THE INNKEEPER

“Oh?” Mary said, looking at Lex curiously. “I thought you’d want to avoid it. So far, you’ve done your best to hide inside the Inn and avoid trouble as much as possible. What changed?”

Lex chuckled.

“That was only possible as long as the trouble was outside the Inn. Now that I have trouble right here with me inside the Inn itself, hiding won’t do me any good. The only thing I can do is to become as strong as possible, as quick as possible. Completing system quests usually goes a long way in helping with that.

“But that doesn’t mean that I’m going to go into this without any preparation. I need to have as much information about the garden and Ventura’s relationship to it as possible. I also want to know the Crystal races situation there, and the kind of dynamic that place has. Moreover, I need to maximise my personal strength as well. I’ve received a few new skills, but I’m nowhere close to mastering them.

“Finally, we need to take precautions for what I might encounter inside the garden. I have to look into how I can connect the Inn to the garden. Although I have a fruit from that place which I can potentially use to buy a ticket, we already know of another way in there. We have to decide which method of entry will give us the most advantage.”

“There’s one more thing you need to do before you go there,” Mary said, adding in. “Or, at least, that’s my advice. You need to upgrade the System enough that it gives you a quicker, more efficient way to connect a realm to the Inn. I fear connecting a place like the Primordial Garden, which is notoriously difficult to find, will take centuries if not millenia if you do it the traditional way.”

“That… is far from ideal,” said Lex. He pulled up his latest quests and looked at them once again.

“I think we will need to find access to Primordial energy. If I can complete the quest about accelerating the Inns repair without completing the one about the Primordial Scale, we can make some progress towards that goal. Repairing the system at this point is too tough. I haven’t encountered any other materials that could allow me to repair the System in a long time, so bolstering its self repair ability might just be the best option.

“There’s also the possibility of getting such a reward through quests. I will have to acquire and complete new quests if I want a feature like that. Fortunately, we don’t have a strict timeline to adhere to, so we can take our time with the preparations.”

Lex paused, for he got some feedback from his Host Attire about something that was happening inside the Inn.

“I think, for now, we should focus on concluding the Midnight Games, and after that we can begin our preparations for this. I just got news, Luthor is on his way back. If everything goes well, I think we can have a launch event for the dungeons feature right after the Midnight Games.”

Lex had long subscribed to the plan of constantly having events so that he can hire event security for the Inn. Even though he had a few Earth Immortals at the Inn now, he had no Heavenly Immortals, not to mention Celestial Immortals. As such, having the Reaving Dread mercenaries run security for him was a good fallback.

Besides a single occasion, he’d never had any problems with them either.

“Oh, and we need to look into the Kyron race as well. I want to know all there is to know about them.”

With his plans made, Lex was feeling good about his immediate future. It was nice to take control of things for once, rather than have them thrown at him while he was least prepared.

While Mary disappeared to carry out his instructions, Lex turned his attention back to the Go board, his expression becoming a little more intense. He had never been one to give up on revenge. He just needed to think of the best way to do so.

*****

“Hold the line, dammit!” yelled a Beast in the shape of a lion, only its body seemed to be made of magma rock.

All around him, hundreds of other Beasts fought ferociously, living up to the reputation of the Reaving Dread mercenaries. Unfortunately for them, they were facing a horde of Chimera, and their ferocity seemed too much for their partners.

They screamed, they shouted, but that did not help them against the onslaught they were facing.

“Retreat dammit, I’ll cover you!” the magma lion yelled as he ran towards them, but he was too slow – or maybe the Chimera were too fast.

Soon, the small team of mercenaries from the Reaving Dread were left alone.

“Retreat! Full retreat! Move back slowly and systematically – don’t show the enemy your backs or we’ll all be dead!” the lion roared in frustration.

No matter how great of a fighter he was on his own, he couldn’t fight an entire army by himself.

“Boss, that’s the third wave of reinforcements we’ve lost,” said an exhausted looking liger as he approached the fearsome beast. Compared to the glowing red body of the magma lion, his normal, mundane body of tissue and flesh looked much less imposing – especially considering how much smaller he was.

“I know how to count, dammit! Just pray that whoever comes next can handle themselves! If we have to keep throwing bodies at these damn Chimera, even the Reaving Dread mercenaries will begin to run short of hands. We’ll have to withdraw from some of our other contracts.”

“What are we even doing here boss? I say we just suffer the loss and abandon this commission. This is bad luck.”

The lion shook his head, looking troubled.

“I don’t know,” the lion muttered. “All the Condottiere said was that this was a quest he could not reject.”

The liger whined a little more, but then soon returned to fighting off the Chimera. The battlefield was no place to have a chat, and if they didn’t retreat in a timely manner, they might not even be around by the time the next batch of reinforcements came.

He just hoped that this time, whoever it was, they would survive a little longer.

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