Steve did Hirrus the final favor of keeping most of his blood running down the front of him rather than fountaining all over Hirrus in his death throes. Made things potentially easier. With his disguise unmarked, Hirrus thought he might be able to talk his way through the next guards he saw, so long as he reached them before Steve’s corpse was found and an alarm was raised.

The hall beyond the waiting room was not what Hirrus expected. He had anticipated the guild’s defenses to be closing in around him, but instead, it was empty.

There were no guards waiting.

No blast of Arcana or wall of mercenaries.

The door wasn’t even locked.

It was a simple hallway, lined with marked doors. In the absence of any direction, Hirrus just walked down it, trying to look for any sort of direction that might tell him where Keynes might be.

With every step, Hirrus was more and more perplexed at how he was allowed to wander so freely for so long. He completed a full circuit around the floor without seeing another soul.

The marked doors fell into three categories.

Most were labeled very ambiguously, with only four-digit numbers, but no other identifiers. These doors were not locked, and when Hirrus checked behind them, he found them empty, but for scattered furniture - mostly chairs and tables - that didn’t not clearly explain the rooms’ intended purposes to Hirrus’s eyes.

A few of the doors were labeled unambiguously as storage. They were marked as “Broom Closet'' or “Extra Chairs” and when Hirrus checked, none of these labels were deceptive, leading to narrow spaces filled with cleaning supplies or spare seating.

There were a few rooms - few and far between - labeled as vaults. These, too, were numbered, but many also had smaller signs alongside them that identified the contents. Some were trade goods, like what was being negotiated over on the first floor up above them, marked as cloth and leather, or as bone and ore, or as ingots and gemstones. There were vaults marked as luxury goods as well, like fine furniture and paintings. One was marked as containing weapons and armor. And there were three or four that were marked as holding coins and coins alone. One of these was marked with a smaller handwritten sign that indicated that the money was “Keynes’ first million DO NOT TOUCH” despite the fact that “Keynes’s” was the correct way.

The vaults were locked and firmly sealed, and so Hirrus was unable to discern if the contents were accurately identified. Hirrus’s physical strength was insufficient to force the doors, but he could have blasted them with Arcana. Considering he had seen no resistance, cracking open a vault might have earned him some attention. But he wasn’t sure if he wanted that yet.

The lack of guards - and the emptiness of every room he found - was only making him more and more anxious. If this area held the best of the best of this guild, then Hirrus was not going to be picking them off and thinning their numbers. It was likely that - unlike Cerberus - Keynes would fight alongside his forces, rather than waiting to see them all dead before him before making his dramatic appearance.

Hirrus was going to battle them all at once.

After searching the halls for signs of life, Hirrus found a door that was unlabeled, which opened into another hallway.

What separated this new path from the hall he was already in was that he finally saw another person.

Battuta was standing outside one of the doors about twenty feet down the hall, leaning against the wall and angrily tugging at his beard. Even from here, Hirrus could hear him grumbling in frustration.

“Have you been waiting here this whole time?” Hirrus asked as he approached.

The man looked up with sudden surprise. It gave way immediately to confusion as he pushed away from the wall, looking around to ensure that they were alone.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Battuta hissed. “And lower your voice! They’re in a meeting and if I interrupt again they’ll skin all three of us alive! And where the fuck is Steve?”

“Where is Keynes?” Hirrus asked, though he lowered his voice as indicated.

“Where do you think?” Battuta snapped back at him, hooking a thumb at the nearest door. “This officer meeting has been going on for nearly an hour.”

“You can’t get in,” Hirrus said, as much an observation as a question. “Even though you could put all the blame for the interruption on Steve?”

“Come here,” Battuta hissed, pointing at the door.

Hirrus stepped up and realized he could hear through the door quite easily from this angle. He didn’t even need to close his eyes and concentrate. The words were garbled and difficult to make out, but it was very clear that the discussion was quite heated. One voice was yelling in an accusatory tone, periodically interrupted by another voice petulantly disputing what was being said.

“It’s been like this the whole time I’ve been here,” Battuta whispered. “If I walk in while they’re like this, I’m gonna be forcibly removed from the building before I can even blame Steve. I’ve been waiting for it to cool down, but every time it quiets down it heats right back up within seconds.”

“Hm,” Hirrus grunted.

As the man had described, the accusatory voice finished speaking. Hirrus couldn’t take one full breath before another voice immediately started yelling in obvious impatience and agitation.

“Do you mind if I take the lead on this, then?” Hirrus asked.

“Aren’t you an NPC?” Battuta asked before looking around. “And you didn’t tell me where Steve is. What’s going on here?”

“I’m sure it will be obvious shortly,” Hirrus said, stepping up to the door.

This room was not a vault, and so the door was not locked or sealed. Hirrus stepped up and pulled it open without issue.

The room contained one long table that ran almost its entire length, and on each side were several high-backed padded chairs. There were people occupying those chairs, and they were almost parodies of merchants. Every one of them was in fine multicolored cloth, bedecked with gems and jewelry. The large man at the far end of the room wore a suit made entirely of cloth-of-gold.

Hirrus could only assume the expense involved in the construction of such an outfit was likely greater than the monetary value of every small town he’d passed through from Yenon to Inoha and Inoha to Shemil.

In addition to the merchants, the room was lined with no fewer than sixteen guards, including two at the door who lowered their weapons to bar Hirrus’s entry. They wore the familiar bulbous black armor that marked them as foreign mercenaries, who would not yield to the authority of a Hari guard.

“What is this shit?” one of the merchants snapped. Hirrus recognized the voice of the petulant dissenter from whatever speech had been underway moments ago.

“Shut up, Mike,” several voices shouted him down in near-unison.

“Yes,” the man in cloth-of-gold said, leaning over the table and steepling his fingers. “Shut up, Mike. But the question still stands. Who are you, what are you doing, and why are you here?” He quirked an eyebrow. “In that order, if you don’t mind.”

“Are you Keynes?” Hirrus asked.

“Of course,” the large man said. With a gesture, the guards raised their weapons out of Hirrus’s path. “Come on in, boy. Don’t make me shout out into the hallway. Whatever bizarre glitch this is, there's no need to be rude.”

“What if he’s-” the whiney merchant began.

“Shut up, Mike,” Keynes said again.

Hirrus glanced over his shoulder briefly before entering, noting that Battuta was nowhere to be found. He wondered if the man was that afraid of Keynes and his officers, or if he’d pieced together who Hirrus was, and what was about to happen.

“You’ve got balls, I’ll give you that,” Keynes said as Hirrus entered the room. “My own people are afraid to interrupt me when I’m talking. You? You’re not even wearing my guild tag and you walk in here dressed like an NPC. No fear at all. Not even a hint. I respect that.” He gestured for Hirrus to speak. “Boldness should be rewarded. Hit me with your offer. But it better include whatever hack you’re using to pass for an NPC, because that’s very interesting.”

“What do you know about the Merciless One?” Hirrus asked.

“More than I need,” Keynes said with a dismissive gesture, “but less than I’d like.”

“Do you know what he’s after in Denstad?” Hirrus asked.

“Violence, revenge, whatever,” Keynes said, turning over his hand and making a show of examining his fingernails, “it doesn’t matter. It’s not bad for business, so I don’t care. But let me give you some advice. People who are looking to buy things are the ones asking questions, not answering them. If the speech you have prepared has a long question-and-answer section, skip it and get to the point.”

“Hm,” Hirrus grunted, “that’s interesting.”

“Yes, yes, I’m a font of knowledge and you bow at my feet, whatever,” Keynes snapped. “Why are you here? Just to learn from my sales technique?”

“No, not that,” Hirrus said. “You have no time for games. No desire for worthless chatter. You want to cut to the root of the matter quickly and efficiently.” He nodded. “I never thought I’d have something in common with someone like you, but here we are.”

“Thanks?” Keynes said, boredom visibly starting to outweigh his initial interest in Hirrus’s appearance. “So can we cut to the root, then? Sometime today?”

“The root of what I’m here for,” Hirrus said, drawing his weapons, “is, indeed, to cut.”