Chapter 192: Welcome Back [Bonus Chapter 6/10]

They made their way back to the Le Fay pavilion, moving through the main entrance and across the trading floor without stopping.

The noise of the hall fell behind them as they reached the door at the far end. Lukas pressed his ID to the keypad. The light shifted and the door opened.

The smaller hall inside was quieter than the main floor, carrying the same calm atmosphere as the day before.

The same senior attendant spotted them almost immediately and walked across the room with a smile on his face.

"Welcome back," he said. "How may I assist you today?"

Karrakas stepped forward. "We’d like to purchase a comprehensive information packet. The one with detailed coverage, not a general update."

The attendant nodded. "Of course. Payment is processed at the desk first, and then we’ll have you shown to a private room. The packet will be brought to you there."

Lukas walked to the desk without waiting. The lady sitting there processed the payment. He pressed his bank card to the machine and confirmed the hundred thousand gold coins.

The attendant led them through a side door and down a short corridor to a room that was nothing like the vast spatial hall they’d been taken to the day before.

This one was a normal size, with a large rectangular table running down the center and eight chairs arranged around it.

"Use the room for as long as you need," the attendant said.

Karrakas held up a hand before he could leave. "Could we also get pens and paper? We’ll need to take notes."

"I’ll have them brought with the packet."

He left, pulling the door closed behind him.

They sat down on the chairs on one side of the table, clustering together rather than spreading out. Lukas set his hands flat on the surface and looked at Karrakas.

"While we wait," Karrakas said, leaning forward, "there’s something you need to understand about what we’re looking for in this packet and why it matters."

They looked at him.

"Storms," he said. "That’s the first thing we plot around. Everything else is secondary."

He looked at Lukas directly. "A sandstorm appearing during your class change quest would end the quest immediately. You can’t walk through a storm barefoot. You can barely walk through one with full gear if you don’t know what you’re doing."

"And before you ask, yes, it’s that serious for high ranked Adepts too. An S-rank caught inside a severe storm without preparation has died before."

"First, the sand moves fast enough and carries enough force that it could pierce through gaps that armor doesn’t cover. And second, the beasts inside the storms are not Chilopodas or Scorpions. They’re way different."

"What are they?" Akira couldn’t help but ask, a frown on her face. "The beasts inside a sandstorm?"

"Storm dragons." Karrakas said.

Silence filled the air at that. Just the word ’dragon’ alone was enough to imply how dangerous it was.

He sat back. "So when this packet arrives, the first thing we’re mapping out is storm patterns. We’ll check the timing, frequency, and direction of travel. If there is any realistic chance of a storm appearing in our window, we don’t go."

Lukas nodded.

"How accurate are the storm predictions?" Melody asked.

"Accurate enough that the pavilion charges a hundred thousand gold coins for them," Karrakas said.

The door opened. A junior attendant walked into the room, setting a thick stack of bound documents on the table alongside several pens and a stack of paper.

Karrakas thanked him, reaching for it immediately.

He pulled the bound documents towards him, tearing open the seals and placing them on the table.

He picked one in particular and began flipping through it quickly, his eyes scanning each page until he found the sandstorm section.

He pulled those pages free and spread them across the table, then uncapped a pen and set a blank sheet of paper in the center where everyone could see it. 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

"Start mapping," he said. "Find every storm route and prediction in there and call them out. I’ll draw them."

They divided the remaining pages between them and got to work.

Melody’s fingers moved through the page in front of her as she read out the timing and direction of the storms.

Akira worked on cross-referencing the frequency data, while Lukas tracked the projected paths.

Karrakas drew as they spoke, marking the ringed city as a point in the center of the page and sketching lines away from it, each one representing a storm route with its predicted window noted alongside it.

The drawing grew busy quickly. Lines crossed and curved in multiple directions, some overlapping, and some running parallel.

When they had worked through everything relevant, Karrakas set his pen down and stared at the paper.

"Four days," he said. "If we keep the quest window to four days at most, then the viable directions narrow down to two."

He pointed at the paper. "South and southeast. Everything else carries too high a probability of a storm crossing our path during the window."

They moved on to the beast population data.

Karrakas pulled those pages next, and they worked through them the same way, mapping migration routes and population concentrations against the path they were beginning to plan.

Lukas was halfway through a section on regional beast movement when something caught his eye.

He read it again to make sure.

"I found something," he said.

He slid the page towards the center of the table and pointed at the relevant section.

"A C-rank Spiked Turtle. It’s been tracked moving through the south and southeast corridor over the next three days." He looked up. "There’s a projected path here. Depending on the timing and the exact route we take, there’s a chance our paths could cross."

Karrakas reached over and picked up the document. He read through the section carefully, checking the projected movement data against the timeline, his eyes moving back and forth between the page and the map they’d drawn.

Then he set it down.

He exhaled slowly, leaning back in his chair, and looked at the ceiling for a moment before looking back at the table.

"I genuinely don’t know," he said, "whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing."