How To Avoid Death On A Daily Basis: Book Two by V. Moody Page B

will to live slowly being drained from Maurice and Dudley—rather them than me.
     
    If you think my portrayal of Claire and Flossie as obsessed with shopping seems a little unfair, you could be right. After the intense pressure of trying to survive in a crazy fantasy world where death was around every corner, perhaps it was just their way of relaxing. Or, maybe they were a couple of shopping-mad bimbos. Hard to say.
     
    Before going to bed, I did my exercises. Sit ups, push ups, squats and lunges. I was determined to be at least fit enough to run away properly. Then I practiced with the sword, but I didn’t feel very confident with what I was doing. At some point I would need to hire someone to train me.
     
    A blacksmith on the outskirts of the city made me a spike like the one I’d given up. He was a bit baffled by my request and I had to talk him through how to make it for me, but in the end I got something pretty close to the original. It felt good to have my trusty spike back.
     
    I also bought a large piece of lead from him. The sap I’d tried to make using bits of old metal had never felt right. This time I got a professional seamstress to sew the lead into some leather and the whole construction was a lot more solid.
     
    I returned to the Municipal Directory to try and figure out what the place was for, and how I could use it to my advantage. Master Nevin had shown us the window where we could get our money and other items, but I still had no idea what all the other windows were for.
     
    My plan was to hang around and see if I could pick up any information, but trying to inconspicuously stand next to people in an attempt to overhear their conversations did not go down well. I got some threatening looks and had to quickly make myself scarce.
     
    In the end, I just joined the longest queue and waited until I got to the front. It took about two hours.
     
    The woman behind the window looked like her family had just been murdered, and she was the one responsible. If you’ve ever been to a post office, you’ll know the look.
     
    “Yes?” she demanded.
     
    “Oh, is it my turn?” I was stalling, trying to figure out what she did. She was in a small office with nothing in it, as far as I could tell.
     
    She glared at me. “What service do you require?”
     
    “What services have you got?”
     
    This earned me a look at her teeth, which she bared at me. “Do you have something to hand in or not?”
     
    “Maybe later.” I could feel every person in the line behind me staring as I walked away.
     
    It took me another two days to discover the stairs leading to the basement. Down there I discovered a throng of people, all of them armed to the hilt, milling about. The walls were covered with posters offering bounties on various monsters, like the ones Grayson had in Probet. There were dozens of them. And these had a lot more details about each creature.
     
    There was also a map on one wall, but unlike the one in Probet, this one was being constantly updated with information on where targets could be found.
     
    We still had lots of money, but it had started to noticeably go down. Eventually, we would have to find a way to make more, and claiming bounties was the obvious way to do it. But I was very reluctant to go down that route again. I needed another method.
     
    But there was one poster that caught my interest.
     
    “I want to head out to the marshlands tomorrow,” I told the others over a dinner of roast chicken and potatoes. The meat wasn’t chicken and I’m pretty sure potatoes aren’t blue, but that’s what it tasted like, and I had learned not to ask questions I didn’t want to know the answer to.
     
    “Why?” said Claire. “What’s in the marshlands?”
     
    “Frogmen. It’s about time we got back into the adventuring business.”
     
    The other stopped eating and looked at each other somewhat apprehensively.
     
    “You can calm down,” I said. “There won’t be any killing.