Twins POV
The branch creaked under Varyn's weight when he shifted, and Sena shot him a look that could strip bark.
"You're going to scare it off," she said.
"There's nothing to scare off yet." He settled back against the trunk, arms folded, watching the treeline below with the particular patience of someone who had learned very early that patience was the only thing that kept him from doing something he'd enjoy and regret in equal measure. "The bounty board listed her last confirmed position as the Zone 2 market edge. That's two miles south. We wait here, we catch the route."
"Or," Sena said, "we go to the market edge, find the trail, and I get the Soul Gems before some Level 12 with a sword and ambition beats us to it."
"You're not getting the Soul Gems."
"Three times market rate, Varyn."
"She's a Glitch Class. You don't walk up to a Glitch Class and ask for the Soul Gems."
"I wasn't going to ask."
He turned his head slowly and looked at her. She looked back. She had their mother's eyes and their father's complete absence of self-preservation and a sword she kept sharper than strictly necessary. He loved her in the unthinking way you love something that has always been there, the way you love air, and he was also fairly certain she was going to get them both killed one day and the cause of death would be labelled opportunity cost.
"The bounty says intact delivery," he said. "Not dead. Someone up the chain wants her functioning."
"The bounty also said fifty gold shards, and it doubled in six hours." Sena tilted her head, watching the clearing below. Her ears shifted — a small movement, the kind that happened before conscious thought. "Which means someone is escalating. Which means if we wait too long, someone with actual resources arrives and we lose the window entirely."
"We're not here for the bounty."
"You're not here for the bounty. I have opinions about the bounty."
"You have opinions about everything."
"It's a gift." She dropped to a lower branch with fluid ease, silent enough that the birds in the next tree didn't notice. "What I'm saying is, the smartest move is to find her first. What we do after is a separate conversation."
[SYSTEM — ZONE PASSIVE ALERT]Territory Scan: Zone 2-3 border, northeast quadrantRegistered Users Detected: 2Unregistered Entity Detected: 1 (Classification: ANOMALY — GLITCH FLAG)Proximity Warning: 1.4 miles
Varyn felt the System ping before he saw it. It hit behind his eyes the way Zone warnings always did, a low pressure that lasted half a second and meant nothing good.
He pulled it up.
Read it.
Read it again.
"Sena."
"I see it."
The System didn't usually bother with unregistered entities. It catalogued them, sometimes flagged them if they crossed zone thresholds, and otherwise ignored them the way a river ignores a stone at the bottom. An active Glitch Flag on a proximity alert was not normal. He had been in and out of eleven zones in the last four years and he had never seen an active Glitch Flag on a proximity alert.
"One point four miles," he said.
"Moving," she said. "Look at the ping interval. It's updating."
She was right. The distance counter was ticking down. Not fast, not running — walking. Something was walking this direction at a deliberate pace. Not fleeing. Not hunting. Just moving.
He pulled up the entity classification again.
ANOMALY — GLITCH FLAGClass: UNREGISTEREDLevel: 0Life State: GREYUndead Entity Count in proximity: 3+
He stared at the last line.
Three undead. Minimum. The System's count capped at a rough estimate when the entities didn't register cleanly, which meant it could be more.
A Level 0 being. Walking through Zone 2. With a minimum of three undead.
He had spent a significant amount of his adult life pursuing things that were interesting. Sena pursued things that were profitable. These two priorities aligned more often than not, which was why they were still working together after fifteen years and three near-deaths and one incident involving a Zone 6 basilisk that neither of them discussed anymore.
Right now, their priorities were in complete agreement.
"Alliance potential," he said.
"Soul Gems," she said.
They looked at each other.
Below their tree, something moved.
Small. Goblin-sized. Moving through the undergrowth at the base of the tree line with a silence that was wrong for a creature that small — wrong in the way that things are wrong when the usual rules don't apply to them. It followed a straight line. Not foraging. Not fleeing. Running a route, precise and repeating, the way a trained scout runs a perimeter check.
A zombie goblin.
Its eyes caught no light. Its System tag was blank where the name should be. Above its head, where a living creature would show a class and a level, there was nothing. Just the grey indicator that meant dead, and below it, a single word that Varyn had never seen displayed on a creature tag in his life:
BONDED
He and Sena both went still.
The goblin passed below them without looking up. It completed its route, turned at the edge of the clearing, and started back the way it had come. Following something invisible. Following something that had sent it out and was waiting for it to return.
Sena looked at Varyn.
Varyn looked at Sena.
"That's a scout," he said.
"That's a profitable scout," she said.
They dropped from the branch at the same moment, landing without sound, and looked at each other with the wordless agreement of people who have argued the same argument long enough to know when it no longer matters.
"We follow it," they said, together.