I wake early. It doesn’t matter how tired I am from the day before, or if I have a job that day—I always wake at 5 a.m. and immediately start training. On the day I was supposed to meet with Lloyd in the afternoon, my morning routine was exactly the same as ever. I began by running the perimeter of the imperial capital—about 50 kilometers, carrying a pack as heavy as three large men the whole way. That took about three hours. After that, I ate breakfast at home, then performed a quick bodyweight routine of fingertip push-ups, sit-ups, and reverse sit-ups, all as a warm-up for two hours of resistance training with barbells.
One thing my grandfather taught me was that even members of the support classes needed physical training. In a pinch, your own body may be the only weapon you have.
Talker skills can be activated by simply speaking the words, so they don’t deplete MP. It’s still exhausting to use them continuously, just as giving a rousing, hours-long battlefield speech might be. Not to mention that hunting down Abysses and fighting beasts was far more strenuous than your usual morning promenade.
My skills had effects on my party members, but not on me. I couldn’t use my skills to enhance my own physical prowess. If I were rendered unable to use my skills or think clearly because of exhaustion at a critical moment, I’d jeopardize the party.
I always carried potions with me during Seeker jobs, but it wasn’t enough. You couldn’t always find time to down one in the heat of battle, and if the bottles broke, I’d be sunk. Rigorous training was the only answer.
My morning training finally finished, I washed away my sweat in a hot shower and then gulped down a bottle of potion from the icebox.
“Yuck…” It tasted horrible as usual. Imagine a fine puree of apples and raw fish. It wasn’t so bad that I couldn’t handle it, though. A post-workout potion made my muscles heal themselves instantly, so I never needed to take rest days.
While I was doing my cool-down stretches, I heard loud footsteps coming down the hall. Walter burst into my room without knocking.
“Noel, it’s terrible!” he cried, panting. He was a mess, his eyes were bloodshot, his face dripping in sweat. It looked like he was coming to tell me the world was ending.
I cleared my throat and crossed my arms in front of my shirtless chest to hide it from him. “Hey, pervert! How about knocking before you just barge in!”
“What are you playing at?! Who would want to see you naked?!”
He was angry with me. I was just trying to lighten the mood… Regardless, it looked like Peer Support was working perfectly. He started to calm, inhaled deeply, and was already looking a bit better.
“Anyway, it’s important. Read this,” he said, handing me a single letter. It was wet with sweat, probably because he had been holding it so tightly. I had to take care not to rip it as I spread it out to read. I instantly knew the handwriting. It was from our leader, Lloyd. He had signed it, and the signature was unmistakably genuine. There was no way someone else had written this.
The four-page letter was long and most of it unnecessary. However, the message was extremely simple.
“Hmm. I see. In summary, Lloyd made a bad investment and he’s in a lot of debt. And he embezzled the 12.8 million fil to pay it off. But since I was in such a hurry to establish a clan, he and Tanya fled the capital, so we couldn’t grab them before the truth came out. Ha ha. What an imbecile.”
The letter explained the entire situation in detail. It was padded aplenty with excuses and apologies that only served him, but that was the gist of it.
That explained the strange feeling I’d had when we were discussing it at the tavern. It was so ridiculous I couldn’t help but laugh.
Seeing me in paroxysms only made Walter angrier. “What’s so funny?! They betrayed us!”
“That’s why I’m laughing. I never thought that straight-arrow Lloyd would embezzle the party funds and then disappear in the night. Ha ha ha! C’mon, Walter, laugh!”
“How can you laugh, idiot?” Walter was so furious that spittle flew from his lips. He crossed his arms and leaned against the wall. “Dammit…what are we going to do? What can we do?”
“By the way, where and when did you get this letter?”
“Huh? Just now. I heard about a good job at a tavern last night. I wanted to grab it before someone else could, so I went to Lloyd’s boardinghouse first thing in the morning and the old man said he left this letter…”
“When did the man say Lloyd left his room?”
“He said about eight last night.”
The city gates closed at 8 p.m. and opened again at 5 a.m. He must have left right before the gates closed so he could get away in the cover of night. A true midnight escape.
“It’s 9:30 now, so it’s been about half a day. I doubt they hired a coach or borrowed a horse, for fear of leaving a trail we could follow. So even moving at night, they can’t have gotten far on foot. With some fast horses, I’m sure we could catch up by evening.”
“Maybe so, but we don’t know where they went,” Walter said.
“We can ask the city immigration officials. As long as we know which gate they left from, we can determine where they’re headed. They wouldn’t dare wander off the road in the middle of the night. I know the limits of their stamina. They’d need some rest by now, so they’re likely in a nearby village.”
Walter snapped his fingers. “That’s it! Let’s go to the immigration officials!”
“Hold on a minute. What do you intend to ask them?”
“Huh? Are you dumb? You just told me how to find them. I’ll find Lloyd and knock him out! It’s just gonna eat at me if I don’t!”
This guy had no idea. It was true that I had given him a way to find Lloyd, but my point was only that we had options and therefore didn’t need to be hasty. After all, we had more issues to deal with than just finding our wayward comrades.
“Do you plan to resolve this with a fistfight? Or if Lloyd weeps and tells you he’s sorry, will you forgive him and take him back?” I asked. “What are you, some kind of muscle-bound fairy frolicking through flowery fields? Shall we hold hands and sing a song as we dance? Use your brain and stop living in a fairy tale, dummy.”
“Wh-what did you say?!”
“Listen, they’re idiots too, but they’re desperate. Hunting them down won’t solve anything. We won’t just wind up fighting… We could kill each other.”
If the situation hadn’t been dire, Lloyd and Tanya wouldn’t have fled. The 12.8 million fil Lloyd embezzled was already gone. They likely didn’t even have their share of the bounty from hunting the lesser vampires anymore. We’d been paid our share for the job, but Lloyd had been in charge of the party funds.
They’d absconded with 16.8 million fil, 8.4 million of which belonged to Walter and me. It was a lot of money to steal from your own teammates. Skilled Seekers like Lloyd and Tanya would have had no problem paying it back. But they had chosen to run instead.
This was betrayal, plain and simple. They’d severed all ties with us. Now that they had forsaken the path of restitution, it was clear they had made up their minds. If we ever encountered them again, it would be as enemies, not allies.