Chapter 576 - Speed dating???

“Yes! That was the correct solution,” Velania explained, sipping on a hot drink, “You can only get the shroud using [Regret], actually. If you get to the final three it’s designed so that the first one you pick is always wrong.”

“Ooooh, that’s nasty. Who designed that?” Everelle asked.

“Like almost everything else, it’s all Romuald. All I really did was make the things…”

“Right, who made the artifact?” Sofia asked, looking at the shroud still wrapped around her shoulders.

“We are not sure… Auntie wouldn’t tell us, but it was already there when… It was there…” Velania’s eyes clouded over slightly as her voice died down.

Shit, is she about to pass out again?!

“R- Right, Velania, I had another question for you! Don’t you want to leave now that I have the shroud? You don’t have to stay trapped here,” Sofia said, coming up with a distraction on the spot.

That question seemed to surprise Velania. “L- leave? I… N- no, I can’t leave. You still have the other trials here to get through later!”

“Right… What about after I clear them all, then?”

“I… I’ll think about it…”, she mumbled after some consideration, blushing for no apparent reason, “But that means you have to be the one who gets the wheel and allow Auntie to come back!”

“That was always the plan. It’s going to take a while though, I don’t feel strong enough to barge into Fairy territory quite yet.”

“You should be at least as strong as me first,” Velania confirmed.  

“Yeah, definitely going to take a while…”

A few days later, after Sofia helped bring everyone back to the other side of the world by going into Zangdar and having Alith bring them out with her ring, Sofia was alone with Bookie and Pareth, doing some shopping in the streets of Hooasow.

The peculiar trio drew a lot of attention from the people, but nobody dared say anything to the weird tall lady with hair of light covered in gold and magical artifacts and her two skeletons dressed like noblemen.

“Vasperia is great but nothing can beat the choice they have here on the human continent,” Sofia commented as she looked through a monster-parts shop that sold many rare things including a prohibitively expensive Dragon claw shard. 

“What if we don’t find the ingredients here?” Bookie questioned, holding Sofia’s hand.

“Well, there’s always Richard’s red carpet. And if that fails we can take a quick trip to Exidia, but it shouldn’t be that hard to get a few rare herbs and reagents… Maybe. At least Alith already had most of them.”

“I still don’t get how the potion will help…” Bookie admitted, which made Sofia giggle.

“No need to worry about it, if the Demon King says it’s going to help then it probably will, don’t you think?”

“He could have at least sent an explanation with the recipe!” Bookie complained.

“I am just happy that he accepted to help at all, honestly. Hopefully I’ll finally be able to use that racial skill. It’s just there, in my status, taunting me… Ah… I don’t see anything that we need in this shop, let’s get a move on.”

“There you go!” Karlson proudly said, tapping on the large mithril cube Sofia had ordered a few days prior, leaving him with a pile of ingots worth a fortune. “Gotta say, never worked with that much Mithril at once, a bit sad that you wanted a box and not a weapon…”

“I need it for my new leveling technique, but I’ll probably make something else out of the Mithril when I’m done. Don’t need a weapon though, my staff is still perfect.”

“It sure looks decent… Wait… Is that a diamond?” the rabbit beastman asked with bulging eyes.

“Eheheh… Here, take a handful, I make them myself,” Sofia told Karlson, handing him a small pile of tiny rough diamonds.

“W- wait, I should pay for this.”

“Just think of it as a present from a friend,” Sofia said with a wink, “right, how’s Karin doing?”

“Ah! Same as always, nose in her accounting books, I’m sure she’ll be overjoyed if you swing by the palace to say hi… After you fix her memory…”

“Yeah… I need to go to the adventurer’s guild too, at least to see Kuli and Drian, maybe Michael if he’s there. Speaking of which, are Topaz and Opal around?”

“You know the imperial twins?! Oh wait, no, yeah, I heard about that I think, something about you being a teacher? It’s a bit messy to link things together since this was discussed after everyone aside from Xeros forgot about you. They should still be in the Empire, but they might be at their summer home in the south, though,” Karlson explained, “They’ve been wanting to go train in a dungeon around there for a while now.”

“I’ll go see Xeros first to ask him, I guess. Plenty of people to catch up with and fix the memory of… Well, I’ll take this and go, thanks for working so fast, Karl.”

“Don’t mention it, drinking buddies gotta have each other’s back. We should have another party night one of these days, you look like you’ve got plenty of stories to tell. Starting with your becoming a beastkin yourself.”

“The race is Lumian I told you,” Sofia corrected him, jokingly rolling her eyes.

“Hey, listen, I told you the other day, if you’ve got horns…”

A masked god appeared in the middle of a swamp, his long legs knee-deep in the mud.

“Seriously… Did they give me the wrong location? Hmm… Is this a skeleton out there?”

The god appeared next to the tall three-headed skeleton who was using some sort of measurement tool, “Hey, big lad, I’m looking for a girl. Demon, shiny horns, scary grin, you wouldn’t happen to have seen her around?”

The skeleton pointed south, where Speed could only see a black cloud writhing over the swamp.

“Are those fucking mosquitoes? Disgusting… Well, thanks for the pointer…”

Speed disappeared.

A tall girl was in the middle of the swarm of giant mosquitoes, she was not attacking them, just avoiding their continuous attacks.

“Oh hey, training your speed? Smart,” the god commented, “I’m looking for a demon, she got the same horns as- oh… Damn, girl, you look different than I remembered.”

Sofia summoned a sword of bones in her hand, she swung it once, and the entire giant mosquito swarm was caught in a series of silent luminous explosions. When the light died down, there were only charred corpses left sinking in the mud.

“Hi, Speed!” Sofia answered, reflexively wiping non-existant sweat from her forehead, “Yeah I do look a bit different when not in demon-form. I hope finding me wasn’t too difficult?”

“Well, t’was easier than the first time, for sure. You know my rates?”

“Tiny stone for a non-priority letter, got that right?” Sofia asked.

“Yep, you can expect delivery almost anywhere on the surface in under a week, and the recipient can send an answer letter for free,” Speed specified.

“Honestly it’s a lot cheaper than I expected.”

“Well, a tiny stone ain’t exactly cheap to begin with, for most people; level 300 plus folks don’t croak every day. But also I can’t make the service too expensive or I won’t have any business.”

“Why does a God need money to begin with?”

“Same as you, I wanna buy shit,” he answered with a shrug.

“Alright, well, here’s the stone, harvested that one myself,” Sofia explained, giving Speed the Fortune dwarf’s mana heart as well as a sealed letter.

“Seems legit,” Speed analyzed, fiddling with the stone, “who’s the letter for, answer to the big D?”

“For Morning Star, Sun’s saintess. But it is also fine if you give it to Sun or her Oracle.”

“Huh, probably just a trip to Herzal, then. Easy enough. And I heard you had some other odd job for me also?”

“Yes… Hum. It might be a bit of a strange request but… Could you show me to the place where the previous Speed died?”

The question took Speed aback, “And here I thought I might have landed myself a date…” he joked, “The old one died in his domain so… That’s my home now, basically, kinda. Why would you want to go there, even?”

“Well… It’s complicated, but to make it simple, I have an urgent need to gather the remains of dead divinities…”

Speed was left speechless, he turned around, looking at the three-headed skeleton still measuring things in the distance, then back at Sofia. “Necromancers, man… How much do you pay?” he finally said with a sigh.

Sofia had to pause for a second, she really did not have many things in her possessions that could be of interest to a God and that she would be agreeable to trade.

“H- How about a date?” She finally tried without thinking.

“Huh? That’s- I mean…” Speed scratched his head, deep in thought, “Like…” He stopped and looked Sofia up and down, not even trying to hide it, “Sure? Yeah, alright. Let’s do that,” he finally agreed. “What am I getting myself into…” he mumbled from behind his mask.