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-hides-
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-pushes another chapter out-
Edit: And this is why I need to not be half-asleep when checking over chapters. V01d ended up semi-beta-reading for me.
"Might as well kill two birds with one stone… or two basilisks, I guess." –Danté
Chapter 2.3 – Numb
Part 12
Danté looked around Luin, watching idly as Donald walked around, talking to people here and there and trying to track down his daughter.
Danté wondered idly if the old fisherman was maybe a bit late to be trying to do that. Apparently the woman had been gone for a little over a decade now. The chances that she was still in Luin were slim, if she'd left Izoold.
Though, he had to give credit to one thing. Luin was full of lovely little hiding places.
He'd found so many of his targets already, and he wondered for a moment how he was going to get away with this one. He certainly couldn't kill them all in one night. And he couldn't stay for too long. Sure, he'd snuck away from a camp three walking hours out from Luin the night before they'd come and killed a couple of his targets, but he knew that there was little chance he'd be able to keep it up.
A man who was clearly a half-elf walked up to him.
Danté said 'clearly,' because the man had brown eyes, but startlingly white hair, and he could just spot pointed ears past the straight hair. He was too bulkily-built to be a full-blooded elf, though.
"Strange spot to be standing around," the man said.
Danté looked at him, then looked around the marketplace again. True, he had a bit of a bubble around him because he was just standing here, and most of the people in the area were bustling to and fro, but really.
"Don't mind me. Just trying to figure out if I'll be keeping a client, or if I need to find a new one."
"Mm. Mercenary?"
Danté nodded, and the man made a bit of a face and moved to walk off.
"Aseroth?"
The half-elf froze, then turned to look at him. "How did you know my name?"
"Erik told me."
There was a long moment's pause.
Then Aseroth frowned. "You're a mercenary?"
Danté smirked. "When there's a five-year-old to be kept out of the line of fire? You do whatever you have to."
Aseroth nodded a concession to this, then paused. "And a fellow half-elf. Though… Hm. You've got more human blood and less elven blood. Somewhat backwards from me."
Danté raised an eyebrow, and the man shrugged. "Mother was an elf. Father a half-elf."
That explained a lot.
"I wouldn't know my parentage. Mine were both dead or gone within a few days of my birth, and I was raised by a human. He never realized I was a half-elf, and neither did I, until a few Desians got pissed at me for getting in their way," he said.
"Erk. Don't remind me."
"So… Did anyone find my friends from last night?"
Aseroth chuckled a bit. "Oh, yes. I'm not sure what the hell you used that created those wounds, but they were found this morning. The mayor's been in a bit of a tizzy, but three dead in one night is nothing new. We have a Ranch fairly close, they've been known to come take or kill people in the night before."
Danté nodded. "That particular method is my usual… I'll switch it up on occasion. You'd be amazed the wonders a little variance in MO can do, but…"
"Let me know beforehand, if possible. You're aware that there's still about a dozen, right?"
Danté nodded. "Might have to make a couple passes. I didn't get into town until about an hour ago, so hopefully I've set the worst of the suspicion off. Did something similar in Izoold, left, and then got the last one. But…" He shrugged. "That many… The problem with backlogs is that you can't really clear it out without attracting attention."
Aseroth nodded. "If you have to save some for a second or even third pass, you're welcome to. I've lost the last person close to me in the last Desian raid, but I know what it's like to fight with keeping someone safe." The man paused and glanced around. "At any rate, if you're looking for work, I'd head over to the mayor's office. He's got a board just inside the door, people post jobs on it all the time. Most of it gets ignored, since there aren't a lot of people willing to go contend with the monsters outside the city, and it's kind of make-work stuff, I'm sure, but…"
"Work is work," Danté said. "And if nothing else, it gets my name out there a little better. The more people know of me, the less time I have to waste trying to find work. It'll come find me."
Aseroth nodded again and wandered off, and Danté started asking around for the Mayor's office.
It didn't take long for him to find it, and just as Aseroth had said, there was a bulletin board with notices posted all over it, people looking for someone to do things here and there.
"Need some help?"
Danté looked over his shoulder at the young woman standing behind him, then looked over the board again. "Just kinda cataloguing things for the moment."
There was a decided pause, before…
"You're a mercenary, aren't you?" Danté nodded at the question. "I'm guessing a rather bored mercenary."
"It's hard finding work when you're just starting out," Danté admitted. "And I'm of the opinion that work is work."
The woman giggled, then pulled one of the notices down.
One of the monster-related ones that actually had to do with the monsters. Specifically, basilisk scales.
Danté knew they'd been considered valuable back on Auldrant, especially outside of the Zao Desert area, but for her to pull that one down…
"Basilisks, huh?"
She smiled and shrugged. "I don't know how many antidotes you've got on you. Might want to stock up before you head out. But the woman who put this one up is known to talk. A lot."
Danté smirked. "Thanks for the pointer."
She grinned a bit, then gestured to the notice to the left of the board, a notice that Danté had only barely glanced at, just long enough to confirm that he'd only be able to take two of the jobs at a time.
Didn't mean he couldn't do a couple of these collection jobs while doing the others. He'd just save the herbs and items until he could actually take the jobs.
"The basilisks tend to hunt around north of here. You'll need to be careful, the Human Ranch is to the north-east. But there are a few other things in that general area… Hm…"
Danté pointed to another one that had to do with basilisks. Specifically, a nest of them near a spring. "Might as well kill two birds with one stone… or two basilisks, I guess."
The woman giggled a bit. "Yeah, that'll do." Then she paused. "It'll take you pretty close to the Ranch, though. You sure… They haven't attacked us recently, so they're probably planning one. I wouldn't put it past them to be keeping a close eye out for anyone wandering outside the town to grab up," she said.
Danté sighed. "If I was afraid of the Desians, I wouldn't live within half an hour's walk of a Ranch."
The woman stared at him, and he shrugged. "The Iselian Ranch. They've got a treaty with Iselia, but… I don't know if that applies to me, Dirk, and Lloyd or not. We're almost an hour's walk out of town."
The woman grimaced. "I guess… you do what you have to in order to survive," she said. "Even if it means developing what others might consider really weird responses to threats." She pulled down the second note and walked over to her desk, clearly used to having to do this even though it was obvious that the jobs didn't get taken on often.
She handed him the two papers detailing the jobs after she'd taken a few notes down. "Good luck. And again, you may want to go stock up on antidotes," she said.
Danté nodded. "Thanks." Then he slipped the papers into a pocket and left, headed back toward the marketplace.
Antidotes weren't something he carried on himself often, mostly because he tended to stock up on panaceas.
However, he was running low on those, and he could not for the life of him find panaceas in Sylvarant. So he'd have to get the antidotes.
Now stocked up and ready to take on the basilisks, Danté headed for the exit to town.
"Found more work?"
He stopped, glanced at the old man he'd brought here, and then nodded. "Yeah. Make-work stuff again. I'll probably be around Luin for a bit. But at least I've got work again. I hate having nothing to do."
Donald smiled a bit. "Might see you around then. I think I might have gotten a lead on where Anna went after here," he said.
Danté nodded and started walking.
He was almost an hour out of town when he finally realized something.
Anna.
That was Lloyd's mother's name.
Danté shoved the thought aside rather violently. Anna was a common name, it was very unlikely that the woman Donald was looking for was the one buried behind Dirk's house.
A hissing sound drew his attention back to the mission at hand, and Danté scowled at the basilisk that was hissing at him. Hissing, but not attacking. That was never a good sign.
If he was getting warned off, that meant the basilisk wasn't willing to simply leave if it looked like it was going to lose a fight.
The only time monsters became that territorial was if there were eggs involved.
Danté drew his knives and eyed the foliage around them. There had to be another basilisk or two running around. Had to, because they never worked alone, not if there were eggs to be protected.
He threw one knife, then shot forward when the basilisk dodged it.
Fighting with short-range weapons was always dangerous against an enemy like this, but he couldn't risk using his guns, not right now, and certainly not when he had a limited number of cartridges with him. Dirk had been so very apologetic that he couldn't get the mana cartridges done by the time Danté left, but Danté had reassured him that it was fine.
He could get them when he came back. For now, using the knives would help keep people from suspecting.
He couldn't afford to waste bullets on these things.
He barely managed to avoid getting bitten by a second basilisk when it shot out of the nearest bush, but he twisted out of the way of its attack and hit an eye.
It wasn't a fatal wound, but it would mess with the monster's depth perception if one eye was gone.
He'd have preferred blinding the thing, but beggars couldn't be choosers, and he was pretty sure there was still another one lurking around somewhere.
Another couple of thrown knives distracted the basilisks, and he managed to bury a knife deeply enough through the eye of the not-previously-injured basilisk to kill it.
Then he had to deal with the injured one.
Huh. Nothing else was jumping out of the bushes to kill him.
Yet.
He only barely managed to kill the second one without it sinking its fangs into him, and he started collecting up his knives, even as he started testing scales to see if there were any loose enough he could pry them free. There was a very specific point where it was best to pull scales, and it was very difficult to find a basilisk with a scale loose enough to be pulled away, because they were so very good at pulling them out themselves.
The pulled scales would then be eaten, making finding shed scales impossible.
Danté gave up on the two he'd already killed. No scales off of these two.
There were eggs in the area.
That sobering thought in mind, he checked the bush the second basilisk had come out of. No eggs, no sign of an underground den, no more basilisks ready to come jumping out at him.
He moved on.
There was nothing here, so he'd have to keep looking.
He killed four more basilisks before he managed to get a single scale off of one, and he sighed.
"Well. Guess it's a good thing that basilisks breed well. I'm going to be at this for hours." And probably part of the next day, really, Danté realized. It was already well into the afternoon, and the longer it took him to find the basilisks, the longer it would take him to get the scales.
He idly tucked the thought away and headed off, looking for more.
If he was going to be out here looking for the rest of the day, he might as well actually be looking and not sitting around. They knew something was hunting them now, the last basilisk he'd killed had screeched loud enough to wake the dead—or at least anyone sleeping in Luin or the Ranch.
He was wary every time he found a basilisk, though. Most of them came at him in groups of three or four.
He became very, very grateful for the woman's advice, and also grateful that he'd actually accepted it, because even though he was being careful, even though he was using them fairly sparingly, he was still running through antidotes as he hunted.
He finally collected the last scale he needed almost an hour after getting rid of the nest that was restricting access to the spring, and apparently just in the nick of time. Danté glanced around, got to his feet, and then took off running back toward Luin. He wasn't expecting to make it all the way back, but he was out of antidotes, so he didn't really want to get caught by more of the damn things.
He needed to save his panacea bottles for as long as he could, it looked like.
Five basilisk scales and a nest exterminated. He doubted that the basilisks would leave the spring alone for long, but at least for a few months, the spring was safer.
Safer. Not safe, nothing was ever safe, but safer. And that might have had something to do with why Danté felt pretty good when he walked back into town just as the sun was setting.
He'd managed to get the damn scales before nightfall, and hadn't still been at it in the morning.
He made a beeline for the mayor's office, wondering if the lady from earlier was still there or not.
The office was open until an hour after dark, according to the sign, so he wasn't surprised when he was able to enter easily.
"You're back."
The woman sounded vaguely surprised, and Danté dug out five of the six basilisk scales he'd managed to get. The last two had been pure luck—one of the basilisks hadn't preened recently, apparently, as he'd pulled them both off the same lizard.
"And done."
The woman beamed up at him.
Fun Fact: I've had the name 'Aseroth' floating around in my head for ages. It was finally assigned to one of the random OCs I knew Danté would have to contend with, and I realized quickly that it would have to be a half-elf, because he insisted on white hair. Sadly, while I've come to really enjoy having Aseroth in my head (though it's rather dangerous listening to him, Yuan, Jade, and Reighn all snarking at each other), he doesn't get as much screen time as I'd like. :( Why?! Why did you have to run off on me Aseroth?!
