"Cat's Eye" pushed open the tavern's creaking wooden door.
The smell of cheap ale, sweat, and an oddly savory aroma of scorched potatoes hit him.
He was used to it. It felt like coming home. As captain of the Blackstone Hand's "Cleanup" squad, he had long grown accustomed to carrying out missions in all sorts of filthy dens.
Two squad members, one tall and one short, slipped in silently behind him.
They took positions near the door and window respectively. Their movements and placement looked casual, but were the practiced work of seasoned professionals, allowing them to watch the entire room and react at a moment's notice.
The tavern was lively, but something about that liveliness struck Cat's Eye as strange.
In his experience, a tavern in a frontier territory should have been a den of all manner of riffraff, seething with resentment. Drunks would curse the damned nobles, complain about grueling labor, boast about far-fetched adventures, or come to blows over a few copper leaves.
Such places were ideal breeding grounds for rumors and rebellion. A single spark could set the whole territory ablaze.
But not this place.
Townspeople fresh off work filled more than a dozen rough wooden tables. They wore coarse clothes caked with dirt, and exhaustion showed on their faces, but their eyes held none of the numbness and resentment Cat's Eye had expected.
"...So if you narrow the spacing between the beet rows by another half a finger joint, they won't compete for nutrients at all, but you'll get ten percent more yield per mu. I'm going to try it on half a mu tomorrow, and I'm telling you now..." A burly, stubble-faced man gestured at his tablemates, spittle flying.
"Our five-person squad needs a scout for a clearing mission in the swamp! Guaranteed three