Marko studied the duo in silence before tossing a heavy pouch onto the wooden table. "A deal's a deal," he said, sliding a sealed parchment alongside it. "Here are the promised Velars and your letter of recommendation. Show that to the librarian, and he will grant you your pass."
Adrien reached out to claim the reward, but Marko caught the letter with a calloused hand. "Care for a word of advice from an old-timer?"
"Always," Adrien replied, easing his grip.
"Never show this kind of efficiency to the nobility," Marko warned, his voice dropping to a low rumble. "The faster you deliver, the higher their expectations climb. And God help you if you ever fall short of them."
Vera gave a sharp nod. "We will keep that in mind."
"Good, now, on to the matter of your cover mission," Marko said, leaning back in his chair. "I had managed to dig up the perfect excuse for you to venture through that village."
"What kind of job?" Vera asked.
"A village named Ironsworth." Marko caught the sudden emotions in their faces and sighed. "Yes, it is Ebonworth's sister village, and lies just to the northeast. If you follow the main road, you will pass right through Ebonworth anyway. They are losing livestock to some prowling beast and need mercenaries to hunt it down."
Adrien frowned. "We are still Unforged, the lowest rank. Is it even legal for us to take a hunting contract like that?"
Marko shrugged, a dismissive grunt escaping his chest. "Your rank measures your paperwork, not your strength. Everyone starts at the bottom, no matter how good they are. True, the lower ranks usually get the scraps, but that is just because the veterans refuse to do chores."
"Given how you handled those bandits, a stray beast should be a walk in the park, but listen closely," Marko leaned in, his eyes narrowing. "You two need to start watching your backs. You killed enough of those bandits, and it won't be long before their heavy hitters come looking for payback."
Adrien gave a subtle nod, well aware that his faction standing with the Snow Wolf Bandits had already dropped straight to Hostile in his relationship UI.
"Since I specifically flagged this task to cover your real objective, delivering that love letter, the choice is yours, as your task of delivering the letter is already complete," Marko said, resting his heavy forearms on the table.
"Accept the queue, or pass on it, no penalties either way."
Vera bit her lower lip, staring at the grime on the floorboards as she calculated their odds. "So, we reach the village and put the beast down, simple enough."
"A dangerous oversimplification, girl," Marko countered, his tone sharpening. "There are too many unknown variables in play. First off, when you reach the village perimeter, keep your eyes peeled. Do not trust the villagers blindly; you need to investigate the attack area, study the tracks, and figure out exactly what kind of monstrosity is eating their livestock. The villagers are clueless, and if the threat level is too high for you, abort the mission and fall back to the guild; your life is worth more."
Vera looked up, her expression hardening. "Understood. If we accept this task, what's our time limit?"
"After you accept this quest, I can afford to allow you two days to begin it," Marko replied, tapping a finger against his ledger. "After two days, the quest goes back to the public board. Someone else will claim the bounty, and you'll take a permanent hit to your guild's completion rate. So, think carefully. Are you accepting locking it?"
With a sharp ping, a familiar notification matrix materialised in front of their fields of vision:
━━━━━━━━━━━ ⚔ [ QUEST ACQUIRED ] ⚔ ━━━━━━━━━━━
Title: The Beast of Ironsworth
Description :
Investigate the sister village of Ebonworth and neutralise the unknown threat terrorising the local livestock before it turns on the population.
--
Objective:
• Travel to the village of Ironsworth.
• Investigate and identify the predatory creature.
• Hunt down and eliminate the target.
--
Warning:
• Villagers can be unreliable.
• Expect unknown anomalies.
--
Rewards:
• Guild Reputation XP (Unforged Rank advancement).
• Velars (Scaled to hunting performance).
• Changes in favourability with Marko, Ironsworth Elder, ??
ACCEPT:[YESNO]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Adrien and Vera shared a glance before Adrien spoke with a sigh, "We will accept it, but we will begin two days from now, as we have some studying to do in the library."
"Excellent," Marco beamed at them, "have fun learning."
The duo's boots clicked against the cobblestones as they trekked toward the library."So, what now, Adrien?"
"Let's see what is inside that building. Looking at its size, it looks promising."
"What are your final thoughts on Marko, Adrien?"
"I still do not trust him."
Vera rolled her eyes as she spoke, "You are being too paranoid."
Adrien merely shrugged as he threw his weight against the brass-rimmed doors. They stepped inside, and the biting cold air was replaced by the comforting, heavy scent of aged parchment, leather bindings, and fresh ink. Rows upon rows of towering bookshelves stretched into the gloom, rising toward a vaulted ceiling.'A bibliophile's paradise,' Adrien thought, his eyes scanning the endless rows.
Near the entrance, buried behind a fortress of stacked ledgers, sat a bald old man. A spectacular white beard cascaded down his chest, and a pair of perfectly round spectacles rested on the bridge of his nose as his quill scratched rhythmically across a massive, leather-bound tome.
"Do you require assistance, or did you merely cross my threshold to gawk?" The old man spoke without breaking his rhythm. His voice was soft, barely a whisper, yet it carried an eerie, resonant weight that commanded instant attention.
Adrien stepped forward. "We're looking for a chance to study in this library. The branch manager, Marko Đorđević, sent us a formal recommendation."
He pulled out the wax-sealed letter and laid it on the desk. "Here is the letter."
The librarian's bony, wizened hand shot out, snatching the note. His eyes darted across Marko's handwriting, and without a word, he reached into a hidden drawer beneath the desk, produced a pair of crisp registration forms, and slid them across the ink-stained wood.
"Fill them out."
Adrien and Vera pulled over a pair of pens and quickly filled out the forms. As they pushed the papers back, the librarian precisely sheared off the confirmation slips, pressed them onto the face of two metallic grey library tokens, and slammed a heavy brass seal onto the ink pads. He slid the finished permits across the desk.
"Your passes," the old man murmured, finally looking up with eyes like chipped flint.
"Be warned: no volumes leave this hall. Treat the texts with more reverence than you treat your own lives. Cause a ruckus, damage the books, or disrupt the silence, and the consequences will be...dire."
"Understood," Adrien said, leaning in. "I'm looking for a specific volume regarding—"
"Consult the master index on the pedestal to your left," the librarian cut him off, pointing a crooked finger toward a massive copper ledger. "The ledger handles the routing, and if a title is not recorded in those pages, it does not exist within these walls. Move along."
Adrien opened the massive copper index, his eyes scanning down the routing columns until he locked onto the correct shelf coordinates.
Once they found the relevant volumes, Adrien instinctively flicked his wrist to pull up his interface menu, intending to use the system's screenshot tool to capture the dense blocks of text. Beside him, Vera was already raising her internal camera overlay, framing a detailed anatomical sketch of an unknown beast.
Before either could trigger a capture, a harsh static hiss filled their audio feeds. A crimson system warning box slapped across the centre of their vision:
━━━━━━━━━━━[SYSTEM RESTRICTION]━━━━━━━━━━━
Intellectual property of the Library is locked.
External UI imaging, screenshots, and video recording of text are strictly prohibited.
━━━━━━━━━━━
The camera overlays shattered into digital pixels, leaving them staring at the physical pages in frustration.
"Of course," Vera muttered, pinching the bridge of her nose. "The devs really want us to suffer through the immersion."
"It's a classic gold sink," Adrien said with a heavy sigh, walking back toward the front desk.
With a bitter taste in his mouth, he traded a handful of their hard-earned Velars to the silent archivist in exchange for a stack of blank parchment sheets.
Returning to the dim light of the reading table, the duo began the gruelling process the old-fashioned way. For the next few hours, they sat hunched over the heavy oak table, meticulously copying long paragraphs of lore and sketching out diagrams by hand.
Vera froze, her eyes locked onto a paragraph hidden deep within a book regarding Hasean culture. A sharp, angry hiss escaped her teeth, slicing through the heavy silence of the reading room.
"Adrien," she whispered, her voice trembling with sudden rage. "Look at this. Right here."
Adrien leaned over her shoulder, his expression shifting from curiosity to sheer disbelief. As his eyes tracked down the yellowed text, a violent wave of anger blazed through his mind.
~
"A vessel filled too soon will crack, spilling its grace into the dirt.
Thus, the Holy Baptism is not a gift to be grasped by eager hands. It is a searing celestial fire. Consider the common soul: a tender thing, unformed and fragile like damp clay. Should the lightning of Active Grace strike them before their tenth cycle of growth, their fragile minds would shatter into madness. It is out of infinite, weeping mercy that the Holy Church seals their power. We shelter the weak from their own undoing until labour and devotion harden their spirits to endure the light.
Yet, look upon the Exalted Royalty. Do they not bleed for us from birth? They are born into the ultimate sacrifice, carrying the crushing weight of an entire kingdom before they can even speak. Because their souls are forged in the white-hot fires of rule, their vessels are born wide, deep, and unbroken. Thus, the heavens grant them the First Cycle blessing. It is not favouritism; it is the divine math of the cosmos.
So it is with the High Nobles, down to the steadfast Barons who bear the spiritual toil of governance by their seventh cycle. The Church recognises its heavy burden and rewards it. The heavens grant them an early awakening, providing the weapons they need to defend the realm.
If a labourer wishes to defy the natural limits of their station, they must prove their soul has outgrown its humble dirt. Let them spill blood for the Crown, or let them undergo the holy shedding of earthly vanity. When you lay your gold at the altar, foolish minds call it buying grace. In truth, you are merely emptying your pockets of heavy, materialistic sin. You are lightening your burden so the Holy Church may lift your spirit closer to the sun. Only through the absolute cleansing of charity can a common soul survive the early fire."
~