Opportunity

Now out of the guild and instead in a random alleyway, the broker was cowering while the wretch looked down on him from a pile of crates that would have shattered under the weight of anyone else.

"What did you say your name was?" asked Axio, not even bothering to look at the pale man.

"Souriceau, sir..." he almost whispered.

"Mmh?"

"Souriceau!" he said more clearly.

"Very well, Souriceau, you realise that you should have kept your mouth shut I believe, for I am definitely and obviously not part of whatever authority that threw you in prison but now, I know it all..." the monster snickered making the man cover in ears to avoid the hearing damage.

"What do you want? I have nothing to offer!" he said but the wretch knew that this wasn't true, before the man started wondering if perhaps, this furry midget was really a part of the kingdom's inspectors.

The fool had mentioned something, which also hinted that he hadn't put his previous attempt behind him, this made the wretch wonder if those inspectors weren't really keeping an eye on this shifty guy.

Had the wretch really been after him for that reason, he would already be in a cold cell awaiting execution, one could only wonder how he hadn't spilled the beans the first time already.

"I know you still have the explosives hidden somewhere, tell me what or rather, who were those meant for?" Axiolypito jumped off his vantage point onto Souriceau's shoulders, the thin man barely noticed this until he felt hands grasping his head.

"Answer or you can say goodbye to your depth perception" with a sharp claw itching closer and closer to his left eye, the broker finally spoke up.

"You- You're going to laugh really... It isn't anything too grandiose-" seeing that he wasn't getting to the point, Axio grew a hook claw and got a hold of his eyelid, forcing his eye open.

"Argh! The explosives were meant to bury the main members of Otrera! It was my mother that founded the guild and she always despised me, so I wanted to get back at her and show her that were fake amazonians weren't worth shit!" pleased by the rapidity of the answer, Axio let the claw fall off from his finger, letting it to Souriceau to get it out.

"That's great! Let me help you, tell me what the plan is in details" he casually tapped the man's shoulder as he struggled to not rip his eyelid in two to remove the claw.

Grabbing and twisting the man's ears to get him to move, the wretch rode his shoulders as he forced Souriceau to carry him to where had hidden the explosives he spoke of.

"Faster you fool! What are you? Part sloth?" he berated him the entire way, uncaring about his bleeding wound.

Soon enough, after avoiding any main street to not appear as the fool he currently looked like, Souriceau finally arrived at the place he had hidden his stash.

An old dungeon whose core had been taken, rendering the place as utterly useless for any adventurers.

In a room hidden from view, Souriceau had pushed a rock in front of a hole near the ground, after struggling for tne minutes to get it out of the way while the wretch was still sitting on his back.

The room was filled with stacks upon stacks of magical items and unstable mana stones of all sorts of elements, the magical items were, for the most part, all damaged, just like the unstable stones, if infused with any more mana, they would blow up.

Souriceau hadn't actually spend any money on items meant to explode, each of those were 'unwilling' explosives and thus, much cheaper to buy.

"The- The plan was to plant the explosives into a dungeon area and have them detonate to bury the Otrera party inside, at least locking them in the dungeon for a while or have them be targeted by the dungeon if they were in the Defy" explained the broker as he rested against a wall, totally spent from this mildly difficult exercise.

"Defy?" wondered Axio, wanting for him to elaborate some more.

"Defy is the name given to one of the local dungeons, it has a unique way of functioning compared to others, monsters will spawn under certain circumstances, it is sort of a boss only dungeon, you challenge certain ones and get rewarded based on performance"

"But I don't know much about the inner workings, I never went in it..." explained Souriceau, proving once again that he wasn't much of an information broker.

"All that matters is that as long as you don't make it clear you want to fight or fall into a forced fight, the dungeon won't tolerate any destruction, sending a boss it is certain the particular people inside won't be able to survive..."

Curious, the wretch stared him in the face.

"Won't the dungeon targets whoever put the explosives there then? Or does being out of its perimeter will just make it attack whoever?" he asked and Souriceau gave him a tired smile.

"I tested it... The dungeon will murder everyone inside even if only a single person is responsible, it has no capacity or intention of making different cases when it comes to this" responded the thin man, his attention then turning to an unnatural noise coming from inside the dungeon.

He wanted to ask Axiolypito if he had heard it too but the small man was gone.

Worried by both of those events, he pushed himself up and quietly peeked his head from the hole linking the cache of explosives to the rest of the dungeon, seeing nothing but hearing a pained scream coming from the path they both had taken here.

It didn't sound like the strident voice of his blackmailer though.

With his legs trembling from tiredness and fear, he moved until the next corner and once again peeked from it, seeing a scene he wasn't expecting.

Hearing the sound of something falling to the ground, Axio lifted his head from the throat of unfortunate person's that had tried following them inside.

The white fur around his mouth and below drenched red, drops of blood falling from his beard, he shook his head dejectedly.

Making a corpse disappear was easy with his appetite but carrying anyone was off-limit for him.

"Dear me, he wants to murder a dozen of people but can't handle seeing even one corpse" he said directed at the passed out Souriceau.

'Anyhow, this guy must have been one of those inspectors, if he was, I'll have to keep that wimp well hidden, this one was meant for Souriceau, so he couldn't even see me coming but that might not be the case after that one goes missing...' he thought as he looked at the quick work he had made.

One needle claws in each of his eyes and his throat ripped out, the man wasn't even completely dead yet, just slowly chocking on his own blood while in complete darkness.

The eyes were always a good spot to strike for him, considering that they were always one of the weakest part to strike, the throat too but that was already much harder to pierce, he was only able to sink his teeth in and chew through because the man hadn't put up much of a fight after being suddenly blinded.

'What a shame almost everyone shields those parts' he lamented as he plunged his hands into the messed up throat of the man to get him to stop making gargling noises.