Chapter 174: Someone Copied My Rifle and It Exploded

They reached the inn.

Raven automatically checked the entrances, windows, and number of people inside.

Valeria noticed.

"Now you’re nervous."

"Technical assessment."

"Of course."

Raven didn’t respond.

The Church was different from Keller Ridge, House Orbrecht, or even the traffickers they had encountered. Those threats had possessed objectives Raven could understand once he identified them.

Money.

Control.

Secrecy.

The Church was harder.

He knew it possessed political, military, religious, and social authority. He knew it could declare people heretics, and he knew some of those people were executed.

He also knew not every member of the Church acted the same way.

That complicated everything.

A simple enemy was easier.

Raven preferred simple enemies.

---

Elise finished examining the wounded man shortly after sunrise.

The corruption had receded considerably during the night, which was good.

It hadn’t disappeared completely, which was less good.

She placed her hand near the bite again and released a controlled pulse of golden light. The dark lines beneath the man’s skin contracted toward the damaged tissue instead of spreading farther up his arm.

He clenched his teeth.

"Am I going to lose it?"

"Not if it keeps responding like this."

"And if it doesn’t?"

Elise didn’t lie to patients.

"Then we decide how much tissue can safely remain without threatening the rest of your body."

He swallowed.

"So yes."

"It means we don’t cut away something that can still be saved."

That made him look at her.

Elise continued the treatment.

Yesterday, the black discoloration had reached halfway toward the elbow. A more frightened healer might have removed the arm immediately.

That would have stopped the corruption.

It also would have crippled a man who might never have needed to lose it.

The difficult part wasn’t recognizing danger.

The difficult part was determining how much could be preserved before preservation itself became dangerous.

Elise watched the dark lines retreat another few millimeters.

That distinction mattered.

More than Halven seemed to understand.

Perhaps more than some of the offices currently reviewing Raven Ashford understood.

If Raven’s abilities were corrupting him, Elise needed to know how far the process had gone.

If they weren’t, destroying him because his body looked wrong to Church doctrine would be no different from removing a healthy arm because the wound around it frightened you.

The comparison wasn’t perfect.

It was still useful.

When she finished, the man’s wife offered her bread for the road. Elise accepted one piece.

Refusing everything people offered could become another form of pride.

Brother Halven already had the horses prepared when she stepped outside.

They traveled for several hours before stopping to water them.

That was when Elise opened Raven’s file again.

Two new attachments had arrived through the Church courier network.

The first formally confirmed the death of the Skygrave Wyvern at South Relay.

The second explained something Elise had been wondering since leaving the liaison office.

How the Church was following him.

Not through divination.

Not through spies.

Through paperwork.

The projectile recovered from the Wyvern had been registered under Raven Ashford because the South Relay contract listed him as the mercenary who fired the unknown weapon. That report contained his Mercenary House license number.

Once the Church filed an external ecclesiastical inquiry against that registration, copies of later House updates could be requested through regional offices.

Not his exact location at every moment.

But enough.

Contract validations.

Bounty processing.

License checks.

Administrative interactions.

Raven had shown his license in Arven Crossing.

The House had recorded it.

The Church now had a last confirmed location.

Elise looked at the date.

They weren’t tracking Raven because he had made some obvious mistake.

They were tracking the bureaucratic trail any active mercenary left behind.

Halven noticed what she was reading.

"He used the House again."

"Yes."

"If he keeps doing that, we’ll keep narrowing the distance."

"Unless he realizes the inquiry is attached to his registration."

"He may already know."

Elise looked at him.

"Why?"

"Arven Crossing’s office could see the external inquiry."

That made her close the file halfway.

So Raven might now know the Church was looking.

That changed the meeting before it had even happened.

She reopened the annex.

Recent witness summaries followed.

[Weapon Discharge Lacks Visible Spell Circle.]

[No Conventional Enchantment Detected.]

[Projectile Velocity Exceeds Standard Bow-Class Weapons.]

[Operator Reportedly Capable of Biological Reinforcement and Accelerated Regeneration.]

Then:

[Possible Public Designations: Black Thunder / Monster Gun / Thunder Bow.]

Elise frowned.

"Thunder Bow."

"Rumors," Halven said.

"Bad ones."

"People need names."

"Not when they don’t understand what they’re naming."

She turned the page.

Another note caught her attention.

[Subject Reportedly Consumes Monster Tissue.]

Elise stopped.

"Confirmed?"

Halven glanced over.

"No."

"Then why is it in the report?"

"Multiple witnesses described similar behavior."

"Similar behavior is not the same thing as confirmation."

"Saint Veyra, we know he works with monster organs."

"Yes."

"And he displays Skills that shouldn’t naturally belong to the same discipline."

"Possibly."

"How many coincidences do you need?"

Elise closed the file.

"Not coincidences. Evidence."

Halven fell silent.

She looked toward the road.

"If he truly consumes creatures to acquire biological functions, then I want to know what that process is doing to him."

Halven studied her.

"You believe he can still be treated?"

"I don’t know if there’s anything to treat."

She thought of the man in Hareth.

Black veins.

Pain.

A wound that looked worse than it was because the corruption had responded to purification.

Then she imagined the opposite.

A body that appeared stable while something deeper continued replacing the person inside it.

That was what frightened her.

Not strange flesh by itself.

Loss of self.

"The man this morning had visible corruption," Elise said. "If I had judged only by appearance, I could have taken his arm."

"And if you had waited too long?"

"He could have died."

Halven nodded.

"Exactly."

Elise met his eyes.

"That is why I examined him."

Halven said nothing.

"So I will examine Raven too."

---

That night, Raven found a small card beneath the door.

Not a threat.

Not a secret message.

An advertisement.

He picked it up.

Valeria looked over from the bed on the opposite side of the room. They had rented two connected rooms because it was cheaper than taking three, and Roland had somehow lost an administrative argument Raven still didn’t completely understand.

"What is it?"

Raven read the card.

[SEE THE THUNDER GUN OF KHARAD]

[LIVE DEMONSTRATION TOMORROW]

An address had been written underneath.

Raven remained motionless.

Valeria sat up.

"No."

"Yes."

"Another imitation?"

"Demonstration."

Valeria started smiling.

"We have to go."

"No."

"Absolutely."

"No."

"Raven, someone is going to fire a fake Thunder Gun."

"A crossbow."

"We don’t know that."

Raven looked at her.

"It’s a crossbow."

"Then I want to know how much they’re charging."

"No."

She took the card.

"Free admission."

Raven closed his eyes.

"That makes it worse."

"That makes it better."

"We’re not going."

"Roland will want to."

"That’s why we won’t tell him."

A voice came through the connecting room.

"Won’t tell me what?"

Raven stared at the wall.

Valeria started laughing.

"Nothing," Raven called.

Roland opened the door.

"Now I definitely want to know."

Ten minutes later, Raven had lost the argument.

**Author’s note: Sorry for the interruption, but I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has been reading the novel so far. Thanks to you all, this novel won third place in the dark fantasy contest! It’s not first place, but among so many other entries, I finally got lucky—haha! Thank you.**