Stahurt is one of the five great cities of the Melki Empire. With the rampant growth of the economy and because of the wars raging in the North, the city has attracted great nobles from various regions, who have left their huge mansions in the countryside to live together in a high-class society.

However, everyone knows one thing: where there is money, there are thieves.

“Hey! Get him! He stole my purse!” A beautiful lady was bawling for help and the idiotic city guards, who got dashing whenever they saw a pair of breasts, rushed to catch the thief.

The men wore large white armour with gold details, which showed that they were just sons of nobles and cared only about looks. Meanwhile, the agile thief, who looked like a running shadow, quickly jumped more than three meters high to climb onto the roofs of the houses. The guards ran less than twenty meters before giving up.

“Ah! Never mind, let’s have a beer. That’s not our problem anymore.”

“That’s it. If I want to fuck someone, I can have my dad hire a whole brothel for me.”

“Urgh! Brothel? You’re disgusting, Adam.”

“What? A man has to satisfy his needs.”

From the top of the buildings, the hiding thief listened attentively to that conversation. Since most of the guards were dumb, they were very vulnerable when drunk, making robbing them easy.

But since it wasn’t even past three in the afternoon, he decided not to follow them; after all, it was too early, and if he got involved in a fight, they could identify him.

The noise of someone landing behind the thief alerted him. Vulp! “Luke, did you get any information?”

The thief looked seriously at the woman climbing on the roof and replied: “Nothing. They don’t have a fixed route; they just… go back and forth like confused rats.”

“What a bummer! I can’t believe I had to wear that ridiculous dress and pretend to be a slut for nothing.”

Realizing that the man did not react to her irritation, Meredith did not continue with her drama. “Now what? What are we going to do? It’s been two months since we arrived in this town, and we still haven’t found anything. Should we not have left New Yukiat?”

“We made the right decision. That religion is growing even more there, and you know they think we are as dangerous as demons.”

Luke is a half-wolf, and Meredith is a half-fox. However, both were positive human lineage, so they only had superficial characteristics like tails, ears, and eyes. Before the negative human half-beast lineage was discovered, positive lineage half-beasts could even walk among people if they were brave… but everything changed when the great Sakan Religion announced began to condemn all half-beasts. 

“You know I will always be on your side, so why don’t we go back to Oukiwa? We grew up there and have our connections.”

Luke looked angrily at the girl with his yellow eyes, as if that was a forbidden subject to the touch.

“So what? Why not?” She persisted in her question.

He stood up and spoke angrily while frowning all over his face. “Don’t irritate me when I haven’t even had lunch yet.” After that, he started bouncing around the buildings as he seemed to look for something among the dozens of alleys.

“Luke… Man, it’s been a year since we left Oukiwa and you never told me the reason we had to rush out of there.”

“I did tell you!” He started to let go, and his quick heels made a noise only when he touched the ground with his feet. Vulp! Vulp! Luke jumped forward two jumps.

Meredith caught up to him because she was fast and grew up doing it, but she knew that if Luke wanted to get away from her, he could easily do it. “Refresh my memory. What was the motive then?”

“Ann… I told you I owed someone.”

Being his childhood friend, she knew that Luke was a great thief and a terrible liar, so she decided to tease even more: “Who was it?”

“Annn…” Luke thought for a while. “It was Matthew.”

“Are you kidding? Matthew turned to father and was your best friend, why would you run away from him?”

“Because he was a jerk?” The half-wolf said as he stopped at one of the buildings near the main avenue.

Stahurt was a city hundred miles long, packed with guards for every corner, so it was hard to get victims worth the risk. There were plenty of ladies and boys who left the Academy full of money in their pockets, but Meredith didn’t like the idea of drawing that much attention, and that suited Luke’s sneaky style.

Since he had already robbed a lot of innocent people, Luke wasn’t worried about stealing a few students or small food tents; however, they were not after robbery like this; they needed information.

“Who are you looking for? We already came here this morning, and we haven’t found anyone who fits our description.” Meredith asked but was ignored.

Luke was checking person by person in the vast crowd that strolled down the main street when finally, his eye stopped on one place. Meredith looked to see who her partner was looking for so hard.

Numerous people were gathered around a bulletin board, and amidst all the people, this girl’s experienced eyes didn’t miss a man.

He wore an inconspicuous brown hood, was short, and moved slowly, the perfect profile for a thief. Excited, Meredith said: “There are more thieves! We should follow him.”

“Maybe, but calm down.” Luke looked attentively at the short man as well.

Taking advantage of the distress of the crowd of adventurers, who were fighting to get good quests, the little guy reached out for the coin purse that was on the utility belt of a big guy.

The big guy was wearing heavy armour and had stretched out to pick up a mission, so the little guy easily managed to grab the bag.

“Okay, let’s go.” Meredith said excitedly.

“Relax…”

The black gauntlet of large armour grabbed the head of the thief, who was about to make it out of the mess.

“Did you think you could steal The Great Slayer of Wyverns named Hokudo?!”

The crowd scattered over the confusion and began to pay attention to the brawl.

“Great? Only if you are talking about its size. I’ve never heard about you.” A brown-haired girl said, debauching the big guy’s flashy attitude. She was also an adventurer and was irritated because of the excitement created by Hokudo.

The man, without blinking, hurled the thief at the woman and hit him squarely. By now, Luke and Meredith were long gone. A fight between adventurers would draw the attention of the whole town and mobilize many guards, which made the main street a dangerous place for them.

“Holy shit! If that guy hadn’t been caught, it was likely we’d be running into more of us now.”

“Did you know you’re pretty scatterbrained for a thief?” Luke joked with Meredith.

“Don’t tell me you organized all this yourself.”

“No, you know I never get involved with those guild people. They draw too much attention.”

“Then why did you take us there?”

“Annn… I wanted to stretch my legs.”

Meredith couldn’t understand why Luke didn’t talk to her the way he used to, and he was also much different than before, colder. It seemed that everything had changed in a few months… And well, all this change had a reason: the fall of the Broteforge Empire. 

But for me to tell the story of how the largest empire on the continent collapsed, first I have to start telling where it all began; after all, the decadence of Broteforge was a series of long events.

— Broteforge Empire, two years ago. —

“The sun asked the moon to marry him. And the moon said: I don’t know, I don’t know. Give me a break. ♫”

A lousy band was playing frantically in an even worse tavern. Deep in the tavern, a quartet of guys is gathered because they had had another successful day.

“Aaahh! We should go get someone to fuck.”

“We? You say that like you want to have group sex.” replied a short boy whose glasses were already old and worn out.

“Why not?” continued Zack: “We’re brothers, so it’s okay!”

“Luke, Zack is acting weird.” The boy warned the half-wolf as he crawled away from the big guy. “Why do you have to drink so much? Ergh!”

Bam! Zack hit his head on the table as he fell asleep. Luke mentally thanked himself for not having to interfere. He was already trying hard enough to keep going in such a stinky place.

“Hey, John! Have you ever thought about becoming an adventurer?” Ynosuke, who had a harlot on each arm, exclaimed to the bespectacled boy. “You have a very innocent look for your profession.”

“Naah! The robberies in Oukiwa are worth much more. The guild here has too many strong adventurers for people like us to try to compete with, and the Dungeons… in the end, we’d close the day full of injuries and without a penny in our pockets.”

“Hahaha! What about you, Luke? Have you ever thought about becoming a adventurer?”

“Yeah, I’ve never seen you in trouble. You must be as strong as a B-Class.”

The half-wolf knew that adventurers swam in money. From the moment you get a Class A certification, you won’t have to enter a Dungeon ever again if you don’t want to because you could make fortunes just protecting noble families.

However, the main advice Luke heard from more experienced thieves as a child was:

“Never steal from an adventurer.”

“Don’t ever get near an armored dude’s bag of coins.”

“If the person has a knife, know that they are ready to kill you if you try to steal it. So don’t steal it.”

He had already set aside two of those three pieces of advice, but there was still one that he wouldn’t even think of crossing off that list.

“No.” Luke replied to his friends.

When he smelled with his sense of smell something so rotten that he had to cover his nostrils and his ears picked up three loud footsteps about to enter the tavern, Luke knew something was about to happen.

The tavern door creaked as it opened slowly. Nheeeec! The bard’s band stopped playing and accompanying a fat man; two huge men had to stoop to enter the establishment. Both were wearing all-black armour with sharp details and carried claymores on their backs.

The fat man gave a nasty smile and said: “We are looking for someone….”