Olpasbet, the Prison City
Olpasbet, the Prison City
Prison City Olpasbet was, for all intents and purposes, a city where most of the inhabitants were convicts.
That didn't mean every resident was a prisoner.
Some held free status and owned property outright.
The innkeeper was one such example. Aside from the lord's retainers, he held one of the highest social standings within the city.
Olpasbet drew a steady stream of travelers, which kept demand for inns high. And those travelers were almost inevitably wealthy folk who had come to savor the city's sordid atmosphere, so their purses tended to be open.
The inn, accordingly, was not cheap. Neither was the food.
The innkeeper had his doubts when the shabby traveler and the convict first walked in—could they even pay? But the moment a few silver coins appeared from Aslan's belt, a meal arrived without further hesitation.
A whole roasted fowl. Boiled eggs.
And a crimson stew studded with mushrooms, potatoes, carrots, and a root vegetable that fell somewhere between radish and ginseng.
A feast that would have drawn praise even at a lord's table was laid before the girl.
She abandoned every pretense of wariness and threw herself into the food.
She tore into the bird with frantic hands, stuffed meat into her mouth, peeled and devoured the eggs, and all but poured the stew down her throat to fill the hollow ache inside her.
The other patrons, drinking or dining, cast sidelong glances at the ravenous display, but the girl paid them no mind.
Aslan paid them no mind either.
He was busy wrestling with something else, and sat so still he barely moved.
A semi-transparent window hung before his eyes.
[Active Main Quest]
[Escape from prison with Angela Tail]
The girl across from him was Angela Tail. That much was clear.
The dragon-kin who had pursued her had called her by that name, and the quest had appeared the moment he laid eyes on her.
It would have been stranger if she weren't Angela Tail. So he didn't waste time on that question.
What gnawed at him was something else: why had seeing her triggered a main quest tied to her name?
In all the years he'd spent playing the game, twelve years ago, he'd never once encountered a quest like this.
He had cleared every sub-quest, every main quest, every single route. He knew them all. And this quest was utterly foreign.
Nor could he guess at its origins. He'd spent twelve years cut off from the main questline without ever learning why, so there was no reason to think he'd suddenly know now.
With nothing to go on—no thread to pull, no plausible theory—Aslan decided there was no point in agonizing. What mattered was not letting this opportunity slip.
Escape from prison with the half-starved girl in front of him. That was the immediate objective, and so far, the current was flowing in the right direction.
A successful escape together would require trust and goodwill.
If the first step toward building that trust was spending a few silver coins on a lavish meal and letting her eat her fill, then he considered it a bargain.
That didn't mean he intended to feed her and simply send her on her way. Aslan dismissed the system window and turned his gaze back to the girl.
She was a textbook Olpasbet convict.
Her clothes were relatively clean—she hadn't been imprisoned long—but they were ragged, and a stark white restraint collar gleamed at her throat.
The short incarceration, however, didn't mean she'd ever led a comfortable life.
That much had been obvious from the start: the rough, fierce temper, the high-strung wariness, the scrawny limbs.
The surname Tail belonged to the underclass of Belus Alpen, so Aslan could easily guess she had grown up in poverty.
That explained the hostility toward the dragon-kin and the intense guardedness.
The problem—if there was one—was that the Belus Alpen poor rarely ever left the city.
Hoping it might yield a clue about the main quest, Aslan noted that her eating pace had finally begun to slow, and he spoke.
"Should I order more?"
She shook her head. The plates in front of her were already scraped clean.
"Then mind if I ask you something?"
"...Go ahead."
Her words were curt, but her expression had loosened with satiation, and the wariness in her eyes had noticeably thinned. The hungrier a person was, the more food loosened their tongue.
"What's your name?"
"...Angie."
Angie. The diminutive form of Angela settled Aslan's last doubt—he'd been quietly worried she might not be Angela Tail after all.
"Angie. Easy to say. I like it. I'm Aslan."
"...Aslan. Easy for you, too."
"Thanks. So, Angie—if it's hard, you don't have to answer—but how did you end up here?"
Olpasbet was, at its roots, a prison city.
There were service industries and mining operations built on convict labor, but the foundation was the prison itself.
Some inmates were common criminals. Others were people who had drawn a noble's wrath, or nobles who had lost a political struggle.
Angie didn't look like a noble, so Aslan assumed her imprisonment carried its own complicated story—and its own wounds.
His guess must have been right. The girl's face tightened, and she fidgeted with her plate.
"...I lost. They dragged me here."
She didn't say exactly who she'd fought, or why. Aslan didn't press.
He instead asked something he could reasonably deduce.
"The people you fought alongside—were they red flag or blue flag?"
Red flag meant Count Warpol. Blue flag meant Count Sholukund. Two counts who had clashed on the fields of Nechagni, where Aslan himself had once taken part in the fighting.
The two nobles were locked in constant border disputes, and mercenaries routinely fought under their colors along the contested frontiers.
Aslan had guessed she was a mercenary, and she answered easily.
"Red."
"So you were with Count Warpol's forces. Red flag with the white horse, right?"
Count Warpol held the territory of Nechagni.
His rival, Count Sholukund, was the very same count who included the lord of this prison city—the Baron of Olpasbet—among his vassals.
The fact that she was imprisoned in Olpasbet already made her former allegiance to Count Warpol easy to guess, but Aslan knew that moments like this made it all the more important to let her talk.
Still, he could already form a clearer picture.
She would not have been part of the count's direct retinue, for one thing.
She was poor. She'd have lacked formal combat training, let alone experience.
The chances of someone like her serving directly under a count were vanishingly small.
"...Uh, yeah. That was it."
The girl's eyes lit with belated recognition, and she nodded.
Aslan suspected he now understood how she had come to be here.
It had likely started with a mercenary company visiting Belus Alpen.
The company would've been looking for new blood, and the ignorant, desperate poor of Belus Alpen would have made perfect targets.
Performance bonuses, weekly pay, a chance to leave Belus Alpen behind and travel with the company—for some of the poor, that would have felt like a lifeline. Angie would have seized it and joined up.
'But they lost. And judging by the fact that no other mercenaries are here with her...'
Aslan kept his deductions to himself and drew the rest from her own mouth.
"So where are your companions? You seemed like you were part of a company."
At his question, Angie's expression darkened. The way she bit her lip told him everything he needed to know about that company's fate.
They'd either fled, or been wiped out.
Since she was the only one here, Aslan formed the simple conclusion—and cut in before she could speak.
"You don't have to say."
That only seemed to make her expression more troubled for a moment, but after a few seconds of wrestling with it inwardly, her face slowly eased.
She was a prisoner of war. Olpasbet was always in the market for convicts, and the men who'd captured her would have taken a suitable price and handed her over.
Aslan turned over what he'd heard, what he could infer, and sorted through it all in his head.
'...Still no obvious connection to the main quest.'
She wasn't a figure who ought to trigger a main quest, and the events tied to her didn't link to one either.
But he had clearly seen her name in that quest window.
The game's very first main quest did begin with a prison break—maybe that alone was the reason—but the thought was too absurd.
If that were true, it would mean the girl in front of him was the protagonist.
He shook the notion out of his head. As he did, the inn door slammed open and someone strode in.
"...So you were here."
A heavy voice dropped into the room, and the raucous inn fell silent.
Every patron's eyes swung toward the entrance. Aslan saw Angie's expression stiffen and turned to look.
"I'd heard a traveler had taken a convict to the inn. Wondered if it was true."
It was the dragon-kin.
The dragon-kin warrior who had chased her, who had told her to come under his protection.
He stood framed in the doorway, flanked by several of his men, and stared impassively at Aslan and the girl.
"I don't know what that traveler used to lure you, but don't be so quick to accept. Even without resorting to such measures, I, Harod Claw, protect those who deserve protection. There's no reason to indulge the filth of this city."
The dragon-kin who identified himself as Harod Claw strode further inside as he spoke.
Standing a shade over two meters tall, he stirred a rustle of unease with every step.
Travelers seated near the entrance, wanting no part of whatever trouble was brewing, quietly slipped outside.
Only the innkeeper's face soured at the sight of paying customers vanishing.
"And you. Traveler. I don't know what urges you're hoping to satisfy with that girl, but if you have any conscience, you'll let her go."
Aslan realized the words were meant for him, and a flicker of irritation crossed his face.
The dragon-kin seemed to have mistaken him for one of the degenerates who lured convicts with food and coin to indulge sordid appetites.
Given that most of the travelers who visited Olpasbet were exactly that, it wasn't an unreasonable assumption.
"...This is tiresome."
Being misjudged for carrying a purpose he didn't possess was still unpleasant.
Aslan rose from his chair, gestured lightly for the girl to stay seated, and turned.
"Several grown men trying to beat down a lone girl—that's conscience. But buying her a meal out of pity—that's against conscience. Is that the logic?"
Aslan fixed his gaze steadily on the dragon-kin's eyes as he spoke. The dragon-kin's brow twitched, and he advanced.
The soft rasp of a tail dragging across the wooden floor filled the silence, then stopped a short distance from Aslan.
Harod's expression tightened.
"Traveler, there are things you don't understand. You're a traveler—you couldn't possibly understand our ways."
He let the sentence trail off. His tail lifted slightly. Aslan tracked the movement with his eyes and narrowed his gaze.
"If you won't stand down, I'll have no choice but to use force."
Harod was settling into a combat stance. Aslan studied the dragon-kin, who looked ready to throw a punch or a kick at any moment, then lowered his eyes and moved his hand toward his belt.
A mace hung there.
The travelers who saw his hand go to his belt blinked in surprise.
Until Aslan's hand moved, not a single person in the room had noticed the weapon resting there.
Even Harod, poised to fight right in front of him, hadn't seen it.
Eyes still lowered, Aslan spoke.
"Try it."
The low murmur was cold. Unlike a sharp threat or an overt declaration of intent to kill, it carried the heavy chill of a warning delivered without heat.
Aslan disliked fighting. He disliked it, and he took no particular pleasure in killing things, but when a fight became necessary, he didn't hesitate.
Because of that, the coldness and killing intent in his words were beyond anything Harod Claw had expected. The dragon-kin flinched under the weight of it.
Harod Claw was a warrior.
Claw was the surname given to the warrior caste of Belus Alpen, and dragon-kin who bore it had been trained for battle since childhood.
A veteran warrior could gauge an opponent's strength against his own and estimate the outcome of a fight.
And that seasoned warrior's analysis—bordering on instinct—was tipping violently in one direction.
Staring into those icy blue-green eyes, Harod swallowed.
The standoff between Harod and Aslan draped the inn in silence. Even the grumbling innkeeper now watched the two of them with anxious eyes.
Aslan was the one who broke the silence.
He kept his hand at his belt as he spoke.
"I've leased Angie. But I promise—nothing will happen that runs against your precious conscience."
Leasing.
Paying a fee to the lord and taking a convict into personal service for the duration of one's stay in the city.
With the lord's authority involved, there was nothing Harod could do.
Harod stared silently at Aslan and Angie for a long moment, then turned his back and walked out of the inn.
Only then did Aslan take his hand away from his belt. He gathered his cloak around himself and concealed the weapon once more.
*
Outside the inn, Harod Claw wiped his brow and released a heavy breath he'd been holding.
The long-suppressed exhale poured out of his large frame, carrying a faint whiff of tension.
The bald man who had followed Harod out glanced sidelong at Angie, still seated inside, and asked,
"Lord Harod, why did you back down? A warrior of your caliber against someone like him..."
"No."
Harod cut him off and looked down at the back of the hand he'd used to wipe his forehead.
Dragon-kin didn't sweat. But it felt as though cold sweat should have been beading there nonetheless.
He shook his hand dry, his expression unnervingly blank.
"If we'd fought, we'd all be dead."
The subordinate's eyes went wide at that matter-of-fact declaration. Harod Claw took another step and glanced back toward the inn.
"I don't know how a monster like that ended up here... but a lease doesn't last forever. We'll aim for the next chance."
His subordinate's mouth twisted, but he asked no further questions.
And after they were gone, Aslan made a decision.
Before they came back, he really would have to make the lease official.