Chapter Forty-Nine - Aftermaths and Walks

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Rosario barely looked up as Cricket rejoined them. Her glance was just enough to confirm that Cricket was fine, though... she did linger a little on a small stain, right on Cricket’s cheek. 

“Find anything fun?” Cricket asked as she bounced over.

“Maybe,” Rosario said. 

They had made out--puns intended--like bandits. They had a few pouches full of loose coins now. There was a definite lean towards simple bronze bits, but there was a fair amount of silver and a few gold pieces. Probably more money than the average adventurer made in a month. Not much compared to what she had in her bank, but she wasn’t sure when the next time she’d be able to look into her bank was. 

She shook her head and refocused. Strange, how her mind was wandering a lot today. She felt... maybe she just needed a long shower? “Do you recall those papers in the bandit leader’s room?”

“Mhm?” Cricket asked. 

Rosario lifted the pages and waved them around. “Some of them have a cypher. But the Titled was lazy and he wrote the solution below some of the pages. I think we have the actual decoding script right here. It’s not impressive work.”

“What’s a cypher?” Lucky asked.

Rosario blinked, then turned towards the younger woman. That was a strange question until she considered how unlikely it was for things like cyphers and codes to come up in a small farming town. “It’s a way of re-writing text so that it can’t be read by those without the key. Imagine... do you know how to read and write?”

Lucky looked a little offended at that, mouth pinching and brow furrowing. “I’m not uneducated,” she said.

“Forgive me,” Rosario said. “Right. Imagine you take every letter in a word and shift it one forward in the alphabet. It would be nonsense unless you knew to shift them back. Obviously, a real cipher is considerably more complex than that. Some of them require rather advanced math to solve. This one... not so much.”

She had the impression that it was the bare minimum. A substitution cipher with a few extra steps. It was still going to make reading the text complicated, but much of it was simply not encoded.

And there were drafts of sent letters, before they were encoded, with the work under each line. Given a few hours she could probably decode the rest, but the text that wasn’t encoded was incriminating enough.

“They had backers,” Rosario said. She handed a few pages to Cricket. “They were receiving regular shipments of food and materials. They even had requests set up. And look at this page here, see this paragraph? It says ‘we didn’t see the family of four you mentioned passing through, they may have run afoul of the slugs.’”

“Someone was telling the bandits about people that were going to pass through,” Lucky said as she connected the dots.

“Quite possibly, yes,” Rosario said. “There’s a segment here, though.” She gestured at one of the pages that Cricket held.

Cricket squinted at the words. “‘Don’t target the red carriage. It’s filled with good countrymen from Crowthorne.”

“I don’t know what that means, necessarily,” Rosario said. “Perhaps allies of allies?”

“Or they’re targeting specific people,” Cricket said with rather obvious disgust. She made a face and handed the papers back, as if she had touched something foul. “I think this might be... politics.” 

“Yes. Rather unfortunate, that,” Rosario said.

If the bandit camp was political in some way or another, then it would maybe explain their level of organization. Though she didn’t have a good guess as to who was funding the whole thing. It could be partially self-funded? She imagined that a Titled (even a low-Titled) bandit was strong enough to earn a fair bit.

She had cut him down with ease. He had died and--

“Let’s keep moving. I think I can smell more rotting meat out ahead. We might find another zombie enclosure. The least we can do is put the dead out of their misery before moving on. We’ll hand these papers over to someone in a position of authority once we’re back in a proper city.”

“Mhm! Oh, by the by, I’ve levelled up! I am now just a little more perfect than I was before. Thou may bow in my presence!”

Rosario used [Inspect] almost on reflex.

Cricket

[Jester] - Level 30

“Congratulations! Level thirty is a nice one, you’re past the middle of the second tier now. Well on your way to level fifty. Weren’t you only level 27 when we met?”

“Yes, my most torturous relationship with you has caused me much work and much strife, and so I have endured and gained much strength to compensate! Fear me, world, for I have become ever grander and more magnificent than ever before!”

They discovered the zombie pen just a few hundred paces further down the gorge, right about the same distance from the camp as the last one. This pen was a little larger, with well over two dozen undead within.

She could have simply burnt them there. But...

“Lucky, are you feeling up to it?” Rosario said. “I’ll be more than accepting if you don’t want to do this. These are... were, normal people once. If you’re not comfortable fighting them we can simply move on.”

“No, it’s fine,” Lucky said. “We’ve managed undead before. It ain’t common, but it’s happened. I know that they’re not who they were.”

Rosario nodded. “It’s good training for fighting humanoid monsters.”

“Humanoid?” Cricket asked. “Isn’t it usually elfoid?”

Rosario cleared her through. “These are mostly humans,” she said, hopefully covering up the gaffe.

Cricket blinked at her, then shrugged, dismissing it.

Rosario opened the cage, then shut it again once a half-dozen zombies had shuffled out. It was about what she expected Lucky to be able to handle.

In the meantime, she settled back to watch, Cricket staying next to her. “So, new skill?” Rosario asked.

“Yup! [Ablative Humour]. It makes me a little faster and stronger against people that I’ve mocked.” Cricket grinned. “So now when I tease you it’s to pull out ahead!”

“You’d need a lot of teasing to catch up to me,” Rosario said.

“Then I’ll start right now!”

Rosario resisted the urge to roll her eyes, but she did find herself wanting to smile. Strange that just a few moments ago, she was feeling a little off. 

Cricket tilted her head to the side while looking up to her. “You okay?”

“I’m fine, Cricket,” Rosario said. “I’ll be fine.”

“Hmm hmm,” Cricket said.

Lucky soon put down the last zombie of the first batch, and Rosario gave her a minute to cool down before sending in another wave. A smaller one this time.

Lucky was still flailing a little. Her footwork was decent, but she wasn’t used to the uneven terrain of the forest, and her swordwork wasn’t perfect. Too often she struck with the edge unaligned, leaving her cuts to lose a lot of strength. 

Still, she wasn’t bad, and she was becoming used to adjusting herself. By the time they were done and the last of the zombies was cut down, Lucky was panting heavily and was a little sweaty, but she had come out of the fight without taking any injuries.

To be fair, most of the zombies weren’t too much stronger than she was. They had a higher level than her current job, but not all of her cumulative jobs. The main threat they posed came from their relative toughness and their unrelenting nature. It actually made the zombies almost ideal as practice dummies.

Rosario cast a few spells, lighting the entire group on fire. Then, after watching the flames fade a few minutes later, with only ashes remaining, she gestured. “Let’s go. We have lost ground to make up for.”

Cricket groaned. “You’re not going to have us job to catch up to where we would have been, right?”

“That’s an excellent idea!”

“Cruellest of all taskmasters! I need, nay, I demand, pampering of the highest quality once this is done. My toes need to be massaged most gently and my calves squeezed, my back stretched and my insides wiggled!”

“W-wiggled?” Lucky asked as she flushed red.

“Most wigglishly!” Cricket agreed, then she started making a strange gesture with all of her fingers that really shouldn’t have been so lewd, but in the current context.

“Fine, we can walk a little,” Rosario said. “Let’s at least get to the end of the gorge before the sun starts to set. I’d like to start making my way across the plains tomorrow. From what I’ve heard there are frequently undead on that plain. They tend to move towards any travellers not moving rapidly enough, so we might well be targetted.”

“And the slugs!” Cricket said. “Don’t forget those nasty cousins of mine.”

“I don’t think slugs are part of your family tree,” Rosario said.

“They are bugs, are they not?”

“I... okay, so I honestly don’t know, but I know they’re not insects. I don’t know what counts as a bug.”

“Spiders!” Cricket said with more finger wiggling, this time with her hands under her head to mimic eight little legs.

Rosario shuddered. “If we encounter anything of that sort... I’ll take care of it.”

“Is Swordmaster Thorn afraid of spiders?” Lucky asked.

“Yes.” 

“I’m not,” Rosario lied. “Spiders and I simply have an understanding.”

***