Chapter 16: First Night

Thirty silver coins.

That was what the small leather pouch held when I loosened the string and counted them into my palm. Each coin was worn smooth at the edges, stamped with a symbol I didn’t recognize, some kind of crowned beast.

I watched the other students receive their pay as the line moved forward. Some pouches were fatter than mine. Officers and senior personnel walked away with heavy bags. But every student I could see got the same amount.

Without understanding the economy, the number meant nothing. It could have been a fortune or an insult. I had no frame of reference or memory of prices.

I tucked the pouch inside my robe and passed through Grenzheim’s main gate.

 

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The town was smaller than it looked from outside.

The walls had been deceptive. They enclosed a vast area, yes, but most of that space wasn’t city. It was farmland.

Rows of crops stretched across the interior. Irrigation channels cut through the fields, fed by some source I couldn’t see. The soil was dark and rich, a stark contrast to the dry, cracked earth beyond the walls.

Beyond the fields, a second ring of structures served the garrison. Barracks and armories. Watchtowers rose at intervals along the inner perimeter, their crystal-crowned tops pulsing faintly with mage-glow.

The actual town occupied a compressed knot at the center. Buildings crowded together, their walls nearly touching across narrow streets that twisted and turned without clear logic.

I walked slowly, letting my eyes and ears wonder.

“Three attacks this month alone. Three. And the Guild sends us what? Two commissions?”

“Two commissions for the entire southern stretch. My husband says the patrols are pulling back. They don’t have the bodies.”

“They are pushing closer every season. We used to see a stray beast once a year. Now they’re at the walls.”

“The Guild doesn’t care about frontier towns. Never has.”

I kept walking while listening to everything around me. I didn’t fully understand them, so I focused on the one thing I could learn right now.

Prices.

The market street, if it could be called that, was a single lane of stalls and open shopfronts wedged between buildings. Canvas awnings shaded displays of produce, dried goods, and simple tools. The vendors called out to passersby with the practiced, half-hearted enthusiasm.

I stopped at the first stall.

Fruit. Rough-skinned things that looked like a cross between apples and pears, piled in uneven pyramids. Beside them, bundles of leafy greens tied with twine, and root vegetables caked with dirt.

A hand-painted sign leaned against the display.

I couldn’t read it.

But I could watch.

A woman ahead of me selected three pieces of fruit. She counted small copper coins from a pouch and placed them on the vendor’s board. The vendor swept them up without counting.

Two coppers per piece. Three coppers for the greens.

I moved to the next stall. Watched another transaction. Bread, dense and dark, sold for five coppers a loaf. A jar of something that smelled like honey went for twelve.

At a third stall, a boy, maybe fourteen, tried to pay for a sack of grain with a silver coin. The vendor made change, counting out a pile of copper pieces that the boy scooped into his palm.

I counted with him.

One hundred copper to one silver.

I had thirty silver coins or three thousand copper. At two coppers per piece of fruit, that was fifteen hundred pieces of fruit. At five coppers per loaf of bread, six hundred loaves.

Food was cheap.

Or my pay was generous.

Or both.

Either way, I wasn’t going to starve. Not immediately.

The relief was real. I let it sit in my chest for a moment before the next thought shouldered it aside.

I needed a weapon.

The market stalls sold food, cloth, rope, candles, simple tools. A blacksmith’s shop at the end of the row offered horseshoes, nails, hinges, and a selection of farming implements that could theoretically be used to hurt someone but weren’t made for it.

No swords or daggers. Not even a hunting knife.

I widened my search. I left the central market and followed the streets outward, toward the garrison district.

Here, the shops changed.

Vendors displayed items that had faint mana traces. Wands carved from pale wood, their tips capped with crystals of varying colors. Staves, taller than a man, their shafts inscribed with spiraling runes. Small devices I couldn’t identify. Metal spheres, glass vials filled with liquids.

Magical equipment. All kinds of it.

I moved from shop to shop, scanning displays, searching for anything with a blade.

Nothing.

Not a single edged weapon.

In a world where magic had replaced steel, weapons like mine simply didn’t exist in the supply chain. They had been rendered obsolete so thoroughly that even a frontier garrison town didn’t bother stocking them.

I turned down a narrow alley, following it more out of frustration than direction.

The buildings closed in. The light dimmed.

A man stepped out of a doorway.

He was thin, hunched, with darting eyes. His clothes were layered and mismatched, and he held something wrapped in dark cloth against his chest.

“You,” he whispered, leaning closer. His breath smelled of onions. “You look like a man of discerning taste.”

I took a half step back.

“I have something special,” he continued, peeling back the cloth. Beneath it sat a book. Small, leather-bound, its cover stamped with a symbol that looked vaguely arcane. “A grimoire. Genuine. Recovered from a Third Circle mage’s estate. The spells inside—”

“No,” I said.

“—could change your life. Fire manipulation. Barrier construction. For a mere—”

“Hell, no.”

I stepped around him and kept walking.

A grimoire couldn’t be sold. Iris had told me that. They were bound to their owners. Whatever that man was peddling, it was either fake or stolen and useless.

 

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The alley opened onto a wider street, and I emerged blinking into the afternoon light.

No weapons. Nowhere in this entire town.

I was in a world of monsters and magic, carrying thirty silver coins and no way to defend myself beyond a body that couldn’t cast a single spell.

I turned the corner and nearly walked into a wall of people.

The street ahead had stopped. Completely. Every person within sight had pressed themselves to the edges of the road, backs against walls, heads bowed or turned aside. The center of the street was empty.

I stumbled to a halt, confused, and someone’s elbow caught my chest.

“Watch it,” a man hissed, shoving me sideways without looking.

I blinked, steadied myself, and opened my mouth to ask what the hell was happening.

Yet, I didn’t need. I saw them.

Five figures walked down the center of the empty street.

They moved in a loose formation. They wore no armor. No robes. No insignia of rank or magical order.

Simple clothing, dark fabrics cut for movement.

But at each of their hips hung a sword. Long-bladed, sheathed in worn leather scabbards.

Their faces were hard. Their eyes swept the crowd without lingering, taking in everything and dismissing it in the same glance.

The crowd watched them pass with an strange expression. A mix between admiration and fear.

“Knights,” someone breathed.

“Headed south. To the front.”

“I heard the Seventh Division requested them specifically.”

“Barbarians, the lot of them. Who fights with a sword when you could—”

“Shut your mouth. You want one of them to hear you?”

“They say a single Knight can hold a breach that would take twenty mages to—”

“Fanatics. Religious fanatics. That’s what they are.”

“Call them what you want. I’d rather have one at my back than a dozen Second Circle graduates.”

The five Knights passed without acknowledging the crowd, without a single glance that suggested they cared about the whispers or the stares.

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I watched them until they turned a corner and vanished.

My heart was beating faster than it should have been.

Knights.

Iris’s voice echoed in my memory. Lunatics who still use swords and spears. They only care about having cores and using mana to increase the power of their own body.

I stood there in the street as the crowd dispersed around me.

My hand drifted to my hip, where a sword should have been.

Where a sword would be again.

 

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An inn sat at the end of the commercial district.

It was a squat, two-story building wedged between a shuttered storefront and what looked like a decommissioned guard post. The walls were rough stone on the ground floor, timber-framed above, with a roof that sagged slightly in the middle. A sign hung above the door, painted with an image so faded I couldn’t make out what it had once depicted.

Beside the inn, connected by a shared wall, sat a small tavern. Its door stood open, and from inside came the smell of cooking meat and something rich and savory that made my stomach clench with hunger.

I hesitated on the threshold.

I didn’t know what a room cost. I didn’t know what a meal cost. I had thirty silver coins and a rough understanding that food was cheap, but “cheap” and “inn prices” were different things.

The smell decided for me.

The tavern’s interior was dim and warm. Wooden beams overhead, darkened by years of smoke. A handful of tables filled the main room, most of them occupied by people eating.

Something small and fast slammed into my shin.

“Oof!”

I stumbled backward. My boot caught on the threshold and I nearly went down, catching myself on the doorframe at the last second.

A girl stood where my shin had been.

She was tiny. Eight years old, maybe nine. Her hair was a wild tangle of gold. She wore an apron three sizes too large, tied at the waist and bunched at the shoulders, and she held a stack of plates in both hands that should have been impossible for someone her size to carry.

She looked up at me with wide eyes.

“Are you okay?” she asked, the words tumbling out fast and breathless. “I’m sorry! I didn’t see you! I’m really sorry!”

Before I could answer, she was already moving again, darting between tables with the plates balanced in her arms, weaving through chair legs and outstretched boots with the agility of a creature born to navigate chaos.

I watched her go, rubbing my shin.

“Forgive her.”

The voice came from my left.

I turned to find a man approaching from behind the bar. He was older, mid-fifties, with gray hair and a face that had been lived in hard. His body was thick and solid, the kind of build that came from decades of physical work.

His left leg didn’t bend properly. It swung forward in a rigid arc with each step.

His right eye was missing.

Where it should have been sat a prosthetic. Not glass, metal. A small, intricate device of polished steel and tiny gears that sat in the socket. As I watched, the prosthetic shifted. The iris, if you could call it that, rotated with a faint whirring sound, and a tiny spark of blue light flickered at its center.

Magitech. Had to be.

“No harm done,” I said, straightening up. “She’s fast.”

The man’s real eye crinkled.

“Too fast,” he agreed. “One of these days she’ll take out a load-bearing wall.”

He extended a hand. His grip, when I took it, was calloused and firm.

“Vael,” he said. “I own the place.”

“Kaspar.”

Vael studied me for a moment with that single living eye, the mechanical one whirring softly as it tracked independently.

“Looking for a room?” he asked. “Or just food?”

“Both,” I said. “How much for a night?”

“One silver gets you a room and a hot meal. Breakfast included.”

I reached into my pouch and pulled out two silver coins without thinking. I placed them on the bar.

“Two nights,” I said.

Vael looked at the coins. Then he looked at me. His expression didn’t change, but something shifted behind his eye.

He swept the coins off the bar and gestured toward an empty table near the wall.

“Sit. Food’ll be out shortly.”

I sat.

The table was scarred and uneven. I rested my forearms on it and waited.

Vael returned within minutes, moving with that stiff, mechanical leg. He set a plate in front of me with a solid thunk.

Meat.

A thick slab of it, dark and glistening, seared on the outside and pink within. Beside it, a bowl of stew so thick the spoon stood upright when I let go of it. Chunks of root vegetables floated in a broth that smelled of herbs and fat.

I picked up the knife and fork.

The first bite of meat hit my tongue and I nearly closed my eyes.

It was real. Actual food. Not the thin, metallic soup of the expedition.

I ate like a man who had forgotten what eating was for.

The stew was almost better than the meat. Rich and heavy, each spoonful coating my throat with warmth that spread downward into my stomach.

When I finally set the utensils down, I felt something I hadn’t felt since arriving in this world.

Full.

I sat back and let my gaze drift across the tavern.