Chapter 119: Goblin Quest

Could he kick my ass? I mean, he’s stronger than me. Better stats by far. Full class, with all that comes with it. He has a combat skill, I don’t. He got a lot of items and achievements from that competition, too.

He has better weapons, for sure. Weird ones. Weird powers to back them up.

Shit. So much for walking quietly home.

In retrospect, Sean realized that winning an unwinnable game probably wasn’t the best way to keep a low profile on his low-key walk back to his hideout. If the man didn’t let go soon, it might become a combat situation, something that would get even louder. Itto had said he could defend himself without too much trouble from the local peacekeepers, but Sean had no idea if that counted with an angry shopkeeper. Either way, it was more heat than he could afford right now.

“Nobody cheats me, boy. I think I’ll have to…”

“Hands off the kid.” Itto said, suddenly between him and the man. “You might be able to scare him, but you can’t scare me. You think I won’t get loud about this? You not paying out on a legitimate win? I can get plenty loud. Let everyone around know.”

“It wasn’t a legitimate win!” The man said. “He…”

“He what?” Itto said. “Hit the target and pushed it in? You said any strike without splash damage. No projectiles. He didn’t do either.”

“But..”

“No but. No nothing, Pay.”

The man froze for a second before looking at his hand, still clasped around Sean’s wrist. He dropped it limp to his side, then slumped.

“Listen. I’m sorry.” He said. “You know the scam. I get it. There’s always a chance someone has the skills to get through this thing. It’s just that usually the guys who have them don’t bother with the kinds of prizes I can get.”

“Not my problem.” Itto apparently had no mercy in this kind of situation.

“I know. But business hasn’t been that good lately.” He sighed, reaching into his pack and withdrawing a small, coin-sized token. “Here’s the prize. Might as well take the shop, too. I can’t replace that thing, the way things have been going.”

Sean looked down at the token, suddenly aware how much he really didn’t have a use for it. He might have had time to hawk it and get a little for it, but he wouldn’t have got nearly anything near its full worth. He definitely didn’t feel like ruining the guy’s life over it.

“Listen, just keep it.” Sean said. “Give me back my potion. We can call it even.”

The man started as Sean let him off the hook.

“Just like that?” He said, an unbelieving look on his face.

“Just like that.”

The man ran back to his stand, got the potion off the counter, and almost leapt back to Sean to slap it in his hand. “Here. And thanks, really. I know this isn’t the most honest work. Not many people would have helped here. I owe you.”

“It’s not a problem.” Sean said. It really wasn’t. He got to play the game for free while giving his new weapon a test drive, and as far as he was concerned. That was a win in and of itself, as far as he was concerned.

“What was that all about?” Itto said. They were back on their way, now. “Letting him go like that. He’s a scammer, Sean. He knows the risks to that game.”

“Eh, it’s fine.” Sean said, scratching his hair. “I didn’t want it to get loud, if it came to that. And the token wasn’t that useful to me. No reason to put the guy out of business over it.”

“And that’s it? You just take a loss over that?”

“Yeah, I think so.” Sean said. “A lot of people have been decent to me where they didn’t have to, especially in the last few months. And I don’t think that paid off for most of them. Not everyone lived through it, even. I feel like I owe something, somehow. Call it a karmic debt.”

“Huh.” Itto said, clearly unimpressed by the logic. “Well, whatever. I’m glad it didn’t go loud too, for what it’s worth. You never know how much pull those guys have with the locals. Could have got messy.”

When they reached the Shanktuary, Itto’s confusion about their route gave away to mild surprise as Sean pulled open the door.

“You want me to go down there?” Itto said.

“That’s about the size of it. Go on, it’s fine.”

Itto let Sean go first, but at least followed into the hallway after him, pulling the door shut behind him.

“How the hell is this here?” Itto said. “I was expecting maybe you had some kind of stealthed tent. They sell those. I’ve seen them. This is a full base, Sean.”

“Yeah. It’s that rare?” Sean said. “Remember I haven’t been out of my own world that long. This still seems normal to me.”

“A base that follows you planet to planet? Sets up wherever you want it, looking like a shitty hole in the ground that nobody would want to investigate?” Itto said. “I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never actually seen it. I’m not sure how much it’s worth, if you could even buy it. But it’s useful as hell right now.”

“Yeah, I figured it was better than actually getting a room.” Sean led him past the storage room towards the main room. “Beds are in that one. That’s a workbench, if you need it, and there’s the shower. Those apples are edible, but don’t eat one if you want to eat anything else that day.”

“They regrow? It’s an infinite food source?”

“For a person or two, yeah. But you get sick of them sooner than you’d think.” Sean sat down and unlaced his boots. It had been a long enough day. He wasn’t planning on going out again.

“And what’s that?” Itto said, pointing at the soda fountain. “The rest of the stuff I can guess at, but I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

“Oh, Itto, you naive waif.” Sean said, slipping his boots off. “You are about to go on a wild ride.”

“How fat is this gonna make me?” Itto said, walking back from the showers with a full soda in hand. It wasn’t late, but both of them were more or less ready for bed. “If I drink one of these every day, I mean.”

“Plenty. It’s pretty much entirely sugar. All the rest of the flavoring is fake in some way or another. It’s the sugar that does the real work on making it drinkable.”

“Damn. Doesn’t matter for you, running around everywhere and fighting. For me, cooped up in a ship most of the time? I’d get jiggly in a week.”

Sean was coming to like Itto just fine. Outside of the part where he treated Sean like a kid despite being a third of his height, Itto was a companionable sort of guy. He made easy conversation, didn’t ask for a lot, and had done more than Sean expected his debt to Jeff strictly asked for. Which worried him in a different way, when he thought about it much.

“So how much is this putting you out?” Sean asked. “This trip, I mean. You’ve lost a ship, even though it looks like that worked out all right in the long run. But I’m guessing your time isn’t all that cheap.”

“It’s not. But I’ve done pretty well. You don’t have much context for this, but independent shipowners make good money. I make more than most, because I’m willing to take bigger risks. A month here or there doesn’t hurt that much. It’s nothing I can’t absorb.”

“It’s also nothing you are getting paid for.” Sean said. “Besides whatever Jeff helped you with.”

Itto sipped from his soda, smacking his lips a little bit. “Damn. These really are more sweet than you’d think. You drink a lot of these?”

“A fair amount. But you didn’t answer my question.”

“You didn’t really ask one. But I get what you mean.” Itto said. “It’s like this. I go to some place, I do a job. Maybe I sneak something someone wants in, or I sneak someone out. I get shot at, I get paid, I blackmail someone, or something like that. And it all used to be very exciting.”

“Not anymore?”

“Not so much. It’s just business. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not boring, exactly, and it’s better than office work. But it doesn’t change much. The details vary, but eventually it’s just me waking up for another day of smuggling.”

Itto stretched out his legs on the bed, leaned over, and put the rest of his soda down on the ground.

“So when a time traveling maniac saved me from a bad situation and said he needed me to help some maniac kid escape to some undefined location while he ‘set things up for the kid to knock down’? After blowing up an entire building just to clear an escape route for me?” Itto laid down and closed his eyes.

“It sounded like an interesting change. So far, it has been.”

“So what is there to do?” Sean said. “We can’t just sit around here all day, and it didn’t seem like Lina expected any chance of getting us on our way early.”

“She won’t.” Itto said. “It’s her job to know that kind of thing. We are looking at tomorrow afternoon before we can leave, at the earliest. But we really could sit around here until then. It would be safer.”

“No way. I’ve been hiding in here enough.” Sean liked the Shanktuary, and was glad he had it. But something about the door being closed and bolted to keep him in instead of other people out was torture. He needed out, to find something to pass the time. “Street games were a bust. I don’t need that kind of problem.”

“There’s a fighting arena. You could probably make some credits there if you wanted. The rules are pretty lenient, too. Most people don’t even die.”

“Too loud and visible, and I don’t need credits.”

“That rules out a bunch of other stuff, too. You are too much of a trouble magnet to take to a bar, and you don’t strike me as a brothel type.”

“Nope.”

“That doesn’t leave a whole lot, then. Walking around town to give a pickpocket a chance to get your stuff is an option. We could run a shitty dungeon, if you wanted.”

Sean perked up.

“A dungeon?”

“Yeah, just a small one.”

“Like with an actual entrance and objectives?”

“Yeah. But it’s shit. I’ve run it before. It’s just little green guys with spears.”

“It has fucking goblins?”

Itto gave Sean side-eye at that one.

“Listen, Sean. I know you are the new guy and I’m the seasoned veteran as far as living in the real universe is concerned, but you have to remember I don’t know shit about your world. Yeah, it has little green men. What’s the big deal? I don’t have context for why this is important to you.”

“It’s… imagine you grew up on books. Fantasy books, or shows, whatever. About a different world.”

“Yeah, we had stuff like that.”

“Then imagine all that stuff was real. You got to go to that world, and you knew that kind of stuff was available, but you were too busy to actually do any of it. You didn’t get to go to the weird fantasy bar or get the fantasy girlfriend, or do much at all in the safe-ish fun adventure part of everything.”

“So these ‘goblins’ are that for you?”

“One hundred percent they are. This is something I have to do before I die.” Sean said. “Unless it’s going to put you in more danger than you want.”

“Danger?” Itto scoffed. “I could run that shitty place by myself without taking a scratch. With you, there’s no danger at all.”

“So we can do it?”

Itto stood up and headed out to the hallway, chuckling. “Sure, whatever. Let’s go kill some goblins.”