Chapter 103: Chapter 103

I got a little bit of personal work done before Khagnio arrived. After telling the Scarthralls that I was going to be busy that day, I took a little bit of time to focus purely on myself.

Essentially, my focus was on using Threaded Reinforcement to infuse mana into my other arm. I was faster now that I had some practice, so I could even manage a Sacrifice of the entire array of magical cracks in my right arm and then perform Threaded Reinforcement again with greater density.

Keeping up Sacrifice on minor things had helped stave off the countdown timer, though I was looking forward to the heist. The ever-generous Khagnio had stated I could keep whatever I stole.

I told him I wasn’t keeping them. Instead, I’d be using Sacrifice.

“Oh, what’s this?” Khagnio said when he arrived later in the morning. I was overseeing my new cult initiates’ training, even if I wasn’t participating myself. They were just sparring against each other. “You building up your own little army, mageling?”

I nodded very seriously. “That’s right. I call them my anti-Scalekin-rogue squad.”

Khagnio snorted. “That’d actually help a lot where we’re going. But unfortunately, stealth is going to be our best friend.”

Unfortunately. If a rogue like Khagnio wanted to go guns-blazing, then he probably hated the Claws a lot.

Speaking of stealth, we decided that I was going to put away my cult robes and wear a simple cloak instead. It would be best if I wasn’t recognized. My association with the Sun Cult might automatically bar me from entry into Ring Zero, which was kind of annoying, but at least there was a simple workaround.

The real problem was the fact that I might be an actual target. We were still pretty suspicious of what that Scalekin Claw member could have been seeking on Ring Four.

“I imagine they’re going to figure out who I am once we get started on the heist anyway,” I said.

Khagnio nodded as we headed towards Ring Three. “If they catch us and we’re forced into a fight. Specifically, if you’re forced into a brawl, mageling.” He bared his fangs. “I’m going to be fighting anyway.”

I had figured that. We discussed the plan some more, though typical of Khagnio, it wasn’t much of a plan to begin with.

While he distracted the guards with his fighting, I was supposed to sneak in with my Gravity powers and retrieve a certain treasure. In return, Khagnio would get a piece of the Scalekin who had attacked me on Ring Four, something I could use Soul Sight on to hopefully find out what in the world the Roaring Claws wanted with the Cult of the Sun.

That was the essential gist. I was sure there would be actual complications, but I would find that out in the undercity itself.

“You don’t have that big mace of yours?” Khagnio asked as we took a familiar path.

“Uh, no, not yet,” I said. “It’s still under construction. I thought I wouldn’t be needing a mace since we’re supposed to be heisting, not fighting. Well, I’m supposed to be heisting instead of fighting.”

Khagnio tutted. “Fine. I see you got some weapons in case things go south, so you’re not completely hopeless.”

I did. There were knives at my belt, and I had some helpful potions in my little dimensional storage bag, just in case. I also had a few extra goodies I had purchased for Sacrifice, some runes and other things, so I’d have some options if needed.

Basically, I was ready.

The familiar road turned out to be the one leading to the Rat Catcher’s Guild. Right. Now I remembered learning that they were the public front of everything that was going on in the undercity and the black market in Zairgon and all that. Made sense that we’d need to go through them to get into Ring Zero.

As ever, there was the Ogre standing guard in front of the suitably ratty building that served as their guildhall. He scowled as we approached, standing up threateningly.

“What business do you have here?” he asked. There wasn’t any sense of recognition about him, so at least I had passed a visual check. Although, his eyes did flicker a certain way when he spotted Khagnio.

“Get out of the way, brute,” Khagnio said.

They squared up, which was frankly ridiculous. The Ogre was several heads taller than Khagnio and almost three times his width. I was wondering if violence or some sort of show of force was going to be necessary here, but then both the Ogre and the Scalekin grinned.

“You can’t ever take your job less seriously, can you, Magorth?” Khagnio said.

Despite the grin, the Ogre still didn’t back down. “Need to stay on my toes to keep pests like you from getting past me, Khagnio.”

After another minute of their standoff, they broke apart. I tried not to roll my eyes. Khagnio didn’t even bother introducing me, only jerking his head to follow as we stepped past the Ogre to enter the Rat Catcher’s guildhall.

The inside was nothing more than a shack with a strange stone floor and a desk attended by a robed Scalekin. Khagnio was obviously a known quantity, and he had quickly chatted up the other guild member before introducing me as a nondescript merchant from outside Zairgon who wanted to purchase some special goods.

I got an evaluating look from the Rat Catcher’s Guild member, although it wasn’t anything more than that. They didn’t check me for weapons. So lax on security. I was just glad I didn’t have to elaborate on specialgoods.

Before I could proceed, I was given a shiny new badge. Khagnio already possessed the tiny emblem depicting what looked like a hook.

“Don’t lose it after this,” Khagnio whispered. “We’re going to need it later.”

I kept my voice low too. “Right.”

The floor was stone because that was apparently the best way to hide a trap door.

I was going to suggest wood next time, but in this world, real wood was probably more expensive than plain old rocks. The robed Scalekin jerked his hand and a thick panel of the floor slid away to reveal a hole with a ladder.

“Let’s go,” Khagnio said.

All I could think was that it felt very easy to gain access once you had an in. But maybe that was supposed to be the point. Someone else was responsible for matters of security. And if something went wrong, said someone would be held responsible.

We descended the ladder for a good while, at least eight to ten minutes, before we arrived at a network of tunnels that stretched out before me.

“Woah,” I said, my voice echoing slightly. “How far does this go?”

Khagnio sneered a little at seeing my reaction. “How far do you think an entire, unofficial Ring would stretch?”

What caught my attention about the tunnels was the way they were civilized. These weren’t random dungeon passages. Instead, they were lined with torches burning strange blue fire that was no doubt driven by mana in some way. The tunnels didn’t stay tunnels either. Most expanded out into larger, cavernlike zones.

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These were the populated areas. People milled about here, and some even sported small dwellings, warehouses, and the like.

If I had thought the crowd at the Adventurer’s Guild was rowdy and unapproachable, the people here were a few levels worse than that. Every single one of them judged me either as a potential threat, or as someone who could be sold off for profit.

“Don’t wander off,” Khagnio muttered as we walked. “You’re going to get lost.”

“Yes, you will get lost.”

“No, I wasn’t going to wander off.”

Khagnio grumbled under his breath, but I could see why he was warning me. Off to one side, a different tunnel led to an area marked with a board that said “Services”. Despite my morbid curiosity, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know just what kind of services the undercity was open to providing.

The direction we took was marked with “Goods”. I was open to perusing various sorts of contraband, and honestly kind of curious if there were interesting things I could get to Sacrifice.

What I wasn’t expecting were real live creatures held in cages and guarded by the winners of the Meanest People in Zairgon contest.

Well, I supposed that was a little naïve of me not to expect monster trafficking. I wanted to be fascinated by the creatures I saw. Some of them I recalled seeing at the Mage Guild as familiars of different mages there, like the fox with the mane of fire and there was an interesting bird whose head kept retreating into its rather shell-like body as if it was a turtle with wings.

But mostly, I just felt sorry for the beasts. Sorry for these innocent-looking monsters that had been captured from their natural habits and forced to endure misery in cages.

“Are adventurers involved in capturing creatures like that?” I asked in a low voice as we passed. “Like, what’s the economy around them? Who secures monsters like that, and who buys them?”

Khagnio’s face soured a little. “Who else? The Great Houses are the only ones with enough money to spare for this. Obviously, it doesn’t go through official channels. The people securing beasts like that aren’t guild adventurers. Crooks, more like. You should take a peek at how many of them House Uralivanth has gotten in their clutches so far.”

Sorry as I felt for the creatures, once we passed them, my thoughts drifted to how they actually survived in the wild. The existence of actual ecosystems that weren’t artificial was hard to fathom, but then again, with the proliferation of mana, who knew what was possible.

All this time, I kept associating magic with people and only people. As in, I hadn’t yet heard of any non-intelligent beings like animals possessing the Weave.

But maybe I just hadn’t asked the right questions yet.

After all, wasn’t the classical definition of “monster” in this world that of a creature who could channel mana?

A different spot in the “Goods” section almost drew me away from Khagnio, who had to hiss at me to stick together. I couldn’t be blamed. The stall was selling runes. Of course my interest was piqued.

Even without actually getting to the store and investigating, I noticed a rune that could supposedly preserve corpses—human bodies, to be exact—then another that created facsimiles of the erogenous zones of other beings, and then a rune of invisibility. I wasn’t sure why that last one had to be sold in the black market, but Khagnio didn’t let me investigate.

“No, you’re not missing out on anything, mageling,” he said. “Sure, that rune would make you invisible, but what it doesn’t say on the tin is that it would also make you extremely…” He took a second to search for the right word. “Incontinent.”

About twenty minutes later, after a stretch of tunnels that didn’t have much, we arrived at another zone. This one was broad and tall enough to house an actual, three-storey building with what looked like a tower at the rear. Said tower's top climbed into a hole in the tunnel ceiling.

“That’s your target,” Khagnio said, pointing at the tower from our hiding spot. Most of the roof was walled off, but one side—the unapproachable side—allowed a view of the tower. It was best not to get spotted by the guards in their ripped clothes. “Right where that tower meets the roof, you should be able to get inside and climb to the top. That’s where you’ll find it.”

He was eager, his fingers clenching into a fist and his words spoken with relish. I hadn’t seen Khagnio this fired up before. Not even in Seethescale dungeon.

It was almost encouraging how we had a common enemy in the Roaring Claws now.

“What have you got against them?” I asked.

Khagnio laughed shortly. “What don’t I have against them? They’re scum, villains, bastards, selfish and arrogant pricks, evil scavengers filled with hate, far worse than any real monster you’ll ever meet and—”

He stopped himself with a sigh. “I used to be one of them a long time back. A member of the Roaring Claws. The best thing that can happen to you. You’re set for life!” He spat. “They send the little ones into the dungeons as sacrificial scouts.”

Little ones… long time back… Ah, so Khagnio was with them when he had been young, maybe when he was a kid. He certainly had the air of someone who’d had it rough while growing up.

“Dungeons?” I asked. “How? Don’t you need those access tokens or whatever to get inside?”

“Normally, on the surface, yes,” he said. “But here in undercity, we’ll occasionally have a dungeon straying into the area and connect a passage to one of the excavated tunnels. This forms a bypass, and obviously an opportunity that people here aren’t ever going to pass up.”

I frowned. It was hard to believe that the Council was willing to look past something like that. But then again, I hadn’t exactly heard about it being an issue for Zairgon yet, so.

“Before we go,” I said. “We need to perform a Ritual.”

Khagnio looked at me like I was suggesting we eat rocks to open up new tunnels of our own. “A what now?”

“A Ritual of Precaution.”

“The Pits is that supposed to do?”

I pulled out some of the stuff I had brought with me from the dimensional storage bag. One was the scroll the Sea Cult had allowed me to borrow, another was the item the Ritual was going to need.

Following the given instructions, I used a piece of broken glass to cut open small wounds on our palms, both of which healed up pretty easily with a few drops of a healing potion.

“Now what?” Khagnio asked.

Wrapped in a small cloth, I handed the shard with his blood back to him. “Now, let me ask you this—do you trust me, Khagnio?”

“I don’t even know what we’re doing here.”

“We’re performing a small Ritual that’s going to help safeguard us before we head in.”

Khagnio considered me for a minute. Or at least, considered the fact that I was pretty serious, that my eyes were holding his with sincere intensity.

He sighed. “I trust you. I don’t fully understand all your cult business, but it works. You’ve been doing crazy shit for a while. You clearly know what you’re doing. So if you think this is something that’s going to help, then I’ll follow along. As long as it’s nothing too weird,” he added with a mutter at the end.

I smiled. “No, it’s nothing weird, trust me.”

It really wasn’t. The two major components were done. One was securing a piece of ourselves in a tangible way so that we could vow to protect it. For some reason, just promising to protect our bodies wasn’t going to be enough. We needed something beyond that.

The next one was making sure Khagnio considered the Ritual genuine rather than something he was doing for the sake of it. His words assured me that he did believe in it. He might have been new, but that didn’t mean his efforts wouldn’t be real.

Lastly, we just had to perform a short chant, which was basically vocalizing our intent to make sure we remained safe.

You have performed 1 [Minor] Ritual of Precaution. Windfall bonus activated.

Reward: Vitality raised by 3 ranks and resistance to afflictions raised by 30% for 30 minutes. ]

The buffs were already starting to take effect, adding layers of what felt like weightless mass to my skin. It was a decent enough reward, but I still Sacrificed it with my brand-new Returned Offering Affix. “I want something better.”

You have Sacrificed 1 [Minor] Ritual Reward. Windfall bonus activated.

Reward: Vitality raised by 5 ranks, resistance to afflictions raised by 50%, and Agility raised by 5 ranks for 30 minutes ]

“There we go,” I muttered.

“What did you do?” Khagnio asked. He was looking from himself to me and back again. “Were you able to change your reward?”

I explained what I had done with Sacrifice, which Khagnio unfortunately couldn’t replicate.

“Pits-licking cultists,” Khagnio said with a shake of his head. “And you want to poke around in my head with Soul Sight or whatever it was too!”

“Well, that would have made learning things easier—”

“You’re with me, mageling. You got it easy already.”

“Right, right.” I held myself back from rolling my eyes. “Speaking of Soul Sight, remember to grab a piece of that Claw, please. I want to see what they’re after.”

Khagnio nodded seriously for once.

“Here.” He pulled out a pack of tools that made my eyebrows ascend a bit. That was... a lot. “Don’t worry, this is the simple stuff. You’ll pick it up in no time. So long as you don’t have Shagor hounding your scaleless butt, you should be fine.”

“Shagor. He’s the local leader of the Roaring Claws. At least, the leader of their operational side.”

Khagnio spent some time showing me things like glass-cutting, lockpicking, sneak-thieving, and even pickpocketing, and I wished I was smarter so I could have remembered it all. Luckily for me, most of them wouldn’t even be necessary.

“Here’s a map in case we get separated,” Khagnio said, handing me a piece of parchment. ɴᴇᴡ ɴᴏᴠᴇʟ ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀs ᴀʀᴇ ᴘᴜʙʟɪsʜᴇᴅ ᴏɴ NoveI★Fire.net

I stared. “I can’t read anything. This is literally chicken scratch.”

“What in the Pits is a chicken?”

I sighed. “Never mind, I’ll just Sacrifice it if I need it.”

He gave me a weird look, then shook his head. “Good enough, I guess. Let’s go.”

Taking solace in my buff, we headed out to get our heisting done.