Their next stop was the market, where they gathered the rare metals for what Remus had already started calling, in his own head, the aetherspore microscope, along with what supplies the coin could stretch to for the road ahead. He stopped at Dinolfo's shop on the way out and bought one of every weapon on the rack.
"One of these has to suit me," he said, more to himself than to anyone else, running his fingers over a row of blades, spears, and daggers with the same appraising eye he'd once used on prototype components back on Earth.
He hadn't yet found the one that would, and some quiet, unexamined part of him already suspected the answer wasn't going to be a weapon at all. He filed the thought away, unresolved, the way he filed most things lately, and kept moving.
Before they left the market district entirely, Remus ducked into a narrow stall selling salvaged goods, more out of habit than need, and found himself running his thumb absently over a small, oil-stained mechanical latch someone had pried off some larger, broken machine. The smell of the oil, faint and metallic under the dust, caught him somewhere he hadn't braced for, and for one disorienting half-second he was standing in a different workshop entirely, in a different body, with a woman's perfume cutting through the smell of solder and machine grease. He set the latch back down without buying it, more carefully than the moment required, and didn't say anything about it to anyone. It wasn't the first time some small, unremarkable object had done that to him since he'd woken up in this world, and he was beginning to suspect it wasn't going to be the last. He tucked the thought away in the same place he kept the question about the real blueprints, wherever they still were, and whether it had ever mattered to anyone that he'd hidden them at all.
He caught up with the others outside the shop without explaining the delay, and nobody asked.
They gathered at the western gate of Oldtown as the last light of the day slanted low and gold across the walls. Julius had already gone ahead to Quinoa with the gold under a hired escort, and it was just the four of them now, packs shouldered, an old yellowed job posting for a monster nobody had ever hunted successfully tucked into Remus's travel coat alongside his stub of charcoal.
"West, then," Gregory said, hefting his own pack with the eagerness of a man finally getting the adventure he'd left home for in the first place.
"West," Remus agreed, and touched the charcoal at his collar once, an unconscious habit already, before falling into step behind him.
The four of them passed through the gate and out beyond the walls of Oldtown, turning west toward the edge of the Midlands, toward the border crossing into the Northlands and whatever waited for them past it, a poisoned garrison and a much larger army neither of them yet knew was coming, a fortress none of them had built yet, and a monster whose eye they would need long before any of them found the creature itself.
Behind them, Oldtown's gates swung slowly shut for the night, and somewhere back inside those walls, in a room full of ledgers and forms, a beast-woman with rabbit ears was already telling anyone who asked about the strange party of four who'd just walked out to hunt a Basilisk that had killed every company sent after it so far.
None of them looked back.