Chapter 60 - Rat Claw, Part 1

I'd like to forget the long, hard walk through the winter woods that followed our encounter with the werewolves, and to this day I pain the decision we made regarding that girl, Melicent, but my companion was strangely compassionate. : Although we generally never let any evil pass if we could fight it off, this occasion was an exception. Frey let the wolf girl live, according to him the girl did not deserve to die.

With a restless heart due to Frey's strange attitude, we once again entered the forest and headed north.

After a long journey we finally reached the Capital City of the Duchy of Bergland, a place of sophistication, refinement, wealth, and great learning. At that time, Duke Emmanuel was at the height of his fame and power, and his city drew the rich, the aristocrats, and the famous like moths to a candle flame. Bergheim was one of the most beautiful cities in the entire Kingdom.

Of course, our entry into the life of the city was at a much lower rung of the social ladder. Short of money, hungry and exhausted from the long journey, we were forced to engage in what was possibly the worst occupation we would perform during our wanderings. And during that period we encountered an enemy who was destined to haunt our paths for years to come.

Elysia, 'The Adventures of the Dark Hero', vol. II,

Printed in Riverheim, Kingdom of Arcadia.

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"Into the sewers, hunting vermin, again. Why are we so unlucky!?" Elysia muttered feelingly, and she cursed all the gods without qualms. Elysia considered herself something of an expert in unpleasant surroundings, but the sewers certainly took the prize for worst place. Twenty feet above them, the town of Bergheim was going about its legitimate business of daily life, and there she was, in the dark, crawling through narrow passages where a single slip could plunge her up to the top of her head in stinking filth. Her back ached from him from hunched over for hours. Indeed, since she was paired with the dark hero Frey, it was the second time she had plumbed such depths; the first time was in the Riverheim sewers.

"Stop whining, cat girl. It's a job, right?" Frey said cheerfully, not paying the slightest attention to the stench or the narrowness of the ledge they were advancing on, nor even the proximity of the bubbling broth of excrement the sewer guards called 'the stew'.

Apparently, the dark hero was in his element within that endless maze of brick walls and canals. Frey was advancing on the ledge with a step as sure as a cat's. In the two weeks since they'd joined the sewer patrol through a contract with the adventurer's guild, Frey had become vastly more skilled at the trade than the veteran adventurers with ten years of service. But you had to keep in mind that it was Frey, he was not someone normal or common.

"Luckily we are both able to see in the dark." Elysia thought; that way, she didn't have to rely on the flickering light of the guards' deaf lanterns, though that, however, didn't explain how Frey could stand the stench. The stench down there was extremely horrible, and his head was spinning from the fumes.

The Dark Hero looked peculiar without his usual weapon, for to Elysia the greatsword Lævateinn was something grafted onto the hand of her companion. At the moment, Frey was wearing his huge Adamantite sword strapped to his back, as in most areas of the sewers there was no room to wield it.

Elysia had tried to convince Frey to leave the sword and armor in the weapons room along with his magic sword, but had failed. Not even the prospect of his weight dragging him into the depths should he fall had made the dark hero part with his beloved relic. Thus, Frey carried a Short Sword in his right hand and a huge spiked mace in the other. Elysia shuddered as she imagined the second in action. It resembled a great hammer with cruel hooked curved spikes on one side. Powered by the dark hero's colossal strength, she would undoubtedly shatter bone and rip muscle with ease.

Elysia tightened her grip on the short sword she held, and she wished she still had the magical weapon in her possession, its hilt shaped like a dragon's head. The prospect of her facing goblins in the dark made her long for the reassuring sensation of handling the familiar weapon. Perhaps Frey had been wise to keep his greatsword close by.

He was accompanied by the tall, lean Gant, whose scarf hid a face turned moonscape by pockmarks, and whose neck was a volcanic archipelago of boils. If ever there was a good ad advising that no one spend twenty years working inside the sewers, it was Gant.

Elysia shuddered at the thought of that toothless grin, bad breath, and worst jokes, though she had no intention of telling Gant to his face. The sergeant had implied that he had killed more than one for that.

Also with them was the stocky, gigantic Rudi, who had a huge chest and hands almost as big as Frey's. Often he and the dark hero would wrestle in the tavern after work. Despite Rudi's pushing himself until sweat ran down his bald head, he hadn't been able to beat Frey, even though he had come closer than any human Elysia had ever met.

Then there were Hef and Spider, whom Gant called 'the new guys' because they had only been working in the sewers for seven years. They were indistinguishable twins, living with the same woman on the surface. They had a habit: sentences started by one brother were finished by the other. So strange were their long, sunken faces, with staring eyes like a fish's, that Elysia suspected inbreeding was part of their heritage, though she did not doubt how deadly they could be in hand-to-hand combat, or how deadly they could be. dedication of each to the other and to the girl with whom they shared their lives, whose name was Gilda. She had seen how they did terrible things with their curved-blade knives to a pimp who had insulted the girl one night.

Along with the burly dark hero in plate armor were the men the catgirl worked with, such a desperate group as she had never seen before. They were violent men, who had found no suitable work for them anywhere else, and who had finally found an employer who asked no questions.

Sometimes Elysia felt the urge to go to the adventurer's guild office and beg for a better errand so she would have a chance to leave that place. She knew they would give it to her, as she was still a member of a platinum rank group. But she didn't, since she joined Frey, she had learned a lot, she had endured hardship and even believed that she could tolerate it.

But the situation at that moment was almost the straw that broke the camel's back: she was forced to work in the sewers like Bergheim's most despicable hit men… Yet they had found nothing else. The guild didn't have (or didn't want) quests of the appropriate rank for two adventurers like her and Frey.

Elysia found it painful to think of what she must look like when she was looking for work in her threadbare breeches and her patched cloak.

So they needed the money, any amount of money. Their long journey through the shadowy mountains had brought them no benefit. They had found the treasure of the fortress-city of the five peaks, but they had left it to the ghosts of its owners. They were faced with the alternatives of finding work, stealing or starving... and both she and Frey were too proud to steal or beg. So here they were, in the sewers beneath the Kingdom's second-greatest city, traversing slimy tunnels beneath the home of Duke Emmanuel, the nation's most famous nobleman.

It was unbearable. Elysia constantly wondered what evil star had marked her birth, and she consoled herself with the thought that at least things were calm. It was dirty work, to be sure, but so far it hadn't been dangerous.

"Footprints!" she heard Gant yell. "Ha! Ha! We've found quite a few of those vermin. Prepare for action, boys."

"How good!" Frey's voice thundered.

"Damn!" Elysia muttered. Even a sewer guard as inexperienced as she could see the tracks.

"Ratfolks," Gotrek chirped, and spat out a huge mass of phlegm into the main cloaca channel, which flashed over a patch of phosphorescent algae. "Ratmen, the last time I met them it was fun."

Elysia swore. It had been barely two weeks since she had begun this work, and she was already going to face the creatures of the deep.