Taffy

“Thank you”, I said, taking the bouquet of flowers from the girl selling them, in exchange for the coins.

Having bought everything I’d need for the next year, and once again disappointed that the Adventurer’s Guild was still so weak, I started to walk to one of the exits of the Beginner’s City. Back home. Back to more torturing wait.

“They’re back!”, I heard an adventurer gossiping to his friend while he passed by me running.

“Who?”, his friend called from his back. “Hey! Who, dammit?!”, he followed after the first adventurer.

“The new 90th rankers!”

I stopped. I didn’t really expect to be here when they came back from their mission, they still had to get way stronger, and they wouldn’t be able to do so with me babysitting them all the time… Or did I? I definitely could have done my groceries quicker…

Well, maybe I could just say my farewells?

“Yes, a few last words won’t hurt”, I decided, finally outside the city, and in the green grass field around it. Seeing that there was no one around to see me, I stored the flowers with everything else, inside my [Inventory], and jumped.

The wind bypassed me fast, whistling in my ears, as I made a huge arc from the grass field, to over the walls of the old palace. During the fall, however, I made sure to control the wind around me, so my skirt wouldn’t flip indecently, as I’ve been doing since I met him: my feet touched the hardwood of one of the branches of the tree that grew in the center of the city, and from there, I looked for the window to the right room of the guild…

“There”, I located the twins, and one of their new [Party] members approaching a guild clerk.

As I was waiting for a right moment to jump through the window without anyone noticing, I heard the fox girl saying, as she bowed down and handed out a piece of paper:

“Here… My resignation letter.”

Only then I remembered that the new [Party] of the twins should contain one or two more people. I looked to the defeated faces of Ank and Hunah, as the clerk respectfully took the letter in. I knew that look, better than I wished even.

I expected that from the [Party] of those two: their enemies were the [Gods] after all. Few were the ones who had enough to fight alongside them, and probably even less were willing to do so.

“…You will need to tell the guild how it happened”, the clerk mentioned. “And their names, classes…”

“Everything is in that letter”, the fox girl fixed her posture, but kept staring at the ground, her shoulders slumped down. As the clerk unfolded the paper and started to read, however, she finally broke down, and starting to cry, the fox girl dashed out of the room.

The twins reached for her, and for a moment it seemed they would run after her, but they stopped, their usually tired or lazy-looking faces deformed by guilty.

“[Voider]?”, the clerk read out loud. “The monster that killed your friends… Hm, I’ll have to check it later, to know if it's the same type that ended the 10th Guild Master’s [Party] too…”

I trembled. And quickly turned my face upwards, to the skies, when I opened my eyes: beyond the atmosphere, the moon, the billions of billions of the corpses of those failed aberrations, and after even the galaxy-sized clouds of blood and gore which made the pretty “night clouds” everyone liked to look at. At the very heart of darkness, I found them. A small covenant of pathetic losers, spinning and plotting around the largest and most powerful of them.

My blood boiled at their image, and I almost jumped after those lesser beings, to end them once and for all. But I restrained myself. First, I closed my eyes, and took some deep breaths. Then I noticed how the clouds above had split because of my stare. Finally, looking at the twins, even if divided, I decided:

“This is a good thing” the [True-Gods] were quite strong, after all.

I fell from the tree branch, and stood right before a stone statue of a man holding a sword under it. I stared at his determined carved face, which failed to capture even a 1000th of the essence of the true version, and felt even more divided: since I met the twins, I wasn’t too sure anymore.

“Oh, my”, I smiled. “I shouldn’t have recognized this last fact”, I giggled, and the bouquet of flowers appeared back on my hands in an instant. “Maybe, I can stay with them for a little longer”, depositing the flowers at the feet of the statue, I concluded, uncertain: “Maybe… you already have too many flowers back home?”, thoughts of my garden came back.

I knew I probably would visit that statue later, maybe even get one myself, but, for the moment:

“FUSH!”, the wind swirled, and I was back inside one of the rooms of the Adventurer’s Guild without anyone noticing.

“Oh, my!”, opening a door and exiting the empty room, I found the twins. Noticing me, they forced themselves to smile. “Then? How did you go?”

“Well…”, Ank scratched the back of his neck, searching for words. “The 10th Guild Master acknowledged the two of us as exceptions, so we’re officially a [Party] of two now”, he laughed.

“We’re already heading out again”, Hunah flipped a piece of paper before me, a map. “This city doesn’t have any missions for [Level: 200] adventurers; and we need to get our 80th ranker promotion and hear our next piece of information, right?”

“Cloud Fortress City?”, I read the marked city name on the map. Smiling I pointed out, raising a finger: “I just remembered I have something to do there! Do you mind if this old woman travels a little longer with you two?”