Chương 304: chapter 266

Thalric Ashenvale stands in front of the public Tutor board with the heaviest hangover of his life and the worst friends in the entire kingdom. He is nineteen years old. He is the youngest Diamond-rank in three generations of his family. His name is engraved on the wall of the Ashenmere training hall in letters as tall as a man's hand. Children point at him in the street. Old women bring him fresh bread and refuse payment. The mine foremen tip their helmets when he walks past the gates.

He is, as everyone in the city has been telling him since he was eleven, the pride of Ashenmere, despite not being an Ashenmere himself. And he is about to hire the worst Tutor in the city.

"Just pick one," says Doran, leaning against the corkboard with his arms crossed.

"It's not going to bite you."

"Pick the worst one," says Maelin, who has not stopped grinning since last night.

"That was the bet."

"I know what the bet was."

"An entire session with him. No protesting. You promised. We'll be checking, and we'll bring snacks."

"Snacks," Thalric repeats.

"A big bag," says Doran. Thalric closes his eyes. He should not have agreed to play. He knew, watching Doran shake the dice cup, that whatever came up he was going to regret. But he had been four cups deep and feeling generous, and he had just defeated a Diamond-rank visitor from the Greenmarsh in a public sparring match, and the world had felt very, very forgiving. The world is no longer forgiving.

The world is making him stand in front of a public Tutor board at nine in the morning while two of his closest friends watch him pick the most disgraceful instructor in Ashenmere. He scans the board. Only the worst Tutors and those without a Token would put their names up on such a bulletin board. Desperate, very desperate people. Thalric reads them with growing despair. Master Veralt, instruction in basic forms, three coppers per session. The handwriting is shaky.

Madame Korre, traditional cultivation methods of the Old Tribes, payment negotiable. There is a small drawing of a frog next to her name. The frog is winking. Hedge Tutor Wenn, all techniques considered, will travel. Someone has scrawled UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES across the listing in red chalk. And then, in the corner, almost falling off the board because the pin is loose, a flyer Thalric has to read three times because the name does not look like a name. OCABJ. He stares at it.

"What does that say?"

"What does what say?" Doran leans in.

"That one. Bottom corner. The one with the loose pin." Doran squints.

"Ocabj."

"How do you say that?"

"I don't know. O-cabj? Oh-cabbage?" Maelin laughs so hard he bends in half. Thalric reads the rest of the flyer. Tutor Ocabj, accepting students of all levels. Mid-tier credentials. Reasonable rates. Inquire at the Sleeping Goose Inn, room above the kitchen. The handwriting is pretty bad itself and the pin is half-loose, with the flyer about to, well, fly away at any moment.

Thalric notices, leaning closer, that there are at least six other copies of the same flyer pinned all over the lower section of the board, like someone had made a hundred of them and given up trying to find a single decent spot. It is, by every metric, the worst listing on the board.

"That one," Maelin says. Thalric groans, knowing they'd have picked that. Doran whistles.

"Oh, that's a winner. A real winner."

"Make sure you remember the name when you sign in," Maelin says.

"We're going to need to put it on your tomb." Thalric does not respond. He pulls the flyer off the board, folds it in half, puts it in his pocket, and starts walking toward the Sleeping Goose Inn. His friends follow him at a distance, laughing.

The Sleeping Goose is the kind of inn that people walk past without noticing. The sign is faded. The door is propped open with a chipped brick. The innkeeper is a heavyset man with a greasy apron. He looks up from a ledger and squints at Thalric with mild disinterest.

"Help you?"

"I'm looking for a Tutor."

"Don't have one."

"His name is..." Thalric pulls out the flyer, smooths it on the counter.

"Ocabj." The innkeeper reads it. His eyebrows climb. His mouth twitches.

"Oh," he says." Sir Cabbage." Thalric stares at him, "he's a Knight?"

"That's what we call him," the innkeeper says.

"Mr., Sir Cabbage. Who cares. Up the stairs, second door on the right, the one with the warped frame. Try not to break it. The frame, I mean. Mr. Cabbage's already complained twice this week about the noise."

"Mr. Cabbage."

"That's what I said." Thalric closes his eyes. He hears Maelin behind him making a sound like he's about do die wheezing.

"Thank you," Thalric says between gritted teeth, and walks toward the stairs. The stairs creak. The door with the warped frame is exactly where the innkeeper said it would be, and there is, in fact, a small piece of paper pinned to it with the name Ocabj written in the same bad handwriting as the flyer. Thalric stares at the door for a moment. Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. I won't ever drink with those bastards again, I swear. He raises his hand.

He knocks.

The door opens. The man on the other side is, at first glance, the most unremarkable person Thalric has ever seen. He is young. Perhaps Thalric's age, perhaps a little younger. He is thin. His hair is brown and badly cut. His clothes are simple and slightly creased, like he slept in them and then forgot to change. His eyes are a dull, unremarkable color that Thalric cannot name even while looking directly at them. Everything about him says: I am nobody.

Thalric, who is dressed in his second-best training robes and wearing the family ring, expects this nobody to see him, recognize him, and go pale. The nobody does not go pale. He notices the piece of paper on the door and facepalms, immediately turning his head and shouting back into the room." Lance," he says, with the kind of weary irritation that suggests this is not the first time, "didn't I tell you not to post that damn thing?" A voice from inside the room answers. It is muffled.

It sounds like the speaker is eating something.

"You said some of them."

"I said none of them."

"Mm. That's not how I remember it." Thalric stands in the hallway, watching this exchange happen across him as if he is a piece of furniture. The nobody turns back to him. He looks Thalric up and down. His expression shifts into something that is not contempt, exactly, but a kind of pitying no thank you that Thalric has only ever seen on the faces of women being approached by men they find slightly disgusting.

"Not accepting students," the nobody says.

"Sorry. Please go away." He shuts the door. In Thalric's face. Thalric stands in the hallway for a full three seconds, blinking. Then he looks down at the flyer in his hand, and back at the closed door, and back at the flyer, and his face goes hot.

"DID YOU JUST SLAM THE DOOR ON ME?" There is no answer from inside. Thalric raises his fist to knock again.

Inside the room, Jacob Cloud sits cross-legged on a thin straw mattress and pinches the bridge of his nose with two fingers.

"I am going to kill you." Lancelot, who is sitting on the floor with his back against the wall and a half-eaten meat pie balanced on his knee, raises an eyebrow.

"Why are you killing me. What did I do."

"The flyers. You posted flyers."

"You said we needed students for the Tutor cover, no?"

"I said that maybe we could have had... Look, I said the words do not draw attention. Do you remember those words? Do they sound familiar?"

"You also said we needed a Tutoring license to justify the cover."

"Yes."

"And you said we needed students for the license to look real."

"Yes."

"And how was anyone going to find us if we didn't post anything?" Jacob opens his mouth. He closes it. He pinches the bridge of his nose harder.

"I had a plan, Lance."

"What was the plan."

"The plan was to quietly get a couple of nobodies. The plan did not involve plastering the entire city district with paper that has my fake name on it with your terrible handwriting."

"My handwriting is good," Lancelot says, with mild offense.

"Your handwriting is terrible. The innkeeper called me Mr. Cabbage. Didn't we say the names weren't decided yet?!" Jacob is now shouting. He's got a Primordial Spell that changed both of their appearances and one that isolates the sound and Mana inside the room. Lancelot considers the issue of Jacob's fake name. He bites the meat pie.

"I think Mr. Cabbage is a great name," he says, chewing.

"Very memorable. And, to be fair, would Dark Champions or anyone suspect the Leader of Champions is on a secret mission to foil their plans while being called Mr. Cabbage?"

"I am going to incinerate you."

"Can I finish this, first?" Lancelot raises the meat pie. There is a knock at the door. It is louder than the first one. Jacob looks at the door. He looks at Lancelot. He looks back at the door.

"Don't answer it," he says. Lancelot is already chewing.

"I'm not answering it," Lancelot says.

"I'm eating." The knock comes again. Then a voice through the wood, hot with offended pride.

"I just need some Tutoring and I'll be on my way. I can pay. Good money. I have coin." Jacob lets his head fall back against the wall. He is in Ashenmere on a Special Quest. Three days ago Orrivane pulled him aside at the Academy and said that there was a problem. A small problem. Probably nothing. Probably just a rumor. But the rumor was that one of the Dark Champions had not, in fact, left with the Prophet through the dark fold at the end of the tournament.

The rumor was that one of them had been shed quietly, like a coat, in the days before the final fight, and was now working alone, somewhere in the kingdom, doing something the Prophet wanted done in advance of whatever came next. It's even possible that this Dark Champion has been brewing trouble for quite a while given the number of Dungeons around Ashenmere. If the Dungeons were to erupt, a million people would die. There's not enough hands at the Academy right now to take care of this.

Ashenmere is a pretty weak provincial town, honestly, but it's extremely populous given how much food they grow and all the Dungeons they can farm around them. Jacob had spoken to the Headmaster who gave him a Special Quest to investigate this. If it was up to Jacob, he'd be at the Academy right now. He's got a lot of unfinished business after the tournament, but alas... Jacob had to come here, alone.

Well, with Lancelot, actually, because there was no version of any plan that involved leaving Lancelot behind to eat liberally on his dime at all the Academy's fancy restaurants. He had not anticipated Mr. Cabbage becoming his pseudonym.

He had also not anticipated Lancelot, while ostensibly being told to find a single discreet location to post a single discreet flyer, deciding that the mission would be best served by carpet-bombing the city district with apparently hundreds of handwritten copies of a notice that looked, frankly, insane. The knock comes a third time." I'm coming in there," the voice says." One way or another." Lancelot finishes the meat pie. He licks his thumb. He stands up.

"I'll get rid of him," he says." Politely."

"Boss, I am the soul of politeness." Lancelot crosses the room, shrugs at Jacob, and reaches for the door handle. He opens it, on Jacob's exhale, just as the speaker on the other side commits fully to charging through.

Thalric's plan, in the half-second between his decision and his motion, is simple. He is going to barrel through the door. He is going to stride into the room. He is going to put a few silver coins on the table, demand his Tutoring session, sit through whatever absurd nonsense Mr. Cabbage offers him, leave, find his friends, and tell them the bet is honored. The whole thing will take twenty minutes.

He will buy them all drinks afterward to make up for the indignity and to forget whatever nonsense he's about to be taught. However, his plan does not survive contact with reality, because the door swings open at the exact moment of his charge, and a thin young man stepping into the doorway from the other side. Thalric, mid-stride, sees the new figure. His momentum, however, makes him unable to stop.

"Get out of my way!" Thalric says, worried, "you'll break all your bones!" The thin man doesn't move and he hits him with all of his weight, flinching for half a moment, thinking he's about to kill this poor bastard. Yet, the thin man doesn't move. For a single, terrible instant, before the world goes dark, Thalric has time to feel his shoulder crumple against something that is not a man, that is not flesh, that is the densest and hardest substance Thalric has ever made contact with in his life.

He has time to hear one thing before fully passing out.

"Damn it," the other guy, Mr. Cabbage, says, still pinching the bridge of his nose, "drag him over to the corner. The innkeeper is going to charge me extra if there's a body in the hallway."