Chương 209: (204) 3.69. Not So Crafty After All

As it turned out, it took more than just a bold declaration and rallying the troops to prepare for wiping the Red Dawn from the face of Edregon. After Golrim admitted to having formed and controlled the band of marauders from afar via his soul-bond with Curash, there were a number of things that had to be taken care of. Such as marching Golrim straight over to Spur's new residence and waking up the sleeping colonel to fill him in on everything Vin had just learned.

Luckily, despite technically being the overall leader of town, even Spur had deigned to follow the same rules as everyone else rather than grab his own place. Which meant all it took was knocking on a single door for Vin to find himself before an audience of Spur, Myers, and Phil, each of them rubbing sleep out of their eyes. It seemed the fourth bedroom had been converted into some sort of in-home workshop for Myers' experimental contraptions, so it was just the three of them.

Part of him was mildly surprised to find a lack of any sort of guard outside their door knowing how cautious Spur was, before he remembered that Phil was undoubtedly the most deadly warrior in the entire camp after Alka. At Vin's direction, Golrim finally came clean and repeated everything he'd told Vin, not leaving out a single detail. To Vin's surprise, the trio's reaction ended up being… Different, from what he'd expected.

"Damn it!" Spur hissed, slamming a fist down on their table as Golrim came clean about his relation with the Red Dawn.

"Phil, you had Golrim was secretly running the whole show as your bet, right? Come on, want to make it double or nothing?"

"No," Phil stated, holding out a hand expectantly. With a sigh, Spur got up and headed into the other room for a moment, before returning and handing the Challenger a large bottle of wine.

"Come on, I'm running out of this stuff way faster than I expected!" Spur whined, looking as if he was in physical pain as he handed over the bottle.

"I swear, it's like they keep vanishing!"

"I'm sorry, what?" Vin asked, looking between the three of them. Myers had rolled her eyes at the childish display between her housemates, but not even she had looked all that surprised at Golrim's admittance.

"Did you guys know about this somehow?"

"Not for sure, but we largely suspected he was involved somehow," Myers admitted, frowning at Spur as he crossed his arms and huffed at being on the losing end of their bet.

"Spur was banking on Kym being the actual mastermind all this time, which is one of the reasons we still have a guard posted on him twenty-four-seven."

"What did I do to make you believe I had a connection with the Red Dawn?" Golrim asked, looking more curious than anything at being found out.

"You didn't warn Vin or any of us about them," Phil said bluntly, staring at him like it was obvious.

"When Vin came back and first told us about the Red Dawn, we figured the only reason why you'd withhold that information was because you had plans for them. And a group of bloodthirsty marauders is far too volatile to plan around unless you were controlling them somehow. The only question was who was truly pulling the strings."

"I thought you were too obvious," Spur muttered, his frown deepening.

"Come on, you dress like a villain and have a scar down half your face! You're missing an eye, for crying out loud! It makes so much more sense for Kym to be the real mastermind pulling all the strings from behind the scenes!"

"When the Red Dawn didn't show their faces at all during the operation to recover the members of your fragment who wanted to join our town, that was when we felt fairly certain our hypothesis was correct," Myers continued, ignoring Spur's outburst.

"Someone had to have told them we were coming ahead of time, or our force would have at least run into a few of their members."

"I didn't want to risk any more members of your group dying," Golrim admitted, looking impressed by Myers' deduction skills.

"So you guys all but knew either Golrim or Kym was working with a large group of bloodthirsty marauders… And you let them stay here in town anyway?" Vin asked, looking between the three of them like they were crazy.

"Golrim's been helping run the place!"

"And he's done a phenomenal job of it," Myers nodded, earning a respectful bow from Golrim.

"Vin, you don't understand all the headache and work required to run even a camp this size, let alone an actual town. The sheer amount of logistics behind obtaining supplies, getting things where they need to go, creating and shifting work schedules, monitoring morale… While a few of us could work together to accomplish all that, Golrim is quite literally built for this. His Logistician class has been a godsend.

Just because we suspected him of having some connections that he thought were a secret, that didn't mean we couldn't make use of him and his skills."

"I couldn't have said it better myself," Golrim nodded, his smile only growing wider.

"The key to good leadership is managing to make optimal use of everyone, friends and foes alike. Granted, as I said previously, I am a friend to your people, which is why I've been so forthcoming with Vin." The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

"Oh we know," Phil snorted.

"We've been monitoring just about every move you've made since you first set foot into camp. And I'm not talking about the guards posted on you."

"What?" Golrim asked, his smile finally faltering as he looked between the three knowing smirks.

"Who do you mean?" In answer to his question, Myers retreated to her workshop for a moment, before coming back out with a strange lump in her hands.

"I believe Vin is rather familiar with the monster this comes from," she said, placing the scorpion stinger on the table before them. He'd seen enough of the three-stinger scorpion monsters to recognize exactly where the monster part had come from.

"The villagers of Sakis call them hunters," Vin nodded, curious where Myers was going with this. Golrim looked just as confused as he was as he examined the stinger.

"They call them that because they have a unique magic in their eyes that helps them hunt," Myers explained.

"Once the monster's eyes lock onto a target, they can pretty much find that target again no matter how far it runs or where it tries to hide. Even through just about all forms of invisibility and concealment, it would seem."

"So that's how the thing kept finding me!" Vin gasped, easily recalling how despite his best efforts to lose the scorpion by running behind hills or faking it out on his very first day on Edregon, the monster always found him easily.

"Yes. They truly are expert hunters," Myers said, smiling at Golrim as she fished something out of her pocket.

"... I decided to make use of that." Myers opened her hand, and Vin stared at what looked like a small black orb. There was a very small piece of metal jutting out of one end, making the orb look like the world's worst-looking compass. Pointing directly at Golrim.

"That's genius," Golrim muttered, looking thoroughly impressed as he stared at what Vin finally realized was a modified eye of one of the hunters.

"I never would have considered that you'd devoted any of your limited time to tracking me via the monster's gifts. I thought you were focused solely on improving your explosives."

"I have a lot of side projects," Myers said, putting the orb away once more.

"Like Golrim said, I linked three of these to him the first day he set foot in camp. I keep one on me at all times, and the other two are split between two people who take shifts watching Golrim from afar. You're quite familiar with one of them, Vin."

"It's Theodore. It's definitely Theodore, isn't it?" Vin asked with a blank face, finally getting an answer as to how the Spy had been leveling so quickly.

"Theodore and Sherly, our Investigator from wave three," Myers nodded.

"She has a lot of experience tailing people from back on Earth, and normally, she doesn't have a compass pointing directly at her target at all times. The point is, we've been following Golrim's moves this whole time, waiting to see what he would do. Spur even decided to go so far as to purposefully put minor things in front of him that he could have taken advantage of if his purpose truly was to harm the town in the long run."

"Wait, is that what the original supply distribution crisis the other week was all about?" Golrim asked, his shock finally turning to annoyance.

"You let me think that it was your own mishandling of the situation when you asked me to correct it! You wasted countless man hours that could have been put to better use elsewhere just to test me?!"

"Yes, that was entirely a test," Spur said, snapping out of his funk and steepling his fingers together as he raised an eyebrow at Golrim.

"One you passed with flying colors. Excellent job correcting the mistake I purposefully made to test you."

"The fact of the matter, Vin, is that we really only had three options," Myers explained.

"Kill Golrim and Kym, exile them again, or let them work for us and aid us with their skills and knowledge. It was a risk, absolutely, but one we were prepared for."

"Why wasn't I brought in on this?" Vin demanded, finally getting a slightly sheepish look from Spur and Myers, and an expressionless stare from Phil.

"I'm one of the council members, aren't I? Hell, I'm basically Theodore's boss!"

"You're not here most of the time," Phil said bluntly, as if that was all the answer that was needed.

"Not to mention you have a bad habit of making decisions on your own that should be run past the rest of us first. Like when you decided to go investigate Golrim's fragment in the first place with the intention of possibly having them migrate over here. Theodore told us up front that he'd tell you everything if you ever specifically asked him what he was doing to level, but it sounded like keeping that information from you even just by omission actually helped him level even more. Spy is a strange class."

"I talked to you guys before actually inviting them," Vin argued weakly, realizing Phil still had a good point. He did have a bit of a track record of doing whatever he wanted and not thinking about what others might have to say about such actions.

"Did you guys at least fill Alice in?"

"Yes, she was well aware," Spur nodded.

"I gave Golrim the location of a 'secret emergency tunnel' he could take if the town was ever attacked and he needed to escape. It was actually just a hole that Alice dug and rigged to collapse in the event he ever tried using it to sneak out and contact the Red Dawn."

"Are you serious?" Golrim asked, staring at the grinning colonel in shock.

"What if there had been an emergency?!"

"Then we wouldn't have had to worry about what a questionable asset was doing while we were all distracted," Spur shrugged.

"Point is, we've spent these past few weeks testing you Golrim, and you've pretty much passed all of them with flying colors. All that's left now is helping us prepare to take down the Red Dawn, and you'll have truly earned your place within Terra. We'll even remove the guards we have set to follow you everywhere."

"And the Spy and Investigator doing the same?" Golrim drawled.

"I'll think about it," Spur winked.

"For now, Vin, you should go and try to get some sleep. We've got a big day tomorrow if we want to prepare to take out the entirety of the Red Dawn without losing any of our own people, so make sure you're rested and ready to go. Golrim, I have a few more things I want to discuss with you privately before you're going anywhere."

"I figured as much," Golrim sighed, turning to look at Vin.

"At the very least, a part of me is glad you weren't aware of any of these plans to track and monitor me. I don't blame them in the slightest for doing so, as I would have done the same in their position. But I would have been a bit more troubled by dishonesty from you after I made the decision not to lie to you." Golrim smiled, and his next words sent an unpleasant chill down Vin's back.

"Perhaps after I help you slaughter the remnants of the Red Dawn, you'll see I can be trusted."