“Cedrick, do you see that bell tower outside? Just the other day I got on my hands and knees to beg a metalworker to repair the crack on that bell. And you know what? I got her to do it free of charge! You see, that’s the type of thing that I’ve been doing every day to run a poor town like Bell Village.” With a snide smirk, Leon Marble then pointed down on the table, “So how do you expect me to have the time to hire more people to repair your floor?”
“Um. That’s not exactly what I was talking about.” Cedrick Arbor scratched the back of his hand. “Look, I know how… personal you like to take your new job, so I thought it was a good idea to come to you.”
Leon raised his eyebrow in response.
“It’s just that… For the past month,” Cedrick laid his hands on the table as he looked to Leon, “I’ve been hearing scaping under my floorboards.”
“Go on.” Leon withdrew his hand and crossed his legs.
Cedrick briefly looked down and furrowed his eyebrows. “It goes on throughout the whole day, as well as when I’m sleeping… Sometimes, I swear I hear coughing too!”
“What? This past month? Didn’t you tell anybody?”
“Well, at first it was so quiet I thought it was nothing, but this week it’s gotten to the point where it sounds like the scraping’s almost underneath me. So I thought about investigating or getting help…” Cedrick averted his eyes away from Leon to look to the floor. “But I just ended up doing nothing instead.” Leon opened his mouth but Cedrick quickly continued, “T-That changed this morning! When I was making tea, my foot broke through a floorboard and left a hole into some dark place.”
“Hm…” Leon leaned back into his chair and sighed. “Fine, I’ll go take a look at it. But where is this hole?”
|—|
Cedrick opened the front door of the house and lifted his hand, pointing through the doorframe. “It’s near the middle of my living room.”
Leon took off his coat and stepped past Cedrick, entering the home. Various furnishings like bookshelves, chairs, tables, and dressers occupied the room. Lowering his gaze, Leon saw a shattered porcelain object next to a missing floorboard, leading into pitch-black darkness. Leon took a step from the entrance as he squinted his eyes. A noise like raking resounded from the hole.
It’s probably just a mole… But just to make sure. Leon put his hand up to his mouth to guide his voice, calling out, “Hello? Is anyone there?” A low mumbling began to accompany the scraping and Leon clicked his tongue. “Who’s in there?”
“Go…” a man’s voice groaned from the dark, “Go away…”
Leon tilted his head and Cedrick walked past him, nearing the hole and crouching a good few feet away from it. “Uh, hello? Sorry, but could you please stop going under my house?”
For a second there was silence, but it then was broken by loud laughter coming out of the hole. “Your house?.. You mean the land that you stole from me?”
“Hm?” Leon’s eyes narrowed at the hole and Cedrick’s mouth opened.
“What? Stole?” Cedrick let out.
A chuckle echoed from the hole again. “Yeah, I left this place a while ago, but now… I’m back… Now just go away and let my land be. I couldn’t care less if you built your little house over it… It’s mine…”
A nerve in Leon’s head popped out as he stepped beside Cedrick and accusingly pointed down into the hole. “Hey hey hey hey hey hey! What makes you think you can dig under my town’s houses and say it’s yours, huh? I’m talking to you, you donkey!”
“I’m Azul Gold~… And I lived down here while digging for gold… It was here that I found so much I became rich… I left here long, long ago because I couldn’t find any more gold… But now that I ran out, there has to be some more left for me! If I just keep looking, it’s gonna be like the old days~… Hell, my last name is Gold!”
Leon clicked his tongue. “You’re crazy. Almost like those-”
“Listen, Azul,” Cedrick called out again, “Could you please come up here so we can sort this misunderstanding out? Please? I’ll be willing to share~”
No response came. Leon and Cedrick waited a few more seconds before looking at each other and back at the dark inside of the hole. Thinking about getting help, Leon turned around to leave before the man’s voice finally answered. “Okay… I’ll show myself then. Come over here to help me up.”
Leon stopped for a moment before hurriedly turning back to the direction of the hole. “Cedrick, don’t!”
However, Cedrick was already at the hole, expectantly looking into its abyss with an innocent smile. Leon called out to Cedrick as a red light shone out the board-shaped hole and a ball of flame broke through it, smashing into Cedrick’s chest. Cedrick flew backward into Leon and they both fell to the floor as laughing came from below. Leon smacked the fire spreading from Cedrick to him while Cedrick let out panicking groans and wriggled on the floor. After a few seconds, the flames on them were finally put out and Cedrick was left gasping for air.
The laughing grew louder, reverberating throughout the walls, and Leon stared at the circular hole as small flames surrounded it. “Haha! Serves that dumbass right! Now leave me be or I’ll blast ya full of holes! Hahaha! I always win in the end! No matter what!”
I knew it. This guy matches those crazy mages covered on the news to a tee! Leon began to drag Cedrick away. But what now? This man has magic and I don’t. But if I leave like this, the fires will spread to the whole town. Even though Cedrick’s wound doesn’t look fatal, I can’t leave someone behind to run and get the Magic Council either. And most of all, letting some deranged intruder get away with hurting one of my residents is unacceptable! Once Leon dragged Cedrick far enough away from the hollow, the sound of scraping under it returned and the man resumed his laughing.
I’ll settle this right here.
Skimming ahead, he noted that the flames had now spread a good two feet away from the perimeter of the hole. Leon Marble sighed as he put Cedrick on the ground before standing up. Then, looking toward the hole, he bolted into the fire. “If Cedrick was able to break the floor from just brewing tea, then stomping can easily do it!”
Leon crashed his foot into a blazing part of the floor, hurtling the burning wood into the tunnel as it clanked into the ground. But he didn’t stop there, and more bits of the smoldering boards started to crack down into the tunnel. Even if the flame had spread to parts of the wood above solid ground, Leon just kept trampling it until it was put out.
“What? What are you doing!?” Azul shouted.
Leon didn’t respond until all of the burning bits of wood were now inside the tunnel. Then, seeing Leon turn and walk away from the tunnel, Azul backed away from the fire now in his way. A minute of watching passed. Azul then chuckled as he saw the flames start to die down and he looked away to resume digging. But when he started scraping, a wooden chair fell into the pit, refeeding the flame.
“Sorry for this, Cedrick. I’ll get you replacements later!” Leon’s voice resounded from above the pit as a coat and five more chairs crashed down one by one, boosting the fire.
“Hey! What are you doing?! Stop that!” Azul backed further away as two wooden dressers dropped down, one landing in front of him and further creeping the flames toward him. Azul kept retreating as more furniture dropped down, but his back was then met by the end of the tunnel, and he blasted another fireball into the wood, further intensifying the blaze. Azul screamed his lungs out and he hurriedly took his chisel to dig. “STOP IT NOW YOU BAS-”
The man’s voice was then muffled as a bookshelf slammed over the wide trench in the floor, covering it completely. “Tsk, your mistake was that you thought your bygone reality could outdo me. Nothing beats the lengths I go to.” Smirking, Leon sat down on the shelf as he reached for his leg, but he recoiled his hand upon feeling the pain of touching his burns. “Ow! Well, I guess shouldn’t be talking, that probably isn’t going to be enough fire to reach him since I couldn’t risk growing the flames too high.”
Leon then looked to Cedrick, who had stopped gasping at this point and just laid there, unconscious. With a sigh, Leon stood back up and dragged Cedrick out of the house.
|—|
“I think it’s through here.” Leon and a green-hooded man took a turn and approached the smoldering ashes and charcoal resembling furniture on the floor, which the green-hooded man doused with a blast of water. Leon passed the soggy ashes and lifted his lantern to where he last saw the man.
“There he is. It looks like he was too scared to run through the fire and just tried to dig. But it would’ve taken some more time before he suffocated from air-poisoning or lack of air… Just what was he standing around for?” Leon sighed as he approached the reversely bent body of the ragged man named Azul Gold. His lower body slumped on the ground while the upper was sprawled against the wall. On the ground laid a chisel. Leon crouched down and checked Azul’s barren pulse, verifying that he was dead. Then, he squatted down seeing Azul’s hand, and with a smirk, Leon took for himself what it was grasping. “Ah, I see. You got your gold alright.”
Author's Notes
Hello! This is my first post on the forums, even though I’ve been lurking here for some time now.
I wanted to write about something in the WoM world for a while now, but due to everything being shifted to AO it took a long time for me to try to come up with an idea that seemed interesting. Eventually, I just came up with the idea of a citizen doing the impossible of triumphing over a magic user and it turned into this.
I’d be glad to get some feedback. (Especially if this entire story ends up being cringe 
)
That’s it. Bye bye.
