Eintirp was a good goblin. She’d done her job. She’d gotten everybody in the underground – or at least she thought so, and wasn’t that enough? But now she was missing the best part: because the hero was fighting cousin Yun-Yun. She couldn’t wait to tell her momma! Unless that was treason. Was it treason? She’d have to ask the boss-man. But none of that would matter if she couldn’t get there before it was over.
She tried to think of how long it had been since they’d started, and her spirits fell. Even though Eintirp didn’t know any heroes up until now, she did know her Yun-Yun. He was probably dead already. Poor hero.
The page galloped through an empty corridor, down past the scheming-room, and whipped around a blind corner. There was a door to an emergency toilet, and it opened up as she was blasting past it. The profane alchemist of horrors yawned as she lurched out from her unmentionable privacies. She had curlers in her hair and she smacked her lips obnoxiously while scratching indelicately at one breast.
Eintirp slid into the far wall, stopping herself with her hands and spinning about. “Hero! Lady Jern! Sword! Deathmatch, EXTREME!” She panted. Then, satisfied she’d fulfilled her responsibilities, she bolted off along her way.
The alchemist blinked as she watched the little gob vanish, but then her eyes bulged as she realized the meaning of what she’d been told.
“WHAAAT?!” She screeched.
Everything was going great (in the sense that Eintirp was making good time) until finally she had to pass by the boss-man’s office. But there, as she crossed past the open, candle-lit door, she tumbled to a crashing and despondent halt.
“Page Jern,” the Adjutant addressed her.
Eintirp trudged back and into the open room. “Yes, Ser. May I serve you, Ser?”
“Girl,’ the officer rumbled. His feathered pen scratched importantly across numerous papers, and so he did not look up as he continued. “I would like to remind you that you are wearing the Second Prince’s colors. Never forget the significance of that responsibility. As long as you represent the orange, honor demands that you embody it with all the comportment and dignity of a knight.”
The gob kicked at the carpet with her toe. “Even if I’m not gonna be a knight? Gobs don’t getta be knights,” she sniffed.
“Please,” the adjutant snorted, looking up. “Exceptions are made all the time. They just put risers in your boots and tell everyone you’ve got some extra elf in your gran.”
The girl considered that, and straightened with a certain renewed sense of purpose. She looked up and saw Fidelity ‘Thousand-Cut’ Brand’s fabulous mustache bobble with mischief.
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“So long as you understand your duty, you may be excused,” he said. But then, before he took up his pen, or the beaming girl could leave his office, he stopped her once more with a word. “Wait,” he ordered.
His face grew distant. He laced his fingers together and leaned forward over them until his mouth was hidden and the tops of his knuckles were cradling the tremendous weightiness of his facial hair.
“You don’t ah… happen to know who’s winning, do you?”
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About a half an hour into being beaten on (in public), Rhode started to feel like he was getting into a rhythm. The moment his body had exhausted itself, he had tapped into the deep well of his [vigorous ichor] and he was like a whole new monster again. It was true that Knight Hakkat-Yune was faster than he was, and more talented, and had more levels, and basically everything else that mattered, but gods be good, there was just something unfair about being in a fight with someone big.
Yune began, by inches at first, to fall on the back foot. She was still dodging, weaving, deflecting: kind of like a prison-fight ballerina in chainmail, but Rhode’s sword was battering ever closer, lancing ever righter, and the difference was beginning to show.
This (obviously), was where Rhode should have realized that he was making a critical mistake.
See, the Kingdom of Sacred was known around the world for its four major knightly orders. The fearful Oath of Pyre, the scintillating Illuminance of Brass, the cunning Order of Vipers and even that thing with the Bears that no one liked to talk about. And while the Vipers as an institution was the youngest of all of them – still. Most everyone (who was anyone) agreed that Illuminance was for nerds, and that those scrappy, snakey, try-hard newcomers were probably Sacred’s second best.
Eintirp’s bestest cousin Yun-Yun sprang. She’d been at a complete stop, with only the slightest crouch, and then she exploded forward. Rhode didn’t have a chance. The word ‘spring’ wasn’t even completely a metaphor, as the Order of the Viper revealed the first of its signature features through its blade-mistress. Viper knew steel like nobody else in Sacred. It was laced through Yune’s bones, actually; that and other, more magical metals. Just a little fell alchemy, and a few key levels, and really there were a lot of things the body could learn to do to itself.
Rhode was backpedaling so fast that he actually ran out of space and into the wall. As he twisted out of the way, her sword scored the rock behind him in a spark-showering scream.
He actually started to panic, beads of sweat forming on his forehead, and goose-pimples rising up the length of his arms. “Time out, time out!” He laughed desperately, “can’t we switch out for a second?”
There were little chips, dings and cracks all the way up and down the edge of his weapon, and there was a noticeable tremor starting up in his arm.
The lady was stalking towards him, and as she did, the second, famed signature art of the Vipers was revealed. Her daemon spun out of her aura like a coil of a hangman’s rope, and it reached out ahead of her like an extension of her weapon. Its eyes were dripping with falling ashes and its mouth, as its jaw unhinged, was strained to bursting with a profusion of ghostly fangs.
“Brand!” Rhode called out, finding a familiar face in the audience. “Hey, Brand! Tag me out, man. Come on, buddy. I’d like to switch now. Hey Adjutant? Fidelity? S-S-Ser?”
No, things were not going particularly great for Rhode in that moment. But Special Projects, by comparison, was in as fine a mood as can be. It was about that point, as the drinks were flowing freely, and everyone was starting to ask why a certain Flesh Alchemist was late, when the most wanted exile of New West City finally arrived herself, a bit overdressed and uncharacteristically frazzled.
“MY CREATION!” She cried out in agony, as the homunculus she had brewed up into existence bled ichor into the dirt.
But Journeyman Scholar Yagget was by her side in an instant. The old, frazzle-haired gob produced a handkerchief and with her unspoken permission, he wiped up a tiny smudge of her stray face-paint. Then he showed the woman a steamed root vegetable that was stuffed with cheese and wrapped with meat, and as she glared at it he placed it directly into her hands.
The two of them stepped back over to Scholar Tarrop and Father Uod without further words, and the four of them, spellbound, turned back to watch the climax of the show.