Absolute chaos. Quinn Tritol is unsure what to do. He has failed his task. Even now, he prepares an ice magic spell to do what he can against his opponent.
The brilliantly shining woman in front of him has caused a stampede, forcing both the Tritol guards and the statue marchers that Liri was making use of to flee in fear.
He tries to shout the spell incantation. The woman looks over at him, having noticed his movements once again. Her face and upper body starts to turn from bright white to bright blue, her hair turning a brilliant white from its original shining red.
The air around the area becomes much warmer. Yet, she doesn't move to confront Quinn. He can barely even look at her now as if she were a herald of the sun upon the face of the world.
Does she know that I’m using ice magic? Or is she showing me her killing intent?
Sweat pours from Quinn’s face behind his mask. Even if he's able to fire his spell directly at her, all he'll do is create a steam cloud by which she'll either try to attack him through or escape through. Even if he were to fire a blitz of diamond shards, they would likely evaporate before even reaching her skin.
He had refused to use this attack against her because it was less focused and liable to damage the statue that he was meant to protect.
Though now, it doesn’t matter. It turns out that she had been holding back against him this entire time. There was no outcome where she would be unsuccessful in defeating him and destroying his statue. She is capable of killing him. She knows it. He knows it.
Quinn retracts his spell. He looks directly at the woman with hate-filled eyes, feeling impotence. Though the light shrouding her tries to blind him, he doesn’t care. He can get healing for his eyes anyways, if need be. She returns his defiant gaze with a cold one of her own.
Her light changes from bright blue to bright red. Quinn keeps his defense up and she makes her own eyes, her true eyes, barely visible. Quinn can see them staring at him but cannot exactly see their color.
How is she able to wield such control? What kind of magic genius was sent out here… I stabbed her in the heart too. Which noble house is keeping such a monster in their ranks?
Instead of confronting Quinn in a confrontation which would result in him being forced to escape, she turns her head away from him.
The woman immediately starts running, directly towards one of the four exits of the square. Where she sprints, the crowd is somewhat scattered; none of the guards give chase. The guards and the marchers become calmer as the fiery woman leaves without doing anything further.
The stampeding guards and statue marchers slow, eventually stopping. Though their embarrassment doesn’t cease. For every single one of them, today is a humiliation,
Quinn stands there in front of his statue. He understands that when diamond ignites, it evaporates into the air. The original melted statue is no longer even there. Though the sudden influx of carbon dioxide into the air might make it easy to rebuild the statue.
Should I… Fuck…
However, he won’t. The first reason is that as soon as the statue is destroyed, the statue march has failed. There have been only a few times in the past when the statue marchers’ stone and dirt sculptures crumbled, either due to shoddy magic construction or deliberate sabotage.
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As soon as that woman had destroyed his statue, Quinn had no other choice but to end the march as a failure. He does not wish to try rebuilding either, considering the woman may simply return. He doesn’t have a clear way to recognize her.
The magic she used had obscured her face. As the attacker, she could come out of nowhere, from any direction. However, Quinn was the defender. He would need to be near the statue at all times. If he tried to rebuild, she might not show him mercy this time.
It feels humiliating to him. He can understand moments in the past where marches failed because of the weakness and incompetence of the average human commoner. But, this time his brother had asked him to oversee the march; they weren’t the ones responsible for this failure.
Quinn was, and, by extension, Liri. To be brought lower than past groups of commoners.
Even the ones who came out here are mostly uneducated and dull, with poor planning skills. They really think they’re a race superior to the demihumans. It’s so pathetic from afar. Even the commoners who married into their mother's family were like that.
Quinn sighs. At the very least, he feels relief at the woman’s departure. He has a failsafe to escape if she had tried to fight him in earnest, but it would have been expensive. His brother is a patient, understanding man, but even he has limits, especially concerning money.
He surveys the crowd.
He feels utterly disappointed by the guards, fleeing as they did… Yet, in truth, this is what their natural reaction should be as a mostly commoner-filled order. He can't blame them for reacting this way before the battle of two who they were born to call master.
The Captain walks up to Quinn nervously. Quinn relaxes, seeing the man. He looks unsure of himself. His pride likely took a hit as even he had joined the fleeing crowd. He wasn’t expecting too much from the man though.
"...Haa, that was certainly not something that we could have prepared for." Quinn murmurs, slightly amused by the Captain’s fear. Quinn’s anger bleeds away, replaced by a slight smile.
"I'm… I'm sorry, sir, that you have seen my men and I display such cowardice. I will take my punishment in place of my men. Please deal with me as you are fit."
Quinn is somewhat surprised by this. He was not expecting the Captain to be this daring and protective of his team. Was this commoner always so honorable? He hadn’t known him well enough to ascertain this.
"What's your name, Captain?"
"Sir?"
"Forgive my rudeness, but I've been calling you ‘Captain’ all this time without catching your name." Quinn says, his voice neither cold nor warm.
"...Tom, sir. Tom Muscad."
"Huh. Tom then. You're quite brave, aren't you, Tom. Well, anyways you understand the gravity of your crime, don't you?"
"Yes sir. We should have laid down our lives so that you could have escaped, if you desired it. Yet my men and I fled in fear of that… n-noblewoman." Tom says the last word with fear rather than anger.
"Well, I cannot deny that this is what you have done. A grave injustice, pure incompetence. My brother… well, he probably wouldn’t make an example of you, considering the situation. I was not killed. The woman didn’t directly kill anyone herself either."
"Sir, I–"
"No, it's alright. I'll overlook your insubordination as a brother to the Baron. It’s not as if you and your men were meant to be my brother’s personal knights either, you’re meant to look over the order of his city. But… well, it’s always nice to have eyes and ears, especially if they owe me a favour. You understand, yes?”
"Yes, sir."
Tom believes that the noble wishes to have him as an informant within the guards, someone he can directly get in touch with. The implicit idea is that Tom would drop everything in order to help him, regardless of the consequences to himself by his direct superiors.
The guards force are limited as an organization mostly run and operated by commoners, yet it still has troves of information about the city and its inhabitants that would always prove useful. Things could certainly have ended worse than that.