Elemental Cats

Brunswick met Wulf's eyes for an instant before averting his gaze and looking around and behind himself to see if Wulf was looking at someone else. However, it was abundantly clear that Wulf was watching Brunswick and no one else.

Wulf stood up and picked up one of the items from the trash pile that Brunswick had thrown away.

"You discarded this one, right? Mind telling me why?"

Brunswick's naturally nervous disposition was already giving him a hard time due to the hectic day he had experienced and due to being surrounded by people he had never met before. Brunswick felt as if Wulf's stare pierced through his body and nailed him to the ground.

Even with his eyes telling him that there wasn't any aggression in Wulf's movements, Brunswick couldn't stop himself from freezing up. But Brunswick also knew that staying silent to a question directly targeted at him might encourage Wulf to use more forceful methods, so he stuttered out an answer.

"B-because it is of low quality, sir."

"Hmm? In what way?"

"T-the blade is unbalanced, sir."

Brunswick remembered the sword he chose to discard, but even if he didn't remember, he saw the faults as soon as he laid eyes on it after Wulf picked it up.

Wulf swung the sword a few times before asking his next question.

"Are you a weaponsmith? Or a swordsman, maybe?"

"N-no, sir."

Brunswick wanted to tell Wulf that his eyes allowed him to analyze things, but it didn't look like he would get the opportunity. Brunswick felt like opening his mouth without first being spoken to would end poorly for him. He couldn't use his eyes to plead for help from Toz, either, since he was too scared to move his eyes away from the floor.

However, Brunswick didn't have to endure Wulf's pressure for much longer since Hayar smacked his arm.

"Cap'n, you're about to make Swirles piss himself. Chill out a bit."

Wulf looked startled and took a step back before regaining a calm and composed expression, completely hiding his intense stare behind a facade of tranquility. Though, he immediately exposed his awkwardness when he opened his mouth again.

"Oh, right. Sorry about that. Got a little too curious about your appraisal ability."

Brunswick flashed a grateful look at Hayar while answering.

"I-I don't mind at all, sir."

Though even without Wulf's eyes boring down on him and with his apology, Brunswick was still too nervous to relax completely.

"Anyway, why are you handing me stuff that's completely fine when you're better at discerning an item's true value than me?"

Brunswick was shocked enough at Wulf's question that he stopped looking at the floor and faced Wulf again.

"What do you mean?"

"Exactly what I said. I don't know what your inclination is or what you did for the Blue bastards, but your swirly eyes are better at discovering fakes than mine. I didn't even notice the sword was unbalanced until I swung it a few times."

"R-really?"

Brunswick had a difficult time believing he was better than the captain of the Bunglehoppers at identifying treasure, and he looked quite skeptical at Wulf's claims.

"So that pile over there aren't items I couldn't see the flaws with? They are actual treasures?"

Brunswick asked while pointing at the pile of items he had handed over to Wulf for a secondary review since he couldn't find anything wrong with them.

"You tell me. I don't sense anything wrong with those items."

Brunswick was still shocked and busy trying to grasp how he, a fourth level mage, was better at something than Wulf, who was almost at the ninth level.

"Great! With that settled, let's run every item we're uncertain about through Swirles from now on."

Wulf clapped his hands and began shoveling the piles around him over to Brunswick with a smile.

The clanging and rustling roused Brunswick from his daze and forced him to get to work again.

With Brunswick speeding through the piles of items, accurately determining their approximate worth, the sorting progressed at an incredible pace. However, there were some things that took longer to determine the worth of.

Though, since Brunswick couldn't see through them in just a few moments like he could with practically everything else, those items probably weren't useless, and Brunswick placed them to the side so he could go through them later when he finished with everything else.

The pile of books, odd treasures, and what looked like scrap naturally garnered the interest of the others, but since they wanted to complete the sorting, they put a lid on their curiosity.

However, even if they focused on going through everything Toz and the cats brought back from the Blue Lounge Treasury, outside circumstances wouldn't let them finish in peace.

Everyone heard Frank's voice echo down through the stairway.

"Cap'n! I think we pissed off a couple of wasps' nests with our stunt!"

It didn't take any thinking for the people going through all the loot to realize that the Blue Lounge League of Pirates was coming to take revenge and reclaim that loot.

Toz and everyone else stood up and began heading toward the stairs. Brunswick trailed slightly behind, but no one thought much about it since he was, after all, the weakest physically.

The Bunglehoppers and the Paw Print Pirates came out of the hole in the ground to find Frank on the verge of a mental breakdown. Frank looked like he was about to burst into tears as he saw everyone else.

"Cap'n! There are so many of them! What do we do?!"

Wulf chopped Frank's head without flinching as he began moving toward where he could sense a whole bunch of people coming from.

"What do we do? We show them how fearsome bunglehoppers are."

Toz and the cats had trouble keeping themselves from laughing despite the serious situation after hearing Wulf's statement.

However, that didn't stop them from walking next to Wulf directly toward the Blue Lounge League of Pirates, who had come to take revenge.