After spending a full day hanging out with Brian at the Grand Auction, and then the next meeting with Groln and helping Samantha practice her newly evolved skills in the forest, Asher had to admit he was itching to get back into the thick of things. Spending time with Brian and Samantha was something he treasured and wouldn’t change for the world, but it was good to have a nice balance between relaxing time and stabbing time.

  Moxy certainly understood.

  “Are we finally fighting again?” she asked the next day as she walked in on the two of them eating in the lounge room Donvath seemed to have all but designated for them at this point. Grabbing a bowl of porridge for herself, she took a seat, thrusting her spoon toward Asher. “After bringing me to the royal palace, you guys just up and left me to my own devices for days! If I hadn’t found a new sparring partner, I don’t know what I would have done with myself!”

  “We were busy selling some of the loot we’d collected and evolving a bunch of Samantha’s skills,” Asher said defensively. “Who did you end up roping into fighting with you anyway?”

  “The captain of the royal guard,” Moxy snorted, waving her hand in a ‘so-so’ motion. “He’s not bad, but he could certainly be stronger. Kept trying to tell me he had to hold back on all his more dangerous skills because he ‘didn’t want to hurt me.’ I think he’s just a sore loser.”

  “The captain, huh?” Asher repeated, sharing a quick look with Samantha. According to Donvath, there were quite a number of futures where Moxy and Christian, the captain of the royal guard, ended up not only getting together, but getting married. He briefly thought about informing her of this, before deciding against it. Most likely Moxy would just laugh and call him an idiot even if he did.

  “Even if he was a barely acceptable sparring partner, he doesn’t have a ton of free time, so now I’m back on my own again,” Moxy said, shoveling porridge into her mouth and talking around the food. “So? Who’s our next target? We finally bringing the fight to the demons or what?”

  “I’d definitely like to, but there’s the small matter of having to actually find them first,” Asher tried to explain. “We didn’t get any clues as to the lich’s new whereabouts from raiding its tower, which means we have no idea where to even start looking. Which is actually a fantastic segue into what I think our next move should be.”

  Asher had already run Samantha through what he’d been working on all this time last night, but Moxy blinked as he pulled a dossier out of his rift and tossed it onto the table before him. Having already Incorporated it, he knew all the information as if he’d written it himself.

  “What’s the main thing our little team is missing?” he began, watching Moxy as she picked up the dossier and stared at the sketch on the front. “Not to toot our own horn, but we’ve got combat power in spades at this point. All three of us have a healing skill, so we can take care of ourselves. And with Samantha’s wings and my Recall, we’ve got mobility taken care of as well. The biggest gap in our abilities is actually finding the targets we want to take down. We were able to rely on Donvath to give us the location of Talon because the Guild is unrelated to The Council of Death, but we’re on our own when it comes to tracking down the liches and their demon lackeys. Which is why I have a proposition for our fourth team member.”

  “Rulfar?” Moxy asked, glancing up from the drawing of the burly bloodhound one of Donvath’s aides had sketched for them. “Why him? There have to be other seekers or bloodhounds out there we could recruit.”

  “There are, but I think he’d be a good pick for a few reasons,” he started. “For one, familiarity. I barely spoke to the man for more than a couple of minutes, but he seemed like a pretty stand-up guy. More importantly, it sounded like he did a decent chunk of retrieval work for Loratta, so I was hoping you’d had some interactions with him.”

  “Yeah, we spoke on plenty of occasions,” Moxy nodded, leaning back in her chair as she thought. “Rulfar was far more professional than most of the chumps who tried to get in good with Loratta. Never injured anyone without good reason, and always managed to find his mark. I tried to get him to spar with me more than once, but he always refused. Said he already knew what he was capable of and wasn’t a fan of needless violence.”

  “I know we talked about this last night, but you really think asking a guy who worked for Loratta to join us is a good idea?” Samantha asked, before her mind caught up with her mouth. Glancing at Moxy, who merely had an eyebrow raised and a smirk on her face, Samantha cleared her throat. “You know what, forget I said anything.”

  “No, it’s a good question,” Asher said, smiling at her. “Moxy is something of a unique case, I probably wouldn’t trust anyone else who was a part of Loratta’s gang. But Rulfar was more like a side contractor. By his own admittance, he worked for the town guard just as much as he did Loratta. When someone put out a bounty, he’d pick it up, tracking the person down and bringing them in, completely unharmed whenever possible. From what I heard, when other people took on Loratta’s requests, her targets ended up dead more often than not. Rulfar ensured that didn’t happen.”

  “Still, this is the capital of the entire kingdom,” Moxy said, currently skimming through the dossier Asher had given her. “I’ll admit this is some impressive stuff. But surely there have to be others capable of finding people with just as impressive records?”

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  “You have no idea,” Asher laughed. “I asked Donvath to help me look into potential seekers and the like, and he put one of his aides on the task. Do you guys have any idea how many people go around advertising their services as a bounty hunter? In the capital alone, there are a few hundred.”

  “Well that’s pretty much my point,” Moxy said. “Why Rulfar?”

  “While he doesn’t have the absolute best record of finding his target, he’s in the top five percent in the entire kingdom,” Asher said, repeating some of the statistics Donvath’s aide had prepared for him. “And more importantly, he can handle himself in a fight. Have you interacted with a lot of seekers? I briefly met up with a couple to help me track down assassins in Dormaul, and let me tell you, what I saw was a bit eye opening. The seeker who I ended up hiring was good, no question there. But he was a scrawny guy who made it quite clear he wouldn’t be partaking in any fighting. The fact of the matter is there are bounty hunters who excel at fighting, and there are bounty hunters who excel at finding their targets. The overlap between those two groups is shockingly small.”

  “I can believe it. Most of the chumps I referenced earlier relied on surprise attacks or poison to knock out Loratta’s targets when they finally found them, which is why so many of them ended up dead instead of brought back to us,” Moxy scowled. “Alright, I’m warming up to this idea pretty quickly. You’re right that without a dedicated seeker we’ll never manage to actually find these demons I want to fight so badly. Not to mention I always did want to try sparring with Rulfar, and if he joins the team, he’ll be all but forced to fight me for training. Where do we find him?”

  “And there’s the tricky bit,” Asher said, chuckling as Moxy rolled her eyes. “Ironically, we might need to hire a bounty hunter to find the bounty hunter. Or bloodhound, in this case. Donvath’s aide was able to tell me he was last seen operating out of Furora, the kingdom’s fifth city, but he couldn’t tell me much more than that.”

  “Furora… Never been there myself,” Moxy admitted. “Anything noteworthy?”

  “It’s actually the most populated city in the entire kingdom, and it supplies the Noala Kingdom with almost a third of all of its food,” Asher said, mentally reading from a general book about the Noala Kingdom he’d Incorporated a while back. “Not surprising a bloodhound looking for work would end up heading in that direction.”

  “So we need to find someone unintentionally hiding in the most populated city of the kingdom,” Samantha surmised. “A bounty hunter might not be the worst idea after all. Though maybe we’ll get lucky and find him advertising his services!”

  “It doesn’t generally work that way,” Asher explained. “From what I gather, normally, people post notices for specific bounty hunters to pick up. It’s first come first served. Usually bounty hunters have preferred places they hang out in their downtime, and people who want to request them by name know where to find them. Furora is large enough that trying to run around it asking people if they know Rulfar could take us literal months. Even just trying to track down all the bounty hunter hotspots and checking them one by one would be rather time consuming.”

  “Good thing you’re rich then, eh?” Moxy asked, getting to her feet and stretching as she flashed them a wide grin and held out her hand. “Alright, that’s enough talking. Pull me into that weird hidden room of yours so we can get over there.”

  “No need to be in such a rush, it’s going to take Samantha most of the day to fly from the capital over to Furora. Being in there doesn’t bother you?”

  “It’s certainly freaky, but I’m not about to let a weird room scare me,” Moxy shrugged. “Besides, if you ever decided to try and trap me in there, I’d just start punching the walls until I ripped my way out of your chest or something.”

  “Please don’t ever try doing that,” Asher said, shuddering at the thought of Moxy burrowing her way out of his very soul, or wherever the hell his Personal Rift was kept. He was about ninety-nine percent sure she wouldn’t be able to punch her way free like she thought, but that didn’t mean he wanted to challenge her to try.

  “Should we tell Donvath we’re heading out again?” Samantha asked, holding up her sending stone. “Seeing as we’re staying in his palace, it always feels weird when we just come and go without saying anything.”

  “I wouldn’t bother,” Moxy snorted. “Apparently, the High Prince is busy for the next day or so. I asked Christian during our match yesterday if he could convince the High Prince to spar with me, and he let slip that the man’s all but barricaded himself in a portion of the palace basement even the royal guard are forbidden from entering. It’s something he only started doing about a month ago, and Christian’s worried because only the truthseekers are allowed down there, so he can’t ensure his safety.”

  “Really? That’s a bit strange,” Asher said, starting as he realized what else had happened a month ago. “Hold up. Wasn’t that around the time all the truthseekers were recalled to the capital?”

  “Sefta said her father and uncle were as well,” Samantha said, beginning to look worried. “And you didn’t end up seeing any sign of Theorn’s parents while you were within the Frent estate, right? Maybe the other heads of the noble families were summoned at the same time.”

  “Why would Donvath need all his truthseekers and the heads of the noble families to all meet him at the capital?” Asher muttered, staring at the floor as though wishing he could see straight through it and down into the basement. “Okay… I’m tempted to go take a peek for myself, but that might be crossing a line. He has been letting us live here and given us all sorts of help this past week and a half. Donvath seems pretty receptive. Let’s wait for him to come out again and I’ll ask before we do anything.”

  “You’re the boss,” Moxy shrugged, waving her hand in front of his face again. “Now pop me into that room of yours and get to flying, or I’ll throw you off the palace roof.”

  Discord