Better Than One - Chapter 16 Whos A Good Demon?

One human looked like he took a serious pounding. The other one was missing a head, and it didn’t look like she brought it along, unless it was in her stomach.

“You’re not going to eat them, are you?” I asked, and she looked surprised, but I couldn’t read if that meant a definite yes, or a ‘hell no.’

“Found the two sneaking ’bout the place. Gave them bit of greeting,” she said with a grin. I asked if there were any more and she shook her head.

“Maybe we can get some information from that one.” I pointed at the one with a head. He had a trimmed beard with a few streaks of gray hair. “Can you [Heal] him, please?” I asked Estra.

While she healed, I tied his hands and feet so he couldn’t run, then checked through their belongings. They were both wearing light leather armor and were dressed for the cold, with fur-lined cloaks and boots. He wasn’t wearing a helmet, nor did he have any weapons on him, except for a worn out hunting knife.

“Wait, what are you doing?” I asked Globba as she was dragging the headless one away towards the cooking fire. She looked surprised and pointed with a finger to her mouth.

“Ugh.” Estra said, looking horrified. I turned us away so we wouldn’t have to see the grotesque sight. Ogre or not, a week is not enough to ever get used to that, but it wasn’t the time to be squeamish. We were short on food and she had more than earned it.

The old man came around shortly and was surprised at what he saw. His head and eyes darted frantically as he took in his dire situation. Though surrounded and wrapped up like a present, to his credit he didn’t attempt to flail or flee. One look at what was happening to his headless buddy and he was shaken, trembling. Frankly, I’d be pissing my pants if I was in his position. Especially once I heard Globba hacking away at her meal. At least she had the forethought to remove the armor.

It has been a strange week to place me in such a villainous scene. I don’t know if they participated in the recent attacks on our northern clans. These two could have been some villagers, but now one of them is dead. I don’t need this headache.

“What’s your name?” I asked, sighing.

“W-what do you want?” He barked out, his voice cracking and groaning under stress. I gave him a minute to settle down, but to also take in his plight. I asked again and his face twitched like a madman as if he was arguing with himself.

“Const.” He spat more than voiced his name in my direction.

Though Lan posted a few scouts and lookouts in the vicinity, no human movement has been detected. “Did you get lost?” I asked, and this time he actually did spit on my bare foot. At least I thought he did, I had to move my belly to the side and look down to make sure. No, he missed, but it was close. For some reason I caught myself picturing backhanding him across the face for such an insult, much like in a movie during an interrogation scene. I chuckled and asked him the same question again.

“We didn’t get lost.” He sneered at me. “Just scouting our territory.”

“Our territory?” I said. Did we miss some eminent domain public hearing?

“Sergei will murder you for what you did,” he said. His attention was focused more on what was happening behind me, as sounds of crunching bone could be heard.

“What we did? You attacked us. Just two days ago! Killed a whole bunch too,” I said.

“You’re nothing but vermin.” He growled. Well, scratch the ‘poor villager who is lost’ theory. He’s also not doing a great job of bargaining for a release. Just great. Now I’ll need to build a prison cell or feed him to Globba.

“You’ll deliver a letter, to my fa- to King Auster,” Estra said.

“Uhm, what?” I whispered to her. What are you doing? “Are we just for a letter?” I don’t know if letting this prisoner go is a good idea. It will bite us in the ass. “Are you sure? I thought didn’t we already talk about this?”

“I’ll deliver your letter,” he sounded surprised and hopeful.

“To King Auster.” Estra asked.

He shook his head, confused. “Varfyth has assumed the throne,” he said.

Estra choked, her breath caught in her throat, making me breathe harder to compensate.

“Brother?” I whispered, and she nodded lightly. I didn’t recall asking her if she had more than one. “The same one that you know?” She nodded again and with her eyes emphasizing ‘obviously.’

I walked us off to the side to talk privately. “Are you alright?” I asked her, gently.

“I-I don’t know!” She snapped at me angrily.

“We need to stay low. We can’t send someone out and alert your brother, especially now that he’s in power.” I looked for some agreement in her eyes, but her mind was elsewhere. “If he finds out that we’re alive he’d send someone to deal with us! To tie up a loos- ” Ah, crap. I sighed. “I bet those two are exactly that. They weren’t scouting the area! They were looking for us,” I said the last part in a whisper, but I wasn’t sure if she heard anything I said. She was chewing her lip, on a verge of tears. I walked us back to our quarters, and that’s when the dam broke open.

While Bansari was trying to cheer her, I was thinking about our situation. Her brother knows which way we went from the sewer and it would be difficult to mistake a two-headed ogre. This place is becoming more dangerous, and if these two humans don’t return they may send out more.

My suspicion was further confirmed when I asked around. Globba had run into them towards the south, and the humans that attacked from the north wore different armor. I had the guy stowed in a newly made prison cell. There was still more information I could get from him.

After Estra calmed down we dropped off two pairs of boots to the leatherworkers to size one pair for our feet, and the other pair for Bansari’s. The two fur-lined cloaks would also get stitched together to fit our wide back rather comfortably. The rest of the human’s leather armor we brought to the armory near the smithy.

The place was a bustle of activity bubbling with excitement, and Kuuz was as cordial as one could get. It was amazing what a couple of new spells could do to liven up their mood. His crew of smiths had more than doubled since the arrival of refugees. A group of them were making wire and weaving together chainmail. To make the wire they started with a long thin rod and would draw it out through a metal plate with various sized holes. By progressively using more narrow holes they would stretch it out to the needed gauge. It looked like a lot of hard manual work.

Kuuz said that it would take him the rest of the day and late into the night to finish forging all the steel bars I gave him. He was making several High-quality steel plate cuirasses, sized to fit the five dragonborn. I intended to bring Bansari along and asked him to stitch up a chainmail hauberk for her. My iron chainmail armor was still being upgraded to steel, and they were even extracting the rust right off the links. I was impressed with their work ethic.

Asking how to further improve our armor, Estra told me about [Enchanting]. Nobody here had the profession, so, for now we’ll have to get by with high-quality steel. It didn’t sound so terrible to me. She also said that the best armor comes from dungeons, whether as dropped loot or from suitable remains of some creatures. This made sense since that’s where we got the steel bars, a significant improvement over wrought iron. Maybe delving deeper into the dungeon would yield better metals.

While trying to find out about all the metals that Kuuz knew, I learned that my [Inspect+] skill might be extremely rare. Nobody has heard of it, not Kuuz and not even Estra. I wanted to see if he had some metal samples that I could [Inspect+], but all he had were the common ones I already saw. He did list off a bunch of metals that sounded straight out of fantasy, which reminded me about alloys.

Unfortunately, I only knew one, stainless-steel, but vaguely. I was somewhat sure that it was chromium that I needed to add. Or was it Chromite? It was something ‘chrom.’ I had no idea what chrome ore looked like, or how much was needed for a proper alloy mix. It would however, be a great addition to all the high-quality steel we suddenly had. Obviously, it had to be mined up out of the ground like any other ore.

Which was why we have been walking around with Kuuz on a tour of all the mining tunnels that were available to us. I was looking for something shiny because that’s how chrome and stainless-steel cookware looked like. As we slowly progressed around the tunnels, I would pick up and [Inspect+] every new looking rock that I could find. I wasn’t a geologist but it was exciting to get a breakdown of the components the rocks contained. Most weren’t anything I recognized or knew would be useful.

All the while Estra was grumbling about how it was unfair that ‘monsters’ had such easy access to High-Quality steel. Apparently, it is exceptionally pricey and sought after for weapons and armor among the humans. I didn’t get it, least of all because she and I were on the ‘monster’ side of things. Much like all the rest of her complaining, I couldn’t fathom what she wanted me to do about it.

“So monsters, erm .. us, we. We can make steel now, while it’s harder for humans. So?” I was frustrated. I understood it was an amazing boon for us, but if anything it’s even better that the humans have a large demand for it. Maybe we could establish some kind of trade? It would solve all our food problems.

“Forget it!” She finally let up, and I could concentrate on the reason why we were out here in the first place. I picked up a quartz-looking, shiny rock with gold streaks the size of my fist. “Is this gold!?” I asked Kuuz excitedly, trying to scratch out a few golden specks out. He took one look and chuckled.

“That’s fool’s gold,” he said, while I looked through a long list of elements. The two-pound rock included mostly Quartz and something called ‘Iron Pyrite’ in combination with a whole slew of other minerals and elements. Towards the bottom was gold! A tiny smidgen of 0.23%, but still!

“No, no. It has gold!” I said and channeled [Extract Substance]. Blue wispy tendrils that I assumed were some kind of visible manifestation of mana flowed out the rock. Slowly, the blue wisps congealed into a tiny gold point that grew and expanded into a shiny flake.

He didn’t respond but was instead shaking his head with disappointment clearly written on his face. However, the tiny speck grew larger and larger by the second, much like his curiosity. Within half a minute the rock ran dry and I had a small two-gram nugget of 100% pure gold in the palm of my hand, while Kuuz had his mouth hanging open. We all marveled at the lustrous glow of the golden treasure the size of a bee. I was excited for a whole minute until I started thinking about what I was going to do with gold in a place without a market.

“Do ogres at that village trade in gold?” I asked. “What can we do with gold?”