"Thank you for sharing that."
Ryan kept the amusement out of his voice and expressed genuine gratitude — though inwardly he couldn't resist:
If you'd been any vaguer about it, I'd have thought you were a plant.
"Think nothing of it. It was years ago." The man replied in his raspy voice.
Ryan nodded and turned to the Old Gentleman.
"I have nothing more to ask."
This wasn't a classroom, after all. A casual question was one thing — pushing deeper would mean paying for the privilege. And never mind the question of reliability; the rates alone might be beyond him. No one in today's gathering had dealt in sous.
"Very well. Same as always — leave at three-minute intervals." The Old Gentleman took the cue.
The brief gathering came to an end. Apart from Ryan, no one had walked away with much. For a gathering held in secret, with only a handful of attendees, that was entirely normal.
While waiting for his turn to leave, Ryan turned the cigarette tin over in his fingers and found himself with a bold idea.
That deep crimson gelatin might actually make an excellent reason to approach the authorities.
An organization over thirteen hundred years old was almost certainly familiar with what the thing was. If he proactively brought it to a church, then even if the Church's Beyonders came looking for him afterward — might they not be slightly more inclined toward civility first? Look into his background before resorting to force, for instance? Especially someone like a Evernight Goddess officer, who had very convenient ways of getting people to reveal their secrets.
It would expose the fact that he was a transmigrator, yes. But there was an upside to that: if it really did come out, he'd no longer have to fear the worst-case outcome. And if it didn't come out, then from the authorities' perspective, his only real problem was simply being an unlicensed Extraordinaire. Given that he'd also voluntarily reported two criminal gangs to the Church, a degree of leniency wasn't out of the question.
The more he thought about it, the more he felt like it wasn't a bad outcome regardless of which way things went.
The two remaining concerns were: one, he couldn't be sure these two actions would actually earn him any lenience; and two, if the transmigrator angle were exposed, what came after was genuinely unpredictable.
I might end up being worse than a collaborator — an inter-world traitor, so to speak.
The thought took him further than he intended.
In the end, after much deliberation, he still hadn't decided whether to approach the Church directly. But he'd made up his mind that before leaving Avignon, he would hand the crimson mass over to them regardless — something tied to a potion, something that could theoretically produce monsters, was better left to professionals. Even now, revisiting the big lug's memories of that near-death moment left him unsettled.
He returned to the Wild Dog and hung up the cloak and mask as he left. Then he went straight to begin preparations for the report.
He wasn't leaving a handwritten note. Instead, he spent time cutting individual words from several newspapers. Better to be safe — some Beyonders could read too much from a person's handwriting.
By evening, after a light dinner at an ordinary café, he switched to a different, similarly-priced inn on the other side of the neighborhood and turned in for the night.
After dark, he slipped out of the inn again and detoured through the slums.
He made a point of checking from a distance on the two gangs he'd be reporting tomorrow morning. Nothing useful, but he did confirm that one or two of the thugs he recognized from the night before were now completely uninjured.
Then he went to the ordinary gang he'd scouted earlier.
The security here was significantly stronger than that rag-tag operation in Mourne — at least they could afford oil lanterns and candles, which meant they'd notice him coming long before he was on top of them. But that was all. Ryan still slipped into the gang's compound without anyone noticing.
The gang was smaller than the brutal brawl the night before had suggested — but the greater opportunities available in a larger, more prosperous city had let them grow. They even had a safe.
Too bad an Assassin wasn't specialized in theft, and Ryan hadn't had time to study the setup properly. After an attempt, he chose not to be greedy. In the end he took only what was easy — eighty-four pounds from a few of the better-appointed rooms — and left.
What Ryan hadn't expected was the sensation he felt as he slipped out of the compound, clean and undetected. In that moment of easy relief, it came again — roughly the same as when he'd kidney-struck the thug: the foreign presence giving a faint shudder.
Hm? I didn't kill anyone.
He had briefly considered it, but the gang's leader was alert, and pulling off a clean kill without alerting the others wasn't feasible in the short time he'd spent inside. Ryan had shelved the idea.
He retraced his actions mentally. Apart from basic caution, he'd really only made two decisions the entire night: first, when he had no good way to crack the safe, he'd chosen not to push his luck; second, not knowing the layout well enough, he hadn't tried to assassinate the gang leader just because he was an Extraordinaire and could.
So the key is thinking and acting like a true Assassin? The potion's name isn't just a description of the abilities you receive — it's a kind of instruction?
What exactly the instruction was pointing toward, Ryan still couldn't say for certain. But he found himself increasingly curious about what would happen when the internal presence finally dissolved completely — because if anything, this made it even less likely to be something harmful.
Early the next morning, after breakfast, Ryan handed both the cigarette tin and the report to a church priest and immediately left Avignon. He took another ride upstream along the Tasok River and stopped at the second city he came to, around midday.
He had no real hope of finding the woman the raspy-voiced man had mentioned — whoever she was, an Extraordinaire with a possible higher-tier Assassin formula. But the few cities between Mourne and Avignon were places the big lug had passed through within the last year. Compared to somewhere entirely unfamiliar, they offered a slight foothold, and Ryan was content to work on building some goodwill with the Evernight Goddess officers there.
Out of concern for the futility of the effort, he didn't bother trying to court the Storm Church's Punishers.
In the city of Birkoff, he rented a single room at two sous per week, with a six-sou deposit. The room was tiny — sleeping, eating, and everything else happened in the same space, with only shared washrooms in the hall — but the rent reflected it. Not exactly a warm or pleasant home, but for somewhere that would mainly serve as a place to sleep and store the few cheap clothes he'd bought, Ryan decided he could manage.
He opened an anonymous account at a bank, deposited one hundred and fifty pounds, and kept thirty in cash for emergencies.
I've already relocated to another city, he reminded himself. Still — lie low for now. Scout, don't strike.