The Heroes' Guild of Ashlow was a converted tavern with delusions of grandeur and a corkboard sagging under the weight of everyone's problems.
The woman behind the counter — Guildmistress by title, bouncer by build — took one look at us, four road-worn nobodies and a boy in suspiciously nice pajamas, and reached for the lowest slip on the board before we'd said a word.
[Rank F contract accepted: Clear the infestation in Odo's cellar.]Reward: 15 copper.]Client note: they've eaten through two doors and the winter stores. Please hurry.]
"Fifteen copper," Vera murmured, doing the math she was always doing. "Half a day's rent. We take it."
Odo the baker was a broad, flour-dusted man with sad eyes who met us at his shop and pointed grimly at a trapdoor behind the ovens. "Down there," he said. "Whatever's nesting, it's not normal rats. Normal rats run. These—" he shuddered "—these organized."
The cellar was a low stone room that smelled of rotten flour and something sourer underneath. Our lantern found the floor first: a moving carpet of red eyes. Then the shapes those eyes belonged to. Rats, if rats grew to the size of dogs and learned to work in packs. Dozens of them, watching us with an intelligence that rats should not have.
"Right," said Bruno, rolling his neck until it cracked, radiant with joy. "This I know how to do."
And he did. Bruno waded in like a landslide with opinions, that huge sword sweeping low, and the cellar erupted. Lila planted herself on the stairs and flung sparks off her fingers, shouting "PERISH, VERMIN!" with an enthusiasm that was frankly concerning. Vera flowed between the crates like a dropped knife, quick and quiet and lethal, appearing at a rat's flank the instant before her dagger did.
Me? I had a broom. I'd found it by the stairs. It was my entire contribution to the operation.
"Is that all you do?" Vera panted, wrenching her dagger free of a corpse.
"I'm Rank F with zero skills and an uncontrolled apocalypse trait!" I swung the broom at a rat and missed. "The broom is my build!"
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
It was going well, all things considered — Bruno's side of the room was a graveyard, Lila had set a crate memorably on fire — right up until the biggest rat, a scarred brute the size of a wolfhound, ignored all of us and launched itself straight at Lila's exposed throat while she was mid-incantation.
She didn't see it. There was no time to shout.
So I didn't shout. I threw out my hand, the way I had in the dungeon, and this time I reached for the smoke instead of flinching away from it — and it came. Not a formless wisp. A shape. A claw of pure shadow, four black talons, that snapped out of the air, caught the leaping rat in a fist of darkness, and slammed it into the stone wall hard enough to crack the mortar.
Silence dropped over the cellar. The last few rats broke and fled into the walls. Lila stood frozen, hand still raised for a spell that was no longer necessary, staring at the dissolving smoke where the claw had been.
[Skill unlocked: Shadow Claw (Rank F).]First Demon King class skill acquired.]Contract complete. +25 EXP. Rank F: progress 31%.]
"My... first skill," I said, staring at my own hand like it belonged to someone else.
"You saved Lila," Bruno declared, and clapped me on the back with enough force to reset my spine. "Good brother. Good brother."
But Vera wasn't celebrating. She'd gone still by the far wall, her lantern raised, and she was staring at the spot where my Shadow Claw had struck. I went over.
Where the claw had cracked away the grime and old plaster, the stone underneath was exposed — and it wasn't blank. Carved into it, worn shallow by what must have been centuries, was a circle. A ring of symbols. And I knew that pattern, because I'd knelt inside one exactly like it my first night in this world.
"Vera," I said quietly. "Why is there a summoning circle under a baker's cellar?"
She reached out and brushed the dust from the carving, and her face did something complicated. "It's old," she murmured. "Look at the wear. This was cut into the bedrock long before Odo, long before this shop, maybe long before Ashlow." She traced one of the symbols — and I watched her recognize it, watched her go pale, because it was one of the symbols from the burned sheaf hidden in her coat. "These aren't rare because someone hides them," she said, almost to herself. "They're rare because they're old. Relics. Scattered in the ground all over the borderlands, from something that came before." She pulled her hand back like the stone had bitten her. "Odo didn't put this here. Nobody alive did."
Upstairs, Odo called down to ask if it was safe. Vera stood, brushed off her knees, and pasted on a smile.
"All clear!" she called back. Then, low, to me: "Say nothing. We take our fifteen copper, and we go, and we do not mention that his flour's been sitting on top of the same magic that dragged you out of your kitchen."
We took our fifteen copper. We went. And I spent the entire walk back to the Split Barrel trying, and failing, to convince myself it was a coincidence.