Chapter 9
A knock came at my tavern door a few hours later. I sent one of the girls to answer it.
“A friend wanted to send you this,” a barmaid said, holding up a bottle of champagne.
“Yes, we’ll take it,” I replied.
That champagne was a signal from Podni. Having the bottle delivered to my room meant that the plan was a success.
While I was teaching four sad prostitutes how to fuck, a carriage pulled up to Higcliff's house at the exact time I promised.
Four feminine hands beckoned him inside.
Drunk, high, and tired, Higcliff realized too late that these women weren't what he expected.
They were copies of the succubus boss from the Grubiit dungeon, and the carriage was warded to the tits.
If he could somehow overpower the monsters, he still wouldn't be able to escape the carriage, nor would any of his cries for help.
If he hadn't fallen for the hooker ploy, I would have kidnapped him with a dozen silk soldiers, but he was gullible and horny, and this method was far quieter. I was sad I didn’t get to see it happen, though.
Now Higcliff was locked in a cabin down the road from Minsic, away from the desert and in a forest. A succubus was on hand to keep him weak, and if that didn’t keep him from escaping, the silk soldiers standing guard inside would.
Ideally, he survived long enough for Horpus to get whatever satisfaction he wanted out of this exchange, but if Higliff had to die, he had to die. My constructs could handle that much.
In a just world, I would have been able to shake off the working girls hanging from me and go see the captive Higcliff in person, maybe cut him up a little bit before Horpus arrived. You know, a little treat for myself after all this fucking work. But no, I had to keep up appearances.
The tavern shook just enough that every woman in the room paused. The force didn’t physically shake anything off the walls or spill the beer I had on the nightstand, but the vibration was tangible for an instant, and then it was gone.
Notifications for earning good-aligned levels streamed in, one after another, for a total of 133.
That should have been good news too. A whole barracks of paladins had just been disintegrated by an Unholy bomb. They were no longer a threat to me, and I reaped the spoils via the system.
But I wasn’t the one to kill them. My sword didn’t cut them open.
I didn’t watch them bleed out or hear their final gasps of curses and insults.
Reading about my success via system notifications was like only seeing profits from a business via a ledger.
Never talking to a customer. Never negotiating a deal.
Just opening a page and reading a number in a box.
Fuck. It was so boring.
“You continue to overestimate yourself, viceroy. Your own arrogance is already bleeding you dry.”
I tried to ignore her voice.
I looked down. Two of the girls slowly licked me.
We had fucked all night, and now they were running out the clock until their shift was over.
The other two girls sat in a plush chair on the other side of the room, making out with no enthusiasm.
They too were doing the job, counting down the minutes until they were free.
“Even the women you pay don’t want to be with you.”
I grabbed one of the girls tonguing my shaft by the hair. She yelped in surprise and pain.
Maybe pounding her until she cried would make me feel better. If it didn’t, maybe getting the second or third to whimper and bawl as well, smearing their makeup down their faces with their tears, would give me the gratification I wanted.
The one I held looked up at me with terror in her eyes.
No, little one. You’ve had bad clients before. You think you know what’s coming, but I promise you, the intensity of the next hour will be something you could never imagine.
I’m going to fuck the soul out of your body and make you lick it up when I’m done.
And that got Aurketzu to shut the fuck up.
I intended to spend one more full day in Minsic before I officially vanished. Ghosting the day Higcliff disappeared would be suspicious. Normal people took a day off after a multi-day dungeon run, so that's what I would do too.
On the off chance that books on topics like demons and celestials, or even Abaddon specifically, were in a Minsic shop or library, I had to look. When I returned to the inn empty-handed early that afternoon, I was given a message Wistia had left.
She asked me to come to the guild hall as soon as I could and didn't say why.
I could guess, though.
As soon as I stepped through the door, Wistia pulled me into a side room so we could speak in private.
“Do you know what Higcliff's plans for the evening were?” she asked.
Wistia was there for that conversation, but she was also pretty distracted at the time.
“He was still in the tavern when I went to bed,” I answered. “I bought him some girls, so his next stop would have been home if I had to guess.”
Wistia nodded. “His maid confirmed he came home and stepped out later. She said a bunch of girls came looking for him around 3 a.m., but he hadn't returned, so she sent them away.”
“I can give you the names of the girls I hired if you think that would help.”
“It might. Confirming the maid’s story about girls visiting is a good start.”
I put a hand on Wistia's arm. “I'm all for looking out for a friend, but it's the day after a major drinking event. He's probably sleeping in a corner at some friend's place and will come home when he wakes up.”
“He's always the first in the guild hall the day after a run because he wants his money that badly,” Wistia explained.
“Two years of running with him, he has never not been here first. Today? He didn’t show for his cut, not even late.
Just never came. You're probably right, but something about it feels wrong to me. I can't ignore that.”
“I get it. I don't know him or the city very well, but I'd be happy to search with you.”
“The others think I'm being paranoid.”
“For me, those gut feelings usually have some truth to them,” I said. “We can go to the brothel first, or I could go if you don't want to be in that kind of place.”
Wistia rolled her eyes. “I'll manage.”
The brothel I hired from was several blocks away from the Dungeon Brawlers guild hall. The specific girls I requested for Higcliff weren't there, but the madam confirmed she sent girls for an appointment, and the client no-showed. I stopped her before she started her “no refunds” speech.
We checked a few of the taverns Higcliff sometimes frequented. We dropped in on friends and acquaintances. We even visited the guard station. No one had seen Higcliff or had any idea of where he might be.
“Asking Alexi for help is probably the next best step,” I said as we paused at the oasis late in the evening. “I was planning to leave tomorrow, but I see how worried you are. I can stay longer and help if you want.”
Wistia leaned into me and put a tired head on my shoulder. “No, you've done a lot already.”
“I don't mind.”
“It's like you said. He probably passed out somewhere with whatever girl he met and will turn up tonight or tomorrow as if nothing happened.”
“That's probably true,” I agreed. “Does Higcliff have enemies? Should we be thinking about that as an explanation?”
“He rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.”
“Really? He seemed nice.”
Wistia laughed. “He gets childish when he doesn't get his way, and he's had some pretty public disagreements with guild leadership.”
“You two seemed close.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You were sitting on his lap at one point last night,” I said.
She sighed. “I was on my way to making a mistake. Hooking up with party members only creates problems. I know that, but… Anyway, I haven't slept with him, or any of the other men in the party.”
I noticed she specified “men,” which left sleeping with the women in the party, but I didn't point that out.
“So he made enemies. Should we look into any of them?”
“No, this is probably a lot of nothing. Thank you for keeping me company today.”
“I didn't mind,” I replied.
“Are we not going to talk about last night?” she asked without lifting her head.
“What about it?”
“Your very long and flexible dick. Or two dicks. I remember two, but I was really fucked up because that can't be right.”
“Sounds like you have it figured out,” I said.
“Is it like a spell?”
“Yes.”
“The toy is surprisingly accurate,” she added. “Now that I've had the real thing, I don't know that I can go back.”
“You use Byron's Blessing?”
“More than I should admit.” She pulled away from me. “Want to come back to my place?”
“I normally would. I'm pretty tired, though. I don't think I've recovered from the crawl, let alone the afterparty.”
She pouted. “Okay, fine. Toy it is.”
I kissed her on the cheek. “He'll turn up. I'm sure of it.”
You know I wasn't tired, but I was horrifically bored. Pretending to give a shit was so draining that finishing in Wistia wasn't enough of an incentive to extend our time together. I wanted to get back to Grubiit so I could conclude this Horpus project and move on to more interesting things.
I turned onto the street my inn was on and felt foreboding wash over me like a stale summer breeze. Sense Danger told me something was off.
I triggered Wraith+5 and dodged to the side, putting every point of my 51 strength into pushing off the earth, turning my sidestep into a great leap.
The heat of a Holy spell blew by me as I moved. I was immune, but that trick was more useful if I hid it. Paladins could still kill me without Holy magic. As soon as they knew Holy didn't work, they would switch to something that would.
I counted four-no, seven paladins. They were dressed like average sellswords, but laying eyes on them was like tasting bile. Their very existence repulsed me on a deep and spiritual level.
I hadn't felt this strongly when I saw paladins before. What did that mean?
Was I more sensitive and more aware, or were they easier to spot because they were exceptionally high-leveled? That didn’t matter right now, though.