The moment she finished her sentence, Mia felt a small sense of accomplishment wash over her. She’d spent the last ten minutes putting together that sentence and puzzling out its pronunciation.
The four people, all four looking like regular humans with slightly tanned skin except for the girl sitting off to the side with sky blue hair and eyes, just spent a few seconds looking at her.
Before her self-consciousness could mount high enough for her to start fidgeting, they spoke as one. Their words blended together into a confusing mess of sounds that not even a natural speaker of the language could have deciphered.
Just as Mia flinched back from the auditory onslaught, a System Window popped up before her eyes.
[Hidden Quest: Linguistics] Unlocked!
Objectives:
- Spend at least 20 hours in the process of actively learning a new Language. ( Imperial Common ) COMPLETE
- Learn how to speak, write and understand at least 500 words. ( 1698 / 500 ) COMPLETE
- Translate 100 sentences correctly. ( 3496 / 100 ) COMPLETE
- Speak to at least 5 Users speaking the language on a natural level. ( 5 / 5 ) COMPLETE
{Newcomer }Note: This type of Quest can only ever be claimed once. If you claim it this time, it won’t ever trigger again. If you refuse to claim it, it will trigger again when you fulfil the Objectives with another Language. (This Quest only works with standard, non-magical languages)
Rewards: Imparted, System guaranteed knowledge. You’ll be able to speak, write and understand the associated Language as if it was your native language.
[Claim Reward?]
[ Yes / No ]
***
Mia barely even took a single second to consider her choice before she pressed Yes. Communication was one of the most important parts of society that separated humans from animals. Being able to talk to almost anyone from anywhere in the System’s Realms fluently was going to be a godsend.
With Imperial Common being hailed as the universal language, spoken in all Six Realms, Mia didn’t even hesitate. It was perfect, and might as well help her along her path to becoming the first step towards learning an arcane language and Changing.
The deluge of shouted, confused words launched her way that she had no hope of understanding before cleared up and Mia had a sudden feeling of vertigo as even her memory rebounded, every single word spoken to her before in Imperial Common now as clear in their meaning as if she’d been spoken to in English.
“Stop for a moment,” Mia said in fluent Common while holding up a hand, and then glanced over at the others. Then she continued in German. “I got a Hidden Quest that taught me the language in an instant. I’ll tell you the details later.”
“One of you finally got the Quest triggered,” a lithe, younger man with bangs of brown hair falling into his eyes said. “I’m Neil. Can we get this over with, we’ve been stuck here for days? Chop, chop.”
The other man in the group, one that looked like he could crush rock with his bare fists looked over disapprovingly at Neil while the two women in their group glared, the one with sky-blue hair looking like she was about to smack the shit out of Neil for being so rude.
“Sorry about him,” the other woman said, the one with a Mediterranean tan to her skin tone and her hair held up in a loose braid hanging over her shoulder. She stood up and held out a hand to Mia. “I’m Krea, I’m the unofficial leader of this ragtag party.”
“Well, hi Krea,” Mia said, taking her hand and shaking it politely, but stiffly. A part of her expecting some destructive wave of mana to come surging out of the woman’s hand to mangle Mia’s in a way similar to what she’d done to the Shadestalker Goblin that ambushed her in the Rift. “Nice to meet you.”
“That’s Gilbert.” Krea said, stepping back after the handshake and pointing at the big lug of a man. “He doesn’t speak much, and the other one is Nikki.”
Gilbert gave a grunt and a nod while Nikki stood up and with what Mia thought was shyness held out a hand for her to shake too and said, “Well met, as Krea said I’m Nikki.”
Mia nodded, then glanced back at Zeigler and raised an eyebrow. ”What do you want me to ask them?”
“Ask them to explain what their ties to Starhaven are,” Zeigler said, shaking off his astonishment at Mia’s sudden fluency in Common in a moment. “And how their mercenary company works, who they hold loyalty to and why they have been so cooperative so far. Don’t mention the suspected saboteur from Starhaven just yet.”
Mia nodded, then glanced over at a pair of sofas. “Can we sit? I’m supposed to act as his translator for you, and by the sounds of it he has quite a few questions he’d like to get answers to.”
“Stellar,” Neil grumbled, his face scrunched up in a near-glare. “Well, what if we don’t wan-“
He gasped, and Nikki nonchalantly removed her hand from the nape of his neck where Mia could see small ice crystals forming on his skin as he shuddered.
Mia didn’t focus on that though, instead noting how her Spirit Sense barely registered the blue-haired woman moving her mana to her fingers.
As I thought, they had a lifetime to hone their mana shaping. A few weeks of training barely brought me up to toddler levels of control.
“Ask away,” Nikki said respectfully as she lowered herself into the seat across from Mia with a languid grace Mia had only ever seen in dancers before.
Krea sat down next to her, plopping down like a sack of potatoes thrown onto the seat. The contrast only made the difference between the two women starker.
“Yeah,” Krea said, shooting an undecipherable glance at the poised woman next to her. “What she said. Ask away.”
“Well, let’s start with the easy one then,” Mia said, smiling in what she hoped was a disarming way as Neil stomped away to a corner like a child and ignored them all. “Where are the four of you from, and why are you here?”
“I’ll go first,” Krea said. “We are Adventurers from the Guild’s Starhaven Branch. We’ve been sent to scout out this stretch of land for Rifts or Dungeons and to survey the area for any sentient locals. We weren’t supposed to make contact, but we’d been told to try and be diplomatic if we can to anyone receptive to the idea.”
Nikki nodded, then cleared her throat when Krea stared at her imploringly. “It’s largely the same with me, though my main goal has been to make use of all the newborn Rifts filled to the brim with Rewards.”
Mia took a moment to let that sink in, while she thought over how ‘Adventurer’ and ‘Guild’ didn’t quite mean the exact same thing as the word’s English translations did. It was close, but there were a few nuanced differences.
Adventurer, for example, implied exploration, fighting, camaraderie, and freedom. However, the term 'Guild' implied some monolithic institution that had an almost indestructible grandness to it, unlike the tiny little guilds mediaeval cities had.
“Can I ask what that means for you personally? What does it mean for you to be Adventurers of the Guild’s Starhaven Branch?” Mia asked. “We have neither Adventurers nor what you call a Guild here.”
Some back and forth ensued with the two very confused women who couldn’t quite comprehend how people survived without ready-made monster-hunting mercenaries on quick dial.
“Ya didn’t have monsters before?” Krea asked dubiously, then murmured to herself in a wistful tone. “A world without monsters.”
“I suppose that makes sense,” Nikki said. “No mana, no monsters. Well, you can just take the Guild to be just … a universal middleman for freelance mercenaries. They have rules, have the right to call on Adventurers in a crisis and their ranks serve as an ironclad proof of an Adventurer’s competence. They don’t meddle in anything otherwise.”
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
“So it’s not a government institution?” Mia asked, trying to be subtle about the direction she’d been told to guide the questioning, but by the squinted look Nikki sent her way, she was failing at it spectacularly.
“Adventurers are freelance mercenaries,” the blue-hared girl reiterated. “We can take on jobs outside of monster hunting, but we’d be doing that as random people and not as Adventurers. The Guild wouldn’t stand for that. Aside from that, only natural or other crises that involve monsters or magical creatures are the only times we are called into active service and have to obey the army.”
“I don’t suppose having your Plane merged with a planet chock full of monsters and Rifts would count as one such crisis?” Mia asked as nonchalantly as she could manage.
“Aaaaahhh!” Krea said, then facepalmed. “You think we are spies, don’t you? … That makes so much sense. So that’s why we’re locked up!”
Mia grimaced, but quickly centred herself as she felt Carmilla shift next to her at the sudden shout, with the rest now lingering behind her doing the same. She patted the vampire’s knee gently, glancing over at her with a look that said everything was fine.
“A perfectly valid worry to have in your situation,” Nikki said, trying to similarly calm Krea down, but with much less success. After giving a defeated sigh, she looked over at Mia and at the people behind her. “We are primarily scouting for Rifts, Dungeons or even Monster Nests. Finding local settlements was a much lower-priority, secondary objective … though that was before we learned that this planet was populated by humans.”
“Is that weird?” Mia asked, frowning.
“Well, coming to a whole new Realm, we were expecting something much, much weirder,” Nikki said. “Then we found only regular old humans and a few other races we were already familiar with.”
“Yeah,” Krea said. “We thought we’d find talking spiders or the like at best, maybe intelligent slimes … or floating octopuses …“
“Well, I guess I’ll just ask the rest of the questions I’d been told to ask.” Mia shrugged. “What are your ties to the Kingdom of Starhaven? Do you own fealty to its king and why have you been so surprisingly cooperative so far?”
“For the three of us,” Krea said, motioning to herself and the two men. “We were just there on … business. There is a bunch of pretty nicely curated Rank 0 Rifts and even a pair of nicely curated Dungeons available for just a tax on loot taken out for Adventurers in Starhaven. Our home was much more … tyrannical. So we ditched it, but then we found ourselves perfectly positioned to take advantage of the merging, so here we are, scouting.”
“I have family there,” Nikki said after a moment, grimacing. “But we don’t keep in touch, and I have little intention of heading back. I swore no Oaths if that’s what you mean by the second question. As for being cooperative, well … we thought being diplomatic would be the easiest way of getting out of here without blasting our way out with magic.”
“And the beds,” Gilbert cut in from the side, nodding sagely as he leaned against the wall with his arms crossed. “This is the first time I slept in a bed this good in months. Fuck camping.”
“Yeah, that too.” Krea shrugged helplessly. “You have Rifts here, Rank 0 ones we could delve and Clear for you and you have food, water and beds. We could have gone with breaking out and delving some Rift deep in the wilderness, but that’d be an absolute pain when compared to just walking down the street to the nearest Rift.”
“Do you think they are lying?” Mia asked in German, whispering the question into Carmilla’s ear. Sadly, it didn’t have the effect Mia had half-hoped for, and the redhead just shrugged.
“Didn’t seem like that to me,” Carmilla said. “But I’m not a foolproof lie-detector.”
Mia nodded, then glanced back at the Colonel as she asked, “Any other questions? They’ve answered the previous ones.”
“How?” Zeigler asked and Mia summarised the duo’s answer, which left the older career soldier stunned for a moment. “Beds? And they want to delve our Rifts for us?”
“They specifically said ‘Clear’,” Mia said. “And I don’t think Destroying Rifts is going to go over well with them, it seems like Rifts are a rare commodity where they come from.”
“Ask them who they are scouting for,” Zeigler said after a moment. “No, ask who’s going to have access to whatever information they get from us here.”
Mia did so, and the two women just shrugged.
“Beats me,” Krea said. “Could be not even the Guild rep we give our report to bothers to read it, or it could end up on the Guild Master’s table for all I know. Hell, could be it goes as far as to end up on the Prince’s table.”
“The Prince’s?” Nikki asked, clearly dubious about something in that statement. “Why not on the King’s while you’re at it?”
“That’d be challenging,” Krea shrugged, raising a dubious eyebrow at the blue-haired woman. “Considering the King’s stuck in the Mystic Realm along with everyone else. Did you not even stay for the first speeches and just run for the hills the moment the System Notifications came?”
“What speeches?” Nikki asked, gulping.
“King Thorne and Crown Prince Edwin were off-Plane on some noble get-together when the merging happened,” Krea said, likely as much for Mia’s benefit as for Nikki’s by the widening look of shock in her eyes. “That means Starhaven is now ruled by Lord Regent Arwen. You know, even we heard of him. That infamous rogue Prince that never slept without a woman to warm his bed and without his spear still being drenched in the blood of his latest victim.”
“What manner of outlandish rumour is that?” Nikki asked, sounding mildly outraged as she glared at the tanned woman sitting next to her.
Krea was unfazed, shrugging cheerily. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Young Miss. Prince Arwen’s lifestyle is the topic of every second tavern goer’s drunken ramblings in Starfall. I just picked one that was suitably down to earth … would you have rather me tell them the rumour that he’d slept with every woman at court besides his own sister? Or the one where he supposedly picked up some bastard half-elf thrown out of the Astral Court?”
“Those are all unfounded rumors,” Nikki said, almost desperately as she looked at Mia with a plea for being believed clear in her eyes. “Krea and the rest of them never even stepped foot in the capital, don’t believe a word they say.”
“Well, at least now the girl knows whose loyalty lays where,” Krea said, a wicked grin on her face as Nikki froze. “Ain’t that true? You ran away from home, but you still want to protect your infamous prince’s honour. Building a new life out here my shapely butt.”
Nikki just glared at the other woman, her teeth gritted as the blue of her eyes went from the welcoming colour of the sky to the bluish tint of a frozen glacier. Her whole demeanour, from her eyes to her poise, radiated coldness and an inevitable, creeping death.
“That girl’s bloodline is quite something,” Carmilla whispered into Mia’s ears, her warm breath on the petite girl’s overly-sensitive earlobe sending a shiver down her spine and distracting her from the tense stare-off happening before her. “Nowhere as good as yours, but it smells tasty. Feels … developed, well cultivated. If I had to guess, she’d been fed bloodline strengthening Elixirs and Natural Treasures associated with her Element since she could eat solid food.”
“What’s happening?” Zeigler asked, his voice authoritative and serious enough to snap the two girls out of their little world even if they couldn’t understand the words he spoke.
“The three tanned ones are freelance mercenaries,” Mia said. “But it seems the blue-haired girl is some … runaway noble girl? I think that’s what the other woman was alluding to. Anyway, the mercenary woman sort of made the blue-haired one protect the honour of a Prince of Starhaven by basically trash-talking him under the guise of telling me ‘common rumors’ about him.”
“I see,” Zeigler said, eying the two women for a few seconds in silence before he spoke up again, not breaking his eye contact with them. “Ask them whether they’d be willing to stay in Graz without reporting any of their findings back to that Guild of theirs.”
Mia did so, translating the question for the two of them to Imperial Common.
“Depends?” Krea said uncertainly, glancing over at the two men in her party. “We usually talk anything like this through, and doing so would tank our rating and likely send our reliability rating down into the Abyss. We have until the end of the month to send back our first report, if we don’t send anything … they’ll likely assume we got eaten by monsters, but if we return unharmed a year or so later … we might even get kicked out of the Guild for sabotaging an official Mission we’ve joined. If we are to even consider it, we’d have to have a damned good reason for it.”
“I’m in,” Nikki said, waiting only a second after Krea was done talking. She sounded serious, resolved, and she stared right back into Zeigler’s eyes without flinching or backing down. “That I won’t have this … Krea throw verbal drake dung at a member of my motherland’s Royalty doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that I am willing to do anything to start a new life here and become powerful enough to throw off any societal shackles I’d still have on me if I returned home. If you let me dive Rifts without limit, I’m willing to even sleep and bathe under surveillance.”
Mia relayed the answers, and Zeigler raised a curious eyebrow at the resolute runaway noble. Then he nodded. He turned to Mia and asked, “What do you think of the rest? How honest do they feel? How much trouble would they cause if we let them stay?”
“I don’t think the woman and the big guy would be much trouble if they were allowed to monopolise a Rift,” Mia said. “But with that not being an option for us if we want an Obelisk, I think they might get … rowdy. I don’t think they’d get murderously violent, but they might try to strong-arm us into just letting them delve the Rift freely.”
“And the blue one?” Zeigler asked, his calculating gaze not leaving the two women.
“I personally think she really wants to start anew,” Mia said, her voice growing slightly sheepish as she continued. “I don’t know. She sounded sincere and said she’d be willing to live with some of your mooks breathing down her neck even while she slept if it meant we’d give her unrestricted access to a Rift.”
“And you said you’ve found a Rift just a little ways outside the city?” Zeigler glanced at Mia. “Do you think there are other ones? We can’t let them keep us from destroying the Rifts inside the city, but if they help with that, I wouldn’t mind them monopolising a Rift outside the city.”
“I can ask.” Mia swallowed as she returned her gaze to the two women. “What about Krea and the two guys? They really don’t seem like we’ll be able to convince them to not report their findings after we give them the only thing we have that they want.”
“Well, let’s float the idea with them and see how they react,” Zeigler said. “Then we’ll go from there.”
Nikki Illustration: