Chapter 19: A Den For Stragglers

Kael kept a lookout around him when they moved, made sure to memorize the streets they walked through and turns they took, just in case he needed a way out. He tracked landmarks like a worker tracks a job site. Broken billboard. Collapsed stairwell. A car flipped onto its side like a corpse. A street sign bent at an angle that pointed nowhere.

And also check and double check the newly acquired map.

The mini-map hovered in his mind like a second set of eyes. It was almost unsettling how natural it felt now, as if his brain had always been waiting to accept a floating screen. It showed him his position in clean lines and dots while the world around him was chaos and ruin.

With the special map that allows him to see both allies and enemies, he could see more red dots on the map, but these were grayed out, perhaps enemies that weren’t ’active’ yet. Or maybe just dormant ones. Kael didn’t like the word dormant. Dormant meant alive. It meant waiting.

The day wasn’t the time where the goblins attack. But that didn’t mean it was safe, especially with this red enemy walking right between them.

Kael glanced at the silent man again. The red mark hovered above him in Kael’s perception, crisp, undeniable. The others were blue. This one was not.

And yet he walked with them. Close. Like a wolf wearing sheep’s skin and being escorted into the pen.

The group headed through several passes, weaving between buildings that leaned like drunks and streets that had split open into jagged mouths. They crossed an intersection where the pavement had sunk inward, then moved through a narrow walkway formed by two collapsed storefronts pressed together. The air in those tight spaces smelled of old rot and wet concrete, like the city had been buried and dug up again.

Soon arrived to a building complex that had a large open area inside it. The building complex was four stories tall, with some of its structure still intact.

Its courtyard was wide, and it had that unnatural feeling of being too open, too visible. But the surrounding walls gave it shape, and the surviving structure created high vantage points. Kael recognized the logic immediately: line of sight, defensibility, one entrance.

There was one entrance to this complex, and it had several men standing at the front, acting like guards. The entrance itself was made of metal and further barricaded with old planks.

For Kael’s eyes, this was barely fortification as he worked in construction, but for them, this was safety.

He could see the weak points without even trying. The wood was split in places. Nails were placed poorly, not at the right angles. If something strong hit that gate, it would fold like cheap furniture. But then again, perhaps the fortification wasn’t meant to stop a monster. Perhaps it was meant to stop people.

“You’re already back?” one of the people guarding the gate asked.

His voice was wary, but not alarmed. Familiarity sat under it. His eyes flicked across the two men, then to Kael, then to the silent one, and Kael saw the subtle tightening around his mouth at the sight of him.

“Who’s the new guy?” the other one asked, more attentive.

“Someone interesting we picked up, I think the boss might be interested in him.”

“I see, is he…”

The guard didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to. Kael felt the implication. Is he trouble. Is he bait. Is he one of them.

“He’s good,” the burly man said. “I think the boss might like him, he killed a goblin with a sledgehammer, a normal one at that too.”

The burly man smiled, and for a moment Kael wondered if he was proud, or if he was simply showing teeth. Pride from strangers was often hunger disguised.

“That’s tight, c’mon in, John.” The guard said as he opened the door and took a look at the silent man.

“This guy keeps creeping me out…” the guard said though low voiced, but enough for Kael to hear it.

Kael almost snorted. He didn’t, but the thought came anyway: Good. At least someone here has eyes.

And agree with it internally, his instincts were spot on.

The group walked in, and the gate was locked behind them.

The metallic sound of it shutting, of a bar sliding into place, made Kael’s skin tighten. The world behind them was gone in a single click. If this went wrong, he would not be running out into the street to vanish. He would be running inside a trap.

Kael was a bit anxious as he realized now he had no way out, and had to see this to the end so he simply walked ahead, ready for any unforeseen event to unfold.

The courtyard opened wider. Inside, the air was warmer, protected from wind by the half-standing walls. It smelled like sweat, smoke, and the faint copper tang of dried blood that had soaked into cloth and never washed out. People sat on broken chairs and chunks of collapsed concrete, some speaking low, some quiet and watchful, some staring into nothing with the hollow look of those who had seen too much too quickly.

Soon after the gate, they were standing in the opening where several people were sitting on chairs and pieces of large crumbled bits of the building.

There was a man who was slicing at the tip of a piece of wood, as if testing the sharpness of his knife.

The sound was small. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. A steady rhythm that didn’t belong in panic.

Unlike the many tools Kael had seen, this was the first metallic weapon he saw yet. The rest were all goblin gear, brutish and crude and made of stone.

This was the real deal. An item, a weapon of the tower.

The man was middle aged, had a bald spot on his head, but his muscles and forarms looked like they belonged to a lumberjack. Thick cords of tendon stood out beneath skin made rough by work and battle. He wore a leather made vest over his own tracksuit, and looked too busy sharpening the stick to even care for who came in.

But Kael recognized that kind of busy. The deliberate sort. The kind where a man acts uninterested because he already knows everything he needs to know.

“Boss!” the burly man, John said.

Looking up, the man in the center of the building complex gave him a quick glance, spat the small stem of weed from his mouth and stood up.

Even the way he stood had weight. Not rushed. Not hesitant. Like gravity had decided he was allowed to move differently from others.

“Who’s this?”

“New guy we recruited, says he aint from the other faction, but wanted to bring him to you.”

“Stinks of goblin blood…”

The boss said it like a fact, not a suspicion. Like his nose was a weapon too.

“He killed a couple with a sledgehammer.”

“Who is to say he’s trustworthy?” the boss said.

His knife remained in his hand, but he wasn’t waving it like a thug. He held it like a tool. Like if he needed to carve Kael open, it would be clean and practiced.

“That’s why I brought him here,” John replied as he backed away from the boss’s path and let him approach Kael.

Kael didn’t step back. He didn’t step forward either. He stood his ground, shoulders loose, hammer still resting like a promise rather than a threat.

“Kid,” the boss said.

“Yeah,” Kael replied.

“You don’t strike me as someone who climbed high, you’re too… relaxed.”

Kael almost laughed at that. Almost. If only the boss knew what relaxed actually looked like. Kael’s idea of relaxed right now was simply not screaming.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep