We were still five minutes early to services, even with all the distractions and delays (giant spider monsters). He had a haunted look to him, and I heard him a couple times asking people if they were really quite certain that all the berry bushes in the village had been destroyed. I greeted people politely and offered pro forma compliments on clothing or careers or children, and discussed the weather in a general and genial sort of way.

  I met with the people like this was just another day, but Nathan was side-eyeing the hell out of me the whole time. He knew now that this situation was grave and terrible, but that we were now going to go to church like nothing was wrong.

  Look, I'm not good at taking advice, but I've had enough hints lately that I'm over-stressed and need to find some way to dial the pressure down. I feel better, more relaxed, and more grounded after church. It helps me. The only other thing is lethal violence. So, I'm going to go to my Sevenday services, and I'm going to pay attention to the parables, and I'm going to observe the rituals and do the recitations and drop some coins in the the tithing box and the alms box.

  It was relaxing, it was familiar, and it was the sort of simple sincerity that could really reach to me. I felt soothed, and I had a smile on my face when we walked out. Nathan did too, but his was a performance smile, worn while he was talking to the other parishioners and worshipers. We drifted out the front doors, with greetings and thanks for the ministers, and walked across the street to the public-house for lunch. The kitchen was serving up crown roast of pork, and I ordered a portion like everyone else.

  It was slightly underdone. I curved salt, dashed some on, and heated the salt to finish cooking it. Also, a little extra salt helps on its own. I ate quickly, maybe a little more quickly than is strictly polite, and I stood after paying. "Nathan, darling, I will be attending an errand or two. Please do be here when I come back to find you, yes?"

  He glanced up from his conversation with two thatchers, his mouth still chewing, but I was not waiting or slowing down. I went straight out the door and then straight into the void.

  Let him fume about being left behind miles from home, stranded. I've got work to do.

  For a while now I've been planning on traveling to the tower in Hartrend, and this was a good time to do it. I took the portal over to the empty building, and flew up to get in through the high windows on the top level. The lower windows were narrow, just arrow-loops, but high up where arrows would never reach, the windows were wide and open, to give better view of the landscape to see enemies approaching. An ancient watchtower, built to spy on an enemy long forgotten and gone.

  And soon to be pressed back into service. But only briefly, I would see to that. I took the ring off my finger, the Signet of the Seer, and gazed through it to see the interior of this room, the top observatory level of this tower. When I could look through here and see someone else, it would be time for me to come and kill them.

  Because obviously I cannot take Nathan on an all-you-can-stab tour of the monster infestations if I am not going to keep my focus planted firmly on the mage responsible for all of this.

  After that, I teleported into the city, to the scrivener's shop that operated under the name "Brandyblack's Notary". I floated myself up to the second-floor window, and peeked inside. There, surrounded by inks and papers, was a lich hard at work. All the tools of scrivening, his particular pathway to necromancy. He had found the symbols that defined the boundary of life and death and wrote himself a contract to keep himself suspended in a perverted parody of existence. And from that day to this he remained hard at work, putting his dry and deathless years to work in perfecting his knowledge of the magic arts and using them to do what he could not do with his single lifetime as a living man.

  It's just such a damn shame that most of his life had also been devoted to crushing hope, and ruling over all the land with terror and torment. So, I'm not really invested in letting him pursue those goals any longer. Besides, I owe him a swift death, again.

  I tapped on the glass.

  The dead man inside turned around to see what this sound was. When he spotted me, his mouth fell open in surprise. Clearly he was not expecting to ever see me again. He probably expected that I would not be able to find his next hideout without alerting one of his scouts or spies. I conjured void and let the singularity consume him, it grabbed first his arm and then yanked him off of his feet. Bones were crumpled like newspapers and compressed down into invisibly-microscopic materials. The light and motion distorted so it looked like his body was being yanked through a spiral and distorted cruelly, stretched and distended into a long tapering strand. I smirked as the runaway gravity well swallowed him and destroyed his body down to atoms, and then I released it to blast his pulverized corpse all over the room. The boom of it could be heard from blocks away, his windows rattled in their frames. While dust was sifting down off the rafters, I swept all the papers in this room into his fireplace to burn away months of work, and forcing him to use his next back-up body.

  It was the same lich, after all, who wrote the sigils that burned down my family home. I hold grudges. He burned down my home once and I destroyed his shop once. But he still owes me several lives.

  Apparently he keeps the same methods, a human servant working the front of the shop. Whoever was downstairs came running up the stairs after the explosion to investigate the noise, so I teleported away back to Skydown. It was about a half-hour later, and Nathan was sitting at a bench with a clear view of the front door of the pub and the street outside, so he was jumping to his feet while I was still blinking the blotchy red stars out of my vision.

  "If you were not back soon I was to think that you were not as sincere about your sense of urgency as you claimed," he quipped.

  "Your sense of urgency is brand-new because you just saw the monsters for the first time," I told him. "And then I left you with the people most likely to suffer if this does not come under control. My urgency in this matter has had fifteen years to firm itself. It does not waver easily."

  "Well, the sooner we get back to the Academy, the sooner I can be sure everyone is all right," he said.

  Everyone, Nathan? Or just one particular everyone? Maybe a princess, Nathan?

  Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm being judgmental. But I feel like his thoughts are already with her instead of with his duty. Still, I'm a woman of my word: I brought him back and dropped him off at the school, and then returned to my room to change clothes. I needed something comfortable and hard-wearing.

  And not quite as try-hard gothique as last time I headed out.

  When I walked into the Final Form, I was wearing something high-necked in white, with a pale leather bodice and drapey layered skirts. I stepped inside, still half-blinded from the portal. The tapman glanced at me, recognized me quickly. I suppose they don't get a lot of paper-white fifteen-year-olds walking through these doors.

  "Your paperwork's not ready," he said to me. "Guild applications move slow."

  "That's fine," I said. "I'm not here to work, or to hire. I'm bringing a tip, and an offer."

  This stirred a little interest from some of the tables around the tavern. The Final Form is an adventurer's bar and like most of that type it serves many, many purposes. It's so intertwined with Guild business that it's practically underwritten as a Guild hall itself. The customers are adventurers and most of the staff had retired from the same line of work. The walls and rafters were a museum of treasure hunting, and all manner of contacts, confrontations and contracts were finagled within these walls. This was where people left messages, picked up rumors, made meetings, and lost fortunes.

  So someone walking with a hot tip is not unheard-of, but may be met with some skepticism.

  "What sort of tip, princess?" the bartender said.

  I raised my voice just a wee bit to be heard more clearly around the room. "Does anyone here like hunting monsters?"

  The tapman barked a laugh. "All right. Hell of a strong start. I'll cede you the floor. Dames and sirs, the princess here has a proffer for you!"

  I hovered myself up a foot, to get a better visibility as I swept towards the middle of the room. "The question before the audience today is: do you like hunting monsters?"

  "Depends," said one graybeard with a horned helmet sitting on the table next to him. "What kind, how many, what're they guarding, what're they hoarding, what's the bounty, and how many day's travel?"

  "Several different kinds, a great many of them, most of them are guarding nothing and hoarding nothing, there's no indication that there will be a bounty, but I can offer swift travel to the region." I rattled it all off easily, and made no attempt to soften the blow.

  "Dangerous?" he followed up, settling against his table. A tin plate was in front of him, and from the pile of bones on it he must have eaten about half of a sheep in one sitting. Cooking-grease stained his beard but his arms bulged powerfully, biceps like cantaloupes. Clearly not a man unused to danger and struggle, and he lifted his chin in a challenge to me.

  "Very," I said, again doing nothing to soften the blow. "And there will be little time to prepare, and almost no time to scout the enemy ahead."

  There were mutters at several tables. Mages glanced at men-at-arms, warriors whispered to wayfarers. Most of them were saying the same thing I already knew: this was just not how this is done.

  At the very least a prospective questgiver should walk in assuring everyone that the job is easy, the risk is nonexistent, the rewards are guaranteed, and all the variables are already accounted for. I am doing much the opposite.

  The gray-bearded man looked like he was grinding his teeth. Seething angrily, the first rumbles of a volcano. "You're offering damn little but risk and danger, girl."

  "That's true, but I'm offering plenty of both," I said with a sunny bright smile.

  With a grumble the man stood from his booth and jammed his helmet down on his head. "Fucking fine then," he said, sounding resentful at being tempted like this. "Fucking hate the outskirts, hundred miles from any tavern at all... I'll go get my gear and meet back here."

  "By all means grab your things," I said, "but at least you won't be out on the borders. We're headed to Meadowtam."

  A man in black-stained armor lurched at this. "Hold up," he said in a snarly, evil voice. "You've got monsters in the duchies?" He had a shaved head, several scars, and his lower face was covered with a bright-red bandana mask. He was wearing more knives than any two kitchens I've ever seen.

  "That's right," I said, still with a saleswoman's smile. "Sleep in an inn, breakfast at a table, killing monsters and saving lives."

  "Monsters in civilian lands?!" blurted a blue-haired woman in robes, already coming to her feet. There were long blue marks running down her hands, as if her bones were shining through her flesh with a bare azure light. She was not carrying any weapon I could see, nor a staff, but she certainly did not carry herself like a healer or a noncombatant. In fact, right now she seemed dangerously intent on my words.

  A voice from the shadowy back called out "what part of Meadowtam? I got family in Cosfull!" There was a rising rumble from that corner, this tavern had rather a lot of shadowy back corners. And most of the folk back there had that hard-bitten world-weary look of people who knew how dangerous and untrustworthy the world could be. People of that stripe usually wind up becoming the worst bastards in the world, or the most kind-hearted and self-sacrificing neighborly people you could ever find.

  The bastards usually wind up rich, and this tavern was not catering to the wealthy. The clientele here skewed heavily towards cold-blooded killers with hearts of gold who would throw themselves straight into a hydra's fangs to save a stranger. My pitch, full of danger and trouble, was like catnip to these people.

  Harigold Glitter had a few different occasions where Nathan would rouse the people of the Adventurer's Guild with a speech. I'm not good at speeches, but I do remember what worked on them.

  I picked up volunteers in the Final Form, waited for them to assemble their gear, and sent them over to Cosfull to deal with incursions there. Not spider-creatures, but giant swine that needed to be entirely dismembered before they would stop fighting. And Hearstcliff had other adventurer's taverns, the Final Form was not the only watering hole for rangers and wizards. I collected the eager expeditioners from there and sent them to Goggamun to fight against what appeared to be zombies. Fortunately they know how to fight zombies, because the minstrels of the kingdom recently started spreading stories about the hordes of shambling undead.

  There was a similar establishment in Cliffside, but it was actually a very posh and exclusive gentlemen's club for safari hunters and dilettante daredevils. And it had a strict "no girls" policy that seemed to go above and beyond even the sexist standards of this culture in this age. It took me an hour to get permission to send in a letter to be read aloud, but an hour later I had twenty eager prospects and twice as many sherpas all lined up ready to go. The last time I saw them they were screaming and fighting for their lives against what looked like demon toads.

  Every adventurer's guild and treasure-hunter's tavern would yield volunteers to the fight, and most of them leaped in with no questions asked. I had to slow some of them down and encourage them to ask more questions just so it would not feel like I was taking advantage of their eagerness.

  The local authorities were calling in the duke's army and guards, that was already in the works. There's not much that my void and I can do to transport a guard detachment or an army division. But a half-dozen adventurers can back a hell of a punch if I send them to the right places. And when they've cleared one infestation, they will move to the next. And when they're done fighting monsters... well, they'll be unpaid, tired, and with no sorceress to send them back to Hearstcliff. Hopefully most of them start finding work nearby, so that they're still in Meadowtam after the Upheaval. And unlike the duke's soldiers and guards, guild-accredited adventurers can level up. So killing blight-beasts will make them even more powerful when it comes time to fight the next challenge.

  Just in time for the war against The Blind.

  I'm trying to lay out my strategy early, get the pieces in position. It'd be a damn shame to be given the gift of foresight and not demonstrate some forethought to go with it.

  The adventurers that I spread through Meadowtam had, safe to say, mixed results. I would assemble stories after the fact over the next several weeks and months. Stories of powerful mana warriors who slew giant necrotic blobs that were threatening to absorb an entire village. Mages pursuing venomous porcupine-bears back to their dens and slaying them there. Small troupes of mismatched mercenaries that would escort villagers disposing of the poisoned bushes down into the deep caves and sinkholes. Entire parties assembling to take down an isolated hermit that was morphing into a giant harpy. Those gentlemen journeymen managed to rally back after the demon-toad debacle and made quite a sport of hunting down a flock of decaying pigeons that were traveling from town to town harassing citizens and attacking anyone who did not take cover. With thrown hammers and bolts of mana they were able to spend a whole day target-shooting and grinding levels.

  I had underestimated the appeal, if anything. I thought that the average adventurer in Hearstcliff would be interested in traveling the land and rescuing some villagers, fighting some monsters. I figured they'd probably be tired of thief-taking and bounty-hunting, seeking out bandit camps and culling predators near human settlements. But it turns out that every adventurer wants to be a monster-hunter first and foremost, and those that get by with thief-taking are only biding their time. The blight-struck areas became a tourist-destination for the adventuring set, and after word got out more of them traveled there under their own power than I had brought in myself.

  It was late by the time I dragged back to my dorm room, but I felt good about it. And my new achievement from the System.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  [ Quest Checkpoint Complete: Ambush-Sneaking, Havoc-Wreaking and Thrill-Seeking. 10 XP. Advancement : The Huntress ]

  Apparently this was a good productive day in the eyes of the System, as well as the saving of Hearstwhile.