Chapter 29

After casting some nature magic Bella lead us to a decent sized stream flowing through the area we had to survey. We decided to follow the river a little deeper into the area we’re supposed to be working in before starting to set up camp. The place we chose is by a really large rock that looks a little out of place in the middle of the forest. We figured it would make a pretty good landmark for the map and seemed decently easy to find our way back to.

”We don’t need to worry about any kind of river monsters or anything right?” I asked.

“In a stream like this? There might be monsters in larger rivers and lakes but this is a little stream. We’ll be lucky if there’s fish in the river,” Torien assured me.

“I can check for that too!” Bella said excitedly.

“Ah well maybe you should save your mana for now, it shouldn’t be too hard to check the stream ourselves and we might need it.”

“Ah, right. Sorry I’m just excited to get some use out of my nature magic. It’s pretty exciting to use magic now!”

Morrigan turned to her looking confused. “Wait, how new are you to magic? I saw you heal Lilith yesterday and you didn’t look very new to it.”

Bella looked down shyly. “I’ve been using magic for less than a week. I have a special skill that gives me more effective healing magic under certain circumstances. My healing is probably about two or three times more effective on Lilith than it is on you two because of it. B-but don’t worry! My stats are well tuned for healing and magic casting regardless!”

“Why would a farm girl have stats attuned for mag-”

Torien cut Morrigan off, “Mori, they have their own circumstances, it’s not polite to pry.” She smiled for a moment. “Man, that feels really good. Usually it’s Mori that’s on my case about being rude.” Morrigan looked at her sister in open-mouthed shock before playfully punching her arm.

“She’s right, I’m sorry. Even if it’s a bit less effective on us your healing looked reliable.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Bella replied smiling.

We started making the camp by marking off the area we were going to be setting up in, followed by digging out a small fire pit. Bella and Morrigan went to collect firewood while me and Torien put up the basic tents. The tents were pretty simple, rather than the folding contraptions we had in my previous world, here we had to secure poles together using twine and basically just laid a canvas tarp over it.

I really can’t say I remember doing much camping in my previous life but I could tell that with my strength stat at 50 I’m definitely having an easier time despite the more difficult setup including staking poles to tie down the canvas. I’m probably just being silly but setting up tents this way feels more authentic then slotting pvc pipes in a pre-cut and measured polyurethane waterproof tarp with zipping flaps. On some level the people in my previous world were just lazier but on the other hand 50 stat points in strength is just cheating. I didn’t even break a sweat staking down all of the posts. Perhaps there isn’t a need to make things easier than this since most people bothering to camp in monster infested places would be strong enough to stake their own tents anyway.

I noticed that Torien was struggling a bit more than I was setting things up so I went to help her out.

“Hey Torien, have we made any decisions about night watch yet?”

“Oh, normally the groups we join don’t really give us a say in it so I didn’t think to ask about it yet.”

“Do you think we should do four watches or two groups of two?”

“Groups of two might be easier on everyone.”

“Mmm, yeah. It would be easier for everyone to stay awake if everyone had a watch partner.”

“True, a lot of the time even in larger groups the entirety of the watch would split between any slave adventurers so my sister and I usually had to do it alone. It was really boring that way.”

“Why does the adventurer’s guild let slaves get treated so poorly?”

“The guild has to turn a blind eye to it or slave adventurers would likely never be included in groups. Because they’re tied down to the area and could be sold away at any time they’re usually a bad investment for parties. A lot of groups travel from town to town following work, and even if they want to stay local spending the time building teamwork and camaraderie for slaves that could just be sold away at the end of a mission isn’t worth it to a lot of parties. Usually the only people who take in slave adventurers are groups who just need a little bit of extra help for a specific job or want to take advantage of the situation to get more hands without paying for them what they’re worth.”

She finishes up the last stake so she goes and sits on a rock before continuing, “Honestly that’s why you’ve been pretty confusing to us. I guess I can just chalk it up to you guys being new to adventuring but you seem way too nice to us, it makes me wary of you two. You seem like good people though so I want to be able to trust you.”

I shrug in return. “I can’t really do anything about that then can I? I don’t care if you’re a slave, you’re a person first. It wouldn’t be fair to treat you like that and I know you two are trying your best so I don’t want to take advantage of you for it. Maybe you’ll be sold one day and we won’t see each other again but until then I’m pretty confident in saying I intend to adventure with you guys as long as I can. I haven’t known you two for long but I think I can trust you two to have my back.”

It’s quiet for a moment while my words sink in. After a minute of silence my sharp ears catch her speaking quietly to herself. “It's too bad she can't afford us.”

If the forest had been any louder in that moment I probably wouldn’t have heard her. She probably didn’t intend for me to hear but I felt the emotion in her words. I decided I would ask this for real this time. “Torien, how much do the two of you cost?”

“...We cost too much for beginner adventurers to buy us.”

“Just tell me. I want to know the figure.”

“...Our buy out price is 80 gold for the both of us. It’s possible we’d go for even more at auction.”

“If your debt is that much why are you working as adventurers? It seems unrealistic you would be able to pay that off any time soon like this.”

“The debt I told you about isn’t our purchase price but the amount we need to pay to make sure the slaver’s guild doesn’t sell the two of us separately. We made a deal with our handler to hold off on any sales that didn’t include both of us together as long as we paid them enough to fully cover our food and a bit more for ‘rent’ on our cell at the slaver’s guild. Our handler set a price that we would be capable of actually paying and we’ve been doing this for a few months now. It’s been close a few times but we’ve managed to keep up with our payments. We got permission to go on this mission beforehand but it’s a little risky to bet three days of pay on the reward for this mission but with the split you’re giving us we’ll be a little ahead on our payments when we get back.”

“Do people buy a pair of slaves together often?”

“Not really no, 80 gold is a lot, so the best we can hope for is a rich noble who likes us for our bodies or a rich adventurer that wants to train up a pair of slaves. The only thing we really have going for us is our looks and the fact that we’re specialized in different areas for an adventurer party. And wild mages tend to be unpopular even if Mori is well suited for it so that could be a sticking point as well. Most mages wouldn’t even be able to train her the same way as they would a normal student. But none of that really matters to me, I just want to stay with my sister. I don’t really care what I have to do to make that happen.”

“I see.” There wasn’t much more I could say. I wasn’t sure how much I would get for Bitch but 80 gold was a lot. I don’t know enough about slave trading to know if that amount was above or below normal and I didn’t really look around when I was there earlier. Either way, 80 gold was out of reach for most people and I could see why she didn’t want to say earlier. From her perspective, it would hurt if I tried to get their hopes up when it was unlikely I would even have a fraction of the money to buy them.

Not long later we heard laughter as the two other girls were walking back with firewood in their arms. I was pretty happy to see the other girls getting along, clearly their conversation didn’t take the dreary turn ours did. Bella hasn’t really talked about any friends she’s had in the past so it was nice to see her getting a bit closer to Morrigan.

It was only a few hours past midday so I decided I wanted to work on our rough map a little bit before we started relaxing. Torien reaffirmed how important this mission was to their finances so I figure it would be best to get a jump start on the map we’re working on. Torien and I decided to go together for this too since her scouting abilities would probably be the most useful for this sort of thing. Morrigan assured us she would be able to use magic to tell us if they were in trouble while we were gone. The signal was explained to me as something loud and explosive in the sky, I had no kind of retort to that so I just accepted it and moved on.

The first thing we decided to do was try to map out the stream since it was a pretty obvious natural landmark. We walked down the southern edge of the stream before we were pretty sure we had gone far enough and then counted our paces as we went south towards the road. We took note of that then figured out how many paces it was between our two markers. After that was done we walked back up towards the stream as straight north as possible from the first marker so we could figure out where the edge of our map should be. Once we had taken care of that, I started walking back to camp while I tried to keep track of the stream on the map.

While doing this I realized something, I’m really good at sight measuring. Like weirdly so. Using just the compass and my eyes I feel like I’m able to get a pretty accurate map. Maybe this is another extension of my drawing abilities? Just by figuring out the angles and using relative measurements I feel pretty happy with the accuracy of the map I’ve drawn up.

[Drawing has increased from level 8 to level 9]

By the time we got back to camp the sun was starting to get low in the sky. We figured we had gotten a lot done for the day despite the long walk so we decided to relax for the last hour or so of sunlight. The rest of the evening went by pretty quick. We cooked up a bit of soup using some of our rations with boiled stream water, finalized our night watch plans, and chatted about this and that before we took turns sleeping for the night.