Chapter 13 – The Bounty Hunters of Sentinel Ridge

In the afternoon, the two of them, Jace and Grid, rendezvoused at a newly opened tavern near the gates of Stormwind to unpack for the trip, and Grid had brought quite a few things with him for the trip.

“My felling axe and small round shield, the straight sword of Stormgarde that I won from the prince of what’s-his-name, cheese, jugs of spirits, and traps. That’ll do, pretty much bring it all.”

“A trap?” Jace raised his head and looked over at Grid’s hand, just in time to see the black, iron trap that lay on the table.

Grid said, “You want to find the Evil Claw, we can set traps in the Twilight Forest where the wolves hang out, and then use the meat to attract them …… Isn’t that much safer than fighting those beasts head on?”

“It does make sense.” Jace said, “But it could take a long time.”

Greed strapped the trap on his back and said, “Should be no problem, I’m an old hunter from Cintron as well, what about you, what did you bring?”

Jace replied, “Just the usual stuff, markers to help us find herbs, diagrams, that’s the most important. There’s also dry bread, jerky crumbles …… of course the jerky crumbles were brought for the two of us to eat.”

Grid hung the lanyard of the small round shield on his waist and nodded, “I know, and if we’re in the Twilight Forest, we can get it on the spot.”

Jace gave a stiff laugh and said, “Not so good, the Great Cemetery of Raven Ridge has some of the heroes of past wars buried in it.”

Grider sidled up and asked, “What does bait have to do with the graveyard?”

Speaking of which, he suddenly felt that something wasn’t quite right.

“You want to dig up human corpses to use as bait to lure those animals? Dude, aren’t you a little mentally challenged? I mean catch some critters ……”

Jace quickly said, “Ah, maybe I heard too many horror stories from those patrolmen, they all said that the animals over there like to eat human corpses, and we were just talking about the Raven Ridge Cemetery, so you’re going to have to take it on the spot ……”

Grider’s face turned and said, “Really? If that’s true …… it’s not a bad idea.”

“Or not.” Jace dug into his bag and said, “I brought an extra tunic, so if you must go deeper into the catacombs, make sure to change your clothes when you get out. The great graveyard at Raven Ridge has been heavily contaminated with necrotic poison, and some of the people who have gone in hastily have come out with aftereffects that may be the result of wearing dirty clothes for too long.”

“Is that what the patrols told you?”

“Some of this was told to me by settlers from Raven Ridge and Grantown.” Jace lifted the package and said, “Pack up and get going, any later and I don’t know if we’ll make it over to Western Springs by night.”

Storm City had already taken in thousands of new foreign citizens due to the expansion of the city and the massive construction of new houses, but there were still many refugees in and around the Valley of Heroes who had built tents.

Many of them are disabled people with little means of survival, and some are elderly people and children whose homes have been destroyed and who have lost their sources of income.

Some of the priests of the Cathedral of Light are distributing food among these tattered tents and tending to the sick, and some of the laborers are helping these poor people to mend torn tent cloths, or other necessary tools.

The young king wanted to take in as many of these refugees as he could, especially since many of them were nationals of the Stormwind Kingdom who had fled from the Twilight Forest or the Red Ridge Mountains to get here.

Before, they were able to divert toward Shining Gold, but now that Shining Gold has a refugee camp as well, perhaps the new arrivals will have to see if they can be considered toward Moon Creek and these more distant towns.

Jace walked to the entrance of the city and looked at the children who were sitting at the entrance of their tents, staring at the gates of Stormwind City, remembering the time when he had just come to Stormwind City, facing the devastated city center, and wondering if he would be able to have a place to live here in the future.

It’s kind of barely lived in now, but the future is anyone’s guess.

The two men paid ten coppers to have a caravan of wine delivered to a stagecoach near the Western Springs Fortress, and after a night’s rest they hitched a ride to Sentinel Ridge early the next morning.

The Wild West was by no means a wilderness at this time; the generic name for the Wild West was closer to “the great flat land to the west.”

It’s almost time for the harvest festival again, and the endless fields of summer wheat fields are flooded with golden spikes, and the woods that divide the wheat fields in the distance are green and form a strong contrasting color.

A single scarecrow jutted out across the slightly undulating field, gazing at the travelers on each passing wagon.

Arriving at Sentinel Ridge when it was already dark, the game in a few minutes to run on foot to the place, here hitching a wagon surprisingly hard to go a day and a half, there is a dense post along the way to guard, the main road of the western wilderness is still considered safe.

Sitting in the wagon, he could see from a distance the torches lit from the tall sentry tower on the hillside.

The place was still bustling at night, with miners chatting and drinking and looking down the street at the foreign or local wagons that entered this stage now and then.

Said to be a stagecoach stop, Sentinel Ridge was actually close to reaching the size of a small town.

The kingdom’s major town in the southwest, Moon Creek, was the richest place within the kingdom besides the capital, and the town had grown from a huge mining cave.

This region being the most important grain producing area in the kingdom, it was only logical that the town of Yuexi in the center of the region would become a major grain distribution center.

Because of the rebuilding efforts of the kingdom in the past two years, the demand for stone and minerals had surged, and Moonbrook Town had quickly regained the prosperity it had enjoyed before the Orc War.

Taking advantage of this wind, Sentinel Ridge, which was supposed to serve as a transit point between Moon Creek Township and the Alvin area, followed suit.

Coupled with the recent discovery of a new mining area to the northwest of Sentinel Ridge, quite a few miners from Moon Creek Township had moved to this side in search of new opportunities, making Sentinel Ridge just like a trend of becoming a new town in the western wilderness.

It’s much larger than the game, and looks like one of those American western movie towns in the middle of nowhere built next to a railroad track, except that the “tracks” are guard towers, barracks, and ration roads.

The damage from the orc war was also more visual than in the game, with some of the outermost houses burned down and no repairs made to this day.

The little church next to the lumberyard had been badly damaged in the war, and at the moment a group of construction workers were sleeping by the scaffolded main floor of the church guarding the stone and lumber, and the miners and townspeople coming and going beside them did not interfere with their sound sleep.

Jace could see that the brand new town was kinda short on manpower, and there were recruitment notices all over the place, whether it was for miners or builders or farm helpers, the prices were surprisingly not that far off from Stormwind’s.

No wonder Eden Marin was worried about running here to find a job, if he got used to life here or in Moonbrook, he might not really want to go back to Stormwind City.

“See that slaughterhouse?” Grid pointed to a small building on the corner about ten meters away and said, “Tomorrow we can go over there and buy some crushed bones or something to use as bait before we’re forced to dig up dead bodies.”

“Even crushed bones aren’t cheap, especially now that food is scarce.” Jace said, “We could try hunting wild boars for meat or something along the banks of the river to the west?”

Jace didn’t have much experience in trapping, he just blurted it out from his knowledge of the game.

Grid said, “The blood-tusked boars in this part of the world are notoriously manic, and even the jackals don’t expect to hunt them for a steady supply of meat. Do you know why liver pies are so expensive? It’s because only the liver of a blood tusked boar can make that flavor …… Hunting blood tusked boars requires a professional boar trapper.”

Jace asked, “You’re from Cintron, why do you still know so much about southern boar?”

Grid replied, “When you live another fifty years, you’ll know some useless knowledge on the side too, Jace. But those boars are quite fierce, but at least they’re much better than the monstrous wolves of the Twilight Forest. We’ll have to be more careful when we get there, I don’t want to be surrounded by a bunch of sharp-toothed beasts.”

Jace said, “This way at least the death will be painful.”

Grid shook his head and said, “That’s not always true, for example, the bears in Cintron don’t like to kill their prey, they tackle you alive and eat you starting with the least important parts of your body until you feel no pain and accept your fate, and then when you take your last breath they just drop you, just because they don’t like dead ones.”

Jace moved his legs and feet uncomfortably as he listened to his vivid description of the scene of how they dwarves were eaten alive.

“The wolf over here will bite your throat off first, right?”

Grider said, “I guess so, rare good news.”

The two walked into an inn as they chatted, and were surrounded by a strong smell of rust.

Jace couldn’t tell if the rusty smell was from the miners or the blood that came from the butcher who had chopped up too many innards, but in any case it smelled awful.

Grid ordered two mugs of ale and the two men sat down and pulled out the dry food they had prepared and ate it.

The tavern was very noisy, and their neighboring table was occupied by several men and women in various traveling attire, talking loudly.

But each of them was armed, and the other patrons had the sense to stay away from them even if they were feeling a little annoyed.

“Some cowards, when they come across something they’ve never seen before, will deliberately exaggerate what they’ve seen.” A strong man with a full black beard and a long-handled war hammer on his knee said, “If you ask me there was no such thing as a two-man-tall jackal, it’s just that those guards hadn’t been in contact with jackals for too long, so the moment they saw one they were scared out of their wits and had nightmares about seeing it.”

“You mean there’s no such thing as a jackal leader?” A woman carrying a hunting bow said coldly.

The woman’s voice was thick to the point where her gender characteristics were somewhat blurred, and with the already poorly defined blonde hair on her head shaved extremely short, she could be mistaken for a man without a closer look.

Jace might have had a hard time recognizing her as a female at first glance if she wasn’t both strong and fat, her breasts bulging out of her leather jacket tightened by the bowstring to a particular degree of prominence.

The group’s skin was all quite white, so white that it was even a bit blinding, and the veins on it could be seen clearly, so they were probably from somewhere very far north.

A man sitting next to the woman, clad in a thin white shirt, said, “If a jackal tribe loses its leader, the next one is quickly chosen. But if the new one doesn’t have the same leadership as the previous one, then the whole tribe will be depressed for a while and engage in infighting. I don’t deny that the Jackals have been much more rampant lately than before because of the emergence of a new strong leader …… but two men tall is too much.”

“That’s what I think.” Blackbeard said, “At the end of the day, we may not even find any two man tall jackal leaders, no matter how many jackals we kill it will be a waste of time …… After all, the wanted poster wants a jackal head twice as big.”

Blackbeard said, “Maybe little Urien wants to make an empty-handed deal, make a wanted condition that can’t be met at all, and then have us fools hunt around for jackals, looking for some big leader, and find nothing in the end. They’ve reduced the number of jackals in the area without spending anything, and the bounty goes to no one!”

The man in the white blouse said, “I don’t really see how crowning the name of Urien would do something so underhanded, and in the end, it’s the credibility of their royal family that would be lost.”

The woman said, “I did research beforehand, and some miners and farmers did see huge jackals, but I’m not sure …… if it’s the same one as the one stated in the wanted.”

Blackbeard laughed contemptuously and said, “You can’t trust the word of a mercenary, let alone those goonish miners and peasants!”

“What did you say?” A sturdy man next to him stood up with a slap on the table, and Blackbeard slanted a glance at him, just taking a light sip of his drink.

“Dare to fart like that here, I think you’re tired of living, hairy ghost!” Another miner said coldly.

Jace slowly raised the cup in his hand and gently took a sip blocking his face in the process, it looked like a bad fight was unavoidable.

“Holy Light on Earth!” The man in white stood up and spoke to the people around him, “For the sake of our common faith, everyone calm down. My friend had some trouble with the miners before, but it was a group of Dwarf miners who provoked us, not you guys ……”

Grid choked on several consecutive mouthfuls of wine at this and turned to glare at the man, and it took a few of the closer patrons to realize that the thick, short, burly man sitting here turned out to be a tall dwarf!

Jace whispers to Grid, “The dwarves in Eagle’s Nest haven’t found the mines yet, have they? He’s talking about either black iron or the copper whiskers of Rockmordan ……”

Grider looked back again, with a look that said you really had a point.

“We’ve seen the big jackal leader.” Jace lifted his voice to speak to a couple of mercenaries there, “It’s just over by the Western Springs Fortress, if you follow the riverbank, I’m sure you’ll find a clue.”

“It’s not that I despise you, boy.” Blackbeard glanced this way and said, “I don’t believe a jackal like you could survive seeing a jackal like that.”

“By my rough estimate, his balls are at least twenty times bigger than yours.” Grider sneered, “One more fart and watch me shove this wine glass up your fucking posterior.”

That said, Grid waved the glass with the one not much smaller than his head in front of his eyes with his left hand, and his right hand was already on the table, gripping tightly the hilt of the sword that had leaked out of the sack.

Jace, who had been a little worried that a real fight would delay what was going on behind the scenes, couldn’t get his brain out of the notion of a spawn twenty times his size now.

A tavern-raging Dwarf possesses a rather huge deterrent in the human world, and now even the unimpressive Blackbeard is a bit intimidated.

The woman next to him, who had been staring at the sword in Grid’s hand, sidled up and whispered something in Blackbeard’s ear, which, by the shape of her mouth Jace could tell, should have included the phrase “Stormgarde.”

“I’m just trying to be helpful too, guys.” Jace cleared his throat and said, “After all, if you guys can take down that giant jackal, it’ll be good for the entire Stormwind Kingdom, and I’d really like you guys to get that honorarium. But if you guys continue to be unkind, I think everyone here would be happy to help this friend of mine shove his glass …… into your …….”

Blackbeard glanced to the side and realized that he had indeed pissed off a large group of middle-aged and older laborers who had just crawled out of the mines.

The man in white sighed and said softly, “Cliff, it’s time you managed your temper and stayed out of trouble, this isn’t Northside.”

Northend? It turned out that these few people were from the continent of Northrend on the north coast of the North Sea, so no wonder they were speaking in an accent that they had never heard before.

The tension in the tavern gradually eased, and the three men in Blackbeard’s party seemed to sense the unfriendliness of the inn, exchanging a few words before exiting as one.

After all, it wouldn’t be good if you slept here and were missed in the middle of the night and touched into the inn room and opened up, the miners who had lived here for half their lives had ways of getting you killed.