Naturally, after Ugnash had been so kind to come personally inform me that things were underway for my main reward, I went with him all the way to the Adventurer’s Guild at Ring Two. When asked why we had to go to Ring Two instead of the Ring Three Guildhall, he said that was where the Guildmaster was.

I didn’t know why I needed to go see the Guildmaster in person, but Ugnash said it would be helpful. That wasn’t exactly very revealing, but I supposed I was going to find out soon enough.

“Isn’t this a bit sudden?” I said as we walked through the Preservatory, several Se-Targa waving as we passed. They were always so pleasant. “Like, what if I hadn’t been at the temple or had been busy with something else?”

Ugnash just shrugged his broad shoulders. “Then I would have just gone on to find you wherever you might have been.”

“What if I was incapacitated or otherwise too busy to just suddenly come over to the Adventurer’s Guild?”

“But you weren’t, were you?”

I grumbled. There was no point in dealing with hypotheticals. That was true enough. But I didn’t like the fact that they thought they could just pop in unannounced and expect me to go along with whatever they said. Advance notice was a basic sign of respect.

Miffed, I remained silent for a while the way to the Guildhall. It wasn’t hard. Ugnash wasn’t much of a talker in the first place.

Throwing a temper tantrum wasn’t going to be helpful, though. I needed a firmer footing because I was venturing into unknown territory here.

“Is it normal?” I asked. I followed Ugnash to a side of the street as a self-driven carriage zoomed past us, their occupants cheering loudly. Pretty sure if this place had speed limits, they were obviously breaking it. “To have someone get called to the guild to negotiate their own reward? Aren’t there standard rates?”

“Not for killing a monster far above an adventurer’s stated rank, which is also a monster that the guild can then proceed to harvest.”

I grunted. “I need something to work with here.”

“You’ll be fine. Just remember what you need. The Guildmaster is pretty shrewd. I suggest not claiming anything insane.”

Well, that wasn’t very helpful. At least I had learned a little more about who I would be negotiating with.

Time was hard to tell in world where it felt like perpetual degrees of night, but I was pretty sure it was still basically the afternoon at best. And yet, the Adventurer’s Guild was as rowdy and busy as ever. I could hear people singing and shouting long before I got close, could see people hanging around the Guildhall or fighting in the fields behind it. Wildly active as ever.

Ugnash led me inside. Just like last time, the air felt stuffy. Clogged with sweat, with the stench of too many bodies pressed too close together, with the smell of different meals and the char of something burning.

I felt like I was getting a lot more looks than I had on the day I had come here with Kostis, and the looks were even more unfriendly than last time.

“Has something happened?” I asked in a whisper.

“Just try not to antagonize anyone too much,” Ugnash said.

His bulk carved a path open for us, something that I figured I’d have had trouble with on my own. Just like last time, we headed straight for the bar. At least I was only a distraction for a short while. Most people returned to their games, their conversations, their meals after taking one scathing look at me.

“Something’s off,” I muttered. “Also, where’s Khagnio?”

Ugnash was looking around, tall enough that he was capable of looking over the heads of most adventurers around us. “Wait here. Let me see if I can find where the Guildmaster is.”

He thumped off. I wasn’t exactly fond of the idea because as soon as Ugnash left, it felt like everyone else crowded in a lot closer all of a sudden. The looks weren’t leaving me as quickly either.

“Idiot little human,” someone muttered. I looked around but couldn’t spot the speaker.

“Lucky bastard,” said another.

There were more mutters, slowly growing louder and clearer. My skin itched. One Ogre was looking at me with undisguised scorn in his eyes. No, not just scorn. It was almost hate. Like he was actively restraining himself from marching over and making me feel exactly how he felt.

It wasn’t that I didn’t understand where it was coming from. Humans were looked down upon in Zairgon, had been for ages. I had seen first-hand evidence of it.

The only difference was that it hadn’t stopped me from doing what I needed to do. It wasn’t so oppressive that I had been blocked from achieving any of my goals. The Mage Guild hadn’t stopped me from becoming a member or taking a job. The Adventurer’s Guild hadn’t refused to let me join a dungeon expedition. The academists of Xokrist had even helped me.

I had pushed aside the constant denigrating remarks that held a disdainful human in them to focus on what I could do.

But here, it had suddenly become oppressive. It was almost aggressive. These people weren’t just prejudiced. They were actively hating me personally for some reason.

The Ogre shifted and my heartrate picked up. I turned to face him, but he had frozen as soon as he had begun moving, a surprised expression on his face. He was looking past me, and I turned.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

Another figure was rising from a nearby bench. Covered in a cloak, I had dismissed whoever that might have been, but now the cloak was falling away. I could only stare.

A Rakshasa with umbral blue skin and long, pitch-black horns curling down from her head like a waterfall of hair got to her feet. Where her cloak shifted, I spotted strange armour that looked like it was made of ivory. Silver eyes glanced briefly at the Ogre, who shrank back all of a sudden, before landing on me.

“Are you the one?” she asked. “Ross Moreland?”

“Uh, yes?” I said. My muscles were tense. “Who’s asking?”

“I’m Guildmaster Kudva.” She smiled at me, showing teeth so bright, I should have been blinded in the dimness of the Guildhall. “Glad to finally meet the wyrm-killer.”

Despite the cloak suggesting her wish for some level of privacy, the Guildmaster didn’t even try to lower her voice when she spoke. Her words rang out enough to get people muttering, and everyone who had gotten a little too close to me now all moved off even farther back than they had been before. Funny, that.

Most people around us were trying to look busy doing their own thing. Eating, gambling, playing, arm-wrestling, insulting and joking with each other. But it was only a pretence.

Even as I focused on the Guildmaster, I could tell that the others were paying all their attention to us too.

“Ugnash went looking for you,” I said.

The Guildmaster laughed. She wasn’t anywhere near as tall as Ugnash—in fact, she was distressingly close to my height—but brief glimpses at her arm and neck showed she was just as muscular. “Good. Bastard can spend time wandering outside like a headless chicken. While he’s gone, we can talk business.”

“He called me here, saying that we were going to discuss my reward for killing the Greater Brillwyrm.”

I made sure my voice was firm and carried farther than just my conversation partner. It definitely had an effect. Several people nearby stilled. I caught the briefest flickers of heads turning towards me. Ah, so that was it. I was starting to understand why I was getting such an intense reaction.

“And that is what we shall discuss,” Kudva said. She snapped a couple fingers in the direction of the bar. “Adashe! Bring the meat. I want it grilled to perfection.”

The bartender, who had been professionally ignoring everything going on so far, now snapped to attention. “Immediately, Guildmaster.”

Credit to him, the meat arrived in moments, sizzling on small plates. I felt my mouth watering, which didn’t abate even after recalling what exactly I had done to get this meat.

“Go on, have some,” Kudva urged. “It’s scrumptious.”

I did. She was right. It was mouth-meltingly good. I was reminded achingly of steak, though less juicy while also with a slight tangy, spicy tint. “It’s really good.”

“Isn’t it?” She gobbled her serving down within seconds, licking her lips. “So good. I’m quite grateful you nabbed us a Greater Brillwyrm. They’re a lot less stringy and far more filling than their Lesser counterparts.”

I could see that. “Grateful, huh?”

“Don’t push your luck too much…”

A minor warning, but one I could take in stride. I was tempted to ask what the standard offer in such cases was. The problem here was that I didn’t have a frame of reference to work off of. I could claim something that felt like the minimum of what I was owed, and the Guildmaster had absolute authority to counter that I was asking for too much.

All I had to go off of was Ugnash’s warning. Oh, and Kudva’s most recent one too, I supposed.

“Have you started selling the meat already, Guildmaster?” I asked.

“We are still in the process of purifying enough to send to our vendors and contracted merchants.”

“And what’s the rate you sell them at?”

Kudva’s eyes narrowed. “Rates are negotiable and often individual to each merchant we work with, depending on circumstance. But considering this is prime Greater Brillwyrm meat, we’re looking to offload them at a minimum of fifteen-hundred gold per hundredweight.”

Crap. I was reminded I still hadn’t gotten a proper handle on the units of measurement in Zairgon. Kind of crazy how I could spend a month in some place and still not figure out all the basics. “Hundredweight?”

The question probably raised concerns why someone wouldn’t know something so basic, but I didn’t care about hiding the truth. Kostis knew about me being summoned, and so did my adventuring buddies now. It wasn’t impossible that the Guildmaster would know about it too.

“About enough to feed a quarter people in this room for one meal,” Kudva said.

“Huh.” That was a ton of gold, because I knew the whole Greater Brillwyrm could feed the same number of people for weeks, if not a month at least. “Thanks, that’s good to know.”

Kudva nodded, clearly re-evaluating me at seeing I was slowly gaining a footing from which to make an offer instead of going at it blindly. I knew my PA experiences would be handy at some point. “So what will it be, Mage Moreland?”

The way the Guildmaster said it sounded so eerily familiar, I was now convinced she was keeping tabs on me through other means. My earlier assumption was basically verified now.

“Sixty percent of the profits,” I said.

The claim was ridiculous, as evidence by the Guildmaster stilling, as well as most people around us. Dice stopped rolling, chewing and chugging sounds stopped. Someone cursed and called me mad.

Kudva slowly smiled. “I did warn you not to push it.”

I shrugged. Start high, go low. “If I hadn’t stepped up, not only would you not have had any Greater Brillwyrm to chew on, you’d also be down a few adventurers. You’d have families to recompense, a Council to answer to, the problem of an overpowered monster prowling in the dungeon that you would need to deal with.” I tapped my head. “I didn’t just give you a monster, I saved you a lot of headaches.”

Kudva considered that quietly, although the people around us were grumbling and growling and clearly not appreciative of me rubbing things in like that.

“You must understand how things work,” the Guildmaster eventually said. “Twenty percent would be pushing it. Believe me, I don’t think I’ve ever even done a deal higher than thirty. Your points are valid, but what you’re asking for is frankly a ridiculous sum.”

“Fine. Fifty percent.”

“Come now. You must be more reasonable, Mage Moreland.”

I met her silver eyes. “With all due respect, Guildmaster, I don’t appreciate the patronizing tone.”

We were at a bit of an impasse. There had to be a reason the Guildmaster had decided to do this in a public setting. Kudva couldn’t be seen on the “losing” side against a complete stranger like myself, especially since I was just a human. After all, she had a reputation to maintain.

I had priorities too, though. Ones that stiffened into unyielding rods the longer I spent here, the more I kept hearing just how much every other adventurer seemed to detest me.

And I also remembered the Guildmaster’s penchant for the eccentric from what Kostis had said. The pleasure she took in upending arbitrary orders of how things were supposed to be. I looked into her eyes and the glint I saw reminded me of exactly that. A faint hint of amusement. Ah, I was wrong. That hadn’t been a patronizing chastisement. Not really.

It was more like an invitation.

“Alright,” I conceded. “Maybe we can come to a compromise.”

Several people grumbled and growled some more at compromise—how dare I settle to a mere compromise—but the Guildmaster’s words shut them up.

“What did you have in mind?” she asked.

I was about to state it, but someone apparently could no longer take it. A rapid shuffling and creaking of chairs had me turning around, just in time to see a grey-skinned Ogre stomping towards me.

“How dare you, you miserly little ape!” he growled. Black-red threads swam around his hands as he approached, crackling into livid energy.

I got up to face him, nerves tingling and skin feeling like it was about to leap off my flesh. No one stopped the Ogre. Not even the Guildmaster. I would have to handle this on my own.

“You—”

“Shut up!” he growled, without letting me speak. Then his hands jerked forward, the energy shifting into a strange mix of fire and lightning, turning into a thunderous bolt of dark crimson that slammed into me.