Jjhutto_Son of Flame
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B3. Ch. 27 Well Laid Plans
🕑 Added 2024-08-12 16:00:08 +0000 UTCTilly was spitting mad. This was the first time he had been “awarded” Stat points by the System since he had eaten that stupid ‘throw-up leaf’! He couldn’t help but feel like he had been tricked, and was being cosmically maneuvered into a place of vulnerability.
“Goddammit!” He snarled.
Julius took a stoic step back, signaling to the Ranger unit to give Tilly some space. Poor Marq however, did not pick up on the signal and stepped forward raising his hands again in concern.
“What is it, Mr. Tillman? Do you need more healing?!”
“No, I need to stop getting screwed over,” Tilly grumbled up at the sky. Kindle shimmied out of her pocket, shaken awake by his emotional turmoil. She hopped up to his shoulder, cheeping in anxiety. In the face of the innocent concern from the two youngest members of his group, Tilly got ahold of himself. He took a moment to squeeze his eyes shut, rubbing them vigorously, before opening them and addressing the group with a sigh,
“Look, I’m alright. It’s just that the most recent test gave me some unforeseen… benefits, which have messed up my stat spread royally.” Along with those words, Tilly sent Kindle an image of a bird missing its diving strike on a rodent, attempting to convey his loss.
She cheeped mournfully in understanding, and Tilly enflamed his hand and patted her in response.
“Oh- Ok,” Marq answered, clearly not really understanding, but finally taking a cue from the others.
Nyuk cleared his throat and turned to his unit, “Alright, back to the staging area. No more special details this morning. After the debrief this afternoon, you are all on leave until tomorrow morning. Dismissed!”
“Yes, sir!” The unit answered in unison, before heading out, shooting a few lingering stares back at Tilly. The beginnings of some whispered conversations floated over, but nothing distinct enough for Tilly to hear, not that it mattered.
“Sorry about that,” Nuyk added as he watched his unit move back along the cliff toward the staging area. He turned and found Tilly’s eyes, showing a twinkle of genuine concern as he moved up and placed a reassuring hand on the shoulder opposite the flaming chick,
“Whatever it is, it can’t be too bad… You managed to move faster than anything I have ever seen. Your stat spread may be off, whatever that means, but it can’t be worse than what I expected… so all in all, we are coming out of this ahead, I think.” He finished, adding a couple of comforting pats to his gesture. The whole time, Tilly noted that he studiously avoided looking at Tilly’s other shoulder. The one that was more or less on fire at the moment.
Unable to keep the smile from crawling up his face, Tilly asked, “What, exactly, did you expect when I asked you guys out here?”
“Oh, I didn’t know specifically, but I was fairly sure it would involve explosions. When I saw how far from camp we were going, I gave us a fifty/fifty chance to live through the morning. So I, for one, couldn’t be happier with the results.” He answered, a completely genuine smile on his face.
“I do other things besides explode.” Tilly deadpanned.
“Sure you do, human. Sure you do.” Nyuk laughed, letting his hand fall back to his side, “I’m going to catch up with the unit, then later today if the gods are kind, I’ll be catching up with the missus, if you know what I mean.” He finished with a wink. Then with a cheerful nod to the confused Marq, he jogged off, whistling a jaunty toon. Tilly watched him go for a few seconds, letting the turn of events sink in.
He had accidentally lost his [Resolute] title again. This time, through an almost unforeseeable turn of events. To make matters worse, he was hours away from attempting to bullshit through an event filled with some of the most powerful beings on the Plane.
None of that, however, killed the reluctant smile on his face as he watched the fatalistic Lapin head home, apparently having gained a new lease on life. At least someone was going to have a good day.
“You need us for anything else?” Julius inquired, reading the shift in Tilly’s attitude.
“No, you guys did great. Unless I find you again, consider these exercises over. I have learned everything I can for now.”
“I’m clear… Come on, boy, let's get some sleep. Unlike the string pullers over there, we have another shift tonight.”
Tilly broke with his testing team, letting them walk back to the wall, while he jogged back to the city center. His thoughts were swirling with concern as possible scenarios began to play out in his mind. Just because attacks during an auction were rare, didn’t mean they never happened. Knowing how volatile Corruption’s influence could be, Tilly hated depending on the rules alone for safety.
He had been fine testing Dexterity today, even with the auction coming up because he could not afford to attack anyone. That didn’t mean he hadn’t been counting on his defensive trump card if things suddenly escalated beyond his ability to bullshit. Being able to take a single hit, no matter how powerful, and shrug it off, was an incredible boon that had propped up his shaky confidence through many encounters.
Now though? His hand was completely empty. To these beings, he was just a cocoarouch, inconvenient to kill, but otherwise harmless. As he passed through the parade ground, he didn’t miss the sight of the innocuous mountain looming in the distance over the valley,
“You better not have done this on purpose for some beyond my understanding bullshit reason… I’m willing to own my part in this, but I want you to know, I am putting a lot of eggs in the, ‘you are not an asshole’ basket.” He grumbled up in its direction.
The structures of the city moved to block his view, and he decided to leave it at that. The Alliance had made it this far, and if he could nut up and face whatever this event had in store, they would be one step closer to survival. It was either that… or give up.
The Temple of Light’s report had painted a grim picture. The stance of most of the Powers on the Plane was that Corruption was either a distant threat that would weaken rivals or a possible new resource to exploit. Those nearest the Blasted Lands who were unaligned with the Pits were most at risk, but they tended to lean toward the darker end of the spectrum and wanted little to no contact with any Light-aligned Faction.
It painted a strikingly similar situation to what Tilly had witnessed before the fall of the capitol. The aristocracy of the Thousand Phalanx Empire had almost been willfully ignorant, radically underestimating the threat they faced. Instead of unifying, they played power games, cannibalizing what little chance of defense they had for an elusive temporary gain.
Tilly’s face fell as he remembered the chaos at the end of their flight through the portals. Moving through the crowds of now hopeful people, he couldn’t help but remember the faces of those trapt just outside of Elder Kihei’s barrier. That couldn’t happen again.
Not now, when he actually had a chance to change something. The failure of the empire’s leadership should have resulted in destruction for its people. Instead, a few key groups put away their differences and aligned to salvage an impossible situation.
If something similar didn’t happen on a Plane-wide scale, they would very quickly reach the point in the bell curve of change where there was no going back. By then, whatever fractured resistance Corruption would face in its domination of this reality would be wiped out one by one.
The Church was on its back foot, the other plane-wide Factions were neutral at best… Something had to change. Their enemies were consuming each other in a savage establishment of a hierarchy of power, but soon the fighting would cease, and Corruption would face the world with a united front. The system itself seemed to need to quantify and officiate this conflict, and so was drawing these forces to the Contested Lands, a place no one had seen in epochs.
To top it all off, he had been drawn into an ancient vendetta between dragons, that somehow centered on this same area.
By the time Tilly had arrived at the appointed square, the stakes of the coming event were pulling on his shoulders like insistent toddlers, demanding more of his attention than he could afford to give. The Commerce Guild still stood proudly at one end of the block, its ornate and columned front demanding respect, the statue of weighted scales standing proudly at its apex.
On the other end of the flagstoned space was a strange structure. It was a mix of tiled domes, and graceful curves, unlike any building Tilly had seen on Nephesh so far. Strung up above the entrance of the low wall that surrounded the building was a banner, fluttering in the breeze. It had the words, Auction House stitched into the creamy textile with golden thread.
Behind and around the swooping curves of the walls and buildings, Tilly could see hits of artful gardens, and even a few patios tucked into the insets of some of the wandering lines of the structure. Before he knew it, he was swaying on his feet. Without a conscious decision, his investigation of the structure drew him deeper and deeper into the maze of increasingly impossible lines and spaces.
“Look back at the banner, it will ground you,” said a voice from behind. Tilly did as he was told, eyes scanning urgently as he attempted to pull his attention away from the Escher-like building. The fluttering caught the corner of peripheries, and suddenly he was standing back in the square. He instantly cast his gaze downward and turned toward Mochizuki, who was standing behind him accompanied by a stoic Ichiro. Today, instead of a kimono, or a servant’s outfit, she wore a large cloak, and Tilly wondered what scheme the drab covering concealed.
“If you would follow us, Jonathan Tillman,” Ichiro said, milky eyes shifting easily from the structure to find Tilly’s. He added a polite smile to the request and turned to move toward a stone building looming clumsily at a perpendicular angle to the two graceful structures.
“Just when I think I have a read on this place… it finds a way to get weirder,” Tilly grumbled, following the two lapins. As they approached the sturdy doors, a pair of guards emerged, opening the way for the trio and bowing slightly as they passed.
Inside was a spacious room that was part guard station, part… something else. There were tables with maps, and notes scattered over the surfaces, racks of different types of clothing, and a few odds and ends Tilly could not ascribe any sort of purpose too. At the center of it all, a familiar voice boomed cheerfully,
“Jonathan Tillman! I am truly sorry duty has kept me from checking in, but as you can see, there is more than enough work here for a man to drown in!” Shuji barked in a laugh that seemed every bit as cheerful as his tone, even when contrasted with the ominous words he had used as a metaphor.
The corpulent Lapin glided forward, dark circles under his eyes juxtaposed against his big white smile. Before Tilly knew it, he was caught up in a large hug.
“Good to see you too Shuji… I hope you have been taking care of yourself.”
“Oh, you know me. I’m a glutton for punishment! Enough about that, I hear you are about to go on quite the adventure!”
Tilly looked around eclectic room and the group of ten Flame’s Watch sitting in the corner, checking over equipment.
“What exactly is this place?”
“This is the base of our covert operations!” Shuji boomed happily.
Comments
Wyatt Hilbert
Thanks for the chapter
