Chapter 12

"What world would you like to send the message to?" Archie asked, pulling a large box from beneath the registration desk, its surface covered in runic ornaments and shimmering streams of energy.

"The Thirty-Three Kingdoms. The world of Nias."

"Which guild number?" the werewolf asked, opening the box and instantly transforming it into something resembling a magical typewriter.

"Thirteen," Yan said with a smile.

Archie froze for a moment.

"Thirteen?" he repeated uncertainly.

"Exactly!" the rogue grinned. "And here's the message." Yan took a quill, ink, and a small sheet of paper straight from the counter and wrote a couple of lines. "Well? Can you do it?" He handed the message to the werewolf.

Archie was clearly skeptical, but took the sheet anyway, nodding.

"That'll be fifty gold."

"What? That's robbery!"

"The Thirty-Three Kingdoms are very far from Tsagat. Sending a message there is extremely expensive. You should have known that," the werewolf replied, clipping out every word as sharply as a struck coin.

Well, that was a problem. Yan did not have any money on him at all. And running back to Sovt now was hardly the best option.

"Hmm. Then put it on the Blue Paths' account," the lad said, snapping his fingers. "You know them?"

"We do," Archie replied with a frown. "Wait here. I'll bring out the seal."

"What? Hold on…" Yan did not manage to finish.

Archie disappeared into the back of the guild, leaving the rogue alone with himself among hundreds of mercenaries. Amid the noise, clamor, and life boiling all around him.

The rogue sighed heavily. Well, plans, as always, changed on the fly.

"Putting yourself on the line for others again? And what exactly are you trying to accomplish?" a woman's voice suddenly sounded from his right.

Yan spun around as if scalded. His eyes darted from side to side.

But all he saw was a group of dwarves at the neighboring table registering the head of a basilisk they had killed.

The rogue smiled bitterly, shaking his head. Then he turned back toward the counter, braced both hands against its hard wooden surface, and sighed heavily.

"What am I trying to accomplish? Hmm. Good question… darling." Yan shook his head. "Maybe I'm trying to prevent this world from being destroyed? Or maybe I'm trying to save my own black soul? Who knows with mysteries of such universal proportions!"

He fell silent and continued waiting for the werewolf.

Time seemed to stop for him.

And then, suddenly, a massive hand dropped onto his shoulder.

"Mysteries of universal proportions, huh? Ha!" someone shouted into his ear in a cheerful, carefree, and slightly thickheaded voice.

Yan had been so lost in himself that he had not even noticed anyone approaching. He jerked backward, spinning a full hundred and eighty degrees and preparing for a fight, but…

"Brother, please, keep it down! We're already drawing too much attention as it is," came a second voice, softer and more timid. "Sorry about him, Yan. He probably scared you. He definitely scared me."

The rogue stared at the pair in astonishment.

One was tall and broad-shouldered. The other short, thin, and hunched. One muscular and radiant, the other wiry and grounded. One had short hair, red as blood; the other's was blue and disheveled. One wore a tight sleeveless jacket and billowing trousers, with a belt shaped like a silver flower. The other wore a white-and-blue hooded cloak and an iron gauntlet on his left hand.

One carried a long metal staff on his back.

The other—a katana in a white sheath.

One was "a gorilla."

The other—"a crane."

One was named Khad.

The other—Julius.

"The Amressa brothers," Yan said, smiling—smiling genuinely—as he looked over his old acquaintances. "I should've guessed you'd be here."

"Ha-ha-ha! Damn right, Yan!" Khad laughed, clapping the rogue on the shoulder.

"Brother… I asked you not to shout so loudly."

"What? Am I shouting?" the Abyss Chaser replied cheerfully. "I just saw Yan, who, as always, wandered off on his own, started staring into space, and slipped into an existential crisis, ha!" Khad gave the rogue a mocking look.

Yan nodded in agreement.

"Alas, that's exactly how it is, my friends," he replied. "Girls always start crawling into your head when you're lonely. Can you imagine?"

"Ha-ha! Oh, I can imagine!" Khad replied cheerfully, stepping up beside the rogue.

The difference in their height was enormous.

"You're here because of the Abyss?" Yan asked, though in truth he already knew the answer.

"Well… yes and no, actually," Julius replied awkwardly, scratching his cheek and looking somewhere at the floor.

"At first we were just hunting the local monsters—as true Abyss Chasers should," Khad said. "Then some work suddenly came our way. Ended up becoming bodyguards."

"Really?" Yan smiled. "That's good. What are you guarding?"

"Not 'what.' 'Who,'" Khad replied merrily.

"A visiting sorcerer," Julius explained. "He hasn't been in the city long. Maybe three days. That's when we met him. He pays a lot better than the church does for the skulls of ordinary skeletons." The Abyss Chaser sighed. "That's how it is."

"A sorcerer?" Yan repeated with interest, then abruptly fell silent.

"What a coincidence," the rogue thought.

Then he heard footsteps behind him.

Archie had returned with a small magical device—the so-called "seal." Every officially recognized Adventurers' Guild, no matter what world it stood in, was connected to the same interworld registry. Members, licenses, payments, rewards, bounties—if the guilds had ever had reason to record someone, that record remained in the system.

The seal read the magical and physical essence of whoever used it and matched that signature against the registry. That was how a recipient hundreds, even thousands, of worlds away could know that a message was genuine. A signature like that was almost impossible to fake. And, naturally, the same check told the guild exactly who was standing at its counter.

"Please, place it here," the werewolf asked, paying no attention to the fact that the rogue's company had suddenly grown considerably larger.

"Well… here comes the moment of truth," Yan thought, taking hold of the wooden handle inlaid with magical stones of different colors. "Let's hope the rules of this guild are as strong as steel."

He brought the seal down with a loud thud.

And at that very moment, a loud, ringing "shaboom" echoed throughout the entire guild.

It meant only one thing…

There was someone inside the guild whose head was worth hundreds of thousands of gold across Existence.