Chapter 62. Emissary to the Rats
“Can I help you?” Rhys asked warily, reaching for his sword. One of the smugglers…? But no, why would he be worried with me? I’m down in this hole, far away from the stashes…
The figure stood there. The wind blew, catching their robes. Two ribbons danced behind their head, as pure white as the rest of them. They stood stock still, watching Rhys silently.
Rhys grasped the hilt of his sword. He watched the man, waiting for him to move. He still had the element of surprise. The man didn’t know he could fit an entire, full-length sword in his robes. The second the man moved, he’d—
Abruptly, the man looked away, distracted, as if someone had called him.
The second his gaze moved off Rhys, Rhys lunged. He slammed his hand onto the trash under the man and absorbed it greedily. The ground under the man dropped, and he jumped back rather than fall toward Rhys. Rhys kept absorbing, collapsing the ground as he pressed on. The trash rained down on him, but he didn’t mind. Better to be buried than face execution at the hands of that domineering figure.
“Solaire!”
The figure leaped off, responding to the name. Buried in the trash, Rhys watched him go. When he could no longer sense the man’s mana, he pointed his hand upward instead, and started digging himself a ramp out of the trash. He absorbed all the trash around him as he went, too, igniting a few more trash stars on his way up. At the top, Rhys shook the dirt out of his hair and looked around. The man was gone. There was no sign of him at all.
“Phew,” Rhys muttered. He had no idea what the man had wanted from him, or if he’d wanted anything at all, but he was glad he’d gotten out of that situation without having to fight or risking injury. There was nothing wrong with fighting, but the emanations he sensed from that man reminded him of Ev. Not in strength—the man was Tier 2, like him—but in sharpness. Killing intent. He’d never seen Ev’s Intent skill, but he knew she had one, and looking at that man, he’d been instantly sure of the same—that the man possessed at least one Intent, if not multiple. He could fight above his Tier, but that man doubtlessly could as well. If the two of them fought, Rhys wasn’t at all confident that he’d win.
Well, I am here for a tournament. It only made sense that he’d encounter opponents at his strength, no, above his strength. Not everyone was held back by a trashy start they were only able to overcome through their path, after all. Some people even had natural advantages, as impossible as that was for Rhys to imagine.
He looked at his now-filthy robes and groaned. He’d been pretty clean for most of his trash adventure, but burrowing through the trash to evade the man had thrown all that out the window. “I need a bath.”
A hand tugged at his robes. He looked down, expecting a rat, but the raccoon he’d seen earlier stood there instead. It offered him its hand.
“Oh, impurities? Here.” Rhys touched its paw and extracted its impurities.