“Can you believe that human?” said Rikan, the gnoll mage that Jerome had killed. “It impersonated our best soulcrafter… these humans, they’ve got some nasty tricks, but this one is the nastiest. I knew something was up, but Nakat’s always been weird. Then suddenly it snapped my neck, took my form, killed the rest of the guards, then escaped with one of the other humans. It could be anywhere. We still don’t know what it did with Nakat, so we’ve had to shut down investigations until—”
The shopkeeper had been motioning over to Jerome ever more insistently, and eventually coughed, cutting off Rikan. The gnoll saw Jerome as if it just noticed a bug in its soup.
“It’s not like half the city doesn’t already know,” Rikan said bitterly. “I’m not the only one that saw that thing work.”
The shopkeeper gave Jerome its most ingratiating smile. “I apologize for the fantasies you’ve heard here today. You are to not repeat anything you heard here today. Do you understand, gatherer?”
Jerome’s jaw still hadn’t left the floor.
Rikan was alive? Jerome remembered this gnoll’s neck snapping, its blood pumping from the wound. And it was talking about the incident casually, like he was in pre-raid chat complaining about last week’s wipe.
“Do you understand?” The shopkeeper asked more insistently.
Jerome nodded vigorously. “I won’t talk about the murder human.”
“Murder?” asked Rikan.
“What’s a murder?”
“A murder,” said Jerome. “A killing.”
“Have you heard that word before?” asked the shopkeeper.
Did they seriously not know the word ‘murder’? Was this some weird translation error, or did the gnolls not have that concept?
“I’ve heard it once,” Rikan said slowly, eyes narrowing. “From a human.”
Jerome rushed the mage, only to be caught halfway in a Hold.
That was no problem. He used Portal Hand to place his hand on Rikan’s back, then catapult the beast towards him. Except… the mage barely moved.
“You thought Hold was only for others, did you? I read the battle reports. I am prepared for your tricks.”
Shit. These things were organized. Whenever he battled one of them, unless he completely wiped out the team and any witnesses, they’d share knowledge about the tactics he’d used. And even the ones he killed might come back! That meant any surprise tactics would lose some of their effectiveness after one battle.
This battle, however, he could win because he had tactics the city gnolls hadn’t seen yet. He’d have to just keep on finding new tactics every time, that was all.
He used Crystal Overload + Magic Burst to shock away Rikan’s Holds, using up over half of his MP bar with a single move.
The shock only lasted a second, but that plus the two seconds Rikan needed to recover was enough time for Jerome to cross the distance. He prepared his claws, jumping so that he could do more damage in a flying strike… then got hit midair with Crystal Overload. His shaking body, already in midair, slammed into Rikan.
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The shopkeeper! He’d forgotten about the shopkeeper! Not all were as useless as the first one he’d impersonated.
After what seemed like an eternity of unendurable pain it stopped. Jerome lay panting on the floor, his HP down to 5.
“You almost killed him!” Rikan yelled. “If you’d done that, we’d have learned nothing!”
“Can’t he transform? I say take him down while we’ve got a chance. You lost a whole level last time. Others, ones who don’t have the personal favor of the king, lost way more.”
Rikan pulled up a chair a couple feet away from Jerome. “My friend here, he’s normally quite nice… but if you twitch the wrong way, he’ll finish you off real quick. Not everything takes as long to warm up as Crystal Overload.”
A spike of stone shot up just a couple inches from his head. Great — a weaponized version of whatever those mages in the courtyard had been practicing.
“If you answer our questions nicely,” said Rikan, “you might be able to contribute to science and to helping the rest of the humans — and yourself, should the theories prove malleable enough — to live in harmony here. Perfect integration. Multiple species working as one, just like we now have multiple tribes working as one. But you… you filthy, smelly, bigoted humans, you disrupt progress at every opportunity. Did you know there was a second escape attempt after you left? They’d been such docile subjects before that, but you put ideas into their heads. One of the subjects died! Died and hasn’t returned. Just like you’ll die if you don’t cooperate. So...”
Should he cooperate, lull them into a false sense of security, and then strike? Assuming they didn’t kill him, then that might be the best thing to do. However, if they slipped, or if they didn’t like one of his answers, he could die in an instant.
Another gnoll walked in.
“You,” said the shopkeeper to the newcomer, never taking its eyes off of Jerome, “go and alert the guards.”
The new gnoll ran off, taking waiting off the table as an option. He had to strike and escape now while he still had a chance.
Jerome transformed into Krystyna, then rolled towards Rikan. The place where he had been laying turned into a bed of earthen spikes. Then, catching up to the state of things, a spike formed right where Jerome was rolling, piercing his chest and sending fire through it, as well as taking out 28% of his HP and causing a bleeding effect.
Only way out was through. He had to finish these two out quick before he ran out of HP — this was the strongest fighting form he had — and before the gnoll messenger returned with reinforcements.
He fired off a Crystal Overload + Magic Burst using the new MP pool, disrupting whatever the shopkeeper was going to do next. Then he finished the roll, driving the spike deeper into his chest (causing more damage), and reached Rikan, who was scrambling away and trying to charge some sort of spell.
Can’t have that! Jerome punch Rikan in the shin, hurting his own hand but doing more total HP damage to Rikan and, more importantly, disrupting whatever spell the gnoll was charging up. He then rolled to a squat so he could see what the shopkeeper was doing… nothing good! It too was trying to charge up a spell, probably Crystal Overload. If either of them got that off on him again he was dead, and it only took two seconds to charge.
Jerome punched the shopkeeper using Portal Hand, sending it reeling backward and resetting the two-second warmup. Then he turned back to Rikan, who was also trying to warm up a spell. Jerome grabbed the mage by the arm and the opposite side of the neck and pulled it close, disrupting the charging.
“Let’s see if it sticks this time.”
He did a Recoil Burst, but his hands weren’t perfectly aligned. No neck snapping, although what happened certainly wouldn’t feel good for Rikan.
Another Portal Hand punch to the shopkeeper, to keep it disrupted, and then he pushed Rikan in front of him, did a double-handed Recoil Burst to send it flying into the shopkeeper, knocking them both into the wall, and then he stepped forward triumphantly to —
Motherfucker, one of them had put Hold on him. Must have been the shopkeeper, since Rikan was unconscious now, if not dead. Jerome used Portal Hand to pummel the gnoll into submission from a distance.
When it died the Hold was broken and Jerome collapsed to the ground, hacking up blood.