Duskbound

Not everyone made it back that night. While Velik's team was ultimately successful despite the complication of Pevril's presence, four other teams failed to subdue their targets and took casualties in the attempt. Not only was the number of golds working to cleanse the monster infestation from the guild down now, but the enemy had no doubt become aware that they'd been exposed. Rescuing those people from their captors was now going to be that much harder.

None of that was Velik's problem. Nobody really considered him part of the organization, nor was he asked to go out on secondary strikes aimed at mitigating damage. The truth was that, as far as the guild was concerned, he was still an untested and unreliable element. This group might not be controlled by monsters, but they hardly treated Velik any better than the official guild had.

That was why he found himself in the infirmary the next morning, where a few dozen men and women were recovering from their wounds. Monster hunters were tough, one and all, and that combined with magical healing in the form of skills or alchemical concoctions meant that only the most severely injured were still on bedrest.

That included Pevril, which made it easy to track the man down. Velik was hoping the real Pevril wasn't a jackass like the monster pretending to be him had been, but he suspected he was in for a disappointment. An agent of corruption was a master at imitating its victim, and if it had behaved that way, there was every chance that Pevril wasn't much better.

Hopefully, saving his life counts for something, Velik thought to himself as he found Pevril's bed. His eyes traveled down to the foot of the bed, where the blanket lay flat for the bottom few feet. Guess they couldn't fix that, though. That might make it a bit hard to get what I want from him.

"What do you want?" Pevril asked, his voice hoarse. He hadn't even opened his eyes to see who was there, which didn't bode well for the interview.

"I wanted to ask you some questions."

"Boy, I've had enough questions to last me a lifetime. For the first time in years, I can choose when to close my eyes and when to open them, and right now, I want them closed. Now piss off; I'm not in the mood to be harassed."

"Well there's a fine thank you for saving your life," Velik said. "Would have been easier to just kill you, you know?"

"Then you should have," Pevril told him bitterly. "It would have been better than the way you left me."

"What, you're too poor to afford limb regeneration? I thought you were a guild bigshot."

"That… thing… pretending to me was. All the money it earned or stole went toward its activities. I have nothing, and your half-baked insurrection is so limited in manpower and resources that I couldn't even convince them to send anyone out to save my daughter."

"She's in danger?" Velik asked sharply.

"I have no doubt she'll be taken as a pawn to use against me. They won't know that I'm useless, just laying here in a bed. The monster always used her as a hostage to my cooperation. I watched it lay down its plans to hurt her if I ever did anything to disrupt operations."

"You can fight against their control?"

Pevril sighed and scrubbed a hand across his face. "A little, if you've got the right stats for it. A high mental helps. Mystic can be useful, but gear does nothing. Any benefit you gain from it, the monster gets, too. Mage-types were avoided as targets if possible because they have the biggest potential to wrest control back at an inopportune moment for the monster."

Velik hadn't spared a thought for Milly since exam day. She'd hated him, and he'd been happy to ignore all of them. The old team had passed their tests and become bronze. He'd been the only one to fail, a deliberate sabotage to get Aria out of the guild while they slipped one of their agents into the guild master. Ironically enough, it had made no difference. He'd finished the hydra hunt so fast that they hadn't had time to enact their plan anyway.

"Make you a deal," Velik said. "You want someone to go get your kid? I'll do it."

"You?" Pevril snorted. "You have the time for that? No one else around here seems to. 'Not a priority right now,' were their exact words."

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Velik shrugged. "Nobody's asked me to do anything, and frankly, I don't give a fuck what they want. This deal is between you and me. You want your daughter back where you can keep an eye on her? Fine. I'll go find her for you. In return, you answer some questions for me."

"She'd never agree to go with you, not after everything the creature did to alienate you from your training team," Pevril said.

"Write her a letter or something. I don't mind pretending to be a courier. I'm sure she'd believe I was being given a crappy job because the guild couldn't trust me to do any real gold-ranked work. The way you all treated me makes that a perfectly believable lie, right?"

"For what it's worth," Pevril said slowly, "I know how strong you are. I know you could have killed that bull in a single strike, that you held back on purpose to allow the rest of your team to do what they were supposed to. It's not often I agreed with that monster, but I would have failed you even if it hadn't been in control. You don't belong in bronze rank."

"Great to know," Velik deadpanned. "Weird direction to go, insulting the person you want a favor from, but sure."

"And you don't understand why you failed. Admittedly, the game was rigged. If you'd done everything right, the monster would have found some other reason. It needed you to take that gold trial with an evaluator. But the real reason you failed isn't because you didn't do your part correctly. It's because you knowingly allowed your team to go through with a reckless plan doomed to failure, one that put their lives at risk. You didn't communicate with them. You didn't help them. You weren't part of the team; you were just there."

Alright, well, that's fair enough. He's not exactly wrong when he says I wasn't interested in working with them.

"Like I said, great to know. Now, about those questions of mine…"

"Get me a pen, an inkwell, and some parchment," Pevril told him. "I'll answer whatever questions you have while I write Milly."

That was easily accomplished. The house had a study not too far from the infirmary that Velik pillaged for the required supplies, and while Pevril laboriously started scrawling out the letter on a piece of parchment laid out against the back of a leatherbound book, Velik asked his first question.

"This organization, there are multiple groups in different areas, right?"

"That's right," Pevril said. "I don't know where, though. Each group is kept separate. I only know the name of the man who collaborated between all of us. Your team is working on hunting him down already."

"Was he in charge of the… I guess… the situation up north?"

"No one was in charge of that," Pevril said. "As far as I know, nobody even knew it was happening. The monsters think someone was doing an experiment on the side that got out of hand, or that it was something left over from a previous generation that was forgotten about until your friend became the new dungeon up there."

Velik grappled with that for a moment, then said tightly, "Are you trying to tell me that the moment that ruined my life was an accident? That someone's negligence cleaning up their toys resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people, including my entire family and my best friend?"

"It doesn't make you special," Pevril told him absently. "Mistakes happen, and sometimes lives are lost. Keep up this job, be a real monster hunter, and you'll make your own mishap that costs someone's life. It's inevitable."

"Somehow, that doesn't make me feel better."

"It's not supposed to. Good hunters internalize that fact. They fight against it every day, knowing that they're not always going to succeed. They try anyway. It's the ones that don't care about their mistakes costing other people's lives that I have to weed out. I thought you might be that kind of hunter, with your arrogance and your disdain for the rest of your team. I'm still not convinced I was wrong."

At least he's honest, even if he is an asshole.

"If you were trying to destroy the monsters, and I don't just mean the ones infesting the guild, I mean rip that problem out of the world at its root, how would you do it?" Velik asked.

"Me? Well, I'd probably start by getting my legs regrown. That might take a few years, unfortunately. I imagine by then, your friends will have things well in hand. If you really want to make yourself useful, there is a place you could explore. It's dangerous, a dungeon where new agents are created. Destroying that would certainly be a harsh blow to their plans."

"Where is it?"

Pevril glanced up from his letter and frowned at Velik. "I'll tell you when you bring me my daughter back. How about that?"

"That wasn't part of our deal," Velik objected.

"I'm altering the deal, then. Milly is more important to me, and I need to know you'll bring her back here, alive and well, and not go running off to get yourself killed in a dungeon. Once I have my daughter, then I'll tell you where the place is."

He didn't like it, but Velik understood the reasoning. Pevril didn't trust him, and keeping back this scrap of information to use as a piece of leverage was a smart idea from his perspective. On the other hand, Velik had already given his word that he'd find Milly, so he was a bit offended by the lack of cooperation.

"Fine. Where's she at?" Velik asked.

Pevril took a moment to wave a hand over the letter and speed the ink's drying. "She and her team are doing a bronze-ranked job southwest of here, on the coast. It's some sort of scalewark tribe tearing up fishing villages, easy enough to kill individually, but with a lot of numbers."

"I'll find her," Velik promised. He paused, considering whether he trusted Pevril enough to ask the last question on his mind. It was something he'd been turning around for a few weeks now, but ultimately, he decided it was better to sit on it.

Pevril gave him the letter, and two hours later, Velik was out of the city along the south road. His only stop was to purchase a new backpack enchanted to keep water out of it. After his experience in the swamp, he wasn't eager to suffer any more aquatic adventures without something like that.