Goodie had run back when he had realised he had forgotten about the meeting.

If this were a manga, he would have made an entrance by bursting in just after the meeting had started, drawing everyone’s attention and the eternal ire of whoever was giving the lecture.

Life was never so simple. First, there was no ‘in’ in this field, to begin with, something made excruciatingly obvious by the unrelenting heat. And he had not arrived late. He was early, so early in fact, that he had to spend another two hours waiting for this prick to show up.

He could not even cool himself in the shade of the tree he had been sitting under as people had taken the brief moment that he was absent to flood the small amount of space, the number of bodies forming a wall that he could not hope to penetrate. Lucky bastards.

He looked around at his follower sufferers baking in the midday blaze, certain that more than a few would suffer heatstroke if things did not wrap up soon. Whoever organised this mess, or was supposed to have organised it, had truly fucked up.

He altered the flow of the gaseous shadow substance as it threatened to once again obscure his vision, its currents surrounding him in his own personal atmosphere.

Being directly under the sun, its light, causing it to darken and increase in density to such an extent that he had to constantly readjust his output of the stuff. With the energy from the sun reducing its cost to nearly nothing, his ability to create and emit the dark vapour had him surrounded by a whirling shroud of shadow stuff, nearly a foot thick.

The bright side was that the covering kept the temperature a few degrees lower than what was being afflicted upon the poor saps around him. He would have liked to do more, but it only absorbed the rays of the sun, not the moisture in the air, the heat contained within it threatening to boil him alive.

It would have been nice if the shroud could have generated some mana through the absorption of solar energy, at least, but he did not think it would begin paying for itself any time soon, at least not at his level.

That it could not do so was not a particularly huge disappointment, however, as his powers barely cost any mana at all unless he was using them in the dark; even then the drain was manageable. Its only cost at the moment being the amount of concentration needed to keep it going.

With no need for new plans or anything like that, he had been distracting himself with the link between him and Her Majesty. That and a particularly annoying bug that had taken in interest in his head for some reason. Stupid thing.

As he had asked, Her Majesty had scoured the village for any sign of her quarry and it was there that she had come across one of the children that had been running round the field earlier that day; She followed the little shit just outside the village to an apparent secret meeting place for their lot.

It was there that Her Majesty had discovered the thieves, who had all gathered together for some reason, no doubt to discuss what they had observed of him and his action.

They too had been waiting. But unlike him, they had spent their time in the cool shade of a basement or whatever the underground structure that they were currently occupying was called. It did not look like a sewer, but he was sure that with all those warm bodies, the room would have been rank with B.O., the sweat from their morning activities flooding the enclosed space with its stench.

Speaking of B.O., he was once again alone as people had avoided sitting near him, even as the people pouring in crowded the area where they all waited for the briefing to begin. He knew once was happenstance, twice a coincidence, and all that, but his insecurities were jumping on it like wolves on a piece prime rib and he could not help but extremely self-conscious of his personal hygiene.

Under the guise of scratching the back of his head, he took a moment to sniff himself. He smelt normal enough, but he was used to his own body odour what with having lived with it his whole life. To the next person over he might have smelled like a rotting corpse, for all he knew.

What he knew…it always came back to him knowing nothing. His problems, his insecurities, everything, would all be far easier to deal with if he just knew what the hell was going on. He should have picked a class with mind-reading skills. He would have been arrested or forced to sign a contract to limit his use of such abilities, but at least he would then know if the people down-wind of him were trying their best not to gag.

He had to grimace as he then not only had to deal with the unbearable heat, but also Her Majesty’s discomfort as the darkness of the room, she had found herself in began weakening her as, its location underground depriving her of the light and warmth that she desired, her emotions transferring through the magic that bonded the two together. There were a few torches that the thieves had lit, but the light they gave of was far too weak to offset the effect of darkness upon her.

He heard the sounds of the crowd alter, their collective body language shift as something had changed. The prick had finally arrived. He did not recognise who it was, someone from one of the other scouting parties.

It brought on more stress than relief, however as he now had to split his concentration between listening to whatever this prick had to say to them and listening to the other prick who had just arrived.

Across town in a dark and dank cellar, a man had walked in, obviously a leader of some sort, judging by the reaction of the crowd to his presence.

It was the thug from Mr. Mayor’s office.

Flanked by a group of cronies, he walked to the centre of the room and barked something. What, exactly, Goodie could not tell, his grasp of the local language being only slightly better than his grasp of quantum physics.

Meanwhile, the prick in front of Goodie had done something similar, only his yelling had more to do with reaching the people in the back than trying to exert any form of dominance upon them.

Goodie could already feel a headache coming on as he realised that he would have to pull off a balancing act between what was in front of him and what was not.

He needed to know what the waggon train had to face on the road ahead and that would require his full attention on the waggon master before him, but the information he would gain from the thieves’ meeting could also prove vital. Even without understanding what the thug was saying, he would still be able to learn things from how he spoke, who he spoke to.

“Fuck,” he said. He really just wanted to go to bed. Actually, he wanted to jump into a vat of ice first, then go to bed.

He listened as both men began to talk.