“We’re gonna be looking through your valuables. We probably won’t take much, though, so don’t be worried. Just window shopping, you know?”
Artil’s heart had begun racing when he heard the word “robbery,” but he frowned when he heard the rest of the statement. What was the game here? He’d never heard of thieves going “window shopping” before, and certainly never heard of them helping their victims to the floor so that their abilities were less likely to cause harm. What in the world was going on?
“By the way, don’t lie to me. I can tell when you lie,” the man said. He walked up to a man on the ground and bent down to look him in the eye. “How much eyt you got on you?”
“U-um, around eight hundred.”
“No, see, this is what I’m talking about. Tell me the truth—the exact truth. You have eight hundred and forty-nine eyt in your front pocket, plus an extra fifteen in your back. Don’t give me estimates.”
“R-right,” the man said with a frantic nod, reaching into his pockets to withdraw the money.
“Nah, leave it. We don't want your coin. Like I said, we’re just looking.” The armored thief looked down at the man’s hand, and grabbed his wrist, bringing it up closer. “That’s a cool-looking ring, though. Is it Enchanted?”
He shook his head. “N-no.”
“Damn.” The armored man looked back at the woman, who was currently walking through the crowd of people. “Hey! Want this ring?”
She looked back, leaning over to see better. “Hmm, no thanks.”“Ah!” the armored man mockingly held a hand to his heart. “My proposal has been rejected. I may as well throw myself off a bridge in shame.”
She rolled her eyes with a smile. “We still have some time to kill before doing something like that. Also, it wasn’t a proposal; you weren’t even down on one knee.”
“Damn. You got me there.” The thief shrugged and dropped the man’s hand back down, then looked to the woman next to him. “Okay, next up, you got anything interesting on you?”
“Just some coins,” she said. “Nothing else.”
“Well, not nothing. You also have a purse that’s been Enchanted to be made slightly more lightweight. That’s certainly something.”
She opened her mouth to speak, but was cut off by the man continuing, “Anyway, I don’t care. Keep your purse.”
“Hey, can I have that?” the dark misty woman said from the other side of the room. Artil glanced over, seeing her grabbing a small book from someone’s pocket. She held it up to read. “‘The Rise and Fall of Empress Lyra: Lies, Conspiracies, and the Truth.’ Sounds interesting.”
“I-I’m not a dissenter,” the man she took it from said, waving his hands in front of his face and averting his eyes from her terrifying form. “J-just curious about, you know—”
“No, I just wanted to read it,” she said. “You don’t mind if I grab it, right? You’ll get it back later, don’t worry.”
“Er, y-yes, I suppose,” he said with a bewildered—yet still afraid—look on his face.
“Great.” The woman pulled over a chair and sat right down, in the middle of the robbery, crossing her legs and setting the book between her thighs so she could hold it open with just one hand.
It seemed to Artil like it would be uncomfortable to sit like that, and he was suspicious for a moment, wondering whether she was planning anything, but then he remembered that she was a cripple. She couldn’t read with both hands. But that just brought up an even stranger question. Even with the magic obfuscating her appearance, how could she hope to keep her identity a secret with such an obvious feature as the lack of an arm up front and center like that?
Before he could think on the issue any further, Artil’s attention was drawn back to the armored man, who had stepped back upon one of the clothed tables.
“Okay, we’re just gonna speed this up real quick. If anyone has anything interesting, go ahead and raise your hand.”
Nobody raised their hand.
He leaned his head back in a manner that made Artil wonder if he was rolling his eyes back behind the visor of his helmet. “Good gods. Okay, so, again, I can tell if you’re lying to me. Everyone, I want you to think very hard about this. If you have anything interesting—anything that isn’t just mundane clothes or a few coins or whatever—show it to me. Enchanted stuff, Spell Crystals, hells, even just a good book or a neat piece of information. And if you don’t raise your hand when I think you should have, you will probably regret it.”
A few hands went up after that. And Artil hesitantly raised his own hand, too, thinking of the bottle in his back pocket. Perhaps that was something this brigand would want? He hoped not, though.
The man walked through the room, asking each person with their hand raised about what they had on them. Occasionally, he’d pass someone with their hand down and look at them for a moment, before commenting that they should have raised theirs. Every time he did that, a couple more people put their hands up. The whole time, though, he never took anything from anyone.
The woman still sat in the corner, skimming through the book she’d taken in an absentminded way. Weren’t these two afraid? Law enforcement was surely on its way, and if they weren’t, someone would find a way to contact them soon. Why weren’t they in a hurry? Why didn’t they care? Even if they left soon, they’d still be on the run basically forever. And for what? They weren’t even stealing the fortune of objects in these people’s possessions!
“Just a ring that quickens Health regeneration?” the man asked a woman looking fearfully up at him. “That’s neat, but nah, don’t need it. Thanks for telling me about it, though. Where’d you get it?”
“Um,” she stuttered out, “t-there was an Enchanter that came by every few months, a while back. S-she would travel between all the towns in the area. But I-I believe she was drafted recently by Etrin, to the capital.”
“Ah. That sucks. Well, anyway.” He shrugged and continued walking in an all-too-casual manner, coming up to Aril. “What do you have?”
“I…” Artil took a shaky breath, then pulled the bottle of glowing blue liquid from his pocket. “Just this potion.”
“Hm. What’s it do?”
“It’s a Mana potion. I may not look it, but I trained to be a Level 6 Wizard in my younger days, thank you very much.”
“Mana potion?” He glanced back at the sitting woman, who raised her eyebrows at Artil’s words as she continued to read. The man looked back at Artil. “Sounds nice. How much?”
Artil resisted the urge to sigh in disappointment. This item was expensive, something that he only kept in case of emergencies. If he were to lose it, he’d be out…Oh! More than five dinners’ worth of eyt! Would he really need to skip out to replace it? He slowly opened his mouth. “Er, it isn’t a set amount, but rather it multiplies your Mana/Minute by 5 for two hours.”
The man whistled, then gave out an elongated “Ni-ice.”
He held out his hand to Artil, who once again hesitated to put it in his hand. After a moment, he groaned in anger. “Wh-why are you picking on me?! I could really use this, you know?! It will be expensive to replace, such that I will need to go without some necessary comforts in my life. Taking it from me, just to…what? Allow you to fight off a couple more monsters? You are a selfish and rude man, do you know that?!”
“Uh, sure. Selfish and rude, got it. I’ll still be taking your potion, though.”
He reached down to pluck the bottle from Artil’s hands, and almost out of instinct, Artil withdrew his hands to prevent the man from doing so. But the moment he moved against him, Artil suddenly felt that crushing ability reactivate on him, and he was suddenly forced to focus all of his energy on keeping himself from becoming flattened on the floor beneath him. And during that time, the man simply grabbed the bottle and turned away, letting the ability up right after. Artil could swear he heard the man exasperatedly mutter, “Some people, man,” as he walked off.
“Alright!” the thief called out, “I think we’re heading off. You got everything you wanted?”
The woman nodded and stood from her chair. Really, her movements were quite refined, when he looked at them. She certainly wasn’t a noble, but she must have had a fine upbringing. Her posture was straight, her head held perfectly parallel to the ground. Why had she resorted to such a low life as this? Not just a thief, but an adventurer, to boot? He was simply left awestruck at the absolutely bizarre situation.
Regardless of Artil’s slowly catching up mind, the two quickly headed off. Before they left, as the people on the floor were fearfully beginning to look at each other, wondering if they were okay to get to their feet now, he turned around, calling back out to them, “Hey, by the way, anyone got another good book to read? I don’t wanna be left sitting around bored while she’s reading that, you know?”
Absolutely nobody said anything, moved an inch, even looked in his direction, as he waited for an answer. Artil didn’t know what it was, but despite the man’s casual disposition, he carried behind him such a strange power in his attitude, like he could do absolutely anything he wanted, that it struck into him a fear that wouldn’t even exist while facing down a raging Dragon. And he imagined the rest of the people in the restaurant felt the same way.
After a few moments of silence, the man shrugged, turning to go out the door. “Alright, I get it. Uh, feel free to call the guard and all that, once I leave. But I hope I didn’t ruin any of your nights, have a good meal, everyone!”
And then the door shut behind him.
There must have been at least three full minutes of silence after that last noise. Everyone waited for him to come back, or for the building to explode, or a monster to attack, or something to make the tension they all felt make sense. It sure felt like a living explosive had just walked the floor. But as the time stretched on, and the weight on everyone’s chests lifted, a couple people rose to their feet. And then a couple more, and then everyone was standing. The staff left their hiding spots in the back rooms, not even muttering between themselves as they glanced around.
And then, Artil, both unable to bear the silence any longer and wanting to get some sort of confirmation that he hadn’t just hallucinated the entire thing, burst out, “What the Hell was that!?”
Erani and I took a little more time walking the streets, using Index to look in the pockets of everyone around us to scout out if they had anything good on them. Our main goal was to find Spell Crystals, but we knew that was a longshot, considering the number of people we’d have to search. Unfortunately, we’d already asked around, and due to the Enchanter shortage throughout the whole Empire caused by the mixture of the empire no longer trading with the Koinkar Kingdom, as well as them gathering up any Enchanters they had within their borders to get them to work on military efforts, it was suddenly very difficult to find anyone selling anything Enchanted anymore. And that included Spell Crystals. It was apparently better in the capital, but out in these border towns, anything that was Enchanted and not being sold second-hand was pretty scarce.
So we were resorting to just searching anyone nearby and hoping we got lucky. It wasn’t a perfect plan—or, really, even a good one. Index wasn’t omniscient about the material world, and would have to personally check each person’s pocket it wanted to search. And it could only move so fast, search so many people, in any given amount of time. That was why we’d decided to run by a couple of the most expensive non-adventurer-related places we could find and tried to do most of Index’s job for it, asking them to let us know if they had something worth looking at, so we could move much quicker.
Our haul from the most recent one wasn’t bad—at least, it was more than nothing—with that weird thin-faced guy’s Mana potion. It worked great with my natural abilities. Well, it would have been an absolutely amazing find, if we weren’t currently in the middle of a doomed timeline, so we wouldn’t be able to keep it and use it in a fight. But still, I went ahead and downed the thing and started using its extreme regeneration abilities for Spell practice. I’d recently been focusing most of my Mana on charging up those Mana Batteries so we could teleport to the capital, but now that I knew I’d be using Time Loop, I could swap to doing all-in practice.
At my base, I was currently producing 94.1 Mana/Minute. After drinking the potion, that number went up to an absolutely staggering 471. That was almost five full Spell XP every single minute! It was so high, in fact, that casting Noxious Grasp was literally not enough to spend all the Mana I was producing. As a toggle Spell, the best I could do was just turn the Spell on and leave it on, but since it only cost 5.59 Mana per second, and I was somehow producing more than that, it still left me with some extra Mana that I could spend.
With the extra, I decided to contribute that toward Ethereal Armor. It was my next-best Spell to work on, with its powerful discount it could apply to everything I cast, and also the only other Spell I was using on a daily basis, meaning I was already putting a decent bit of Mana into it. So, in total, with this being active for a two-hour period of time, I would end up gaining a bit over 400 Spell XP for Noxious Grasp, plus 162 for Ethereal Armor. All from one potion I’d nicked from some rich dude! It was a great feeling. But also somber, knowing that I’d have to give it up after Time Loop, since there was no legitimate way I’d be able to get something like this. At least, not right now.
Erani and I went to a couple other locations as we wandered the streets. People would probably be looking for us soon, but we were willing to risk hanging out for a little while longer. Or, really, it wasn’t actually a risk at all, since we had nothing to lose. We, of course, had the side-mission of having Index analyze the belongings of as many people as possible, meaning we tried to stick to populated areas, but really, I was most concerned with just having a good time with Erani. It was her first occasion traveling through time, so I wanted to make it a good one. Plus, I really had barely ever used my Talent just to have some fun, so this felt like a good opportunity to do that.
We stopped by a few different places. We paid to enter a caravan by the edge of town labeled as the “Show of Wonders,” headed by a short and energetic man who seemed eager to show us all of the amazing things he had in store, and even more eager to take our money. We walked through the several rooms filled with glass boxes, where he told us the story of what he claimed to be the sword that belonged to the only Level 100 person who lived thousands of years ago, about the tooth that he claimed was taken from a half-Dragon, half-Human, a rock he claimed was taken directly from the surface of the moon, and even the parts of a few creatures I didn’t recognize, which he claimed were all massively powerful, world-eating monstrosities.
Most of what he said was clearly not true, but it was still fun to walk through and see what kinds of insane fictions he cooked up—especially when we knew we’d be getting our money back later. Erani even recognized one of the monster parts he showed off, telling him that it was actually not a “scale that came from the World Serpent,” but rather the fin of a Dorsin, which was occasionally used for some niche Enchantments. The man quickly moved on after her correction to show us a bottle of “Basi-Hydra venom” which was almost certainly just colored water.
And, when Erani wasn’t there to cut off his lies, Index also helped out with its System knowledge. That sword he showed us didn’t belong to the only Human to have ever reached Level 100, because no Human had ever reached Level 100 in history. That rock wasn’t taken from the moon, because the moon had magic around it that made any stone taken from it instantly recognizable—though, it couldn’t elaborate on what that magic was.
Once we were done with that, we also stopped by a play, paying to enter, only to get bored five minutes in—we’d arrived halfway through the thing, so we honestly had no idea what was supposed to be going on in the story—and leave, as well as purchasing just about fifty different random food items from anyone who had the fortune of having nice-smelling wares. We’d buy some fruits from a stand, take a single bite, and then throw them away. We’d buy fresh pastries from shops in the town square and sample all of the seller’s best products, we even went to a butcher who said his meat was so high quality, it’d even taste amazing if you ate it raw. It didn’t.
Eventually, though, we saw a few guards walking through the streets asking people questions. We weren’t totally sure if they were already onto our several robberies and searching for us—typically, guards would wait a little bit when it came to non-violent criminals and approach them safely in unpopulated areas, since there was no harm done to innocents by letting them do their thing for a few more hours, while confronting them in a populated area and potentially starting a fight could absolutely lead to countless deaths. Still, whether or not the guards were looking for us now, we decided it was probably about time to leave town.
We knew that, once we left town, we wouldn’t have much of a chance to happen upon people with Spell Crystals or Mana potions, so we wanted to wait as long as we could before leaving, but at this point, getting captured would just cut our run even shorter than that.
So we headed off for the nearest town exit. But on the way, we made a stop.
Erani and I walked into an adventuring supply store. We’d actually passed a few of them by already, since we were specifically looking for one that didn’t have any customers inside. In the chance we went up against a couple Classers, there was still a good chance we’d be stronger than them, but even then we’d have rather avoided the hassle.
So once we found an out-of-the way one, full of mostly random gear and clearly not worth visiting for most serious adventurers, we entered.
At the counter was a somewhat gruff-looking man with a wooden badge around his neck, and nobody else. He looked up at us, seeming surprised by our appearances, but not saying anything other than a curt greeting.
“Hey man,” I said with a wave. “Just to let you know, we have, in fact, spent every last eyt to our name in countless ill-advised splurges during the last, like, two hours. But we still do need a couple things, just to get us by for the next while. Probably a tent to camp out in, maybe a couple rations, sleeping bag to lie on would be nice, you know how it is. So, uh, just letting you know—this is a robbery.”