David’s wife was apparently named Pyra, a beauty with bright red hair and control of over a thousand head of cattle. It was the largest operation in the area, with over one hundred hired hands, and if one wanted to be political about things, it was exactly the kind of family that would be extra-keen to marry powerful adventurers to help maintain their position.

“David’s never brought any other adventurers home before, it’s nice to meet you, Mr. Toomes.” Pyra said after introductions were made. The baby didn’t have a name, traditionally in this region names were a first birthday kind of thing. Casimir thought it was kind of a weird tradition, but he’s been to far too many places to bother commenting on odd customs.

“It’s nice to meet you too.” Casimir replied. “I admit I didn’t expect David to be the settling down type, “ Well, the responsible type in general really. “-but after seeing you I can see why.”

Pyra giggled at the compliment. “David, you didn’t mention your friend was such a flirt!” The servants started to place down the dinner, which was quickly prepared because of another local tradition of always being ready for guests. Anima had that same tradition, which was a nice taste of home. Pun intended. Turning back to Casimir, she gestured to the food. “Eat as much as you want. No one leaves this house with an empty belly.”

In most places, a thick slice of beef steak was a luxury item beyond the ability for all but the wealthy to acquire. Monsters seemed to be able to tell the difference between domesticated animals and wild ones, and usually left the latter alone while the former were hunted and killed with just as much ferocity as they did people. As a result, most meat was hunted, and the flavor of wild game was far inferior to a good, fatty chunk of beef.

Around here? Casimir bet that he could buy a whole cow’s worth with just a gold coin or two. Still expensive, but in Anima that kind of money could buy maybe one fifth of that. If he caught someone who sucked at haggling. He still has that book of enchantments that had the meat storage design in it, right? He really needed to get around to making a personal spellbook one of these days, he used to use mind magic to memorize utility spells like that. Can’t do that anymore.

Come to think of it, he should probably lay off of those mind potions for a few days. He can still sense some of the remnants in his system… But they were so useful…

As he ate the delicious steak, Casimir kept an eye on David and Pyra, both whispering to each other at the other end of the table. Cute couple. It did leave him feeling like a bit of a third wheel, but a little awkwardness was fine in return for such fine food. The baby wasn’t at the table, Pyra passed the little one off to a nanny shortly after David got the chance to coo over them for a bit.

Towards the end of the meal, the silence was broken. “So how long have you two known each other?” Pyra asks, as an icebreaker.

Casimir gave a long exhale to think about the question. “Must be like, what, twelve years?” He said, looking to David to confirm.

“Around there.” David said.

“Yeah, Hana had formed that team seven months before,” Casimir said, going into the story as he was remembering it. “-and one day there was this punk kid, fourteen but looked twelve, demanding that his sister come back home and stop risking her life all the time.”

Pyra seemed very interested in the story. “His sister?”

Casimir nodded sadly. “Yeah, Luci died a few years ago. Probably before you met.” Given the timeline involved, probably shortly before they met. “Anyway, we were three standards and a veteran at the time, Hana was the vet, so while I don’t remember exactly how things went down that day, I do remember that after we got another job and moved out, we woke up the next morning with that same punk kid swearing that he’ll keep the ranked adventurer safe.” Casimir grinned at the memory. “It was hilarious! Still, we weren’t doing anything too difficult, so after a huddle, Luci convinced us to let him tag along. Magnus whipped up a sturdy stone staff for him to hit things with and I whipped out the books and scratched some enchantments on the thing to make it lighter for the boy on top of some useful curses.” Really, with some solid cursework you could get a dozen cats to finish most standard hunting missions. Hana refused to take veteran-ranked quests until at least one of the group had joined her at the rank.

“Why would you curse him!?” Pyra said, horrified.

Casimir stared at David, unimpressed. David just laughed. “Right. Any non-instant spell that you cast on a person is a curse. Anyone who says otherwise is lying to make you feel better.” He summarized. Laymen… “I meant that I gave him a little extra strength, speed, and weight to allow him to better wield the stone staff and hit monsters with it.”

“Okay…” Pyra said, a little confused but accepting it to let the story continue.

Casimir will just have to take what he can get. “Okay, so the mission was…” Casimir paused. “David, do you remember what we were hunting? It was some shitty tribal monster, I remember that much.”

“Goblins.” David said. “It was goblins.”

“Right.” Casimir said. Now it was coming back to him. “So these goblins had taken control of a small river, and were being their usual disgusting selves. It made things unpleasant and difficult for the village downstream, so they hired adventurers.” Casimir noted that he was beginning to lose Pyra’s interest in the tale, so he skipped to the good part. “So there we were, strategizing our approach to the goblin camp. The only issue was, no one kept an eye on the kid.”

Pyra’s interest was seized once more. “What happened to David?”

“The crazy brat took his brand new asskicking stick and decided to shove it up a goblin’s arse, is what happened to him!” Casimir nearly shouted, laughing at the image. “We all scrambled to make sure he didn’t die, all the goblins got killed, including their war chief, an ogre.” Casimir got that particular kill, if he recalled correctly. He didn’t have his axe back then, but he did have this one mace that Master Southwind provided that accomplished a similar role of a big hit that he used to finish off his incapacitated enemies. “So it worked out.” He added to finish the story.

“So then he joined your group?” Pyra asked.

“No, it took another two times of him tracking us down on our way to a job before we accepted that he wasn’t going to just go away.” Casimir explained. “Luci wouldn’t let us attempt more forceful persuasion. But she also didn’t want to go back home, so the only solution to the problem was to let David get his sister complex out of his system by tagging along.”

David actually got offended by that jab. “S-sister complex!?” He exclaimed. “I did not have a sister complex!” he insisted, a luminescent blush on his face.

Pyra giggled at her husband’s indignation. “So what was your team name?”

Casimir frowned. “We could never decide on one, honestly.” He said. “We had all kinds of official ones, and we changed it every few months. The Scholarium, The Bookwyrms, Four Nerds and a Brat…” Casimir chuckled at David’s groan at that one. “Eventually the joke of us constantly changing our name became a greater trademark than any one of them. The last official name we had was The Indecisives.” It had lasted a little longer than most of the other names. Casimir wasn’t superstitious enough to think that kind of settling on a name doomed the team, though. “So how did you two meet?” He said, changing the subject.

Pyra flushed. “Well, my family decided to hire out some adventurers to increase security after some rustlers stole a few dozen cattle…” She said, twiddling her thumbs. “One thing led to another…”

So nothing terribly interesting, then. Conversation continued, idly passing the time discussing topics without real substance. Eventually, Casimir was directed to the guest room where he used magic to ensure that he quickly went to sleep and became unable to detect whatever David was doing that night.

----------------

“What in the world are you going to use that much beef for?” David asked as Casimir referenced his book and carefully inlaid the copper wire that created the preservation enchantment on the metal travel chest full of meat wrapped in wax-treated paper.

“I’m going to eat it, mostly.” Casimir said flippantly. “But you know how useful meat can be when it comes to baiting monsters.” Use just the right flavor of life mana, and you can fool the stupider monsters with mana senses that the steak you threw is alive and distract them, a list that included most undead. You need to use domesticated meat for it to work, though. “If I’m lucky, it’ll last long enough to serve Master Southwind a nice celebratory dinner.”

David scoffed. “Teacher’s pet.” He said accusingly. “Well, I’ve sold the arms and armor of the undead army to my buddy, he’s in the military. He wants me to deliver it to a contact at the capital, but that can wait.”

“How much is the return?” Casimir asked, idly. Military hardware was worth a fair bit, and while the material was cheap, if high quality, there was an awful lot of it.

“Four hundred gold for the lot.” He bragged. Casimir whistled at the price. Yeah, that’s definitely worth lugging that crap this far. David tossed a bag of coins to him. “That’s your half.” Casimir caught the bag, hefted it to check the weight, and tossed it into one of his spatial bags. Yeah, that felt like twelve and a half pounds of gold. Wait.

“Hey, what’s the purity of the local coins?” Casimir asked. If this really was two hundred ounces, it better be pure…

“It’s pure gold.” David confirmed. “So how much longer are you going to take there?”

Casimir looked at the progress of his inlaid enchantment and compared it to the design in the book. “...Give me ten more minutes, preservation enchantments are very delicate.” The margin of error is much smaller than most of the other enchantment crap he uses. There’s a reason he’s using inlaid metal rather than etching or ink, after all. It’s more durable this way.

After finishing his work, Casimir tossed the chest into his high capacity spatial bag, the one that sacrificed a lot of the convenience of his other ones in return for the most space. “You say goodbye?” He asked.

“Yep. Let’s go.” David replied.

----------------

Petranis’ phylactery couldn’t be precisely tracked for several reasons. For one, he only got one data point on the rough distance and direction. He could narrow it down to a few dozen square miles, but that’s it. Second, she’s had nearly a whole day to move it. No one really knows exactly how long it takes for a lich to reform a new body, but Casimir’s heard of them springing up after just one day before. Finally, they rated the odds of Petranis’ Master not being the one holding the phylactery to be extremely low.

The terrain was a particularly hostile set of hills known as the Flowstone mountains. There was some kind of underground mana convergence within it; each hill outpoured black flammable mud on a continuous basis; the build up created frequent mudslides that can and often do turn into deadly firestorms. It reminded Casimir of coal, actually. It had a similar mana scent to it, if you ignored the fact that it was mostly liquid and mixed with a bunch of clay and dirt. The locals (Aviost mostly) harvested the stuff and did all kinds of alchemical nonsense with it. Most of it seemed to be scams, in Casimir’s professional opinion. The lubricants were pretty good though.

“So… How are we supposed to find her base?” David asked as they overlooked the hills from the air. There were several kinds of monster that only seemed to exist to stop people from flying too high in the sky, Cloud Slicers being merely one of them, but they weren’t worried about any such attacks. They were two elite-ranked adventurers, after all. Even if ‘The Titan’ was a stupid epithet.

Casimir hummed as he contemplated his options. “The geography’s so unstable that you’d have a beast of a time finding records of underground areas. Any place that exists would need to be shaped and maintained magically.” He reasoned. “I’m not sure if I could detect it if we did a search, but I’m also not sure that I couldn’t.” It would really depend on the competence of whoever was doing the hiding. It’s not that hard to blend things in with the local mana profile if that profile is reasonably thick with it like this place was. Detecting hollow sections wouldn’t work without the rigidity of solid stone that he has to work with in cave systems…Yeah, densely packed dirt was okay if it had enough clay, but mud? Fuck mud.

“You know what I do when I need to find hidden shit?” David asked.

“...Okay, I’ll bite.” Casimir said. “How did you find shit without me to do it for you?”

“I ask locals.” He said simply. “Let’s get some drinks at the adventurer’s guild.”

On one hand, Casimir’s pride really didn’t want to just roll the dice by asking locals and possibly tipping off their quarry. On the other hand, Petranis likely already suspects that they are soon to be in the area, and more importantly, fuck mud. “Alright, maybe they’ll know of some stable cave systems we could check.” Casimir admitted. “Let’s go.”

The closest guild hall was not in the small village that Casimir ended up buying a little grease from, but instead a medium-sized town on the far side of the hills called Ettlu’at. As expected for the area, about two-thirds of the people were aviost, each one distinct in feather pattern and beak shape.

Casimir mostly held back and watched David do his thing, buying the whole guild a round of drinks and chatting up everyone from the serving girl to the grey-feathered old birds in the back. Casimir considered himself reasonably good at getting intel from the local adventurers, but it was a little humbling to see how he flawlessly pivoted whatever the person he was talking to wanted to talk about to topics that were important to the investigation.

Looks like the brat’s grown up in more than one way.