How to Get Girls, Get Rich, and Rule the World (Even If You're Ugly)
Chapter 64: How to Rescue Someone Who’d Never Admit Needed Saving (4)

Chapter 64: How to Rescue Someone Who’d Never Admit Needed Saving (4)

There was a certain kind of silence that only happens when you’re too free to know what to do with your freedom.

And that was the silence that followed me as I walked through the containment wing of Antoril’s guard post—alone, no guards, no shackles, no guidance. Just me, my stubbornness, and the misshapen urgency to find Thalia before the city swallowed her whole.

What bothered me—aside from the persistent smell of mildew and evaporated dignity—was how easy everything had been.

One guard? In the capital? With an unconscious prisoner and a half-orc soaked in blood and mud? Either the guard administration was understaffed, or... there was something else. Something that reeked of authorized abandonment.

Even so, I pressed on.

The small administrative room—if it could even be called a room—was at the end of the corridor. The door was ajar.

A crooked chair, a desk with papers stacked in no visible order, and of course, the inevitable mug with something that once resembled coffee and now qualified as its own ecosystem. There was no magical presence there. Just neglect. The kind of place where reports go to die when no one wants to write the truth in them.

I approached cautiously. The papers were divided into piles of despair: unfinished reports, detainment orders, prisoner records scribbled over until their very souls were erased.

I didn’t look for logic. I rummaged the way one digs through muck hoping to find a soggy map.

And then I found it.

A small document, written in the rushed hand of someone at the end of their shift, dated the night before—or maybe earlier that very dawn. A short note. Straight to the point.

"The unconscious girl was transferred to the House of Bells, medical order. Sent as a precaution. Location: central sector, edge of the Arch Square."

Bells? A charming name for a healer’s house that probably rang its bells whenever someone died—or worse: when someone survived and had to pay for it.

But the most important part was there: she was alive. Or at least alive enough to be moved instead of discarded. A thread of hope that cost nothing to grab onto—and, frankly, was the only one available.

I shoved the paper into my pocket, left the room without a sound, and crossed the iron gate leading to the station’s outer courtyard as if I were a respectable citizen.

The streets were beginning to wake. The sky was still dark, but a grayish light had started to creep between the rooftops, as if the city were trying to remember that the sun existed.

I had no idea where I was.

Literally.

Antoril’s northern wing looked more like a collection of warehouses stacked without any regard for maps or coherence.

The signs were faded.

The alleys, all the same.

And the few citizens passing by carried the kind of urgency that comes from not wanting to be noticed—or from knowing that walking slowly around here might turn you into a rumor.

"Central sector," the report had said.

Of course. The center. The damn center.

But in a city built in concentric circles, full of fake shortcuts and architecture that looked like it had been designed by a drunk cartographer, "the center" was a joke with a moving address.

I tried to follow the flow, the louder noises, the smell of baking bread that rose now and then through the sewers. I walked down two wide streets, a narrow alley, turned a corner and... another alley.

The same one? I couldn’t tell anymore.

A few more steps, and I saw a door.

Large. Dark wood, polished iron ring. There was an old inscription above it, but rust had erased almost everything—except for a worn-out bell symbol.

Maybe this was it.

Maybe it was luck.

Or maybe I’d gone full circle and ended up in the kitchen of some third-rate brothel.

But whatever it was, I had to try.

I reached out. Took a deep breath.

And opened the door.

What I saw on the other side...

Was not the center.

"...Shit."

Antoril had the elegance of a well-fed snake: sinuous, hard to read, and clearly willing to swallow you whole if you stayed too long in the wrong place.

The door I opened led not to a medical center, nor to a brothel—though it had the decor of both. It was an abandoned storeroom, smelling of old incense and sour wine, where a couple slept on top of grain sacks while a hungry dog watched them like a thug waiting for a late payment.

I closed the door slowly, as if apologizing for the interruption, and turned back toward the street.

Or what was left of it.

I had exited through one of the side paths of the old city, and now I was in an ambiguous zone between shut-down markets, forgotten alleys, and backstreets that looked like simulations of real roads—false paths that looped back on themselves like a labyrinth drawn by a drunken poet.

I stepped into one of them by mistake, only to discover it ended in a moss-covered stone staircase, and at the bottom of it, a courtyard where a group of children were throwing rocks at a branch and pretending it was a witch.

I climbed again.

Turned back.

Walked through a triangular square where there were more pigeons than citizens, and three statues that clearly depicted historical figures but, judging by their expressions, could just as well have been people about to sneeze.

Technically, I was free. But freedom without direction was just a more poetic form of imprisonment.

I walked through streets that smelled of leather and manure. Through alleys where the buildings seemed to huddle against one another, as if afraid they’d collapse alone.

I saw what looked like markets but sold nothing but rags, and taverns so silent they felt like churches.

At every corner, I told myself "This is the way." And at every new turn, Antoril answered with a resounding "Absolutely not."

I even considered something desperate.

The sewers.

"Maybe," I thought, "if I find an open grate, or a maintenance entrance, I could follow the flow of water to the center. Water always flows to the center."

But then the memory came.

Rats.

So many.

Red eyes. Needle-like teeth. That sound—a liquid snarl mixed with ancient hunger. My feet sinking into mud and entrails, Thalia unconscious on my shoulders, the living shadows trying to swallow us whole.

No.

I wasn’t ready for another underground tango with the infernal army of rat-dentists.

I sighed. Long. Bitter. The kind of sigh only someone lost, tired, and with the wrong person in danger can give. I was starting to feel small.

And not the philosophical kind of small—the actual kind. Like a grain trying to locate itself on a map of flour.

Until, finally... signs.

Yes. Three iron signs planted at an intersection that looked more like an architectural mistake. One of them pointed toward Arch Square. Another said Central Sector – Medical Wing. And the third, crooked and covered in soot, bore a nearly faded drawing... but clearly a bell.

House of Bells.

"Hallelujah," I muttered, though no one around was worthy of a choir.

I followed the indicated path. Now the streets were wider, the tiles better aligned, and the number of people more consistent.

Not crowds—Antoril never really felt crowded, even when it was—but the kind of functional movement of a city not yet entirely corrupted by its own power.

I started walking with more confidence. My street instincts returned easily: read the flow, identify the escape points, the lingering gazes, the hands that strayed too close to pockets.

I passed three hooded men pretending to be deep in conversation while scouting targets, and a woman selling apples who kept a dagger hidden beneath her stall board.

But no one recognized me. And that was good. It meant the prison break hadn’t turned into gossip yet. Or that no one cared enough about a runaway half-orc when the political game was always dirtier than a drainage tunnel.

And then I saw it.

At the end of the main street, between two buildings with stone columns and circular windows, there it was.

The House of Bells.

Large. Tall. With a façade of beige marble blackened by time. Two staircases met at the main door, forming a symmetrical half-arch. Above them, bronze bells hung from enchanted brackets, motionless—but ready to ring.

A ring of healing, or warning.

Or mourning.

My throat tightened.

I had arrived.

But now came the hardest part:

Going in.

And hoping she was still inside.

Alive.

And hating me just a little less than I hated this city.