I picked over my tattered clothes, clicking my tongue. I was going to need a new outfit soon; I’d have to visit the used clothing store and put together a set that suited me.
I also stank of rotting food, having been shoved into a pile of garbage. The silver lining was the entire town smelled like that, so I wasn’t going to stick out that much. Before, there were workers who wheeled the refuse away to serve as fertilizer, but they hadn’t been around since the stampede. Apparently, they would be back soon, but in the meantime the garbage had piled up and stank to high heaven. It was awful even around the dungeon. Regular folks hadn’t strayed near it even in the better times, but now there wasn’t a soul around. So the trash dump by the dungeon was turning into a veritable mountain.
Trying to ignore my strong new scent, I made my way through the streets, noting in the moonlight all the buildings that were under construction. During the day, the town was full of the sounds of hammers and shouting. It had been nearly a month. The people who’d evacuated the town were coming back, and more stores had resumed their business. When the buildings were obliterated, some folks even brought out carts and served booze in the street. Bit by bit, the town was looking more like it had before the stampede.
But only along the main roads. When I went into the side streets and alleys, I saw the many abandoned buildings that were partially or fully destroyed. The impoverished had nowhere else to go, and they eked out a living in their barely intact homes. Disaster afflicted the rich and poor alike, but the real difference manifested in the period afterward. By the time anything had been rebuilt on their lots, the majority of them would have frozen, starved, or been crushed to death.
Status and money were cruel to the have-nots. On the big streets, the mansions of the rich and the merchant storefronts were abuzz with carpenters and laborers, carrying lumber, striking nails, stacking stone, and painting walls. They worked from morning until night, then went home to the barracks, where their families awaited them.
They might have the skills to build their own homes, but neither the money nor the materials. It would be a long time before they had proper houses again.
“Oops.”
I was so deep in thought, I had failed to notice that the coins I’d taken from the third-rate would-be hero’s purse were slipping out. They were all coppers and silvers, a pittance for appearing in his little play. I’d have to make good use of them. I decided I could best foster the arts by engaging in some training at the brothel that night. It would be an all-nighter.
Brimming with fresh resolve, I bent down to scoop up the coins when I was bowled over onto my side by someone roaring with anger. I was tossed like a twig. Through slanted vision, I saw an elderly man grabbing greedily at my money and scampering off.
“Now that was uncalled for.”
There was a sour stench coming from the alley the man ran down. Several men in bedraggled clothes sat along the buildings, looking tired. They were gentlemen of the street. They had always been found around the town, but since the stampede, there were certainly a lot more of them.
Many found themselves joining the ranks after losing their jobs and their means of feeding themselves. The man who had grabbed my coins was probably one of them. Some folks had had good jobs that allowed them to support their families, only for that bedrock of safety and security to crumble beneath their feet and send them plummeting into the depths.
Their future was bleak.
They didn’t all just sit around begging and hoping for pity. There was a law and structure to their layer of society, centered around territory. The criminal underworld facilitated this system, too. If a newcomer tried to beg in the wrong place, he’d get beaten by the others.
I heard a noise. Down the narrowing alley, the gentlemen were kicking one of their own. I couldn’t tell if they were punishing a transgressor or just blowing off steam, but they were certainly going to town on him.
The gentlemen gradually noticed my presence and trickled away, sparing a few rude comments in the process. All that was left behind was a badly beaten man. Despite my suspicions, it was not the same man who’d just knocked me over. This one looked to be a bit shy of forty. His silvery hair made him look older than he was. While he was filthy, his eyes still had plenty of life in them.
“You all right?” I asked. He steadily got to his feet and rested his back against the wall. They’d stuck his head into one of those trash piles; some kind of bone fragments were stuck to his head.
“Get lost, you piece of shit.”
“Ah, with that boisterous attitude, I’m guessing you’ll be just fine.” I chuckled, taking note of the black spots around his bony wrist. Those were marks from Release use. So he’d brought about his own downfall with drugs. I wasn’t going to mock him for that; it could happen to any person of any age. Even princess knights.
“If you’re trying to work this area, I wouldn’t bother,” I said. “The Spotted Wolves are propping up the Gentleman’s Alliance around here. You don’t want to get into a fight with any scary fellows, do you?”
He didn’t respond.
“If you want to get out of town, go see old Toby in Blue Dog Alley.”
“…I’ve got money. Plenty of it.”
“Ah, of course. No wonder you reminded me of a nobleman.”
Struggling with poverty for long enough could drive people to delusions. They consoled themselves with comforting dreams, truly believing that they were bastard children of some rich merchant, that their prince would one day come for them, or that they hadn’t actually killed that man they’d offed.
“It’s only temporary… I’ll be out of this hellhole soon,” he said. That was ironic, because usually they found their way out via the hole to hell.
“I see,” I said, lending him my shoulder so he could stand on his own. “C’mon, let’s go that way. You’ll only get stomped again back here. I can take you out of their turf.”
After taking the gentleman of the street to his resting place for the night, I returned home. It was late.
I turned the corner and saw home, sweet home. It had once been crushed and turned into rubble, but was freshly rebuilt, having been finished just the other day. The floor plan was almost the same as before, but we now had a long-awaited bath in the annex.
“I’m home,” I said to no one. Arwin was still in the dungeon and wouldn’t return until the next day. I’d already eaten, and it was too much work to start a bath just for myself. Instead, I went up the stairs, which still smelled fresh and strange, and collapsed onto the bed.
As soon as I was off my feet, the pain of being beaten came back to me, so I shut my eyes, hoping to slip past the agony into sleep. The sandman arrived quickly.
Sometime later, I was awakened by an unexpected sound.
It was still before dawn. I sensed something downstairs. Whoever it was had opened the locked door and was sneaking up the stairs. They were trying to stay as silent as possible, but they weren’t entirely successful. They reached the top and walked down the hall, stopping outside my room.
They weren’t coming inside. Nor were they knocking. They were just standing there, holding their breath and listening for me. I got tired of waiting, so I got out of bed and opened the door.
“Welcome back,” I said. Arwin hunched up like a small, frightened animal.
When someone spent long amounts of time in the dungeon, they lost their sense of time. There was no sunlight, and everything looked the same. Add in the tension of combat, and it was easy to flip one’s days and nights.
So it wasn’t uncommon at all to emerge from the dungeon and find it was the middle of the night. Arwin had come back at night several times, but she always just went to her room and slept—or woke me up and demanded I prepare a bath for her.
“It’s not quite the hour for a midnight tryst, is it? A morning tryst, perhaps? Whatever time of day, I’m always up for it,” I said, trying to ease the tension with one of my classic wisecracks, but Arwin neither laughed nor snapped at me. She just looked away awkwardly. She seemed afraid, like she was fleeing from something. She rubbed her right wrist with her left hand.
“What’s wrong? Did you get hurt?”
“It’s this…”
She removed what was covering her hand and raised her arm, showing it off.
Black spots were on the inside of her right wrist—the sign of a Release addict. She had indulged in the dangerous drug to escape the effects of the dungeon sickness that had once tormented her.
Her dungeon sickness was in remission, but she continued to take trace amounts of Release to keep withdrawal at bay. The black spots showed up where the veins were close to the surface, such as the wrists and back of the neck. When and where varied according to the individual, so she could develop the spots at any time. She had returned from the dungeon early because she was afraid of the spots.