Whilst her husband was a gentle soul at heart, preferring to keep the threats to no more than just that, threats, T’Kere was… not. She reveled in violence. She loved the thrill of the fight. She was born to be an adventurer, and the stint in the village hadn’t dulled that sharp desire. Her killer instinct hadn’t gone anywhere. For Mar’Kir, she’d go anywhere, but she was more than a little excited to stretch.

This was not just a matter of safety for the village. It was an insult.

As the response to a simple insult, she didn’t feel the need to take the guards along with. They could stay behind and ensure no one got any bright ideas while she was gone. Varo’K was with Vashnoruk, so she didn’t have to worry about her little girl, either. The orc was going to be involved in the conflict, too, but Vashnoruk couldn’t really fight. If the enemy was within conventional eyesight, things had already gotten fully out of hand. The shaman had assured her she had plans for if things went south in that way, and she trusted her word.

Mar’Kir was looking into whoever spurred this on while she dealt with the bandits that attempted to play themselves off as her guards. She sure hoped the money they got paid with was enough for their lives, because they made a serious miscalculation of who they were messing with.

It didn’t take long to find where the attacks were occurring. Those bandits had been attacking their own trade caravans, too, but they were very good at avoiding patrols. She was excited to learn why that was.

When she arrived on the site of a few of the attacks, she searched the area slowly and thoroughly. She didn’t have the powers that her husband had with tracking and intelligence gathering, but she was a skilled tracker, and had picked up and trained telemetry some time ago. Those two abilities made following brigands something she could do with ease.

What she found interesting was some of the tracks she found on the way. Footprints transformed into various animal prints that honestly made the tracking easier. Foxes did not travel with boar.

It seemed clear that they were therianthropes, but they were not nearly as subtle as therians usually were. The tracks were too big to belong to someone young, but they lacked the grace of a grown therian used to their forms. They must have changed recently.

The question is, did they do so willingly? The fae have a great deal of influence over therians, so it was never out of the question that they were somehow involved anywhere a therianthrope was.

Well, she’d find out. She carried a cold iron blade for this reason after all.

It was clear that the conflict was the goal of their attacks, as they had moved to a base too far away to make attacking a major road plausible. Their job was done, as they were concerned. Unfortunately, the past had a way of catching up.

As she tracked them, the excitement grew, practically shaking with how giddy she was becoming. She loved her town, and her family, and the people she protected, but without Mar’Kir to help keep her stable, she could never live somewhere for long before her tendency for violence got her kicked out. Thankfully, he did wonders for that, but that just made the moments where blood was spilled all the more exciting.

Eventually she found where they had hid out around dusk the next day; a dungeon deep in the forest. It wasn’t unheard of to see such a thing, dungeons were great bases if you could control the monster spawns inside. Being pocket dimensions, they were unaffected by local weather. It made it harder to keep watch on their entrance since one on the outside couldn’t just shout to call an alarm, but the benefits far outweighed the negative.

The entryway that marked this particular dungeon was a random pair of freestanding gates made of a dark grey wood roughly ten feet in width. They had simple crab patterns across them.

Scouting the location out, she found that there were quite a number of bandits here. At least twenty-four, and that’s just what she could see from the outside.

Cutting herself for some “paint”, she drew runes across her body. A complex stealth spell that, combined with her practiced techniques, gave her the title “Shadow in the Night.” A title she flexed when she finessed her way through the door past the watch.

It looked like this dungeon was once some kind of crab-themed dungeon, both from the door and the environment itself. When she entered the gates, the entire world around her changed from one moment to the next. Gone was the forest; now T’Kere was standing in the opening to a cliffside cave network. To her back was a small cave entrance leading to an endless ocean, one that likely went on forever. Or at least until physics and matter began to break down at the seams.Thankfully, it was sunny here, and it was unlikely the weather would change in a dungeon represented by only a double gate. It was too simple, so the dungeon was probably originally rather weak.

However, instead of going deeper into the cave, it looked like the bandits had built their base out onto the water, a floating network of buildings held up by ballasts and platforms. This had definitely been here for a while, as there were more than fifty buildings; some were clearly barracks, others housing, others training areas. There were even a few shops and numerous entertainment areas. It was much larger than the village.

It was unlikely this was all owned by the one group.

It seemed like she’d stumbled her way into a proper stronghold.

She was but barely able to hold herself back from kicking the fight off. This was going to be fun.

She never even considered sinking the city, not because she wasn’t tactically minded… but because that would end the fight before it began. Plus they certainly had some kind of protection against that. An automatic repair system or enchantment on the thin stone platforms themselves, more than likely.

Excited as she was, though, she knew better than to jump into this without proper preparation. There were definitely some strong bandits here, maybe even some that made enough money to settle down and lead this place. That was the goal for most people after all; to make enough to be able to do what they want with no concern for their health or wellbeing.

She began preparing on the flat roof of one of the buildings, out of sight of the victims below. T’Kere was a skilled magic user, just like Mar’Kir, but in a very different way. She focused on buffs and protection abilities, as well as area control. She always found it funny that she was the violent one, yet his abilities were much more gruesome and offense-focused.

A little over three hours had passed before she finished her silent preparation. The roof went from clean and clear to covered in arcane circles and spellcraft.

The entry to the dungeon was going to be temporarily sealed soon.

It was time to begin.

Maybe she’d even manage to level up to 130 finally.