Chapter 173

System was a constant source of frustration. For all the information he provided, it was always like pulling teeth to get something helpful. He could confirm the concentration of monsters nearby and point in its direction, but wouldn’t say the name of the business or give actual directions useful for navigating the city. And Luke knew System could have told them exactly which streets to take to get there, but no, the best he got was a distance and a direction when he wanted GPS maps.

They eventually ended up in the right district, but finding the monster arena was another matter. They weren’t strictly legal, since as a business they specialized in bringing dangerous creatures that would happily slaughter anything that got near them into the middle of a dense urban population center, but Zea took over the search once they got close enough since System wouldn’t tell them anything more than that they were in the vicinity of the monster cluster.

“Places like this are open secrets,” Zea said. “They have to be in order to make any money. So we’re looking for a big business or a warehouse, something with a building five or six times bigger than your average place. Hmm… monster fights though. It might even be bigger than that. It’ll need to be ground floor so they have access to an underground area to hold monsters and dig the pits. Closer to the edge of the city is better so that it’s easier to transport new monsters in…”

She rambled on while explaining the signs she was looking for. Luke dutifully nodded along, though he saw nothing that looked anything like what she was talking about. “There isn’t anything remotely like that here,” he pointed out.

“It’s a big city. There’s plenty of places to look still, and if all else fails, we’ll find some shady people somewhere and start asking about a place to go for some entertainment and gambling. Someone will point us to the arena eventually.”

Soon after that, Luke caught a whiff of something musky and wet. It was a familiar smell out in the forest, but not one he expected to find in a city. He put a hand on Zea’s shoulders and said, “I smell something.”

“There are a lot of smells here,” she said.

“No, something that shouldn’t be here. Animal stink.”

“Can you tell where it’s coming from?”

“Probably,” he said. “Give me a minute.”

Tracking by smell wasn’t a precise thing, even with 55 perception. Humans were exceptionally bad at parsing that information even when the smells were strong enough that their noses could pick them up, and making it easier to smell didn’t necessarily translate into making it easier to home in on the source of the smell.

For Luke, it was something like hearing dozens of different sounds, all in varying pitches and intensities, all coming from different directions, and trying to lock in on a specific sound to follow it back to its source. It was possible, sure, but he thought it would probably be accomplished more through a lot of persistence than through skill. Even that didn’t really describe the scope of the challenge, though. It wasn’t a few dozen smells; it was hundreds.

They started doing laps around the streets while he determined which direction the smell was strongest in. Half an hour later, they were outside a small shop that sold smoked meats.

“Here,” Luke said.

“Are you sure? I’m not doubting, but no one is fighting a monster in this building, let alone drawing in a crowd to bet on them.”

“Maybe it’s just a front and the entire thing is underground?”

“They’d have to go really far down to dig below the foundations for all the other buildings around it,” Zea said. “How would they get rid of the dirt?”

Luke shrugged. “I’m just saying, this is where the smell is coming from.”

“Or maybe they do butchering on site and you’re just smelling that?”

“They don’t do butchering on site,” Luke said. “I don’t even think they do meat processing here. They just sell it.”

“Hmm. It would be a good cover, but the location is all wrong.”

Luke peered at the store for a moment, then looked around. “Maybe it leads somewhere else? You know, just a tunnel underground that goes to the main arena.”

“That’s a possibility, but it would still need to go to somewhere nearby.”

“The warehouses near the docks are only half a mile away,” Luke pointed out.

Zea thought about it for a moment, then shook her head. “System said the monsters were here, not over there.”

“Well… We could just go in and ask?”

“I don’t think this is the place,” Zea said. “Too small. Nobody is going in and then not coming out again, so it doesn’t lead anywhere else. And, honestly, I don’t smell anything. I’m not saying you’re wrong about that smell, but it’s so faint it needs someone with ridiculously high perception to detect it.”

Luke sniffed the air again, then glanced off to the side of the shop. There was a narrow alley separating it from the house nearby. Frowning, he took a step into the alley and looked around. Almost immediately, his eyes lighted on a small crack running along the length of the store. “Found something,” he called to Zea.

“A crack in the stone?” she asked as she joined him.

“It’s where the smell is coming from. This building is on top of whatever underground holding area they’re keeping the monsters in. Maybe it’s not the entrance, but it’s close. We’re definitely in the right area. I think it’s time to find some of the clientele and just ask a few questions.”

They kept walking around, but stumbling across some seedy looking Heishin natives squatting in a back alley throwing dice was harder than it sounded, and Luke wasn’t really sure what he was looking for anyway. After about half an hour of walking, though, Zea stopped and said “Those three guys right there.”

“The ones with the beards?” Luke asked. He studied them, but [Detection] didn’t point out anything unusual.

“They’re gamblers,” Zea said.

“How can you tell?”

“One in the front had a tattoo of dice on the palm of his hand. Shitty tattoo, at that. All three of them are carrying money on them, but the bags are too full to be gold. So probably a large amount of copper, maybe some silver mixed in, that they’re planning on using to bet on individual hands. The one in the back, see that thing he’s doing with his fingers? That’s a grip you use for dirty dealing. I bet you if you [Analyze] them, you’re going to find skills like [Sleight of Hand] or [Odds Maker]. Might see [Cunning Calculation] if they’re any good at what they do, and definitely [Deception] or [Acting].”

Luke did just that, and found all three to be under level 20 with a mix of skills that included everything Zea had predicted, along with some minor fighting skills and a few related to sailing and fishing. “So, what does this mean besides that they like gambling and are cheaters?”

“Means they work together, probably enter a den separately, join a table one at a time, then play off each other to cheat the other people. If they’ve been doing it long enough, the house will know who they are and be in on it as long as they stick to targeting other patrons. It means they’re familiar with places where illegal things happen, which might mean they know where the monster arena is.”

Luke nodded along. That all made sense to him, but he still saw one problem. “How do we get them to tell us?”

“Well it’s an easy motivation to figure out, isn’t it? They like money. We give them some money, they tell us what we want to know.”

“And if they lie to us?”

“Then we make them regret it,” Zea said, a vicious grin forming on her face.

Zea marched off with Luke following up behind. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting her to do, but it wasn’t that she would just go right up to them and say, “Hey, can I ask you a question.”

The trio stopped walking and traded glances briefly before one of them said, “Piss off.”

Zea flashed a piece of silver at them and said, “You sure?”

“Alright,” said the one in the lead. “Hand it over and ask your question.”

“Question first. I’m not paying for an ‘I don’t know’ or some crap like that,” she insisted.

The man laughed and nodded. Luke caught his hand moving behind his back, signaling something to the other two. They nodded at each other, but otherwise didn’t move. They couldn’t be thinking of jumping Zea, not when she was close to 20 levels higher than any of them, and with Luke so obviously standing right there.

“Where do we go to see the fights?” she asked.

“Which ones?” the man responded.

“The ones with the monsters.”

The man started laughing. “You’d better have more than some foreign silver in your pockets if you want in on that action. I can tell you where to go, but you’re not getting through the door for chump change like that.”

Another hand signal. Luke wasn’t sure what the trio was up to, but he suspected it was nothing good. Zea kept haggling with the leader of the group while the other two slowly retreated backwards until foot traffic started flowing between them and the leader. Luke thought it unlikely that they were abandoning the man.

[Burst Step] worked best when it was providing a speed boost going in a straight line. That was how Luke got the most distance out of each use, but it was a flexible enough skill that it could be used to weave through obstacles too. He’d never tried moving through a crowd with it, but there was a first time for everything.

Luke plotted his route, activated the skill, and appeared behind the two men just as they went to take another step back. Both of them bumped into him, caught a glimpse over their shoulders to see him standing there, and flinched away.

“Hi there,” Luke said. “Where are you guys going? Seems rude to just leave your friend behind.”

“Er, right, of course. Don’t know what we were thinking,” one of them said. “Just got in a hurry, is all.”

“Let’s go ahead and just rejoin the group,” Luke said as he reached out and clapped his hands down on their shoulders to gently push them back toward where Zea and the third gambler were talking.

The leader had a better poker face than his buddies. He didn’t even blink when Luke steered them back over, let alone falter in his conversation. He just kept rattling off directions and answering Zea’s clarifying questions. When she was happy with the answer, she handed him the coin.

“Whatever you and your boys were planning, I’d advise you rethink it,” she said. Then she looked at Luke and said, “Let’s go.”

Luke patted one of the trio on the back as he walked by. “Nice meeting you. Have a good one.”

They walked away, leaving three confused and somewhat frightened degenerates standing in the street clutching a single silver coin stamped with foreign imagery and shaped in a circle instead of the flattened oval of the local currency. None of them protested their treatment.

“So, what do you think that was about?” Luke asked as they walked away.

“Probably planning to get some of his buddies and mug us,” Zea said. “Apparently this place is very expensive to even get into, the kind of place nobles go to waste money on entertainment. If we’ve got enough money to be asking about it, we’ve got enough money to be targeted.”

“Hmm. Hopefully they gave you good info. All three of them have already run off,” Luke said.

“Oh, I imagine we’ll see them again, probably with a dozen of their buddies. A few of them might even be higher level, maybe as high as low 30s.”

“Not any higher than that, huh?”

“People that strong don’t make a living mugging tourists,” Zea explained. “If they want to fight, they get jobs as bodyguards for nobles.”

Luke thought about that for a second. “That makes sense. Guess if it happens, it happens. In the meantime, where do we go?”

“Right over here,” Zea said, pointing down a street. “Should be that big building a few blocks away.”