Town guards swarmed the battlefield. Fires and rubble were spread throughout, as were bodies. There were quite a few casualties, unfortunately—though most of them were those of our enemies—but not only that, there were plenty of living people that’d also collapsed on the ground, unmoving. It had happened at some point during the fight, but many of the enemies that originated from Jon’s side and decided to stop fighting once they heard what I had to say had collapsed to the ground. Upon closer examination, I found that they simply no longer had limbs to hold themselves up on.

I remembered in my first fight with Jon, back at the guard outpost, I’d seen something similar happen. These soldiers could have their limbs remotely shut off when their leaders decided they deserved to be punished. I wasn’t sure whether to apologize to these people or thank them, that they’d been willing to have that happen to them for my sake. Or maybe they’d just decided they’d be killed by my side if they kept fighting, and reasoned that living without limbs was better than not living at all. Either way, I was happy to see them alive.

The town guards didn’t seem to care about any of them, though, instead focusing on those of us with functioning bodies. They rushed in from all sides, quickly forming a perimeter around the entire population of everyone who had been engaged in the fight. Erani, Ainash, and I stood beside each other, and I saw Boy, Entismo, and Sylvie find each other in the chaos and form a group nearby. Several adventurers—some of them allies I’d hired, and others the survivors from Jon’s side that hadn’t had their limbs shut off—attempted to flee from the scene and escape into the night, but were quickly apprehended by the guards.

“Stay where you are!” the head guard shouted, speaking with an Enchanted voice amplification device. “Resisting the guard will be considered a crime. Attempting to flee will be considered a crime. You are all under arrest, please comply while we try to understand what has happened here tonight.”

Erani leaned over and whispered to me. “Are we just going along with this? Legally, we could claim self-defense, and I’m sure everyone here will vouch. So if they take us in, they’ll probably end up letting us go.”

“I don’t trust that at all,” I responded. “Just because we claim self-defense doesn’t mean they’ll agree. Besides, we don’t have time to spend all week locked up in some cell going through legal proceedings. We beat this team that got sent in, but what about the next one? Because there will be a next one. We need to get out of here as fast as possible, and we can’t do that in custody, especially not as Arlan and Erani, the fugitives.”

“So then, what? Run away and hope we don’t get caught? I’m not sure that’ll work.”

“Well we gotta do something. Proactive, not reactive.”

“We are sending in soldiers to apprehend each of you! I repeat: do not resist,” the lead guard shouted. A wave of guards surged forth, each grabbing a different person. Confusion and disorganization rippled throughout our group. Some tried to resist, but were quickly tackled by a nearby guard who had been dealing with someone much more docile and didn’t need as much of a hands-on approach.

It was while glancing around at everything going on that I noticed something. Despite being surrounded, our group was pretty big. Big enough that…

Index, do we outnumber the guards?

“...Yep, just got a birds-eye view. I mean, you outnumber them by, like, two people, but still. It’s at least an even match.”

You know what I’m thinking, right? Think it’s a good idea?

“All of your allies here are still pretty high in Health and energy, for the most part. Plus, they still have adrenaline pumping through their systems from the fight. Should work.”

Adrenaline?

“Oh, you’d call it ‘battle fever.’ My point is, they’ll be pretty ready to fight back.”

I nodded and took a breath. Alright, here goes.

“We fight off an invasion and this is what we get?!” I shouted at the top of my lungs, my voice tearing through the scattered sounds of shuffling shoes. The few people who’d already been grabbed by the guards stopped in their tracks. I raised my arms and turned to look around at the crowd. Honestly, I’d gotten pretty comfortable with taking the role by now. “The kingdom—the Demons—send their armies into this empire, this town, and we defend them! We protect the citizens and do these useless guards’ jobs for them! And they arrest us! They treat us like criminals! They should be treating us like heroes!”

The crowd around us cheered, and several more people broke from the grips of the guards. With the guards shouting for us to follow their orders and the adventurers yelling about how they refused—with a lot more profanity than the guards were using—the whole battlefield was louder than when there was an actual life-and-death battle going on.

“We saved this town, and we saved this empire!” I shouted again. “We cannot be held down by these dogs! Serving the nobles, the royals? How about us, serving the people!”

Erani gripped my wrist as we were shoved back and forth in the struggle. She leaned back over to me. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing? This feels less like an escape attempt and more like the inciting of a riot.”

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“Trust me,” I said back, then raised my voice to continue. “We saved this town, and we’re being rewarded with a jail cell?! Speak with us before arresting us! You’ll regret treating us like this tomorrow, when these forces come back in twice the number, and you’ve got nobody left to defend you!”

“Hey,” I heard the head guard say over the commotion with his amplified voice. “Hey! Hey! Calm down! We can talk!”

“Okay everyone!” I shouted out, hoping I still had control over the crowd. “They aren’t arresting us. Guards, you all back off, and yeah, we can talk.”

I wasn’t sure how it actually got to be like this, but the head guard and I sat on two pieces of rubble that’d been slid into place to form a pair of seats, with the adventurers and guards all circled around us. Honestly, it reminded me more of a negotiation between two armies than a civilian talking with a guard.

“Alrighty, son, listen. Let me introduce myself,” the head guard said. He was a tall, lanky man with some well-grown but poorly-trimmed facial hair, wearing chainmail and a plumed helmet. “My name’s Mick Luvvon. I’m the captain of this here guard, and I don’t take my position lightly. I need you to understand that there are procedures. Now, I can avoid taking all of you to the jail cells—I don’t even know if we have the room for all of you on such short notice—but I can’t just let you all go without asking you some questions about what happened here. So let’s start with your own name.”

“I’m Arlan Nota,” I said.

He froze for a second, then began to nod slowly. “...That would explain the commotion, I suppose. What, were these bounty hunters here?”

“No, not at all. I discovered that there were Koinkarian soldiers hiding out in this town, presumably here to scout out for a larger invasion.”

“An invasion to catch you.”

“I’m not so sure of that,” I said. “The Demons took over Koinkar, and I’m not living there right now, am I? They’re bent on conquest, is how I see it. Even if they had me, that would just grant them even more power, which they would likely use to accelerate their staging of this invasion. At least, if they weren’t here to conquer the Overworld, I don’t see why they’d need to have completely replaced the leadership of a kingdom in order to catch one man. I’m a side goal, from what I can tell.”

He frowned. “And all of this…All these people can back you up on that, if questioned independently?”

“Probably not all of that stuff about the going-ons of the kingdom, but what happened here? Yes, they were all here while it happened. Oh, and the ones without limbs, lying around on the ground, they aren’t dead. Those are all soldiers from the kingdom, had some sort of procedure done on them. I don’t know exactly how it works. But they can probably be questioned under a Truth Stone, and you’ll get all the info from them to back me up regarding the kingdom.”

The captain looked back at some of the guards behind him. “Get some people and start questioning them. Back this guy’s claims up.”

“Yes, Captain Mick,” one of them replied, and rushed off.

“Now,” Mick said, turning back to me, “about what happened here, exactly…”

“Right.” I nodded. “I heard rumors of these people coming to invade, so I hired a bunch of people to come help me—that’s who the vast majority of these people are, by the way, hired help—in case anything went wrong while I came to investigate the area. When I found the enemy soldiers, they attacked me on sight, and from there, we fought to defend ourselves.”

“And as for all the destruction?”

“Collateral damage.”

He laughed. “Surely you don’t expect me to believe all of this was collateral damage. Was there a bomb that went off?”

“Well, most of the combatants here were at minimum Level 15, and a good number were in the 20s. The leader of the enemy forces, a man named Jon, was a Level 28 Cleric.”

“Their leader was a Cleric?”

“He had taken a few combat-focused Spells. There was one—I don’t know the name—”

“Infuse with the Elements,” Index whispered in my ear.

“Oh, actually I do,” I said, continuing as seamlessly as I could. “Infuse with the Elements. It could—”

Mick’s raised eyebrows showed that he already knew what the Spell could do. “Well, shit. That would explain the fire. Is that man still around here? Or did he get away?”

I pointed. “His corpse should be in that pit.”

“Oh. Good.” He blinked. “Y-you killed a Level 28?”

“It was a team effort.”

“Level 28 with Infuse with the Elements. If he’d gone on a rampage…” Mick trailed off, shaking his head. “Well, sir, you did a mighty fine deed today. Assuming we can get everything you just said verified on Truth Stone, well…I’d say you are a hero.”

“You don’t need to call me a hero.”

“Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Hm,” I said, taking a moment to think. “Can you get me into contact with the people who run teleportation around here? I have a friend who I’d like to speed things up for, maybe get a discount on services for him, if it’s possible.”

“Well, I’d have to ask the mayor. I mean, as long as we don’t find any reason to turn you in to the kingdom. But with them invading us…Good grief, I don’t even know how we’re going to send that up the chain. War? Already?” He shook his head. “Anyway, I’ll see what I can do with the teleportation, but we won’t be arresting you for now, at least. You’re safe with us.”

“That’s good,” I said with a nod. I glanced over at Erani, who was standing off on the sidelines, more than happy to let me do the negotiating. Then I looked back at the guard captain, and lowered my voice. “Hey, Mick, also…I know you’re gonna want to give those limb things on the kingdom soldiers to your Enchanters or whatever to look over, but could you spare one of them and let me have it? A left arm.”

“You got something to use a non-functioning limb for?”

“I’m hoping I can make it into something I have a use for, yeah.”

“Well…” he shrugged. “I hate saying ‘I’ll see what I can do’ over and over, but you know how these things go. I don’t have all the information yet, but if it’s possible, I’ll do my best to help you out.”

“Great, thanks.”

He called someone over and started speaking to them about my requests, asking for a report on what they’d learned from the other people they’d been questioning.

While he received back confirmation that I’d been telling the truth, I took a breath and glanced around at the rubble. Take a curse, turn it into a blessing. That was what I would do, every step of the way. Curses into blessings.

I blinked. There was probably something else I should’ve asked for.

“One more thing,” I said, and Mick looked back at me. I took a breath. “Can you get me any Spell Crystals?”