"What's the mission?"
Namey asked.
"Recover Daegon's crown from Kaldrec's tomb, in the Cindered Reach," the merchant said.
"I don't mind letting the armor go for nothing.
All I ask is that you come back and tell me how it went, once the mission's done."
"That's remarkably generous of you," Namey said.
"Very kind, thank you," I added, because it seemed polite.
A half hour later, standing outside the shop, something nagged at me.
"Did you catch that?"
I asked Namey.
We'd just spent thirty minutes inside that building, and neither of us could properly recall the merchant's face, or what he'd actually been wearing, only the vague, dreamlike shape of the conversation itself.
"Yes.
I couldn't sense him at all until he was already standing right behind us," Namey said, frowning.
There had been something wrong about the man, something in the way he moved, light and precise as a trained dancer, unbothered by walking around unguarded while sitting on merchandise worth a small kingdom. I filed it away next to the name still rattling loose somewhere in my skull, Corvin Ashe, and the cold that had followed me out of that dream two nights running.
"We can't move forward as a group until we start acting like one," Luxy said, hands on her hips, standing squarely between the rest of us like a wall built out of sheer patience.
"That means trust.
Actual trust, not the pretend kind."
"I don't trust four eyes," Savage said, jerking her chin at Namey.
"He's hiding something.
I can smell it on him."
"Can we table this until after the mission?"
Namey tried.
"We're not moving another step until somebody tells me who this kid actually is," Savage said, pointing straight at me.
"I agree with her.
Talk to us, Namey," Luxy said.
"We all left our old parties because we stopped trusting the people in them.
We swore we'd do better when we built the Wayfinders.
That promise doesn't mean anything if you're not part of it too."
Namey let out a long breath.
"I helped make Jon.
I worked at Genesis Studios until a few weeks ago."
"Made him how," Savage demanded.
"I can't tell you all of it, it's not entirely mine to tell, but I helped write the program that built him.
That's how I know his skills don't cap out the way everyone else's do, and that he gains experience roughly a thousand times faster than anyone standing in this room."
"So that's what you meant about my archery being a hundred and fifty on a scale that tops out at a hundred," I said, the pieces finally clicking together into something I didn't much like the shape of.
"You built your own NPC?
No wonder you talk like you swallowed the whole user manual," Savage said, somewhere between disgust and reluctant admiration.
"Wait.
Whose secret was this really.
Yours, or someone else's you're covering for?"
Luxy asked, sharper than I'd heard her yet.
Namey's jaw tightened.
"My mentor's.
A man who was more of a father to me than my own ever bothered being."
"You'd better not be lying to me," Savage said.
"I swear it's the truth," Namey said.
"Fine."
Savage thrust out an arm, and Namey shook it like they'd just settled a business deal instead of a small betrayal.
I wanted to ask more, about the mentor, about what a thousand times faster actually meant for a body that still got hungry and tired and numb in the arm after one big shot, but Luxy cut back in before I found the words.
"There's something big in the next hall," she said, going still in the particular way she did right before trouble arrived.
"We fight smarter this time."
She wasn't wrong. A spider shaped horror the size of a cart waited past a heavy stone door, the sort of thing you'd expect guarding a floor on its own.
The Veiled Plate's countdown sat at the edge of my vision, a thin ring of pale light cinched at my wrist, already down under forty hours from the moment I'd buckled the last strap. I hadn't noticed so much as a flicker of the promised drain yet, no ache, no hunger sharper than usual, and that scared me more than pain would have. I had no idea what warning I'd get before it actually started taking pieces of me, or whether I'd get one at all.
"Savage, up front!"
Savage tore into the temple stairwell first, hacking wildly through a scattering of rot-rats that had swarmed up out of the dark to meet us: fat, rabid rodents with claws and teeth built for tearing, individually harmless, collectively a nightmare in a space too tight to swing a proper sword. Cleave wanted room she didn't have.
"Stay in formation!"
Namey shouted.
"There's too many to brute-force!"
The rot-rats found her anyway, swarming her shield in waves the way flood water finds every gap in a levee, gnawing through armor plate and skin alike while she gasped for air under the weight of them.
I loosed my nocked arrow, and Volley split it into a fan of duplicates, each one weaker than the last, the price paid in exchange for numbers. Rot-rats carried no real armor and barely any health to speak of, so I let the copies fly cheap and thick, and they dropped in rows, leaving small grey gems scattered where they died.
"Why won't you listen to a single word I say?"
Namey bellowed at Savage.
"You're supposed to hold and wait for support!"
Savage had been simmering since we set out for Kaldrec's tomb, saying almost nothing the whole ride, glaring at Namey and me both in equal measure. Something was clearly eating at her. She wasn't in the mood to say what.
"Back off, four eyes," she snapped, still fighting.
"Unless you'd like to end up looking like these rats."
She looked furious and weakened both at once, poison from the bites already working through her, though pride alone seemed to be holding her upright. Some part of me wanted to call a full retreat and let her breathe. The ring at my wrist had ticked past the thirty six hour mark sometime in the last few minutes without my noticing, and retreat was a luxury the countdown wasn't going to hand back to me twice.