"I knew I shouldn't have let him become an adventurer!" Slamming her fists against Charlotte's chest, Freya was screaming her heart out as tears kept flowing down her cheeks. "Like his stupid, no-good father. What do you people even get out of this stupid-stupid adventuring business!? NOTHING!"
"Aunty…" Trying to get closer to Freya, Audrey took one step forward and was quickly met with a haunting gaze.
Pulling her hands away from Charlotte, Freya tried to hold herself back from hurling more profanities at her stepdaughter. She knew that she would regret it later, especially after she'd just insulted her father in front of everyone.
"Just…stay away from me." Even so, some poison still escaped her mouth. "You're as much help to your stepbrother as your father was."
Shaking her head, Freya looked away from them all. Already, the regret was setting in for having said something so cruel, and to look into Audrey's eyes while her expression contorted with sadness and hurt was far from something she could handle at the moment.
"We need to find people from the guild to do something, to rescue him…" Glancing over at the stacks of adventurers sitting at the tables, she folded her hands and took a step forward. "Help me get him back, and you can eat, drink, and shit here for as long as you live!"
Slamming her hand on Zephyr's table, she looked right past him to the dwarf, the elves and everyone else. Drinking some more from his mug, the archfiend followed her gaze and was met with the sight of shrinking cowards on the chairs.
"Please! I'll do anything!" Freya begged, and a few stood up from their tables.
At first, she gasped, smiling, but as she realized that they were simply walking out of the inn, that smile quickly died. After the first crop of people had left, the others felt less guilty about leaving, and so they did. The last of them were the dwarf and the elves, but even the bearded man had no intentions of heading out to the woods at night.
"It's mating season, Freya…" Shaking his head with an awkward expression plastered on his face, the dwarf tried not to look into her eyes. "And it's dark outside. Who knows how much darker it is in their caves, and the number of them…a hundred, at the least. Not even the whole guild combined can take them out like this."
Upon hearing the dwarf's rationale, Freya turned yet again to her sister.
"And you lot thought that you could do it by yourselves!!"
"I'm sorry, Miss Sombersoul, but we thought that we could at least map the cave a little and escape." Speaking up for the other two had already been silenced, Roxanne stepped forward with her hands anxiously clenched by her heart.
"Yeah? And whose great idea was it?!" Freya yelled right back at her.
Flinching at her voice, Roxanne hung her head low and took the blame upon herself.
"It was my idea…"
"What?" Audrey's eyes widened in shock, but as her eyes fell on the healer's back with one of her hands gesturing to her to remain quiet, the fox girl reluctantly allowed Roxanne to take the blame for now.
"Of course it was your idea," wearing a grimace on her otherwise charming face, she dejected her gaze and closed her teary eyes. "A man nearly destroyed my life and my ambition, and now a girl is going to destroy what's left."
Only a few sounds of her cries had escaped her mouth when finally Zephyr tapped his fingers on the table to draw the girls' attention. Tapping and tapping until the hero's party members were looking, he stopped and waited for the mother to slowly turn to him as well.
Setting his mug of beer down, he gestured for the dwarf and the elves to leave. At first, they just stared at him blankly, but then they had no choice as Zephyr pervaded their minds and made them rush out to leave. Confused by the sudden bolt, everyone looked at them for a moment before returning their gaze to the merchant.
"You want to save your son from a goblin cave, right?"
"Did you even hear what we've all been hounding about all this time? Of course I want to save him!" Wielding a mix of anger and desperation as her contour, Freya joined her hands and slammed them on the table. But she was far from begging the man, as in her eyes, he was nothing more than a merchant. "Unless you can help, please just stay quiet while I'm trying to think what to do next!"
Leaning back in his chair, the merchant boy rocked back and forth with his eyes blankly staring at Freya's face. Feeling his gaze boring in on her, she snapped out of her desperation for a moment and stared back, feeling strange.
"You said you will do anything to save him, is that right?" Zephyr asked, and in that moment, Freya's heart dropped.
Looking down at herself, she was reminded of who she was. The eye candy of the story, and as such, she expected the worst of demands.
"About that store that I told you I wanna open," however, betraying her presumption, the merchant asked for something else entirely. "I will need someone experienced to work the register."
Lifting her head with furrowed brows, she blinked at the man, not knowing what to make of his demand.
"How does that sound? I help these girls behind you save your son, and in return, you work for me as a receptionist when my shop's ready to do some business."
"How…will you?"
"Leave that to us, or would you rather go out at this hour and beg the people at the guild to help save your son?" The sound of Aura's heels cut sharply through the now silent hall, no music, no chatter of adventurers, just the tension from the girls ringing heavy in the ears. "So? What will it be? Will you work for my master, or do you wanna wait until who knows what happens to your son? Just know that the goblins have a tendency to be especially cruel to the men."
While Freya struggled with her choices, Zephyr noticed Aura brushing the same area on her hand where the dwarf had touched. Replacing her skin in that place was a bandage, wet with her blood and roughly patched with a piece of her own skirt.
'What did you do?'
'I killed one of the horses too, I'm sorry.'
'We will talk about this later.'
"Fine! Just save him if you can, I'll still go looking at the guild in case you're no help!" Giving her answer, Freya wasted not even a second before rushing towards the door. Leaving her son's party to guide the archfiend to the hero.
"Cecilia, go bring our bag. We're gonna need it," ordering his wife to fetch their bag, Zephyr stood up and approached the group of anxious women. Not as intimidating in the merchant boy form, he looked up into Charlotte's eyes. "Don't worry, he's not gonna die today."
Those words that he had spoken were no mere consolation; they were a pact, for the hero's blood won't be spilt by no goblin, at least not before Zephyr had tested his own blade against the hero by himself.