Chapter 58: Beware

Chapter 58: Chapter 58: Beware

The guards didn’t announce him. No title, no mention of his family name, none of the usual courtesies. They shoved the door open, pushed Allan into the Duke’s private chamber, and shut it behind him without a word.

Allan understood why. It kept up the appearance that his reputation was still under control, at least for now. He hated it anyway.

The room was smaller than the formal audience hall. Thick carpets, heavy curtains drawn against the afternoon light, a single desk buried under sealed reports. The Duke of Varn sat behind it with his sleeves rolled up and ink on his fingers. He didn’t look up right away.

Allan stayed where the guards had left him and said nothing. The Duke finished the line he was reading, set down his pen, and finally met his eyes.

"You know about the Dragon Syndrome cases." It didn’t sound like a question.

Allan took a small step back. How did the Duke know that? He kept the thought off his face.

"Of course you do, Lord Allan. The Emperor’s decree is clear: report every case, burn the children, silence is treason." The Duke’s voice stayed level. "I have no intention of reporting the ones I’ve found. And I’m telling you this on purpose."

He watched Allan the whole time. When the shock he’d expected never came, his eyes narrowed slightly.

"You’re not surprised."

Allan held his stare. "Should I be?"

"Most men would be. They’d start explaining themselves, or asking how many heads were about to roll." The Duke leaned back. "You worked it out the moment the door closed. That’s useful. It’s also dangerous."

He opened a drawer, took out a single sheet, and slid it across the desk. No seal, no header. It was a report on the Countess’s husband.

Allan read it top to bottom.

"Countess Mary’s husband didn’t die of sickness?" he said, taking it in.

His expression never changed, but his mind had already started to race.

"Mary isn’t grieving," the Duke said. "She’s hunting. Whoever or whatever did that to her husband, she means to find it. She’s dismissed half her household and replaced them with people who don’t ask questions. She has gold, she has connections, and she has a reason that won’t fade with time."

Allan stopped asking questions and started calculating. The Duke had handed him a name and a detail that contradicted the public story. That wasn’t generosity. It was a test and a warning on the same sheet of paper.

And the warning was simple: be extremely careful around Countess Mary.

"I’m grateful for the information. What do I owe you?"

The Duke laughed. "Ha! Allan, that’s not how we nobles talk. We have to be more subtle."

Allan gave him a thin smile, not liking one bit how casually the Duke used his name. "Then I’ll be more careful."

"Fine, fine. I’ll be straight with you too, since the next problem is already on my desk, and I need someone who can look at it without blinking."

He pushed a second folder across. This one was even thicker.

"Cult activity in a small town half a day outside the capital. Disappearances, strange symbols. The local garrison reported monsters behaving oddly, then stopped reporting anything useful. I’ve sent three investigators. Two never came back. The third returned with half his mind gone, and he couldn’t write a coherent sentence."

Allan didn’t reach for the folder yet.

"How many people know you sent them?"

"Too many. Which is why the next one won’t be an official investigator."

"Why me?"

The Duke’s mouth twitched, almost a smile but not quite. "Everyone else goes looking for the cult and fails. You know them better than they know themselves."

Allan looked at the folder, then back at the Duke. The pain in his side pulsed once, a small reminder that he was nowhere near okay.

"So how much?"

The Duke blinked. Men in this room usually asked for soldiers, safe passage, or political cover. Allan had asked for gold.

"Five hundred up front. Another thousand if you come back with something I can use. And if you don’t come back at all, hazard pay to whoever you name."

Allan nodded once. "Done."

He took the folder. Before turning to leave, he spoke again, his voice flat. "Lord Duke, the Empire is burning Dragon Syndrome children. If those children are early signs of whatever’s coming, survivors, carriers, evidence, then the Empire is doing the cult’s work for them. Something to think about while I’m gone."

He didn’t actually believe it. It was only a guess, a thought that surfaced on the spot.

But the Duke’s face went still. For the first time since Allan walked in, his control cracked, just a fraction, before it sealed over again.

"Get out," the Duke said. "And come back alive."

Allan nodded and left, smiling.

He found a tavern where nobody knew him and nobody would think to look, took a room, locked the door, and sat on the edge of the bed. Then he opened the folder.

The town was called Greyford.

The name stopped him cold.

In the game, Greyford was where the Ashen Rebellion began. Players showed up after the first massacres and had to pick a side: back the Empire and crush the rebels, or join the revolutionaries and burn down the local garrison. Allan had played both routes. The Empire path paid better in the short term, while the rebel path unlocked better unique gear later. He’d always gone for the bigger payout.

But that was much later than this.

"Wait. Could they be...?" he muttered. The timing was too convenient for the cult.

In the game, the Dragon Syndrome cases had kept climbing and the mass burnings had kept going until the first public demonstrations turned into riots. The masses couldn’t take any more, and the first revolution began.

Now the cult might know all of that, passed down from earlier players, and be using it.

"It’s just a theory. I don’t have any proof."

Still, if he was right, the timeline would fracture, and nothing would be predictable anymore.

He closed the folder and downed two healing potions back to back. The pain in his side dulled from sharp to a heavy ache, but it didn’t go away. He pressed two fingers against the old Berserker wound and felt the scar tissue pull.

The damage was permanent, but he could still fight. Another serious injury, though, would cost him a lot more than gold.

He changed into the cheapest clothes he owned: stained leather, a patched cloak, boots with holes in the soles. A dirt-poor adventurer. No one would look twice.

The sun was already low by the time the hired carriage rolled out of the capital gates.

The road to Greyford was worse than the reports had claimed.

The first attack came an hour out. Three low-rank beasts, the kind that normally stayed deep in the forest, hit the carriage from the side, claws scraping against the wood. The driver screamed. The bodyguards were no help at all.

So Allan stepped down himself. With the short sword he’d bought that morning, he killed all three in under a minute. The injury slowed him, but not enough to matter against trash.

He looted the bodies out of habit, and that was when he found the first anomaly.

One of the beasts had a patch of scales along its spine that looked wrong. They were the same dull grey as the early Dragon Syndrome descriptions in the game, and beneath them the flesh had started to change color.

Allan wiped his blade, climbed back into the carriage, and kept quiet. But he made a note of it.

The second attack came at dusk, a bigger pack with the same strange behavior. Two of the monsters broke off mid-charge when they got close to him, turned, and bolted into the trees. The rest died hard. On one corpse he found a crude symbol burned into the hide: three overlapping circles with a slash through the center. It was the same mark the Duke’s reports had described in Greyford.

By then the driver was shaking. "Roads get worse every week. More monsters, fewer adventurers willing to take the run. Something’s wrong out here, I’m telling you."

Allan looked out at the darkening trees. "It’ll change. I promise."

"Huh? How?"

"There’s a new guild on its way. It’s called Arcane. If you’re after regular adventuring work, that’s where you’ll want to go."

"Oh, that’d be great. Who opened it?"

Allan smiled. "Just some nobles."

The driver’s face fell. "Nobles? Those pampered cunts, always looking for another way to rob us peasants."

Allan bristled. But what could he say? For now he was just another adventurer. Still, it was worth remembering.

Peasants hate guilds tied to nobles.

By the time the carriage rolled into Greyford, night had fully settled. The town looked like any other border settlement that had seen better years: timber walls, muddy streets, too many closed shutters. The inn recommended in the Duke’s papers was half full of low-rank adventurers and local laborers, all drinking and saying very little.

Allan paid for a corner table and a bowl of stew he barely touched. He kept his head down and listened.

Three disappearances in the last two weeks. Monsters creeping closer to the walls than anyone could remember. A traveling priest who had preached about purification and then vanished. People only said the word "cult" when they were sure no one important was listening.

He paid up and stepped back outside.

So far, he was blending in. Nobody recognized him, and nobody gave him a second glance. The night air smelled of wet wood and, underneath, something sharper. He walked the main street once, eyes open, shoulders slumped as if he were tired.

That was when it hit him.

A hot spike behind his ribs, right where the worst of the damage lived. His vision narrowed for half a second. He knew this feeling. He had felt it once before, in his manor, the night everything went wrong.

"Shit..." He forced himself to stand straight. Then he saw it, a flash of familiar, vivid color.

Red hair.

She stood near the edge of the square, talking to a man in a faded adventurer’s cloak. The man was holding a scrap of cloth, and even from here, Allan recognized the symbol burned into it. Three circles, a slash through the center.

Diva.