"But before I tell you everything we know about him, I’d like to talk with you a little."

"Sorry, but we don’t have all the time in the world—"

"I’m sure you’re a very busy man, but I’m also sure you’d like to hear what I have to say, Richard Forster."

I felt a chill run down my spine when he said my real name. Diane and I got up from our chairs almost at the same time, driven by survival instinct.

Vulcan raised his hand. "My bad. I didn’t mean to make you nervous, but to continue the negotiations from here, I needed to reveal your real name."

I was shocked by that abrupt revelation. Fortunately, the time I had spent in combat had made my mind more resilient, allowing me to pull myself together when I needed to think logically.

"How did you find out?" I asked.

"Rookie mistake. You should have lied about your names the moment you entered the city. Some of my ears around town found out your name when you went to hand over the rescued girls. Or maybe you should have lied when you rescued them..." Vulcan seemed unsure about the two possibilities. It was easy for him, since he was used to a life of hiding his own identity.

"So..."

"What will I do with you?" Vulcan deduced what I was about to say. "Normally, I wouldn’t even call attention to someone trying to hide their identity. It’s common in this kind of business, and I usually pretend to respect my clients’ privacy."

"How nice of you," I said sarcastically.

"But you are not ordinary clients, which puts me in a difficult position."

I had a bad feeling about what he had just told me. I decided to let him talk without giving away any more information, if possible. It wasn’t much, but it was the best I could do at this point.

"What do you mean by that?" I said, pretending not to understand.

"Well, a few hours ago, a woman came by saying she wanted me to pass along information about a certain adventurer who might come through the city. She gave me a very detailed physical description and his name. Curiously, that same young man decided to come here. If it weren’t for a bizarrely small difference in timing, you might have run into each other here."

"Did she tell you why?" I asked.

"No," he told me bluntly, but he didn’t seem to be lying.

Besides, imagine if she had told the mercenary in front of me. I didn’t know who he would sell the information about the philosopher’s stone to, but he could certainly retire with it.

"And what do you intend to do?" I asked, expecting the worst.

"I won’t lie, I’m personally curious. That girl paid me good money to hand over your location, but since you’re here, I could simply hand you over instead."

I had to think quickly to get out of that situation. The woman Vulcan was referring to was probably Equidna. After our clash, she must have come to Greenville and left that request at the Ghosts of the Road camp.

The only good news was that Alicia didn’t seem to be Equidna’s target. Maybe only Gerard cared about the girl, or maybe she didn’t know the princess was with me. Either way, part of me felt relieved at the thought that I was the only one being hunted in this situation.

Maybe there was still a way out. If money was Vulcan’s mother tongue, then there would always be room for negotiation.

"How much money did she offer you?" I asked without hesitation.

"Thirty gold coins," he told me. "And she didn’t offer them to me, she already paid. But I’m willing to let you go if you offer me something equivalent. Of course, you already gave me five coins, but if you gave me twenty-five more, I wouldn’t give that girl any information."

The coincidence was ridiculous at this point. Thirty gold coins was exactly how much we had earned from the mission in Ironburgh, but it was everything we had. I had the pouch of coins, but if I gave it to him, I would walk away empty-handed, without the information about Leo and without any money at all.

"Maybe you’re short on coins, but there is always another way to pay."

That sentence was awful in this context. It sounded like something a h*ntai character would say before something bad happened. Knowing that he worked in the black market, the worst possibilities for paying the debt were on the table.

"And what would that form of payment be?" I asked, already regretting those words as they left my mouth.

He raised his index finger, pointing at Diane.

"If you hand over that girl to me, I’ll let you go without any further trouble," Vulcan said with a restrained smile on his face.

"What?!" Diane and I exclaimed in unison.

"You heard me," he said without a shred of shame. "And I’m still being generous. Even though she’s a pretty young woman, thirty gold coins is still a very high price for a slave who, most likely, isn’t a virgin."

"You pervert!" I shouted, truly raising my voice for the first time in that tent. Every cell in my body screamed at me to draw my new sword and strike him down where he stood.

My mind was already primed for combat. If negotiation wasn’t possible, I would fight. I would hold off all three of them if I had to while Diane escaped from there.

"Ooh." Vulcan sounded impressed by my anger, in a good way, his smile growing more irritating with every passing second. "You look much better with that angry expression than with the overly polite way you were speaking earlier. You seem more human that way. But I think you misunderstood me. I don’t want her to be my sex slave at all, nor would I sell her as one."

"Then what do you want to do with her?" I asked, still quite irritated.

"She’ll be a slave I give to my subordinate as a gift," Vulcan told me.

I turned to the white-haired man with the butler mustache, glaring at him angrily. His eyes were closed as he tried to avoid my death stare.

"Not that subordinate," Vulcan told me, as if my reaction was tiring him out. "My female subordinate."

"Eh?" I was dumbfounded, my anger fading amid the confusion rising in my head. "So your subordinate is lesbi—"

"No, you idiot!!" he shouted at me. "Forget the sex slave part!"

It seemed I had misunderstood, but was it really my fault? If a man who worked in a shady business pointed at your wife, who was very beautiful, by the way, and said that if you left her there, he would let you walk away unharmed, what were you supposed to think of the situation?

But Vulcan’s subordinate did not care about the commotion I was causing in Diane’s defense. Although her eyes were covered, her expression remained unchanged throughout our conversation. Instead of addressing me, she turned her face and stared at Diane for a moment. I believed the black blindfold did not hinder her vision, though I had no idea how.

"It’s been a while," the blindfolded girl said to her in a soft yet monotone feminine voice.

"Eh?" Diane looked surprised. "Have we met before?"

I didn’t know much about this girl. Aside from the fact that she had a good design and was an Assassin, little had been said about her in the story. But if she was an Assassin and knew Diane, I could imagine the relationship between the two of them.

In the original story, Diane had been killed right at the beginning, so they never got to reunite. I stared intently at the scene unfolding before my eyes, like a player who had accidentally unlocked a new path in an RPG he swore he knew completely.

"You don’t remember me, Ursula?" the girl who called herself Jasmine said to my Valkyrie. "Or should I call you by your real name, Diane?"

The green-haired girl lifted a lock of her hair until the roots became visible. The new hair growing beneath the green strands was white like Diane’s.

Diane’s clan had been destroyed years ago in an attack by the King and Gerard, but just as Diane was still alive, there was still a possibility that remnants remained throughout the country, hidden in the shadows.

And now, in the darkness of the underworld, in this mercenary camp, I was witnessing a family reunion that did not seem very friendly, to say the least.

I couldn’t see the color of her eyes, but something told me that beneath the dark blindfold, they had the purple gleam of amethysts.

"It’s been a while, big sis," the girl called Jasmine said coldly.

Diane looked dumbfounded, finally recognizing the girl standing before her. "Tanya."