Chapter 1654 Bones?

--- Kat --- (Around two hours later)

They’d made great time in the two or so hours of travel. With everyone at Rank 3 and Bower no longer with them they ate up the distance along the road. It was… honestly refreshing and a little strange. It didn’t completely lift Kat’s mood but being out under the open sky with freedom to just run did help quite a bit.

Of course, as soon as they stopped Kamiko had moved off to the side and was now splayed out on the ground not looking at anyone else. Even as Meg reminded everyone, "Make sure to have some water and grab a bite to eat. We’ll be running for some time yet," Kamiko didn’t actually make any motions to take that advice but for now that was fine. Kat could by her a little time.

"So… do we know if the drake piece is still moving? Or how far away it’s gotten?" asked Kat. Meg glared back over the rim of the canteen she was drinking out of. Clearly unable to answer. Kat just shrugged. The question needed to be asked and it wasn’t like she was rushing Megthera over it.

Eventually, Meg did finish imbibing sufficient quantities of fluid allowing her to answer. "It’s harder to say now that it’s so far away from us. Which I suppose is half of the answer. I estimate that it’s at least three days away and unlikely to be more than a week but that’s just right at this moment. If it’s still moving the distance between us might shrink at a slower pace so take my estimate with a grain of salt.

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"The chances that it’s still moving? Very unclear. I think that it might’ve been picked up by somebody, intentionally or not. This road leads almost directly to the drake piece. It’s what made it so easy to decide where we needed to go. It’s obviously up in the mountains, and its also just as clearly along this road.

"Now weather it was taken by say… a bird of some kind that’s claimed a shiny thing for its nest or a merchant, or perhaps even just a random traveller… well that’s a lot harder to say. Normally the road would be a good indication but…"

Meg gestured around at the ground. The road, as nice and compact as it was bore the scars of the monster waves that the drake had triggered. Chips and cracks littered the edges and you could see evidence of fights along its length. There were at least three notable spots that were plainly visible from their little spot off the road and that was without even trying to look for more.

Which, sure. Obvious signs of fighting were obvious… but Kat didn’t entirely understand what that meant. "So… I see the marks but I’m not sure what you’re implying. Why would it matter that the road is in disrepair?"

Meg gave Kat an odd look of ’is she serious’ for a few seconds before realising that Kat indeed was. Meg started to debate if it was worth explaining when Hunter appeared and did it for her. "23HX502 is implying," Meg pouted "that the extensive monster migrations have messed with the echo system. With them fleeing the drake, some are likely to have followed the road simply because it’s clear open terrain that’s easily moved over. Not all monsters prefer that type of thing, but some do.

"With the clearly visible evidence that the monsters did cross the road, even if they didn’t necessarily take it… we can’t know what happened to the drake piece. It does look like a fancy crystal after all. It’s possible it was caught on something that got eaten, or perhaps it fused with a monster that a caravan guard later killed… we perhaps should have asked if anyone had passed by back at the village,"

"I did," announced Meg. Kat gave Meg a raised eyebrow. "It wasn’t hard to just ask the guards at the gate while you were all saying your goodbyes. They did have a few people stop by, but it’s hard to pinpoint any one group as our culprit, if any of them even are. They had a number of adventurer teams soon after we’d left. They came through and did a sweep of the roads, culling the monsters and leaving behind some scent markers to deter more from coming. From what I understand it didn’t help all that much, but it was requested so they went through with it,"

Hunter flicked her tongue out a few times. "I believe I can confirm the presence of the deterrents you’ve mentioned. They are quite faded already so I suspect that whoever was hired to do the job didn’t do a particularly good one,"

Meg shrugged, "Eh that or the person making the request didn’t care for much more than waving the flag. Anyway, there were a bunch of adventurers in the first few waves. Then came adventurers with caravans. They were the second wave and were capitalising on the disrupted travel to bring much needed supplies at a markup and to take a bunch of the carcasses at a discount.

"There were three caravans in that wave, and none of them line up perfectly with when the crystal started moving. Of course they may have encountered difficulties on the road, or perhaps they needed to double back and check something. I have no idea. I’ll keep an eye out of course, but," Meg shrugged. "No clear evidence.

"There was also a few lone travellers. The guards called them ’shady types’ all wrapped up in a cloak and not showing their face… but honestly those sorts of travellers are a dime a dozen when you start really poking at a town guard. Plenty of people who don’t want their face known or are just… making use of a traveling cloak? Keeping the sun out of their eyes? We might be blessed with superior demonic genetics but not all are so lucky,"

"23HX502 is just mad about the time she spent three weeks following a ’suspicious individual’ for a contract that the town guard was certain had stolen from the mayor before leaving town… only to find out they were a dhampir and needed the cloak because of their sensitive eyes in a place where sunglasses had yet to be invented. The fact that multiple town guards all confirmed their presence, agreed they were suspicious and offered to keep a look out should the return was just the icing on the cake," explained Hunter.

"Urgh, you’re leaving out the main detail of WHY I chased them so long. They had a large storage artifact on them and the two guard posts that had monitoring enchantments confirmed they had a large quantity of gold coins on them so I was fairly confident they had in fact stolen from the mayor. But no. It was their allowance from their sire and they were off looking for expensive reagents…n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

"Worse though! Is that the contract specifically requested that I find the thief! Not retrieve a certain amount of gold or chase down that particular individual. So I had to run all the way back to the town and then get started on the investigation again! If only I had seen that damned vampire with my own eyes I might’ve been able to guess they weren’t the culprit!"

Kat glanced over at Kamiko who still hadn’t moved and decided to ask a few more questions. "Right that all makes some sense… but why weren’t you able to keep up with them?"

"The little shit was still enough of a vampire that they could turn into a swarm of bats and FLY. I was still at Rank 2 at the time and while my sense of smell is good, I’m not and likely never will be as good at picking out old smells or separating large amounts of scents. I track with other methods most of the time. Sure I could tell they were moving between towns swiftly, and they had a good week head start anyway… but being able to fly over the bends in the roads really did help keep ahead of me for quite some time," explained Meg.

"How did you figure out that they weren’t the thief?" asked Kat.

"It’s because when I finally caught up to them they were in a scheduled meeting with one of the local lords. One obsessed with botany. I had to sneak in to this heavily guarded compound, only to overhear what the ’thief’ was trying to buy… and that they didn’t have greed as one of their weaknesses. Know they had honour and integrity instead.." grumbled Meg.

*Wait… honour and integrity count as weaknesses?*

Kat decided not to ask that question out loud. "So what had actually ended up happening to the gold?"

Meg let out a long groan. "Well there was a big tunnel dug into the safe, and that’s how the presumed thief had managed to sneak in… but in truth it was an exotic species of tunnelling worm someone had accidentally released into the wild. They navigate by searching for large deposits of precious metals. They feast on the metal before moving on to search for more. Worth quite a lot if you catch one because their skin and bones are extremely valuable,"

"Wait… it’s a worm with BONES?" asked Kat.

Meg nodded, "Yup. Creepy little shits…"