Chapter 41: There's always another quest
Requiem_Jeer
The Most High
Next chapter's the last one for Book 1. I won't be starting on book 2 any time soon, if at all.
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Rorik's outlook was a pretty typical dungeon city: a fortified keep in the back end of nowhere. This one in particular was on the top of a reasonably-sized mountain among other mountains, maybe two and a half miles tall. Several ropeways connected the place with the bottom of the mountain on various sides as well as the adjacent mountains, each endpoint a miniature town in its own right.
"Wow…" Peter said as he saw the massive cargo lift. Thick steel ropes, enchanted for further strength and durability, trailed up the slope about twenty feet apart, wooden columns with even greater enchantments keeping them suspended over the rocks and shrubs.
"It's impressive engineering." Illivere said in agreement. "But wouldn't this be expensive to replace in the event of an attack?"
Casimir had seen it before, so he just kept walking. "This is a dungeon city. They're fiercely independent, even the ones that are nominally taxpayers to the nation they're in or near. No one attacks them with armies, because that's just a quick way to get a massive monster outbreak. These are the kinds of cities that get passed back and forth between nations in peace treaties, all the while just continuing their business suppressing the dungeon and selling the monster parts." Well, dungeons spawned more than monsters, certain magical ores and other materials spontaneously form from mana flows in dungeons, but you could also use geomantic manipulation, so it wasn't an exclusive source. "They're good places to live, if you don't mind the risk of a monster outbreak."
The group approached the ticket office, where a young elven girl sat bored. She had clearly been working at this place for a while, as she was no less bored when five adventurers came to her workstation. "When's the next lift?" Casimir asked.
"Six hours." The girl said. "Tickets are two each." She looked him up and down. "You have any local coin?" She asked.
"Nope." Casimir replied.
"Half silver, then." She said, switching to adventurer guild shorthand.
Casimir started digging through his coin pouch. No, this one only had gold… where was his silver? Ah. "Same cost for a Runner's ticket?" He asked.
"...a what?" The elf asked, confused.
"Oh, you don't do that anymore?" Casimir asked. "It's where you let us just run up the rope." They did it back when he spent that one year based here…
"...No, we don't." The elf replied. "I've never even heard of that."
Casimir scratched his chin as he contemplated that. "Come to think of it, I usually went up and down from the other side…"
"You're not allowed on the ropes." The now much more alert girl insisted. "Only the enchanters are allowed up there." Well, he assumed that emergencies wouldn't count, but it was possible that Zeke was acting outside his official remit when he offered that alternative route.
"Fine, fine." Casimir said, sighing. "Five for the regular tickets then." He counted out some coins from some backwater that they passed through while hunting for liches. "These should be fifty-fifty silver and tin." Quarter-ounce per coin, so… twenty coins. He placed them on her scale.
She weighed them, then examined a random coin. Her eyes glowed with magic as she inspected the mana composition of the metal. "It checks out." She brought out their tickets, the same familiar numbered leather-wrapped wooden tokens with faint enchantments to identify themselves.
"Well, what do you want to do?" Casimir asked his students.
They immediately started talking over each other, excited to have some time to burn in a town. Casimir chuckled. Makes him feel a little old, really.
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After some shopping and way too many impulse purchases from the slick merchants who specialize in separating young adventurers from their dungeon money, they were able to go up the lift into the city proper.
Guildmaster Seasplitter was a middle-aged elf, probably about one hundred and fifty years old, and he welcomed Casimir warmly into his office. "Sit, sit. Now, I understand that you need a portal back to Anima?"
"That's right, Guildmaster." Casimir said respectfully. "Within the next four days, preferably." That would leave them with one full day to get resettled before classes start up again.
"I've already spoken with Headmaster Gardender. He's quite relieved to have heard news of you, he was expecting you back already." Guildmaster Seasplitter said, somewhat chidingly.
"Stuff happened." Casimir said, shrugging.
The elf snorted at the understatement. "Yes, 'Stuff happened'. Anyway, he's arranged for their end of the portal at noon in three days." Fantastic. "Until that time…" He said, trailing off.
"Yeah, I'll cull the dungeon a bit, no problem. My students could use the experience in underground fighting." Casimir said immediately.
"Not quite what I was going to ask." The guildmaster said. "It would be appreciated nonetheless, but what I actually need is more… precautionary. There are strange reports from the deepest recesses of the dungeon, unusual magical effects with no discernable origin, oddly intelligent monsters, and even the terrain appears to shift between reports."
Casimir would like to think that such things happening so close to Malice's movements was a coincidence. He knows better. "Have any other dungeons reported similar issues?" He asked. Maybe he was just being paranoid…
The Guildmaster waved his hand vaguely. "The Umbral Loch may have mentioned something along similar lines." Crap.
Casimir sighed. "I'll check it out, but any significant action on my part is going to need to wait until after the next semester."
"Just get me something to go off of and I'll make the portal." Guildmaster Seasplitter said, an edge of desperation to his voice. "You may be a fresh Heroic, but this town hasn't even seen an elite in months, ever since that dungeon rush started in the Bladespire mountains." He winced. "I was about to recruit my best veterans and lead them down there myself."
"Yeah, that's probably not a good idea." Casimir said, eyeing the elf's notable paunch. "Any other oddities you haven't mentioned?" He asked.
"Just one." The guildmaster said. "There's also been an uptick of treasure located. Hopefully it's just a new cavern that opened up, something made by some wildcat dungeoneering expedition twenty or thirty years ago. It would fit the quality of the treasure." He looked to the wall of his office, where a massive map of the tunnel system took up the entire area. "I have a bad feeling, though. Minor hitches in the fabric of space, like someone's been using space magic recklessly. I haven't sensed any proper magic, though, so I shouldn't be seeing those aftershocks. But I am. It's a mystery."
Casimir was beginning to understand what was disturbing the old elf about these reports. "Hopefully it's just that." He agreed.
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Even with all of the fancy titles and recent promotion, Casimir never really saw himself as a hero, some larger than life figure that could have epics written about them. He killed monsters, with cruel efficiency more often than not. Striking from stealth, counteracting whatever impressive tricks his targets had, and letting them suffer and weaken before putting them out of their misery rather than any kind of dramatic clash of blades.
By the same token, most of his jobs get done without much in the way of… dramatic twists. When something goes wrong, it's usually because he took a calculated gamble that didn't pay off, or some known unknown was revealed to be more than they were prepared to handle.
But lately… that was changing. After not one but three separate coincidences pulling Casimir into the same plot of the God of Monsters… even if it was because he was teaching Illivere, there was enough luck involved to make a guy… suspicious.
Or just paranoid. Once you know Malice existed and acted through monsters, you start seeing his hand whenever anything remotely odd starts happening. Was he involved in this? Perhaps. It almost made him look forward to teaching classes again. Almost.
The dungeon was large, miles of tunnels crisscrossing the mountain's interior. The adventurer's guild took steps to keep things contained, sealing any entrance beyond the one they control and sending patrols to keep watch for any new ones forming. He had sent his students to just do some regular dungeon quests to keep them busy until the portal, but Casimir's quest had him venturing deeper.
The thing about dungeons is that mana flowed a lot more freely through air than solid stone. Thus, underground tunnels like those found in dungeons tended to form currents, with the thickest and strongest monster populations being where those currents intersected each other. These 'monster nests' were clearly marked on the extensive maps that Casimir was provided. Such as the one he was standing in right this second.
"...This is not nearly enough monsters for a nest." Casimir decided after placing the last of the monster cores in his bag. The impurity of those mana flows made them a lot more difficult to sense, unless there was something in the area purifying or filtering the mana; like those cactus mushroom things he harvested a few of that were drinking up and concentrating the water mana, keeping the tunnels dry and providing a source of clean water that adventurers could use if they were too desperate to save it as an alchemical ingredient. They practically glowed to Casimir's mana sense in comparison to the objectively much stronger mana convergence he should have been standing in.
But more difficult to sense did not mean impossible. "It's shifted…" Casimir said, feeling out the subtle flows. "It's all going one direction now." He marked his map, noting that the monster nest was now defunct. "Now, where are you all going?"
He drew his sword, slicing the monster that tried to ambush him in half. Nothing unusual there. He siphoned the core to clean up the corpse anyway, and placed the resulting stone in the bag with the rest.
Eventually, he paused in his journey. "What… is that?" He took a few steps back. Nothing. He walked back over that invisible line. He really wished he was better at interpreting space mana because that's… certainly something.
"I found your anomaly, Guildmaster." Casimir muttered to himself. It was subtle… if he wasn't actively looking for weird mana interactions, if there were more monsters around… he might have missed it.
He let out a pulse of stone mana, ready to flee if he detected something dangerous. Creating a mental map of the terrain, he compared it to the area he should be on the map. It… didn't match at all. It looked… carved. Like man-made tunnels rather than the naturally formed ones, even if he really didn't know enough about geology to guess how.
It was only a dozen feet or two before he found the tunnel. Smooth floor, unnaturally flat, paved the way deeper into the dungeon, even though this segment of the dungeon was supposed to be a twelve degree ramp. It wasn't tiled, and it was clearly meant to look like it was naturally formed, but no natural surface was this… flat.
This whole area followed that theme, of "natural" walls that were far too regular and shaped to be anything of the sort. There was still some kind of subtle aura suffusing the area, somewhat reminding Casimir of domain magic, a sense of presence, the mana held in place in readiness rather than the natural state of flow.
Any further musings were interrupted as the local monster population rushed his position all at once, a few even going around behind him in an attempt to cut off his retreat. There's the 'oddly intelligent' monsters that were reported. This would be dangerous… if the monsters involved were actually dangerous. He just flooded his network of augmenting curses with mana and carved a bloody swathe through the monsters.
It was strange, these monsters were weaker than the ones higher up in the mountain… After the last of the monsters were slain, there was an odd fluctuation in the stillness of the psudeo-domain, and the monster corpses all simultaneously dissolved into nothingness. Now that felt like active magic use… but if you could do that, why not attempt to interfere with his curses as he fought?
What in the world is going on?
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Whatever force directed those monsters to fight in a coordinated matter, it gathered all of the monsters in the area to do so, as Casimir found the rest of the curious dungeon segment utterly bare of them.
That isn't to say that there wasn't anything to find. "...Why is there a treasure chest?" Casimir asked out loud. It was just… strange. It was even trapped… with an outright amateur wire that he could have clamped and cut when he was six years old. Inside was a basket hilt sword of reasonable quality that more or less matched the style of the one he was using… but it much more closely matched the one that kobold was using, back when he was still hurting for a weapon usable against massed enemies.
Does he still have that sword? Or did he sell it to that army where David lives? If he did still have it, he likely stashed it… in here? No, in here. He drew the sword from his bag of backup weapons, unsheathed it, and compared the two. If you ignored the enchantment he had put on the original sword… It was a perfect copy.
It was also the only thing in the treasure chest. No one would put just one sword in a chest! He put the swords away. Something seriously strange was going on.
After another few minutes of attempting to discern the direction of the mana flows past whatever was stifling them, Casimir eventually found an odd pedestal, a gigantic gemstone inlaid on the top of the elaborate structure. It felt… like a monster core. Not an undead one, but a more ordinary, if potent, monster core, the stink of overlapping mana scents thick in his senses.
The mana of this particular room was much thicker than anywhere else, swelling and trembling at his presence. Casimir touched the core, in an attempt to more precisely examine it, but it suddenly started flooding his system with mind mana, nauseatingly impure mind mina, and it cut through his compromised defenses as it attempted to shout, telepathic noise so discordant that Casimir reflexively lashed out, kicking the pedestal and breaking it in half. The noise intensified for an instant, causing him to collapse in pain, before fading away.
After recovering from the mental attack, Casimir picked the biggest piece of the broken pedestal, separating the giant monster core from its mooring and pocketing it now that it was inactive. "Whatever this is, it was the source of everything." Casimir said to himself, noticing that the mana in the air was no longer being strangled and was now beginning to flow more freely.
He kneeled down, examining the shattered pedestal. "Ah, there's some kind of enchantment array here." Casimir said to himself, noting the distinct wires of an unknown metal within the pedestal. "That I've ruined." If he had known… Bah. The metal's still kind of strange, so he spent some time looting it before turning back and making his way back up to the surface.
There was no way something like this was just a one-off… He'll have to leave it in the Guildmaster's hands. He'll be too busy to do much about this in the near future.
Maybe next year, if it's still a problem.
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Rorik's outlook was a pretty typical dungeon city: a fortified keep in the back end of nowhere. This one in particular was on the top of a reasonably-sized mountain among other mountains, maybe two and a half miles tall. Several ropeways connected the place with the bottom of the mountain on various sides as well as the adjacent mountains, each endpoint a miniature town in its own right.
"Wow…" Peter said as he saw the massive cargo lift. Thick steel ropes, enchanted for further strength and durability, trailed up the slope about twenty feet apart, wooden columns with even greater enchantments keeping them suspended over the rocks and shrubs.
"It's impressive engineering." Illivere said in agreement. "But wouldn't this be expensive to replace in the event of an attack?"
Casimir had seen it before, so he just kept walking. "This is a dungeon city. They're fiercely independent, even the ones that are nominally taxpayers to the nation they're in or near. No one attacks them with armies, because that's just a quick way to get a massive monster outbreak. These are the kinds of cities that get passed back and forth between nations in peace treaties, all the while just continuing their business suppressing the dungeon and selling the monster parts." Well, dungeons spawned more than monsters, certain magical ores and other materials spontaneously form from mana flows in dungeons, but you could also use geomantic manipulation, so it wasn't an exclusive source. "They're good places to live, if you don't mind the risk of a monster outbreak."
The group approached the ticket office, where a young elven girl sat bored. She had clearly been working at this place for a while, as she was no less bored when five adventurers came to her workstation. "When's the next lift?" Casimir asked.
"Six hours." The girl said. "Tickets are two each." She looked him up and down. "You have any local coin?" She asked.
"Nope." Casimir replied.
"Half silver, then." She said, switching to adventurer guild shorthand.
Casimir started digging through his coin pouch. No, this one only had gold… where was his silver? Ah. "Same cost for a Runner's ticket?" He asked.
"...a what?" The elf asked, confused.
"Oh, you don't do that anymore?" Casimir asked. "It's where you let us just run up the rope." They did it back when he spent that one year based here…
"...No, we don't." The elf replied. "I've never even heard of that."
Casimir scratched his chin as he contemplated that. "Come to think of it, I usually went up and down from the other side…"
"You're not allowed on the ropes." The now much more alert girl insisted. "Only the enchanters are allowed up there." Well, he assumed that emergencies wouldn't count, but it was possible that Zeke was acting outside his official remit when he offered that alternative route.
"Fine, fine." Casimir said, sighing. "Five for the regular tickets then." He counted out some coins from some backwater that they passed through while hunting for liches. "These should be fifty-fifty silver and tin." Quarter-ounce per coin, so… twenty coins. He placed them on her scale.
She weighed them, then examined a random coin. Her eyes glowed with magic as she inspected the mana composition of the metal. "It checks out." She brought out their tickets, the same familiar numbered leather-wrapped wooden tokens with faint enchantments to identify themselves.
"Well, what do you want to do?" Casimir asked his students.
They immediately started talking over each other, excited to have some time to burn in a town. Casimir chuckled. Makes him feel a little old, really.
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After some shopping and way too many impulse purchases from the slick merchants who specialize in separating young adventurers from their dungeon money, they were able to go up the lift into the city proper.
Guildmaster Seasplitter was a middle-aged elf, probably about one hundred and fifty years old, and he welcomed Casimir warmly into his office. "Sit, sit. Now, I understand that you need a portal back to Anima?"
"That's right, Guildmaster." Casimir said respectfully. "Within the next four days, preferably." That would leave them with one full day to get resettled before classes start up again.
"I've already spoken with Headmaster Gardender. He's quite relieved to have heard news of you, he was expecting you back already." Guildmaster Seasplitter said, somewhat chidingly.
"Stuff happened." Casimir said, shrugging.
The elf snorted at the understatement. "Yes, 'Stuff happened'. Anyway, he's arranged for their end of the portal at noon in three days." Fantastic. "Until that time…" He said, trailing off.
"Yeah, I'll cull the dungeon a bit, no problem. My students could use the experience in underground fighting." Casimir said immediately.
"Not quite what I was going to ask." The guildmaster said. "It would be appreciated nonetheless, but what I actually need is more… precautionary. There are strange reports from the deepest recesses of the dungeon, unusual magical effects with no discernable origin, oddly intelligent monsters, and even the terrain appears to shift between reports."
Casimir would like to think that such things happening so close to Malice's movements was a coincidence. He knows better. "Have any other dungeons reported similar issues?" He asked. Maybe he was just being paranoid…
The Guildmaster waved his hand vaguely. "The Umbral Loch may have mentioned something along similar lines." Crap.
Casimir sighed. "I'll check it out, but any significant action on my part is going to need to wait until after the next semester."
"Just get me something to go off of and I'll make the portal." Guildmaster Seasplitter said, an edge of desperation to his voice. "You may be a fresh Heroic, but this town hasn't even seen an elite in months, ever since that dungeon rush started in the Bladespire mountains." He winced. "I was about to recruit my best veterans and lead them down there myself."
"Yeah, that's probably not a good idea." Casimir said, eyeing the elf's notable paunch. "Any other oddities you haven't mentioned?" He asked.
"Just one." The guildmaster said. "There's also been an uptick of treasure located. Hopefully it's just a new cavern that opened up, something made by some wildcat dungeoneering expedition twenty or thirty years ago. It would fit the quality of the treasure." He looked to the wall of his office, where a massive map of the tunnel system took up the entire area. "I have a bad feeling, though. Minor hitches in the fabric of space, like someone's been using space magic recklessly. I haven't sensed any proper magic, though, so I shouldn't be seeing those aftershocks. But I am. It's a mystery."
Casimir was beginning to understand what was disturbing the old elf about these reports. "Hopefully it's just that." He agreed.
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Even with all of the fancy titles and recent promotion, Casimir never really saw himself as a hero, some larger than life figure that could have epics written about them. He killed monsters, with cruel efficiency more often than not. Striking from stealth, counteracting whatever impressive tricks his targets had, and letting them suffer and weaken before putting them out of their misery rather than any kind of dramatic clash of blades.
By the same token, most of his jobs get done without much in the way of… dramatic twists. When something goes wrong, it's usually because he took a calculated gamble that didn't pay off, or some known unknown was revealed to be more than they were prepared to handle.
But lately… that was changing. After not one but three separate coincidences pulling Casimir into the same plot of the God of Monsters… even if it was because he was teaching Illivere, there was enough luck involved to make a guy… suspicious.
Or just paranoid. Once you know Malice existed and acted through monsters, you start seeing his hand whenever anything remotely odd starts happening. Was he involved in this? Perhaps. It almost made him look forward to teaching classes again. Almost.
The dungeon was large, miles of tunnels crisscrossing the mountain's interior. The adventurer's guild took steps to keep things contained, sealing any entrance beyond the one they control and sending patrols to keep watch for any new ones forming. He had sent his students to just do some regular dungeon quests to keep them busy until the portal, but Casimir's quest had him venturing deeper.
The thing about dungeons is that mana flowed a lot more freely through air than solid stone. Thus, underground tunnels like those found in dungeons tended to form currents, with the thickest and strongest monster populations being where those currents intersected each other. These 'monster nests' were clearly marked on the extensive maps that Casimir was provided. Such as the one he was standing in right this second.
"...This is not nearly enough monsters for a nest." Casimir decided after placing the last of the monster cores in his bag. The impurity of those mana flows made them a lot more difficult to sense, unless there was something in the area purifying or filtering the mana; like those cactus mushroom things he harvested a few of that were drinking up and concentrating the water mana, keeping the tunnels dry and providing a source of clean water that adventurers could use if they were too desperate to save it as an alchemical ingredient. They practically glowed to Casimir's mana sense in comparison to the objectively much stronger mana convergence he should have been standing in.
But more difficult to sense did not mean impossible. "It's shifted…" Casimir said, feeling out the subtle flows. "It's all going one direction now." He marked his map, noting that the monster nest was now defunct. "Now, where are you all going?"
He drew his sword, slicing the monster that tried to ambush him in half. Nothing unusual there. He siphoned the core to clean up the corpse anyway, and placed the resulting stone in the bag with the rest.
Eventually, he paused in his journey. "What… is that?" He took a few steps back. Nothing. He walked back over that invisible line. He really wished he was better at interpreting space mana because that's… certainly something.
"I found your anomaly, Guildmaster." Casimir muttered to himself. It was subtle… if he wasn't actively looking for weird mana interactions, if there were more monsters around… he might have missed it.
He let out a pulse of stone mana, ready to flee if he detected something dangerous. Creating a mental map of the terrain, he compared it to the area he should be on the map. It… didn't match at all. It looked… carved. Like man-made tunnels rather than the naturally formed ones, even if he really didn't know enough about geology to guess how.
It was only a dozen feet or two before he found the tunnel. Smooth floor, unnaturally flat, paved the way deeper into the dungeon, even though this segment of the dungeon was supposed to be a twelve degree ramp. It wasn't tiled, and it was clearly meant to look like it was naturally formed, but no natural surface was this… flat.
This whole area followed that theme, of "natural" walls that were far too regular and shaped to be anything of the sort. There was still some kind of subtle aura suffusing the area, somewhat reminding Casimir of domain magic, a sense of presence, the mana held in place in readiness rather than the natural state of flow.
Any further musings were interrupted as the local monster population rushed his position all at once, a few even going around behind him in an attempt to cut off his retreat. There's the 'oddly intelligent' monsters that were reported. This would be dangerous… if the monsters involved were actually dangerous. He just flooded his network of augmenting curses with mana and carved a bloody swathe through the monsters.
It was strange, these monsters were weaker than the ones higher up in the mountain… After the last of the monsters were slain, there was an odd fluctuation in the stillness of the psudeo-domain, and the monster corpses all simultaneously dissolved into nothingness. Now that felt like active magic use… but if you could do that, why not attempt to interfere with his curses as he fought?
What in the world is going on?
----------------
Whatever force directed those monsters to fight in a coordinated matter, it gathered all of the monsters in the area to do so, as Casimir found the rest of the curious dungeon segment utterly bare of them.
That isn't to say that there wasn't anything to find. "...Why is there a treasure chest?" Casimir asked out loud. It was just… strange. It was even trapped… with an outright amateur wire that he could have clamped and cut when he was six years old. Inside was a basket hilt sword of reasonable quality that more or less matched the style of the one he was using… but it much more closely matched the one that kobold was using, back when he was still hurting for a weapon usable against massed enemies.
Does he still have that sword? Or did he sell it to that army where David lives? If he did still have it, he likely stashed it… in here? No, in here. He drew the sword from his bag of backup weapons, unsheathed it, and compared the two. If you ignored the enchantment he had put on the original sword… It was a perfect copy.
It was also the only thing in the treasure chest. No one would put just one sword in a chest! He put the swords away. Something seriously strange was going on.
After another few minutes of attempting to discern the direction of the mana flows past whatever was stifling them, Casimir eventually found an odd pedestal, a gigantic gemstone inlaid on the top of the elaborate structure. It felt… like a monster core. Not an undead one, but a more ordinary, if potent, monster core, the stink of overlapping mana scents thick in his senses.
The mana of this particular room was much thicker than anywhere else, swelling and trembling at his presence. Casimir touched the core, in an attempt to more precisely examine it, but it suddenly started flooding his system with mind mana, nauseatingly impure mind mina, and it cut through his compromised defenses as it attempted to shout, telepathic noise so discordant that Casimir reflexively lashed out, kicking the pedestal and breaking it in half. The noise intensified for an instant, causing him to collapse in pain, before fading away.
After recovering from the mental attack, Casimir picked the biggest piece of the broken pedestal, separating the giant monster core from its mooring and pocketing it now that it was inactive. "Whatever this is, it was the source of everything." Casimir said to himself, noticing that the mana in the air was no longer being strangled and was now beginning to flow more freely.
He kneeled down, examining the shattered pedestal. "Ah, there's some kind of enchantment array here." Casimir said to himself, noting the distinct wires of an unknown metal within the pedestal. "That I've ruined." If he had known… Bah. The metal's still kind of strange, so he spent some time looting it before turning back and making his way back up to the surface.
There was no way something like this was just a one-off… He'll have to leave it in the Guildmaster's hands. He'll be too busy to do much about this in the near future.
Maybe next year, if it's still a problem.