“Screw that damned human!” Vulcano Volkan paced up and down the alleyway in front of Bagup’s Inn, cursing Orphen with every breath he took.
“Who the hell does he think he is!? He’s just some slimy bastard with a few party tricks!” Next to Volkan was another, slightly shorter dwarf boy sitting on top of an empty barrel, swinging his legs back and forth. He was slightly younger than Volkan, and wore a pair of glasses with very thick lenses. Unlike Volkan, this boy didn’t carry a sword, but seeing as how the rucksack sitting next to the barrel was almost the same size as the boy himself, he clearly wasn’t travelling very lightly.
Volkan stopped in his tracks and turned to face the bespectacled boy.
“You think so too, right, Dortin?”
“...Huh?” The boy — named Dortin, apparently — clearly had not been listening to Volkan’s ranting.
“That Black Sorcerer human! Don’t you think he’s so full of shit!?” Volkan repeated what he’d just said, clearly in a very foul mood.
Dortin gazed up at the sky for a moment, as if at a loss for how to respond.
“...But you’re the one who borrowed all that money from him, right, Bro?”
It seemed that the two were siblings.
Volkan gaped his mouth wide open and spat out his words as though he were breathing flames. “Right, and that makes me a valuable customer of his!!”
I don’t think you’re a very valuable customer when you’ve failed to pay him back in time, Dortin thought to himself. He didn’t dare put these thoughts into words, however.
Apparently taking Dortin’s silence as agreement, Volkan continued his rant with the energy of a raging bull.
“Here I go through all this trouble constantly bringing him all these great jobs, and what does he do!? He acts like some huge bigshot, only to ruin every last job! I swear, I’ve met some good-for-nothing humans in my life, but that guy takes the cake and the whole birthday feast!”
I’m the one who finds most of the work, though... Dortin said to himself again; internally, of course.
The job this time was most certainly one that Volkan had found. This wasn’t reassuring to Dortin in the least, however — he had tried many times to pry the details out of his older brother, but Volkan refused to say a single word about the alleged jackpot he’d stumbled across this time.
From all of Dortin’s experience, this could only mean one possible thing: Trouble. Big trouble.
Volkan continued ranting to himself out loud, and very loud at that.
“And another thing! What’s this crap about me having to talk to him ‘politely’?!” He spat. “He acts like he’s in charge just because he’s a few years older than me! What the hell’s with that!? So what, you’ve got a couple more years under your belt! Fall off your high horse and break your damned neck while you’re at it, damn it!” If that’s how you feel, then why do you always treat me the same way? Dortin complained internally, as he was wont to do around his older brother. He gazed up to the blue sky peeking into the alleyway from above, feeling the late-Spring breeze on his face. Clouds dotted the sky, almost ominously, as if the sky itself were getting ready to come crashing down at any moment.
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—Tick, tock, tick, tock...—
In the middle of the large fountain atop the fireplace stood the statue of a smiling Goddess holding up a clock, the twin pendulums of which were made to resemble a mother dog and a puppy as they swung back and forth between each other. The entire room was filled with huge, gorgeous furniture, which only served to sink Orphen’s sense of dread all the way to the bottom of his stomach like a ship’s anchor rooting itself firmly in the seabed.
The room was outright littered with such ornate furniture that Orphen didn’t even know where the least expensive place to set his gaze was. The fireplace wasn’t lit, nor did it need to be — Summer was just around the corner, after all. The pure white cloth on the table in front of him was less a tablecloth than it was an embroidered work of art. In one corner of the room stood a pair of large, imposing, empty suits of silver plate armor crossing weapons with each other, and Orphen could have sworn they were glaring holes right through his back. The deep red carpet was so thick that he wouldn’t have been surprised if he ended up tripping over it, and the huge wooden chair he sat in was carved with such an intricate, artistic design that it was probably worth at least as much as a gemstone of the same size. As the cherry on the cake, Orphen could’ve sworn that the chandelier dangling from the roof was bigger than the space of his entire boarding room from back when he used to stay at the Tower of Fangs. At first the room had just bewildered Orphen, but by now he was just trying to hold in his panic as he desperately tried to come up with a plan of escape from this terrible mess he’d gotten himself into.
The silver lining in all of this, if it could even be called that, was that Orphen himself was at least well dressed enough that he didn’t look entirely out of place in this luxuriously massive room. He was outfitted in a suffocatingly smart tuxedo-like suit, his pendant currently in one of his pockets. Next to Orphen sat the two young dwarf boys in similarly designed, but obviously much smaller, tuxedo suits. Volkan was chatting away vigorously by himself, but Orphen could tell without even looking that Dortin was shaking nervously and his face was as white as a sheet.
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