Marco managed another few hours of sleep before the sun finally caught up with him, but this time the awakening was welcome. The team was already up and about by the time he and Aethe got downstairs, and a quick breakfast later they were on the road.

The few hours between them and the capital were barely a problem. The road was clear, and no more bandits seemed eager to attack them. They even met a roving group of rangers who were meant to prevent just the kind of problem they had the day before. The captain of the group took their report seriously and, thankfully, promised to take care of the bodies and let them go without so much as a moment's delay.

Marco took that as a generally good sign. It was what he'd expect in situations where the government was generally anti-bandit. He tried to let that reassure him as much as he could as they headed towards the capital.

All the time, his temple sense was getting stronger. He was getting closer to a temple objective in a way that was impossible to ignore. The system hadn't explicitly said that there was a person on the other side of things experiencing the same sense, but his experience with temples seemed to indicate there was a pretty good chance there was, that someone in the capital knew he was coming and had plenty of time to prepare his reception, whether that turned out to be good or bad.

When the capital rose from the horizon ahead of them, it was even bigger and shinier than the port city had been. To some extent the first stop had inoculated them against the second, and prepared them for how big a city could be. The capital blew past that anyway. It was bigger and grander in every respect, a walled city that had long since overflowed its own protections to fill miles upon miles of territory in every direction.

"Big," Marco said. "Why is it so big, Kuzai?"

"I get the impression you've only ever been around relatively small islands. If that's true, they were restricted by what they could produce themselves and get by trade over sea. That's a comparatively limiting way to live. The main island isn't much worse than a small continent, I've been told. That's lots of room to grow food, mine, encounter dungeons, and the like."

"It's like a fish in a tank," Riv said. "It grows to fit what it has to grow in."

"Our driver will get us through the gates," Kuzai said. "That's his job. As big as this city is, there isn't much in it that would interest you and what there is will be very hard to find. If you take my advice, you'll use me as a guide to find the thing you are looking for and then get back to your normal ocean prowling. It's more profitable that way."

As big as the city looked, they still had a good half hour before they would get there. In the meantime, Marco chatted with Riv and Aethe while Elisa took some time with the most mysterious of her many notebooks. It was the one she had picked up from the corpse in the turtle, and Marco was only unsurprised that she had read it so seldom because there had been so little time since its acquisition that she had been idle, at least while he had also been conscious.

"Any progress with that?" Marco asked. "I don't see how you could ever figure it out. You don't know a single word of that language."

"Not yet. I'm a scholar, though. It's a hard problem, but if I give my skills enough time to work on it, it might take."

When they reached the gate, the guards and the Wagoneer greeted each other as if they had interacted many times before. There were some formalities to entering the capital, which they went through at lightning speed, but still took minutes of work to clear. By the time they seemed to be wrapping up, the guards knew the last time the Wagoneer had been there, why he was here now, who he was carrying, how long they had been with him, and what he expected his charges would be doing in the city.

Marco found that the Wagoneer had been listening far closer than he expected he had, listing off a few reasons for them being there that more or less tracked with their goals. He did exercise some level of discretion, subbing in class advancement purposes

for more specific mentions of the temple. Even so, there was much more information in the air about his crew and their objectives than Marco had expected there would be.

That didn't go unnoticed.

"Excuse me." A man in official-looking clothes approached the wagon, disregarded the wagoneer entirely, and addressed the group. He set his searching eyes on the crew, somehow seemed to identify Marco as its leader, and leaned in. "Are you perhaps recently arrived from sea? The outer seas, I mean."

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

"I am." Marco stood and hopped down from the wagon. "Who is asking?"

"I'm a servant of the regional overseer."

"The what, now?"

"The king, Marco." Kuzai gave a slight bow to the newcomer. "Or as close as we have to one."

"He doesn't like that title much. He is elected, after all." The man reached into his pocket and handed Marco a note. "Here is a message, straight from the overseer. Before you ask, I don't know what it says."

Marco handed it off to Elisa, who opened it and read it out loud. Marco thought that was the best move here. It kept his hands free, at least.

The note was signed Jare, which seemed a little plain for a man most seemed to see as a ruler. Marco didn't know whether to see that as a good sign or a bad one.

"Kuzai, what's this guy's reputation like?"

"Honestly? Stellar. He's been in charge for decades. The country has thrived around him. You hardly ever hear about him taking direct action outside of emergencies."

"And then?"

"Tough old guy, by all accounts." The guards nodded along with the assessment. "Although by now he must be ancient. No telling how that's affected things."

Marco turned back to the assistant, who was waiting patiently off to the side.

"What are your orders if we decline?" Marco said. "If we decide not to go, I mean."

"Orders, sir?" The assistant looked honestly confused. "I don't have any. I'm on courier duty. My job is to relay your message back to the Overseer. I have no orders beyond that."

Marco did his best to do the math. If this was a trick, there was a whole city worth of forces close by. He figured that most of them would be pushovers, but concentrated fire from hundreds of different foes was enough to take down big things, usually. In Jare's position, he figured it wasn't even necessary to ask Marco to come.

On the other side of things, not everyone who held a temple or wanted to was violent. Quill had been. Stead had been. Some people were just normal folks who got lucky or unlucky enough to come in contact with that system. He had to think there was a chance that occasionally a person who seemed good just might be.

"What do you think, team?"

"We either don't have a real choice or it's fine," Riv said. "That's my take."

Elisa and Aethe seemed to agree.

"Kuzai, you want to come? Might be interesting."

"Oh, I'm sure," he said. "But no. Not my meeting, not the best use of my time. I think our time traveling together has probably come to an end."

"Ah." Marco knew it was coming, but he was almost sad to see the pulper go. He had been a good guest, so to speak. Kuzai was more help than he was trouble to have around. "You did promise me some sort of message, here at the end of things."

"Can you wait?" Kuzai asked the servant. "Just a minute or so."

"This is my work for today. Take all the time you need."

Kuzai took Marco a bit away to the side of the gate and slapped him affectionately on the shoulder.

"You've been a good captain to travel with. Considering what your life is like, I thought I'd share something. It's just a thought, really, but it's something I've been thinking about for a long time."

"I'm ready when you are."

"It's like this. I'm old, Marco. Not ready to die, but too old for adventures in many ways. When you found me on that island, it was during one last jaunt into the outer seas, just a little trip to see if I might get lucky and pick up another level, or have an adventure. You gave me both."

"I was glad to."

"I know you were. Point is, though, I got to a point in my life where I was either going to find some ship pointed out towards the horizon and travel until there was no me left to travel with, or I was going to make a safe choice. I have all the money I could ever spend, all the equipment and resources I could ever need."

"You won't run out of things to pulp?"

"Run out?" Kuzai laughed. "Marco, I own entire forests. The point I'm trying to make is that eventually I had to make a choice between out there and in here, and I chose in here. Everyone you'll ever meet who makes it to the outer seas eventually has to make that same choice. If I had to guess, your choice is going to come up sooner than most people's."

"I don't understand."

Marco was nearly frustrated and couldn't put his finger on why. Kuzai wasn't telling him anything that didn't make sense, nothing that wasn't obvious to even the most casual observer. Anyone who thought about it earnestly for even a moment would have covered this mental territory on their first day at sea, again on the first day in an outer sea, and every day after things got hard there.

Marco had talked about it, of course. About sailing forever, about the limits of things or the lack thereof. But somehow those were all just the kinds of things you said in a conversation like that. Here, somehow, was the first time someone had really specifically called his attention to it in a focused way, in a way where it was presented as the infinitely important eventuality it was.

And in that moment, Marco was realizing the reason he didn't immediately understand was because he had just never really thought about it.