"Afternoon, kids. What can I do for you today?" Bekhi and I arrived at the warehouse and were greeted by someone who seemed in authority.
"We're here about the Thombuldahr trade run." I mentally sighed at being mistaken for kids again. "Here are our guild cards and a letter from the guild."
"Well, I'll be damned. You kids are ranked E already?" He looked over our guild cards and the letter carefully before handing our cards back and pocketing the letter. "Yep, you haven't forged or altered your guild cards and Lina speaks highly of your abilities. If you two are sure about this then welcome aboard. I'm Newman, the leader of this expedition." Newman reached out with a friendly smile to shake our hands. He looked to be in his late fifties with graying hair and a neatly trimmed beard.
I shook his hand and returned the smile. After introducing ourselves, I got straight to the point. "So, Newman. When does the expedition leave? We still need to find an inn if it's going to be a while."
"We'll be leaving at dawn the day after tomorrow. But you're short on cash, then you can just set up camp by the wagons. Most of the crew is already doing that so you'll be able to get to know them before we leave. And it will make my job easier to gather you when it's time to hit the road."
"What do you think, Bekhi? Inn, or camping out?" I was leaning towards the inn personally, but if we were going to spend a year guarding these wagons, then it would probably be a good idea to get to know the fellow guards.
"Let's go meet everyone and we can decide then." Newman nodded and led us around back of the warehouse where, for lack of a better word, there was a large parking lot packed with empty wagons.
Making our way through the innumerable wooden wagons, Newman stopped in front of a group of three adventurers. "Afternoon, everyone. I've got the last two members of our party here. This is Kvalinn, and this is Bekhi."
"Seriously, boss? You had to get more kids for this trip? What, is the moneybags paying for this trip being cheap?" The one looking over us skeptically was a skinny man in his mid thirties with blazing red hair. He was currently inspecting the fletching on his arrows for the longbow leaning behind him.
"As much as I hate the taste of the words, I agree with Richard. One kid is more than enough for a trip this long." The woman objecting to us joining looked to be in her twenties with bundled up blond hair, she was running a whetstone across a rather well made longsword.
"Aww c'mon guys! Where's your sense of adventure?" The last adventurer asked with a carefree smile as he hopped off the wagon he was perched on. "I'm Peter, fire mage extraordinaire at your service." Peter looked to be in his late teens and was overcompensating for his youth with a fuzzy beard and long hair. He had what looked like a wooden wizard's staff in his hand but instead of wearing robes or a pointy hat, he was wearing the same sturdy leather armor as the rest of us.
"Good to meet you, Peter." I shook his hands and looked at his staff curiously. "I've never met a mage before. What type of spells can you cast?"
"Heh, never met a mage? I'm liking you better already, kid." The archer put his arrow away and stepped up to shake our hands. "I'm Richard. Don't get the punk going on about his magic, he'll try to give you an example and run out of magic, and I have money down on him setting fire to a wagon before we get to Tochka."
"How rude! That only happened once, I mean, I would never do that!"
Richard smirked at having set off Peter into a defensive spiral. "The final member of our group is Kat. Don't talk to her unless you want cold steel shoved up your ass, or at least don't try it before she gets comfortable around you."
Kat grunted at Richard's warning and glared at me with repulsion. Newman then said that he had work to do and told us to play nice.
"So, Kvalinn. Where are you from? There's not many places out there that don't have at least one magic user protecting the town." Peter passed us a stale beer as he asked his question.
"We're from Einangrad." I took a sip of the beer, it was flat, stale, and nowhere near the quality of dwarven beer. But I took another sip since water these days was far from safe to drink.
"Einangrad, eh?" Richard took another arrow from his quiver and began inspecting it. "Not a lot of dwarves come out of there. What brings you two down here?"
"It's a long story." Unlike Kurt, who had left well enough alone, Richard just raised a skeptical eyebrow.
"Does it look like we have places to be?" When I stayed silent about our past, he gave an annoyed sigh. "Alright, I'll make up a backstory for you. Actually, Peter, give 'em your best backstory." He then looked at us with a grin like he was waiting for the show to start.
"Really?" Peter looked surprised that his talents were being called upon, but he soon recovered and gave a shit eating grin. "Ok, hmm. I got it! You accidentally tripped and tore the beard off Bekhi's father while having a pie eating contest, and now the two of you are running away to open a restaurant in Tochka under an assumed name and you'll wear stilts to appear human. Did I get it right?"
"Close enough." Bekhi giggled uncontrollably as she listened to Peter joking around. "He didn't tear the beard off my father, and Kvalinn is going to open a weapon smithy somewhere instead of a restaurant, but other than that, close enough."
I chuckled a bit myself. The idea of a pie eating competition did sound nice. Especially a tasty blueberry or apple pie. But since I hadn't seen any fruits resembling blueberries or apples so far, that was just a dream. Then again, this was my first spring above ground, so maybe there were tons of fruits to make pies out there.
"You can make weapons?" Kat interrupted the merry mood with a piercing glance towards me. "Can you make custom weapons?"
"I can, but since we only have a day left I wouldn't have time to make anything like the sword you already have. Or at least not of a quality that I could let you use with good conscience." I may have been kicked out of the weapon clan, but my father's high standards for weapon crafting were too deeply ingrained for me to make an inferior weapon.
Kat nodded thoughtfully while instinctively reaching out to her bag to assure herself something was there. Richard spoke next
"What about arrowheads? Can you make those?" When I nodded in affirmative, he gave the first honestly cheerful grin I'd seen from him. "Perfect. We're gonna be wintering in Tochka, and the building they usually provide has a forge for fixing weapons. I'll get Newman's permission for you to use it to make me a couple hundred arrowheads." Kat gave a low growl and Richard held up his hands placatingly. "After you make Kat's weapon that is."
"Hey, if Richard and Kat are getting new weapons. Can you make something cool for me too?" Peter leaned over with an eager look. With his honest baby face and joking nature, a couple ideas for experimental weapons from video games in my past life popped into my head.
"Be careful what you wish for, Peter." Bekhi warned. "That look on his face right there means he has an especially destructive or painful idea that has an equal chance of killing you as it does any monster."
"How bad could it be? You just need to get the pointy end into the other guy? Magic is way more difficult to use."
"You'd be surprised at how destructive Kvalinn can get." Bekhi took out a throwing hammer with the rune of impact on it and threw it at a partially dismantled wooden box. It shattered the crate into splinters with a bang. "That's just one of his least powerful experiments."
Richard walked over to the hammer and picked up in curiosity. "Wait, is this a magical rune?!"
Bekhi had an 'oh crap' look on her face as she realized she may have let the cat out of the bag. Back when we were still on the mountain, Dak had warned us about letting anyone know that I could make magical runed weapons since humans valued them so highly, he said I'd be turned into a national resource and put under lock and key before I could blink.
"Don't worry about it, kids." Richard handed the hammer back to Bekhi with a small smile. "The only reason I knew was that I have a tiny bit of elf blood in me. And I'm not gonna tell anyone that your boyfriend can make national treasures, although I would like those arrowheads to be extra fancy."
"I'll see what I can do." I said in resignation. "I guess you two want magical runed weapons as well?" Kat firmly nodded, while Peter grinned in anticipation.
"You, girl." Kat nodded at Bekhi. "Can you fight?" She handed Bekhi her spare sword. "I don't want to entrust my life to someone who's just following their man. Show me what you've got." Kat then took up a fighting stance with her long two handed sword.
Bekhi, always glad to find a good fight, grinned as she took up the sword and started fighting with Kat. Despite the length of Kat's sword, she managed to wield it as if it were lighter than cardboard, and the weight of the blows smashed several empty crates. Bekhi dodged and deflected with ease and with her smaller height, she was able to get under Kat's defense and land several blows. She used the flat of the blade though so there were no injuries.
"I yield, Bekhi." Kat and Bekhi lowered their blades, and Bekhi handed the practice blade back. "Whoever trained you did a good job. That's going to keep you alive a lot longer than your fancy magic weapons." Kat seemed to have much more respect for Bekhi now that she had crossed blades with her, even calling her by her name.
"Thanks! Kvalinn was trained by the same teacher so he's pretty good too." Kat merely grunted at Bekhi's praise, not even looking over at me.
"So those are magical weapons?" Peter looked at the sword at my side in curiosity and awe. "My master told me about them, but I've never seen any before today."
"Really? Then what is your staff?" I had figured that his wizard's staff was just the human equivalent to runed weapons, forgetting for the moment that while dwarves were created with no magic whatsoever, humans had a decent amount of magic at their disposal.
"The staff is just something I can use if I need to swing at something that gets too close, the real power is in here." Peter tapped a dark red stone that was embedded in the wood. "A magic stone is made in a top secret way to collect small amounts of magic from me all day so I can fire off spells whenever I need to. But if it gets empty, then it's just a stick with a stone in it."
"So you can't just use your own magic directly to cast the spell?" Peter snorted at my suggestion.
"Only elves have that much magic. If I tried to use just the magic in my own body, then maybe I could light a campfire at most, but without an elven tool that would just be suicide. Or at least it would be according to what my master taught me." I nodded as I took mental notes on the human magic system.
"So those magic stones, is there any way for me to get any?" The way magic runes worked was that you took a set amount of magic and put it in the rune, but that meant that once the rune ran out of magic then that was it. No more magic would ever come out of the rune again. If I could somehow combine whatever magic tech was in those stones with my runes, then I'd be able to make basically solar powered runes to run any gadgets or tech! But Peter's answer shattered my hopes.
"Nope. My master learned the secret to make them from the Imperial Academy in Altenweil, and only Imperial mages are taught the secret. As for buying them, it's outlawed for any who aren't Imperial nobility to buy or sell magic stones. I only have mine because my master gave me one of his old ones."
I mentally shrugged, there was bound to be a black market for magic stones, I'd just need to find it. If I ever made it to the Empire, I'd track it down and get my hands on a supplier of the magic stones or make them myself. The implications of runes that gathered ambient magic from the wilder to recharge the runes with magic was too awesome to ignore.
"Kvalinn. Give it up." Bekhi's warning reached through to my racing thoughts. And I gave a physical shrug to show her that I would put a pin in it for now. Dwarven lives are long, and I could afford to wait.
The conversation moved from magic and weapons to more general topics about what we would find on the roads. Both Richard and Kat were experienced adventurers with years of experience, and they gave us a lot of useful information. We spent the next day following their advice and obtaining many of the little necessities that would make life on the road much easier. Like small rags to light fires with, a small shovel to dig up the dirt under our sleeping blankets, and dried emergency rations of jerky. Just in case the wagons ran out of food. By the end of the day, our backs had much more in them than just our clothes and weapons, and were much heavier. But we were now prepared for anything the world could throw at us.
"And that was the third time I almost got eaten by ogres. So the point of my story is, always keep an extra blade up your sleeve." Newman finished his third story of the day with a satisfied nod. We had been walking for over a week now, Newman had positioned himself in the line so that both Bekhi and I were within listening distance of him, and he had been telling stories of his past nonstop since we left Vescato. For some reason he seemed to think that we were in need of lessons on how to survive, and the best way to teach us was to talk about his past.
"What if I just cut off the ogre's hand before he can reach out to grab me?" Bekhi asked.
"Well that's the ideal solution, but it's not always that easy. Especially when they sneak up behind you while you're fighting someone or something else. One time, I was standing guard in the middle of the night, and I felt the giant fingers suddenly grab me from the darkness…" Newman started off on another story while I shot Bekhi a glare for setting him off again.
Not to say that the stories weren't informative, they were actually quite useful, and even mildly entertaining at times. But they just seemed to drag on forever and a day! Literally! It was worse than being stuck on a plane with a talkative passenger because I had to deal with sore feet while listening.
To deal with the boredom, I looked at the forest around us. It was early spring now so the weather was getting warmer, and the trees and bushes were just starting to bloom, and small animals rustled in the undergrowth as they fled from us. It was a sight I had never seen before in this world, every spring before now had been spent underground, and it was quite pretty to see it all again after so long. The peace and quiet didn't last though.
"Newman! We've got company!" Richard shot an arrow into the woods, where someone fell off a tree branch with a dying scream.
"Shit!" Newman cursed as he drew his sword. "Every damn time we go through this wood we get attacked. Kvalinn, Bekhi, stay and guard the front half while we deal with this." He then rushed off to the back half of the line of wagons, where a half dozen scraggly looking bandits wielding rusty swords and wearing patched up armor, were rushing our comrades.
"Kvalinn! What do you have with that much range?" Bekh asked as she held out her hand for a weapon. The wagon line was ten wagons long, so there was nearly a hundred feet of distance between where we were standing and the fight.
"I don't think we have time to worry about them." I said as I slipped my shield off my back and faced the woods to the front. Another half dozen bandits, all wearing decent armor and wielding a variety of good weapons walked out of the underbrush. The most well dressed of the bunch leered at us as if we were a prime product to be sold.
"Well, well, well! Newman, as always, has good choices in guards. These two are young dwarves and should sell for a handsome sum in Zaihan. Quickly now, disarm them and tie them up before Newman finishes with the bait."
"Hey, boss." One of the minions said in a skeevy tone. "One of them's a girl! Can we have some fun before taking her to market?"
"Of course not, you dolt! That would ruin her sale price! Now get going!" The boss of the bandits kicked the skeevy one on his ass before moving towards us with weapons drawn.
"That one's mine, Kvalinn." Bekhi had her normal feral grin that she wore during fights, but this time it was full of freezing fury. She put away her sword with the rune of sharpness, and took out a one handed warhammer that had the rune of bone breaking. Evidently she wanted to make these assholes suffer.
I was seething in anger towards them as well. They were likely routine slavers that captured adventurers and sold them into a life of slavery without a second thought. The thought of getting sold off by such filth made my dwarven blood boil with rage. As I got angrier, I felt the rune of wrath on my left hand begin to heat up and activate, and soon enough, the rune of wrath appeared in all the bandits' eyes.
"Kvalinn? What did you do?" Bekhi was still standing ready for a fight, but all six of the bandits were now rushing at me. Swinging their weapons with bestial instincts that made it easy to dodge but hard to block.
"Who cares what I did! Just get them off me!" I was using a hammer with the rune of sunshine on it to try and fend off the bandits. Apparently the rune caused whoever got hit with the weapon to go temporarily blind if they got hit around the head, and if they got hit on the body then they would get severe sunburn. Like peeling skin and painful to move level of sunburn. But even with the extreme pain and temporary blindness, the bandits kept trying to kill me while completely ignoring Bekhi.
"Ok, but next time you steal a fight from me I'm going to put you through a training session like we used to do with Elder Dworhick!" Bekhi was a bit peeved at not getting to fight the skeevy bandit and his boss. So she went for the next best thing and broke all of their knees. When that failed to stop the bandits from trying to attack me, she knocked them out with the handle of her hammer.
We panted for a few minutes after the fight before Bekhi glared daggers at me. "Seriously, Kvalinn. Steal my fight again, and I'll beat you with one of the many weapons you made for me." Bekhi was more irritated than I thought. I quickly agreed to never steal her fight ever again.
"Kvalinn! Bekhi! Are you alright!?" Newman rushed up to where we were standing with his sword drawn and bloody. "I had my hands full dealing with the refuse of the gang and only finished the last one now, are you wounded anywhere? Wait a moment, what happened here?"
Bekhi glared at me to explain, so I did my best to tell what happened. "I made a couple of biting insults, and they all attacked me at once. Then while they were distracted, Bekhi broke their knees."
"Why didn't you just kill them?" Newman asked. "Their bounties all say 'dead or alive' on them."
"They may have insulted Bekhi's honor, so she wanted them to suffer a little more than just a quick death." A look of comprehension dawned on Newman's face, and he sidled away from the still seething Bekhi. Kicking over the leader of the bandits, Newman peered at his face. "This looks like Romauld, he's been wanted for years for kidnapping and murder. Looks like you two will get a decent sum added to your paycheck when we finish the trip. His bounty is at least fifty silver. The other scum here all have varying amounts but it all adds up. Here, help me tie them up, we'll take them to the closest village."
Taking a length of rope, we tied all the bandits' wrists together to a single rope. If they didn't have their knees broken I would have assumed that Newman meant for them to walk behind a wagon, but their fate was going to be worse than that. Newman tied the rope to a wagon and let them be dragged along the road.
A few of them regained consciousness to scream in agony before fainting again, while the others remained unconscious. Newman, Richard, and Kat all stamped on the broken knees a few times each as we walked down the road.
"I've lost a lot of good men and women to these vermin." Newman explained to Peter who was looking uncomfortable at the unnecessary cruelty. "I'd hire a good shielder or front line adventurer to take care of the front, and when I finished dealing with their attack from behind, the adventurer would be gone and I'd never see them again. Evidently this scum was selling the adventurers in the slave markets of Zaihan."
Kat stepped on Romauld's knee especially viciously with the heel of her boot. Muttering and swearing to herself in a language I didn't recognize but sounded vaguely French.
"Kat has a bit of history with the slavers in Zaihan." Newman quietly explained. "Maybe over the winter you might get her to tell you about it."
The rest of the day was nerve wracking to say the least. Every so often someone took a step on the bandits and they'd scream in agony before passing out. Even Bekhi was reaching her limits with the excess cruelty.
"There are several more bands in the area." Newman said to us when he noticed us looking at the bandits with just a hint of pity. "Each of them has probably memorized your faces by now so that next time you pass through, they'll leave you alone. They won't want to suffer a fate like this one. Plus, they might just leave me alone while they're at it. I'm sick of losing good adventurers to people like this."
When we reached the nearest town, the residents cheerfully took custody of the bandits and started making plans for their public execution. Fortunately for me, we left town at dawn and didn't have to see that. I may be a dwarf now, and those bandits definitely deserved it, but I didn't want to have to watch them die.
Thanks to the display Newman had made of the bandits. We weren't attacked a single time by humans for several weeks. Although there was still the occasional monster attack that Bekhi and I took care of easily.
"We're approaching Zaihan." Newman said with several muttered curses. "Make sure no one spots your runed weapons. If a noble there catches sight of them, he'll stab you in the back without a second thought and loot your corpse for pocket change. Bekhi, wear this." He passed her a dented and banged up helmet that would cover her face. "Don't take it off until we leave the country, even to sleep. If one of the nobles takes a fancy to you then you'll either end up on the slave block or in a harem before you can swing your hammer."
"What about Kat?" I asked. Newman just pointed behind us with his chin. I saw that Kat was wearing an identical helmet to Bekhi, as well as a ratty poncho that covered her well toned figure.
"Kat came from Zaihan. She knows how to avoid the nobles." Newman muttered. "The usual procedure is to bribe a noble at the gate to accompany you through the country, but there's no guarantee they won't get greedy or meet a more powerful noble on the road. So it's best to be as cautious as possible."
"I don't suppose going around is possible?" I tried recalling the map of this continent and realized that it was a stupid question. In order to go around Zaihan, you would need to go all the way south past Einangrad, and then make a huge loop around the mountain through The Empire, and then go through a half dozen duchies and territories to reach Tochka. The only other route was to send stuff via sea and have the country of Vermogen charge you an arm and a leg for using their port.
"The cheapskates sending this stuff to Tochka don't want to pay the Vermogen harbor fees so this is the only route from Handel. So we just have to pray to the gods that our luck holds until we reach the other side."
Bekhi squeezed my hand nervously, the helmet she was wearing was definitely not flattering, but I hoped that it would work. By the end of the day, the large white walls of Zaihan were within sight, and the next leg of our journey would be starting soon.