Gremlin Jack: Well, Harry and co. aren't going to kill the Conjurer out of hand. They're Adventures, not murders. Also, they figure that if summoning an Eidolon is anything like burning through all a mage's magic, he's going to be down for at least a few hours.

The Mad Mad Reviewer: Rejoice, my friend, because there will never be any numbered levels or HP or anything in this fic. The different jobs do have levels that determine what people with those jobs can do, but the only person who will ever see them is me. Mostly so I can keep track of what different characters are capable of.

Chicwowwow: Hecatoncheir is the same spelling as the monster in Greek mythology. It is also one of the many, many summons in the Final Fantasy series. I'll be leaning more on the mythological angle for the other Eidolons that will be mentioned later on, so don't expect to see Ifrit or Shiva or Bahamut running around (even though Square picked those names out of mythology, too).

Chapter 8
Town of Beginnings

"Two dimma each?" Harry repeated in disbelief. He picked up one of the weapons he, Dudley, and Hermione had 'liberated' from the living quarters and workspaces of the Conjurer's subordinates. Tapping the dagger against the counter, he raised it up towards the curmudgeonly old blacksmith. "This is good steel. I've seen blades as good as this on sale in Glasgow, and they were going for ten or fifteen dimma a piece."

"Which one o' us is the smith here?" grunted the other man. "That might be good steel, sure. Or it might be a load o' crap. No way to know for sure without puttin' 'em through a lot o' tests, and doin' all that'll take longer than jus' meltin' 'em down. There's time and expense there that'd be wasted on bad materials. I'm not throwin' money away like that. I can maybe be talked into four each."

"You're focusing on the chance they're worthless to you, but even still they'd be raw materials to make your own stuff out of. You'll make a profit regardless. All I want is not to get cheated after I went to the effort of getting them."

"And I need to make sure I'm not cheated either, laddie. 'Specially since you're talkin' about what it costs to buy weapons in the city. There's not as much money in nails and buckets and hammers, the kind of stuff we need out here." The smith rolled around the wad of leaf in his cheek before letting out a sigh. "Tell you what. I'll give you forty-five for the eight o' 'em. That's as fair as I can be without takin' a loss on the whole deal. You can take it or leave it."

Forcing himself to take a mental step back, Harry looked over the counteroffer. Forty-five dimma was far from what he had hoped to get, but considering they had picked up the daggers while burglarizing the burglars' den, any money he got for the weapons was profit. Profit he did not even need to purchase supplies since they had raided the kitchen space the Conjurer's men had set up for all their potables. Not to mention, the people of this town had been deprived of their primary source of income for a month, so they understandably felt the need to pinch every penny they ran across. How much would he benefit from continuing to push for more?

"Fine. Forty-five it is."

Finishing up the deal and claiming the agreed-upon coins, Harry left the heat of the smithy and leaned against a wall. Within the town square in front of him an impromptu festival was coming together, the townspeople celebrating the liberation of their mine. Dudley should soon be back from selling off the items they did not want to keep, and with the money from those sales and the reward for the manor job, this promised to be one of the best months they had ever had.

Several minutes later, Dudley and Hermione both walked up to find him sipping from a glass of lemonade he had bought off one of wandering servers. "How'd you make out?" he asked.

"Thirty or so when it's all totaled up," answered Dudley with a shrug. "Not bad for the amount of work we had to do to find it all."

He nodded. "That should be enough to rent the mustids again to get us back to Glasgow. Turns out that stable we dropped them off at yesterday was owned by the same agency as where we got them, so the staff thought we were turning them in."

"You don't even have to do that." Harry turned to look at Hermione, who had a sly smile on her face. "I was coming back from talking to the mayor when I ran into a small caravan. They stopped here to try selling their wares, and they're willing to take us on. They're headed east to another village, and from what they remember, that town has an aviary." She pulled a metal tube out of one pocket and gave it a small shake. "I need to send this foslyrite to the Grange as soon as possible."

"A caravan?" Harry and Dudley glanced at each other to find the same look of confusion. "When you say 'take us on', what exactly do you mean?"

"You guys haven't spent much time outside the Free Cities, have you?" she asked with a shake of her head. "Within the League's borders, merchants can be given an escort by one of the larger official companies upon request, but out here in the hinterlands there's no such guarantee. They can try to go it alone or hire regular guards, sure, but that won't mean anything if they run into one of the more dangerous creatures roaming around. So, depending on who's running the caravan, they're sometimes willing to feed Adventures and let us use them as a taxi service in exchange for having us around to protect them." She shrugs. "It eats into their profits, but better to make a little less money than wind up dead on the road or in some monster's belly."

"And this caravan you found is willing to bring all three of us along?" Dudley pressed.

Hermione grinned. "I dragged you out here to help me. It'd be poor form to leave you behind now."

The gentle rocking of the cart as it rattled down the dirt road and the summer sun shining down on them was more than enough incentive for Harry to doze lightly. It had been a couple of days since they left Gimli, and so far there had not been anything worth getting excited about; the most action they had encountered was a bomb he and Hermione pelted with spells and arrows until it blew up a respectable distance away from the caravan. Right now, at least one of them was keeping a weather eye out just in case something tried to sneak up on them, but right now it was not his shift.

"Hey, Hermione," he heard Dudley say into the silence, "I've been waiting for two days to see if you'd tell us on your own, but now I have to ask. How do you know so much about Eidolons?"

Harry grunted and pushed the front edge of his straw hat up out of his field of vision. "Gotta say I'm curious too."

The catgirl grimaced and looked away, her ears flatting against her scalp. "Is there any chance I can convince you just to ignore what happened down in the mine?"

"Sorry, but no. Spill."

Hermione glanced at Harry, but then she sighed. Undoing the ties of her leather vest, she took it off and then pulled up the left sleeve of her shirt. Harry was not sure what he was expecting, but thick scars in the shape of a swirling pattern around her shoulder and upper arm was not it.

"It was about three years ago," she said quietly. "A friend and I were coming back from a job. I was still a greenhorn; it might have been my fifth or six job ever? We were just walking along the edge of a cliff when everything went weird. No one ever reported anything like this there, but we had somehow stumbled into the domain of an Eidolon. Boreas, the god of the north wind. What happened next…" She hung her head for a moment before looking back at them. "I can't even call it a fight. Not really. It was just toying with us. It beat me within an inch of my life. Killed Abraham. We weren't a threat to it. It saw us as entertainment. Like a cat that finds a couple of mice."

"But you're still here. You beat it," Dudley reminded her.

Hermione scoffed, "Beat it? You don't beat these things. I couldn't even hurt it. It only left once it got bored. I barely managed to get back to a town, and then I spent the next two months looking for any information I could find about it and its ilk." She tugged her sleeve back down and picked up her vest. "The rules of a fight with an Eidolon are simple. You outlast its assault, or you die. You can't bargain with it. You can't run away from it. If you manage to survive its attacks, it will reach out and brand one person who fought it." Fingers reaching out to touch the hidden mark, she continued, "The brand gives you power. Like you saw with the Conjurer, it lets you become a shadow of that monster. Not that anyone should want to. You're letting an insane and dangerous thing take control of your body."

"You transformed into Boreas at some point, didn't you?" asked Harry in a gentle voice. "You said you and Geoff's group fought another Eidolon bearer before. That was how you know this."

"…I didn't have a choice. It was try it or die. It wasn't like it was the one fighting him, either; I wasn't in control of my body. All I could do was watch with my own eyes as I fought like a maniac." She shuddered. "It's the first and last time I'm ever going to do it.

"An Eidolon brand does one other thing, although this one at least is useful. You remember the griffin I can summon? That's how I can do that. I don't know about all the possible creatures brands can summon, but my griffin is relatively docile. It doesn't lash out at anything and everything like Boreas did. It's the only reason I'm comfortable riding it anywhere."

Turning away from them, she looked out at the landscape in search of any reason to change the subject. "Oh look, a Spire."

Harry decided to cut her some slack and looked in the direction of her gaze. Sure enough, there was a Spire in the middle of the plains beyond them. It was carved or maybe even grown from grey stone, multiple twisting curls criss-crossing like a braid of hair as it reached for the sky. At the very top was a peaked bulb shaped almost like a flame, and even without being able to see inside Harry knew that in the middle of that bulb was a red crystal hanging from the ceiling. He knew it as surely as he knew that the strands of stone on the outside had natural divots to serve as handholds for anyone clever enough or foolish enough to try climbing the outside and avoid the monsters that called the interior home.

"That… looks really familiar," Dudley muttered with a growing frown.

"Because it is." Harry turned back to Hermione. "The town this caravan is headed for. Would it be named Whinging Village, by any chance?"

She nodded slowly. "How did you know that?"

"It's where we grew up."

"Unfortunately," came Dudley's comment.

"I'm sorry. I didn't know. All I asked about was whether they had an aviary." Putting on a brave face, she continued, "But we shouldn't have to be there very long. I send off the foslyrite, you say hi to your families, and then we'll head out before it gets too uncomfortable."

Harry let out a mocking laugh. "Seeing Dudley's parents is what will make it more than just uncomfortable."

The Hunter stared at him for a moment before chancing, "You aren't talking about the wanderlust, are you?"

"Wanderlust?"

She nodded. "The Spires are miraculous. They give us magic powers and a protective aura that lets us survive blows that physically should be more than enough to kill us. You would think everyone would want to claim a Mark, but they don't. Haven't you ever wondered why?"

"Because just climbing a Spire is stupidly dangerous?" guessed Dudley.

"If it were just the danger, the first few people who managed it could kill all the monsters inside and make it safer for everyone else. No, it isn't the risk. It's that these powers aren't free. In exchange for our Marks, Adventures have to suffer an urge to see and explore that keeps us from ever settling down in one place for too long and makes it hard to stand coming back to our hometowns. I've only heard rumors of Adventures who retired, and even then they essentially have to keep their Marks inactive for the rest of their lives. How did you not know this? Haven't you ever gone home, even once, since climbing the Spire?"

"Not a single time," he said. "Remember what you told me about how you became an Adventure so you would have a reason to leave the Riverland Grange?" Hermione nodded. "We did it for the same reason."

"Oh… Now I'm really sorry."

"What's done is done," he replied with a sigh. It was the closest he could get to forgiving her at the moment. Pulling his hat back down, he muttered, "This is going to suck."

Short chapter, but I wanted to get something out for you guys. The next couple of months are going to be super hectic (moving back home, studying for my board certification, moving again to my new place, starting work, and taking said boards), so if you don't see any updates for a while, now you know why.

Silently Watches out.