Elemental Cats

Since Hugh had agreed to take credit for defeating the Rat King and make sure no one would know Toz was involved, Toz gave him another potion and helped bandage him. Although the potions healed the skin until its effects settled, Hugh's newly recovered skin and muscles would still be very fragile. Both, to protect the injuries from opening up, and in case the wounds do tear open again, it would be better for Hugh to be wrapped in bandages until he recovers completely.

After Hugh started recovering properly, he and Toz began planning how to successfully let Toz avoid the curious and troublesome gazes of the guild and all the other places. Since not many of them would believe that Hugh singlehandedly defeated the Rat King, they wouldn't believe Toz could have done much either. But if those two are the only known factors in the Rat King's defeat, suspicion and curiosity, mostly suspicion, will fill the investigation.

The more they talked about the various ways that the guild and everyone else would react, the more Hugh started understanding why Toz didn't want to take credit for defeating the Rat King.

While the Explorer's Guild would most likely support Hugh since he is a part of them and acted kind of on their orders, the other guilds and organizations could possibly refuse to honor Hugh and his part in defeating the Rat King. Not acknowledging the worth of the carcass and underpaying for it. Delaying those payments and so on.

There would also be a lot of extensive questioning to try and get Hugh to spill the beans about what really happened. This was the part that Hugh and Toz were working on. If any of the guilds requested a Truthseeker or someone similar, it would be easy to find out if Hugh was lying or not.

So, in order to work around that, Toz came up with the idea to tell the truth, but without actually telling them the whole story.

Hugh agreed that keeping the story short, and sticking with it, would be the easiest way to get through the questioning. It will be easy for him to remember and easy to believe in since there are a few precedents in the history of the Explorers.

The story they had decided to go with was that an expert unidentifiably stronger than Hugh had passed by, defeated the Rat King, and told Hugh to take care of the rest.

The expert in Hugh's tale was naturally Toz in reality. But since Hugh didn't know how much better at fighting Toz was than him, he was unidentifiable stronger. And since he had indeed passed by, tortured the Rat King a bit, and then handed it over to Hugh, the rest of the story also matches with what happened, thus leaving Hugh with a mouth only speaking the truth but without actually telling his future interrogators anything of value.

Blaming the death of the Rat King would also explain the wounds and scars on its body that were vastly different from anything that Hugh could inflict on it.

And if the ones who are questioning him were to ask if he could describe the physical appearances of the mysterious expert that helped him, Hugh could answer that the mysterious expert asked Hugh not to divulge anything about him. Or, if they only ask for a name, Hugh can give up the fake name Toz gave Hugh to confuse them. Hugh knew that Toz hadn't given him his real name for this exact reason.

If the interrogators press on and ask why he would listen so carefully to some random person just because they helped Hugh defeat the Rat King, Hugh could answer that it's because they were very scary. Which they, mainly Lucy, were.

The two of them continued hammering out the details and what to do in certain situations that might arise. Something that had Toz worried would be the promise of even more money from the organizations that wanted to find the mysterious expert. But Hugh said that as long as he was given his proper due for the Rat King's corpse, he wouldn't need any more money for quite some time. Toz had no choice but to believe in Hugh since there was no way to guarantee that he wouldn't hold a grudge for Toz's treatment and just flake out on holding his end of the deal.

Hopefully, there would still be some kind of restrictions on what they can do to Hugh to make him spit out the truth as well. Although finding out the truth about the Rat King and the mysterious expert would be important to a lot of people, who either wanted to recruit him or make him compensate for the losses they incurred due to the evacuation panic, it wouldn't be to such a degree that the Explorer's Guild would let one of their own be subjected to torture. Most likely, the Explorer's Guild would be forced to pay some compensation to every part struck by the rat-induced panic.

After they felt Hugh was somewhat ready to deal with everything that would be coming his way as soon as he brought the dead Rat King to Yellow Sparks, it was time to actually kill the already almost dead creature.

Toz had been right about to launch the final blows when Hugh woke up and distracted him. And although some time had been spent handling that, the Rat King hadn't recovered enough mana to even begin healing its injuries, and it was on the verge of dying from blood loss, even if they left it alone. But both Hugh and Toz knew that the Rat King wouldn't necessarily stay dead if it was mere blood loss that killed it. There was a reason the vitality of the beast was underlined and emphasized several times, and neither Toz nor Hugh had any intention of finding out why exactly that was. It would be better to guarantee its death once and for all, the first time it's killled.

The only problem was how Toz was going to go about killing the Rat King. Hugh would be happier and more likely to follow through on their agreement if he could get as much money as possible from the Rat King's corpse. But at the same time, the corpse needed to be deader than dead for both of them to be satisfied. What to do?

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