Chapter 577 (2/2)

“Rough?”

“...rough.” Hank confirmed, in a soft voice. The two men looked at each other. They both remembered a time before, where both had been the first batch to become Tier 3 Citizens, and they had fought monsters and politicians to make a better world for people. That had only been hard. It hadn’t been rough since…

The first night. The first week. The chaos. The raw animalistic violence of humans when culture was stripped away.

Thaddeus nodded, and the two men shook hands.

Ezekiel fidgeted. “Will someone tell me… what we are doing though?”

Hank laughed. “Just follow. I have a feeling these feet of mine will lead us there.”

*****

Frowning, Randidly looked up at the place where his hovel had once stood on the edges of the steelworker's town. There was now a tea shop there instead. Randidly tried to remember how many days it had been since he had been home, and had a lot of difficulties parsing things out. It couldn’t have been much more than a week, could it…?

But now there was a tea shop where his home was, a nice looking one at that. Even at the late hour, there were several candles burning warmly in the windows, shedding light onto the street. The shop was in a nice spot too, on the corner of one of the busiest roads in the growing town. Randidly remembered vaguely that most of the town’s people had been excited to put their buildings next to where he lived. So why…

The tea shop wasn’t the problem. The problem was that the walls of it were covered in graffiti.

Feed your cunt to the monsters.

Fuck you whore.

WORTHLESS.

Unity is DEATH.

Don’t drag us down wit u.

Bitch.

Randidly looked at the graffiti for a long time. The once clean white walls were stained with crimson paint. The walls seemed to take on a cartoonish hue in the darkness of the night. The words could only be vaguely seen in the light from the windows, but they were there before Randidly’s eyes. Clear as day.

Next, Randidly became aware that he was being watched. Down the street, in the windows, people were gathering. They peered down at him. With his high Perception, he could feel their uneasiness and uncertainty as they looked at him. Abruptly, Randidly realized that they were waiting to see what his response to this was. They had done it while he was away, but this wasn’t aimed at him…

That made Randidly blinked. He had been flabbergasted for several minutes as he looked at the walls because he thought this was a personal attack. But it wasn’t. It-

The door opened. Maude stood framed in the doorway, a stately expression on her face.

“Ah, Mr. Baloo. Apologies for the state of this place… I suppose I’ve been a little too distracted by other matters to properly clean.” Her voice was calm and she was… polite. That made Randidly blink.

She gestured inside. “Would you like to come in?”

Randidly nodded.