Our new quest was carefully picked by Harry. Instead of a combat-oriented quest he chose a dull escort mission with low payment. While I understand that he wants the girl to be bored and quit, I can tell that she has no plans of leaving.

Our task is escorting a merchant through a small forest. Low risk-low reward is the perfect description. There should be no monsters on our way and mostly we’ll be there just in case.

“Why are you just sitting there? It’s your turn to be on the lookout!” Harry was already at his limit. He was guarding for the entire day and now that it was Eridani’s turn she just decided to keep on sleeping.

“Don’t want to. You picked this one so it’s up to you to work. I am not getting paid for this so it’s your problem.” She immediately dismissed his demand.

“If you don’t remember, you are getting a share of reward so do work.” (G)

“I did my share of work and because of that you are still here and not in that lizard’s belly.” She waved at me and lied down to sleep.

“She is only a burden, why the hell are we even babysitting her?” (H)

“I’d be glad if we just leave her here but I doubt she’ll just disappear.” While there are a lot of interesting options, only one of them makes sense. We can only be patient and hope she just leaves us alone.

Nothing was happening on our way and soon the merchant will drive in the town. It will be the end of our quest but considering we have absolutely nothing else to do I offered our services for the way back. The merchant was interested in not wasting his time waiting for those who are willing to escort so he accepted. At least we will gain twice the money without having to walk or rent a wagon.

Because there was nothing else to do I decided to talk to Eridani and try squeezing some information from her.

“You said there were a lot of ruins but how did you find them? Where did you learn the words the ruins were called?” (G)

“If you search and know what and where to find then you will encounter much more than you ever thought you can find. I spent my entire childhood crawling through the ruins and only then I had enough understanding to see the picture.” (E)

There are many ruins on the other side of the ocean but why there are none here? Were the peoples of our continents that different?

When I finally had a question about it, I saw that Eridani was sleeping and did not bother her anymore. Instead I started looking around the road to find something to distract myself from the fantasies I was having.

While I was monitoring the surroundings, with the corner of my eye I saw two glowing eyes that watched me. Right when I turned my head there to see them the eyes disappeared and something shot into the darkness.

Just from a thought that something was watching me, I had goosebumps.