I Was Reborn as a Daddy in Another World

The Return - Part 2

The week and a half following Katya and Val's aborted gilt council hearing was a whirlwind.

Val handed over the items he'd brought back from the labyrinth, including the hide and wicked horns of the dire bull, to Locke, a smooth-talking, dealer in the merchant's district that Katya had recommended. Since her membership to Terminus had not been rescinded, it meant that the guild would be taking a fifteen percent cut of any earnings, but Katya assured him that the number would be offset by the higher prices they'd likely get for their use of a council sanctioned vendor.

So far, she'd been right. Money had been trickling in over the days as each of the items was sold off to various craftsmen, artisans and resellers. They'd yet to find a buyer for the horns, but Locke assured them both that the item was rare enough to fetch a significant price from the right buyer.

Which was lucky for the two of them. Katya had been studiously avoiding spending too much time in the Terminus base, so the two had set up camp in a couple of rooms in one of the nicer inns on the edge of the royal district, from which she dragged Val to and from the various guildhalls around the city. Each visit was, on paper at least, a social event of some sort, but that small subterfuge, and the relative prestige of visiting the major guilds, meant they were forced to purchase suitably upmarket attire to keep up the charade.

It was technically allowed, though considered extremely poor form, to poach members from another guild, but each night, as the crystal lamps grew dim and the tables were cleared, some meister or ward would find an excuse to pull Katya, either with or without Val in tow, into a dark corner and pitch her on the benefits of joining their organisation. They would, in honeyed tones, suggest she had outgrown Terminus, or that some clerical error was the only reason they had not voraciously attempted to draft her out of the academy.

Val sleepwalked through the meals and soirees. He had initially thought to use these suddenly opened inroads with the major guilds to seek useful information, but he had so far devised no plan, nor had any inkling, as to how he could mount another expedition to the thousandth floor with any greater success than the first. He barely tasted the rich food that even the middle-tier guilds served in their attempts to butter Katya up, and he refused the plentiful wines and liquors he was offered, for fear that if he started drinking at this point, he might never stop.

On the eighth night since their return, he sat alone at a table in the Forgelight hall, watching as Katya coyly received the advances of some guild-ward he had not been introduced to. To Val, she seemed a little off, though her outward behaviour was perfectly polite, she rarely, if ever, made eye contact with him in these moments. Watching her listen as the ward made his case, he wondered if he was imagining things. After all, he really hadn't known her that long.

Alone at his table, he idly tapped the crystal on his neck and brought up his stat sheet. His minor part in the fight with the bull had pushed him up just short of level ten, though again the gains in his actual stats of STR, DEX, et al, had been almost negligible. His eyes were drawn again to the single item in his 'Skills' list.

He stared at the entry, but the two words offered no more information than they had the other twenty times he'd looked. He was reasonably sure the language was Latin, but that was only a guess, though he figured it wasn't impossible that one of the myriad summonees who had been brought here over the centuries might have been an ancient Roman, or a Catholic school headmistress. Despite repeated attempts, he had been unable to recreate the golden light that burst from his palm and temporarily restored Katya during the bull fight, so, if he was honest with himself, he wasn't even sure that it was related to the skill.

Either way, Katya had not broached the topic with him, and he had more pressing things to worry about, so there had yet been no genuine attempt to solve the mystery of 'Fastus Patri'.