None of his efforts to find a happy medium had worked. Greg had even tried to go to the extreme and indulge his suspicions and kill the man during their first meeting. That, however, led to its own list of problems. The first was that no matter how he came at the problem, Get often ended up having to kill almost if not more than half of the elites as they tried to protect their employer. The remaining half would either hate or fear him enough that they'd betray or abandon him at the first chance they got. As for the mages that protected the caravan from sandstorms, Greg had yet to figure out a way to get them to stick around whether by promises or threats. Lastly, the other traders in the caravan seemed unwilling to be led by an upstart that killed his master as they always abandoned him whenever they caught up to the other caravans. Rather than waste his time failing over and over again, Greg had chosen to use his time in the desert deepening his understanding of magic. Ironically,

The man, however, didn't expect Greg to produce a small pouch and throw it at him. Five hundred coins was a large, not to mention heavy sum that would have been next to impossible to produce in one spot, let alone carry in as small a pouch as the one he'd handed over. Luckily, gold wasn't the last denomination of currency. From lowest to highest, it went from copper, silver, gold, platinum, and mythril at the top. Each denomination was a hundred units of the one below it. Meaning that the five platinum coins in the pouch he'd handed over were the entire sum that had been asked for. "The key," Greg spoke in a now bored tone of voice as if something trivial had just taken place. The man before him struck Greg as the kind to take pleasure in other people's misery. If he showed that he was bothered by what had just taken place, chances are he'd try to tag on something else unreasonable just to push. Greg thus maintained a flat expression even as he held out a hand for the key to the girl

Human eyes tended to turn white and dull after death, however, after grasping the aspect of decay, that wasn't a problem for his creations. With eyes that looked every bit as lively as when they had been alive, the corpses surveyed the area around the carriage. Just because he was powerful now didn't mean that he didn't have enemies who might try to take advantage of his brother's death to ambush him. The corpses themselves didn't see anything, but through their eyes, Ozen could survey everything within ten blocks of where they were. The dead didn't see the same way the living did. To them, light and darkness didn't make a difference, the whole world was a muted grey to their eyes. The only thing that appeared different to them was living souls. Like bright white flames against a dull grey background, they were the only things that stood out to the dead. So long as you were within line of sight, even if you were fifty miles away the dead would see the bright flame that was your soul.

A fair hand reached over and took all five coins from Esar's open palm. The look of greed on the man turned positively murderous, his lips pulling apart to show his scary maw as he looked up to see who it was. The bride that Ozen had sent forward to take the money from him, however, didn't even react, unbothered by the man's anger. His underling quickly schooled his features as he remembered where he was, who was before him, and why they were here. "Forgive me mage Ozen, I forgot myself," he said, keeping a calm façade in sharp contrast to how madly his heart was beating away in his chest. He knew perfectly well that if Ozen took offense to his reaction, his life could easily be forfeit.Ignoring the man, Ozen looked between the coins his undead minion had handed to him and his brother on the ground. Where had such a waste gotten a fortune like this? There was zero doubt in Ozen that the source of wealth was most likely also his brother's killer. Not that he cared about that part, the

After seeing Kaza's death, they had two options. Kastia could have manipulated time to allow them to track his brother's killer back to where she came from. Or, they could have stuck with Kaza to try and understand why he had been targeted. Unanimously, all three chose to go with the second option. None of them had lived as long as they had by jumping into situations half-cocked. They needed to understand all that had happened to lead to Kaza's death before they went after his brother's killer. Following Kaza had led them outside of the slums and over to this establishment in the middle-class area. When the owner caught sight of them, he went white as a sheet. To his credit, however, he'd remained standing and polite in greeting them. Having killed countless people before, Ozen could recognize the look in the man's eyes. It was the look of someone resigned to their fate. He recognized that he wasn't powerful enough to take on one of them let alone all three. Rather than put up a poi