FFF-Tier System, SSS-Rank Wife-Chapter 64: AnGreg

"Huh?"

It didn’t take a genius for me to connect the dots.

The man who entered right before us, the only one who managed to withstand my competitive stare... has now stormed out of Greg’s smithy after what could only be described as a considerable crash-out.

For a moment, I just stood there, my eyes turned over to where the first unsatisfied customer of Greg’s smithy had already reached the fence’s main gate.

Yet, rather than getting on his merry way back into the city like anyone else, he instead moved just a little bit off to the side before boarding one of the carriages waiting there!

And if all of that wasn’t enough, when the carriage started to move, it wasn’t the only one that did.

Sure, out of the three personal carriages parked by the smithy’s fence, only the one the man just boarded started to move.

Much more worryingly, however, with a further two dozen or so transportation carriages... roughly two-thirds quickly followed suit!

’So he wasn’t a customer but a merchant, huh?’ I thought, my eyes drawing to the details of the transport carriages that followed right after the man’s personal one.

They were built with the use of long wooden planks rising roughly a meter high and set at an angle, just like the horse carts I’ve seen a few times back at my grandfather’s farm.

However, while my grandfather’s carriage was but a relic of a bygone era, something barely good enough to bring grain or dry straw around, those carriages couldn’t look any less professional.

There were metal fittings holding the boards together. Then, there were metal bars strewn across their tops, serving both as a reinforcement to the cart’s structure but also as a skeleton for the piece of cloth draped over the cart’s top, both hiding the cargo while also protecting it from the elements.

All of those details spoke of the heavy-duty tasks those carriages were designed to complete. And if those details weren’t enough, just the amount of effort their horses had to put in just to get them to move, along with the deep marks their iron-reinforced wooden wheels left in the dry ground of the town’s outskirts...

"Don’t tell me..." I’ve only managed a soft whisper as I connected the dots. I then reached out with my hand to cover my face, hiding my expression from the outside world while leaning back and taking in a deep breath.

’Is this fate? A coincidence? Or an unexpected product of my own careless words and actions?’

"That was... something, wasn’t it?" Standing to the side, Selia appeared to be as baffled by the whole event as me. Yet, judging by the hint of tension in her eyes, she could also see further into this issue.

’In the end, we’ve arrived at the same conclusion, even though in entirely different ways, I guess?’

For Selia, this situation had to be an obvious end to a relationship she was bound to know about, a relationship between Greg and one of the merchants he either had a wholesale business with or was procuring materials from.

And given the intensity of both parties in the exchange we accidentally eavesdropped on...

On the other hand, by noticing the details of the carriages, their number, and then their obvious connection to the man given how they all moved in tow with his own personal carriage, I could pretty much guess what should be obvious by now.

This man wasn’t a simple customer. And if my gut feeling was correct, he was someone Greg sourced coal from.

And I was almost ready to believe that. The only reason why I just couldn’t accept such an outcome was because of how favorable and right on time it would be for me, given the very purpose we came here with!

"Ah," a shop attendant ran out to the doors, the sweat dripping down his flushed face more likely to come from witnessing the whole fight than from running around the steamy-hot smithy. "I’m really sorry you had to witness this disgrace. Dwarven lords often tend to..."

After tracing the now departing carriages with his eyes, the shop’s assistant finally turned his sights to the two of us.

Then, the words froze in his mouth. And while his eyes merely scanned past my face, they quite obviously stopped right on Selia.

On one hand, there was a chance he was simply taken in by her beauty, but...

"Oh my, miss S..." the clerk jumped only to take a step forth, a dull thud coming from behind his back when a chunk of wood fell down by his heels, having just struck him squarely in the back before he announced Selia’s presence to all the people still waiting in the queue nearby.

"Honored miss!"

The shop’s assistant didn’t pause even for a second, instantly switching over to a correct, more ambiguous form.

"If I had known you were waiting in the queue..." he shook his head before retreating a few steps into the smithy and then bowing down while reaching out with his hand to the side, inviting us in, "please, by all means come in, master is eagerly awaiting..."

"So you’ve come," sitting in his usual spot with a half-broken bottle of booze in his hand, Greg called out pretty much as soon as we stepped into the cloud of the smithy’s indoor smoke.

By the time we took just a few steps inside, Greg took a hearty swig from the bottle...

Only to smash it against the edge of his counter and then raise his hand, relaxing it as he watched the broken pieces of glass trickle out of his hand.

’Judging by the rate of the technology here, shouldn’t glass be insanely expensive?’ I thought.

There was a reason why most drinks were stored in wooden barrels and clay pots rather than water bottles. The process of making those was just that much more expensive than the alternative!

And yet, here we stood, watching how Greg happily threw several more coins worth of value aside, all to just abate his momentary anger.

I didn’t have the time to calmly think through the possible processes going on in the dwarf’s head. Not before he leaned over his counter with his fist tightened, still vibrating with the force of his anger he never really had the chance to unleash.

Yet, it wasn’t his fist that made my whole spine grow cold.

It was the gaze he first measured me with before locking it directly on my eyes.

"You better not be here to tell me you’ve failed!"