After rescuing those prisoners from the Geosian Regime's templars, you'd have thought I'd come under a lot more scrutiny, but that wasn't so, oddly enough. It's possible that no one who had seen me on that prison ark ever made it back to the capitol before the end of the Archknight Rebellion. Whatever the case, no one challenged me as I began to expand my business. Moruay turned out to be extremely helpful, but she had shown me something important in her short time with me. I could get so much further if I added more skills to my business. Fortunately, Moruay had brought a friend of hers from Sister Isle named Oogura, who was incredible with a pen.
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More than you would think. She dabbles a bit in magic, so she knew a lot about magical inscriptions. But she made the most of her money from drawing posters and signage. She was always incredibly talented and she had a warming heart, but gods did she have a mouth on her!
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I was annoyed by how chatty she was at first, but you get used to her. I'll tell you one thing, though. That woman has been more of a daughter to me than my own flesh and blood.
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I didn't hire them seeking to replace my old family or anything. I was sincerely thinking about my business at the time and, oh ma'am did we have a good thing going. With Moruay's help, I had managed to expand into a new market entirely and Oogura's improvements to the storefront seemed to bring in more customers.
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Oh, I doubt they ever exploited. I gave them even shares of our income. By that time, I had been working for dozens of years and I didn't really need the money as much as I appreciated their companionship. I'd spent so long shunning the living that I had forgotten what it was to have friends. If you ever tell any of them I said this, I'll deny it, but I would have given up my share entirely to keep them around the shop. As it was, their individual successes were a victory for all of us.
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That arrangement was a sort of precursor to the guild you'll have read about in my file, but that was yet to be formed in those days. I had been bouncing the idea around for a while, but what ultimately led me in that direction was a series of events beginning with the end of the Rebellion. A lot of people were flitting around the capitol at the time we entered a strange month of strange requests. One of the most recent was a request from a gearhead from Ravager named Takaa, who had commissioned Oogura to make some spell scrolls for a friend of his. I didn't think I'd look twice at the man until he returned the next day after he collected his papers. What was more, he had brought my old friend Saayuko with him.
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As it turned out, Saayuko's struggle with Mordecai didn't end when I left them for dead in a burning building. Mordecai didn't quite finish the job, but she didn't have the strength to stop him from picking her up and dragging her away to some cabin by the Pledge River.
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Well, no I didn't finish the job either. The problem is that I only did to him what the Purge did to me. As a sai'mul, he had retreated to some old family home from a time when he still had a family who could stand to be with him.
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Don't compare me to him! The man was a shameless killer!
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Well, the sick fuck had kept her locked in his cabin, torturing her for what we did to him. She only managed to escape when another sai'mul came to meet him. She forced herself free while the two men were distracted and rested up before going after him again. What had brought her to my store was her vexation with Mordecai's new undead mate who was somehow skilled with magic. This reminded me of an old friend from the other side of the city, so while Oogura set off to work on a scroll that could dispel barriers I set out in search of Bene, but I spent a whole day of it in vain.
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When I got back, Saayuko was already gone with her scroll. She said nothing else of where she was going, so we could only try to get back to work. Takaa stuck around after proving himself useful. It wasn't easy finding a use for his fixation with machines, but he turned out to be a damned good shot with his rifle. I was thinking of offering him a job when Saayuko returned, just one day after she had left. She found Mordecai and his accomplice, but had apparently also found them with a small gang of sai'mul and needed backup to capture them
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She didn't need to work to hard to convince me. I gathered everyone up and followed Saayuko to the sai'mul hideout. With Oogura's magic, we had knocked several of them out before they even knew we were there and the rest of the battle unfolded like a song. By the end of it, we had only just caught up to Mordecai and the leader of this gang, a man I would come to know only as Roman.
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He seemed to sincerely wonder why I would bother to get in his way. He went on this rant about how we as sai'mul were the closest anyone gets to immortal. We had only to get over our rotting skin affliction and we would somehow be perfect beings. Now, perfection isn't something I've ever cared for, but this guy had chosen to side with somebody I had resolved to kill, so there really wan't anything for me to consider at the time. I raised my weapons to fight, but Roman and Mordecai had somehow managed to get away using a glass ball of piercing light as a distraction.
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Their trail was cold by the time we were able to see well enough to track them, so we had no choice but to give up for the moment. We wound up returning to the shop for dinner after the search ended, by which I mean I watched the others eat takeout from some Galean place in the Apex District. While talking with Saayuko and the others, I finally decided to come out with my abstract idea to form a versatile guild of crafters with combat skills. Together, we would be a group that combines the skills to create value and destroy those who threaten the public.
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It was only an idle thought before, and I never expected anyone to be interested in both aspects of what I wanted to do. But after what we had done to Roman's gang, it felt like the right time to bring it up. It didn't take much convincing for everyone to agree to become the founding members of The Phoenix Blade.
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