Shot for Shot with Brasco

The party was almost out of the Bitter Remedy when Gravenhurst reminded them that errands have witnesses. Brasco the Red had heard enough. From his place in the tavern, he understood the shape of what the party was about to do: they were leaving with Blastbelle, talking about sewers, stashes, and trouble that ran close to Graven Scourge interests. Ash, not fully tracking the line between Thieves Guild and Graven Scourge, needled him anyway. Brasco answered with a simpler test. Could Ash drink? The challenge became exactly the sort of tavern ritual Gravenhurst knew how to make dangerous: shot for shot, with punches between rounds. It was not a duel, not a formal fight, and not quite friendly. It was a public measurement of pride, pain tolerance, and whether Ash could take a hit from someone whose knuckles felt like iron. Ash accepted. The first drink hit him badly, and Brasco barely reacted. Then the punches started. Ash landed enough to split blood. Brasco swung back hard enough to make the contest real, but his confidence began to fray with each round. By the third shot, even Brasco was feeling it. Ash kept standing, kept swinging, and finally watched Brasco slump down at the table. The Graven Scourge man had lost. Ash won twenty coin and a small social victory: not a treaty, not an alliance, but the kind of tavern win that people remember later when names come back around. He also left the contest drunk, which made the next leg of the mission more complicated than it needed to be. Then Ash noticed the cloth. A finely knitted piece hung from Brasco's pocket while he rested, dazed and vulnerable. It looked personal. Important. Possibly tempting, if Ash wanted to turn a win into a theft. He did not take it. That mattered in its own quiet way. The party was already walking into a job tangled in stolen goods, Guild desperation, sewer territory, and faction pressure. Ash had an easy chance to make a small cruelty permanent and chose to leave the thing where it was. Instead, he took the win, took the coin, and staggered out with the others toward the Glow Pools. For once, the party had not lost a fight. They had merely made the next one harder.