Chapter 48: Outpost
"He’s tier 8? Why is he on this mission then?"
"Didn’t you hear? That’s the twins’ little boy toy."
"Hehe, keep it down. Hela has a serious temper. I don’t want to end up bedridden."
Inside a set of carriages being pulled by horse type summons, Ethan and several White Tower members were carried along past a desolate wasteland toward a mountainous region in the distance.
Tona Town wasn’t far, but in typical White Tower fashion the journey was made in style rather than on foot.
Ethan wasn’t bothered by the conversation moving around him. He had heard variations of it before and it had already stopped registering as anything worth redirecting his attention toward.
His gaze stayed fixed on the report in his hands.
If what was written here was accurate, the giant lizards weren’t simply a local infestation that had wandered too close to a mining road. They were closely tied to Rock Drakes, a lesser dragon species operating somewhere in the mountain range above Tona Town.
He read that section twice.
(Morgan’s Dragon Dive skill required subduing lesser dragons to advance her evolution. Fifteen of them.)
He had been turning that requirement over in his head since the day he summoned her, running through scenarios where the conditions might be met without having to hunt specifically for the opportunity. He hadn’t expected the opportunity to present itself this early, and certainly not packaged inside a White Tower assignment.
In some ways, this mission was a godsend.
He closed the report and looked out through the carriage window at the terrain passing alongside them, the flat wasteland beginning to give way to the rocky outcroppings that marked the lower edges of the mountain range.
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They reached Tona Town as the last of the evening light was leaving the sky.
White Ghost went ahead immediately to coordinate with the town’s leadership, his white hat visible through the low buildings as he moved toward the central offices. With the cooperation of the local authorities already in motion, the group spread out and set a perimeter around the town’s edges, establishing outpost positions ready to respond to any attack at a moment’s notice.
Ethan took his assigned position in one of the outpost houses and settled in, his eyes moving out through the open window into the darkness beyond the town’s boundary.
The mountains sat somewhere out there, invisible in the dark but present in the way large things were present, their weight altering the shape of everything around them without needing to be seen.
"Hey, kid."
The voice came from beside him.
"The name is Lucas."
An arm wrapped around his shoulders before he had fully turned, belonging to a young man who looked to be in his mid-twenties, his posture carrying the easy familiarity of someone who had never found a room he couldn’t make himself comfortable in.
Ethan looked at him.
"Ethan Algar."
He returned it with a forced smile, the expression sitting where it needed to without reaching anything further.
In this group he knew three people. Ella, Hela, and Fin. The remaining four, White Ghost included, were strangers to him, and strangers had a way of requiring a particular kind of management until they became something else.
"Algar clan." Lucas smiled, rubbing a hand through his blonde hair with an energy that didn’t seem to have an off setting. "You’re from a warrior family. That explains it."
White Tower held no family requirement, no noble status. That was the kingdom’s military’s concern. What White Tower valued was talent. If a person had it, that was enough, and no amount of clan name or lineage could substitute for it if they didn’t.
But a tier 8 sitting inside a mission assembled at tier 7 minimum was still a visible thing. It sat outside the expected arrangement and everyone in the carriage had noticed it from the moment Ethan joined the group.
They wanted to know what justified his presence.
"So." Lucas turned back toward him after a moment, reaching behind him to collect a cup of liquor from the shelf near the window. "What brings a noble warrior clan member to White Tower? Especially the Algars?"
Something shifted in his expression, a particular quality of amusement sitting just beneath the surface of the question, leaning into it.
"Oh, yeah. I remember."
The implication was clear enough without being stated directly.
Lucas let it sit for a second and then thought better of it, the amusement pulling back as he registered he had pushed past the edge of casual conversation into something that was no longer particularly fair.
"Sorry about that, kid."
He exhaled and set the cup down.
When he spoke again the tone had changed, the lightness replaced by something more direct, more honest.
"But really. Why are you here? What’s special about you?"
He wasn’t asking to cause trouble. They were sitting in an outpost house at the edge of a town that had been reporting beast attacks for three weeks, waiting for something to move in the dark outside. If it came, he needed to know what the person beside him was actually capable of, not what their rank said on a piece of paper, and not whose company they kept back at the fortress.
Hela and Ella already had reputations within White Tower, built through work that people had seen with their own eyes.
Ethan had none of that yet.
He would have to earn it, and Lucas was simply being honest about that fact before the situation required it to be demonstrated the hard way.
Ethan held his gaze for a moment.
"I nearly killed a tier 7 summoner from the Algar clan back atop the turtle god beast."
His voice came out flat, carrying no particular weight behind it, the statement delivered the same way he would have noted the weather.
"I can easily do it again."
He let that settle before adding the rest.
"As for what’s special about me, you’ll just have to wait and see."
His eyes drifted back toward the window and the darkness beyond it, his attention returning to the mountain range somewhere out there in the black, the report’s contents still moving through the back of his mind.
Lucas looked at him for a moment longer.
He didn’t respond immediately.
He reached for his cup instead, took a slow sip, and directed his own gaze out toward the same stretch of dark.
The outpost stayed quiet around them, the only sound the occasional shift of someone repositioning further down the building, and the distant wind moving through the mountain pass above the town.
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