Return of the Runebound Professor

Chapter 865: Great Scheme

Og choked on his tea.

He doubled over, coughing and nearly smashing the teacup into the plate as he fought to keep from spewing the contents of his mouth across the restaurant floor. The informant stared at him in a mixture of surprise and confusion. He’d already risen halfway out of his seat like a terrified field mouse ready to scurry at the first sign of a threat.

“Are you—” the man started.

“Sit down,” Og growled, grabbing a napkin and wiping his mouth before tossing it back to the table. “What did you just say? Who?”

“Spider?” The man repeated, somewhat less confidently this time. He shifted a bit further toward the edge of his seat.

That couldn’t have been right. Og was not much of a believer in coincidence. Orlen had more than shown him that there was no such thing within the universe. Chaos and order were two sides of the same coin, and a lack of understanding in either did not equate to some mere happenstance.

There was always the chance for two things to be similar. That in itself was not a coincidence. Pattern existed in all things, and it was the nature of logical thought to seek it out. Any rational individual would actively seek out patterns and similarities to cling onto. That was how the mind evolved.

But the chances of two individuals both going by the name of Spider did not seem particularly high. Especially not when they both fulfilled the requirements he had given the informant.

How, though? Spider is dead. Everyone from Arbalest must be. I refuse to accept the fact that he could have somehow survived being turned to stone along with the rest of that little baby Empire. He was nowhere near powerful enough to pull a feat like that off.

His disbelief did nothing to change the words that he’d heard.

“What, exactly, is this Spider doing?” Og asked. “Tell me what you know.”

The informant swallowed. It looked like he was ready to bolt.

“I — well—”

Og suppressed a sigh. He returned himself to his proper position and deliberately splayed out the fingers of one hand across the table to show the flighty man across from him he meant no harm. With his other hand, he summoned forth a small bag from his ring. He plopped it down on the table.

“For your troubles,” Og said.

The informant swallowed once again. He reached out gingerly to snag the bag. Then he pulled it over to himself and peered inside it. His eyes widened slightly. Then he looked back up at Og. And, just like that, all the fear was gone. The glow of wealth had washed it away.

So easy.

“There’s really not that much about Spider.” The informant sounded confident, now. “Most of it is little more than rumor, and I don’t imagine a fair portion of those are true. That’s the way it goes with such things. And that’s the reason I don’t deal in rumors. I use them. The moment you start believing them instead of following them to figure out where your target is… well, you’re going to get fed a load of lies.”

I did not ask for a rundown on how your job works. That said, the advice is sound. He is not wrong. I simply don’t care at the moment.

“Forget that for the moment,” Og said. “Tell me of the rumors. I do not care if they are utter drivel. You have been paid. It is not your problem whether I act a fool or not.”

The informant hesitated. Then he shrugged. “Suppose that’s true. To be honest, half the problem with this guy is the rumors don’t make sense. A lot of them don’t add up.”

“How so?” Og asked. As tempted as he was to tell the informant to get a move on, he’d hired the man for a reason. He was an expert tracker. Anything he felt somehow out of place was very likely to be relevant.

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“Well, for one, the locations are odd. They’re haphazard. Some can be traced back to the edges of Coral, but then they bounce around. There’s no direction at all. It’s like he was just showing up at cities randomly, pulling off some manner of feat or another, and then wandering off immediately.”

Og tilted his head to the side. “How is that odd?”

“Because nobody moves like that. He’s not on vacation, is he?” The informant shook his head. “No. If the rumors are right — and that’s a big if, mind you — then it makes no sense. Individuals as powerful as the ones you had me tracking do not move randomly. And I’ll note that every single other person you had me sniffing out were all moving as I would expect. Namely, straight toward Aqua Terra.”

“And Spider?”

“Couldn’t say. He probably ended up here. Maybe. His path did generally bring him closer to the city,” the informant said. Then he shrugged. “But the way he took was so horrendously inefficient that it couldn’t possibly be real. It seems like he’s a blind idiot.”

“Perhaps he is,” Og drawled.

The informant shook his head. “If he was, then the rumors wouldn’t make sense. See… the feats he’s reportedly pulled off don’t line up with the seemingly braindead path he took. Spider was first observed when a border town reported the presence of a Hand who had wiped out a bandit camp”

“Bandits are hardly a worthy measure of power.”

“They are not,” the informant agreed. “But there are rumors that the Prophet sent the Executioner after him. But I’ll get to that in a moment. In the short time since Spider’s name was first heard in the empire, a figure fitting his description was also reported killing the Star Dragon and its mate, a duo of relatively powerful Rank 6 monsters. And that’s not all. He apparently showed up at Ice Wretch mountains at the same time as one of the Coral Empire’s more aggressive operations teams was sent out to dispatch a monster terrorizing the area.”

“And?” Og asked.

“All went missing,” the informant said. He leaned forward. “All but Spider. The team still has yet to report back, and the monster at Ice Wretch is gone. I’ll skip the other rumors for the sake of both of our time and get to the main one. The Executioner.”

“What of him? You can’t mean to imply that Spider killed the Executioner.” Og asked, his heart starting to beat a little faster. That was a feat that even he was incapable of. Of all the forces within the Coral Empire, one of the ones he wished to draw the ire of the least was the Executioner. That was not a fight he had even the faintest chance of winning.

This Spider sounded absolutely nothing like the relatively weak Chaos user he’d met back in Arbalest. If this were the same man… something had changed. Something significant.

“I doubt that,” the other man said. “But that’s the thing. There’s nothing past that. No news of the Executioner. He hasn’t made the kill. And it never takes that long for a kill.”

“You mean to imply Spider actually managed to fight the Executioner off?” Og asked in disbelief.

The informant shrugged. “You see my problem now, yes? Rumors. Who knows how much is true? They are, at their core, campfire stories. Nothing worth putting real weight behind. But if you do… then you must ask the question. Why would someone so seemingly powerful wander around aimlessly?”

Og’s brow furrowed. That, in fact, was a very good question. There were always powerful idiots. But someone powerful enough for people to assume to be a Hand, someone who had defeated multiple Rank 6 monsters and evaded the Executioner himself — there was only so far raw power could take you. If someone strong was ambling about someone else’s Empire and stirring up trouble for seemingly random reasons, chances were that they weren’t the one that had missed something.

The powerful rarely did anything without purpose. Orlen was the greatest example of that. Though chaotic and fractured, that man had never once taken an action that didn’t have a goal. But if someone who knew nothing of Orlen were to stumble across him, they’d have thought him entirely senile.

An uneasy chill settled on Og’s shoulders. He was being presented with two options here, and neither of them made much sense at all. He might have been able to dismiss the rumors as the informant suggested if it were not for the name of the one causing them.

Spider.

Is it another one? Somebody who merely shares the name? Or did that Spider from Arbalest somehow survive everything and arrive here, far more powerful than he was before?

But either way… what is this Spider doing? Are they just wandering aimlessly around? No. I should think not. You would have to be an absolute idiot to gather this degree of attention within the Coral Empire if you didn’t have a reason for it. Even if only a small portion of these rumors are true, they were real enough for the informant to believe this man to exist.

Og’s jaw clenched. He just couldn’t get past the damned name. It just kept coming back. There were no coincidences in the universe.

One of the two options withered away in his head. A man who fulfilled the requirements that he had given the informant… that was not a man that Orlen could have overlooked.

There was no doubt about it. This had to be the very same Spider from Arbalest. And that meant, somehow, Spider had managed to survive what should have been certain death. That was something that Og himself couldn’t have done.

The unease wrapping around Og tightened. He’d missed something during his meeting with Spider.

He’s planning something. There is a great scheme unfolding directly before my eyes.

But what is it?