He Who Fights with Monsters 9

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DON’ T SHOW UP TO THE FANCY PARTY IN SHORTS

CONVALESCENCE WAS NOT SOMETHING THAT PEOPLE WITH THE MONEY TO

afford healing magic often had to deal with. Jason Asano was wealthy, even for an adventurer of his rank, yet had been experiencing a lengthy convalescence. Some wounds ran too deep, and Jason had a habit of pushing himself too hard.

Magical powers had limits, not just because they required practise to master but because the body could only endure so much. It required years to inure the body to the kinds of forces that high-ranking magic channelled through it. Jason, however, was a man for whom events would not wait for him to have the necessary strength.

On a rescue mission in a half-flooded mining complex, deep at the bottom of the sea, Jason and his team had been sent to rescue civilians. The complex had been raided by fanatical religious zealots, some of whom were exceptionally powerful. When they were trapped in a room with no escape, Jason had, characteristically, done something impossible.

There was power inside Jason that he was not ready to use. Tapping into that power, he opened a portal he should not have been able to open, rescuing his team and a large group of civilians, but the strain came exceptionally close to killing him. Only the combined efforts of his team and his familiars managed to keep him alive. The process had been so spectacular that everyone in the city of Rimaros had felt it. Jason’s aura had blasted across the city and the image of his personal crest had filled the sky.

Jason’s convalescence had not been uneventful either. The repercussions of what he had done to himself had precipitated a meeting with some of the most powerful entities in the cosmos. As this meeting was held in the open,

the people already watching Jason became all the more interested.

Rimaros, the City of Islands, was comprised of three main islands, along with a series of artificial islands that floated in the sky atop columns of rising water. The latest addition to the city was an island that had previously been a flying fortress city, until being dropped into the ocean in a massive and costly battle.

Jason lived on one of the three main islands, Arnote. On an island of sleepy beach towns, his cloud house remained perched on a clifftop amongst more conventional homes. Looking out over a pristine lagoon, it had been a pleasant place to spend his convalescence.

The cloud house was currently in the state of a pagoda. Linked to Jason’s soul, it had undergone some changes when he was close to death, including taking the form of a sinister temple-like structure. Jason’s attempts to change it while in a delicate state had led to an unsettling hybrid structure, but as he recovered, he was able to restore a sensible form.

After a lengthy seclusion, Jason was finally open to meeting with some of the people clamouring for his attention. There was no shortage of them, after his series of ostentatious displays, ranging from the opportunistic to the concerned, although that concern was less for Jason than about him.

Among those seeking Jason’s attention, the better-informed ones made use of people Jason was already comfortable with meeting. This started with Estella Warnock, with whom Jason was sharing lunch on a pagoda balcony that overlooked the lagoon. One of the benefits of being unable to adventure was that Jason had time to experiment with local ingredients, developing variants of dishes he knew using local ingredients. On this day, he and Estella were sharing one of his best results: a variant of shakshouka. He didn’t have chicken eggs or tomatoes, which made eggs poached in a tomato sauce challenging, but the local analogues had proven successful.

Though Estella was an essence user, she was not an adventurer and had no interest in being one. When she had served as a scout to help Jason and other adventurers protect the island from monsters during the Builder’s attack on Rimaros, it had not been out of any sense of civic duty. It had been at the behest of her grandfather, a former adventurer who did have the sense of duty that his granddaughter did not share.

Warwick Warnock had been one of Jason’s neighbours until he died assaulting one of the Builder’s fortress cities at the very same time Jason and Estella were protecting the island. Estella had inherited his home and had

been at something of a loss after his death, having just given up her profession of low-stakes spy-for-hire. She had been one of Jason’s few allowed visitors during his convalescence, commiserating in a shared sense of aimlessness.

“Havi Estos wants a meeting,” she told him.

“Lots of people want to see me. I didn’t think you were speaking to him.” Havi Estos was a major middleman for semi-legal activities to whom Jason had been introduced in his early days in Rimaros. In order to learn more about Jason, he had hired Estella to observe him, not expecting her powerful yet discreet perception abilities to be noticed. This was the very job that prompted Estella to give up the work, as it was not the first job where she got more than she bargained for. Estella had been quite nervous about

encountering Jason again until her grandfather smoothed things over.

“He sought me out,” Estella said. “He knows I know you and wants to make amends.”

“With me or you?”

“Jason, everyone in the city is talking about you, and now he’s very worried about having sent me to spy on you, and what you might do about it. No one is trying to make amends with me.”

“They should. Smart, skilled, discreet people are valuable, and I’m one of those three at best.”

“I’m not going back to work for Estos or anyone like him. They use people like me to catch the trouble they want to avoid.”

“I wouldn’t use you like that.” She gave him a long stare. “Are you offering me a job?”

“Do you know the name Emir Bahadir?” She thought for a moment before answering.

“Is that the guy who tried to rob the royal family a few years back?”

“He did more than try, which is why he’s not allowed back in the Storm Kingdom.”

“Oh, I think they’d let him come.” Jason laughed.

“Yeah, I imagine they would. Anyway, he’s the one who gave me the cloud flask that produced the building we’re sitting in. When he did, he told me that I should consider expanding my operation. Get some staff, the way he has for his treasure-hunting operations.”

“You want to be a treasure hunter?”

“No, but have you ever heard of auxiliary adventurers? They join adventuring teams as non-combat members, providing various specialty services. My group will be doing a lot of travelling soon, and having someone outside the team proper who could get the lay of the land quickly would be valuable to us.”

“You want me to traipse around the world with you and your grab-bag of lunatics who run around with diamond-rankers, gods and who knows what else?”

“Yeah, pretty much. I think things will calm down for a while, though.” “They would have to. I think you’re past the point where things can

escalate without the whole world getting destroyed.”

“Been there, done that,” Jason said. “I’m not helping my case here, am

I?”

Rick Geller and his team had been in Greenstone at the same time Jason was first training as an adventurer, themselves being trained in the Geller compound. One of his team members, Jonah, had been amongst the first to be forcibly implanted with a star seed, during the same disastrous expedition where Farrah had died. The attempt to extract the star seed had been a gruesome and lethal failure. That spot on the team had subsequently been filled by Dustin Kettering.

Dustin had once been part of a three-man team with Neil and Thadwick Mercer. Thadwick’s own star seed implantation had caused that group to fracture, with Neil going to Jason’s team and Dustin going to Rick’s. Thadwick’s fate was considerably more tragic—he had become some kind of energy vampire that was still at large somewhere in the world.

Although he was now silver rank, Rick looked as uncomfortable as ever around high-rankers, being a good and obedient young man. Jason found himself grinning at Rick’s uncertain expression as he watched him emerge from a flying carriage with Princess Liara, stepping onto the lawn in front of his pagoda.

Jason vaulted the balcony railing to land right in front of the pagoda’s large main entrance. He conjured his cloak as he fell to slow his descent,

which wasn’t necessary to avoid damage to him, but to avoid dents in the lawn from a superhero landing. The new look of Jason’s cloak arrested the attention of Liara and Rick, who were both familiar with its previous iteration.

“That looks creepy,” Rick said. “My eyes don’t want to look at it. It’s wrong, somehow. Like you’re wearing a hole in the world.”

“It is quite unsettling to look at,” Liara agreed. “I’m not entirely shocked, however, that your stealth ability is so attention-grabbing.”

“Why do people keep saying that?” Jason complained as he dismissed the cloak.

“At least you’re draping yourself in weird magic instead of weirdly high numbers of women,” Rick observed, drawing an odd look from Liara. “When a beautiful princess attached herself to my meeting, I figured it would be the same thing all over again. What is it with you and these Rimaros princesses?”

Liara gave Jason a querying expression.

“Rick was around when I first met Zara, but I am not always surrounded by women… what’s about to happen notwithstanding.”

The doors behind Jason opened to reveal a group of women, including the pink-haired Estella, Farrah, Sophie, Belinda and Autumn Leal. Autumn was an adventurer whose acquaintance Jason had made, prior to his team arriving in Rimaros. She had an exotic magical frog named Neil that had perished in the defence of Rimaros from the Builder’s flying fortress city. This was something Jason had discovered in the process of checking on people in the wake of the casualty-filled battle, but he had largely left her alone.

Autumn had been in mourning for her bonded companion for some time, but now, for the first time, Jason sensed at least an amount of hope from her aura, along with a solid sense of resolve. It was not the time to explore that, however, and he satisfied himself that she seemed better than she had in the past.

Rick was oblivious to this; all he saw was Jason joined by five women. “And there it is,” he said.

Jason opened a portal to Rimaros and the five women passed through. Jason didn’t close it afterwards, and instead called out through the still-open doors.

“Are you coming or what?”

“On my way,” a voice came from inside, shortly followed by a hustling Taika. He looked around, seeing that the five women had already departed,

then his gaze settled on Liara. “Oh, hey, princess bro.” He then went through the portal and Jason closed it again.

Liara shook her head.

“A bronze-ranker,” she muttered. “What happened to the respect for rank?”

“It’s Jason,” Rick told her. “He’s a bad influence.”

Rick then remembered that he was speaking to a gold-rank princess and his head dipped down as if yanked by a string.

Jason chuckled. “You’d best come inside,” he told them.