"A'ight, I'm off," Singer said, walking off to one direction.

Frill offered everyone a parting glance before walking off to another.

"Wait, are you guys just going to leave me here?" Jack pleaded.

"I believe everyone was under an impression of transience in our meeting," Neruz replied, "As it so happens, I do not believe it beneficial to you to deepen any relationship with me. Talk to the wagon guard. He will bring you to Castle Samarin, where, perhaps, you may meet more of your kind."

Jack bit his lip. "Damn, well, I guess it'd be pretty unfair of me to keep asking favors, huh?"

"True. I'm glad you understand."

With that, Neruz disappeared into an alley. Jack approached the nearby guard dressed in beige fatigues and asked him about the castle.

"Huh? The Defense Castle? Sorrie, we won' be passin' through there. We'n be passin' through a guard post that'd be close, though."

"Fair enough."

Again, he braved the creaky suspension system of the wagon—on the other hand, the presence of a suspension system at all was a godsend. He looked out through the back of the wagon and watched the cracks in the broken asphalt road get left behind. It was a better sight than the blood and bandages that hadn't yet been cleaned from the walls of the wagon. The incense started to wear off—guess that was more for the convenience of the wounded—and the iron in the air mixed with the horseshit in the dungpouch dangling by the asses' asses. How the driver beared with it was anyone's guess.

He waited, slumped down by the wagon's side. The guard sat by the edge, his legs dangling above the asphalt. There were less and less gas lamps lighting the way. Leaves rustled, and the now-distant lamps produced swaying silhouettes of overgrowth that crawled up the buildings.

The guard clenched his teeth, scanning the surroundings. Jack heard a click from his gun. He overheard the guard and the driver talk through a speaking horn connected to a pipe that snaked its way to the front of the wagon.

"I'm tellin' ya, we shouldn've passed through here!"

"What choice've I got? Carmelite Bridge collapsed the other day. We don' really have a choice, do we?"

The wagon guard reached for a dangling length of cord and pulled himself into the wagon. "Best keep away from the tailgate, stranger," he told Jack.

"Why? What's going on?"

"Red Faction's got the hold 'round these parts."

"Red Faction?"

"Top supplier for the Red Market. If ya wanted somethin' that can only be get by killin', that's where you go."

The wagon stopped.

"Oi, Darran, why the stop? Darran?"

No reply.

"Stranger, slowly—get all the way back behind me," the guard said. Jack crawled on all fours, avoiding the bandages, while the guard crouched and set his gun level towards the back of the wagon, ready to fire. Jack looked on. The night was still. Not even crickets chirped. Not even a breeze rustled the trees.

At once, the viewports all snapped open, and a hail of bolts impaled the guard from every direction. Two goons climbed inside and speared him to make sure. "Get his gun! Get his gun!" one of them hushed. Another goon came in with a lamp, and that's when they saw Jack.

"Oi! We've got a live one here!"

He didn't know what to do. He couldn't even breathe nor whimper. They threw him outside, knocking the air out of his lungs.

"You think he's worth anything?"

"Looks thin, but healthy enough. Might be enough for a month's lease."

"That's a kindly good bonus, don' you think? We got horses, Medivac, a gun, and free rent!"

Maybe, just maybe, he could run. The three of them were carrying equipment, so he might be able to outrun them. "Boss!" another one appeared. Behind him, there were even more. Right—there were more than just three bolts that hit that poor guard. There were too many of them. Would they just let him run away? It'd be easy for them to run him down if he tried to escape.

They leashed him with a chain tied to the wagon. They drove the wagon through the streets at jogging speed. The texture changed from hard asphalt to something more coarse. His shoes sank through something wet and messed with his gait.

He didn't last more than 20 minutes before he stumbled, getting dragged through mud-and-gravel streets. His captors wouldn't stop and wait for him to get up.

"Alright, that's enough!" one of the goons said, "The horses are tired!"

They laughed. For now, he got his reprieve, lying down, stretching out, and panting on the ground. Escape, escape, escape—even if he thought of running away, he couldn't run anymore. Not a single muscle wanted to move. Maybe that's why they wore him out. His body ached with scratches and sanded flesh. It didn't look like there was a way out for him, not like this, or even, not anymore.

Footsteps approached, and, in the dark, a blurred figure of a man knelt over him.

"Perchance, do you know yourself to be a man of cursed luck?" the man asked.

Jack passed out. Neruz quietly unchained him while the bandits wore themselves out on alcohol. He wouldn't be able to carry Jack far enough before they'd become alerted to Jack's disappearance. He had to take care of them, and he had to do it now.

The goons laughed around their kerosene lamp, unafraid of the night. Some kept on idle lookout. A volley of smoking knives stuck onto the trees and soil around them. One of them landed by the foot of a lookout. He jumped and, once calm, inspected the small, smoking thing. It, along with its sister knives, exploded in a flash, blinding the lookout and all his other friends. An orchestra of whistles rocketed around the battlefield, drowning out their voices. Neruz threw needle knives with unerring precision, and every goon that they cut experienced unnerving pain that made them drop and writhe, crumpling down, screaming in anguish, and curling into a shrimp. One of the disoriented bandits scrambled for the gun they had looted. A blur of grey flashed by, and he fired at it, hitting one of his accomplices. The fireball that spewed from the barrel served to blind him even more in the night, and a knife hit him in the neck, and he dropped down, paralyzed by searing pain.

Neruz made his retreat into the winding alleys, carrying Jack on his shoulder.

Morning came. Jack sipped coffee, the gentle glow of a window behind him. Stripped to his boxers, moringa-boiled bandages mummified him from foot to shoulder. As he ruminated on the events of yesterday, Neruz came back with a steaming pot of moringa infusion. "Allow it to cool by a slight, and off your bandages and splash this amongst your wounds," he said. Jack nodded and sipped.

He was in a workshop of sorts. Hand tools were neatly arranged by benches and tables. There was this peculiar table, butted against a wall, surrounded by a halo of tilted mirrors, one of them reflecting light from the morning window to light up the tabletop. Many books and bookshelves surrounded it in arm's reach. Small, black bottles and reed-esque pens lined one of the shelves.

"Perchance, are you interested more in my side venture than the fact of your being bloodied and bruised?" Neruz asked.

"I think I'm more confused," Jack replied, "I— You— Who are you?"

"Why, don't tell me you've forgotten yesterday?"

"No, yeah, I know— I mean— You're not just some Indiana Jones, are you?"

"I apologize, but whoever may that person be of renown in your era is now a lost tale in this one."

Jack ran out of coffee. Neruz offered more, and Jack nodded. Neruz poured him some and set the pot away.

"Please, steady your mind before you make questions. Would you care try yourself upon my writing bench?"

Jack shrugged. "Okay. I guess."

"You guess? Strange way to say yes."

Jack stood up like a creaking, old, derelict machine. Neruz offered to help.

"It's fine. If I move slow enough, I won't squeak."

Neruz pulled the chair out for him, and he sat down in the middle of the glowing halo of mirrors. From there, he spotted some books lying about the desk, with titles like "How Come the Mouse Squeaks" and "A Castle Beneath the Ground". He took that second one in hand and cracked it open.

"Nothing and no one towers over the other, under the ground. Only deeper do secrets lie; in silence their seekers die," he read aloud. He closed the cover and saw the author.

"You wrote this?" he asked. Neruz showed him a warm smile.

"How do you find it?"

"Feels like one of those old-timey novels. I'm not sure how the publishing industry works nowadays, but for me, I think I'd invest a few more minutes into it after reading that first line."

Neruz shed a tear.

"A man of culture," he declared.

"What?"

He put his hand over his own heart.

"Will you be my friend?

"I mean, I— wait, didn't you say it wasn't good for us to know each other or something?"

"Ah, that was for the fact that I resided within the Red Faction's domain."

Jack turned pale. He hadn't truly escaped the clutches of human trafficking just yet.

"Ah, that reminds me."

Neruz rolled him up in a carpet and hauled him into a dusty l'il gun shop around the corner. Any initial complaints on Jack's part were simply ignored. Onlookers in this area simply thought that Neruz was hauling a corpse for disposal.

He unrolled the aching body of a man who has never killed a roach in his life. Jack groaned as he pushed himself up off the floor. He got on his feet, and he looked up to see an old man and his granddaughter on the other side of a counter, with a backdrop of a metal rack filled with weaponized plumbing parts.

"Why, nice of you to bring me a new customer," the old man greeted. His hair was a mix of silver and black, and though his skin drooped, his muscles absolutely did not.

"The defenseless must be defended, should they not?" Neruz replied, "I believe a quiet beginner's pistol is best. Please charge it to my account."

Jack limped over to Neruz's side. "Dear god—why? Where—who's that?"

"This is Messiah, and this is his store."

Messiah produced what could be better-described as a "pistol-looking thing", placing it on the counter. His granddaughter dilligently started tapping away at the abacus. Jack waddled over to inspect the weapon, just as Messiah placed a few other objects beside it.

"Are these… crossbow bolts?"

"Crossbow? Why, haven't you seen one of these?"

The image of that guard getting impaled from every direction flashed in Jack's mind.

"I can't say I haven't," he replied.

"Well, in whatever case, this is simple."

The old man screwed on a hotdog-sized steel cartridge onto the rear before sliding a short bolt over a thin pipe that acted as the barrel. He aimed it at a chewed-up target down the counter—the opposite way from his granddaughter of course—and squeezed the trigger. After a hard pop, almost as loud as a real gun in these confines, the bolt dug into the target.

"Course, one shot's all you can manage," he explained, "I've a two-shotter here, but for the freshest men such as yourself--"

"On the contrary, I believe we should be taking the two-shot variant," Neruz said.

"Oh?" the old man gave him the look.

"It is how it is."

Back in Neruz's place, he unraveled the carpet once more and out came tumbling Jack.

"Why?" he asked, not bothering to ask about the carpet, "Why the gun?"

"That's no gun, friend. It is a mere airbolter."

"But still."

Neruz took care to assemble a new wooden case for Jack's new weapon. It would be like a scabbard, allowing him to pull out the airbolter in an emergency.

"Not even the soldiers of Parasol enter this territory. Not even in this workshop are you safe."

"Well—why are you even staying here?"

Jack's frustration finally reached Neruz's ears.

"The Red Faction is an inconvenience to Samarin's peace. The conditions of my work entail that I, in turn, be an inconvenience to the Red Faction."

It was at that that Jack understood Neruz's previous reluctance to help him. He settled for resting for a while, and at least having dinner with the closest thing he had to a friend in this timeline. They had some kind of pumpkin soup mixed with bits of meat and corn. Jack's pants, delivery jacket, and undershirt had been torn up, and so Neruz spared him a few articles, though what clothes Neruz could spare were either too hot for the weather or too thin to wear without embarrassment—between the two, Jack ended up getting the cotton articles. The brown pants felt much coarser than denim, though otherwise felt just as robust, which Neruz explained was because of the small amount of recycled abaca fibers added to the weave. The reddish-brown shirt was what it was—a round-collar shirt with little deviation from the style of the Old World.

From one writer to another, he also gave him a bamboo dip pen, a bottle of ink, and a few scrap pages.

"Are you not a writer as well?"

"Huh—well, yeah, I guess I am."

"A strange way of saying yes…"

The pen intrigued him just as much as the ink and the paper. The tip of the bamboo reed had been fashioned into its own nib, with a slit running down the middle and a bit of wire twisted around above it to serve as a reservoir. The bottle of ink read "Neruz #2", and the paper was rough, thick, and upon closer inspection, there were long, discolored strands of fiber running across it, forming a dirty mesh of different colors in white, yellow, and brown. The pen laid down thick, black lines that blotted the page, and against his expectations for dip pens, he could write an entire sentence with the pen before having to dip it again.

Neruz finished assembling the wooden case for Jack's pistol. He called for him to see how it fits.

"Huh, guess you're a craftsman, too."

"Do spare the praise. A box is a box."

Jack eyed the knife by his side.

"Reminds me," he asked, "Why don't you have a gun?"

Neruz turned around. His eyes glared with cracks like fractured jewels.

"Upon mine honor, I will have nothing to do with the instruments that took my family."