Asher had to admit, he wasn’t sure exactly what reaction he was going to get from the various goons when they realized they were trapped. Part of him expected them to drop their weapons and fall to their knees, begging for mercy as they assumed he was some sort of noble in disguise based on his powerful skill. Another part of him wondered if they’d act like trapped rats, launching themselves at him with everything they had in a desperate bid for freedom.

  In the end, they did neither.

  “See! He’s picking a fight with us!” Franco shouted, grinning as he readied his dagger and stepped forward. “Come on, let’s-”

  A sickening crunch cut him off mid-sentence as the other woman with an aura that spoke of a familiarity with death smashed Franco across the back of the head with a banged-up cudgel, cracking his skull open and sending him tumbling to the ground. Based on the tiny orb of shards that drifted up over his body, he wouldn’t be getting up again.

  “Sorry about Franco,” she said, coughing before clearing her throat and giving them a weak grin that showed off black-stained teeth. Asher had to mentally keep himself from flinching as he got a sudden flashback to the jet-black teeth of the greater demon he’d battled. “He was always a bit too excitable, if you know what I mean. Not a big thinker. Chim, you know where the fight ring is, right?”

  “Y-yes, Audra,” Chim muttered, nodding as he stared at Franco’s dead body slowly bleeding out across the cobblestones. “I like to bet on the fights every so often.”

  “Perfect, you can show these two where they are,” Audra said, snagging Franco’s shards for herself before giving Asher and Samantha a shallow bow. “Is that good enough?”

  “…Yeah,” Asher said, glancing at Samantha and seeing her eyes had gone wide at the sudden and unexpected violence. Like him, he imagined she’d been waiting for the group to launch themselves at them. He hadn’t expected any of them to turn on one another quite so fast. He briefly contemplated killing Audra for her sickening aura, before deciding against it. If she came at them, he’d kill her in a heartbeat, but her aura wasn’t that thick with death. Not to mention he got the vibe that she merely did whatever it took to survive. It didn’t feel as if she went out of her way to kill people if she could help it.

  With a wave of his hand just to give them a visual indication the barrier was gone, he dropped Spatial Lock. Immediately, everyone other than Chim darted off without a second look back. Giving them one more shallow bow, Audra ran off as well, leaving the two of them with a shaking Chim.

  Taking a deep breath, Samantha put a smile on her face as she turned to face the only one who hadn’t run off. “Well, I can’t say any of that went as I’d expected it to go… But thank you for helping us out, Chim.”

  “Of course!” Chim gulped, giving them a small smile before mimicking Audra’s shallow bow after only a moment’s hesitation. “Please, follow me.”

  I have a feeling this isn’t going to be another ‘Kree’ situation, Asher thought as they fell in line behind their new guide. According to Identify, Chim’s class was thug, which wasn’t all too surprising. The vast majority of criminals he spotted wandering the streets had either thug, brute, or thief as their class of choice, and Chim lacked both the scrawny dexterity of a thief, and the bulky mass of a brute.

  Their new friend led them on a merry walk through the first ring of the new city, sticking primarily to the main roads and more well-lit paths whenever possible. Asher didn’t know the gang situation in Vildelph, but it wasn’t hard to guess what would happen if they continued wandering around in the dark like they had been. After a good half an hour of silent walking, Chim finally stopped beside a run-down shack.

  “This is one of the tunnels leading to the fights,” he said, pointing at the crooked doors hanging off their frames. “Rather than having a bunch of people coming in and out of any one entrance, there are dozens of different paths hidden throughout the city you can take. I like this one because it’s needlessly long and almost nobody ever uses it, largely because of the smell. Fighting in the tunnels is against the rules, but you know how it is. Better to take steps to avoid it if possible.”

  “Thanks for the help,” Asher said, surprising Chim by tossing him a hundred shards for his trouble. It wasn't exactly the autograph he'd wanted, but it was probably more than he expected to get after what had just gone down. “Just for my own information, any other rules about the fights we should know before we head down there?”

  “Uh, no, I don’t think so,” Chim said, shaking his head in shock as he absorbed the shards. “If you want to bet on a fight, you have to get it in before the official start of the match, but that’s about it. Oh, sometimes they do surprise exhibition fights, in which case you’ll only have a minute or two to get in any bets before the window closes.”

  “How often do you bet on the fights?” Samantha asked.

  “When the mood strikes me,” Chim said, grinning at them and growing a tad more relaxed. Asher couldn’t blame him. After all, why would he waste giving him a hundred shards if he were just planning to kill him and lose a chunk of them to shard decay? “You want my advice, try and see who the veteran watchers are betting on and do what they do. You probably won’t get any huge payouts, but it’s the most sure-fire way to win consistently.”

  “Oh yeah? Is that what you do?”

  “Me?” Chim asked, laughing at Asher’s tone. “No, I like to bet on the underdogs, which is why I’m in this situation in the first place. Giant payouts if you bet right, but usually, they’re the underdogs for a reason. Most of the time they lose, and lose hard. Still though, one of these days I’ll hit it big!”

  “I hope you do,” Asher said, giving him one more nod of thanks before opening the crooked doors and letting Samantha in ahead of him. Once the doors had swung shut behind him, he turned to take in the winding tunnel before them. Sure enough, the tunnel had a slight but steady angle downwards, and Asher noted how there were even a few chunks of brick and piping partially sticking out of the narrow dirt walls here and there.

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  “I think those are parts of the sewer system,” he said as they began heading down the tunnel, doing their best not to breathe in the foul odor. “Someone literally dug this tunnel along the edge of the sewer.”

  “That would explain the bends,” Samantha said, already pinching her nose as she walked ahead of him down the twisting corridor.

  Asher had spent some time walking through Whikoga’s actual sewer while hunting down Eight, and somehow, the smell in Chim’s tunnel was worse than that of what he’d experienced back in Whikoga. He didn’t know if it was because the actual sewers were cleaned every so often, or if the muck had melted into the dirt walls themselves by this point, but either way, he wasn’t surprised in the slightest when they didn’t encounter anyone else on their way to the ring. It wasn’t until they burst out of the other end of the tunnel, gasping and hungrily sucking down fresh, untainted air, that they realized they were no longer alone. That said, few people even noticed their arrival.

  Everyone was far too busy screaming and cheering at the two people trying to kill each other in the center of the ring.

  Asher looked around at the underground set up. Similar to the bottom of Loratta’s compound, someone had created a massive cavern large enough to hold what looked like a crowd of nearly a thousand people cheering down into a large pit in the center. The people sat on dirt steps descending down deeper into the earth, ensuring that everyone was capable of seeing the fighters in the middle, who fought within a giant metal cage. The roars and cheers were like a physical slap to the face that had somehow been entirely silent right up until they exited the tunnel, and it didn’t take long to figure out why that was the case.

  “They’ve got someone with the Sound element keeping the noise trapped in this main room!” he shouted over the cheering as he pointed out a woman with a look of intense concentration on her face, standing by the many tunnel entrances. He wasn’t able to see a person’s individual elements, but seeing as her class was Soundmancer, it wasn’t hard to guess what she did.

  “That makes sense!” Samantha shouted back, staring with wide eyes down over everyone’s heads into the ring. “Are either of those two Moxy?!”

  Following her gaze, Asher blinked at the sight of two women going head-to-head with one another. One wore rough leather armor with countless rips and tears in it as she came at her opponent with a rusted blade, while the other held two shields of all things, using one to block the blade before using the other to bash the swordwoman’s face in, breaking her nose and getting a massive cheer from half the crowd as blood went everywhere.

  “No, neither of them!” he shouted, shaking his head as the swordswoman recovered swiftly and scored a nasty cut across her opponent’s arm that immediately turned a sickly orange, as if she’d been poisoned. “Crush said he thought Thunder mentioned Moxy’s fight was tomorrow, so she might not even be here right now! I just wanted to make sure we knew where to go in order to find her!”

  “Alright, so what now?” Samantha asked, wincing as the shield woman was forced to drop one of her shields when the orange poison spreading up her arm caused her hand to stop working. “As fun as this is, I don’t think I’m the intended target audience for these fights!”

  “Let me drop a mark somewhere, that way we won’t need to go down that tunnel a second time!”

  As much as he wanted to avoid that horrible tunnel altogether, it wouldn’t do for people to just see him popping into existence out of nowhere. Even if the secret was officially out about his Spatial element, he’d rather people think he was just another ordinary person up until they saw his skills in action. Walking a few dozen feet back into the foul-smelling tunnel, he placed a hand on the floor.

  But which mark to dismiss…

  At this point, Eternal Mark had made it up to level 22, but his total number of marks was still limited to seven. Currently, they were on Brian, Samantha, Rosh, Kree, Helpha’s store back in Dormaul, the tavern they’d stayed at in Poltar, and most recently, the room Donvath had lent them back in the royal palace. In order to mark that last one, he’d finally given up the mark he had on Jennifer, the dart-based assassin he’d scared straight who had fled the Guild entirely ages ago. There was no chance in hell he’d ever remove Brian or Samantha’s marks, and he’d already decided he wanted to keep a mark in each of the cities they visited just for ease of travel with Recall, which meant he only had two options.

  Rosh and Kree are both in Whikoga, so it has to be one of theirs. But who to keep the mark on…

  Popping out of nowhere and scaring the hell out of Rosh had become something like an inside joke between the two of them, even if he tried to make sure he didn’t do it on purpose any more. On the other hand, Kree actually wanted his mark to remain on him, as the thief had high hopes Asher would one day return and ask for his help again. It was a tough call, but it was actually Donvath who inadvertently helped him decide who to leave the mark on.

  Donvath alluded to something bad happening to Rosh in the future when he included a note in his letter telling me to inform Rosh to keep eighteen thousand shards on him at all times. I don’t know if Rosh is going to get gravely injured and need those shards to heal, or if something will attack him and that’s how many he’ll need to channel into his Strength of Shards skill, but one way or another, something is going to happen to Rosh. When that happens, I want to be there for him.

  Happy with that decision, Asher dismissed the mark he had on Kree, placing it instead within the tunnel. Finding Kree again even without the mark shouldn’t be too difficult regardless, as the thief had taken his advice to heart and accepted Draken’s job offer. Now that he worked for Draken, all Asher had to do was ask the man to summon him, and that would be that. Nodding, he walked out of the tunnel, pleased to tell Samantha they could finally Recall back to the palace for the night.

  Though as he walked over to her, he realized Samantha’s eyes were trained down on the caged arena below, wide in shock. Following her gaze, his own eyes widened as he realized the last fight must have ended immediately after the shield woman lost the use of her hand, letting two new opponents take the stage.

  A burly woman who looked like she ate cereal mixed with protein powder every morning who was currently smashing the arena floor apart as she desperately tried to crush her nimble opponent…

  And another woman with pelts covering her vitals who was laughing as she danced out of the way of the devastating blows, happily punching bullet after bullet of compacted air into her opponent. Despite the larger woman’s thick skin that seemed to be covered in a thin sheet of stone, chunks of it were being blasted off her frame with every punch, and in no time at all, the bigger woman finally collapsed from blood loss, smashing hard into the ground as her opponent raised her hands in victory, basking in the cheers of the crowd.

  “Alright,” Samantha said, turning to give him a pointed look. “Is that…?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Asher said, grinning despite himself as he watched his old mentor do a slow spin, taking in the roaring crowd on all sides. “That is Moxy.”

  awesome time for anyone sitting on the fence to give the new story a shot haha (I'll link it below just in case). Either way, I hope you guys have a fantastic weekend, and I shall chat with you all on Monday. You guys rock!

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