The bastard child becomes the empires royal consort-Chapter 56: Trading post [3]

Bang

"Hmm?" As Alan got closer to the tavern, the sounds changed, instead of noisy chatter and music, he heard loud crashes and felt the floor shake.

Confused, he pushed open the tavern door.

"What the fuck...?" he cursed, his eyes wide behind his blindfold.

The place was in total chaos, the first thing he saw was Julia in a duel with the tavern singer, nearby, Lucian was calmly sitting on a literal mountain of knocked-out mercenaries, in the middle of the room, Iris was busy punching someone else into a table.

"I was gone for two fucking minutes! What the hell happened?!" Alan yelled.

"Oh, Alan, you’re here," Lucian casually waved his hand.

"I told you not to give her alcohol!" Iris screamed from across the room. "The last time she drank wine, she knocked out every noble at the Royal Ball!"

"Then why the fuck didn’t you tell us that?!"

"I tried!"

"No, you fucking didn’t!"

While Alan and Iris kept arguing, a young boy stepped through the tavern door.

"Extra! Extra..." His voice died away as he looked at the wreckage, then up at Alan with a terrified face and held out a bundle of newspapers. "Extra... news...?"

"...Thanks." Alan took the paper, and the boy instantly dashed away.

Sighing, Alan tossed the bundle into the air, the pages scattered and fell all over the tavern, landing in front of the groaning mercenaries.

The pages flipped open before settling on a specific story.

"Huh...?" Alan noticed it too, there was a huge image covering a third of the page, it was a picture of him and the group right before they flew out of the capital.

But what caught his eyes was the big, bold title.

[Saviours of Elera: The Bondage Bastards]

"What the hell is this shit?"

Too much unnatural bullshit was happening at the same time.

First of all, they never technically saved Elera, all they did was wipe out all the abyssal creatures and open the vault at the very end, so why were they dubbed the saviours?

Second, the bondage bastards? the bondage fucking bastards???

"Ah..." Then Alan realised it was probably because of him.

He told the kid ’Bondage Bastards’ for the fun of it, assuming the little boy wouldn’t understand what he meant, but he never meant for the name to be published in newspapers.

While Alan was racking his brain, Lucian and Iris stopped fighting to look at the headlines, their faces twisted in horror, while Julia was lost in her own world wildly playing a guitar.

Lastly, the mercenaries sprawled across the tavern floor noticed the image on the newspaper, turning a baffled expression to the group.

They looked at the paper, then looked at Alan, Lucian, Iris and the dancing Julia.

"Wait..." One fallen mercenary wheezed, pointing a finger at Alan. "You’re them? You’re the bastards?"

"Don’t call us that..." Alan whispered, his voice trembling in a mix of embarrassment and rage.

"It says there’s a bounty here!" Another man yelled, clutching the paper to his face. "A hundred gold for selling the location of the Bastards!"

Every eye in the tavern now glared up with a look of greed.

"Iris, grab Julia!" Alan screamed. "And fucking run out of here!"

... 𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆𝙬𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝒎

"Hmm~ Hmm~" Jack hummed a little tune, dusting off his hands, he stood in front of his large carriage, having finished preparing for departure.

He clapped his hands together, smiling at the carriage, he had quite the reason to be in such a great mood.

After all, he encountered a mysterious man and earned close to a hundred gold in exchange for simply dropping them off at the location he was going to anyway.

It was a win-win situation for him.

Humming a pleasant tune with a grin.

Tremble

A small vibration shook the ground beneath his boots.

Jack raised a brow and turned toward the stable entrance.

"What the..."

Alan was sprinting toward him with a face full of pure panic, behind him were Lucian and Iris, with Iris carrying a giggling Julia over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes.

"Drive, Jack! Drive!" Alan screamed as he quickly approached.

"Huh?" Caught off guard, Jack could only stand there perplexed.

Whoosh

A gust of wind whipped past Jack’s face as the group dived into the carriage cabin.

"GO! MOVE THE DAMN CARRIAGE!" Alan stuck his head out of the carriage window, screaming at Jack.

"What’s the rush..." Jack muttered.

Tremble

Oddly enough, the tremor in the ground didn’t decrease, instead it only grew more intense.

Confused, Jack looked behind him.

"Get them, don’t let them escape!!!" Where a literal army of angry shouting mercenaries was charging straight for him.

"What in the world?!" Jack instantly jumped up and scrambled into the driver’s seat.

The carriage hummed with a loud whirr as the mana kicked in, the vehicle jerked forward, tires kicking up gravel.

"WHAT IS GOING ON?!" Jack screamed over the roar of the wind.

"WHY WOULD I KNOW?!" Alan yelled back from the window.

The carriage plowed through a wooden fence, shattering the timber, and sped out of the trading post, they left behind a massive cloud of dust and a crowd of furious mercenaries.

"Why wouldn’t you know?!" Jack screamed. "You left and came back with a riot!"

"Yeah, I don’t know why they’re chasing us!"

"Did you attack them?!"

"Uh..." Alan looked back at Julia, who was currently trying to eat a seat cushion while laughing. "Maybe?!"

"What did I get myself into?!" Jack shrieked into the sky.

Alan pulled his head back inside and slumped into the plush seat, trying to catch his breath, then noticed Lucian staring at the newspaper with a look of deep, silent suffering.

"Alan..." Lucian whispered, his voice trembling. "What is... this name?"

"Don’t even ask," Alan sighed, covering his face with his hands, he glanced at Iris, whose mouth was hanging open in total shock. "Anyway, did you find a reason why they’re trying to kill us?"

"Well, look here." Lucian pointed to a small box at the bottom of the page. "It says they are offering a prize of a hundred gold to anyone who reports our location."

"Yeah, that says location, not our fucking heads."

"Is it because of Julia?" Iris proposed.

"Even that wouldn’t explain the aggression, they were just greedy for something."

"Ah, over here." Lucian pointed somewhere else. "Something about a dragon bounty."

"Huh?" Alan looked over. "Five hundred gold coins for Sparky...?"

There was a five hundred gold coin bounty for any information regarding the dragon.

Although initially confused, Alan quickly realised why, Sparky was technically the first dragon to appear in the Northern Continent in over five hundred years and also the second known active dragon.

So naturally interest in Sparky would skyrocket.

"Greow?" Sparky materialised from thin air, tilting his blue feline head, staring at the news article.

"Yeah, you’re a celebrity, buddy." Alan reached out to scratch the ’cat’ behind its ears. "...Wait, no, we all are?"

"Anyway, we’re finally on our way to Kahl." Alan annouced, he looked over at Julia, who had finally stopped giggling and had fallen into a deep, snoring sleep on Iris’s shoulder.

"Hey! You lot in the back!" Jack’s voice drifted in from the driver’s seat, sounding strained. "I don’t know who you people are, but I just saw some groups chasing us."

Alan pushed the curtain aside just an inch, far back on the dusty road, he could see a cloud of rising dirt revealing the vague figures of people.

"Great..." Alan grumbled. "Jack, how fast can this thing go?"

"If I push it to its limit? Very fast!" Jack yelled back. "But the carriage might explode!"

"Better than getting caught, push it!"

"Eh, am I really willing to risk my lifelong carriage just to—"

"I’ll give you an extra fifty gold."

"Have I ever told you about the time I won a race competition?" Jack smirked. "Hold on!"

Then the entire carriage accelerated rapidly, pushing past its previous speed, leaving all the pursuers in the dust.