To Mondego and his men, it seemed as if all hells had broken loose. Vines whipped up and grabbed the wrists of the men holding knives to Alessa and Caressa’s necks, and dragged them to the ground. Dantes himself appeared behind Zilly, and shot out his living branch redirecting the crossbow aimed at her so that it would fire and strike one of the other men instead. The rats and roaches he had massedaround the building and began to pour into it. The men on the outside began screaming as rats and bats tore into their flesh while roaches suffocated them by climbing into their mouths or disabled them with pain by burrowing into their ears.

Those inside tried to turn their attention to Dantes before they were swarmed with vermin, but he fired a shot from a pistol, killing one of them, then seemed to vanish before reappearing behind another of them and driving some kind of stake through his heart. Then the rest of the vermin made their way inside.

The girls were equally confused by what was going on, but found their bindings quickly severed, and Zilly managed to fight her way with Caressa and Alessa out to the back entrance to escape. It was much easier with their captors being swarmed with vermin.

Dantes was going to make his own escape when the woman with the crossbow loosed a bolt at Alessa’s back and he shifted back to himself for just a moment to block it with his branch which he shifted into the shape of a small buckler.

Mondego had regarded everything that happened with a kind of detachment. The roaches and rats that attacked him, weren’t able to touch him, or several of his men, though only he’d had the presence of mind to remember that while the swarm began to crawl over him. He watched patiently, tensing himself as Dantes appeared and disappeared, the moment that he blocked the bolt heading for Alessa, the vermin on Mondego evaporated into dust. Mondego arched his arm back, and a spear appeared in it as if from thin air, he threw it and it pierced Dantes’s left arm, pinning him to the wall.

Dantes let out a cry of surprise and pain as he hit the wall.

Mondego smiled and laughed. At first it was boastful, but as he moved toward Dantes a touch of madness began to bleed into it.

He raised a hand, and a wand appeared in it. He made a sweeping gesture and a sheet of ice enveloped everything on the ground. With another flick of his wrist, the wand vanished. All of the roaches and rats inside died almost instantly, as did several of his men that had fallen to the ground in the skirmish. Dantes cried out in concern for Jacopo, wrapping the flowers he’d grown into around him to keep him safe from the sudden cold.

A few of Mondego’s men managed to pick themselves up, shivering, or screaming as they pulled rats and roaches that had been frozen against their bare skin off of themselves. A few seemed unharmed aside from the cold, they must’ve had the same protection Mondego did.

Dantes yanked on the spear, trying to pull it free, but it seemed more than just stuck into the wall. It was like the tip of it had completely fused with it. The spear was so wide that his forearm was nearly bisected.

He tried to ignore the pain, and tried to focus on the situation at hand. He needed to do something else. Summon more with his vermin marks, use his branch to gain leverage on the spear, shift into a roach or rat to escape.

Before any of those ideas could solidify, Mondego raised a hand and a small vial appeared. He threw the vial at the ground in front of Dantes and green smoke rose from it. It didn’t act as smoke though, and flew quickly into Dantes’s nostrils, forcing its way inside as if it were some malevolent spirit.

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Dantes’s thoughts became scattered and his will diffused instantly. His thoughts slipped away like sand through fingers, and he lost connection to all of the animals he was connected to. The only persistent thing he seemed able to hold in his head was the pain in his arm.

“Wha-”

Mondego smiled widely, showing his tusks as he walked toward him. He grasped Dantes’s hair and raised his head.

“Dantes. You’re looking well.” He paused for a moment. “We can’t have that.” He struck him in the face with a clenched fist.

Dantes didn’t have the mental acuity to do anything about it, but he felt a tooth dislodge and fall from his mouth onto the ground.

“I gotta say, I wasn’t expecting you to be able to free the girls. I mean, I’d been told a bit about what to expect from you, but you never could’ve pulled this shit off back in the day.”

Dantes groaned, still trying to bring his focus together enough to do something.

“Unfortunately for you, power can be bought, and I’ve been doing very well for myself since you’ve been gone.” He raised his right hand to show that it had a steel ring on each finger. Dantes could tell they were magical, but his attempts to think beyond that were unsuccessful. “I could’ve bought a ship with what these cost to be made, but it’s hard to enjoy a ship when you die because you weren’t prepared for a fight.”

Dantes started to get angry. This wasn’t how this was supposed to go. Instead of trying to avoid thinking about the pain, he started to focus on it. He tried to feel each torn vein and ligament and muscle in his arm. He leaned into the screaming agony where his tooth used to be. He centered himself on it, let it overwhelm his senses, and he started to find a small amount of clarity within it.

“H-how?”

Mondego scowled. “You can talk? I’ll have to have that alchemist’s legs broken.” He shook his head. “How what? How’d I know what you could do? How’d I know when to strike? I’ve got friends in high places. As high as they go in fact.”

“No.”

“No? Then what?”

“H-how are my sloppy seconds?”

Mondego roared and began to strike Dantes with his bare fists. Dantes, even through the haze of whatever he’d been drugged with, and the pain, and even the fear of death, started to laugh at his own joke, blood splattering from his mouth and onto Mondego as he was struck.

While Mondego was distracted by his rage, and his men watched him beat a man they’d never seen before to death, Jacopo released his will.

The flowers Dantes had wrapped around him exploded outward, their ends points, and speared four of the men that were in the room. Bats exploded through the windows and swarmed into the room, covering the men’s faces. They couldn’t actually touch them, due to the portable anti-vermin enchantment that they seemed to have, but that didn’t mean blinding them didn’t have value.

The field around Mondego was much stronger though, and didn’t seem to be vermin-specific as the vines that Jacopo was sending toward him were unable to pierce it. Still, Jacopo launched himself at Mondego. He sent his will through to the key around his neck, unsure of if the enchantment on it would allow him through, but it did.

Mondego began to claw at himself, trying to remove Jacopo from him as he clawed and bit, but every time he almost gained ahold of him, Jacopo shifted into a cockroach to slip away and bite him somewhere else.

“Break free!” sent Jacopo.

Dantes grimaced and tried to tear the spear out, pushing through the pain and blood loss, but he’d been right. The tip of the spear had somehow become one with the wall behind it. Another magical trick Mondego had purchased. It was at that moment his forebrain seemed to give up, and something beneath it took hold.

Escape became the only thought in his mind. He’d been captured, he was going to be killed. Escape the thought filled his mind completely, and he instinctively knew that there was only one thing to do. Instead of pulling on the spear to remove it, he grabbed his hand on the other side and yanked downward. Half of his forearm arm came away, and red flooded his vision as the bits of tissue that were still holding his arm together gave way and his left hand fell to the ground.

“No!” screamed Mondego as Dantes began to run toward the back exit.

Jacopo broke free from him, just as the key at his chest began to turn from metal to dust, unable to resist the more powerful enchantment that was protecting Mondego. He sent all of the bats in the room, and the roots to block Mondego as he followed Dantes out the door.

Mondego summoned a mace from his ring and started to swing it wildly at the bats and roots that stood in his way, braining the woman with the crossbow on accident as he swung, but it was too late. Dantes and Jacopo had escaped.