Redmere announced itself before it came into view.
Smoke first, rising above the treeline in thin steady columns that meant cooking fires and forges and the general business of a settlement large enough to have industry. Then the sound of it, low and layered, voices and wheels and hammers and the particular ambient noise of several thousand people occupying the same space and getting on with their lives.
Then the walls.
Marcus pulled Dusk to a slow stop at the top of the rise and looked at them properly. Stone, properly mortared, maintained recently enough that the pointing between the blocks was still clean.
Guard towers at regular intervals with actual soldiers on them, not village men with farming tools but trained personnel in matched gear doing their job with the focused attention of people who took the job seriously. Guild banners ran along the parapet in both directions, different colors, different insignias, the visual language of organized factions with enough presence to advertise it.
"First real city you've been to?," Liz said beside him, reading his expression accurately as she usually did.
"Yeah atleast somewhere proper," Marcus agreed.
They rode down to the gate.
The guards were professional and quick about it. Names, business, point of origin. Liz handled it with the ease she always brought to checkpoints, traders from the western settlements, nothing worth a second look. The guards looked at Marcus's outfit, at the sword at his hip, at the complete absence of anything resembling approachable in his face, and then looked back at Liz and waved them through.
Inside was everything the exterior had suggested and then some.
The main thoroughfare ran straight from the gate toward the city center, wide enough for three carts abreast, lined on both sides with stalls and storefronts and the foot traffic of players and Veldrath natives moving through the same space with varying degrees of coordination.
The smell was the first thing that hit properly, food and smoke and animals and metal and people, the compressed smell of a place that had been inhabited long enough to develop its own specific character.
"What's with the long face," Liz said.
"I'm observing," Marcus said.
"You've been observing since we rode through the gate. You look like you're taking inventory of everything that could go wrong."
"Useful habit," Marcus said and kept riding.
They found the stables near the eastern gate and left the horses with a boy who looked at Dusk with the wide eyes of someone recognizing quality. Marcus crouched down to his level.
"You take good care of him," he said quietly.
"Understood?"
The boy nodded like his life depended on it.
Marcus stood up and walked away.
He patted he's head
Then they walked away for abit and stopped .
The smell had found him specifically. Something coming from an open fronted eatery twenty meters ahead, meat and bread and something with spices he couldn't name, hot and real and absolutely nothing like dried provisions eaten beside a collapsing cave.
"There," he said.
Liz looked at the eatery and then at him.
Something in his expression she didn't usually see. Not urgency exactly. Closer to intent.
"When did you last eat a proper meal," she said.
"Previous life maybe," he said jokingly and walked toward it.
"Wha…?"
The eatery was small and busy and the woman running it moved between tables with the efficient energy of someone who had been doing this for decades and had no patience for people who couldn't make up their minds.
They found a table near the window. Marcus sat with his back to the wall out of the habit that was old enough to be automatic and looked at what the people around them were eating and ordered the same thing without reading the menu board.
The food arrived fast.
Bread, still warm, with a crust that gave properly when he broke it. Meat in a thick sauce that smelled like it had been cooking since morning. A small dish of roasted vegetables on the side that he ate first because he hadn't had a vegetable since he arrived in this world and his body apparently had opinions about that.
Liz watched him eat with the expression of someone finding something unexpectedly human about a person she had mostly seen in survival mode.
"You look different," she said.
"I'm eating."
"That's what's different," she said.
Marcus said nothing. He was busy.
Halfway through the meal he put down his bread and looked at Liz directly.
"I'm not using Malachar for a while," he said.
She looked at him. "Define a while."
"Until I'm ready. Until my weapon mastery is developed enough that I'm not dependent on him as a first response." He picked up the bread again.
"In the cave I was useless without him. That's not acceptable."
"You weren't useless," Liz said.
"I was close enough to it that the difference doesn't matter." He looked at her. "If anyone asks my class I'm a swordsman. Nothing about summoning."
Liz considered that. "You want to hide what you are."
"I want to develop what I am without advertising it." He finished the bread. "There's a difference."
She looked at him for a moment with the expression she used when she thought he was right and wasn't going to make it easy for him. "Fine. Swordsman."
They used fifteen coins on the meal. The woman running the place looked at the coins, looked at them, and told them to come back tomorrow with the particular warmth of someone who had decided they were regulars whether they knew it yet or not.
They found a weapon shop two streets down from the eatery, a proper storefront with blades mounted on the walls and armor displayed on wooden stands near the entrance. Marcus stepped inside and did a quick scan of the inventory.
Everything was expensive.
The cheapest sword on the wall had a price tag of three hundred coins attached to it with a small piece of cord.
Marcus looked at it for a moment.
Then he checked the system shop out of curiosity.
The weapons listed there were cheaper but he read the tier tags attached to them and understood why immediately. D tier across the board.
Functional in the way that technically not broken was functional.
"Can I help you."
The woman behind the counter was older, broad shouldered, with the particular look of someone who had been in the trade long enough to know immediately whether a customer was buying or browsing.
"Looking for something basic," Marcus said.
"Functional. Not decorative."
She looked at him. At his coat. At the seventeen coins that were somehow visible in his pocket.
"Basic I can do," she said, and reached under the counter and produced a short sword that had clearly lived several lives already.
The blade was clean but old, the handle worn smooth from previous owners, the crossguard slightly bent at one end from an impact it had survived. "It's Old stock but if you can give me a good deal Twenty coins and it's yours."
Marcus picked it up and checked the balance.
Not good. Not terrible. The kind of weapon that would do the job until something better came along.
"Fine," he said.
Liz found a rusted dagger in a barrel near the door marked clearance and paid five coins for it. She tested the edge with her thumb and her expression said everything about the quality without her needing to use words.
"Bad but manageable," she said.
They bought the items and walked back out into the street.
Marcus checked his balance.
[CURRENCY: 17 COINS]
Seventeen coins. 'Two people. A city full of opportunity, seems the guild registration is a must, need to generate that five hundred coins and find out what's so special about those weapons'.
"We need to move fast," Marcus said. "We're basically operating on scraps."
"We're pushing with the guild then?," Liz said. "Before we're down to eating scraps forever."
"Let's go," she said and led.