Noah’s bare back hit the metal of the transport cannon and he furiously tugged his pants the rest of the way up, even as the light of his arrival faded. He managed to pull them up just in time to avoid traumatizing both himself and Bird. Unfortunately, by the look on her face, she definitely hadn’t missed the motion even if she’d been spared a look into the void.

Noah sat up and cleared his throat. He pulled his spare jacket out from his bag and slung it over his shoulders while Bird stared on in silent, entirely unconcealed judgement.

“I didn’t realize you’d be waiting here,” Noah said in what he desperately hoped was a casual tone.

“Were you naked when the transport cannon re-activated?” Bird asked, squinting at Noah.

Seriously? This is the part where we’re both meant to pretend nothing happened. You aren’t supposed to start asking questions. What’s wrong with you?

“More aerodynamic.”

“More — what?” Befuddlement washed over her expression and she shook her head in disbelief. “Were you trying to… do things to the monsters?”

“Are you insane?” Noah asked. He pumped his voice as full of false confidence as he could. His head pulsed with pain, but he ignored it. He’d just blurted out the last line, but now he had to run with it. At least the bear hadn’t eaten his corpse, so the damage to his soul wasn’t as bad as it could have been. “Of course not. Less clothes means it’s harder to get hit. Smaller surface area. It’s only logical.”

“How heavy are your clothes?” Bird asked incredulously.

“It’s got nothing to do with weight. Haven’t you ever gotten a pocket stuck on a door when you were walking past it? Imagine that in a fight. Clothes only get in your way. Moving around without them gives my enemies less things to hit. It also brings me closer to nature.”

“Right.” Bird gave him a flat stare. “Well, I’m glad you managed to get your pants on before I saw anything. I’d have killed you and then myself if I had. Possibly not in that order.”

The headache wrapped around Noah’s skull pulsed again and he grimaced, massaging his forehead. “That’s generally my solution to most problems as well.”

“What?”

Noah shook his head. “Never mind. Thanks for the trip. I’ll be off now.”

“Hold on,” Bird shifted to stand in front of the lift. “You’ve still got my Catchpaper. Take your runes off it and hand it back over. And… don’t touch me when you do. I don’t want to think about where your hands have been.”

“Ah, yes. The Catchpaper.” Noah coughed into a fist, then nudged his grimoire. “I’ve got that. Right in here.” The book didn’t budge. Bird arched an eyebrow and held a hand out expectantly. Noah nudged the grimoire again, then gave her a sheepish grin. “Give me one moment.”

He knelt beside the grimoire and pulled at it. They didn’t budge. It was like the book had been welded shut. His eyes narrowed and he leaned in close to whisper into its leather covers.

“If you don’t give me the damn Catchpaper, I’m cutting you open like one of those lizards and taking every damn rune I gave you. Then I’m going to put them in other grimoires while you watch. Do you hear me?”

The grimoire bucked, shooting several sheets of thick Catchpaper out of it as if it were sneezing. Noah grabbed them and rose back to his feet, giving Bird a winning grin as he held them out.

She took them with two fingers and stared at him with a mixture of abstract confusion and disgust. “Did you just threaten your book?”

“What, have you never done that? You should give it a try sometimes. It’s very cathartic.” Noah slung the grimoire over his shoulder and adjusted his jacket. “I’ll be off, then. Pleasure doing business with Otto. Let him know I’m more than willing to work with him again in the future.”

“Right,” Bird drawled. She stepped to the side and Noah walked onto the lift. He did his absolute best to keep his expression straight until it rattled away, taking him out of her line of sight.

The moment it did, Noah blew out an exhausted breath and buried his face in his hands.

“I’m cursed,” Noah muttered to himself. “I swear I’m cursed.”

***

Bird listened to the lift rattle away.

Bird wasn’t her real name, but she was surprised to find she rather liked it. She’d gone through a number of names in her time. Most of them had been considerably less enjoyable. Her names didn’t tend to last all that long, so there was no reason not to get enjoyment out of this one while she still could.Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

She’d worked with a lot of odd people in her service to Otto. Generally, the ones powerful enough to draw his attention were also rather… enigmatic. Normal people didn’t tend to last long enough or get lucky enough to deal with him. She was no stranger to odd clients.

By all means, Vermil hadn’t been the worst. That was a thought that would have made her younger self shudder, but she hadn’t made it this far in life without seeing more than a few things she would have preferred to scrub from her mind.

The rumors about him being a pervert were somehow both right and wrong. I was fully expecting to have to blast him into kingdom come when he tried to pull something, but I swear he couldn’t have possibly been less interested in me.

Why would he show me those drawings and then show up nearly naked for absolutely no reason? If I’d closed my eyes when talking to him, he’d have come off almost exactly like some of the King family’s warriors.

Bird shook her head and looked down at the Catchpaper clenched in her hand. She’d been pushed so far off balance that she hadn’t even remembered to count it to see if Vermil had given her everything back. She leafed through the papers. A frown crossed Bird’s face. She turned them over, then blinked.

“What in the Damned Plains?”

They were unused. Every single paper was entirely untouched. Aside from the slight crinkles that had been put into them by her own hand, there wasn’t a single sign of a rune ever having being present on them.

Did he really just head over there to strip naked and do absolutely nothing? There’s a chance he brought his own Catchpaper, but why would he choose to use it over mine? And, with how sensitive these are, the chances of him getting absolutely nothing on them is almost impossible unless he really didn’t kill any monsters. I refuse to believe he was that incompetent. Any Rank 4 should have been able to take out at least one or two. There’s no way he made such a large deal with Otto only to sacrifice all of it to… what, to play a crass joke on me?

Bird couldn’t contain her curiosity. She slid the papers into her pouch and returned to the control panel of the transport cannon. Her hands played across the controls as she adjusted its direction once more.

The cannon was low on energy, but she didn’t need much. It would only take a few minutes to check the location out. Now that the transport cannon worked identical to the one in the possession of the King family, setting it to pull her back in a few minutes was no problem.

She finished setting it up and a hum filled the building as it started to power. Bird headed over to the tube and lowered herself into it as the hum grew louder. Then the cannon activated with a loud thrum and she was off, hurtling through the ether.

The travel was familiar to her at this point. She’d used transport cannons so many times that she barely even flinched at the sensation of being pressed through space. By the time she registered the purple grass poking into her back and surrounding her, she’d already started to sit up — but she didn’t make it far.

“What the fuck?” Bird whispered.

Corpses littered the ground, ripped to shreds and blackened. There must have been easily twenty or thirty of them, but the signs of battle on the grass spoke of a much larger fight. Massive portions of it were matted completely flat.

What kind of massive monster could have done that? And did Vermil seriously kill all of these monsters and come out without a single scratch on him? If there were this many of them in the area, there must have been a near limitless army attacking him. He drew way too much attention… but he barely even looked winded. It just looked like he had a slight headache or something.

Bird swallowed. If the scene before her wasn’t some form of misdirection, then Vermil had somehow not only killed all of these monsters, but he’d managed to either kill or evade something far larger than the rest of them.

And he did that while he was naked?

Bird pulled at the lapel of her coat subconsciously.

There’s no way that strategy actually works, is there?

The thought slipped into her mind before she could stop it. She shook her head furiously to throw it free before it could take root. Vermil was screwing with her. That much was evident. There was no way anybody intentionally fought naked. There couldn’t be.

…I have gotten my shirt caught on the doors sometimes, though. Is it possible he was actually telling the truth? That wouldn’t explain how a Rank 4 would be able to do something like this, but I don’t know where else to start. Maybe this is some form of old fighting style that I’m completely unaware of. I’m going to have to look into this.

***

Noah’s embarrassment faded quickly as he hurried down the streets on his way back to the T building. Bird could think of him what she wanted. He had an indeterminate amount of powerful runes stored within his ornery grimoire, just waiting for him to play with.

If I wanted to, I could probably just straight up make the Rank 4 Rune here and now by sacrificing all the energy stored up in them. That would probably be a waste, but there’s no way I’m not going to see what I’ve got to work with and start figuring out exactly what kind of Rank 4 Rune I’ll make them into.

He made it back to Moxie’s room and slipped inside. It was empty. A flicker of disappointment passed over him. Moxie wasn’t there to see all the fruits of his labor. In a way, that was probably for the best. It would let him focus on actually figuring out what he’d gotten.

I’ll just have to show her later. If the grimoire was grabbing runes the whole time I was fighting, I should have enough for everyone that wants one. Sunder is so unbelievably useful. It’s got to be the best Master Rune in existence.

Noah pulled the grimoire off his back and set it down on the bed. He brushed his hands off and took a step back, a grin pulling across his lips as he gestured impatiently to it.

“Come on, then. Let’s see what you got. You can eat the stuff I decide we don’t need.”

That caught the grimoire’s attention. It snapped open, pages fluttering, and runes blossomed across its surface. Noah’s smile stretched wider still as he studied the book. There were dozens of new runes upon its pages. If Otto had known just how many of them he’d gotten out of this, the mage probably would have pulled his ears straight off his head in disbelief.

“Now that’s what I like to see,” Noah breathed. “Let’s get this a bit more organized, shall we? I think I’ve just become a very wealthy man.”