Out of all of Shara’s stupid, spur-of-the-moment plans, chasing a geomancer into a vertical stone shaft was definitely going to take a prime spot on the list. After scaling the wall of the pit, Shara grabbed her brother and rushed up the ladder her quarry had been escaping on, forgetting the legitimate display of power he’d previously demonstrated. By the time Shara realized she’d made a potentially fatal mistake, the shaft was already closing around them, completely sealed off from both ends. Now, Shara and Darron were trapped in a tiny stone box, oxygen and patience rapidly dwindling.

Perhaps most frustrating was that the geomancer had them completely dead to rights. Should he have chosen too, they would have simply been crushed to death by stone. Fortunately, in classic evil vizier style, he had decided to take them both alive. Shara gleaned that he planned to wait for them to run out of air, retrieve their unconscious bodies, and feed them to his vrochthízo pets. Apparently he employed this strategy quite frequently.

Already in a bad mood from the day’s previous events and the current emotional environment, getting outplayed and insulted in such a manner had Shara completely fuming. Condensing her barrier around her fist, she began punching dents into the solid stone ceiling, determined to escape and show that pompous cliché of a man the price of his hubris.

So, uh, is there just a thin sheet of rock above us, or something? Darron asked, staying silent to conserve air and also because he wanted to.

“No,” Shara huffed between strikes, “I’m pretty sure he sealed the whole shaft. Top to bottom.”

That’s very impressive, actually, Darron commented. He must have a lot of arcane power to burn. Also, you have no chance of getting us out before we suffocate at your current rate.

“Well, if you have any better plans, now is the time to use them!”

There is a spell I’ve been developing for a while that might work. It should solve the problem. Or kill you. Or both.

“Two out of three seems like good odds,” Shara deadpanned. “Hit me up.”

Okay, Darron confirmed, and began to speak the spell incantation. I call it “Hypermetabolize.” The idea is that it will rapidly accelerate your body’s energy consumption rate and grant a proportional boost in power and speed.

“That sounds awesome!” Shara exclaimed.

The downside is that you’ll quickly run out of burnable lipid stores and your body will begin consuming itself for food. So... punch fast.

“That is a plan I can absolutely get behind,” Shara said with a grin, and the spell hit.

She felt… warm. Jittery. Like she’d been working out all day and everything was sore but she needed to move anyway, right now. So move Shara did.

Sheathing her sword to spare it from the rain of rubble, Shara unloaded both fists into the wall of rock. Darron huddled close to her to avoid the outpouring spray of debris as Shara picked up the pace. More speed, more strength… her arms became a blur of movement as they tore through stone, piece by piece. Rather than trying to punch her way out while on a ladder, she moved up through the ground at an angle, leaving what was the shaft behind and hoping to eventually hit the basement at an angle. As the rubble and dust began to get too dense, Darron casted a quick Teraldia’s Selective Orbital Cleaner, holding it behind them to efficiently pull the mess around and away from where they were trying to go. It was brutal, it was brutish, and by the time Shara’s fist punched through to fresh air her knuckles were broken to bits. Darron immediately canceled the Hypermetabolize spell once it was confirmed they reached the basement proper, and began to work on healing Shara’s hands.

“Aww, Darron!” Shara whined as the Hypermetabolize deactivated. “That spell was awesome! I want to use it to beat up the stupid goatee man!”

You’d become emaciated. It’s really a spell we need to save for emergencies. Once your adrenaline rush wears off I suspect you’ll be in very bad shape.

“...Oh. Well, I guess we’d better go find him before that then.”

It was a task that didn’t take long. Punching a new hallway through solid stone apparently made a lot of noise, and Shara sensed that everyone on the upper floors was in a tizzy trying to figure out what was going on. Except, of course, for one particularly nasty brain that knew exactly what that sound was– a brickload of brute force ruining his carefully crafted trap. Shara pointed up.

“Second floor. That direction. Is there any chance you can activate that spell in quick bursts? It would be pretty sweet to just jump through the floor and be all ‘surprise, stonesucker!’”

That does sound interesting. I haven’t prepared a quick cast method for it yet, though. It’s more of a test concept.

“Lame! I guess we’re taking the stairs. If we can get to his floor before he gets to ours, it’ll rob him of a lot of immediate rock access.”

Darron relayed instructions on how to get to the stairs– he had apparently kept track of the house’s layout and predicted where they currently were in the basement relative to everywhere else– and Shara had him piggyback her while she dashed off in that direction. She resolved, after today, to train on maximizing her vertical jump height. The skill was starting to come up a lot.

Keeping mental tabs on her target’s intended route, Shara moved to cut him off. Against her expectations, he was actually ascending: going further away from his main source of offense, i.e. the ground, in an attempt to get his abilities within range of something on the sixth floor. To do that, he needed to reach the third floor, which conveniently gave Shara the distance limit of his geomancy powers: about thirty feat. This also meant he could still pull dirt and stone from the ground while on the third floor, but it was still easier to dodge his attacks that way, as they needed to travel a greater distance.

Despite his significant head start, Shara reached the third floor slightly before her target, and made tracks to intercept. He barely finished casting his spell when Shara turned the corner to the hallway he was in.

Breathing heavily, the goatee-man was shooing away nearby servants that were fussing over his distraught state. Upon seeing Shara and her brother-based backpack, he pointed at the duo.

“Help!” he yelled, “They’re after me! I’m under attack!”

Then, with his minions moving to block the way, he motioned upwards with both hands, causing a pillar of stone to quickly erupt from the ground three stores beneath him, pierce the floor he was standing on, and move back down again like an impromptu escape elevator.

Oh, neat, Darron thought. He’s a somatic natural caster.

“Why didn’t he just do that to get up here in the first place?” Shara asked, leaping over the servant’s ineffectual attempts to block her advance. Unlike the wall in the vrochthízo pit, they were not fifteen feet high.

Presumably because doing so destroys his house? Darron posited. Anyway, try to keep him in sight. If he needs to wave his arms around like that to cast, I can ruin his day.

Shara leapt down the hole after the vizier, who had thought himself very clever by getting off his elevator at the second floor while it retreated all the way to ground level. Unfortunately for him, Shara could read his mind just fine and easily followed the intended juke, landing on the second floor with barely a break in her stride. The moment he thought about casting another spell, Shara squeezed her brother’s leg and he took that as his cue to cast a spell of his own, causing a brief, otherwise harmless spasm to shake the man’s arm as he was trying to motion with it. A few spikes of stone erupted around her, but they were easily avoided as the majority of his casting attempts were thwarted by Darron’s diligent counters. As she closed into melee range, she dropped Darron, drew her sword, and swung a deep cut into the tendons above his knee. As he dropped to the ground, she planted a foot into his collarbone, knocking him over and pinning him to the floor. A sword tip to the throat communicated the rest of her threat, but she vocalized it anyway.

“If you so much as think about fighting back,” Shara said, “It’s over.”

Foolish girl! his mind ranted to itself, and Shara could tell it was taking him quite a bit of self-control to not vocalize it. I have no need to fight you! Before you reached me, I released my personal vrochthízo enforcer! He is at least the equal, nay, the better, of Arina herself! He will soon arrive to tear you to shreds, and I need not lift a–

A lizard-mouthed vrochthízo crashed through the ceiling above Shara, claws outstretched to tear through her head like an overripe cabbage. Shara promptly cut it in half with an upward stroke, cleaving it head-to-crotch, and let its pieces fall on either side of the vizier.

“So, is that the one that actually ate Gregory Cornwall?” Shara asked, enjoying his smug face fall white as his defeated mind raced through all the possible ways she could have found out his great secret.

Which was really very convenient, because now she could pick one at her leisure and immediately get a believable story to cover for how she actually found out.

“I… I have no idea what you’re talking about!” he sputtered, clearly having every idea what she was talking about.

Most of the story was spread out before her in his awful, goatee-loving mind, and Shara asked a few leading questions when he got off-track to clear things up. It had apparently gone down like this: goatee-face had been Gregory Cornwall’s main accomplice in raising and indoctrinating Arina. Originally, they had captured her and kept her simply as an intimidation tool. Gregory Cornwall, before he was officially the mayor of Oinos Springs, was a powerful mob boss already in functional control of the surrounding area. He was enamored with the dark, intimidating nature of the vrochthízo, and enjoyed interrogating or simply terrifying his enemies above Arina’s pit before pushing them down to their doom.

However, they hadn’t accounted for the fact that Arina was listening. Vrochthízo were apparently quite a bit more intelligent than they had thought. She learned to understand the concept of communication, even before she understood the words. Eventually, rather than killing her victims immediately, Arina would leave them alive. She would listen to them beg, plead, and pray for mercy, prompting and prodding them for specific reactions in an attempt to learn their language, only eating them once they no longer had the strength to speak.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

One day, when Gregory brought a victim to interrogate, Arina asked to be let out. The smile that parted Gregory Cornwall’s lips was one that would haunt his so-dubbed evil vizier until the end of his days. It was as though an entire reality Gregory had thought to be fiction opened up before him, and granted his greatest, most terrible dream.

So Arina’s training began. Slowly, her world shifted to one where Gregory Cornwall was god. Then, and only then, was she released from the darkness of her pit to the darkness of the Cornwall household. At this point, her body was still that of a child’s, much like the dozens currently trapped in the basement. So Gregory, in almost a perverse joke at his own fatherhood, had Arina watch and entertain his young daughter by day, and kill his enemies by night. Vrochthízo, it turned out, do not need to sleep. Only eat.

Years passed like this. When the vrochthízo lord moved into the area, Gregory seized the opportunity. Using his powerful earth magic, the goatee-man and a few other mages dug a tunnel underneath her lair in the volcano, stole a portion of her eggs, and retreated back to town, the lord either not knowing or not caring about the entire event. The other mages were fed to them first, and the process began to turn them into a miniature army of Arinas. Once they were grown, the males would impregnate Arina and start the process anew, growing generation after generation of the fast-developing loyal beasts to eventually bring the entire region to heel.

At this point, one of the two other servants that knew about the vrochthízo pit had suggested to the evil vizier that maybe, just maybe, Gregory Cornwall might be going a little mad. Just in case, shouldn’t he secretly train some of the vrochthízo to be loyal not to Gregory, but to goatee-man alone? You know, just for self-defense.

Then, a whole lot of “self-defense” occurred, and they reached the current predicament. The vizier had gotten too big for his britches, and his usurping antics caught the attention of some passing super-powered adventurers, one of which was currently stomping on his collarbone. Tough luck, buddy!

In the time it took to get that full info dump from the goatee-man’s mind, however, Shara and Darron had long-since been surrounded by frightened but determined household servants. Shara noted with some minor irritation that there were one or two of them whose mind she couldn’t read. Of the rest that she could, however, it seemed they had no intention to actually attack her, largely out of enlightened self-preservation. Instead, they had sent other servants off to fetch the sheriff and were carefully stalling for time until he arrived. This was fine, because that was exactly what Shara was doing too.

“What in tha sam-hell is goin’ on in ‘ere?” the Sheriff angrily bellowed when he arrived, parting the circle of servants.

Shara, for her part, was still covered in freshly-parted vrochthízo blood with a boot firmly planted on the goatee-man’s collarbone. Darron sat lazily next to her, running magical tests on half of the monster’s cadaver.

“Well,” Shara grinned, pointing to each half of the inky-blooded body beside her, “I found evidence that a different vrochthízo in fact walked into Gregory’s house, ignored all his servants, expertly assassinated one man, and buggered off without a trace. Funny, wouldn’t you say?”

The flabbergasted sheriff glared at her.

“So ya went an’ killed tha culprit, huh? Took justice inta yer own hands?”

“Oh, uh. Only kind of,” Shara admitted sheepishly. “The vrochthízo was about to tear my skull open, so I just had to act on that. Bit of a stress-fueled situation there. But fortunately, he had an accomplice!”

Shara did a quick stomp with her foot, causing the goatee-man to make a funny barf-sounding noise.

“He has a secret monster dungeon under the house and everything. Speaking of, Isabella and a friend of mine are still trapped down there, so do you mind if we go let them out? I’m sure this guy will be kind enough to magic away all the stone he used to block off the exit.”

Shara did her best innocent-girl smile, a skill she was proficient enough to pull off even when covered in something else’s blood. She admittedly had a lot of practice with that. Pulling the Isabella-is-trapped card also seemed to provide a substantial bonus to persuasion, and the sheriff agreed to make freeing her a priority above the immediate investigation.

Shara directed the sheriff and the entourage of household servants to the incense room, where she “persuaded” the evil vizier to re-open the shaft downward, prompting a rush of incredibly hot air to pour out from the secret room. They descended, the goatee-man gawking at the crumbling tunnel Shara had punched out of the stone as they passed it. Everything seemed to be okay, as best Shara could tell. Isabella and Adgito’s minds were present and accounted for, and she wasn’t even feeling the overwhelming hunger from–

She wasn’t feeling the overwhelming hunger. Reaching out with her senses, she didn’t find a single vrochthízo in range. Uh-oh.

When they reached the bottom of the ladder, they found Isabella curled up in a ball, bawling endless tears on the stony floor. She was barely visible, as only light source in the room was presumably Adgito’s burning body, which was still trapped in the pit. Isabella’s servants poured from shaft, quickly surrounding her with consolations, making sure she was alright, and supplying her with sympathy, which Shara noticed seemed to make Isabella feel worse. Guilt, huh?

Along with Darron and the sheriff, Shara approached the edge of the pit. Adgito sat exhausted by the wall of the cliff face, her flames flickering far more faintly than Shara remembered. The air in the room seemed thin, lacking in oxygen. Far more so than it should be from simply two people inhaling in an enclosed space of this size, if Darron’s mental assessment was to be believed. After seeing the pit, though, that was to be expected. Adgito was no longer sitting in a layer of human corpses, after all. In the entire pit, there was only Adgito and ash.

“Hey, um, Adgito?” Shara inquired. “What happened? Are you alright?”

Adgito looked up, sad eyes locking with Shara.

“Oh. Hey. Yeah, I’m… fine.” Adgito lied. “The vrochthízo attacked, and I kinda… well. I wasn’t going to let them get me.”

Shara reached out to touch Adgito’s mind to try and get a better picture of events, but found something unexpected.

Don’t read my mind. Don’t. I don’t know if you’re in here but I don’t want you here. Who am I kidding? Of course you’re in here. Get out.

“...Alright,” Shara said quietly, and stopped. She couldn’t do anything about picking up Adgito’s emotional state, but she’d refrain from digging any deeper for now. “Hey, goatee-face. Lift her up outta there.”

“I have a name, you know!” the evil vizier roared. “It’s–”

“Don’t care,” Shara interrupted. “Lift.”

He obediently removed the depressed Adgito from the pit, a confused-looking sheriff watching all the while.

“Ah, miss, ya appear ta be on fire.” The sheriff said.

“Oh, really?” Adgito deadpanned back. “I hadn’t noticed.”

“Er, ah mean, it looks ta me like tha whole room’s been burned. Incinerated away. Gonna make it difficult ta impossible ta collect any evidence, now.”

“Oh?” Adgito said, surprised, but then turned to glare at Isabella. “Oh.”

“I… I can vouch as a witness,” Isabella piped up, wiping away her tears and standing up. “There were several dozen vrochthízo in there. They… attacked her. She had no choice but to use fire magic to protect herself.”

“Addition-limited thermomancy,” Darron quietly corrected.

“How were they keepin’ several dozen vroch ‘ere?” the sheriff asked. “What were they feedin’ ‘em?”

“I… I don’t know,” Isabella responded. “We didn’t find anything here but the vrochthízo.”

Yeah, that and the room-wide carpet of human corpses! What the heck was Isabella talking about? Shara was about to speak up, but the evil vizier suddenly had a flash of recognition and interrupted her.

“I confess!” he yelled. “It’s true! I was keeping vrochthízo here secretly. They swallowed the small animals we fed them whole, which is why you wouldn’t have found any. It was… it was a pet project of Gregory’s, to see if they could be made, ah, civil, like Arina. One of them must have escaped and eaten him. His death was due to my negligence, so I was too frightened to speak up. I am so sorry. When I sealed off the entrance, I had no idea there were people still inside!”

What??? What was this steaming load of putrid skitter dung? Shara supposed he wouldn’t be a true evil vizier if he couldn’t hiss lies through his rotten teeth, but Shara would be damned before she let him get away with that. She started to speak when Isabella interrupted her this time!

“It-it’s all right! Th-there’s no way you could have known. You thought you were the only one that knew about this place, right?”

Isabella looked at Shara and Darron with a pleading expression. Adgito stared at the ground, disinclined to speak up. Well, maybe Adgito wanted Shara to stay out of her mind, but she could still read Isabella’s.

It was… a ploy. A stupid ploy intended to circumvent justice and let the man responsible for her father’s death get off easy. Why? So that her late father got off easy as well.

Shara had to give credit where credit was due: when Isabella finally realized the truly horrible things her father had been doing, she didn’t just fall to pieces like Shara had expected. Her response had been: “how can I fix this?” Her father’s legacy, the strength of his works, were in large part based around his reputation. She was determined to ensure the things he’d built, the good he’d done, didn’t fall apart as a result of his mistakes. It was laudable, in a way, though the injustice of it made Shara’s blood boil.

The first step was to get rid of the man-eating monsters in her basement. Darron didn’t think the vrochthízo children were morally responsible for the deaths of the people they’d eaten; he put that burden on Gregory and goatee-face. Upon seeing the horrifying scene under her own house, though, Isabella had no such qualms. With Adgito forced to act in self-defense, the children were completely incinerated, and justice was served for the victims of their meals. Isabella hadn’t told Adgito about this plan beforehand, leaving her a little salty about being suddenly attacked, but Adgito also believed the young monsters shouldn’t be allowed to live and apparently let it slide. At least, that was Isabella’s interpretation.

Afterwards, Isabella asked Adgito to cremate the bodies that survived her flames, which Adgito agreed to without understanding the real reason. While analytical magic could probably identify the source of the ash, so far as Isabella knew the town had no access to that and the evidence was destroyed. Too bad Darron was here.

Getting the evil vizier to go along with the charade was just natural; his sentence is hugely lessened down from straight treason and first-degree murder to negligence or possibly even lower, depending on how well he could spin the lie. Not that Isabella had actually thought that through; it was just a lucky coincidence for her. Everything else rode on convincing Shara and Darron to stay quiet.

It sounded nice and orderly when Shara summarized it, but in reality it was a gaping mess of a plan, tossed together by a desperate and emotionally overwhelmed daddy’s girl. Shara could jostle nearly any part of it and send the entire charade crashing down. Shara was surprised Adgito hadn’t already done so, considering how Isabella had obviously manipulated her and how Adgito seemed to have somewhat of a sore spot for that. Yet out of respect, Shara declined to figure out exactly what was going through Adgito’s head on that point.

It was up to Shara. Or Darron, who had simply surmised most of plan Shara dug out of Isabella’s brain, the supergenius cheater. Well, Shara wasn’t having it. She opened her mouth to speak the truth a third and final time.

Naw, Darron thought, tugging on her sleeve. Let’s go with it.

Shara gave him a very confused look.

“The whole reason we are in this stupid mess is because you started a moral crusade,” Shara whispered angrily at him. “You’re backing out now? You’re just gonna let this go?”

It’s exactly because of the reason I started this that we shouldn’t pursue here, Darron explained. Punishing evil does not increase the amount of good in the world. Think further ahead. What happens when we reveal the truth? The bad guy gets executed and Gregory’s evil deeds are revealed to the world. Isabella’s life is ruined. The town’s trust in their government and each other is shattered. Yes, Gregory bought the prosperity of the town with blood, and that’s bad. But it also already happened, and the prosperity is here now. Wouldn’t getting rid of it also be bad?

Shara didn’t have a good answer to that, but thinking about it was enough to shut her up. Letting the town run on a lie didn’t sit with her well, not one bit. Yet, by the time the investigation had wrapped up and they were dragging goatee-man back to the sheriff’s office, she still hadn’t said a word.