9

The three of them, plus the extra tag-along maid, met up again at the Ferrous Flagon the next day. Luckily, none of them had any other prior arrangements.

“Lookin’ lovely and reliable as always, ladies!” Hera joked as soon as they were all together.

Sami and Mari didn’t know how to react to that, but at least Claudia responded with a polite smile.

On their way to the address Gina had given them, Sami hoped that this would be a simple matter to solve; just a quick talk with the mysterious employer. Maybe they had made a mistake in handing over the reward, and they’d have it ready now, and that would be it.

Even if they didn’t have the payment, it wouldn’t be the end of the world for her. She didn’t need the money, after all, but she would feel terrible for her companions who risked themselves for this job and saved each other’s lives without second thoughts. They at least deserved compensation.

Unfortunately, as soon as they got there it became quickly apparent that this wasn’t going to just be an in-and-out deal. The address had turned out to be located in a mostly unused part of town, and the looks they got from the few people they passed were anything but friendly.

Furthermore, the location itself was a set of stairs leading down to a basement in an alleyway, obviously not meant to be found by anyone who didn’t already know where it was. Needless to say, this probably wasn’t an aboveboard business they were dealing with here. It was no wonder their “employer” had chosen to remain anonymous.

Hera was apparently thinking the same thing, because she whistled softly and said, “Well now, really seems like our mercenary services lady should have done a few background checks, huh?”

Mari’s tone was calm, but grim, “Don’t forget that the Hydro blood we collected has already been transferred to whoever requested it from here. If they were planning to use it for something illegal, they may have already done so and left.”

Sami was ready to head in, but Claudia tapped her on the shoulder. “It’s probably best if I stayed behind at the entrance. If you need help, just yell and I will call for the city guards… well, for whatever guards would patrol here,” she told her.

The entry door was naturally locked, but it was easy enough for Hera to slip a small, flat shard of glass into the mechanisms and work something out. The door swung open, and on the other side was… a small, plain storage room. Not wanting to give up just yet, the three women entered and began to examine the room.

At first glance there didn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary. Sami looked over shelves with small amounts of scattered, dusty tools and items of unknown purpose, and long-empty beer barrels.

However, there was something different about the shelves along the back wall: unlike all the other shelves, they had fully built-in backboards that covered the wall completely.

Sami pointed this out to the other two, and Mari nodded. An identification spell was a cantrip for any healer, allowing them to make sense of what was wrong with their patient, but it had many other uses as well. Sniffing out hidden doors and mechanisms happened to be one of them.

“Nothing,” Mari said plainly, a few seconds after casting.

“Aw, figures. Nothing anywhere else in the room, either?” Hera asked her, but Mari shook her head.

“...At least, nothing my magic could find. Very few people know of this, but there are several ways to disrupt magical detection. It’s possible that we’re just dealing with someone who knows a little bit more about what they’re doing,” she continued, and shrugged.

Without further hesitation, Mari swung her mace-staff against the backboard of the shelf, smashing through it and revealing the passage behind it. Honestly, she probably could have just done this from the start.

* * *

The passage led to what looked like it used to be a sewer system, now almost entirely unmaintained. Mari led the other two along, a glowing light on the end of her staff shining through the darkness.

They passed several side paths, but they all led into dead ends. Almost starting to wonder if they had missed whatever they were looking for or had gone the wrong way, Sami suddenly stopped.

Ahead was a wooden door, grimy and decayed from the surrounding conditions, but there was light emanating from underneath it. And not just light, but voices as well. Hiding out so deep back here, these had to be the people they were looking for. Mari calmly opened the door and stepped inside as if it were nothing.

The room inside was fairly wide open, with a few empty or broken bottle racks piled up in one corner. It was likely an old wine cellar that had been cleared out for use as a makeshift base for the three individuals sitting at a table at the back of the room. One on a chair, one on the table, and another leaning on the nearby wall.

The woman on the edge of the table, laughing loudly, was the first to notice their entry, and fell dead silent. The man in the chair, whose hair and skin were both pale white—perhaps albino, but there were other possible causes for white hair and red eyes—stopped his joking as well and turned around.

The other man leaning up against the wall, who had jet-black hair and sun-tanned skin, casually stepped away and drew his sword. “I don’t know how you could have come across this place by accident, but if you’d like to say that you did and leave now, you won’t have to get hurt,” he said smoothly.

The woman at the table gave a nasty look as if to tell him, that’s not how we do things around here, then got up and stepped forward a few steps as well, “Don’t listen to Sir Patrick the Soft over here, we obviously can’t let you leave.”

Her voice was husky and dripping with menace, her dark hair was short and choppy as if it had been hacked off by a knife, and although she didn’t carry a weapon she held herself in a way that suggested she didn’t need one.

Sami moved to stand in front of the other two as the woman boldly strode up to them, her hands in the pockets of her long, heavy coat. Eventually, the two of them stood face-to-face.

Sami tried not to flinch. “Are you the ‘anonymous employers’ who sent in a request for Hydro blood, without any payment?” she demanded, managing to keep her voice steady.

Instead of answering, the woman, who up close turned out to be a little bit shorter than Sami, turned to glare at the white-haired man. This look had a lot more venom in it than the first. “Matthew…” she growled.

Unphased, he simply shrugged and said, “Geez, Sadie, stop looking at me like that. They must have had a way to track our submission. ”

Sadie turned back to face Sami again. They stared each other down for a few more seconds, and then suddenly everything started to move.

Before Sami could react at all, an armor-plated boot was already in her gut, she doubled over and staggered back. Mari and Hera realized what had happened and started to prepare their spells as the two men rushed forward from behind their leader.

Mari managed to let loose a recovery spell to get Sami back in fighting shape just in time to block Patrick the dark-haired brigand’s sword with her staff, and in time for Sami to duck to the side of Sadie’s next kick. Hera called up a familiar wall of shielding panels, smirking as Matthew’s twin daggers only left a few thin cracks on their surfaces.

“Now that’s a soft barrier,” Matthew chuckled, amused rather than disappointed, “if my daggers alone are enough to crack it.”

Hera didn’t drop her confident smirk as she stood back in relative safety, and began preparing another spell.

Now that she wasn’t being taken off-guard, Sami was able to keep up with the flurry of strikes from Sadie’s boots, but she was still too busy dodging to be able to reach for the rapier at her waist.

Finally spotting a chance, she grabbed the hilt and quickly struck out at her aggressor’s leg with the blade… but with one quick movement, Sadie was able to bat away the strike with her metal greaves. “My legs are my weapons, as if I’d go without protecting them.” Sadie sneered.

Mari heard another thud as Sami was once again knocked down, but it was all she could do to hold off her own attacker. “Don’t get distracted, now,” Patrick said with a voice that might have almost sounded pleasant if it weren’t for the circumstances.

It was Hera’s turn to help her friend out. With a snap of her fingers, the walls, floors, and ceiling in a wide circle around the six of them took on a glassy sheen. Determined now to disrupt her plans, Matthew redoubled his efforts towards breaking her shields, and succeeded.

Too bad for him, it was a trap. The shattering glass panels split into a multitude of razor-sharp shards, and they all swiveled around in the air before raining down on him from several directions.

His skin and leather armor were torn to tatters, and several of the shards even carried him bodily backwards, pinning him against one of the broken bottle racks by the rags of his clothes.

Far from finished, while the trapped barrier did its business, Hera summoned a small but solid sphere of blue light in her palm. She hurled it at the now-glassy floor with all her strength, and it began to rapidly ricochet around the room, swerving around friendly targets and bowling through the two remaining enemies.

After assessing the situation and realizing they weren’t at risk of friendly fire, Sami and Mari pinned their respective battered opponents down with their weapons. “Now, where’s that Hydro blood?” Sami interrogated Sadie with newfound confidence.

Just then, the door to the room was thrown open again, and a certain someone strode in, looking very unhappy. For once this wasn’t a tragic twist to make things worse, because that someone was Sami’s younger brother, and behind him was Claudia, looking rather sheepish.

* * *

Mark Locke hadn’t been traveling alone. Apparently, he had just happened to be following a request at the same agency with a group of his own, and was here to deal with “suspicious criminal activities around the sewers of a mostly abandoned district.” Coincidence after coincidence.

The man himself—he was only 18 months younger than his sister, so he could in fact be considered a “man” rather than a “boy” even though he sometimes acted like one—wasn’t particularly enthusiastic to see her here. After helping Sami’s group tie up the ruffians, he turned to face her. “What,” he sighed, “are you doing here?”

“I could ask you the same question, couldn’t I?” Sami replied, a little bit defensive in response to his tone.

He crossed his arms and tapped his foot on the floor, which was no longer covered in Hera’s glassy coating. “You know father has been sick. There are more doctors coming to see him today, and you were supposed to be there to watch over them. We agreed on this.”

Sami’s stomach dropped. Now that she thought about it, he was right, wasn’t he? With all the commotion of the day before, she had completely forgotten. Ashamed, she could only mumble an apology.

Meanwhile, her companions eyed over her brothers’. Present were a man with a bow that Sami or Claudia might have recognized as the skeptical fellow they’d heard during their first visit to the Ferrous Flagon, and a nervous-looking female magician with a patchwork hat and robe both a couple sizes too big for her.

Of the two, Hera was more interested in the latter. While the two siblings bickered, she sidled up to the girl and spoke to her, “So, how’s it going, fellow magician?”

She sighed and opened up quickly to this flashy-looking but friendly stranger, as if she’d been waiting all day to share her troubles.

“Oh, not so great. I was meant to join the group of one of the Locke siblings for a job yesterday, but when I showed up I was told by the lady at the counter that they had already left with a different mage… And now, I’ve had to join a group with these two men instead, and they are rather a lot to handle…”

Realizing that she was almost definitely the cause of this mixup, Hera awkwardly changed the subject to something, anything else. So, apparently she was meant to be traveling with Mark Locke, not Sami Locke. Well, at least she had inadvertently saved the poor girl from having to tussle with a Hydro, right...?

* * *

The three criminals were turned in to the city guad, and the vial of Hydro blood was found and recovered. Unfortunately their reward for their original quest would be nowhere to be found, but at least they managed to earn just about as much from the bounties.

Sami’s group was also given the reward for the quest Mark’s group had taken, and that they had accidentally completed, but they handed it over to him regardless. Gina’s business would be held up to much stricter scrutiny from then on, but at least things managed to end on a positive note.

When she got home, Sami would wait nervously next to her father’s room as one of many doctors tried to examine him to determine the cause of his mysterious illness. Alongside one of these doctors was Fiona, but they would have no idea how much of a fateful meeting their brief exchanges would be.

Perhaps they never would, for the rest of their lives.