Chapter 41: Daily Quests
City M looked better at night than it had any right to.
Lantern strings hung between the old stone buildings, throwing warm gold over cobbles polished smooth by two centuries of feet. Food carts lined both sides of the main street, steam curling up from grills and pots, and somewhere ahead a street musician was murdering a love song with real enthusiasm.
Aidan walked through it with his hands in his pockets, wearing Garen’s face.
Plain features. Dark hair. Nothing worth a second look. He’d gotten comfortable in this face, and it made nights like this easy.
Solenne walked beside him with a skewer in one hand, hood down for once, ash-grey hair loose in the lantern light. She looked almost relaxed. She had entered a Terror Tear and cleared, and also masterd the Silverpierce Lament, the S-rank Spirit Technique that Aidan had given her.
Tom rode on Aidan’s shoulder, tail curled tight, radiating disapproval at the world.
’This place smells like grease and desperation,’ Tom said in his head.
’It smells like dinner,’ Aidan replied.
’That is what I said.’
Aidan chuckled and bought two more skewers. ’Arthur would’ve been drooling crazy already. He sure is taking his time though.’
[Daily Quest: Speak with ten strangers. Progress: 8/10.]
’Two more.’ He turned the notification over lazily. ’Easy money.’
He’d been chipping at it all evening. A vendor who talked too long about her sauce. A kid who wanted to know if his coat was real leather. An old man arguing with a lamppost, who had counted, apparently.
The other daily hung underneath it, still stubbornly unfinished.
[Daily Quest: Vent your anger upon one who has earned it. Progress: 0/1.]
’And that one.’ Aidan sighed. ’Nobody’s even been rude to me. Rough night for a man with anger to spend.’
Solenne glanced sideways at him. "You’re making that face again."
"What face?"
"The one where you go somewhere else for a second. Like you’re listening to something I can’t hear."
Aidan laughed. "Bad habit."
That was when the sound started.
...
It came from the far end of the street, low at first, a rising snarl of engines where no engine should be.
Aidan’s head turned.
The main street of City M was pedestrian-only. It said so on the brass plaques set into the stone at every entrance. It said so in the way the whole road was built, narrow and winding and packed shoulder to shoulder with people eating and laughing.
The engines got louder.
"Move! MOVE!"
Screams rippled up the street like a wave breaking backward. Aidan saw the crowd split, saw carts overturn, saw a woman drag two children into a doorway by their collars.
Then the bikes came through.
Six of them, low and gleaming, ridden at a speed that had no business existing on a road full of people. Each one sat inside a shimmering bubble of hardened Mana, a barrier that shoved anything in its path aside without slowing.
A vendor’s cart went spinning. A man who wasn’t fast enough got clipped by a barrier and went down hard, and Aidan heard something in his arm break from thirty meters away.
The riders laughed.
That was the part Aidan noticed first. Not the speed. Not the barriers.
The laughing.
They were watching the crowd scatter, and they were laughing about it, the way you laugh at a good joke told by a friend.
The lead rider stood on his pegs, arms spread wide, letting his barrier plow a path through the market like a snowplow through fresh powder. He was young, expensively dressed, and his face was lit up with pure delight.
Around Aidan, the whispers came fast and terrified.
"That’s Chuzo Fening."
"Get back, get back, don’t let them see you looking."
"Fening family. Nobody stops them."
Tom’s claws tightened on Aidan’s shoulder.
’Master,’ the Vaelith said quietly. ’Your thread just changed color.’
Aidan didn’t answer.
He was watching the far end of the street, where an old woman had frozen in the middle of the road, and where a small boy, maybe six years old, had let go of her hand and stumbled the wrong way.
Directly into the path of six speeding bikes.
The boy fell.
The lead rider saw him. Aidan watched him see. Watched the delight on Chuzo Fening’s face flicker, and then settle, and then not change course.
He was going to ride straight through.
Something behind Aidan’s eyes went very quiet.
’Ah,’ he thought. ’There it is.’
He raised one hand and turned his wrist.
Wind answered.
Not a gust. Not a gale. A spiral of compressed air the width of the entire street, born in an instant, wound tight with Spiral Flow and Spin and given a shove by Attraction.
It caught all six bikes at once.
The barriers, so proud a second ago, crumpled like foil. The bikes went from a hundred kilometers an hour to weightless, snatched off the cobbles and hurled upward in a screaming corkscrew of wind.
Six young men, one after another, tumbled end over end into the night sky above City M.
They went up and up, dwindling into dots, and then they went sideways, flung well past the rooftops and out over the entertainment district and away.
Their bikes went with them, and the last thing anyone on that street saw of Chuzo Fening was the soles of his very expensive boots.
The wind died.
The street was completely silent.
The little boy sat on the cobbles, blinking, entirely untouched. His grandmother scooped him up and burst into tears.
Then, somewhere in the crowd, a single person began to clap.
It spread. Badly at first, uncertain, and then all at once, until the whole street was cheering and someone was pounding Aidan on the back and a vendor was pressing free dumplings into Solenne’s hands.
[Daily Quest: Vent your anger upon one who has earned it. Progress: 1/1.]
[Daily Quest complete.]
’Would you look at that.’ Aidan flexed his fingers. The heat at the base of his skull had already sunk back down. ’Homework’s done.’
"That was you," Solenne said. Not a question.
"That was wind."
Tom yawned on his shoulder. "You held back. I felt you hold back. Should have killed those fuckers."
Aidan rolled his eyes. "No rush. They’ll probably come to us to die later."
A hand caught Aidan’s sleeve.
It was the vendor, the one with the sauce she’d talked about too long, and her face was pale under the lantern light.
"Sir. Sir, you have to go."
