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Chapter 14. A Step Towards The Shadows
🕑 Added 2025-03-23 15:14:01 +0000 UTCOn a hill not even fifty kilometers away from Hossford city, Guy Wilde saw his closest friend, his brother, his rival, die to insurmountable odds. He went down swinging. There was a whole party of jade-rank adventurers, including the assassin who'd surprised Guy.
She was surprised herself when he didn't go down just from a knife to the throat. If Orlandir could still fight, then who the hell was he to give up? He swung a sword at her and she only barely managed to get a dagger up to block. He still pushed her back. He wasn't going to challenge a jade-ranked assassin to a speed-based duel.
He had to save Orlandir anyway, and he just needed that space to use the closest thing to a movement technique in his arsenal. He flew through the air, raised his sword over his head. The great ax wielder he'd aimed for received a warning from the assassin and managed to bring his ax around just in time. The strength-based technique forced him to his knees.
He was fast, as expected of a jade rank, and a swing of his great ax left rents in the air and moved with a wave of compressed air that was no less deadly than the sharp edge of the blades. He wondered how Orlandir had survived more than five seconds against these bastards. Especially since he had survived the ax only to get two knives to both lungs.
He swiveled with his sword held rigidly, only for the whole battle to flicker out of existence again. He was confused for a moment, but then his left arm fell straight off his body after one perfect chop of an invisible ax. He'd forgotten about the illusion mage, the leader of the jade-ranked party named The Final Rest.
Then he felt it. The tang of iron in the air. The illusion broke like the softest glass, and he saw the glorious battle that was the crowning jewel of his friend's life.
Guy had projected a few months, but the bastard had barely lasted a day before stepping into the master realm. And it was a glorious moment too. It almost looked like a magic spell. A man standing with two swords held at his sides, his eyes half closed, his stance set. He was motionless, whereas, in its advanced state, it had required him to rotate like a human whirlwind.
A storm of swords surrounded him, and any who moved close felt the wrath of iron. Guy could see a hundred ways for the technique to develop, but it was not enough to save his friend even for all its power and potential.
One of the jade rankers was an archer.
He didn't bother to aim though, as he sought to fight the sword domain with a rain of arrows. Guy didn't know if the illusionist helped the archer fake some arrows, but he felt Orlandir's swords cut through thousands of arrows. It was not enough.
There were millions of arrows, and the archer also seemed to have a quick draw technique. The last batch of arrows was faster and had a coating of fire that caused micro explosions on the ground around Orlandir and in his body too.
The archer fell back panting and a gold ranker Guy knew stepped forward to take care of him. He was some kind of support mage, and Guy knew the guy could refill other's mana. The archer was a hybrid warrior mage type.
That was irrelevant at the moment though, and as Guy watched Orlandir's domain fall, he took a crouched stance, managing to balance himself with only one arm, his sword tip aimed at the ground in a one-handed grip.
The great ax wielder stood in front of him and raised his ax in a pantomime of the earth-shattering style. Or maybe the style had been based on such heavy weapons in the first place. Guy didn't have time to consider as he loped forward, his sword already slashing.
Like a snake, his sword swiveled around the ax and his body followed as half the momentum meant to crash him instead increased the speed of his rush toward his friend.
The distance would not shrink. A sword wielder using the same style as him interposed himself between Guy and his goal, and Guy just had to use the man's swings to rush past him. He was a gold ranker, and perhaps deep in the advanced level, but Guy's style of fighting stronger opponents was based on evasion and taking advantage of the momentum.
He was close. The assassin appeared out of nowhere to his left and only his long-honed instincts managed to save him at the last moment. He used the flat of the blade to block and rolled sideways to disperse the momentum and build some distance.
Even though his unarmed shoulder caused spots of black to appear in his vision, he got out of his roll straight to his feet, and straight to running like crazy.
A sword took Orlandir through the chest even as less than two metres separated him and Guy. A boisterous man laughed, a familiar laugh. Someone who'd spoken to Orlandir just a few hours ago at the guild. The man laughed hysterically, even as Orlandir lifted his head. Tired eyes, rivers of blood flowing down them like tears, met Guy's own, and the bastard smirked.
“... surviving untenable odds,” the bastard mouthed through blood-drenched teeth. “That's your specialty. That's all…you're better than me at.”
His words were so quiet, only Guy could have understood them after all the time they'd spent together. He saw the moment his friend's candle puckered out. No, not a candle, a bonfire that had enough fuel still to grow so large it would have cast Guy's candle in shadow. Taken out just like that, and by their fellow adventurers. He didn't know when he started screaming.
Wounds collected on both sides as his rage-addled mind collapsed. His body moved mechanically through hundreds of movements perfected through repetition. He only came to when his body collapsed, his legs sheared off at the knees. He had only one limb out of four, and his sword was still aimed. A swing of an ax saw him lose that too.
“Hah! You don't see that every day,” Hodo of the gold rankers said. “He is still raring to go. Look at how those stumps of his are flailing about. Maybe we should leave him like this.”
The two jade rankers nearest to Guy gave Hodo dirty looks.
“Do not play with your meals, gold,” the assassin said.
“He was a mighty warrior,” the bloodied ax wielder said as he lifted his weapon, “we ought to show him the proper respect he deserves.”
He saw the ax coming for his head and could do nothing. Yet he was so angry that he couldn't help but flail ineffectually. Dismembering wouldn't slow down his resurrection much, but he doubted even ten minutes would be enough to find these murderers still here. He crammed all their thirty-odd faces. There would be blood poured in Hossford city, starting from the receptionists of the guild.
****
There had been an explosion, and, the house involved, in the lower district of the city belonged to some newly minted silver-rank adventurers. Cynthia sighed as she stared at the two formerly two-story pieces of the rabble.
“Miss Cynthia? Fancy seeing you here,” an orange-haired beauty spoke.
Cynthia saw her, looked around, and sure enough her half-elf friend was already there joining the healers at the triage center.
“Jasmine,” she said with a civil nod, “I'd say it's more surprising seeing you here. How is the merchant's district connected to this?”
“This was an act of terrorism committed in broad daylight, near the gates of our beloved city. All law enforcement should be on the case.”
“You make a good point. I don't see any of the nobles’s patrols though.”
Jasmine just turned her eyes to the rabble.
“Any idea about the identities of these poor souls, and were they in?” Jasmine asked.
“I'm waiting on that information right now. You are a hopeless investigator though. The information about this building should have been easier to find in the merchant's district.”
“I was in a hurry, okay. And let it be put on record that it took me way less time to make investigator than it did you.”
Cynthia just snorted, as if to say whose fault was that. Just then a bedraggled-looking aide arrived, panting and bending over her knees to catch her breath.
“Lady Cynthia, the details about the adventurers who owned that house,” she said and proffered the note.
Cynthia and Jasmine bent over the piece of paper and quickly riffled through its contents. Then both their heads snapped up like they'd been slapped. Cynthia was going to say something when she noticed someone wearing a hood and standing just behind her courier. Fast as breath, the man withdrew a tiny blade and pressed it onto the girl's back, whispering in her ear that he'd kill her should she so much as make a sound.
Both Cynthia and Jasmine tensed. They were next to an active crime scene, for crying out loud. Lots of city guards and adventurers loitered about, yet a suspicious individual had somehow made it to stand next to them. And when he spoke his voice sounded familiar.
“Hello Jasmine, Cynthia,” he greeted and the hint of long hair tied in a band at the back of the hood confirmed his identity.
“You and Orlandir had gone for a quest?” Jasmine asked very fast, ignoring the tension of the moment. “Where is he?”
The hooded man stared at them for a few beats, then he sighed.
“Orlandir is dead. I'd only come here to see if I could do anything for Grunter, but I was too late.”
Jasmine hung her head, and the hooded man was content to give her a few moments to grieve. Cynthia could see the fear building in her aide's eyes, and she subtly shook her head to tell the girl not to try and sound the alarm.
“Enough of that dier news,” Guy said with such false cheer, that it was jarring, “ I heard you're both doing well. Orlandir liked to keep tabs on you. Congratulations are in order.”
“Thank you?” they both said quietly, frowns starting to form on their faces.
“So you have the guild master's ear again, Cynthia?”
“Y-yes?”
“Good for you. You're, attached to this girl, aren't you? If the guards act, well...”
“I won't, I swear!”
They both ignored her.
“What do you want?” Cynthia asked.
“Information. I want you to go to the guild, and get me all the information on the receptionists who were active during the day shift. I mean names, addresses, known hangouts, the whole deal. And you'd better do it before you tell the guild master on me. After that, I'll let the girl go unharmed, and you can tell on me all you want.”
“What are you going to do to those poor girls?”
“Poor? I'll guarantee you those receptionists are suddenly richer than you, a former gold rank. Now how could that be? You have ten minutes.”
Cynthia rushed off, and she could see the crazy kid following her but very slowly. He didn't want to be too near the guild when he got the information, all the easier to run from the guild master, perhaps.
****
Helen of Doyle had recently received the biggest windfall of her life. Ten gold, just to tell a bunch of kid adventurers a certain quest was mandatory. When Diane had brought them the deal, they could hardly believe it. And when Hearse, the jade rank invisibility magic expert, the best assassin in the city had backed the other receptionist up, who was she to resist?
Three silver-rank adventurers against a whole party of jades. It was such a ridiculous bet, she could not not take it. Whoever had organised the whole thing sure was meticulous.
She wasn't the one who'd given the boys the quest in the end, but all eleven of them on the bottom floor had been bought off. And now she and three of her colleagues were living it up in a bar all the way at the border between the merchant and noble districts. First off, she thought bars were so much better than taverns.
Here they had stronger drinks, softer drinks, drinks that had some flavor. There were bards every single hour of every single day. And there were professional escorts. The best of them cost upwards of ten silvers, but what was ten silvers to her? She had ten thousand silver. Well, minus the amount she'd spent on drinks.
For the thousandth time, she told her friends how the muscular escorts didn't tickle her fancy. She was maybe considering a moderately priced, moderately handsome one. Just then, she caught a hint of long dark brown hair, interspersed with a few white strands, tied in what was considered a warrior's ponytail in some barbarian cultures outside the cities.
“See that? Now that's what a real warrior's body looks like. Not so big, not so small. Limber, and the way he walks. Yummy! I mean, I spend all day looking at ragged, manly adventurers. These muscles built through calculated artifice dare not sway me. Oh, and he's coming this way.”
The man reached them, blue eyes shifting to take in everyone at the table. There was something about that intensity that set her body to tingling. She licked her lips, and when his attention did not return to her, she tried to bite them and mourn suggestively. He only looked back for a moment before looking away again. She pouted.
“She’s not here too,” he said with a sigh. Then he shrugged, “I'm looking for a Diane.”
Helen snorted. “You came here for her?” she pointed to her current rival, who was directly across the man. “I'll give you twenty silvers to go with me instead.”
The man just nodded, and faster than a blink he had unsheathed a half-length sword and cut off the red-haired Diane's right hand. It took a few moments for Helen to process the red flowing down her cheeks. She screamed at the same time as the rest of her table.
The man flicked his blade and Jess, who'd been right next to him, fell dead. Right across from Helen, Sinda snapped her mouth shut.
“They told me you were the one who brought the information about the quest,” he spoke to Diane, ignoring both Helen and Sinda. “Where'd the job come from?”
He was calm. Too calm even as the bar broke into pandemonium and the guards started to run toward them. They were slow. Too slow. She'd seen how fast he'd killed Jess, and he'd be done with her and Sinda before the guards started swinging their swords, let alone before they cleared twelve meters of distance, in a crowded bar where people were getting in their way in their selfish bids to escape from the crazy table and its occupants.
They had at least a minute of uninterrupted time, and he only needed a few microseconds to kill them all.
“If you tell me, I'll kill you fast. If you don't, I'll take all your hands and feet, but leave you alive. Alive, but with a bit of worm rot sprinkled into your wounds. You'll die slowly and in pain within the week, but you'll still die. It's your choice. You bet, you lost. But you were dealing with lives. There is no option here except death.”
Helen felt her stomach sink even as Diane stared at the man with defiance. She would not yield to threats, her friend's eyes seemed to shout.
The man just sighed.
“The torturous option it is.”
And faster than thought he'd cut off her other hand, and the table was falling, perfectly cut into four pieces, and Helen was falling back on her stool. And there was a foot flying in the air. It landed next to her head.
“I hope your ten gold will let you live happily at least for this last week of your life as a cripple.”
She saw him turn to her, and she heard Diane wail piteously. And where were the guards? As he turned to her in almost slow motion, she made a decision. She did not want to live as a cripple.
“I don't know everything,” she screamed, and the man hesitated, tilting his head to show she had his attention. “But there was something about the monster nest five years ago. Apparently the nobles were not happy with being implicated.”
He looked like he was going to say something, maybe ask which nobles, but then seemed to think better of it. The guards broke through the throng of partygoers, and still, the man did not rush. He stared down at her thoughtfully, nodded, and then proceeded to decapitate Sinda without so much as looking in her direction. He hadn't even moved toward her.
His blade work was beautiful. That was the last thought she had before the darkness took her.
