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Isekai Terry TOD: Chapter 22 – Unburdened…Nope, Still Burdened
🕑 Added 2024-06-12 04:07:58 +0000 UTC“You can’t come with me!” shouted Terry.
He was standing on the road, and Drumstick was standing just inside the trees of the forest. The big stupid beast was giving him sad eyes, which just seemed like something a fourteen-foot chicken-lizard shouldn’t be able to do. As far as Terry was concerned, you could either be huge and terrifying, or you could emotionally blackmail with your eyes like a puppy. You didn’t get to have it both ways. Even if I wanted to let it come, which I don’t, it would end badly. Someone would kill it or at least try to kill it. While Terry knew the thing was obnoxiously harmless, as proven by its complete unwillingness to fight anything, no one else would know that. Terry figured any adventurer rank three or higher who saw it would immediately attack. Drumstick just looked like something that an adventurer should kill.
“Go on! Go back to the land of the chicken-lizards and have yourself some chicken-lizard babies.”
Drumstick cocked its head to one side like it was thinking hard about what Terry had said, which gave him a brief moment of hope. Then, the beast started to walk toward him.
“No! Back into the forest! If you try to follow me, they will kill you.”
Drumstick froze for a few seconds before backing into the forest a little. It took another ten minutes of Terry alternating between coaxing and yelling with Drumstick looking back at him every other step before the beast finally vanished back into the forest. Rubbing his face with his hands, Terry started down the road.
“I swear I need a nap after that.”
Not that he dared to stop anywhere near where he was at that moment. It would be too much like inviting Drumstick to come and find him. As the miles slowly accumulated, though, a sense of lightness started to overtake his mental fatigue. A lot of things ranging from unfortunate to terrible had happened to him recently, but he was free of all of that for the time being. The stupidly pretty people were nowhere in sight. He was mostly sure that he’d gotten rid of the thing that the Church was using to track him. There was no busty farm girl shouting in his ear every fifteen minutes. He’d even managed to get rid of his oversized beast stalker. Things were actually, finally starting to look up for a change. All he needed to do now was keep a low profile, see if he could cash in with the foliasaur’s head, and keep heading south. He just needed to hope that the Adventurer’s Guild wasn’t too cozy with the Church, but there was exactly nothing he could do about that. So, he put it out of his head.
As one day passed into the next with no signs of pursuit and no creepy sensation that he was being watched all the time, Terry’s hyper-paranoia receded to mere heightened paranoia. After weeks in the former state, heightened paranoia felt downright restful. That wasn’t to say that he was friendly with anyone he saw. Far from it. He’d seen what being helpful and vaguely friendly got him. Nothing he wanted. So, anytime he met some other traveler, he responded to attempts at conversation with monosyllables or grunts while letting his hand rest on the hilt of his sword. He didn’t know if that was how all adventurers acted, but it felt like a safe move to him. The whole stoic warrior thing minimized the possibility of saying something he shouldn’t. Plus, it had the intended effect of closing down most discussions within fifteen seconds.
When he finally saw walls in the distance, Terry was a little surprised. It was just one more indication that the primitive pseudo-map he carried was all but useless. He thought he was going to be coming up on another town. This place was more the size of a small city than a town. His annoyance soon turned to happiness, though. In towns, people cared about what happened with other people because the web of connections ran much deeper. Nobody was going to care about him in a small city. As long as he didn’t do anything too flamboyant, there was a good chance that no one would even notice him. He would bask in the golden glow of anonymity and mediocrity, the greatest camouflage ever invented. While he didn’t think his light was too bright, Terry was perfectly happy to hide it under a bushel. And it worked! When Terry arrived at the gates to Riverside, a perfectly sensible name except for the complete lack of a river nearby, the guard barely looked at him.
“State your business,” said the obviously bored guard.
Terry flashed his Adventurer’s Guild credentials and said, “Adventurer’s Guild business.”
“You may enter,” droned the guard.
Terry went to step through the gate and then paused. He hated to do anything at all that might make him memorable, but he didn’t imagine asking for direction would stand out too much.
“Can you tell me how to get to the Guild here?” asked Terry while doing his best to keep his nervousness in check.
His efforts were wasted, though, since the guard didn’t even blink. He just rattled off some instructions in that same bored droning tone. Success, thought Terry. Zero interest mustered. Murmuring thanks to the guard in an equally bored voice, Terry entered the city. There was something of a crush of people right at the gate. He didn’t understand exactly why that was until he realized that there were merchants, or what he assumed were representatives for merchants, trying to find the right wagons. He supposed it was theoretically easier to meet people at the gate and cause a traffic jam than it was to track down one wayward farmer in the city. There were also pickpockets at work in the crowd. Most of them were kids. One or two very hard looks let them know that he knew they were there. They seemingly decided to try their luck with less observant people, which seemed to be almost everyone at the gate.
He quickly broke free from that ever-shifting quagmire of merchants, thieves, horses, and wooden vehicles. It wasn’t until he walked a fair distance that it hit Terry how unlike him it was to simply ignore something like a child thievery ring. At the very least, he should have been appalled by that fact, but he was having a hard time even generating a little righteous indignation. It wasn’t exposure that had dulled his outrage. He’d only spent time in one other town. Shaking his head, Terry realized that more and more must be bleeding through from the other-knowledge. That was another problem he needed to face soon but maybe not until he’d gotten a little farther away from known dangers. He felt at least a little confidence that he could survive in the largely uncharted forests given that he’d done it for weeks. That would give him a bit of an advantage if he needed to, for example, run away and hide.
He felt profoundly less certain that he could hide in a town or city. It must be possible to hide, or people like pickpockets couldn’t possibly survive for any length of time. Yet, he was keenly aware of the distance between possible for someone and possible for him. No, I need to finish my business here as fast as I can and then leave. No detours. No inns. Maybe a quick stop at a market for some extra food, and then get the hell out of town. With that in mind, Terry went straight to the Adventurer’s Guild. The Guild Hall was substantially bigger than the last one he’d been at, but it maintained the basic exterior look. The only sign that he was in the right place was the plaque outside. He pushed open the door and looked around. The setup was basically the same. There were boards where jobs were listed. There were tables where a motley mix of people sat, talked, or boasted loudly about accomplishments that Terry didn’t care about.
At the back of the room was the bar he hoped to see. A slender man with a thoughtful expression stood behind the bar. Terry just hoped the man was less predatory than the woman he’d dealt with last time. He walked to the back of the room without making eye contact with the other adventurers. He didn’t want anyone to decide that they wanted to become his new best friend long enough to rob him later. The man behind the counter gave him a professionally polite smile.
“Hello. Are you a member?”
Terry silently dropped his guild badge on the counter. The man picked it up, did something that made it glow, and nodded.
“Welcome to Riverside Guild Hall. How can I help you?”
“I killed something on my way here,” said Terry. “I don’t know if there’s a bounty for it, but it seemed like the kind of thing someone might want dead. So, I thought I’d check.”
“Of course,” said the man. “Do you have some piece of it with you for identification?”
Terry nodded, lifted the sack, and dumped the foliasaur’s head onto the counter. The slender man stared at the head for a dumbstruck moment. Terry became uncomfortably aware that the room was growing steadily more and more quiet. He resisted the urge to turn around and look. He had the horrible feeling that there were a lot of eyes on him at the moment. The slender man shook himself out of his stupor and nodded. He swiftly rifled through some papers that he pulled out from beneath the counter. He seemed to think of something, shook his head, and pulled out a different stack of papers. The man pulled one free and pressed it to the foliasaur’s head where it stuck fast.
“Very good. I’ll mark this job as complete. If you’ll follow me, we’ll see to your payment,” said the slender man in a slightly strained voice.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck! This is exactly what I didn’t want! Keep it together, man. Just play it cool. Terry grunted in the affirmative and followed the slender man deeper into the Guild Hall. Just before he passed through a door, he glanced back at the room. Every single person was staring at him. Some of the faces showed surprise. A few looked a little bit awed. Several people looked hatefully jealous. Oh man, this is bad.
Comments
ScarletIce
I think it's cute that he thought he could keep a low profile while cashing in that head.
Neal Callahan
"Oops I accidentally the dragon, is it worth money?"
