"What is it, Levis?"
Xia Lan Veloss seemed to notice that something was off with Levis and asked in the temporary "public channel" they had set up using Remlu.
"It seemed someone was watching us just now."
Levis's pair of dead-fish eyes narrowed slightly, as if he were deep in thought.
Upon hearing Levis say that, everyone tensed. Tiamat of the Evil Scale had a fearsome reputation, after all.
But then they heard Levis add:
"Though it doesn't quite feel like her. Maybe I'm overthinking it."
That was what puzzled him. Tiamat's fury that day had burned like fire, utterly sincere and heartfelt.
He had even prepared himself for her to disregard everything and take out her rage on him in retaliation. He had not even dared return directly to Minas Tirith, afraid that the big shot would reduce the family fortune he had painstakingly accumulated over decades to ashes in one blaze.
If she did that, she would almost certainly draw the intervention of Bahamut, the King of the North Wind, or even Mystra, the Goddess of Magic. It would cross their bottom line. But their response definitely would not be that swift. By then, if he was left destitute, who could he argue with?
This world didn't even have property insurance! If it did, those companies would have gone bankrupt long ago. On the disaster-ridden Coriel Continent, there were simply too many unspeakable calamities, both natural and man-made. Insurance couldn't save this world.
Sometimes, the greatest pain in a dragon's life was not that it had failed to hoard enough treasure and then died, but that the dragon was still alive while its treasure was gone.
Yet Tiamat's subsequent reaction seemed rather sluggish.
He had indeed sensed someone watching from the shadows earlier, but there had not been