Nora stood next to the smoldering corpse of the creature that the party had just slain. Emily was binding her wounds while Andrea arranged wood for a fire. She looked down at Daniel’s still form and sighed. She poked him with her foot, looking for a reaction. Finding none and convincing herself that he was truly unconscious, she released the flow of mana to her charm skill with a sigh. On her back, the runescript for her class tattoo cooled noticeably as her mana stopped running through it.
Honestly, she wasn’t even sure she needed the charm skill with Daniel. Technically, her class used mind affinity to allow her to manipulate other sentient beings into being positively disposed towards her, but Dan just seemed to go with the flow regardless. It was almost frustrating how much effort she had gone to, only for it to all appear unnecessary in the end.
From the moment she had seen him using thunder magic to fight the blood bear, to when she had purposefully aimed Ishlar’s party toward the nightglider nest, to when she had run off to be ‘saved’ by him with her charm running at full power… She couldn’t help but shake the feeling that it would have been just as effective to simply walk up to him and offer to buy him a drink. He was just so reasonable and affable about everything that artifice and subterfuge just seemed like a pointless waste.
Regardless, her enigmatic companion really only seemed capable of deepening the mysteries surrounding him. Although he wasn’t terribly powerful as a mage, he was much too young for the amount of magic that he wielded. On top of that, so much of what he had normalized was profoundly alien. He managed to use magic without a class tattoo, which should be impossible for anyone with less than a century worth of practice.
He didn’t seem to understand how rare it was for a mage to fight with weapons while wearing armor, when most found physical fitness and combat beneath them. Now, it turned out that he could also use fire magic. She hadn’t even found an attunement stone on him for the thunder, and now the fire.
Admittedly, it was poorly-cast and mana-inefficient fire, but at a minimum he was a classless dual affinity caster. She snorted. Triple affinity. She had forgotten that he kept using minor space magic to avoid attacks. There was no way he had happened upon a crashed ship and figured out how to use the teleporter on his own. His claims of being some sort of serf being trained for the imperial army were equally hollow. Even elven arrogance would wane around a human this talented. She didn’t doubt that they would train him, but he would have been an elite, given access to the greatest arms and supplements that his sponsor could afford.
No, he was a liar, but an incredibly naive one. She had originally assumed that he was a spy of some sort, which seemed fairly logical given his ability set. But if he was a spy, he was awful at it. He made up a terrible and transparent story, and couldn’t stop himself from wringing his hands the entire time he told it. She didn’t even need the Detect Falsehood skill to tell that he was lying, but it was almost worse that he didn’t even notice that she was using it. After spending a day or so with him, she had come to the bizarre conclusion that he honestly didn’t know the first thing about Twilight or its politics.
He was still lying about something, but he wasn’t a spy from the Kingdom of Dubarr. The Alliance of Free Cities had seen any number of spies after they declared independence, and Nora had made a good deal of coin spotting them for the authorities. Usually, they were fairly easy to pick out. Some still had the accent, but most couldn’t help but ask “casual” questions about local politics and defenses as soon as they were distracted by her batting her eyelashes. Daniel, on the other hand, just seemed content to follow her lead. She didn’t even really want to do a run on the Mashress Silver Mine; she just thought that pushing the issue would make him more likely to show his true colors.
No matter, even if he was just a talented mage with some sort of past he wanted to hide from, the Alliance of Free Cities was the right place for him. The Alliance was a bit lawless, but if you wanted to avoid the great powers on Twilight, it was probably the place to be. Of course, if any of the great powers actually wanted to crush the Alliance, it would’ve been a foregone conclusion.
Instead, the Alliance continued to exist because it cost too much money and effort to invade or co-opt. Rather than take over directly, the great powers used it as a sort of neutral middle ground where their representatives could interact. They mostly only acted through sponsorships, offering themselves up as patrons for individuals like Ishlar within the Alliance and using them to try and gain enough influence to force out their rivals.
To date, the Alliance had successfully played a dangerous balancing act, not allowing any one power to gain enough influence to allow an easy takeover. It would take some time and effort to develop Daniel, but he could be a powerful asset to keeping the word “free” in the Alliance of Free Cities.
“Andrea, what’s taking so long?” She asked the tall woman, stepping away from their recent kill. “Daniel has a head wound, and I want to make sure that he doesn’t die from hypothermia or something stupid like that, after he saved us from whatever this thing is.” Nora motioned offhandedly at the heavily-burnt beast.
“I’ll get right on it,” Andrea replied, fishing a flint striker from her travel pack. Within a couple seconds, the tinder ignited, and the tunnel was lit by a low, but hearty flame. All of them stared at it for a couple seconds before Andrea looked at Daniel and took a deep breath.
The three of them sat in silence, weapons at the ready as they eyed up the darkness. Packs of monsters weren’t terribly common. More often than not, anything big enough to be a threat was territorial and would drive competition away. Still, they’d just made a lot of noise and it didn’t hurt to be cautious.
“Look, I’ll say it for Emily and me,” she said, voice a little shaky. “What exactly is going on with him? What exactly is the story with this Dan guy? At first I thought the lightning flashes from the arena were some sort of class specific ability, but that was straight up magecraft. He’s low rank, that’s for sure, but he shouldn’t be able to cast like that at his age, especially with two affinities. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a caster under forty-five, and that guy was only really capable of creating magical torchlight.”
“Nora,” she continued, “we took this job because of your reputation. There was something off about him from the very beginning, and we assumed he would turn out to be a spy or something of the sort. You told us to trust you, and we do. I just need to know what we’re dealing with here.”
“Honestly?” Nora looked the other woman in the eyes, “I don’t know. He claims that he teleported in from another planet where he had been trained by an elven house, but I’m not sure I buy it. He just doesn’t seem to understand how abnormal his abilities are. If no one tells him that mages don’t fight with a sword and armor, I suspect it’ll take him months to figure out.”
“How did he learn to fight like that?” Emily interrupted, wincing slightly as she placed the last bandage over a bloody gash on her side. “He isn’t the most skilled swordsman I’ve ever seen, but I don’t know the style he’s using. I mean, it’s clear that he isn’t self-taught; everything he’s doing seems to be part of some sort of orthodox collection of moves, but I figured I’d at least have an idea as to what school he trained with. Instead, he’s a gigantic question mark.”
“I do know that he has the potential to be powerful,” Nora replied. “He’s hiding something, but he’s simply too talented to be wasted in a backwater like this. If he wants to hide here for a little while, that’s fine. It would certainly be better for us to work with him and earn some mana and coin, rather than get in his way. He’s weak now, but if he’s given a chance, he could turn into something new and powerful.”
“I don’t know if the Alliance is a backwater,” Andrea chided Nora. “We’re actually pretty close to most of the great powers. Plus, even if we are a backwater, the Alliance is the one paying our bills. Being polite and cordial toward the hand with the purse is just good business sense. No need to antagonize some council member for no reason by pointing out geopolitical truth. That isn’t the sort of thing that wins them voters.”
“I wasn’t talking about the Alliance, Andrea,” Nora answered, eyes not leaving Daniel’s unconscious form. “I’m talking about Twilight as a whole. I don’t know what someone with the body of a fighter and three affinities is doing in a tributary state. Void ships visit us what, maybe once a year, once every other year? The Empire barely even admits that we exist. We’re really only a source of fairly common raw materials and Imperial soldiers. Even the great powers that rule over Twilight are almost nothing in the grand scheme of things. A contingent of the Amberell House Guard could do a surgical strike and wipe out the ruling families of any nation on the entire planet, and there’s nothing anyone here could do about it.”
“The Orakh are nearby.” Emily shrugged. “Maybe he’s someone sent by the elves as an advance scout. I wouldn’t be surprised if a local house tries to consolidate us under their banner, so that they can fortify the planet and use us as cannon fodder to fight off the horde.”
“That does bear watching,” Andrea responded, nodding thoughtfully. “I wouldn’t mind fighting the Orakh, but if that has to happen, I want to do it on my own, not as a disposable meat shield for some two-thousand-year-old noble. None of us might survive if the horde invades, but we could at least fight them as citizens of Twilight, rather than as a cog in some stratagem that is designed to weaken the horde as a whole, probably at the expense of our lives.”
“I agree.” Nora pursed her lips. “I don’t think he’s from the Kingdom of Dubarr, and they’re the greatest threat right now, but it is certainly possible that he’s an elven plant. His magical aptitude and strange fighting style scream of their influence. If he represents offworld forces, it might be for the best if he doesn’t make it back to them to report. I think we could do without some Imperial lordling showing up on our doorstep and declaring himself our ruler.”
The three women sat in the flickering light of the fire and thought. Daniel represented a potential ally, but he could also be a risk to all of them. If he were an elven agent or a deserter, he could easily bring the Empire to the Alliance of Free Cities. One Imperial officer on Twilight could easily upset the strange balance that kept the cities free from the competing powers.
“Let’s wait and see,” Nora finally said, eyes locked on the dancing flames. “If he is simply here to find wealth and power, there is enough of that to go around in the mines. If he’s here as a spy or an agent, there are plenty of hungry monsters in the mines, too. Not everyone who ventures into the darkness comes back out. No one would bother to look for him, and even if they did, carrion doesn’t last long near this many monsters.”
The other two women nodded in agreement but didn’t speak. Silently, Emily pulled out a pot and began making them some stew for dinner. The other two watched her cook and waited for Daniel to awaken.
