Ch. 28 – Glass Cannon Archeress

“Hey, Cara! I’m going to borrow Akira if that is okay!?” Zoe yells out, but it is drowned out by the yelling between Cara and her father. Akira has just been standing around in the other room looking awkward ever since the two strong-willed individuals started to but heads with each other.

Zoe had arrived this morning after squeezing out all their benefits from her uncle. He was pretty hesitant to part with any of the funds from our robbing of the guild’s higher echelons. By the devourer, he wanted to try and charge processing and handling fees, monitoring, and small cuts for his people to be the face that took and collected the debts. Zoe had fought adamantly against them all but still had to concede that not needing to actually do the collecting was going to be worthwhile. Also, her uncle took on those accounts where people promised to get the money later, so their group was getting all of their funds upfront while her uncle was saddled with a bunch of ‘I Owe You’s that he would need to collect over time.

In the end, Zoe came back with several pouches containing 700 silver Dens each, and one for Cara where she had used some of their silk proceeds and the rewards from the previous Guar requisitions that had that one being a bit more. It would have been close to 3,000 silver Dens in total if not for all the things her uncle kept trying to pile on. However, it was Zoe who had truly made out like a bandit, using some of her own personal funds through one of her uncle’s employees that he had not known about, netting her another 400 silver Dens.

Zoe could see it now, her own small traders' guild or even starting up an auction house. Safe storage of all goods in her [Merchant’s Storehouse] would be an amazing selling feature for security and should bring more people with higher priced items.

Without getting a response from Cara who was still heatedly yelling at her father to just suck it up and accept the pouch of Dens to rebuild their home and him refusing outright had turned nasty and Zoe with an almost feral grin marched over to Akira and grabbed his bracer to start marching off with him in tow.

Unfortunately, after a single step she was almost pulled back off her feet as Akira had not budged at all and it was only by providing some doe eyes to Akira that he finally got up from leaning against a wall and followed Zoe outside to the burned down remnants of the old forge.

Turning quickly Zoe was smiling as though she had another business opportunity in front of her while she used her [Merchant’s Storehouse] to summon something into her hands behind her.

“I’m not going to like whatever this is, aren’t I?” Akira said skeptically while eyeing what Zoe had just summoned that was poorly hidden behind her. With a flourish, Zoe pulled out from behind her a tiny little bow, often used by amateur hunters, and presented it to Akira while opening her storage space and having a singular arrow fall out directly toward the ground that she managed to snatch out of the air before it impaled the floor. While rocking back and forth from her heels to her toes, she presented the pair of items to Akira and was rewarded with a face of utter contempt and disgust at what she was trying to offer him.

“Well, I was thinking that with how great you are at everything, being able to show me how to shoot a bow should be easy for you!” Zoe said with as much enthusiasm as she could muster. With a queer look from Akira, he simply shook his head.

“I don’t know why you keep on this, it will be useless in the future.”

“So, maybe the real reason is that you cannot,” she replied, oozing as much sarcasm as possible.

“I see what you are trying to do and it won’t work.”

“Oh, come on, it is just a bow and arrow. Please!”

With a small huff, Akira took the bow and singular arrow that looked like toys he quickly notched the arrow and without breaking eye contact with Zoe pulled the arrow back a tiny amount and let it loose where a slight twang could be heard as the arrow embedded itself into a ‘Y’ shaped crack in some of the foundations a little away.

With a small jump and clap from Zoe, she waved her hand in a grand flourish, and a crate big enough to stash a few bodies inside, fell out in front of her, filled to the brim with longer and properly fletched arrows. This action caused the already grim expression on Akira’s face to darken further.

“No.”

“Please.”

“No.”

“Come on.”

“No.”

“I’ll tell Cara that you were being mean to me.”

“Still no.”

Zoe balled her tiny fists and then let out a small sniffle while looking down defeatedly.

“Still no.”

“FINE! I just wanted to try some things. I know you don’t like it, but I have been doing some testing and I thought I figured out a way around the problems you mentioned.”

“Fine, I’ll bite, do pray tell.”

“Well, when we were rescuing Cara’s dad, I had to move a lot of earth from the cave-in and amongst all the loose dirt, a lot of insects were left out in the open. Also, I just stored an arrow and brought it back, so I understand that others could do the same.” Zoe was starting to pick up her speed as she did her best to convince an unamused Akira.

“BUT! You don’t realize how rare a storage bloodline ability or artifact here is, that would be impossible for a lot of people to have access to, only nobles might have a retainer capable or an artifact that they acquired to do that. Your standard security, guards, or bandits will not have that kind of ability.”

“It would still be a crutch that…”

“I did not get to my testing! I thought about the issue and tried storing an insect inside a bottle with a stopper in it and I was unable to store it in my [Merchant’s Storehouse],” she said excitedly as she was getting to the point.

“I accidentally broke the bottle and realizing how sharp the pieces were, I thought about what if the arrowhead was made of a very sharp glass bottle with an insect inside it? If you mixed some of those inside a volley, wouldn’t that be dangerous and go around the ability to just store the arrows?”

Akira had a contemplative look to him, trying to think through some things.

“It could work at low experiences. There would have been times in my youth where I could have died from such a trick if done correctly. You’d need a very robust critter. If the arrow goes too fast, it would die within the arrowhead, rendering your trick back to the starting square.”

“Okay, so nothing squishy! So can you shoot some arrows!?” Zoe said while clapping happily. Akira gives the small hunter’s bow a couple of test pulls before resigning.

“Sure, but we should get a larger bow, this is meant for hunting small game that you manage to sneak up on.” Without missing a beat, Zoe waves her hand in an even grandeur flourish having a full-sized longbow cast of metal appear. The total height of the bow was actually taller than Zoe's.

“I loaned this one from one of my uncle’s contacts, supposed to be a military longbow, made of metal, very pricey, I had given you the small one thinking you might snap it in two to try and get rid of me.”

“Good idea, the thought did cross my mind. We’ll need more room to do this than this future battleground.” Akira motioned to the father-daughter pair that were still in the apothecary kitchen yelling at each other while occasionally pointing at the burned-down husk of their former home.

“Would the lake be alright?”

“Sure,” Akira responded while taking the giant heavy box of munitions and throwing it onto a shoulder before starting to walk away.

“Hurry now, the faster we start the sooner I can be done with this. Also, just the one box, yes?” Zoe’s steps faltered at the question.

“Wait, I could have conned you into potentially doing multiple?”

“I guess we’ll never know now,” was the reply she got with a small chuckle.

“Well damn. You think we could maybe take a detour by…”

“No, one box for training,” was the reply that Akira got, not seeing the grin on Zoe’s face from behind at things working out in her favor.

The pair left the bickering father-daughter duo to their argument and much to Akira’s dismay. Zoe did not want to be taught how to shoot a bow. Just when she had confirmed that Akira’s accuracy from the dock to various trees on the shoreline was impeccable, did she start her ‘Operation Borrowed Arrow’. Just as Akira would loose an arrow at a target, she’d snag that arrow out of the air and have it put into her [Merchant’s Storehouse]. Resummoning the arrow would have it continue along its original path.

With some training and memorization, Zoe would be able to unleash several hundred arrows with extreme precision. The only issue, it required her to gauge what grouping of arrows she was trying to summon and the direction was very particular to what direction her ‘soul’ was facing. There were several accidental summonses of an incorrect arrow to try and hit a target that Akira had already aimed for. There was a fair bit of deviation with the arrows that Zoe summoned, however with some coaching from Akira, she actually adopted an archer’s stance which helped her stabilize and predict where the arrows could go to a larger degree.

Akira’s reward for helping her improve her accuracy with medium and long-range arcing shots, was her summoning the only two other crates of arrows that she managed to acquire before beginning this exercise in frustration for Akira.

With Operation Borrowed Arrow a resounding success so far, Zoe’s future plans for her potentially being renowned as the ‘Glass Archeress’ and leader of her future auction house, a person feared by bandits, capable of burying them under thousands of arrows in the blink of an eye was slowly coming to fruition.