'll also expect a week or two to take care of my own business once we get to whatever site your class points you to. That, or I won't be accompanying you back home after you're done."

"That's mostly fair," Jensen agreed. "The departure time thing is a tough sell. If you had a better idea, we could plan around that. Let's say six weeks from today as a soft target that we can push back a little bit if we have to?"

Velik had no idea if he was agreeing to something reasonable here, but he at least knew enough about Jensen to know that he was fundamentally honest and greedy. He would try to get as much money as he could out of the expedition without screwing everyone else over. Whether or not this was a good deal, he at least trusted that Jensen thought it was.

"I'll agree to meet with your investor," Velik said after he thought about it. "We'll figure out terms from there."

"Excellent! I'll come meet you tomorrow and take you on by. Where are you staying?"

"Melon and Peach."

Jensen's grin faltered. "The, uh, the cat house?"

"I didn't realize what it was when I found it. It was clean, quiet, and comfortable."

"Uh. Yeah, I guess? Maybe we can just meet at the guild hall? Let's say around noon."

Velik quickly agreed, not in the least because he wanted to get moving again. More than a few passersby had been giving them curious looks, not all of them friendly. The fact of the matter was that he'd been so distracted back at the coliseum that he hadn't showered before leaving, and there was still some dried blood on him that his grays hadn't blocked.

The two parted ways, Jensen heading deeper into Gold Town and Velik returning to Melon and Peach. Normally, he'd have stayed up for another four or five hours, but he'd learned early on that with no monsters to kill and a city full of patrolmen who were quite eager to know what exactly he was doing skulking around late at night, it was easier to just adapt his schedule to take care of all of his business while the sun was up.

His temporary home, of course, was open all night long. That was how he'd found it in the first place, by looking for a place to sleep an hour before dawn. Melon and Peach was upscale enough that he was able to claim a meal before bed, a luxury he'd promised himself he'd never take for granted. Ten years of eating his own cooking had been more than enough.

He took a quick bath, ignoring the women he was sharing the shallow pool with. They were off-duty at this point and not interested in flirting, though perhaps that had more to do with his absolute refusal to get dragged into any of their beds the entire time he'd been staying there. They'd learned quickly enough not to waste their time asking.

Jensen, and this gold-ranked assignment. Slokara and flesh beasts. Everything's coming all at once now after months of boredom. That's just my luck.

With those thoughts chasing each other around in his head, he finally closed his eyes and fell asleep.