Total pages in book: 95
Estimated words: 88010 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 440(@200wpm)___ 352(@250wpm)___ 293(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 88010 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 440(@200wpm)___ 352(@250wpm)___ 293(@300wpm)
“Say it. I dare you.”
“No, I’m just saying it’s always daytime. I’ve never been in the forest at night.”
“You’ve never been in the forest at all,” I remind her. “You’ve experienced a digital representation of a place that is deeply more real than your imagination can begin to conceive. Real blood is shed here. Real lives are lost.”
She looks somewhat shamefaced, but not enough for my liking. As she looks toward her toes in an expression of submission, she spots something.
“What is that?”
“What is what?”
“The scroll there?”
I look down, following her eye line. A scroll must have dropped out of some of the gear. Strange, but not entirely uncommon.
“It might be a recipe for soup or something.”
“Or a message the kobolds were delivering.”
She snatches the parchment up, unfurls it, and looks at it, frowning.
“This says these kobolds were bearing a seal intended for the Lord Janessa.”
“Excuse me?”
“That’s what it says, a seal for the Lord Janessa. Did you miss the seal?” She frowns. “Maybe it doesn’t drop every time. Maybe you have to keep killing kobolds to get the seal.”
“Stop muttering nonsense, human,” I growl. “What are you talking about?”
She hands me the note. “See for yourself.”
It is written in a fine hand, which is instantly odd. Far too fine for kobold script. I expected some kind of a recipe or some incoherent scratchings, but this is clearly the writing of someone educated.
“Lord Janessa, please find the fifth seal enclosed. I trust you are well. —A Friend.”
There is no seal. This is not acceptable. I am going to have to look into this. There are many noble houses and species in this world. Mine is of course the largest and most powerful, but the politics of the realm are more complicated than I like to think about most of the time.
There are certain seals that have power that could be very inconvenient if sent to Lord Janessa. And of course, there is the question why it is being sent by kobold. They are not natural couriers. Kobolds are creatures of stealth, in the sense nobody would ever expect them to have powerful artifacts in their possession.
But where is the thing itself? I would feel the resonance of the seal if it were anywhere close. I do not think the kobolds took it with them. They may have kept the letter, but they certainly did not keep the thing itself.
“Maybe it is in the kobold den,” I murmur. “Maybe the creatures thought to keep it for themselves.”
Melissa brightens immediately, as if I have just suggested we go to an expensive store back on her world.
“Yes! We should go to the kobold den! We could try going in stealth. Do you have any stealth spells?”
“What do you know about spells?” I regret the question as soon as I ask it. Of course she knows about spells. And enchantments. And armor. And weapons. She knows precisely enough about all these things to be dangerous with them.
“If we go to the den, and I do not think we will, I will send men to investigate…”
“Don’t you think you should investigate? You’re here, and this way you would get all the XP, I mean, you’d find out everything that is going on at once. You wouldn’t have to have it relayed to you.”
She has a good point. Not about the XP, whatever that is, but about investigating this myself.
“It’s just a kobold den,” she says. “It’s nothing to you. But I’ll probably level up two or three times while we are in there. It will be so good. I won’t even have to touch anything and I’ll get the experience.”
“The experience of seeing a dozen more of these creatures die?”
She frowns. “Does it have to be so terrible every time? Is there not a better way?”
I sigh. “Yes, of course there are better ways to kill a creature than by accidentally impaling it in a way that is very nearly not even fatal and letting it bleed out over the course of a heated discussion.”
“So. There,” she says. “You could teach me how to do that.”
Minutes ago, I was fucking her senseless over a tree, and now she is talking about doing the very thing that got her into that situation in the first place. She is absolutely resistant to learning the greater lessons I am trying to teach.
“The seal. I bet it is a very big deal,” she says. “I bet if they have it, you would be better off with it. I bet whatever Lord Janessa wants it for is bad for you. Who is Lord Janessa?”
“He lives in the icy climes.”
“Oh. Well. There you go.”
“There I go what?”
“I don’t know. I’m trying to remember the lore. I think I heard about a Lord Janessa. It’s hard to remember the starting quests. All the low-level bosses, oh, my god, Lord Janessa. He’s an ice naga?”