The rain caught them two miles south of the bend, coming down hard enough to flatten the reeds.
"That’s the third soaking I’ve taken today, Doc, and frankly it’s starting to feel personal," Ray muttered, turning his collar up.
Yuzu didn’t even look back, "The river already ruined your morning, leaving the sky to finish the job."
Somewhere ahead the two guildsmen were racing for Kelford, no doubt still arguing over who told the story first. Yuzu steered Ray toward a cave cut into the riverbank instead, a low hole that smelled of wet fox.
He ducked a moment too late, cracking his skull on the entrance hard enough to see stars.
"Aghhh, son of a bitch, who designs a cave this short?" he yelped, clutching his head with both hands.
"Nobody designs caves, though the rest of us manage to duck like normal people," Yuzu said, wringing out her sleeves.
He crouched under the ceiling, glaring at it like a bouncer who just tossed him out of a bar, "I want it on record that this cave started it."
"The guild will call those two liars by breakfast, though honestly that suits me fine, given nobody bothers to hunt a man for a story nobody believes," Ray said, rubbing the knot on his scalp.
"They’ll call you a liar too, given an F-Rank killing two drakes sounds like a tavern joke," Yuzu answered, shaking the rain from her hair.
She built a small fire from driftwood near the back, lining her vials along a ledge to label them. Ray sat by the entrance with his back to the rock, both loaded pistols resting across his drawn-up knees.
She came over without a word, peeling back his sleeve to check the sunleaf salve on his arm.
"The cut is clean, though if you scratch it, I’ll stitch your fingers together," she said, pressing the bandage flat.
"You have the warmest bedside manner I’ve ever met, speaking from the bottom of my bleeding heart."
"Your heart is fine... your arm is the part that bleeds."
She sniffed the strip of jerky he offered from his coat before eating it in three quick bites.
"Wake me if anything with crystals on it comes through that entrance, though not a minute before," she mumbled an hour later, curling up beside the coals.
He kept watch at the entrance, both drake cores sitting as warm as fresh bread against his ribs. Around midnight they started pulsing in time with something under his sternum, like a second heartbeat waking up.
’Either that is the divine seed Nomi promised me, or I’m having the stupidest heart attack in two worlds.’
Heat poured out of his chest into his arms, running down to his fingertips until even his teeth tingled.
He clenched his jaw against a gasp, refusing to wake Yuzu while sweat beaded along his hairline despite the chill.
[ MANA AWAKENED ]
[Divine Seed: Awakened]
[Mana Channels: Open]
[MANA: 50 / 50]
[Recovery: 5 per Quiet Hour]
[New Skill: Mana Infusion]
[Infused Round: 5 Mana]
The pressure eased into a steady glow, like a pilot light settling in somewhere behind his ribs.
"Fifty mana is either a fortune or pocket change, which I would know... if anybody around here ever handed me a manual," he whispered, flexing his tingling fingers.
’Five points back for every quiet hour means I finally have a good reason to stop getting into loud ones.’
[ CONTRACT CLOSED ]
[Job: Dead Fish at the Weirs]
[Cause: Identified]
[Bounty: +150 HC]
[Funds: 270 HC]
"A hundred and fifty for a dead-fish ticket means the lady upstairs grades on danger instead of distance, making her my favorite client already."
He wedged the shard of drake crust from that morning upright in a crack just outside the cave. A plain round bounced off that exact crust at the waterline, which made it the fairest test available.
He drew the right pistol, pushing the warmth down his arm until it pooled in the chamber like poured water.
The runes on the slide lit bright blue, humming against his palm like a cat purring after a good meal. The shot drew a streak of blue light through the rain, punching clean through the crust into the rock behind.
[ INFUSED ROUND ]
[MANA: 45 / 50]
[Rounds: 55]
"Holy shit, that is the most gorgeous hole I have ever seen, and in my line of work that is saying a lot," he whispered, stroking the slide.
"Is the thunder necessary in the middle of the night, when some of us work in the morning?" Yuzu croaked from beside the coals.
"It’s for science, Doc, though annoying you is a very nice bonus."
She propped herself on one elbow, squinting at the pistol, "Your thunder was blue just now, though it wasn’t blue this morning."
"I ate a vegetable for once, leaving my thunder feeling... a whole lot healthier."
’She can know the guns glow, but she never gets to know about the panels only I can see.’
He held the pistols up one at a time, like a proud father showing off twins at a christening.
"These two just got promoted, so they need real names before they start asking me for raises."
She stared at him over the coals, "You’re naming your wands now?"
"This beauty is Payday," he said, lifting the right pistol, then the left, "while this one is Last Call, so together they close out every tab in town."
"You named your weapons after a night of drinking, the exact thing my uncle did with his goats."
"That is the whole point, given a bar is where every bad decision finally gets paid for!"
"Pfft, my uncle’s goats at least came when he called them," she said, rolling over to pull her cloak up over her ears.
The Shop opened across his vision like a market stall, rows of blueprints stacked under prices he could barely afford. Most of it was junk for knights, though one cheap line made him jerk upright straight into the low ceiling.
"Damn it, that is twice in one night!" he hissed, rubbing the fresh lump.
He squinted at the listings, "Who the hell shops here, considering this page sells self-oiling scabbards right next to a horse brush with opinions?"
[ BLUEPRINT ]
[Base: Rune-Gyro Stabilizer]
[Use: Keeps Thrown Spears Level]
[Blueprint: 3 BP]
[Fabrication: 90 HC]
’Somebody built a gyro to keep spears flying straight, which means I can flip the math to make a bullet fly crooked on purpose.’
"Sorry, spear guys, but I’m about to ruin your gyro," he whispered, unlocking it before he could talk himself out of it.
He spent an hour in the Forge rewriting the gyro, teaching it to steer bullets instead of steadying spears. By the end, fresh runes spiraled around the barrel, faint blue lines twisting like the thread of a corkscrew.
[ FORGE REWORK COMPLETE ]
[New Blueprint: Curveshot]
[Mount: Right Pistol]
[Cost: 5 Mana per Round]
[Blueprint Points: 7]
[Funds: 180 HC]
"One hundred and eighty left makes me poor again, though at least I’m poor with style," he said to the sleeping cave.
The notes were blunt about the limits, warning that every bend bled speed while rain and wind shoved the path. A hard curve cost punch, so a bent round landed more like a thrown rock than a proper straight bullet.
He picked a knot on a driftwood log hidden behind a boulder twenty paces down the bank.
A line of light followed his gaze across the display, curving past the boulder before hooking back toward the knot. He fed a drop of mana into Payday, holding his breath as he squeezed the trigger like telling a secret.
The round bent beautifully around the boulder, kept bending, then smacked into the cave wall a foot from Yuzu’s head.
Rock chips pattered onto her cloak while the fresh hole smoked a hand’s width above her ear.
[ CURVESHOT ]
[MANA: 40 / 50]
[Rounds: 54]
"What in the name of every god are you doing out there?" Yuzu shrieked, bolting upright with her rapier half-drawn.
He winced, rubbing the back of his neck, "The good news is that it turns, while the bad news is that it turns about forty degrees more than I asked it to."
"If you shoot me in my sleep, I will haunt you, then bill you for every night of it."
"You’d make the most organized ghost in history, though I’d actually pay that bill on time, which is more than I can say for—"
A clatter cut him off as both drake cores slid out of his pocket, rolling across the cave floor alone. They stopped side by side near the fire, each one glowing brighter on its northern face like a compass needle.
"That is either very cool or very bad... though I can never tell the difference in this place."
Yuzu nudged one with the tip of her rapier, but it rolled back to point the same way every time.
Even the goblin crystal knob from the gorge twitched inside his coat, tugging north like a dog on a leash.
"Since when do rocks have opinions about directions?" he asked, holding it up to the firelight.
"That’s north, toward the bluffs above Kelford," she said slowly, "where the old waterworks have sat sealed for fifty years."
[ SIGNAL ]
[Type: Siphon Resonance]
[Bearing: North]
[Source: Northern Bluffs]
"The cores want to go home, so I guess we’re paying those waterworks a visit."
"Nobody goes up there, not since the council boarded it shut after three workers vanished in the lower vaults."
"You just described a sealed door, three missing workers and a nervous council, otherwise known as my favorite kind of job."
’The spike at the weirs was only the faucet, which puts the pump somewhere up on that bluff along with the real contract.’
"Go to sleep, given the long walk back to town and a guildmaster who wants answers before breakfast," she said, lying back down.
"Yes, ma’am, right after I admire my new toys for another hour or two."
He pulled up the full sheet before bed, the way he used to count bullets on a motel mattress.
[ STATUS ]
[Name: Ray K]
[Rank: Unranked]
[Title: Drake Slayer]
[STR: 13]
[AGI: 16]
[VIT: 11]
[PER: 18]
[MANA: 40 / 50]
[Skills: Contract Style, Marksmanship, Mana Infusion]
[Weapons: Payday, Last Call, Breaker Dagger, Hunting Dagger]
[Gear: None]
[Blueprints: Curveshot]
[Blueprint Points: 7]
[HC: 180]
’Sixteen agility and I still cracked my skull twice tonight, so the System clearly does not measure ducking.’
Outside the rain kept falling, while the new warmth in his chest ticked slowly back toward full.