Chapter 168

◈ Chapter 168:

Zack pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. Bounty hunting was not going as well as he would have liked. He did wonder how he had ended up at this strange stage of his life. Really he was the inheritor of a not insignificant amount of wealth from his family, or at least he had been before gambling it all away and ending up in a small backwoods town known as Lynthia.

He had started to make something of himself in that town, but then she had come, the wicked devil sheep slut and her awful beastly wolf monster.

What a disaster that had been, humiliated by her rejections no matter how hard he pushed, his image ruined, his benefactors dead, his arm and part of his upper torso eaten. He had fled with the embers of his bitterness, embers that had been stoked ever higher into a forest fire of hatred for the sheep girl.

Now he found himself hunting her, driven both by money and revenge, a potent combo that he couldn't just let alone, couldn't stop stewing in his thoughts. If he could just get at her he would make her suffer, make her feel…

Tudor gave Zack the side eye. After a moment the Lapine's paw reached up to idly scratch at the stumps that were all that remained of his ears, just badly healed flesh and twisted fur and a little leather bandaging in a half hearted attempt to tidy up the scarring.

"What's got your elven nipples in a twist?" He glanced down at Zack's disfigurement. "Elven nipple. Singular."

Zack gave him an annoyed look. "Oh, you know, just the slight underestimation of how difficult it was going to be finding someone in a city of goddamn millions!"

Tudor shrugged lightly and sipped from his ale. "I told you the trick, she can make her wool black as a disguise. Should be easy to spot her."

"Should it? Because you can tell me someone's exact description down to how they trim their toenails but it's not going to help much if we're searching alone. This is like trying to find a needle in a haystack made of needles... As much as it galls me to say this, we may need to look into hiring help."

Tudor wrinkled his nose in distaste hearing that. "Now, see, I might not be the greatest bounty hunter of all time but even I know a thing or two. Bringing on more and telling them the trick on how to find her is a good way to only get a fraction of the bounty, or worse get no bounty at all. 'Sides, you said she can go invisible, maybe she's just using that."

"Ah yes, so much better, we're not just looking for a needle in a haystack made of needles, but an invisible needle in a haystack made of needles."

"You're an elf aren't you?" Tudor prodded the pair of violet spectacles hanging down on Zack's chest. "Use them when you sense something.

"I have been using them, every moment I get the itch, in fact I've been using them so much it's making me nauseous! But I have seen absolutely fuck all apart from the odd leveler loitering around or thieving, or the occasional invisible nudist."

"Really?"

Zack deflated a bit. "Nothing. It seems unlikely for just the two of us to find them outside of pure luck without… without information. Which is in stark scarcity as things stand."

"It wouldn't be so scarce if my contacts didn't keep disappearing," muttered Tudor, "I talk to 'em one day, and come back the next and there's nothing to see of them, it's like they just disappear into thin air and nobody knows why or how. It's starting to scare me a little if I'm honest."

"Can you not do a little better than 'oh the sketchy people I go off to have drinks with keep ghosting me after fobbing me off'."

"It's not that. Folk are genuinely disappearing, I hear it from my contacts who are still around. Half of them are shitting their underclothes because of it, some are even planning to flee the city. It's gotten bad and it's only getting worse."

Zack paused suddenly, a memory occurring to him.

"...Wait, is this, is it a succubus causing the disappearances!?"

"Nah. Shrivelled up corpses would have been found by now with how many are disappearing. This is something else."

"Well, figure it out! Use your bounty hunter skills!"

"For the last time you braindead peacocked elf, I was never a serious bounty hunter, it was just my side thing, I… kept an eye out and took my opportunities like any other. I just lucked into stumbling across the stupid sheep the first time… and isn't that something I regret with every grain of my soul."

His eyes drifted down onto the tabletop where a pair of rectangular leather strips lay.

He made a complicated expression, as though wrestling with some internal indecision, then after a moment he let out an agonised sigh. He hesitantly picked up the first rectangle. The top of the rectangle was rounded.

He raised it, increasingly hesitantly, and buttoned the base onto the leather wrapped around one of his ear stumps.

His new singular fake ear stood above his head, drooping slightly in a kind of cheaply made leather way.

A snort of laughter escaped Zack despite his clamped together lips as he looked up at his companion's fake ear.

Tudor looked ready to cry.

"Oh it's not that bad," said Zack extremely insincerely. He lightly punched the forlorn Lapine in the shoulder and the leather ear waggled back and forth a bit.

"It's the worst thing imaginable!" hissed Tudor, his claws marking the table. "I swear to god when I find that goblin I'm going to cover her in bacon grease and throw her in a pit full of starved hogs to be eaten alive! Nothing but oinking and screaming and pain and death! She'll beg me to end her, she'll—"

His rant was interrupted as the door to the empty inn banged open and a man dressed as a guard of some kind stumbled inside.

Tudor and Zack paused as they looked the man over.

His arms were covered in blood up to the elbows, his legs up to the knees. He had the wild eyed frazzled stare of a man who had been stressed beyond breaking point.

He stumbled forward, near falling, and leaving red footprints in his wake before spotting an empty table and collapsing into the chair. His head lowered down onto the table top with a limp thump.

Blood smears were left trailed across the wooden surface from his hands.

Tudor and Zack stared.

"What the hell happened to him?" whispered Zack, pulling out of his dour mood.

Tudor ignored him and stood, grabbing his spare mug of ale and taking it with him.

Zack startled before scrambling up and quickly following.

The guard barely reacted as Tudor slid down into the chair across, placing the mug on the table in the same motion. He slid it into the guard's limp fingers. After a moment the guard seemed to realise what he was being offered and drew it close with both hands. He lifted it like a precious thing, then noisily and messily gulped it down.

The two aspiring bounty hunters watched the guard finish and slam the mug back down.

"Gods burn my memory," groaned the guard in a half-whisper half-croak.

"What happened? What happened to leave you like this? A dungeon breach?"

The guard's wavering gaze drifted up to Tudor. Then up to his one leather ear. The guard blinked in surprise, but seemed to think better of questioning his benefactor. He licked his lip.

"A party. Bunch of high levelers and nobles coming together to wank each other off over some spoilt noble brat… but then…" the guard shuddered.

Zack and Tudor glanced at each other.

"Then?"

"Something… something awful happened, an attack, must have been some kind of hit from a powerful leveler, or a group of levelers. When we got up the courage to go inside, my gods, I've never seen…"

"What?" said Zack, getting impatient.

"They were cut in two, their upper halves crawling as they begged for help, and their guts, their intestines were slithering out of their ends, slithering away from them like hundreds of snakes, all these powerful indomitable levellers keening and crying, begging to be saved, begging to be healed." He held up a shaky hand. "The healer, the only damned healer left alive, had us gather them together, dragging their legs to their bodies, heaping up their intestines and stuffing them back in the ends. Except, oh gods, except we didn't know! Everything, absolutely everything was red! we couldn't tell whose legs belong to which body, and the healer, she was out of her mind with terror. Sh-she was healing the wrong lower halfs back onto them and it wasn't taking properly, they just wouldn't stop screaming! they had someone else's legs and it wasn't working! they just kept dying and d-dying! and their g-guts wouldn't stop trying to escape!" The guard became increasingly agitated as he spoke.

Zack and Tudor pulled back from the guard as though his words were physically repulsive.

"Good gods man, what the hell kind of an inter-leveler fight would lead to that?"

The guard rubbed his brow and only succeeded in smearing red across it.

"It had to have been her, by what the survivors kept saying, a monster, a summoned monster, a panthara and a wolf, so it had to be her. Murmer, the summoner. She even blocked the doors with a great snake so none could escape."

A sharp intake of breath came from Tudor and Zack glanced at him.

"Someone I should know?"

"In Florens? Yes. Bad news. But what was that you said? A wolf?"

"They said it was a massive black beast with yellow eyes, but they seemed more afraid of what came after, they could barely speak of it, some new kind of terrifying panthara."

"And a half-woolie? Was there a half-woolie with black wool? or- or a goblin?!?"

The guard tipped back his drink before answering.

"Yeah, but before all that, this one crazy bitch, the type who lets their level go to their head and thinks they can kill and bully whoever they like. She was on the verge of doing something horrible to me before… before Murmer stepped in… Come to think of it she vouched for the sheep."

"It's her…" spoke Tudor. "It's really her."

"You don't say," muttered Zack. "It's her and that wolf, the thing that took my arm… but it was never… that monster couldn't do such a thing, surely?"

"Doesn't matter, it's as you said, we're not after the wolf, we're after the goblin. We just need to separate them out and we can do as we like to her."

"No, we're after the sheep and the goblin and we can't separate them still because we still don't know where they are."

"Best figure out why they were at this party then…"