After a few minutes of navigating the dense crowd, they pulled up outside a large, multi-story building constructed from dark, stained oak.
A massive, weathered wooden sign hung above the double doors, illuminated by two flickering orange lanterns.
Carved deeply into the wood were the words: Hank’s Tavern.
“Alright, we’ll check in here for the night,” Lisa announced, adjusting her heavy sword belt.
“It’s clean, the food is decent, and—”
Before she could finish her sentence, the heavy wooden double doors flew open with absolute violence.
A loud, terrified scream ripped through the air as a heavily intoxicated man came flying backward out of the doorway.
He soared through the crisp night air for a solid three feet before crashing brutally onto the cobblestones, rolling over twice.
Seconds later, a towering, muscle-bound bouncer with massive, scarred arms stepped into the doorway, his chest heaving as he pointed a thick, menacing finger down at the sprawling drunkard.
“And don’t you ever come back, you cheating scum!” the giant roared, his voice shaking the glass panes of the nearby windows before he slammed the heavy oak doors shut with a deafening thud.
The tavern street went quiet for a brief second.
The drunkard groaned miserably, slowly lifting his index finger into the air.
His head wobbled heavily from side to side as if his skull had suddenly turned to lead, his slurred voice cracking as he called out to the closed doors.
“H-how…
how about my ba…
my bag?”
The exact millisecond he finished the sentence, the double doors opened just a fraction.
Something heavy, metallic, and tightly packed was thrown out at high speed, flying straight through the air like a launched projectile.
CRACK!
The heavy leather bag connected perfectly with the top of the drunkard’s head.
His eyes instantly rolled into the back of his skull, and his entire body went completely limp, collapsing face-first onto the cobblestones in a total knockout.
Kaelen and Karen stood entirely frozen, looking from the unconscious man on the floor back to each other.
The pure speechlessness on their faces said absolutely everything.
Lisa, realizing the sudden awkward silence, forced out a few loud, nervous chuckles to break the ice, rubbing the back of her neck as she looked at her stunned companions.
“Haha…
gamblers and drunkards, you know?
They literally never stop getting into trouble in places like this.”
She quickly shot a meaningful, highly suspicious look directly at Kaelen, then shifted her eyes down to Pixel.
“But don’t worry!
You guys won’t get thrown out of the establishment…
assuming you don’t stir up any unnecessary trouble and actually behave yourselves.”
“What?” Kaelen and Pixel said at the exact same time—Kaelen aloud, and Pixel telepathically.
Both of them wore expressions of pure, innocent confusion, acting as if they didn’t have a single clue what she was implying, even though they both knew exactly what she meant.
Lisa let out a long, heavy sigh, stepping past the unconscious drunkard.
She pushed the heavy oak doors wide open and led her stunned team directly into the roaring warmth of the tavern.
The Brawl, and the Brain-Rattling Bottle
The inside of Hank’s Tavern was a roaring wall of heat, laughter, and thick smoke.
The air smelled heavily of roasted meat, spilled ale, and old wood.
Crowds of patrons were packed tightly around wooden tables—some clinking heavy mugs on rowdy dates, others intensely slamming down cards over stacks of silver coins, while a row of heavily armed adventurers laughed loudly at the far side of the room.
Lisa threaded her way through the chaotic tables, leading Kaelen, Karen, and Pixel straight toward the long, polished wooden counter at the back.
When they arrived, the stool area was empty.
Lisa scanned the space, assuming the attendant had stepped away to the back room, and struck the small brass bell on the counter twice.
Ting!
Ting!
BANG!
A muffled, incredibly heavy wooden thud echoed from directly underneath the desk, instantly followed by a sharp, agonized shriek.
“Ouch!
Ow, ow, ow…
mother of a goblin!”
A very beautiful demi-human girl with fluffy, golden-brown dog ears suddenly popped up from behind the counter.
She was rubbing the top of her head frantically, her soft ears twitching back in absolute irritation as she glared down at the floor.
“Stupid, low-hanging, uncalibrated desk…” she murmured bitterly under her breath.
Lisa blinked, a wave of recognition washing over her.
“Oh!
Sorry to startle you like that, Brenda.”
Hearing her name, the dog-eared girl quickly spun around, her large brown eyes widening in complete shock as she recognized the armored knight standing before her.
Lady Lisa?!
Oh my gosh, dear!
Long time no see!…
how’s it been?”
“I’ve been deployed out on a rough wilderness mission,” Lisa smiled warmly, resting her gauntlets on the counter.
“It’s been a hot minute.
How have you been?”
“Surviving, barely!” Brenda laughed, leaning over the counter.
Then, her eyes drifted past Lisa, peering sharply at Karen’s timid posture before locking directly onto Kaelen’s dark cloak and cold expression.
Her golden dog ears flattened slightly against her hair, and she leaned in close, whispering loudly to Lisa, “Hey…
you sure that’s not a rogue mercenary you’re running with?
That guy in the back looks incredibly shady.
Like, prime black-market dealer shady.”
Kaelen’s eyebrow twitched violently.
A wave of pure, unfiltered irritation crossed his face as he crossed his arms.
“Hey.
I can literally hear you.
And no, that is completely inaccurate.” He let out a sharp, annoyed sigh, tapping his fingers on his arm.
“More importantly, what on earth were you even doing under the table in the first place?”
Brenda squinted her eyes at him, her ears puffing out defensively.
“Hmph!
How rude!
If you must know, there’s been a rogue mouse bugging me all night!
It’s an absolute menace—it eats the gold cash straight out of the register, tears up my accounting books, and shreds the spare clothes!
I finally had it completely cornered in the dark back there, but when Lisa rang that bell, I jumped and hit my head against the support beam during my ascent!”
To emphasize her point, Brenda threw her arms out dramatically.
Her elbow clipped a tall, glowing mana lamp sitting on the edge of the counter.
Smash!
The lamp tipped over flawlessly, crashing onto the floorboards and shattering into a dozen glowing crystal shards.
The counter went completely silent.
Lisa buried her face in her armored palms, her cheeks burning with absolute embarrassment.
Kaelen stared at the broken glass, then slowly raised his eyes back up to Brenda, his voice dripping with pure, unbothered sarcasm.
“Are you always this clumsy, or is this a special performance for the guests?”
That completely tore it.
Brenda’s face flushed bright red, her dog ears standing straight up in pure fury as she leaned over the counter, pointing a finger right at his nose.
“What did you just say to me, you little—!”
Before her sentence could fully register, the air pressure inside the tavern shifted violently.
Kaelen’s sensory perimeter instantly flagged a sudden spike in local audio frequencies directly behind his cloak.
The rowdy, background chatter of the room didn’t just fade—it fractured.
The heavy clinking of wooden mugs stopped mid-air, replaced by the distinct, high-tension friction of heavy leather boots scraping aggressively against the dirt floorboards.
His hyper-analytical focus immediately began calculating the trajectory of a rapidly escalating threat level before the rest of the room even realized a thing.
“Hey!
Shut your mouth, you cheated me!”
A sudden, violent roar erupted from a heavy wooden table directly behind them.
The heated argument instantly cut Brenda off.
Two massive, heavily built brawlers had jumped to their feet, their stools flying backward into the dirt.
One of them, completely blinded with rage, grabbed a thick, heavy glass bottle of dwarven ale from the table, whipped his arm back, and launched it with absolute velocity across the tavern—aiming straight for his opponent’s head.
The other guy ducked.
The heavy glass bottle sailed cleanly over his shoulder, hurtling through the air at high speed, directly off-target, and straight toward the counter.
It was tracking perfectly for Brenda’s face.
The bottle was moving too fast.
There was absolutely zero reaction time.
Brenda opened her eyes, saw the green glass zooming directly toward her eyes, and froze in total terror, clamping her eyes shut to brace for a devastating, bone-breaking impact.
Kaelen’s hyper-analytical focus snapped into play.
He sensed the incoming trajectory instantly, but his body couldn’t deploy a magical void shield fast enough.
With zero time to think up a proper counter-attack, he did the only thing his instincts allowed: he violently threw his own body forward, sliding directly in front of the demi-human girl like a human shield.
CRACK!
The heavy glass ale bottle collided flawlessly with the exact center of Kaelen’s forehead.
The glass shattered into a million pieces, exploding in a spray of dark foam and sharp shards as Kaelen’s head whipped backward.
As the shards rained down, Kaelen stood perfectly still for a brief, frozen second, his back turned to the tavern.
Inside his mind, a final, cynical thought echoed: Using my actual physical body to protect a random stranger I just met…
seriously, how much worse can my day get?
The entire tavern went dead silent.
Every single conversation vanished.
“Hey, man…
are you okay?” a random guy called out from a nearby table, his voice hesitant and strained in the sudden quiet.
Kaelen slowly raised his hand, blindly extending his thumb into the air to signal he was fine.
“I’m…
okay…” he muttered, his voice hollow.
“Oh, thank goodness, he’s fine!” Lisa gasped, clutching her chest as she turned to a panicked Karen.
“I honestly thought that impact was going to crack his skull and scatter his brains on the spot, but it seems Kae is just as structurally strong as—”
THUD.
Before Lisa could finish her sentence, a heavy, limp weight collapsed onto the floorboards.
Kaelen went down like a chopped tree, his body hitting the ground with a dull, echoing bounce.
The world inside Kaelen’s head was spinning at an absolute, uncalibrated pace.
He lay pasted on the floorboards, his face turned sideways as a thick, warm stream of blood began painting the wood, pouring steadily from his nose.
His vision started blurring out rapidly, the bright neon lights of the tavern blending into a single, swirling vortex of spinning color.
The panicked voices of the crowd suddenly sounded like they were talking completely underwater, echoing with heavy, distorted waves.
People were instantly surrounding him in a tight circle.
Through the muffled audio feed in his ears, he could barely make out Lisa’s frantic voice shouting into the crowd.
“Quick!
We need a high-level medic!
Does anyone here know recovery magic?!
He’s losing a lot of blood…
we’re losing him!”
Directly above him, Brenda’s face was completely pale with absolute fear.
She was screaming, her voice cracking as tears welled up in her eyes.
“It was completely my fault!
He wouldn’t have taken that damage if he hadn’t tried to save me!
Please don’t die on us!”
Kaelen’s ears continued to ring, the foreign, echoing language blurring together.
Brenda, Karen, and Lisa were all bending over his prone body.
Karen was weeping openly, her eyes completely flooded with water as she cried harder than anyone else in the room, frantically pulling out her healing catalysts.
Brenda reached down, grabbing Kaelen’s shoulders and violently shaking him back and forth, trying to keep him conscious.
To Kaelen, it felt like someone was aggressively shaking a rusty radio antenna trying to regain a lost signal.
“Please, Lord, don’t take the nice bandit guy!” she wailed, her dramatic choice of words hitting like a physical insult.
“He still owes me for that broken mana lamp!”
The sheer absurdity of her tracking his debt mid-tragedy made Kaelen wish he could permanently mute his own audio feed.
But the most absolutely infuriating, high-velocity disrespect didn’t come from the humans or the demi-humans.
Right next to his bleeding ear, Kaelen heard a slow, pathetic, demanding meow.
Pixel had hopped down from the counter, completely ignoring the pool of blood, and was staring directly into his fading eyes.
“Master,” her telepathic voice purred inside his crashing consciousness, completely calm and entirely unbothered by his medical emergency.
“Please do not pass out before telling these people exactly what I want to eat.
You need to explain the specific recipe for the premium seared meat first, okay?
My hunger bar is still critical.”
Kaelen’s fading mind gave one final, desperate twitch of pure, unadulterated exasperation.
The heck…
out of all things she could possibly say…
she is literally demanding a cooking recipe while my system is shutting down…
The absolute audacity.
It’s almost impressive how selfish she can be.”
A faint, invisible sigh left his lips.
His eyelids grew impossibly heavy, his vision gave out completely, and everything inside his mind went totally, blissfully black, as he blacked out cold on the tavern floor.