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Either way, if this radio silence kept up for much longer, he would try to contact her again soon. Apart from just wanting to check up on her, she might've come up with new treasure hunting clues for him. He hadn't wanted to dispatch a fifth squad, as the reapers all seemed to agree that it would mean spreading their forces too thin, but now that Hahl Saqqaf was here, that might have changed.

With so many teams out looking for these artifacts of power, at least one of them would have to find something, right? It hadn't been looking great so far, but he was trying to think positively for a change.

Hmm.

Yeah, it didn't suit him, he concluded. Better to just plan on everyone coming back empty-handed.

And to that end, Hector's greatest concern at the moment was motivating him to spend the majority of his time differently than usual.

That concern being Ivan.

If the Salesman of Death returned, perhaps with Bloodeye in tow, then the entirety of Warrenhold would be endangered. Everything that he and Garovel had been working so hard to build over the last several months could be destroyed overnight.

More than anything, he couldn't allow that to happen. If he was truly the Lord of Warrenhold like everyone said he was, then protecting this place was his responsibility.

Which was why he decided to start taking an even more active role in the castle's reconstruction.

The one thing he had right now was time to prepare.

And heck, maybe it wouldn't even be Ivan. Maybe it would be some other invader. And maybe it wouldn't be for many, many years.

But he felt in his bones that it would happen eventually. One way or another, Warrenhold would definitely come under siege, one day. With all the shit he'd gotten himself involved in? All the fugitives and refugees he was accepting?

It was inevitable, Hector thought.

And when that day came, he aimed to make sure that the attackers got a lot more than they bargained for.

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But if crime kept going down, then he wouldn't be able to justify going out on patrol very often, and then his free time really would disappear. He'd have to find some other way of unwinding while still feeling like he was being productive. Soaking in the hot spring was great for the prior, but not so much for the latter.

Hmm, maybe he could find a hobby that included the Elroy kids, somehow. That, alone, might make it feel more productive. He felt responsible for all the Rainlords in Warrenhold, of course, but when it came to Marcos and Ramira, that feeling was... magnified, in a way.

Perhaps it wasn't quite accurate to say that he was "closer" to the Elroys than with the other Houses, but there was definitely something different about his relationship with them. Between the familial link of Garovel and Chergoa, Zeff teaching him so much about materialization, and Axiolis being the one who introduced them to all the other Rainlords--he couldn't deny their special status in his mind.

And even aside from Emiliana, there were more Elroy kids out there whom he hadn't met. Francisco and Gema Elroy, wherever they were.

Regarding Emiliana, she'd been fairly quiet, recently. She must've been busy doing... whatever it was she did. Research under Gohvis or something. She hadn't tried to contact him, as far as he'd been able to tell. He wanted to think that no news was good news, especially with the war going on. If she was getting roped into the conflict, he hoped that she would tell him, but maybe that was foolish.

He hadn't exactly volunteered information about his own, insanely dangerous adventures, either. He didn't see much point in giving her cause to worry about her family any more than she probably already was.

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Garovel had been telling him that it soon wouldn't be a matter of "finding" the time for things, anymore. It would only be a matter of "making" time for them. And Hector was beginning to understand what he meant by that.

With so much going on all the time, so many people requesting meetings with him in both Atreya and Lorent, everything was just totally different now. If he wanted to, he could book every hour of every day for the next month with one thing or another. A meeting or training or maintenance or patrolling or reading paperwork for the Bank or listening to reports from various reapers--there was, quite literally, always something that he could be doing.

Free time simply didn't exist, anymore.

Unless he went out of his way to create it, was Garovel's point.

At this rate, he wondered if he would ever watch another movie or play another video game again.

Right now, his "free time" was all going to patrolling Gray Rock. It used to stress him out so much, but now he looked forward to how relaxing it was. Compared to facing down some insanely powerful servant or monster, it was quite pleasant to be dealing with regular ass criminals.

He could use the time to multitask, too. He could read up on various subjects that interested him while en route to wherever Garovel sensed the next "doomed" person. Or he could just mull things over in a background thought process or two. It was nice to just take time to think about shit.

Unfortunately, Garovel was having an increasingly difficult time finding people with the "aura of death" around them. Well, okay, that wasn't actually unfortunate. It was obviously great that crime seemed to be on the decline in Gray Rock, especially after the spikes that it had seen after his return from Sair.