Viktor saw the trio cross the bridge and reach his side of the Voskryn. None of them had spotted him yet, probably too focused on what y ahead to spare a gnce to the side. They kept running, not slowing down even one bit, so if he didn’t act now, soon they would disappear into the forest.

  Cupping his hands around his mouth, he called, “Rhea!” before raising both arms high and waving in a wide arc.

  The girl halted mid-step. Her head snapped to the side, eyes wide as she scanned her surroundings. The instant she recognized him, she broke into a sprint.

  “Quinn!”

  When she reached him, she threw herself forward, arms flinging around his neck, and crashed into him in a tight hug. He could feel her trembling fingers digging into the fabric of his shirt, as if she were trying to confirm he was real.

  “You’re... you’re alright...” Rhea’s voice cracked, and then she broke. Sobs overtook her before she could say another word.

  Now, now. No need to be so dramatic.

  The appropriate response here would probably be to return the embrace or murmur something comforting. I’m fine, you’re safe, it’s all over, that sort of stuff. But his mind had already moved on, focused not on the girl clinging to him, but on the two adventurers who were approaching.

  Brynhildr was tall. Towering, really. He had always observed her from a distance, and the few times he got close, like the brief passing-by in the mess hall, were just that—brief. But now, she was walking straight toward him, and her presence was overwhelming. Not quite Sebekton-level, of course, but close enough. Oh, Dagnar was also here, and he, as usual, looked deader than anyone who was not Khenemhotep. The contrast between these two was so stark that sometimes he forgot who his actual target was.

  “You’re Quinn?” the woman asked. She looked at him and Rhea, her expression softening, as if she was moved by the sight of the tearful reunion pying out before her.

  Well then...

  “Yes, that’s me,” Viktor replied before turning back to Rhea. If there was going to be an audience, he might as well put on a good performance. He pced his hands lightly on the girl’s shoulders and gently eased her back. “Shh,” he murmured, arranging a smile on his face. “It’s alright now. No need to cry. I’m fine, and so are you. I’m so relieved you managed to get away.”

  For a second, he thought it might have been a little excessive, but it looked like everyone present had bought it. Rhea’s glistening eyes met his as she gave a slow nod, while Brynhildr watched with an approving smile.

  “You’re both safe now,” the woman said. “That’s all that mattered.” Then she took a step forward, straightening as her tone shifted into something more formal. “Allow us to introduce ourselves. I’m Brynhildr,” she said, pcing a hand over her chest, before gesturing toward her companion. “And this is my nephew, Dagnar. We’re both Iron-ranked adventurers.”

  So they’ve already been promoted. That was fast, but not unexpected.

  “Thank you,” Viktor said, putting on a mask of gratitude. “For helping Rhea.”

  “We didn’t really do anything,” Brynhildr replied. “We just happened to run into her near the edge of town. She was worried sick about you. Practically dragged us here.” She chuckled. “But it looks like you didn’t need us after all. Escaping from bandits on your own? That’s no small feat. I can’t wait to hear what happened, but...” The woman cast a weary gnce at the forest. “This is not the kind of pce we should linger. Let’s get back to town first. We can talk on the way.”

  And so, they stepped onto the bridge. Brynhildr took the lead, with Dagnar right behind her, while Viktor and Rhea followed, walking side by side. The girl had stopped sobbing, but hadn’t said a word since, her eyes fixed upon the stones beneath their feet. But why was her hand still clutching his sleeve? As if she were a lost dog who had just found its owner and was now too scared to let go. Oh well, whatever. As long as she didn’t get in the way, he didn’t really care.

  “So,” the warrior woman asked, “how did you shake them off?”

  Viktor shrugged. “I just took down two, and the third one fled.”

  The group stopped dead in their tracks. Everyone stared at him. “You did what?”

  He casually reached into his pocket and pulled out the st silk-shooting tube. “This is something you can find inside the dungeon. An adventurer found a few and gave me some as a souvenir. You aim it, press the button, and it shoots a strand of sticky silk that can immobilize whoever it hits. Very easy to use. So I pretended to run, let them chase after me, then picked them off one by one.” He gestured behind him, toward the trees. “If you head back that way, you’ll find two twitching bandits still glued to the ground.”

  There wasn’t much point in hiding the existence of the tubes, since sooner or ter, someone was going to stumble across the two cocooned bandits anyway. So lying outright would just make things worse for him ter on. No, he only needed to leave out the most important bits.

  Brynhildr blinked. “Unbelievable,” she said, then quickly added. “No, I don’t doubt your words. It’s just...” She shook her head. “It’s very impressive. Someone as young as you, acting so decisively. Very brave, very calm, very resourceful...” The woman then gnced at Dagnar. “You could learn a thing or two from him.”

  The sickly-looking man frowned, his thin mouth tightening as he looked away without saying anything.

  Brynhildr sighed, as if she had grown used to such reactions. She gave a resigned smile, before turning her gaze back to the front. “Alright. Let’s move on.”

  Well, enough questions for me. My turn.

  “So, you two are adventurers?” Viktor asked. “What were you doing at the edge of the town? Coming back from a mission? Or were you heading out?”

  “We’re hunting a gorgon,” the warrior woman replied. “It was spotted near the town a couple of times st week. People were getting nervous, so they put a contract on its head. Dagnar and I have been searching the surrounding area for several days, but we haven’t been able to locate it. Might have gone deeper into the forest. We’ll give it one st try tomorrow. If we still can’t find the beast, we’ll have to give up.”

  A gorgon, huh? Seeing one in the wild is rare enough, so Viktor doubted there could be two near Daelin.

  “Don’t bother,” he said. “We already ate it.”

  Brynhildr spun around. “Don’t tell me you killed it too?”

  Viktor ughed. “Of course not. A pyromancer I know took care of that monster. She killed it and made dried meat out of it. Rhea and I just visited her this morning, and that’s what we had for lunch.”

  “There sure are a lot of amazing people in this town,” the woman said, shaking her head in disbelief. “Well, in that case, that friend of yours should go to the Guild and collect the reward. She’s fulfilled the contract, after all.”

  “But how’s she supposed to prove she’s killed a gorgon?” Rhea asked. “All she has now is a pile of dried meat.”

  “There should be scales and horns left,” Viktor said. “Unless she’s thrown them away.”

  The girl’s eyes lit up. “Then this will solve her money problems, right? Now she can come back to town. She doesn’t have to live there anymore!”

  Well yes, until the coin dried up again, of course. And Jeanne’s income, so far, was anything but stable.

  “There?” Brynhildr raised an eyebrow.

  “The old castle in the middle of the ruins,” Viktor replied. “That’s where she’s living at the moment. It’s also why Rhea and I were in the forest in the first pce.”

  The woman chuckled. “Of course she is. At this point, nothing shocks me anymore.”

  That was a short exchange, but it had yielded a few insights into the two adventurers’ abilities. Brynhildr had said she was taking on the gorgon contract, which meant she was confident she could kill it with just Dagnar at her side.

  “How do you pn on sying the beast?” Viktor asked. “Your sword doesn’t look like it could scratch its armor.”

  “You’re right,” the warrior woman said over her shoulder. “But it’s not like its entire body is covered in ptes. There are weak spots. Under the jaw, the joints, the eyes. I was going to wrestle it down and drive a dagger through one of those.”

  Viktor blinked. Wrestle it? She looked strong, no doubt, but bringing down a gorgon with nothing but bare hands was beyond the physical limits of any human. He gnced at Dagnar again. Perhaps the man had crafted a Thauma, recreating a spell of the Emerald Mages, to enhance her strength even further. But whatever the cause, the result was the same: in terms of raw power, Brynhildr might stand toe-to-toe with Sebekton himself.

  “And how are you pnning to deal with its petrifying breath?”

  “Well...” the woman said, her face going stiff. “Potion. Yes, a potion. I have one that protects against the effect.”

  That was, without a doubt, one of the worst lies Viktor had ever seen. She was hiding something, obviously. A Reliquary, or again, a Thauma. A defense only against the gorgon’s breath attack was oddly specific, though, so maybe it was a protection against all curses in general. Yes, he recalled that mid-level Emerald Mages had a spell to ward off curses. So if Dagnar found the right mage, he could have easily copied it. The process was quite simple, actually, since the spell was not really advanced, just unpopur. Curse attacks were rare, after all, so people tended to learn something more useful first, and only picked up that one several years into their career.

  In other words, it was safe to assume that the man had put his Thaumaturgy to good use, and had likely learned a thing or two from an Emerald Mage before coming to Daelin. He should be able to heal as well. And regeneration. And defensive magic. Damn, if the guy had gone all-in on that path, killing him would be a real chore.

  “Have you two gone into the dungeon yet?” Viktor asked.

  Brynhildr shook her head. “No, not yet. Truth be told, we’ve never set foot in a dungeon before. So we’re still on the fence.”

  “But that’s why you came to Daelin in the first pce, isn’t it? If you were just after regur work, you could’ve stayed in any of the bigger cities.”

  “Well, yes. We did pn to go down eventually. Just figured we’d wait until we were better prepared. Then that freak incident happened. You’ve heard about it, right? Some poor sod took a giant arrow right through the chest the second he stepped inside.”

  Viktor sighed. So that experiment did scare them off, after all.

  “Yes, we’ve heard,” Rhea chimed in, her voice uneasy. “No one really knows what happened. But thankfully, nothing like that happened again, and people went back to exploring like normal.”

  “If you’re strong enough to hunt a gorgon,” Viktor said, “you won’t have any trouble with the dungeon. At least not on the first floor. The monsters there are much weaker.”

  There was nothing more he could do. The damage was already done. Perhaps he should lower the difficulty, raise the rewards, and then wait.

  He cast a zy gnce toward the side of the road. They were moving through the same farmnds he and Rhea had crossed earlier this morning. But now, the farmers were gone, as the final patch of standing grain had been harvested.

  “Anyway, where did you two come from?”

  “North,” Brynhildr said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “We’re from Brefjord.”

  Oh?

  Viktor grinned. He jogged up a few paces to Dagnar’s side, so suddenly that his sleeve slipped from Rhea’s hand. “I heard Northern folk worship something called the Eternal Fme,” he asked the man. “Is that true? Tell me more about it.”

  “I... I...”

  Brynhildr immediately turned back, face tightening like she had just swallowed something sour. Then, with effort, she forced a smile. “Of course, the Eternal Fme. It’s central to our culture. Every house keeps a rge fire burning. A hearth that never dies. Isn’t that right, Dagnar?”

  “Well... yes, I suppose...”

  Just as he thought. This guy was completely ignorant of his own so-called heritage. With a simple test, he had confirmed what he had suspected all along. Dagnar was not from the North, unlike his “aunt.” Their retionship was a lie.

  “He didn’t seem too keen on the subject,” he said.

  Brynhildr’s smile faltered slightly. “Well, not all Brefjordians are alike. Some are indifferent to the Fme, while others can be downright fanatical.”

  “Fanatical? Do you mean the priests?”

  “No, the priests are fine. But there’s... a cult in the North. They’re zealots. Obsessed. Extreme.”

  A cult? He had never heard about such a thing. At least, Celestia didn’t mention it at all when she told him about her homend’s religion and customs. Or maybe it wasn’t around three hundred years ago.

  “Is this cult new?”

  “They might have already existed for a long time,” Brynhildr replied. “But only recently have they risen in power and become more dominant.”

  “I see,” Viktor said with a nod. “What do they do, anyway? What makes them more fanatical than the common folk? Burning bigger fires or something?”

  “They use people as fuel.”

  Oh, this was a cult, all right. But at the end of the day, it had nothing to do with him.

  The road stretched ahead, and on either side, farmnd gave way to the first crooked houses of the town. He was going to say his goodbyes at the next crossroads. Then he would head home and sleep. A long day, finally over.