📍 Hisan Bar — Quest Board | Morning
The guild was on the other side of the city. Two silver per person to use the teleportation link — four silver total, gone before they'd done anything.
The bar had its own board.
A tenth of the quests, maybe. Every adventurer staying here was crowded around it every morning, elbows out, scanning fast. The boards across Ramiya were all linked by enchantment — the moment someone took a quest anywhere, it vanished from every other board at the same instant. No duplicates. If it was still showing, it was still available.
Kiyoshi found it near the bottom before anyone else got to it.
C rank. Green lizard. One gold coin. Sixty kilometres out, between the End Mountains and Tabaeya Forest.
He took it.
Sakura read the empty space where it had been. "What did you grab?"
He showed her.
She read the description. "Acid mouth. Slick hide. Fire weakness." She looked up. "We don't have fire magic."
"Sharp objects work too."
"You always say that."
"You always have sharp objects."
She took the paper back and read it again. Then she put it in her storage. "Fine."
📍 Between the End Mountains — Tabaeya Forest Edge | Noon
The lizard was bigger in person.
Ten metres from jaw to tail, coiled at the base of the rock face, one eye already open when they arrived. Its hide was the colour of wet moss — slick, layered, the light running off it wrong. Kiyoshi tested the edge of his sword against a loose scale on the ground. It skated.
Sharp objects, he thought. Very sharp objects, at the right angle.
The eye tracked him.
Then the mouth opened.
He moved left. Sakura moved right. The acid hit the ground between them and the earth hissed quietly, dissolving in a slow circle.
"Keep it looking at you," Sakura said, already circling wide.
"Wonderful."
He kept it looking at him.
He moved constantly — never in a straight line, never predictable. His sword found gaps twice and slid off both times. He adjusted the angle, drove harder on the third strike, felt it catch slightly, and then the tail came around fast and he had to jump back and lose everything he'd gained.
I'm slowing it down, he thought. That's what I'm doing.
That was all he was doing. And he knew it.
Sakura dropped from above onto its back.
For two seconds it was working — her weight forward, dagger angled, body low. Then the hide did what the description said it would. Her boots slid. She lost the angle. The lizard bucked once and she came down its flank and the acid caught her across the back and shoulders before she cleared the range.
She made no sound.
Kiyoshi was already moving.
He pressed his hand to her shoulder — the worst of it — and activated Healing Kiss. The skin was red, raised, branching in the pattern acid makes when it pools. He healed the first burn. Then the second. Then the third. Her shirt was half gone on the left side, the fabric eaten away in the same pattern as the skin underneath.
He saw the wounds. He had to, to know where to put his hands.
He was aware that he was seeing more than the wounds.
He focused on the wounds.
Sakura pulled away before he finished. "I'm fine."
"Hold still."
"It's closing—"
"Hold still."
She held still. He finished the third burn.
Her back had many red marks because of more forced healing. The wound will heal, but I show a red mark when it, and the mark on her right shoulder to the back that she said was from the lightning. She was already turning toward the lizard.
[ Lightning Speed — Active ]
He didn't see the movement. Just the result — she was at its neck, dagger under the jaw at the soft point, and she drove it in with everything, and the lizard dropped in sections.
It was over.
Sakura stood over the lizard and breathed.
Kiyoshi stood three metres back and looked at the ground near his left boot.
She reached into her storage, pulled out a clean shirt, and turned away from him. He did not turn around. He was, very deliberately, examining the dirt.
"Done," she said.
He looked up. She was dressed. Her expression was the one she wore when something had happened and she had decided it hadn't.
"Thank goodness no one else was here," Kiyoshi said.
"Your eyes count as a crowd."
"I was looking at the ground."
"You saw."
"I was — there was acid. I had to look to heal—"
"You saw."
He had nothing to say to that.
"A fly went in my eye," he said.
Sakura stared at him. "A fly."
"Very fast. Terrible timing."
She looked at him for another second. Then she turned and retrieved the skill stone from the lizard's jaw and handed it to him without looking.
He took it.
She started walking toward the road.
He followed.
She's fine, he thought. That's the thing. She's completely fine.
He walked another few steps.
The burns had branched across her shoulder and down her back in a pattern he was going to remember for longer than he wanted to. Red. Raised. The kind that come from acid pooling in the hollow of a back while someone is trying to protect the person next to them.
While she was protecting him.
Because he'd been standing in the open with no ranged ability and a body that fought him every time he pushed it, and she'd gone to the place he couldn't reach, and the ground had been slick and the hide had been slick and—
His nose bled quietly.
He tilted his head back, kept walking, and said nothing.
✦ CODEX — Chapter Seventeen ✦
World Archive: Entries Relevant to Chapter Seventeen
ENTRY 066 — QUEST BOARD NETWORK
Quest boards exist across Ramiya at inns, bars, rest-houses, and the guild hall. The guild board carries the full inventory. Secondary boards carry approximately one tenth of available quests. All boards share a linked enchantment — when a quest is taken anywhere, it vanishes from every other board simultaneously.
ENTRY 067 — GREEN LIZARD (C RANK)
Length: 8–11 metres. Hide: layered and slick, resists blunt force and poorly-angled blades. Kill point: throat or jaw joint with a sharp blade at sustained force. Acid: range four metres, dissolves organic material on contact. Fire magic dries the hide and disrupts the acid gland — most effective approach. Skill stone drop: green, C rank.
End of Chapter Seventeen Codex.