Interlude 04 #3
Seven months had passed since the three of them first met in that mountain corridor, seven months since they'd taken down that Goliath Grey Tortoise together.
In those seven months, the Trigger-Coded Spherulites had saved their lives on at least four occasions Lance could count with certainty, probably two more he was willing to credit them with as well.
Watching C pass up the chance to restock felt a bit like watching a man walk right past water in a desert, an analogy that, given their current surroundings, carried some literal weight.
"No," C said.
"Why?" Rhema asked.
"If it's about resources, I can cover it," Lance offered. He doubted those gems came cheap, but given how many C had burned through saving their lives, he had no hesitation about pitching in.
"It's not about resources," C said, voice even, not defensive, just closed off, the way someone sounds when they've already decided how much they're willing to say.
"At my current level, I wouldn't be able to land the dice roll needed for them," he added, glancing at Nazim's dice.
"And it's, as I said, not a resource problem. "
It took Lance a moment to process that. If it wasn't resources, and his level was the actual bottleneck, there was only one real explanation. "You didn't get them here, did you."
Lance glanced at Nazim, who had arranged his face into a mask of complete, professional neutrality.
The thing about this kobold, much like the wishing system itself, was that he generally wouldn't hand over anything beyond a person's level. For C to be using Spherulites at all meant they'd been acquired outside the system, given to him by someone.
"No," C confirmed. "I didn't get the Spherulites from here."
"Then where."
"They were a gift," C said, after a pause.
"From who."
Lance felt a little bad pressing like this, after all, they'd been comrades for seven months, and at times C had felt more like a mentor, showing them things about the system they'd realized, with some embarrassment, they hadn't even known were possible, like what had just happened with the tent.
But as much as he felt bad about it, he was equally curious about this man, someone they'd traveled with for months and barely knew anything about, beyond the fact that he was C, a fellow soul reincarnated from another world.
They wouldn't learn anything more from him. Not that day, at least.
???
True to the kobold's word, the tent was already standing when they stepped outside to check.
As night fell, Lance found himself genuinely thankful to C for arranging it, thinking about how much rougher the night could have gone otherwise.
So, the first chance he got, he apologized.
"Sorry for pushing earlier, with the questions. "
"It's nothing," C said. "It's understandable to be curious. We've traveled together this long, and you know very little about me while I know quite a lot about you."
"Hehehe, that came out a little ominous, but okay."
C glanced at Rhema, seated nearby, before continuing.
"I was in Vellenark the first time I heard about the two of you.
I wasn't exactly looking for people like us, heroes, but I'd always thought it would be nice to travel alongside people who understood my struggles.
My path's been similar to yours, in that I came to acknowledge that this whole business of chasing RU through killing was not for me. "
Lance glanced at Rhema, then joked lightly, "Don't take this the wrong way, but that's a little hard to believe." If anything, C looked and moved like someone born to hunt monsters.
"I could say the same about the two of you. Months, years of doing this, it roughens a person up," C said, smiling. "Before this life, I spent my time in a city, well cared for. Stayed long enough to build myself quite a name there. You can probably guess why."
Even awakened beings drew attention just for the supernatural power they carried, so Lance had no trouble picturing exactly the kind of attention C meant, the kind an unaging awakened being naturally attracts. He and Rhema had lived through that themselves.
"I could've kept living among them, kept ignoring my Personal Interface's suggestions to go out and earn my way back to the people I loved, but after what happened in Zanoba City, I couldn't anymore."
When they'd first met, Lance hadn't understood why the existence of people like him, Rhema, and C, unknown to the wider world for over a century and a half, had suddenly become common knowledge, along with a growing hunt for these undying souls from other worlds.
Lance had assumed one of them had simply let something slip to the wrong person, and that was probably close enough to the truth, but he finally had the missing context for why interest in them had spiked so suddenly: Zanoba.
A major city, wiped clean off the map overnight, and the one blamed for it, a hero.
That hero, along with whoever had first let slip that other heroes existed, the very people now ironically being blamed for the surge in attention, was the reason Lance and Rhema had felt forced to step out and get stronger.
Maybe they'd never fully reach their goal, but at the very least, they wanted to be strong enough not to end up captured, the way they'd heard some heroes already had.
That had seemed to be C's motivation too. Lance would soon learn he was wrong.