The line at Emon's gate moved slowly.
I waited behind a merchant cart piled with cloth bolts and a family of three who kept losing track of their youngest child and had to retrieve him from increasingly concerning locations around the gate post. By the time I reached the clerk I had watched the child get collected four times.
The clerk didn't look up from his ledger.
"Name?"
"Julius Zeppeli."
"Occupation?"
"Practicing doctor and martial artist."
He looked up at that. Just briefly. The expression of a man who had processed several hundred people through this gate today and had not until this moment been surprised by any of them.
"Huh." He looked back down. "Weird mix but ok." He made a note. "Business in Emon?"
"Work. And lodging."
"Anything to declare? Weapons, contraband, livestock?"
I glanced at my horse.
"One horse."
"Declared." He stamped something and handed me a small slip of paper without looking up again. "Welcome to Emon. Move along."
I took the slip. "Where would I find work? Odd jobs, contracts, that kind of thing."
He pointed down the main road without looking up. "Two streets down, left at the blacksmith, there's a pub called the Broken Compass. Board out front has postings. Half the contractors in the city drink there anyway so if nothing's on the board someone inside will know something."
"Thank you."
He had already moved on to the person behind me.
[The Golden Ratio]
The market district was two streets before the blacksmith, which made it convenient.
I tied my horse to a post outside a general goods stall and went through what I had left with the particular focus of someone who already knew the number was bad. It was bad. Enough for supplies or lodging, not both, and since I didn't have a job yet lodging was a tomorrow problem.
The stall keeper was a stout woman who watched me count coins with the patience of someone who had seen this exact calculation play out in front of her many times before and had no strong feelings about it either way.
Flour first. A small sack, enough for a week of flat bread if I was careful with it. Four bottles of water, stoppered clay, heavier than I wanted but reliable. A bundle of dried jerky wrapped in waxed cloth that smelled strongly of smoke and salt and would taste like very little but would keep me moving. And two pouches of medical herbs from the apothecary cart two stalls down, a woman who knew what she was selling and priced accordingly. I recognized about half the contents from my training back home. The other half I bought on faith and the assumption that a world with functional magic probably had functional herbalism to match.
I handed over the last of my coin.
The stall keeper handed me my supplies without saying anything else.
I packed everything into the saddlebag carefully, redistributed the weight, and checked the straps.
Broke, supplied, and operational. It was a familiar combination.
[The Golden Ratio]
The Broken Compass was not hard to find. The blacksmith's forge was loud enough to navigate by sound alone and the pub sat just around the corner from it, a squat building with a hand painted sign that had clearly survived at least one fire judging by the scorch marks along the bottom edge.
The job board out front was dense.
Most of it was mundane. Merchant escort work, missing livestock, a bounty on something called a Needlefang that I didn't recognize and wasn't sure I wanted to. I worked through the postings methodically, pulling each one out far enough to read it properly before pushing it back.
Near the bottom, slightly water damaged at the corner, was one that made me stop.
Investigators needed. Mine complex approximately four hours east of Emon off the Tal'Dorei road. Workers have not reported for three days. Owner requesting someone to enter, assess, and report back. Cause unknown. Fair coin on completion, additional bonus if workers recovered alive.
I read it twice.
A mine with workers who had stopped reporting. Three days was long enough that whatever was in there had either trapped them, killed them, or scared them badly enough that they hadn't come out on their own. None of those options were simple. All of them paid.
I pulled the posting off the board and folded it into my coat pocket.
My horse was tied to the post beside the door, watching me with that flat assessing look she'd had since I bought her outside Hampert. I checked the saddlebag. Steel balls, bandaging, the last of the salt and pepper, a knife I'd picked up at a market two days, flour, water, jerky, two herb pouches from awhile ago.
It would do.
I untied her and swung up into the saddle.
Four hours east, I really needed to invest in an instrument if I didn't want to get bored or I could do something more productive.
[The Golden Ratio]
Julius then spent the four hours of his journey exhausting himself practicing guidance with his steel balls, it ended with him hitting his face twice during the retraction.
He was thankful that he didn't throw it that hard.
[The Golden Ratio]
After finding the mine I did some investigating before I went in, all the equipment were gone so it was either someone stole them all or the miners still and them.
The second I took a step inside I didn't see anything strange, other than the fact that cobwebs were everywhere it was still a normal coal mine.
But after twenty minutes of walking I was about to turn around and leave, before I noticed something really strange.
'I've seen that rock before!'
[The Golden Ratio]
Julius always had a keen sense of sight, perhaps even better than his brother Gyro. This stemmed front he fact that he had a hobby of shooting plates and game with a rifle.
Click!
VMMM!!!
With a single motion Julius grabbed his steel ball and threw it at a rock, specifically an odd shaped rock that stood out not only with it's texture but also it's color.
As soon as the steel ball made contact instead of being crushed the rock was dented and blood came flying off it, the rock that Julius just threw his Steel Ball at was infact a mimic.
Contrary to popular belief mimics weren't just limited to the form of a treasure chest, givene enough time mimics could be anything.
"SCREEE!!!!!!!"
"Shit!"
Unfortunately for Julius he didn't enter any regular mine, but a mimic infested one. Only the gods know how so many mimics infested a mine.
But with Julius' vision, he could count more than twenty odd shaped creatures charging towards him, and with the Steel Ball he just threw returning to him he only had one thing to do left.
"Screw this!"
Run with what his mother gave him.
Julius turned around and started running the opposite way, behind him were the rapid sounds of the mimics chasing him.
The mine tunnel was not designed for running. The ceiling was low in places, the ground was uneven, and support beams appeared at irregular intervals that he had to duck under or risk taking one to the forehead. Behind him the mimics moved like a stampede and a tide, all clicking joints and wet scraping sounds against the stone floor.
He threw a steel ball backwards without turning around.
It wasn't a clean throw. He was moving when he released it which meant the math was already compromised, but at this range it didn't matter much. The ball caught the first mimic square in what passed for its face and ricocheted off the tunnel wall into a second one. Both dropped. The ball continued forward past him and skipped off the ground twice before embedding itself into a support beam.
Julius glanced back at it mid stride.
He'd moved too far from his release point before it could return. The calculation had fractured the moment his feet left the spot he'd thrown from, same as always.
He kept running with one steel ball left.
Twenty mimics. Now eighteen. One ball. The tunnel exit was still a distant grey smudge of light at the far end.
The math was not good.
He ran harder, boots hitting the uneven ground in a rhythm that started shifting without him fully deciding to shift it. His stride lengthened, his arms came up slightly, his weight redistributed forward in the way his father had drilled into him years ago not for running but for throwing. The form for the Golden Ratio wasn't a stationary thing, it was a full body alignment, every part of him pointing in the same direction at the same moment.
He'd never tried it while running before.
The screeching behind him was getting louder.
Julius exhaled through his teeth and stopped thinking about it. He raised his left hand, fingers extended toward the horde behind him, and reached for the thing Keyleth had shown him at the edge of a dying campfire two nights ago. The hum that wasn't the spin, the current that lived below conscious intention. He'd felt it twice and lost it both times the moment he noticed it.
He noticed it now and held on anyway.
Something clicked.
Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just a small internal shift like a lens rotating into focus, and for one suspended moment everything in the tunnel was perfectly clear. The positions of the eighteen mimics, their speeds, the angles of the walls, the height of the ceiling, the distance to the exit, the exact trajectory a steel ball would need to travel to touch as many of them as possible before its energy gave out.
He glowed gold. Faint at first then sudden, the Golden Ratio and Guidance bleeding out through his skin like light through cracked stone.
"Ora!"
The steel ball left his hand.
It didn't travel in a straight line. It spiraled, corkscrewing down the tunnel in a logarithmic curve that seemed to ignore several reasonable expectations about how solid objects moved through space. It caught the first mimic on the left wall side, redirected off the stone at an angle that shouldn't have been possible, tore through two more clustered in the center, bounced off the ceiling, came back down at a steeper angle and plowed through a group of four that had been bunched together in the narrow section of the tunnel, then continued, slower now but still spinning, still carrying the ratio in its rotation, picking off stragglers with the last of its momentum before it finally rang against the far wall and dropped.
Julius didn't stop running.
He counted as he went.
Fourteen down, Six remaining. The golden light faded from his skin as quickly as it had come, leaving him feeling hollowed out and slightly dizzy, like he'd stood up too fast.
The exit was close now.
Six mimics were still very much behind him.
He burst out of the mine entrance into open afternoon air, nearly tripped over a pickaxe someone had left in the dirt, caught himself, and kept going until he reached his horse who looked at the screaming creatures emerging from the mine with the expression of an animal that had made her peace with a strange life.
Julius grabbed the saddle and pulled himself up, the 6 mimics who had exited the mines saw him get on the horse and leapt on him expecting Julius to try and ride away.
But instead they were met with multiple brutal stabs and slashes done in quick succession, Julius was never the type of man to fight without a weapon but being given one increased his lethality.
And so with that small hunting knife he had in his horse's saddle he was able to kill all the remaining mimics.
"Nyo-ho!"