Dungeon Runner

Stepping Up, Chapter 52

"Absolutely not!" Learbel exclaimed. He was one of the survivors of Sto's 'rampage' which Tibs knew mostly by sight. "I'm not putting my team at risk for a bunch of merchants."

Tibs had gathered as many of the team leaders as he could into an unused building by the bazaar grounds. It was used to store the caravan's goods when they were here, and unused the rest of the time, as far as Tibs could tell.

The two dozen or so Runners were mostly from before Sto reopened, with only three from after, and Tibs counted eight nobles, which confused him since he hadn't invited any of them. Mez's noble friend was among them, so Tibs figured the archer had told her and she'd told the others and they had come to... He didn't know why they were here.

"I'm with Lear," Johanson said, sitting on an empty crate. She was an older leader, not from the original group, but she'd been a Runner longer than almost anyone else here other than Tibs. "Getting in the middle of what's going on is a bad idea. I get that you want to help, Tibs. I don't get why you think the rest of us should make an enemy of the people who are going to run the place."

"The guild runs the town," Tibs said, and she smirked.

Fine, so they didn't actually run anything, other than the guards, and barely that right now. They had still set up the town and owned the land, which Darran said meant something, not that Tibs understood it.

"Aren't our lives hard enough already?" a girl asked softly. She was one from after Sto had reopened. Tibs didn't know her either. The times he'd seen her, she kept to the walls, looking like she was afraid anyone would pay attention to her. "We might be dead on the next run, shouldn't we just focus on surviving that?"

She blushed as the others looked at her, and Tibs wondered how she became a team leader.

Instead of someone coming to her aid, she got Rorgar, who snorted. "Why don't you go back to your room and let the adults handle this?"

She glared at the fighter and momentarily looked older. Tibs realized that under the shy woman was a fierce core. Rorgar glared down the people snickering, while the nobles simply watched. Tibs couldn't read their intentions and that worried him more than the derision directed at either the shy woman or Rorgar.

The fighter nodded to Tibs. "I'm in. Been around enough rackets like this to know merchants' trouble always ends up affecting the small people like us. We need them to buy the stuff the dungeon gives us. Unless you think the guild's going to pay us favorably for anything they aren't already forcing us to hand over for a pittance?"

That was one team, hopefully not the la—

"Me and my team are in."

Tibs stared at Don as the crowd moved away from him. He had invited him, because not doing that would have been a dungeon's worth of trouble, but he hadn't expected the sorcerer to show up.

"What? You think you're the only one here who wants this place to survive and not become some criminal's playground?" he looked around. "He isn't the only one who's been trying to fix this quietly, just the one making sure everyone knows he's doing it."

Tibs kept his disbelief to himself, unlike some of the others. So he had two teams, maybe. Don would try to take over, make this about him, and Tibs would have to figure out how much of that trouble his help was worth.

"I," one of the older Runner said, looking the room over, "could be convinced to help." She was on the most recent recruits, and a rogue, since she ran the dungeon, but Tibs had trouble not thinking of her simply as a thief.

"I don't have coins to pay you," Tibs said and went back to looking at the others, hoping someone else would be willing to help.

"That's not what I hear," she replied, forcing Tibs to come back to her. "Word is, you're tight with the people in charge of this place, well, those in charge for now. Why don't you convince them my—our—help's worth silver, if not gold."