[Bellows] rasped. It gusted. It groaned. [Vigorous Ichor]? Ha! It wasn’t enough. It couldn’t be. The weight of his body was ponderous, and his exertions were tolling every carefully engineered part of him to their breaking points. On Earth, Rhode had once heard of a thing called a ‘runners high’, some kind of transcendental state which would descend on an athlete whenever they pushed themselves past pain, past doubt, past tiredness, and into…
Well, whatever it was, Rhode thought he had found it. Sublimity. A mind that was totally free.
Then Hakkat-Yune cut him again, and Rhode shook out of his reverie with a piping hot serving of rage.
“Why,” he howled. “Won’t.” His sword sheared down. “You.” It clipped the Knight’s knife. “Stop?”
The shoulders of the homunculus were broad like a hill. His arms were like tree trunks. No, that’s ridiculous. When has anyone ever seen a tree with elbows? Besides, all that stuff gives off the impression of supreme fitness. Rhode’s body may have been a masterwork of the dark arts, but it didn’t change the fact that he had a little bit of a chunky tummy. It was showing now; his belly had burst past the hasty stitches that Chyrna had sewn into his new doublet. Yune had torn shreds out of the material, mutilated it, really; and his own swinging arms had done most of the rest.
He looked down and his cheap iron sword was bent and ruined, so he threw it aside and took up another. A Hornupant had been at his side to provide it, and they faded away so fast he didn’t take time to question it. Then, feeling embarrassed, but long past caring, the earth man tore off his shirt and chose to fully embrace the stupid.
In response, there was an uncomfortable and enduring hush that descended over the cavern, punctuated by a lonely cough. The head of every adult within the vault turned slowly at once and without explanation towards the alchemist.
She sputtered, then she flushed, and then her aura spilled out of her in curling wisps.
"What?!" the operatically costumed goblin shrieked. She stamped her foot and droplets of acid congealed from around her. They spattered the stone below and sizzled as her hands curled into fists over her head. "So I have a type. I’LL KILL EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU THAT SAYS ANYTHING ABOUT IT!”
Rhode didn’t quite know how to process that, and he never got a chance to. Hakkat-Yune was already accelerating towards him with a howl. Caught up in the moment, he raised his fresh sword overhead and shouted back as he charged. This time, the rafters actually did really shake as his body hit the floor.
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“Oof,” Scholar Tarrop groaned, a warm glow settling into his cheeks. He passed his empty jug to a soldier. Then he took a yellow tart from the stack he had piled in the other hand and passed one of them towards Yagget.
“No thank you,” the respectable gentlegob waved it away. The confused soldier spun in circles, holding an empty decanter gingerly with dismay. Yagget pointed the poor boy towards the door and ushered him on. “I am afraid those things are a bit too sour for my taste.”
Shrugging, Tarrop took another bite as the great homunculus was woozily dragging himself to his feet. “We could sack the baker. It’s easy enough to get rid of them, and I’ve got a pastry chef from Bay City I adore.”
“That’s so much trouble,” the Journeyman sighed. Rhode yelped as a glowing serpent arced around his side and plunged into his body. “And I do have to admit, I’m starting to feel bad for the rustic jungle gobs. Aren’t half of them gone already?”
The homunculus patted his ribs up and down in a frenzy until he realized he was unharmed, and then Knight Yune slapped him across the face with the flat of her blade so hard he went down to one knee.
“Suit yourself,” Tarrop burped, “I just figure there’s no reason for which a fellow ought to suffer a bad dessert.”
The elder scholar grudgingly tilted his head. And just like that, the doom that the last baker of Malachite had foreseen was come to pass.
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Anyway, Rhode was starting to puzzle out the way that Yune’s daemon worked. The trick was, it wasn’t an attack itself per-se. The spirit was incorporeal, and it mostly vanished if it tried to pass through physical objects. True, it had scared him the first strike or two, but once he’d realized it was harmless he was able to adapt. No, the purpose of the daemon was that it served like some kind of... combat help assistant. It had its own intelligence (or perhaps intelligence is exactly what it was), and the knight used it to ferret out weakness or opportunities in the fight. Every time the snake bit, the lady’s sword would follow right after.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
Once Rhode understood the rule, it wasn’t hard to imagine how to use the hint of its trajectory to counter her. And –
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“Oh, what are you? Blind!” Junior Scholar Rikva screamed. Her hands slapped over her mouth in shame, and then she resentfully passed two silver pieces-of-eight to the goblin at her right. Even though she knew he might be fated to save the nation one day, tonight Rhode was proving to be a disaster for her purse.
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Rhode spun and stumbled, crashing against the support of the wall. He leaned against it and reflected critically in his microsecond of respite. Why exactly had he assumed that a knight must follow her viper? Hakkat-Yune and her daemon whirled from either direction, then both, then from the same side. Rhode’s [vigor] was failing, wrung out and expended. His body searched for alternatives, and found an unexpected and eager partner in [hibernate]. The homunculus felt his very first level open up to him, renewing his battered muscles and nerves. But [hibernate] was not a gift, it was more like a banker making predatory loans. Eventually, everything it gave to him would inevitably come due. He had no choice. He relied on it anyway.
The sword was useless. He grabbed a long polearm from the audience and ignored their protest. He swung the pole brutishly, and complacent goblins scrambled from where they’d strayed too close. But no one was stopping him, no one was trying to stop him.
Maybe it all came back to Rhode’s former life. One had to consider the way that humans grew up. From the youngest age they remembered, they learned all the things that were not right to do. Don’t shout, don’t run, don’t hit. Don’t make a costume out of tissue paper, don’t bother the neighbors – and for the love of all that’s holy in this world, Rhode I swear to God and on the grave of my mother, stop pretending to be a dinosaur in the grocery this instant!
That was what Rhode was facing: a world where all the rules fell away. No one stopped you from stomping. Heck, stomp away! Roar all you want, get MAD. And these goblins, they ate it up, they loved it! It was almost like the worse he was behaving, the broader their needle-y little smiles grew.
The thing in his meaty fist was called a bardiche, and it was basically an axe with a handle that no one’d bothered to cut short. As it swept wide through the arena, Hakkat-Yune could no longer easily dodge. She bounced like a frog instead, up high against the wall and rebounded. Her boot smashed into Rhode’s shoulder in a flying kick and he felt his bones creaking.
One of the oldest tragic foibles of the human race is this: to lose yourself in the perceptions that other people have of you. To allow the person they expect you to be, to overwhelm the person you are. In this new life, in this new world, Rhode had let it happen because he had no one left to tell him better.
“Mercury strike!” the half-elf barked. A metallic quintessence, some ephemeral quality of her aura, flowed through her daemon as liquid silver. Rhode’s eyes widened as his instincts brought his off-hand sword up. A spray of chrome droplets slapped from the body of the snake, and Yune rolled tumbling back to safety.
“What was that?” Rhode spat.
“Had to make sure you know how to block that,” wheezed Yune. The viper reformed over her shoulder and then, transparent again, it slithered between and around her legs. The fighter’s voice sounded unhinged, her hair was plastered to her forehead.
The jeering of Special Projects had turned mean and unruly and loud.
Somewhere in the audience, there was a soldier wearing a bright, silver bracelet around his arm, and his eyes glazed over. He pulled a dagger out of his belt gleefully before Adjutant Brand tackled him down.
And in the height of that tension, a keening, shrill noise rose from the blood-thirsty crowd.
“YES, YES! AHAHAHAHA! EVERYTHING WE DREAMED OF AND MORE! I’m a GENIUS! A GENIUS!”
An alchemist grabbed hold of a scholar’s shoulders and shook him with violent, celebratory glee. Her laughter pierced through every conversation, it ended every thought, and it settled every score.
“Ye muck-brained gobs! You nitwits! You dimwits, too! Look upon my works, ye dum-dums and DESPAIR!”
The woman threw her head back and cackled, full throatedly.
Mist whorled and rolled beneath Rhode’s feet. It congealed from his breath as he towered over the gobs of the Kingdom of Sacred. His weapons dropped to the dirt heavily as his eyes cleared of their haze. The lady of House Jern and the giant looked at one another.
And then Rhode started, just a little, to chuckle. The knight giggled in reply.
The priest who’d been white with fear and concern for Rhode’s safety found escape in relief and basically honked. The sound provoked further snickers and a little page let out a titter, and Rhode found himself start to guffaw. Jolly belly chortles emerged from somewhere, and a snort from somewhere else. But once one particular, mentally possessed soldier decided to join in to the fun from the ground he was pinned to, it was unstoppable.
Dozens of goblins belted out in a malevolent chorus of putrid, demented laughter. Spittle flew from mouths. Teeth gaped open in razor-sharp maws. There were so many high-level auras let loose that night that they roiled and combined into a sulfurous, caustic fume. It hung in the air, and swirled around Rhode as a pressing crush of bodies came to slap him on the back.
Still they laughed, and their voices rose up from the earth like a curse from hell itself.
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The young, but promising magician and diviner of fates Rikva of Branfield had lost too many coins that night, and sampled too much drink. Now, as she looked about the subterranean tomb of a long-dead elven lord, and across that black-midnight convocation of her peers and rivals: she let out a nervous, half-hearted simper. “Did I miss something? What was so funny?” She asked.
And nobody bothered to answer.