End Online: Volume 3 (10 page)

Unfortunately, I couldn’t
make the full jump and ended up with only hanging onto the edge with my hand,
before ungracefully pulling myself up and onto the roof.

“I don’t understand. Where
is she going? It is almost as if she is heading for the city walls,” Mason
states quizzically.

“Hmm. It could be possible,”
Lost replies, seemingly devoid of emotion.

“H-Hey!” I call out to the
group who were currently ignoring me. “What’s happening? I only just got here.”

“Ah, Verde!” Lost turned
around, his voice suddenly happy, “We have found the girl, but she is taking a
strange path. We are having a bit of trouble keeping track of her in this
crowd.”

He indicates to a young
eight year old girl strolling through the crowd quite quickly. She is wearing a
light blue scarf and a pink and white polka dot dress. Under her arm is a small
basket with a few loaves of bread in it.

“Okay, I will go down and
follow behind her.” I feel a little sour considering it was quite the effort to
get up here, and now I have to go back down.

Down on the ground I see
the others easily jumping the distance to the next building as they refuse to
let the girl get out of their view.

“Hey, Lost. Where is
Sir Laurence?” 
I ask the leader with
uncertainty. I have never known him to be one to be late or get lost.

“I’m not entirely
sure. Considering that he has such heavy armour and is the slowest of us all,
he may still be trying to get here.”

“Well, this is pretty
far away from where we began. How exactly did Mason find this place?”

“Also not exactly
sure. Mason mentioned something about putting himself in a little girls shoes
and figuring out where he would go.”

“Okay! Well, I don’t
really get it, but I’m only here to secretly follow this child. It is lucky we
found her in the first place.”

As I say that, I also
focus my attention on having everyone around me avert their eyes.

A cool, secretive
sensation invades my mind, informing me that the skill is now currently active.

In front of me I am only a
few steps behind the girl.

Almost as if she is aware
I am chasing her, she suddenly stops and does a complete ninety
degree turn, disappearing into an alley in the blink of an eye.

A tinge of worry assaults
me, but I feel better when I catch up to the little girl only a minute later.

I keep giving Lost reports
over the party chat. He is slightly behind as when she had
entered the alley the others lost track of her.

I go in and out of
dark alleys and through busy streets, almost as if I am being lead on a
wild goose chase. This girl clearly did not want anyone following her.

The houses all around me
slowly get smaller and smaller. Eventually, I come to a sudden realization.

‘We are approaching
the city wall!’

Lost and the others are no
longer trying to follow as well. Once Sir Laurence caught up with them, there
was no longer a way for all of them to keep up with me and the girl on the
ground.

I told them at one stage
to just come down, but apparently, they aren’t meant to be seen. Of course, I
yelled out to them that if they didn’t want to get seen then they should hurry
up and get off of the roofs. It was an incredibly frustrating conversation. And
over such a simple thing, I even lost control of my emotions.

Feeling ashamed, I follow
the girl in silence. She often flicks her head back to check for any followers,
which makes me incredibly uneasy and nervous, but my skill to avert her eyes
from me prevails in the end.

When I bring my eyes back
to the girl from looking at the wooden buildings, she has somehow disappeared
from right in front of me. My heart clenches at the thought that I just failed
the quest.

I frantically search the
surrounding to find out where she could have gone, but I cannot discern where
she went no matter how hard I look.

Returning to where I saw
her last, I can’t gather where else she could have gone. There are some small
cheap residences on one side of the road, while on the other side, there is the
city wall.

‘She must have gone
into one of the residences, but which one?’

I ponder to myself while
looking around. There is no way she climbed the wall with some kind of
extraordinary feat, so what else could there be.

My eyes wander to the base
of the wall where I notice something peculiar. There is a thin plate of metal,
about forty centimetres long and wide, leaning against the wall.

‘No, it can’t be.’

I move over to the plate
and move it out of the way. I may have suspected it, but to find a hole in the
wall is still surprising.

I hesitate for a moment,
not wanting to crawl along the ground through the small hole. The hesitation
goes as I consider that this quest needs to be done. Lost probably won’t
forgive me for causing him to fail it just because I didn’t want to crawl
through the dirt.

I get down on my elbows
and crawl through the gap. The wall is about two meters deep and having to
squeeze my shoulders together in such a tight spot makes my chest feel rather
uncomfortable.

After a minute of wiggling
around I emerge on the other side of the wall. The hole on the outside isn’t
covered by a metal plate, but instead has a clump of unnaturally long grass
growing over it.

Outside of that crop of
grass was a small clearing about fifty meters in diameter. Everything else was
what appeared to be endless woods, the trees reaching from ten to twenty meters
tall.

On my way out of the grass
it is unavoidable that I made a few rustling noises. So who is to blame me for
warning not only the little girl that I was following, but also the little boy
she is meeting.

The boy is wearing simple
brown clothes, with a white beanie on his head that was pulled down to
cover his ears. Some small wisps of blonde hair poke through the rim of
the beanie, but most appear to have been tucked underneath it.

There is a strange air
about this boy. He appears to only be eight years old, the same as the girl.
But he had this mysterious aura that causes him to look incredibly elegant.

The noise I made allowed
these two to become aware that someone is definitely there and look past my
ability. The boy is the first to throw his glance over at me, fear showing in
his eyes. The girl, at the sight of me, seems to be about ready to start crying
when the boy looked back at her.

“W-what have you done!?”
The boy cries out to the girl next to him. “I told you that you can’t tell
anybody about me, and you led them here!?”

“N-no! It’s not like
that!” She states back, letting out a few sniffles.

“You kept saying how you
want me to go over to yours to play. How you want to introduce me to your
parents. Did you let someone come here with you?”

“I c-checked, there was
nobody f-following me!”

“Well now I have to tell
me parents, and we will have to move away! I won’t be able to come here again!”

Even the boy started
tearing up now, while the girl started balling. All I could do was stand there
dumbstruck and witness this scene.

‘What the hell did I
just witness. Is this the kids these days? Acting out soap operas?’

I fail to realize
that my mouth was hanging open. The boy runs off into the woods with a
frightening speed for someone his age, and the girl sprints back to the
hole in the wall in tears.

I stand there for a good
five minutes before actually doing anything.

“Lost… I have some
good news and bad news.” 
I
hesitantly send a private message to the party leader.

“Oh? What are they?
Hopefully the bad news isn’t too bad, so start with that.”

“If you insist… Well,
the bad news is, that I was caught following the girl.”

“Oh no! Doesn’t that
mean we’ve failed the quest!? Please, what’s the good news?”

“I found out what she
was up to. I was caught at the end, but I don’t know if that is a good thing or
a bad thing. It seemed like an unavoidable situation at least.”

Lost let out a sigh over
the private chat before speaking again.

“I doubt it was
unavoidable. But anyway, I think we still may have passed. Thank you for your
help Verde, really. Meet back at the inn in an hour?”

I blushed when I heard his
gratitude for my help. Being of use to him really made me feel warm inside.

“Okay! I will see you
there in an hour!”

***************************************************
***************************************************

-Lost-

I
am quite shocked and worried when I first hear that Verde was spotted.
Part of the quest description was 
not
 to get caught, after all. But it seems like
she only got caught at the very end, when we discovered what Rix’s daughter was
doing with the bread. As it turns out, she was giving it to a mysterious boy
outside of town every morning.

Dropping the thought for
the time being, there is still an hour before I have to meet up with Verde to
turn the quest in.

“Sorry, Mouse. I like you,
but there is no extra room for any party members.”

Well, there is room for
one more player. Our sixth party member is technically my companion, Fen. As I
recall, it is possible to have a party with more than six members, but only six
players will get experience, and it will be less than if the party contained
just those six players.

“Aww, come on,” Mouse
conjects to me, “We have known each other for quite some time. How ’bout if I
just travel with you? I won’t join your party or anything.”

I give it some thought.
The deal itself should not impact me at all, but that is the thing, I don’t see
what is in it for him. If he came to Grenton to do business with more people,
why is he offering to leave that to play with me? Something about it
seems suspicious.

“Hah, I will have to pass.
Even if you are around level one hundred and fifty like you say, we don’t
really need any help.”

I give him my best smile
to try stay on his good side. Seeing me, he just lets out a sigh.

“Oh well. Maybe one of
these days I will get to have a good adventure.”

‘What do you mean by
that? If you are such a high level why do you need us for a good adventure?’

I sincerely wanted to say
those words out loud, but I thought better of it.

“You will get one
eventually. I am sure of it. Anyway, I best be off.”

Taking my new ‘Tunic of
Toxication’, I head off to go find the auction house in order to sell that
”Nightingale’ Helmet’.

The new clothing item I
got came out as an ‘epic’ rarity item. I guess the materials themselves weren’t
too bad. Even Mouse was incredibly surprised when he got them back from his
‘friend’, or so he said.

***************************************************

I was somewhat
disappointed with the auction house. The cathedral had looked slightly
different from the one back in Iceridge, even made out of some kind of
incredibly dark timber, but the interior was practically the exact same.
They even had an extremely annoying receptionist.

Nonetheless, I got all my
business done. I put up the helmet up for a two week auction at a starting
price of twenty dollars, exactly the same as last time.

Once all the business was
done, I head off straight for the Gold Run Inn.

Inside the inn, I meet up
with everyone else, where they all happen to be drinking large pints of ale.
Even Verde has a large frothy cup of ale in front of her. Under the brim of her
hood, I can see a little bit of that froth on her nose.

As soon as one of them
spots me, they all stand up and follow me over to go see Rix. Fires of
fury lit in the innkeeper’s eyes as soon as he spots me walking up to him.
Being the leader of the party who accepted the quest, naturally I am the
one he will defer to.