What do you do when you have the two best duelists in the empire on your team? You go to the PvP zone, of course. There was just one problem.

  “REPENT YOUR WICKED WAYS AND RETURN TO THE GOOD GODS!”

  Johan had moral objections to the idea of the ambush. The gods know I’d tried to talk him out of it but he wouldn’t hear a word of it.

  “I will accept any duel upon the field of honour but not this crass nonsense! It is beneath us! Think upon the hymns of Harmony!”

  Thankfully, I’d managed to talk him around to believing that what me and the rest of the gang were going to do was a counterattack.

  The eight rejects jeered as they closed in on Johan. One of them chuckled cruelly, their high voice carrying the distance to us inside my distant illusion.

  “Hold,” I said in a warning tone.

  “He’s not even looking,” complained Avril.

  “You know how he gets,” I sighed.

  Avril rolled her eyes and turned back to Johan as the reject’s leader – a great, draconian brute – opened their mouth and breathed fire over The Chosen of Hero.

  Johan accepted the flames with his shield raised and casually deflected a thrown spear with his sword that one of the cronies threw at him from the side. Avril glared at me patiently.

  “Blink to position perceived,” I intoned in reply to Johan finally being attacked, teleporting Avril and Sam, who’d been silently waiting with her minions and a tense smile, into the battle.

  As usual, Avril popped Mastery of Arms as soon as she appeared, preparing to spend the next dozen seconds as an engine of sheer destruction with all her stats increased by ten levels. At about the same moment as her arrival, Hugh’s hands popped from the ground in earth form and grabbed two ankles, their owners falling over while Hugh used them as leverage to lift himself out onto the soil.

  As usual, it was Sam’s arrival that drew the eyes. Two treants and a squelching, wet flesh golem, all two metres tall and almost as wide, began laying about themselves while five skeletons protected Sam herself who was laying down a withering hail of spells.

  That visual spectacle suited me just fine. That meant not a single one of the maniacs we were fighting would even look for the source of the inconvenience I was introducing with the Yanking Sceptre from my hiding spot inside the illusion we’d waited in. It was approximately a hundred metres away from the battle but with a tripod to lean on and my HUD providing a crosshair, I was still effective at pulling on feet or jerking a sword arm at opportune moments.

  Of course, it didn’t all go our way. One of the rejects flew high into the air and crashed down on Sam before exploding like the sun, disintegrating her skeletons. She cast Cruel Puppeteer and walked him back into her treants who promptly whomped him into the earth but she had been terribly damaged and retreated. Another sprouted tentacles and temporarily restrained Hugh, filling up his status bar in my HUD with afflictions. Hugh had to cast Free Ally and retreat behind Johan to buy time to cast his cleanse. Yet another broke into a myriad of mice and ran for the nearby stream, clearly hoping to flee into the swiftly flowing water and reform later. I used Stop And Think. Avril was in the best position to catch them.

  “Runner-nor-nor-west,” I sent to Avril who activated Between The Raindrops to get the time for an accurate throw between the cut-and-thrust of her swordplay. She lobbed one of my fire grenades at the mass of rats. I couldn’t hear the rodents scream over the sound of the wind and the battle but their arched backs and twisting claws suggested screams.

  Johan and Avril, of course, made the other five rejects look like they’d abandoned a job standing outside a shopping centre – or whatever they once did for a noble house – to come here and that they were, in fact, not hardened killers. Those two were a blur and while I had to focus on my own shooting, I still noticed a little. One tried to throw a hammer at Avril, Johan blurred and was suddenly there to block it. Another windmilled their arms, covering themselves in obsidian armour which Avril’s blade ignored and cut the flesh underneath, just like she had with her abilities against Johan in the tournament. As for Johan, we all noticed when he decapitated one that had a frog’s tongue with such force that the head spun high into the air and the devastating blow propagated out with Farmer Reaps The Fields to the other rejects causing three of them to stumble mid-battle. A fatal misstep for two of them. After that, it was just cleanup.

  “Any adds? I have none,” I sent Hugh when it was all over. Hugh checked his own map ability and sent an ‘all’s well’ gesture with his hand back in my direction. That was a problem out here in the blood bogs. You’d fight one group and another group would come in at the end to kill you, weak and cooldowns spent, to sweep up the loot of two parties.

  Johan had stared one group down the other day. They’d arrived early in the battle and hung back, waiting to finish off the victors. When it was over, Johan had called them ‘knaves’ amongst other things in a little speech, during and after which they’d stared at him and Avril in terror, trying to pretend they’d been waiting there by accident. Fortunately, I’d managed to goad them into attacking Johan by suggesting they turn out their pockets to prove they weren’t thieves. They’d had a lot of good items too so it’d been worth the exploding acid ball to the face.

  “Not bad,” remarked Avril, hefting the hammer that’d been thrown at her, trying the weight.

  “We shouldn’t be enjoying this,” said Johan loftily. “It is not a task to revel in.”

  “We can appreciate it, Johan,” I reminded him, covering as much of the battlefield in Grand Mage’s Gravitas as I could. “Some of us find a grim satisfaction, even happiness, in taking from these murderous savages. It feels good to remove them.”

  “You’re sounding a bit like the nobles, Dave,” said Johan disdainfully.

  I glared at him. Because he was right. I had few positive feelings for the self-appointed upper crust but even a broken clock was right twice a day. Some people, it was okay to kill. It just wasn’t, as so many of them believed, ‘every peasant’. I took a breath.

  “We’ve had this conversation, Johan,” I said. “You agreed that –”

  “Yes, I know!” grumbled Johan. “It’s just that – I wasn’t... they look –”

  He gestured at the very, very dead people at our feet. Sam’s remaining skeleton was grinning as it took the worldly possessions from the corpses of what used to be people. They were young. One had an enormous pimple on the end of their nose which brought back a similar, unpleasant memory of myself at nineteen. It didn’t feel right, looking at them, one felt they ought to be learning a trade, starting their first job or touring a campus with their parents. Not snuffed out with a sword hole in them.

  But, they’d made sword holes of their own in other people and planned more.

  “They look all too human, yeah,” I replied to Johan’s trailing utterances. “Not like ‘the baddies’ in the tales, right?”

  Johan flushed and looked at the ground.

  “Evil looks like you and I,” I muttered grimly through a jaw clenched against the distaste of putting one of the stripped bodies into my cargo-space jar. “Not an actual quote, weirdly. Just a summation of a long dead philosopher’s work.” I reached for the next body that the skeleton had stripped. “I found it in social studies at school when I was fifteen. Now, the philosopher himself, he went into strange thoughts with it – looking too deeply in my opinion – but that quote, that always stuck with me.” I stood up from my grim work and looked Johan in the eyes. It was just us two. The others had all gone about their own post-battle routine. “Evil people don’t have a special look. You can’t ‘tell’. They’re the same as us except they make the wrong choices on purpose.”

  “Why do they do it?” asked Johan quietly.

  “Dunno,” I said, “I’m a detective, not a spiritual physician. Doesn’t matter, though, does it? If they’re going to be here attacking people then they’ve gotta go. You seem to agree by the way that bloke’s head went flying.”

  “It was righteous!” said Johan, puffing up haughtily.

  “It was,” I said, giving him a friendly smack on the pauldron. “But, that comes across pretty weak as a thoughtful explanation, mate.”

  The scene was cleaned up pretty quickly after that. Tzu outlined a lone possible-scout who briefly skylined themselves heading away but if they were part of a larger group they’d never get back in time.

  “Good to go?” I asked, looking around.

  Affirmations all round.

  “Okay then. Everyone hold hands. Blink to position perceived,” I said, casting my teleport spell as everyone gripped the wrists of the person next to them and leaned forward in anticipation.

  I sent us all up as far up as I could, which was about six kilometers as far as I could tell. Cold, windy and all of us with slow fall gear, we carefully passed around a rope with a big loop at one end to connect us all together. I cast my next spell.

  “Answer the winds,” I intoned, holding Tome.

  A giant, albatross-looking paper golem printed itself into existence. The air shimmered and split as the winged creature fell from every angle out of the reality printer into the sky. It loomed large enough in the sky for its immense wings which unfolded, watching the wind like the pages of a book to cast a shadow over us. Under my mental instruction it dived briefly and passed its long neck through the loop of the rope and began dragging us weight-deficient adventurers behind its slowly but powerfully flapping wings.

  I’d had this idea of flying while watching the winter clouds and daydreaming the second day we got here about a month ago. I’d perfected the teleport spell by then with Hugh’s help on the way in, after all, astral magic was his specialty. The spell, Abberton’s Instantaneous Jaunt, could take ten individuals of the same rank and at second-iron for my spell slots skill, the range was six kilometers but with a horizontal glide ratio of more than one, those six kilometers up could become more than six kilometers sideways. A lot more. With the origami glider, as it was called, dragging us along we could get a glide ratio of five with a headwind. Ten or more with a tailwind, I was sure.

  So, we’d be back in Harrow Point in a few hours, handing some quests in and looking for more human scum to put an end to. I internally shook my head as I reflected on how easy it was. Killing. How psychotic it sounded calling the people there ‘scum’ and looking forward to ambushing them in the wilds. But, in the words of Johan, it was ‘righteous’.

  The rejects were the kind of people who found perverse pleasure at living in a midden heap like Harrow’s Point. It was broken, run down, violent, it stank, it squelched and it was full of vermin, parasites and god’s know what else. Almost every kind of crime and indignity washed its streets. It wasn’t uncommon to overhear snatches of rejects trading stories about something obscene they’d made a villager do at knife point. Real 1930’s Japanese Imperial Army stuff that made you shudder to think about.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  No, I had no problem with killing those people. The only problem we had was tricking the rejects into thinking we weren’t a threat so they’d never put aside their differences long enough to gang up on us. I worried yet again how to keep up the facade as the stinging, bitter wind of four kilometers altitude whipped at my clothes. Perhaps it was time to move on? We’ve been in the area for a month.

  In any case, we landed a few kilometres outside of Harrow’s point at a place that looked defensible. I immediately conjured up a cabin and the entire party politely took only a single step inside from the slushy, cold wetlands of the area that was rife with all kinds of quintessence. I used Grand Mage’s Gravitas until everyone was clean and the whole team slumped with relief, pulling furniture, a teapot and cookware from their bags. I flicked my hand towards a ceramic plate for a fire to appear there.

  “Town tomorrow morning?” I asked the group. We had never stayed once in the festering scab of a place where we’d die from the rickety buildings falling on us if we were lucky.

  “Town and leave, tomorrow morning,” said Avril, giving me a significant look.

  I rolled my eyes. Not this again. Avril was itching to be a part of the Adventure Society led mass investigation into the explosion that wiped out Lutetia. No thanks! Could we do a lot of good there? Yes. Would the secrets of the entire team be exposed if we spent as much time around magical measurement equipment as Avril wanted? Also yes.

  “Again, Avril?” I sighed. “You know that I, Hugh and definitely Sam can’t be in all that hubbub.”

  She knew about our secrets now too. She wasn’t dumb and our secrets were all pretty easy to figure out once you saw our abilities. Avril fired back.

  “Between you and Hugh you’ll have the cause of the explosion figured out within the week!” retorted Avril with her own eye roll.

  She probably wasn’t wrong and the faces of my companions reflected that opinion.

  “It does feel wrong, Dave,” said Johan, fiddling with the teapot. “Our work here is surely good in the eyes of the gods but the great adventure to be had in this realm is about the destruction of our grand capital city.”

  “And the entire Adventure Society dropped everything to compete with the Magic Society for dominance in that great adventure leaving us to clear out all the spare monsters,” I grouched.

  “We are not clearing out monsters,” said Sam, silently requesting soup ingredients from my inventory which was the best at stacking them. I passed them over just as silently. “We are getting rich killing killers.”

  “Still counts as monsters,” I said, raising a finger in defiance.

  “Sorry, what’re we talking about?”

  Hugh was getting worse. It was like he knew Lutetia had been blown off the map but he couldn’t understand it. I held up a standard card that read ‘LUTETIA’S GONE’ I’d made for these situations.

  “Oh, yes,” said Hugh with a puzzled smile. “I knew that. I just forgot. Anyway, it sounds like you’re avoiding things, Dave.”

  “Yep!” I countered. “Avoiding Builder cult assassination. Just like you!”

  Hugh smiled kindly.

  “You have contacts amongst the nobility, Dave,” said Hugh, nodding his head at Avril who was helping Johan pour from the kettle into the teapot. He noticed my jaw clench. “Even among ones you’re fond of. I’m sure the Ainsworths and that charming fellow Noguera would be happy to help you out in some capacity. Why don’t you ask?”

  “Because of how much bloody money we’re making here,” I answered, wincing at myself. “Not to mention the public good of getting rid of these people.”

  My teammates all pulled faces of uncomfortable agreement.

  “It doesn’t feel right, Dave,” insisted Johan.

  I sighed. Long as hard.

  “He right, isn’t he?” I put to the group.

  Awkward, affirmative shrugs.

  I nodded at the ground and bit my lip. Johan’s moral intuitions were usually correct and I could see Avril’s point. We were a good team and too far away from where things were happening. Perhaps we should be involved? Through the filter of someone we trusted.

  “How about we stay here until the Magic Society finds something?” I ventured slowly. “And when they do, I’ll see if Rupe can muster up someone to do the socialising for us? To keep me and Hugh away from scrutiny but still involved?”

  “What does that mean?” said April, skeptical. “They might not finish their investigation for a year!”

  “Well, I’m sure some preliminary findings will be available soon,” waffled Hugh into his beard.

  “Yes!” I said, clicking my fingers. “If there’s interesting preliminary findings on the cause of the explosion that the Builder cult are taking credit for, we’ll go check it out. Okay?”

  Avril nodded at me, satisfied.

  “I’ve got a spell slot coming back in a few hours,” I continued. “I’ll quickly memorise a scry and take a look at the desk Rupe has set up for me and see if anything’s changed since before this hunt.”

  When setting out from Riquier I’d sent Rupe a letter asking him to set up a desk where he could leave important news for me to read and to be sitting at it at the third hour of the day the next day. He did and now that I’d seen the desk from scrying him, I could just scry the desk on which from then on, Rupe left handwritten news articles. Apparently the newspaper hadn’t been invented yet.

  “Well, I’m glad that’s settled,” said Hugh. “If nobody objects, I might get a little study done?”

  “No, we all have our tasks,” I said with a smile, Sam and I also reaching for books. “You two,” I said, indicating Avril and Johan, “don’t fall through the roof again.”

  “You know that was an accident!” said Avril, looking flustered.

  “Seeing how hard you could tackle Johan was no accident,” I smirked at her reddening cheeks. She had a crush on Johan. It was cute but, then again, looking at him? Who wouldn’t? “But I do understand that there’s nowhere else dry around here with room to swing swords so please, onto the roof with you both.”

  “We’ll be careful, Dave,” said Johan in a beautiful tenor, placing a comforting hand on my shoulder as he passed me. “Avril, let’s work on our low guard today. I feel like we’re both getting some good moves in with that.”

  Later that night, I cast The Stationary Eye Of Farseeing. The room I scried was unlit but the stars provided enough light across the desk to read Rupe’s handwriting. There was a single, long article in the middle. I read the opening paragraphs.

  “Fuuuuuuuck,” I groaned.

  The Magic Society had discovered Lutetia was destroyed by an exploding astral space. We’d have to leave and check it out. I kept reading. Apparently it was a novel use of astral magic that was definitely Hugh’s field of research that had been the cause. Apparently, the whole setup was all just like something that’d been thwarted in South Berbia a few months back by some treasure hunter. Successful here, though. Rupe’s writing continued to reveal that the city dungeons in Lutetia were an astral space and that it was speculated that all the dungeon staff were Builder cult.

  Most importantly, this wasn’t a natural phenomena they’d taken advantage of. News was, this was an engineered act. Something they could do again.

  We had to get involved. But there was one thing left to do here in Harrow’s Point.

  I woke Avril an hour before sunrise. Johan was already up, the farm boy always rising early enough to milk the cows, but he was outside doing extra training with Tzu and Tome.

  “Piss off, Booker,” mumbled Avril, rolling over in her cot.

  “Sorry but we need to talk,” I whispered. “I’m thinking of doing what you said that I shouldn’t do.”

  Avril rolled her bleary eyes and looked at me. Her message was clear; don’t try.

  “I know, I know but actually, I might be able to do it.”

  “Balderdash, Booker.” She sat up and stretched her long, toned limbs.

  I clapped her on the shoulder and grinned. “But I also have news on Lutetia and I know you can’t sleep knowing that so get up. I’ve made tea and there’s an Albian breakfast waiting for you on the roof. Wash your face and get up there.”

  Avril grumbled but complied. She soon joined me on the flat roof. Over breakfast, I caught her up on the events surrounding the destruction of Lutetia.

  “Then we must go!” she exclaimed. “You said we would!”

  “I know and we will,” I soothed, “but the –”

  “Oh, forget it, Booker,” grumbled Avril. “You can’t change the town. It’s always been this way.”

  “But it’s never been this bad has it?”

  Avril chewed thoughtfully on a honeyed sausage for a moment. She stared out at the dank wetlands surrounding us in the pre-dawn light.

  “It’s definitely worse here than I thought it was,” she admitted.

  “Jaouad Valks has gambling debts,” I revealed. “And I think he’s skimming taxes from his Lady Alexandra Vandecasteele, his backer.”

  “You know,” remarked Avril dryly. “Taxes is a very loose word around here.”

  “You don’t need to tell me,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Thirty-two smoke quintessence in ‘tax’ for entering the town.”

  “So, how do you…” Avril left the thought hanging.

  “I agree, Vand the hand probably couldn’t give a care,” I said, sipping at my own tea. “But I think she’ll care if Valks is skimming from her share.” I smirked. “And, I think she’ll care a lot if I send a few letters and it gets out that one of her toughs is taking from her share to pay debts to one of her rivals.”

  “He’s in debt to the Van der Heijden’s?” guessed Avril, shocked. “No, even he wouldn’t –”

  “Rikard Van der Heijden, actually,” suppressing a grin.

  “How?” asked Avril, skeptically, fork halfway to her mouth. Rikard Van der Heijden was known as a ruthless and cold player of the aristocratic game.

  “From what I’ve gathered,” I began, “Van der Heijden showed up in disguise to Valks gambling den. One of my sources says that Valk saw through the disguise immediately because he’s cunning, another said that the disguise was bad on purpose to draw him in. Either way, Valks saw an opportunity to score a big debt from one of his boss’ rivals but he got played in return.”

  “Why didn’t he just refuse to pay?” inquired Avril, listening intently.

  “As he does, Valk got drunk,” I answered. “And in desperation, overconfidence or some other emotion – sources vary – put his baton of office in the pot.”

  Avril just shook her head while loading bacon on her fork.

  “Vand will kill him,” she stated flatly. “Thrash him to within an inch of his life at the least.”

  “From here,” I continued, “all I know is that Van der Heijden has the baton and since then he’s been locking the door and posting a guard when the scribe does his books and the scribe has one of Valks’ men living in his family’s house. My guess is that Valks started skimming from Vandecasteele’s cut to pay back Van der Heijden before Vandecasteele finds out.”

  “This is all very intriguing,” said Avril. The first rays of sunshine were coming over the horizon, casting light on the distasteful surroundings. “But, what’s in it for us?” She looked at me skeptically. “Is your quest really going to pay us enough to get involved in this?”

  “It’s paying a bit,” I admitted, “but, aside from the obvious civic benefits, I think there’s a reward in it for anyway who brings such a plot to Vandecasteele? Perhaps after she kills Valks and his toughs we can have all the magic items? Save her the bother of fencing them, you know?”

  “You’re playing a dangerous game, Booker,” muttered Avril, shaking her head. She worked her jaw back and forth in the still, winter morning air before draining her cup. “But I’m still dirty about those thirty-two smoke quintessence. What’s your next quest objective?”

  “The safe the books are kept in.”

  “You have a plan?”

  “Always.”

  The quest I’d been looking at for weeks finally allowed me to accept it into my UI. Daylight Heist: Gain access to the contents of Jaouad Valk’s safe. The others woke up soon enough. I waited until after morning training to catch them up on current events and plans.

  “Alright, I’ll wrestle you for it!”

  “You’re on, you dastardly dog!”

  Hugh and Johan had started step one; wrestle in the street to cause a ruckus and attract Valks’ men. They’d picked outside the bakery and were presumably wrestling for the right to buy the finest bread. It was close enough to the gambling house that they’d hear but not in line of sight. The splintering of wood told me that they’d be successful.

  Some aspiring citizen shouted for ‘the gang’, as they were called and soon a troupe of four toughs trotted towards the bakery. Not enough to restrain Johan and Hugh. Good, that’d make step two easier.

  “Artistry’s phantoms, canvas this,” I incanted, casting illusions of two of the higher ranking toughs over both myself and Avril who was with me. While everyone’s heads were turned towards the action, nobody really looked twice at us as we crossed the street where we’d been loitering and went into the gambling den.

  I’d been in here before and it had the same stench as last time. The air hung thick with stale booze, cheap cigars, and desperation. Even early in the morning a haze of tobacco smoke obscured the far corners of the room, where shady figures lurked. We swiftly made our way through at a trot, making our way to Valks’ office. He wasn’t in. Still sleeping off the previous night’s effects. I lead Avril up the stairs to the hallway where there were two guards outside the office at all times.

  “Eh! Get outside,” I grunted at them. “Two adventurers are tearing up the bakery. They’re strong!”

  They didn’t question and hopped to, being sent on their way. Avril and I made as though to follow them but hung back and watched the guards stride ahead. We turned and approached the office door. It had a thick lock on it to which we didn’t have the key. I hand drill from my inventory and handed it to Avril who was more used to such tools. She drilled through the screws holding the lock to the door in a minute and triumphantly pushed the door open.

  The air hung heavy with the scent of dust, damp, and a faint, unsettling odor of decay. There was a sense of calculated neglect, as if Valks took a perverse pride in the room's squalor. The walls were stained and peeling, with patches of damp spreading like a disease. The single window was cracked and covered in a thick layer of grime, admitting only a sliver of weak light, which Valks seemed to prefer. Papers, if there were any, were scattered haphazardly, more like trash than documents, and many were water damaged and empty bottles, some broken, littered the floor, attracting flies and other insects.

  “A reflection of the man himself,” remarked Avril, distaste written on her face.

  I couldn’t agree more but we were pressed for time.

  “Let’s just open the safe,” I said, letting disgust coat the tone of my voice.

  We picked our way across the floor that was surely an altar to disorder and I unlocked the safe. It was a magical wheel combination safe – a cheap one that didn’t need an aura imprint – and scrying the combination had been laughably easy. The scribe who does the books opens the window which negates the room’s magical defences. I’d bet Valks got what he paid for when he installed them.

  With Avril watching the door, the safe clicked open and I picked up the book inside ignoring everything else including my Daylight Heist quest notification, preparing to-

  “He’s not stealing from me, Booker.” said a sultry voice behind me.