Outside the gallery, Wulry triggered the alterations he’d made to the Corsona inlays that powered the sound enchantment. A ward configuration that warped light and force sprang into being, mantling the gate with an illusion of a smooth grey wall. He rapped his knuckles against it distractedly, confirming that it held up to snuff.

Wulry lingered at the faux wall, thinking. Of all the possible things he’d expected to stumble upon in this shithole, a hidden master was perhaps the least amusing. Definitely bothersome, that. He turned away and started heading for the roof at a brisk pace.

Wulry was confident that the [Quest Adjunct] restrictions would keep Twenty-two from getting in his way, but that hardly accounted for the boy’s master. It was clear to him that this Sibyl person—whoever she was—had something pesky planned; the fact that she knew him well enough and had sought him out with information directly related to his very reason for being here was telling.

Probably some ancient crone that took pleasure in stuffing children full with information and unleashing them on the world for obscure reasons. Wulry’s grandmother was like that too. It was why he’d left after all.

More curious, though, was the boy’s claims of a Kill Quest being the cause of all the ruckus going on outside. Just the day before, an unconscious Vriorian giant of a man had been brought into the Ens stockade and lodged topside on the ground level. ‘Jrjis’ was one of the only Hoctan words he knew, and he’d heard it thrown around in reference to the newcomer. He would definitely be getting to the bottom of that.

Kill Quests had stringent time restrictions. The death-squad wouldn’t be going for subtlety, they’d be going for speed. And once their time was up, they’d lose the juicy douceur to carry out the killings.

Wulry willed forth his spirit-tool, conveying his intent. The Grommet had three main functionalities; being able to communicate over long distances was one of such. “Mecorble,” he said. “Need you to get a wagon ready immediately.”

“Holy shit, Wulry,” Hetti’s voice came back muffled and tinny, as sound always did on the Grommet. “The fuck’s going on down there? I’ve been—”

“R’shai will fill you in. This is very urgent.”

“Gotcha,” she said. “Roads are a bit choked, but I can work something out.”

He dismissed the Grommet.

The stockade juddered, a dull quake that didn’t quite unbalance him. He hustled along the corridors, trying to get himself in the right frame of mind. Wulry thought of himself as an artist after all, not a fighter. His Class, [Abstrusionist], focused on fine force manipulation with some métier, extra-spatial components that were a distant cousin to pure warding. It actually had limited combat practicality, but he’d long since learned the value of throwing money at problems. That and owning high quality artefacts.

Wulry recalled his spirit-tool changing its functionality. It hung in the air, an inch in front of his left eye. When used for scrying purposes, it presented as a mostly undetectable speck of spatial distortion that he alone could peer through.

The Grommet allowed him to pierce non-temporal dimensionality, or, more fittingly, compress two separate points in space. It abridged long distances and now, as always, insulated his vision so he could see what was happening on the roof and around the plaza in front of the stockade. Doing this drained his mana at an alarming rate, but everything came at a price. Wulry angled the outlet to give himself an aerial view of the building.

R’shai and five others were trying their patchy best to repel the death-squad of three. Some in R’shai’s group had vantage, and they were making this a ranged battle as well. An evidently fruitless endeavour. Sproulen, the warden of this stockade, was injured, but she seemed to be almost single-handedly holding the building’s defences together.

Wulry shifted the Grommet into its final and most valuable function: a spatial storage device; it presented as a razor-thin, one-dimensional tear in the fabric of reality that led to all his treasures. First he took out his foci and slipped them on, feeling cool power tingle at his finger tips. Then he retrieved a handful of steel cylinders and began coupling them even as he ascended a flight of stairs. He whistled a lively tune, fastening joints and relishing the satisfying sound of detached linkages clicking into place.

It was a bit jarring though, clashing as it was with all the screaming going on outside. Even now he could sense the dull thumps of killing intent washing over the building. It juddered once more. It might have seemed as though the stockade was being pummelled by some juggernaut, but Wulry knew that these tremors were merely the result of a domain-type Skill being contested. It was one of the things his Class was especially suited for.

When he’d assembled the hand-cannon, he slipped two weighty ball-bearings into the chamber on the left side of his slick equipment. It was very, very expensive. An Olomti man ran past, cradling a crying, little girl in their arms. The man glanced back at Wulry, concerned, but did not say anything.

Many seconds later, on the ground floor, two [Jailor]s in purple gambesons almost crashed into him as he exited the antechamber’s entrance. One of them, a young man, seemed to recognise Wulry, his eyes widening in outright terror. The female [Jailor] beside him frantically pulled him aside.

Wulry winked at the lad but didn’t halt his whistling as he continued on his way. Many of them here thought he was a prisoner, and it was reasonable for them to think so. He had technically been ‘caught’ rifling through a Commandant’s private quarters. Then again, the plan had always been to get caught.

Another short flight of stairs and he made it through the wide trapdoor, which had been left open.

A careless breeze was blowing in the night, whipping clumps of his hair into his face, rustling his clothes. The streets below had fallen into uncharacteristic havoc, but he disregarded that to stare at the sky, where coruscating pieces of prismatic light shimmered across from the not-quite-full moon.

[Vectorial Awareness] was tingling. He could sense the dense energies at play, thin rifts in space suggestive of something large squeezing itself into a tiny enclosure. A divine manifestation. Already, the terribly sparse mana in the region had improved in quality, which while a temporary thing, was sure to have long-term effects on environmental density.

There was a pair of soldiers garbed in the slick silver armour of the Olomti, holding cumbersome crossbows—the poor saps—in their hands and shooting into the street, where a black-armoured death-squadder with a large, steel-plated cudgel about the width of Wulry’s torso was being engaged by a herd of Olomti base-patrollers.

Nii was down in the plaza, ‘crossing’ blades with another black-clad aggressor. They were a proper giant—probably Vriorian—and had the densest and most imposing armour of the group, her cuirass was spherical and shaped like a cauldron. That didn’t seem to stop them from keeping up with Nii’s more than decent speed. Nii’s swordsmanship was adequate enough, but she had no chance of taking a solid blow from that jumbo, so she danced around them, tying up their attention.

Sproulen, [Warden] of the Ens stockade, was sitting on the floor, tightly cradling a bleeding arm and scowling with such great intensity that Wulry knew she was struggling to maintain her wards; an old-timer knelt at her side, his face also set in a firm grimace. He could feel the integration of their intent. The building’s ward configuration was honestly quite average, but Sproulen had that overrated [Warden’s Domain] Skill. And she was using it now in a rather … interesting way. But no one could run such a mana-hungry area of effect Skill defensively for too long. No one of second elevation, at least.

A pane of force glowed around the edges of the roof and the stockade shook. Ah. Right. He swaggered to the lip of the roof overlooking the plaza, where the Olomti mooks were waisting their quarrels.

He found the final member of the death-squad, also in full, black armour, which arrows from above plinked uselessly against. Wulry used [Identify] on the fellow.

[???]

Could never be too sure.

They held a crossbow lazily in one hand while meditatively pushing their intent against the building. There was barely any killing intent coming from them, but those had to be some demonic values in Will to be able to pressure a weathered warder-type on their turf. They were trying to breach the wards.

Can’t have that now, can we?” Wulry murmured to himself.

He levelled the long glossy shaft of his hand-cannon down at the breacher, since they were doing the most damage for now. The armoured fellow spotted Wulry, visor turning away from their task for a moment, only to dismiss him just as quickly.

That was fine by Wulry.

He funnelled his mana into the contraption and it nearly guzzled him dry. The script inlays pulled heavily on his Will, sending cool prickles along his ducts, and pins and needles along his forearm. The hand-cannon let out a puff of steam, produced a clicking sound and then made light of Wulry’s moderate-ish Strength values by jerking his arm to the side with the brutal recoil.

Amid the cracking boom that startled everyone in the vicinity, the breacher’s left arm burst open like a swollen wine-skin, armour and all.

He’d been aiming for the head, but oh, what beautiful, beautiful screams. Must have had Strength values in the thirties though, which was no mean feat. Anyone else would have just passed out from having an arm blown off.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

It felt like equivalent trade, however, because Wulry’s own arm was trembling from that lone shot. Might have cricked something in his wrist too.

The giant death-squadder let out a piercing shriek, disengaged from Nii, and charged towards their downed companion. No, towards the roof. Her killing intent slammed into Wulry with a vengeance. He struggled to brush it aside with a sluggish pulse of his intent and hurriedly switched his weapon over to his other hand.

He was not ambidextrous by the thinnest of margins, but he’d had some practice. Wulry lined the shot, aiming for where she was going to be.

Just as he fired the hand-cannon, the stockade shuddered. The large woman’s intent slapped into the building like the wrath of an irate guardian spirit. His arm barrelled up in the air on the wing of a deafening boom. Rather than centre mass, the projectile glanced off her poleyn in an explosion of sparks that unbalanced her for a moment, allowing Nii to jump in with a dropkick to the giant’s side, which also failed to down her.

“Cripes,” Wulry muttered, both hands trembling. He was low on mana. All that gratuitous use of his spirit-tool to scry and the Nemithon had come back to bite him in the ass. Not to say that he was out of options, of course. Just couldn’t rely on anything too flashy.

He retuned the gun and pulled out a couple of glass marbles, barely bigger than the ball-bearings he’d used for his hand cannon. Next, he retrieved an iron rod as long as his arm; a jolter. He dismissed the Spirit-tool and jammed a sliver of mana into the consumables, clinking them in his palm.

The stockade shuddered once more as the now lumbering juggernaut slammed her monstrous intent against [Warder’s Domain]. It was not manna efficient and lacked the finesse and control her wounded companion had shown.

Wulry flung the marbles in her path, and they shattered into green, misty goop. Deprived of friction, the juggernaut slipped and fell hard, the foamy semi-liquid substance coating her lower limbs.

“Wulry!” Nii shouted frantically from the plaza. “She’s going for the—”

The large death-squadder leaped off the plaza and hurtled to the roof. The wards were meant to keep her out of the building, not off it.

Wulry dove out of the giant’s trajectory in time as she slammed on a patch of einberries, sending up soil and gravel skittering across the roof. Even stooped on one knee, she was almost Wulry’s height. Her black helmet was a bulb-topped cylinder with lattices on the upper half for sight and ventilation. An Olomti man with a thick white beard pulled out a short sword and rushed her from behind.

Wulry’s eyes widened. “Wait, don’t—”

She smacked the Olomti man aside with a grievous backhand, crumpling his breast plate as though it were made of foil, and sending the bloody—and possibly very dead—idiot over the roof. “I am on a holy mission,” the giant woman declared. She rose shakily to her feet, and he noticed now that her poleyn had taken far more damage than he’d thought; she’d left her sword down on the plaza, but that didn’t make her any less dangerous. “You will not stand in my way. You cannot stop me.”

“Just who the fuck do you think you are?” asked the bald-headed old-timer in leather armour, a linked pair of manacles in his hand; suppressive bands. Sproulen was seated by the old-timer’s feet, pale and panting; the old lady had lost quite some blood.

Wulry used [Identify] on the man.

[Gusmos Han. Head Jailor. Sixty-six years old. Second Elevation.]

“Move,” the Vriorian said.

Gusmos was putting up a brave front, but Wulry could see just how exhausted the man was. He’d bolstered Sproulen’s Skill for several long minutes. “Fucking Faajian scum!”

“Not a Faajian,” Nii said, landing lightly on the roof, broadsword extended and bloodied. She tossed a cudgel onto the floor. Ah. Her breath was fast and puffy, but her face was relaxed in that unsettling way it often was when she was battling with an acute emotion. “She’s a fucking Vriorian. They all are.”

Oh? Did this mean that the boy had been right? Very interesting. Wulry smiled at the giant, wagging his jolter at her. “Ah. So, you’ve come for the Kill Quest then.”

Every unhelmeted person on the roof turned to him in confusion. ‘What Kill Quest?’ their faces seemed to be asking.

“Why, she’s here to kill the unconscious Vriorian,” Wulry supplied charmingly, never taking his eyes off the deceptively tired giant. “Isn’t that right, Biggie?”

She tilted her helmet at him. A nod? “I am here on a divine assignment.”

“In a bid to kill a defenceless. Member of your race,” Sproulen rasped out from the floor. She really didn’t look good. “You cause this much devastation? Are you mad?”

“It is for the good of the Corror,” the giant Vriorian woman said gruffly in a manner that suggested she was speaking through clenched teeth. “The untethered befoul our heritage. The Spiral Mother is wise! And now we have her blessing to do what is necessa—”

“Are you even listening, you fucking noik bitch?” Gusmos said, gripping the mana-suppressants in a quivering fist. “Look around! You’ve gotten innocents killed.”

Sure enough, a few bodies lay strewn about on the street below. Most of them were Olomti or brown-garbed soldiers, but he spotted a noncombatant or two, and it was hard to say which had resulted from stampedes and which from sword or cudgel.

The sound of pounding footsteps came from behind Wulry and he angled himself to keep both the trapdoor and the Vriorian death-squadder in his field of vision. Four knackered-looking Olomti base-patrollers joggled out unto the roof. Wulry checked his jolter, made sure it was perfectly primed. Four charges. Should be fine.

“You’re under arrest,” a large Olomti woman said coldly. She brandished her blade, not nearly as large as Nii’s, and the other three newcomers fanned out to surround the Vriorian. “Comply or die.”

“She’s here to. Kill someone within the stockade,” Sproulen said, wheezing. She spat to the side. “I’m not letting her stay—”

A crack of thunder tore through the relative silence of their discussion. Blocks away, a beam of white light sprouted out of the building that Twenty-two had helpfully referred to as the ‘Premonitorium’ and pierced the night sky.

“Bienro, watch out,” Nii shouted.

The Vriorian shot forward with preternatural speed; Wulry’s Cognition was high enough to follow the movement though.

The Olomti woman moved to meet her, but proved to not be her assailant's match in Agility as her sword skidded off the Vriorian’s breastplate. A crunching sound followed the breaking of the Olomti woman’s facial bones. The Vriorian snatched the longsword from her limp hands and made straight for the trapdoor. Nii was hard on her heels, but not close enough.

The Vriorian slammed the raw force of her intent against [Warden’s Domain] one final time. So close, so taken by surprise, the Skill caved. Sproulen reeled from the backlash. Gusmos wasn’t fast at all but he managed to whisk the [Warden] away.

Wulry himself stood to the side as the Vriorian ran past him, and very dextrously he extended his jolter to her backplate just as she lifted her blade to swing at the Olomti in her way. One eager charge of incited currents surged out of Wulry’s rod and into her armour. It should have scrambled her brain for at least a second.

All it did was make the woman stumble and drop her newly acquired sword. She pushed on, slapping yet another Olomti aside with enough force to dent the side of his helmet. Nii’s blade ricochetted off the Vriorian’s damaged poleyn and once more caused the woman to stumble. She swiped at Nii, who dodged under the blow and struck her pommel at the disfigured knee-pad yet again.

They were moving so fast, mostly Nii, but Wulry stayed the fuck away from any of that shit. Let Nii soften her up. A daring Olomti woman got backhanded off the roof and Nii staggered backwards from a glancing kick to the shoulder that barely connected.

The Vriorian turned instantly and, with no one standing in her way, hopped down the trapdoor. It was almost comical.

Shit. Shit. Wulry moved after her, clambering through the trapdoor.

Nii came down behind him.

“It’s a Kill Quest for jrjis,” he told her, as they jogged along the passageway. “And guess what our young Client downstairs so happens to be?”

“We end her then?”

“No. Too expensive. Get the boy and Serend. Hetti should be out back with a wagon ready. Make for Fouts. Can’t keep our [Warlock] waiting now that we know where he is. I’ll catch up.”

She hesitated before nodding once and handing him something. A pair of linked manacles. Gusmos’s? Then she split off into another corridor.

Wulry knew where the unconscious Vriorian was being kept so he made off in that direction. He nursed some curiosity about how the death-squadder was going to find her quarry. When he took his next turn, that curiosity intensified. She did not seem to be searching. The brass door leading to the lodging-quarters had been blasted off its hinges.

He hurried towards the sound of clanging metal, passing doors on either side of the corridor, none of which had been touched. She knew exactly where her prey was being kept. He made another bend and came into an open hall with long, wrist-thick poles dividing the room in half. The unconscious Vriorian was lying on a straw bed in there. A giant of a man, about as tall and wide as the powerful death-squadder.

The woman was ramming her fists into and tugging at the metal poles, such that she had widened them enough for her to slip in. Wulry rushed her, metal jolter extended.

She turned to face him, swinging that signature backhander of hers. He saw straight through her ploy, and rather than duck, swerved to the side, just in time to be missed by her swishing sabaton-clad foot.

He slammed painfully into the bars and, before she recovered, jammed the pronged bit of the jolter into the hole in her damaged poleyn. He released all three stored charges. She spasmed and staggered backwards.

That was it?

Fucking monster. That would have been enough to lay him out cold thrice over. He was already moving, though, jolter falling from his hands as he dashed into her personal space. He clamped one manacle around the thinnest part of her vambrace. Before he could fasten the other manacle to one of the bars, she jerked away, ripping the thing out of his grip.

Only then did she finally fall backwards on her ass.

He’d worked up quite the sweat and his heart was thudding in his chest, but this was exciting. Kill Quests had time constraints, and he was sure he’d pushed her to the very limits of this one. “Time up yet?” Wulry asked sweetly.

“You think I’m doing this for the rewards?” she asked, staring at the manacle dangling from her wrist.

“Once that timer goes off for you, it’ll be several long hours before the Kill Quest can activate again. And you’ll incur a cess if you participate again.”

“I have been called to serve the Grand Coral and I will do whatever I must, even if it costs me my life!”

By the Shades. This one was a proper zealot. “How did you locate this place? It’s one thing to have known he was in this stockade, it’s another to know the exact room he was being kept in.”

“Our course is carefully being steered. We will find them all. We will abscise the diseased limb and strengthen the Corror.”

A chill ran down Wulry’s spine. “What do you mean by steered? You have a way of tracking them down?”

“Spiral Mother is wise,” she said with a note of finality and leaped at him.

Wulry dove out of the way, rolling on the floor and coming up to see that she had pushed through the gap she’d widened in the bars, going after the unconscious Vriorian within.

Wulry wasn’t out of tricks. But did he want to expend them on her? He knew the answer to that.

It pained him only a little when he snatched his jolter from the floor and pirouetted out of there. He needed to find the others fast. The Vriorian patron Goddess had issued her Kill Quest to zealots, which was brilliant, in fact. Terrible news for young Twenty-two and any other jrjis out there, but still brilliant.

His mana was too low to scry on R’shai’s location, but the ward scheme he’d set up on the lower level had been disengaged. R’shai had left already.

Just one final thing he needed to secure.

“Stop right there!” a voice called from Wulry’s left just as he exited a connecting corridor.

He turned to see a trio of base-patrollers, one of them was of second Elevation, quite large and she wore a green scarf around her neck. Where had these mooks been while that monstrous Vriorian death-squander was handling four people of equivalent power?

“Kinda busy, folks,” Wulry said, continuing on his way.

An arrow whizzed over his shoulder, and he froze.

“I said—” began the scarfed Olomti.

But she was cut short by the Vriorian death-squadder barrelling out of the corridor he’d just exited, blood on her fists.

Green-scarf and the Vriorian engaged immediately.

Wulry left them to it. He had better things to do.