Chapter 181: I Shared a Room With Valeria Before the Church Found Me

The city smelled like bread.

Raven decided that alone made it better than the last three places they had slept.

Bellcross wasn’t large enough to earn prominent lettering on most maps, but calling it a village would have been unfair. Two trade roads intersected there, and around that crossing had grown warehouses, blacksmiths, stables, a fountain square, three inns, and a small temple belonging to the Church of Eternal Light.

There was enough traffic that three new travelers didn’t immediately become everyone’s business.

Not enough for them to remain completely anonymous.

Raven dismounted and felt his back protest after too many hours in the saddle.

Not an injury.

Just a much less interesting form of suffering.

Valeria climbed down beside him.

"Don’t make that face."

"What face?"

"The one where you’re already calculating how much it costs to exist inside the city."

Raven looked toward a blacksmith across the square.

"I don’t know how much it costs yet."

"Exactly. Relax for five minutes."

Roland finished securing the reins.

"I vote for an inn before he starts asking people about steel."

"We need steel."

"We also need food and sleep. My back hurts."

Raven took his horse’s reins.

"I can sleep when we stop."

Roland stared at him.

"Raven, sleeping for two hours, waking up to check the door, sleeping for another hour, and repeating the process does not count as rest."

"In some places I’m from, it does."

"That is deeply concerning."

Raven shrugged.

"I’m used to sleeping in intervals when necessary."

Valeria raised an eyebrow.

"That explains far too much about you."

"It explains nothing."

"Of course it does."

Roland pointed toward the inns.

"In this order: bed, food, then metallic obsession."

Raven almost argued.

He couldn’t find a useful reason.

"Fine."

Roland looked suspicious.

"That was too easy."

Valeria smiled.

"Maybe he’s evolving. How adorable. I just hope he doesn’t eventually turn into one of the monsters he eats."

Raven looked at her.

"I can change my mind."

"There he is," Roland said.

They chose the second of the three inns.

The first had too many mercenaries drinking outside the entrance. The third displayed a pricing board Valeria described as optimistic and Raven described as organized robbery.

The second had clean beds and hot food.

Good enough.

---

The room cost four crowns.

Raven knew because he had paid for it.

Two rooms would have cost seven, which explained why Valeria had apparently made a decision before he returned from the stable.

It did not explain everything else.

"One large room," she said as she accepted the key.

Raven looked toward the stairs.

"How many beds?"

"Two."

"There are three of us."

Roland immediately raised one hand.

"I already have a room."

Raven turned.

"We just arrived."

"I’m efficient, young Raven."

"When did you ask for one? And why are you calling me young?"

Roland smiled.

"While the two of you were resolving administrative matters, at my lady’s request."

Raven looked at him.

Then at Valeria.

She wore the most innocent expression a noble Blood Mage who had spent a significant portion of her life lying professionally could possibly produce.

"Administrative mistake," she said.

Raven looked back at Roland.

"First ’young Raven,’ now ’my lady.’ Apparently while I’m evolving, the two of you are regressing."

Roland gave Valeria a shallow bow.

"Lady Valeria."

She lifted her chin with exaggerated dignity.

"Much better."

Raven closed his eyes.

"It wasn’t a mistake."

"How little faith you have in local institutions," Valeria said.

Roland picked up his bag.

"I’m going to withdraw before I become legally involved in this conversation."

"You’re already involved."

"Not for much longer. Goodbye and good luck, Lady Valeria."

He gave her a deliberately courteous smile and headed upstairs.

Raven watched him go.

"Coward."

Roland’s voice came from above.

"Experienced professional."

Valeria started laughing.

Raven decided the four crowns were beginning to feel more expensive.

---

Dinner cost another seven.

Three full meals, bread, meat, vegetables, a pitcher of beer for Roland, and wine for Valeria. Raven ordered water, which somehow caused an unnecessary argument about whether a meal could truly be considered good when one participant deliberately refused to enjoy himself.

Then the stew arrived, and Raven stopped participating.

The meat was properly cooked. The bread had butter. The vegetables still had enough texture to prove they hadn’t been boiled into surrender.

Raven finished his first plate too quickly.

He ordered another.

Then a third.

Valeria lowered her wineglass.

"Is that you or Predation?"

Raven kept eating.

"Both."

Predatory Regeneration had consumed far more energy than Raven normally would have burned over the past several weeks. Between repaired ribs, burns from the Mk.I, combat, travel, and constant Trait usage, his body had spent days demanding additional food.

The resulting hunger wasn’t exactly normal.

It also wasn’t unpleasant.

Roland remained silent for almost an entire minute while devouring his own meal.

Valeria watched him.

"Are you excited?"

"I don’t want to talk yet."

Raven finished another spoonful.

Valeria looked back at him.

"You like it."

"It’s fine."

"That means you like it."

"It means it’s fine."

Roland swallowed.

"He likes it."

Raven looked between them.

"Do you need collective validation?"

"I simply enjoy the rare occasions when you admit small things," Valeria said.

"Why?"

She cut a piece of meat.

"Because you hide the large ones better."

Raven stopped moving his spoon for a moment.

"I thought you left the room to arrange dinner."

Valeria only smiled.

Roland suddenly became extremely interested in a potato.

"Leave me out of this."

"You’re already involved," Valeria said.

"Physically, because I happen to be sitting here. Emotionally, I’m at another table."

Raven resumed eating.

By the time he reached his fourth plate, the hunger had finally begun to retreat.

Better.

Six plates would have been ridiculous.

Probably.

The conversation might have ended there if the table behind them hadn’t started discussing the Black Thunder Mercenary.

Roland turned his head slightly.

Raven didn’t even need to look at him.

"Don’t. Focus on eating."

"I was only listening."

"Exactly. I don’t want to think about it during dinner."

One of the men behind them insisted the foreigner from Kharad could kill someone from half a kilometer away. Another claimed that had been the distance of the Wyvern shot and that the man had actually been killed from "an entire hill away."

A third confidently explained that the weapon worked by placing crushed demons inside the projectiles.

Valeria drank her wine with obvious satisfaction.

"Your abilities improve in every city."

"My rumors get worse in every city."

Raven looked down at his empty plate, then toward the long rifle case resting against the wall.

"There is one part that concerns me."

Valeria raised an eyebrow.

"The crushed demons?"

"The rifle."

Roland stopped listening to the neighboring table.

Raven continued.

"I’ve spent too much time thinking about how to improve it. I don’t want to start treating it like my main source of strength."

Valeria studied him.

"You have Predation."

"Exactly."

Raven flexed the fingers of one hand.

Stonehide.

Burst Step.

Kinetic Acceleration.

Predatory Regeneration.

Traits that had kept him alive long before the Mk.I had been capable of firing.

"The rifle solves problems I couldn’t solve well before. That doesn’t mean it should replace everything else."

Roland pointed at him with his spoon.

"Especially because every shot costs money."

"That too."

"I knew we’d find the correct argument."

Valeria smiled.

"There’s apparently a version of the story where I built the weapon."

Raven looked at her.

"That’s false."

"It’s also the best version so far. I would have given it more style."

Roland raised his mug.

"It gives you technical credit."

"Which I don’t deserve," Valeria said, "but I appreciate the recognition."

Raven set down his spoon.

The important part wasn’t that the stories were absurd.

Bellcross was already several days away from Kharad, and people here still knew versions of the shot.

Valeria noticed his expression change.

"That complicates your usual method."

"What method?"

"Disappearing before someone can gather enough people to turn a problem into an operation."

Raven answered almost automatically.

"We move before they know where to hit."

"That worked better before the rifle."

"It still works."

Valeria subtly gestured toward the table behind them with her glass.

"They don’t know exactly where you are. But they know your hair, the black rifle, the Wyvern, that you travel with me, and that you buy steel in every town like you’re trying to build a bridge."

"I don’t buy that much steel."

Roland looked at him.

Raven corrected himself.

"Not enough for a bridge."

Valeria smiled, but she didn’t let the point disappear.

"Before, a town remembered a foreign mercenary. Now it remembers a story. Stories travel better than people."

Raven knew she was right.

On Earth, disappearing had never truly meant becoming invisible. It meant increasing the cost of tracking him.

Change routes.

Vehicles.

Documents.

Schedules.

Appearance.

Force whoever was searching to spend more and more resources until continuing stopped being worthwhile.

But back then Raven hadn’t carried a weapon that existed nowhere else in the world.

He hadn’t traveled beside Valeria von Nacht.

And he hadn’t possessed a growing collection of Traits that any competent investigator would eventually recognize as impossible.

"Then we change the objective," Raven said.

Valeria waited.

"Before, I needed people not to know where I was. That’s no longer realistic."

Roland looked up.

Raven continued.

"The rifle creates stories. You have a name people recognize. And apparently my hair has become intelligence."

Valeria smiled.

"It is fairly distinctive."

"The point is that disappearing completely no longer works. So we stop trying."

"And instead?"

Raven drank some water.

"It doesn’t matter if they know where I was. It matters whether they can predict where I’ll be next."

Roland nodded slowly.

"That sounds considerably harder."

"It is. We don’t always use the Mercenary House. We don’t buy everything in one place. We don’t change routes every time a rumor appears because that creates a pattern too. And we stop treating every city like an operation where we enter, finish an objective, and leave."

Valeria studied him.

"So?"

"We assume someone is always trying to find us."

Roland drank.

"That sounds disturbingly similar to living inside a war."

Raven returned his attention to the table.

"I’m more accustomed to that."

Valeria set down her glass.

"What if a local order appears?"

"We avoid it."

"Regional?"

"Change corridors."

"National?"

"We leave Asteria."

"And if the Church distributes the order to other kingdoms?"

Raven drank again.

"Then we stop improvising and start collecting information."

Valeria raised an eyebrow.

"That means you don’t have an answer."

"It means the model changed."

"Model?"

"Before, I could treat each operation as entering, completing the objective, and leaving before an authority concentrated enough resources against me. Now I have to assume an environment where my position will eventually leak."

Roland rested an elbow on the table.

"A permanent war zone."

"Something like that."

"What an elegant way to say you can’t disappear anymore."

Raven didn’t answer.

Valeria took advantage of his silence to steal a piece of meat from his plate.

He watched her do it.

"You have exactly the same thing."

"No."

"Yes."

"Yours was closer."

Roland put down his mug.

"I’m going to start charging extra for traveling with a couple who insists they aren’t a couple."

Raven took another piece of meat.

"I’ve chosen not to waste energy arguing."

Valeria smiled.

"Progress."

For some reason, that felt more dangerous than the argument.

---

Roland disappeared after dinner.

He claimed he was going to check the stables.

Then walked in the opposite direction.

Raven saw him.

Valeria did too.

"How considerate."

"Coward."

"Both can be true."

They went upstairs.

Two beds stood on opposite sides of a small table.

Nothing particularly compromising.

Which only made Valeria’s administrative-error explanation less convincing.

Raven placed the Mk.I case beside the bed nearest the window, then positioned his boots toward the door, his bag to the left, and his knife beneath his coat.

Valeria watched him.

"You always do that in the same order. It’s entertaining."

"It shouldn’t be."

"Weapon close. Boots ready. Bag where you can grab it without fully getting up."

"Yes."

"Knife under the coat."

Raven looked at her.

"Then it wasn’t hidden very well."

"You weren’t hiding it from me."

That was true.

Valeria sat on the other bed.

"What would you do if an official order appeared tomorrow?"

"Depends who issued it."

"Regional Church authority."

"Change routes."

"National."

"Leave Asteria."

"International."

Raven looked at her.

"We don’t know whether they can do that."

Valeria gave a quiet laugh.

"Trust me. The Church has ways of making borders feel like suggestions."

"That isn’t sufficiently specific information."

"It was a warning."

Raven rested his forearms on his knees.

Valeria continued.

"You didn’t need this much information before you left somewhere."

"Leaving solved more problems before."

"No. Leaving postponed more problems before."

Raven went silent.

She continued before he could stop her.

"Every time something started closing around you, you left before it finished. Greyhaven. Dunvar. Even Kharad would have ended the same way if you hadn’t needed to finish the rifle."

"It worked."

"You survived."

"That counts."

"Yes. But it isn’t exactly the same."

Raven knew where the conversation was going.

He didn’t want to have it.

"Don’t start."

"I haven’t said anything about your past."

"You were getting there."

Valeria smiled.

"Maybe."

Raven stood.

"I’m getting water."

"We have water."

"More."

"Of course."

He reached the door.

Valeria spoke behind him.

"By the way, I could have asked for another bed."

Raven stopped.

He looked at the two beds.

Then at her.

Valeria smiled with absolutely no regret and lifted her hands to the fastenings of her traveling clothes, beginning to undo them as though Raven had already left.

He looked.

Only for a moment.

Long enough to notice the skin revealed beneath the opening collar and the first glimpse of the dark undergarment beneath.

Raven looked away before the moment could become anything longer.

Valeria noticed.

Naturally.

"Good night, Raven."

He opened the door.

"Good night."

Raven stepped into the hallway and closed it behind him.

He remained there for one second before continuing down the corridor.

He didn’t need water.

That was Valeria’s fault too.