Min-Maxing My TRPG Build in Another World - Volume 7 - Chapter 4

Summer of the Fifteenth Year

City Adventure

Classic adventuring resides in the realm of hack ’n’ slash, but all the swords and magic in the world will not stop urchins from crawling the streets. The maze of people and bricks cannot always be solved with tried-and-true methods: even should force be forced, violence will not necessarily tie everything up neatly in a bow as it does in dungeons.

I did my best to calm my unsteady breathing as I sprinted along. My arms and legs swung wildly in tandem to turn my body into a machine only focused on a few simple tasks: leap forward, land, repeat.

Rooftops were the pinnacle of instability. They were mere smatterings of shingles lying atop somebody or another’s ceiling, woefully unfit for running. The uneven footing clawed at my toes and heels, and nature had left invisible traps in the form of worn adhesives that gave way if I dared place weight on what it held down. Slopes meant to ward off rain vexed me to no end, turning the task of running in a straight line into a challenge. My slanted soles struggled to find any sort of grip.

But worst of all, one mistake could turn into a full-fledged tumble because the lack of purchase made it hard to right my balance once tipped.

As if on cue, a carefully taken step caused the shingle beneath to tilt—the whole damned roof was probably rotting—and with it, my body. I flailed my arms to correct my upper body and forcefully skirted my foot to the left. I could tell I was straining myself in doing so by the soreness in my sides and thighs, but I didn’t have time to care.

Mensch really weren’t made for the rooftops; this was the domain of peoples far more elegant and lightweight. Though I could kind of, sort of mimic their ways, there was no way I could pull off the same stunts.

“Whoa?!”

Yet I had a reason to be up here with my heavy frame and two clumsy legs: I was on the chase.

A little ways away, a tall siren was strolling along on the rooftops, and my target slipped underneath his wings. The damn trickster was doing this on purpose just to toy with me, I bet.

“Excuse me!”

“Wha— A mensch too?! Hold it, kid! You can die up here, you know?!”

I casually raised my hand in response, but the thoughtful humanoid bird of prey was right in every way.

We were three stories up, after all.

A quick eyeball measurement told me I was at least ten meters off the ground. Below was a street of stone-packed dirt—one slip would easily see me break bones or even die. No matter how well I rolled off the momentum, my mensch frame just wasn’t made to take falls from this height.

In retrospect, I felt like a lot of tabletop games had maintained fall damage as a lethal threat even for high-level PCs. Longer drops often came with extra dice worth of damage that went straight through armor, often only mitigable by magic or mystic tools. The greatest heroes still had to live in fear of gravity.

From where I was now, I could see a cruel GM refusing to even let me roll the dice, instead handing me a blank character sheet with a wicked smile.

And my mark knew that damn well. That’s why he’d chosen to run here.

“Feel free to chase after me, but just know that the consequences are yours alone.” He hadn’t said it out loud, but the sass was written all over his face whenever he glanced back over his shoulder to confirm I was still struggling.

Argh, dammit! Just sit there for one second—I dare you! You’re so mine!

Alas, the perp hopped away, putting one rooftop after another behind him. At times, he landed on thin ground that hardly looked to have a foot’s worth of clearance, only to leap up unscalable walls in the next beat.

Keeping up was taking everything I had. At the beginning of the season, I’d been deliberating between Agility and Stamina as my next stat to invest in...and I’d chosen the latter, leaving me without the requisite speed to catch up. Wait, no—perhaps it was more accurate to say that my newly leveled VI: Superb Stamina was the only reason I hadn’t been shaken off yet, as pitiful as I looked.

Still, I had to admit that his movement was impressive. Not only did he have the snap decision-making skills to find the hardest path for me to pursue him on, he also tossed in the occasional feint in order to take advantage of how bad the mensch body was at pinpoint turns. Yet in spite of it all, his perfect form showed no signs of fatigue.

Dammit! You’re telling me I managed to string along the jagers and Berylin city guard, but this guy is making me look like a total chump?!

“Wah?!”

A frantic step saw me catch air. I’d landed on a shingle that seemed normal at first blush, only to slide right out of place as soon as I put weight on it. It was a case of loose adhesive, as I’d previously mentioned...and it was sliding straight off the edge.

The world looked curiously horizontal as momentum took hold of my trajectory through the air. I’d already lost control, and no amount of limb flailing would keep me upright now.

Accepting my fate, I rolled shoulder-first onto the roof to spare myself from total slippage. I was met with a sharp pain in my shoulder for my troubles, but it still beat a trip to ground level; I’d take aching when I turned in my sleep over never feeling anything again any day.

Besides, now that we were here, I didn’t need to catch up. The job was as good as over.

“Margit!”

“Right here.”

Her response came almost before I’d finished calling. Just as the perp tried to leap to the next building, an arm shot out from the gap and caught him right by the neck. Shocked, our target shrieked like a screeching cat.

Er, well...more accurately, he was a screeching cat.

“Finally caught you,” Margit said, lifting up our feline foe.

The little escape artist thrashed around in a whirlwind of black, gray, and brown, but he was up against a huntress used to handling game many times his size. Margit’s grip didn’t budge in the slightest.

“Owww... Give me a break, you little fish thief.”

You heard me right: today’s quest was to hunt down a cat who’d swiped some fish and bring him back to the requester. That, and twenty-five assarii for each of us, was all the reason we had for running around and working up a sweat.

“You may save your excuses for the judge,” Margit said to the mewing cat. “By the way, Erich, is your shoulder okay?”

“Ah, I’ll be fine. It hurts, but I broke my fall, so I’m sure I’ll be better once I take a bath and rest up.” I’d dug my shoulder into the roof to kill my momentum, but not so much that it’d affect my future performance. Plus, that maneuver had left the rest of me unharmed. “More importantly, I managed to stop that from falling.”

I nodded over at the loose shingle replaced back where I’d found it. I’d figured that letting it just fall was too dangerous and caught it with an Unseen Hand; in the worst case, it could’ve maimed someone down below, which would have been way more trouble than the chase was.

“I’m glad to have such a gentleman for a partner. Well, then. Shall we go turn in the runaway for our reward?”

“Let’s. Not that the pay is worth the effort, but still.”

Holding my aching arm, I followed Margit and the cat down. I had to slowly descend by catching myself on bumps in the wall, but my arachne companion quickly slid down a silk dragline of her own creation. I couldn’t have been more jealous.

Now that the job was done, let me clear up any possibility of confusion: this boring job was textbook adventuring.

Yesterday, we’d wandered around town all day to find a lost personal effect. Scouring alleyways and digging through the mud between cobblestones to find a tiny ring had been monotonous beyond description. We’d gotten half a libra on account of the lost item’s value, but it was hard to say the work had been worth it when looking at our dirty clothes.

The day before that, we’d been tasked with roof repairs that had consisted of going up and down and up and down, carrying shingles all the while. One might wonder why we’d been doing it instead of a tiler or plasterer, but such questions quickly disappeared when considering that a specialized professional would demand anywhere from two to four times as much as an adventurer’s pay. Which, by the way, had been a tear-inducing thirty assarii.

Three days ago, we’d gotten something kind of adventurous in the form of a quest to act as a pub’s bouncers...by which I really meant we’d cleaned and washed dishes for half a day. Never had I thought the day would come when someone would compliment me for “not breaking a single plate” or “actually wiping down the tables.” Ten assarii each, for those wondering.

And today? We’d spent the day chasing down a cat on the rooftops. Surely, the youths of the world would drop their shoulders and sigh if they knew this to be the reality of a beginner adventurer.

But I liked it this way.

This was as fulfilling as new beginnings got. Of course, I loved the intermediate levels of a campaign where the party levels up, faces infamous monsters, and conquers legendary dungeons on their way to becoming walking myths. But I really loved the slow and steady progress of doing honest work as a novice.

At times, a lack of resources only enhanced role-playing flavor. Where a veteran party could solve issues with a single incantation from its mage, low-level PCs were gated by MP and had to think of clever ways of using everything at their disposal to save their most important resources for the inevitable climax.

For my money, this was what set TRPGs apart. Other games had checkpoints where magic was the solution, but the god of fate in a tabletop setting took a far more coercible form: anything could happen so long as the GM signed off on it.

The work was tedious, but when I thought of it in the context of those beloved systems, I was even glad that it wasn’t so easily bypassed. Margit wasn’t quite as enthused, but we took a day off every three days, and I made sure to take her out for fun every time; hopefully, she’d bear with me for now.

Getting back to today’s work, though, we’d made our way to the very brink of city limits. This was the Trash Heap: a gathering place for all the garbage in Marsheim.

That said, it wasn’t a literal mountain of waste caused by people littering in the area. This was just the drop-off point for broken tools and the city’s waste-collection services; it didn’t smell particularly foul.

Unwanted goods were gathered here mainly to enable their reuse elsewhere. Furniture was often carried off for cheap by craftsmen looking to refurbish and resell; if it was really bad, it’d be chopped up and turned into firewood. Man-made biowaste was kept in buckets—it was surprisingly odorless when properly stored—for later use as night soil. As for the mounds of miscellaneous compost, I’d been told that they were worth their weight in coin to the farmers in nearby cantons; apparently, the droves of merchants that swarmed in every spring to buy up this garbage was a sight to behold.

The city was, in and of itself, an organism. All that it produced had to be used somehow, lest the little beings who lived within slowly wither away. Efficient and eco-friendly—I was a fan.

Whatever couldn’t be used in any other way was thrown into a giant covered pit. At the bottom of the hole were the same living blobs of hyper basic goop that kept Berylin’s sewer system running. Clones of the original janitorial slime had been shipped across the Empire as a matter of course, absolving humanity of its perennial pollutive sin.

Margit and I weaved through the garbagemen and gong farmers—some were ex-convicts as evidenced by their tattoos, likely here on compulsory labor—to make our way to the “throne.”

It was quite the gnarled seat of stature. Constructed of broken furniture and bed frames, the artless pile of rubbish looked like the work of a child who’d spent their summer vacation on a haphazard work of arts and crafts.

Yet a regal being sat atop this throne: one large cat.

Other than the black dot on his face, the massive Lord Ludwig sported a luscious coat of gray and white. Note that the title was not for fun and games: he was, in very literal terms, the lord of all cats in Marsheim.

“Your Excellency,” I said, “thank you for granting us the honor of an audience.”

“As you have requested,” Margit followed, “we have apprehended your disobedient subject.”

Our grandiose demeanor and deferential bows were nothing of a game; cats were highly regarded in the Trialist Empire. All the largest cities in our nation kept a healthy population of feline helpers to hunt the pests and vermin that made their way into town.

That a lack of cats was correlated to the frequency of pandemics had been noted since even before the Empire’s founding, and there were records of many Rhinian city-states adopting similar cat-keeping practices even before imperial unification. We weren’t just following in those early states’ footsteps, however.

The other main reason was the existence of cat lords.

Common wisdom dictated that once some unknown threshold was reached in a city’s cat population, one outstanding specimen would emerge. That cat lord would then govern their feline subjects. If treated well, they would bring prosperity to the city; if treated poorly, they would vanish, taking the vital rat-slayers with them.

As such, imperial policy was to respect both the lord and their subjects in the name of the public good.

In the past, a magus had once offended a cat lord in an attempt to analyze their mysterious power. What had followed was a catastrophe so great that the history books had elected not to reprint the details, noting only that it had come about at all. I would’ve needed access to the College’s forbidden vault to find out more, but it was safe to say that whatever had happened, it had been brutal. Why else had someone like Lady Agrippina been careful not to rub cats the wrong way?

The law punished the killing of a cat with a thirty-libra fine or five years in iron shackles, no matter the circumstances. They were more thoroughly protected than some people, and I could honestly see why.

As for why we’d brought the runaway cat to Lord Ludwig, that was an easy one: he had been the one to put up the request for the little scamp’s capture.

The cat lords of each city made sure to declare to their subjects, Let thou not steal from the shops of this town. Individuals who were stolen from were on their own, but in exchange for their cushy treatment, cat lords kept a leash on the feline population when it came to interfering with business.

Unfortunately, not all cats had the restraint to heed such warnings. Those that broke the rules received bounties so that the lord could personally scold them.

Naturally, the task fell to us adventurers, leading us on wild chases through alleys and across rooftops.

Towering at a meter long even without counting his tail, the regal cat majestically rose and leaped to the ground with an air of silent fury. He slowly approached the cat trapped in Margit’s hands.

The fish thief seemed terrified: his ears were flat and his tail curled in between his legs. The lord cared not, batting aside the notion of pity with a huff of his nose; he leaned right in and scowled with such menace that even I was impressed.

Our perp shrank away and yelped in terror. This satisfied Lord Ludwig, who then twirled around, reclaimed his seat, and began elegantly grooming himself.

I guess that’s that.

As soon as Margit let go, the bad cat zipped off as though his tail had been lit ablaze. While it felt like he’d gotten off easy to us, it seemed like that had been a serious punishment in the feline world. His fish-swiping days were over, no doubt.

I swallowed back the urge to ruffle Lord Ludwig’s floofy-woofy coat of fur and took another bow before putting the throne behind us. Too busy setting his tail, he didn’t even glance our way—it looked like everything was back to business as usual for him.

The cat is in his nap spot, and all is right with the world...or something.

“Mrooow.”

Suddenly, a pure-white cat came out of the cottage’s shadows and cried at us with a little bag in its mouth. I extended an open palm, and it dropped the pouch right into it.

Opening it up, I found the plaque confirming that we’d finished the job...and a smooth, shiny acorn.

“Well, well, well. Thank you kindly.”

“Meow.”

I thanked the cat for its troubles by scratching it on the head and under its chin until it eventually meowed in satisfaction and left.

The cat lord had not only obvious intelligence, but the ability to issue commands. It was clear that Lord Ludwig’s position wasn’t just the result of the margrave’s personal preferences—though, admittedly, the Empire was full of cat-lovers—but rather a genuine tactical deal. I mean, some magia even speculated that they were divine beings who traced their powers to some unknown, ancient god.

“What a pretty acorn,” I said.

“Perhaps there’s something special about it.”

I raised the sparkling acorn to the sunlight. It had an endearingly fat and round shape, and it looked more like an oak than a chinquapin. We wouldn’t be able to sell this for money, but I had no doubts it was a first-class seed, considering how many rare knickknacks the cat lord had his subjects seek out.

Might as well take good care of it.

“This’ll be fifty assarii, so that makes...”

“Forty-one in our shared purse,” Margit finished.

The two of us always chatted about nothing in particular on our way back to the Association. Sometimes it was about work; others it was plans for our next day off; but today’s topic was our finances.

Each of us would put away twelve assarii as our own pocket change, and we’d put the remaining twenty-six into our joint wallet. This was our payout for half a day’s work, and we’d either need to find a quick job for the evening or do some grocery shopping and cook our own meals today to cut expenses. Although we weren’t destitute, this wasn’t enough to get comfortable.

That said, Marsheim saw a lot of traffic, which brought a lot of trade, which drove down prices—we were getting by. Fifteen assarii a day was enough to fund a humble life. Thanks to the missus’s benevolence, we only paid five for our room every night, and we could get food costs down below ten if we really committed to frugality. The idea of upgrading our gear or buying arcane tools was comical, but we wouldn’t struggle to put bread on the table.

Not that a life like that would be healthy or cultured, of course. If we were really down and out, we’d have to subsist on hard bread baked who-knew-when and milk well in the realm of souring. That could save us a few more coins, but it wasn’t exactly a real option for adventurers, whose health was a business asset.

While we’d promised to live simply at the start, neither of us wanted to lead demeaning lives, and so we ate proper meals every day. Not too luxurious, but not too meager—our spending was just right for a pair of beginners.

As an aside, the joint wallet Margit mentioned was only filled with the money we’d earned since arriving in the city. The one with all of our savings was sleeping safely in our lockbox.

Figuring that having too much money would only enable us to slack off, we’d proactively stashed away the bulk of our funds. It was just easier to motivate oneself when restrictions were at play. In my last life, I’d earned a decent salary, but tried to limit my spending to ten dollars a day; I’d also promised myself to use the stairs instead of the elevator if my destination was on the fifth floor or lower. That kind of thing.

Besides, we didn’t want to attract the wrong kind of attention by spending too lavishly as a pair of newbies.

“Do you want to go shopping on our day off? I was thinking about getting some more oil for the lantern.”

“That sounds lovely. The ribbon I use for my hair is fraying, and I’ve also been thinking about getting a new piercing.”

“Another one? Your ears look full to me.”

Shifting to a much more fun topic—we were allowing ourselves each one libra per holiday from our stash as a treat for ourselves—Margit began to play with her ears. Personally, I thought they were too small to fit anything else without getting clunky.

Most of her accessories were simple ball studs or bar piercings. Though our matching pink shell earring—speaking of, mine hadn’t been jingling at all as of late—was the only one that had a chain, her ears were looking seriously full. I guessed she could maybe fit another one or two, but at this point it would be hard to find enough space for a new hole.

“Mm... It’s hard to think of where I’d like one next. Maybe my tongue?”

“Your tongue?!”

“Or perhaps my belly button.”

“Your belly button?!”

“What are you so worked up about? My mother has one for both, I’ll have you know.”

Y-Yeah, but... Come to think of it, I’d been put off when first seeing Miss Corale. But wow, was she going for some...daring spots.

“I’d forgotten to get one to celebrate officially becoming an adventurer, and I’d like to put it somewhere special.”

“Sure, but...doesn’t it hurt? I’ve heard that it’s rough while the wound is healing.”

“According to mother, it isn’t that painful. Especially for the tongue, since it’ll be safe inside the mouth—though she did mention it was difficult to speak for some time.”

Margit was the epitome of nonchalance, but this was clearly a cultural splitting point between mensch and arachne. City girls of every walk were liable to be seen with piercings on their ears, but the tongue and stomach were well outside the bounds of what the average person considered fashionable. She’d even mentioned wanting to get a tattoo if she ever brought down a mark worth hunting; this was just something I’d have to accept as beyond my common sense.

Not that I could deny how it enhanced her bewitchment. The risqué embellishments clashed with her natural looks in mysterious and enticing ways.

“Besides... It isn’t like I minded the pain the last time you lent me a hand.”

A ticklish chill ran up from the tip of my tailbone straight into my head. This partner of mine said some incredible things; I might have been used to lopping off fingers or arms, but drawing her blood was an entirely separate matter.

But I bet she knows exactly what she’s saying.

Before I could come up with a response, though, a shadowy figure came suspiciously close, bumping shoulders with me as he passed. The mensch in tattered rags didn’t even apologize before scurrying off into a small alleyway.

“Again?” Margit asked with a sigh.

“Yep. Again.” As I answered, I pulled out two coin purses.

The first was my personal pouch; I’d bought it soon after arriving, and it was a simple bag with a string to close the opening and keep the handful of silver and copper pieces inside.

The second was a coarse burlap sack bound with a strip of leather taken from gods-knew-where. I opened it up to a pitiful number of copper coins.

As of late, I’d found myself marked by pickpockets. Even though I was dressing in untailored clothes, perhaps just having the funds to bathe every few days was enough to give the impression that I had money; I was met with an attempt at least once every few days. I supposed this was the life of an adventurer without an organization to fall back on.

Truth be told, I’d been receiving invitations from a clan for some time now—or perhaps they were better described as threats. I’d politely turned down all the outright scouting attempts, and as a result, they’d begun to pull these sorts of “pranks” instead.

Looking back, it had all begun with my own rashness, as justified as I believed it was.

First had come the Heilbronn Familie.

We’d helped out as bouncers-slash-dishwashers several times at this point, and one day, a drunkard had come in absolutely plastered when the sun still hung high. When he’d gotten a little too handsy with a waitress, I’d stopped him—and that had been the start of it all.

The sad reality was that the women working at taverns had to accept “accidental” brushes across the rear as part of their jobs, but no one was expected to endure an uninvited hand in their chest. And when the unpaying drunkard had tried to pull her into his lap, I’d stepped in to put him in his place.

That said, it had gone down about as peacefully as it could have. I’d just flashed him my most Overwhelming Grin and said, “You look to be rather tipsy. Don’t you think a nice nap at home would feel lovely around now?” Paired with my Oozing Gravitas that let my skill in Hybrid Sword Arts come through in Negotiation, the threat had drained the man’s face of color instantly. My best guess was that the image of his head leaving his body if he tried anything funny had flashed before his eyes.

Compared to a violent beatdown, I’d been very amicable, I’m sure you’ll agree. Besides, even if “bouncer” was only a nominal title, covering for the staff had been part of my job description.

What had surprised me, though, was that his friends had come back to repay the favor after he’d run away with his tail between his legs.

As much as I appreciated how the waitress had treated me to a free meal as thanks, she’d spread the story a little too far. As the story went, a young boy had chased off a member of the Heilbronn Familie—I hadn’t been in the wrong at any point, but I’d ended up throwing dirt on their name.

My little combo had easily scared off the fodder, but now the whole clan had its eyes on me. While their upper officers had yet to make any moves, I couldn’t deny that we were now at odds.

Yet it wasn’t as if I could have simply abandoned my post. Margit had agreed that I’d done the right thing, so it really did seem like an outcome of unfortunate circumstance.

On top of that, I’d also drawn the ire of the Baldur Clan.

I had to admit that I’d been a little careless in this case. Margit and I had been out shopping on one of our days off, and I’d let myself get sloppy when touring the stands.

Tucked away in a cramped back alley, we’d found a stall peddling suspicious pharmaceuticals. I’d taken one look at the so-called healing potions and furrowed my brow: everything from the salves for cuts and bruises to the drinkable stomach medicines smelled so faintly of mana that I doubted they had any effect at all. My mistake, however, had been showing it on my face.

Freed from an environment where thinly plastered smiles were required, I’d let my poker face slip too much. By letting my emotions show, I’d clued the shopkeeper in on the fact that I knew their wares were bogus.

Despite selling stock that was all but an outright scam, the person managing the stall must have been a mage—in which case, it would be stranger to think they hadn’t understood why I’d been staring. It was only natural that they’d have a grasp of what they were offering.

Taken alongside the whispers of forbidden concoctions that permeated the town, the low-quality wares painted a vivid picture of the kinds of people the Baldur Clan was looking for. The business set up in a forgotten piece of real estate was, in all likelihood, a front for a pusher.

This way, they could lay low and keep the ostensible veneer of running a business on the one-in-a-million chance the authorities came knocking. Nothing on display had been meant to be sold. Had they been a grifter trying to market shady potions, they could’ve just done that in broad daylight; it was simple enough to find an example or two at the local bazaar. Anyone without an eye for magecraft had to rely on the seller to judge any given potion’s efficacy, and untalented salesmen were a dime a dozen. Seeing one trying to pass along bad stock that they’d been tricked into buying by their supplier was common.

Yet I’d made a terrible mistake: I’d unveiled that I had a knack for the arcane to a group of people constantly hungry for knowledgeable dealers. I had to admit, I’d just let my guard down.

Honestly, why were we people so bad about that? I’d spent so much time perfecting the ultimate social armor—a vaguely polite smile—but the second I started having fun, it had gone straight out the window.

Ever since that incident, hooded figures had begun trying to approach me. Thankfully, Margit led me away whenever one drew near, but I had a bad feeling that this would become a major pain if we didn’t do something soon.

Were all shady clans in cahoots or something? The worst part was that it almost felt like they were all passing around the intel that I was unaffiliated. Without that knowledge, they wouldn’t dare to harass me so frequently.

Well, I had a lesson for these sorts of rude visitors, and boy, was I charging tuition. Whenever they came by, I swiped their purses and replaced them with small stones wrapped in scrap cloth.

In case you were curious, this trick didn’t take any magic—I didn’t have Divine Favor in Dexterity for nothing. I didn’t need specialized knowledge for a little sleight of hand; I could do this with my eyes closed.

Hm, it’s not quite enough to shell out for a nice dinner, but this’ll do nicely to make our afternoon break a little more pleasant.

“Margit, what do you say we stop for tea before going to the Association?”

“My, that sounds delightful. I would love to.”

The two of us turned into an alley of our own to get away before the fool realized he’d been counterfrisked. We still needed to iron out our evening plans, and a nice cup of the missus’s tea was the best way to do it.

As much as I loved how quixotic the tension between peace and danger was, I couldn’t help but lament the infinity of ill intent that plagued the world. I’d known career advancement would come with unwanted attention eventually, but this soon? Then again, lying down without a fight would just have led to us being exploited, so I didn’t regret fighting back at all.

In good ways and bad, my time under the Ubiorum banner had come with the ability to snap back at any offense in plain view of the public; now, I was a replaceable adventurer without the protection of a backer. All I had to defend myself was my own skill—but that was a double-edged sword. To think, half a year ago I would never have imagined myself being thankful for having a master wordlessly reminding me that I could set off a war if I let myself get carried away.

A backer, huh? It wasn’t like I couldn’t find one, but I didn’t want to eat my words to Miss Laurentius when they were still fresh out of my mouth, and relying on Mister Fidelio any more than we already were would just be sad.

I guess I’ll have to solve this one myself.

Toying with the extra change and listening to its sad, empty jingle, I shook off my doubts—this was just part of being an adventurer.

[Tips] Tattooing is the practice of using needles and other instruments to inject dye beneath the skin, practiced in some regions of the world. In the Trialist Empire, there are two kinds: those chosen as aesthetic statements, and those branded on criminals to mark them for their crimes.

The tattoo sentence is a form of punitive showmanship reserved for crimes that do not warrant corporal punishment but that cannot be written off as minor. These are mainly theft, robbery, or assault—only when caught, of course.