If there had been just one of Rhuna’s moonstriders, they could have piled on it in the choked confines of the sewer and killed it without anyone the wiser. If there had been two, it would have been a struggle, even with their preparation. But three? Three was just too much. And the moonstriders knew it. They were upon the raid group in seconds.
“Retreat!” Someone yelled, as the hope of a successful ambush died in their hearts. “To the guild hall!”
They had traps galore back at the thieves guild, plus Karla’s dregs who were scattered all over as an early warning system. The secret entrance was right behind them, but it was only wide enough for two people to uncomfortably squeeze by at a time. They were nine, and by the time all disabling boons and disorienting spells were slung, half of them were still stuck on the outside.
Elia parried a strike that would have gone for Karla’s neck while Karla acted as their central hinge; she was the only one who could hold her ground and take their blows. Even with all her recent upgrades, Elia couldn’t keep up, not with the eighteen disparate limbs bearing down on them.
She felt a tug at her belt and someone pulled her through the tunnel – moments before the entrance exploded in a flash-freeze.
“Back! Back!” Ninja one yelled. “Stop pushing! How hard is it to go backwards!?”
“We are!”
Elia froze. A peek around everyone else revealed the problem: The single tunnel leading into the guild was looping in on itself in an impossible feat of geometry. The people at the front were advancing, but they couldn’t not push backwards, not when the front and back led to the same end.
A bird-like head peeked into the tunnel.
“Friends?” it crowed.
This one had four rapiers as long as pikes and Elia cursed herself again for not picking up a spear or a crossbow, synergy with her boons be damned. The press against her back lessened to a degree. Right, the moonstriders’ passive reality-warping ability had a limited range. If it hadn’t, then at some point anyone who engaged them would be stuck to their skin like an involuntary limpet.
Though that said nothing about overlapping fields. Did all three have this ability, or only the biggest one?
A thrust ended a foot from Elia’s face, derailing her train of thought.
“Keep moving!” she yelled, “Slowly! Steadily!”
Karla intercepted the following blows, sending her living chain forward, binding two of the moonstrider’s arms together. However, the two other arms jabbed all the more violently, never retreating out of a potentially lethal range. There was no room to dodge; it all came down to if Karla could catch every stab before it hit someone behind or beside her.
Karla could. The attacks skipped off her like raindrops off a turtle shell. One impact bent a rapier so far it should have broken, bar any magical shenanigans. The girl didn’t take one step back. Her shield – a towering wooden thing, tall as a door – protected her from sharp metal and ice, and from the cold. But not the heat. She was breathing heavier by the second.
“Karla?” Elia asked. “Karla, you alright?”
She got a dull groan coming from somewhere inside the armor. A particularly large fireball erupted against her shield and for a moment, Karla stumbled.
She was steaming in the cool air. With all this movement, her armor was cooking her alive.
“Shit,” Elia swore, nearly fumbling her water bottle. She only had the one, but she figured bowl-water would cool just like normal water. She opened Karla’s two visors and poured some where she thought the girl’s mouth was.
Karla coughed, but evidently the cool wet was welcome. Then a strike hit her in the knee.
The rapier broke first.
Karla giggled. “I’ll die before you can kill me!”
Soon, the pressure on their backs lessened. They were through and everyone took the chance to pile on into a much less claustrophobic guild hall. Finally, Elia had some space to maneuver and apply all her hard-earned skills.
But Elia left the entrance only to watch ninja number one’s head sail in an arc. The second moonstrider was already inside, embroiled in a vicious fight with everyone who had made it through before them.
Sans one ninja.
Its head stared through her with empty, frigid eyes. Elia froze.
She narrowly blocked a double thrust just as the small ninja lost both her arms. The ninja jumped back, fished out her own plastic bottle with her feet, then squeezed it empty, regrowing her limbs in a matter of heartbeats.
No one bothered with the dead.
When Elia saw that everyone else had come prepared for losses, she suddenly realized why she found it so hard to swallow. They were undead, and so every death was not a loss of life, but something else. Mouggen died twice, and that had changed him. When Cesare died, maybe he would lose the cloud boon he so adored.
The pact members present were all barely twenty years old, and they’d been made killers and diers, all of them. They threw themselves into every scuffle with reckless abandon, as more and more naivete was chipped off their faces.
This was real undead combat. It was brutal and full of reckless self-sacrifice that Elia despised. No matter how much of a hypocrite that made her, and no matter that the winner could put the bodies back together.
Every cut on them was like a cut on her own skin; every prick of pain a reminder of how she had suffered for centuries. And every reminder was a knife to the heart. All this could happen again, and she would have to watch it play out just that little bit differently.
No one had to suffer but her.
And yet they did, willingly, and with every strike against them, they lifted a burden from her shoulders and her fury only grew. Elia threw herself into the fray with renewed fervor, determined to kill, to win, to live that answer she had found within herself.
No one else would die on her watch.
Karla was propelled out of the secret entrance by a blast of frost, and the first moonstrider came right after. It was too much, too soon. They were still working on the first.
“Karla, all out!” she yelled.
Karl raised a hand. “[Chains of Tartazon]!”
Dozens of chains erupted from every side, catching it in a net right in the entrance. The girl stumbled aside, fishing for her water bottle with her thick metal mittens. Between getting it for her, or pressing the attack on the increasingly flagging first moonstrider, Elia bet on the former. Even with one member down, the group was doing better than expected, leading it through an array of tripwire traps and hidden dart traps and shuriken-launchers.
If the one in the tunnels was specialized in ice, then this one was born in fire. Small tongues of flame licked at anyone who dared to attack, its scimitars looked molten and its hands were scarred with repeated casts of fire.
Fire. Such an odd thing for a conjurer to have, considering pyromancy was supposedly banned by the conjurers of Yorivale. It ate at the walls, the stone, at everything and unlike the ice when it disappeared, it just left more mundane fire. Elia dodged a swipe and yet she could not shake the feeling that something was not right here.
The sounds of chains creaking and breaking brought her back to the present. The first moonstrider was escaping, and Karla was not up yet. It needed to stay down, because if they could just turn all their focus on one fight at a time, then they could win.
“[Ch…], [Chains of tartazon!]” Karla yelled again with a bottle on her lips, emptying her recently recharged reservoir.
She didn’t pass out, and Moonstrider number one was locked more firmly in place again.
‘Good. Very, very good.’
Then the moonstrider disappeared and everything went to shit. The third one had gone entirely unnoticed, and while everyone was busy, it had snuck around the outside and used its teleporty-dance to free its comrade. They stood together at the end of the hallway, the entrance to the big foyer. One of Karla’s dregs approached them from behind and they barely wasted a second in cutting it to ribbons.
Elia met the leader of the moonstriders’ face.
The moment it started its dance again, she knew that she needed to make a play, or someone would die. While everyone else was still shocked by the appearance of a triple-boss, she flexed her legs and leapt forward.
The moonstriders flung a few quick firebolts at her, but a second acceleration-jump off the ground threw its aim off. She hit the already weakened one with outstretched legs hard as iron, bones crunching as she slammed it against the wall, then used a third jump to speed out of the cage of blades within a split second.
Her amethyst ring instantly flared to life, a golden shield blocking a swipe aimed at her neck. But a dozen more tore into her before she landed out of reach, skidding right past them. Her humble smile widened as she noticed that her first shot had hit true. Moonstrider number one’s three left-hand-side arms were hanging limply, all three completely crushed. Their leader meanwhile hadn’t gotten the chance to finish its dance.
‘Eight against two and a half,’ she thought, still not liking the odds. Moonstrider number one looked at her through a baleful eye, but left to press the others, leaving her with the uninjured numero tres.
Elia motioned to stand, but fell back to the ground. Her legs creaked like an old door and she was fairly certain something in her right foot was broken. Every inch of her body was sewn with cuts, or bruises where their weapons hadn’t gotten through. She needed a drink, but her bottle was empty and the moonstrider was approaching quickly.
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“Elia!” she heard Karla yell and turned just in time to snatch her water bottle out of the air. It was almost empty, but it would do. The moonstrider screamed in annoyance and redoubled its efforts.
One of Karla’s dregs threw itself against the boss and was immediately eviscerated. Two more jumped at it from the first floor stairway, landing a nick on an arm and a glancing blow on another. A fatter one clamped its arms around the moonstrider’s bird-legs, who looked down with an irritated squawk.
“The… pact…” it groaned before a stomp squashed its head like a watermelon.
The bird-creature turned to Elia, who was just standing up.
“Thanks, nameless dreg,” she mumbled, feeling bones and tendons realign, pangs of fury running down her cheeks. “I won’t waste that.”
Moonstrider one was fighting Karla, number two the rest. If number three got to them, it was over. He was larger than the others, and looked smarter too. Elia knew a leader when she saw one.
She launched herself at it regardless, exchanging a hail of blows to buy time. Blood soon coated the wall to her right. With some pride, she noted that not all of it was red. With a lot more unease, she realized that her opponent’s whitish blue blood was evaporating into an irritating gas that was getting into her eyes.
Leading the bird away, she kept up the pressure, going high, then low-low-mid-low. It was trying to dance while fighting her, trying to pluck a crucial keystone from the other fight. It wasn’t taking her seriously and even then, Elia was having a hard time keeping up; all six of its arms sported different weapons, all requiring a different answer.
She parried the sword, smashed away the sickle, and dodged the glowing flail. She jumped over the kriegsmesser, side-stepped the barbed spear, and caught the rondel-dagger in a nasty riposte. Finally, she turned it around and in one fell swoop, cut off the dagger hand.
The bird did not reel, but leaned down to peck her. Elia ducked to the side, readying a strike against its jowls when she noted the glint in its eyes.
“Clack!” it said, and clacked its beak together, creating a solitary spark.
The gas in the air around her exploded, and for a moment the world was running circles around her head. Then Elia hit the ground, and her tumble came to a stop.
She was pretty sure she was deaf; the only thing she could hear was the boon-music that had just come to a crescendo. Now it was playing a tragic duo of high and low, already her loss and the encroaching death of hope.
By the look on Cesare’s face as he staggered next to her, it was appropriate. It felt like her entire face was on fire. She licked her lips and they simply weren’t there. She couldn’t see from her left eye either.
“O-oh, sh…” he stammered, throwing a frantic flurry of harmless clouds, “I, shit, I’m out of water.”
Elia wanted to reply that she was too, but all she got was a cough of blood. Thank god for tenacity or this would have been a reset. The fight seemed to have gone better on this side at least.
The party had killed the wounded moonstrider and were still trying to crack the fiery one in a fight that could go either way. The superhuman fight was taking its toll on more than just players though. Armor was cracking, chainmail tearing, and the constant reheating and cooling down of the surrounding foundations made it crack and pop as if there was a fire hidden inside the stone.
There probably was. They should get out of here soon. But to get out, they’d have to get past the enemies first. None of Karla’s dreg reinforcements were trickling in anymore, but despite the weakness of their flank, the third moonstrider did not move in, dancing in place.
“Friend?” it kept asking. “Friend, friend?”
“Fuck. You.” Elia coughed and gurgled.
“Friend!” it exclaimed, finishing a dance and decapitating a disorientated Mouggen.
Elia screamed. She screamed and tore at her restraints, at the pain, at everything holding her back. She stood up, disregarding how her scalebreaker was completely shattered. It was prized among mortals, but not good enough for a fight between immortals it seemed.
She threw it aside and fished for a backup weapon. All she had left a was a knife.
Kitchen knife
A kitchen knife. For cooking.
The kitchen knife was unscratched. It did not even have a handguard. No defense. How fitting.
Elia laughed, a throaty thing for lack of lips. It really was all in the boons, wasn’t it? Some good that did her when the gods had made them random, forced people into trades that were inherently against their favor. How long had it taken for Cesare to get his good boons? How many tries for the moonstriders?
How much had to be sacrificed for such little gain?
Elia felt like she was making a mistake going down this line of thought, but she didn’t care. If she didn’t win today, Rhuna would change the rules tomorrow. The thought of being a piece on the board someone else happily arranged from a safe, distant place was just the fuel needed to stoke her fury and bring with the onset of a damning, all-consuming haze. She sank deep within herself and drank from the cup of vengeance.
Rye was not here to bring her back this time. No one was.
She brushed off a concerned, heavy-yet-light hand from her shoulders and inhaled a rattling breath, letting the wind whistle through her cheeks.
The moonstrider stopped its silly dance, observing her with an odd sense of stillness. It took a step back, noticed that it had, then squawked in indignant fury. With feathers puffed out, it pointed its five weapons at Elia.
And Elia jumped. One [Frog leap] and she was moving at a quick pace. Two and she was practically sprinting. Three and she was approaching what a normal human could reach in a freefall. Four, she bounced off a wall, cracking the wood and shaking a vase off its podium. At the fifth, she closed her remaining eye, smashing the floorboards as she landed right at the feet of the moonstrider.
Five weapons bore down on her. And Elia leapt one final time. She felt her heels crack, her knees grind, and her heart give out. But when her knife glid into the moonstrider’s sternum without resistance all the way past the hilt, she knew it had all been worth it. Its body lurched, then lifted into the air.
All this happened within the span of five seconds, as Elia shot up with the moonstrider, and burst straight through the glass roof.
You have slain: Rhuna’s favorite birdie, the Sunscorched Moonstrider
The moments in which gravity caught up to them were the most exhilarating seconds she had felt since she left the maze behind for good. That feeling remained until her stomach lurched and gravity reasserted itself. The impact on the roof felt less nice, but was a swell reminder that she still lived in the present, and not the past; lived for herself, and not purely for revenge.
Elia coughed, as the strain caught up to her. Her chest was tearing her apart and no matter how she wheezed, the pain only grew stronger. A heart-attack. She chuckled. With her age, she was long overdue for one anyways.
She rolled to her side, idly watching the eternal dusky-daytime of a world that refused to change.
The sound of fighting was distant, but still present. She looked around for a convenient slope to roll down so she could hit the last moonstrider over the head with her falling body. Just because her left arm was broken, every bone in her legs cracked, and she was having trouble hearing herself think did not mean she was out of the fight yet.
The haze wouldn’t let her stop until she was done.
Someone lifted her head up just enough to take a swig from an offered bottle. It was more of a sip, and the moment her heart resumed beating, it was wrenched away again.
“N-nnh,” Elia grumbled. “W-who?”
“No thanks required,” said a booming, jolly voice. Elia’s blood froze in her veins. She looked up at the smiling, no, outright grinning frame of a maned woman with a lion’s mask. “Heya there, frenemy.”
“Rhuna.” Elia swallowed heavily. Even through the simmering haze, she knew that she was screwed. This was the worst situation possible.
It wasn’t for another hour or two that the attack should be starting. How was she here? Why now, when Elia had just started completing the first step?
“What a coincidence.” Rhuna tapped a finger against her lip. “Or, maybe, what providence of mine, that we should meet on this roof here. You make a lot of noise, you know?”
Elia dared a peek at the side. The pact’s party was still going on. No one was screaming or dying in dark alleyways. And when she looked back, she found that Rhuna was not wearing her eternally cocksure smile. She was rather calm, in a way that sent chills down Elia’s pained body.
“You sound different,” Elia commented dryly. “Where’s your humor? Bird catch your tongue?”
A heavy stone foot stepped on hers, crushing it. Elia let out a pained scream.
“Don’t be clever with me, Elia. Ever heard of the theory of three masks? I didn’t spend my centuries growing stupider while I pump my veins full with vices and poisons to forget the world. This is the real me.” The pressure released, and Elia suddenly wished that she hadn’t taken that sip of water. “But I guess congratulations are in order. Congrats. You killed my favorite pet. Whoop-de-doo. Ready for round two?”
“Is that what the water’s for?” Elia hissed, struggling under the weight of the moonstrider’s body. “If you’re so bored that you can’t wait to see me, you’ll have to give me more time so I can prepare a fair fight.”
“Oh, nonono. The water is so you don’t die while I ferry you off somewhere where you won’t be a bother. You’re annoying, you see. Infuriating. You killed Hall, who was incidentally keeping Avon's knights from my flank. You killed Yolon too. Does the pact know you did him in? Did you expect them to cheer you on? Well, I for one, I’m angry, I think. I’m furious Elia.” For a moment, she looked surprised. Then she laughed, booming and hideously like rock grinding on gravel. “Gods, I knew there was something about you when we first met. To think my stone body could still feel this way. Wonderful. Glorious.”
A hunched figure crawled up the side of the roof, not making eye contact with Elia as it whispered into Rhuna’s ear.
“Huh? Oh, yeah, start the assault.” She brushed the creature aside, which sent it bouncing off the rooftops. “This is all your fault by the way. You meddled with my shit.”
“Like hell I did. The world doesn’t belong to you.”
Rhuna scoffed, as if insulted. “Girl, you have single handedly caused me more trouble in three months than the pact has in the last ten years, and probably by accident. Imagine a possum crawls into a nuclear power plant and short-circuits the entire thing, then somehow survives just to do it again two weeks later. You’re the possum, and you’re done playing dead. Now that you’ve forced my hand–” Rhuna shrugged, “--there are only so many moves one can make.”
Elia groaned, still carrying the weight of the moonstriders corpse on top of her, mind racing.
She never did figure out how exactly to use her weird ability to turn back time efficiently, at least not more efficiently than she already was. But when it came to what returned and what stayed lost, there were only two simple rules that followed her: That which was worn, and that which was carried.
The corpse was heavy, but gritting her teeth, Elia lifted it an inch off the ground.
“Only so many moves. Right you are,” Elia said, and swiped a knife at her throat.
Rhuna caught her arm, twisted it, and disarmed her in a single smooth motion. Elia barely grunted this time as her wrist snapped. It was as good a try as she was going to get, and now it was all for nothing.
She seethed, hoping that looks could kill. “Kill me.”
“No, none of that. You seem like the kind of crazy hardass who really would have a boon that triggers on death. I only encourage martyrdom among my followers. Personally, I think death is overrated.”
“Kill me!”
“Oh, you wish I would. I get you, Elia, you hate the world, hate yourself, hate this fucking game the gods and everyone seems to play by. You’re determined, like, seriously, against all reason. In a year or two, you might be able to rival Partlight on your own.” Rhuna leaned down, cupping Elia’s chin. “But I’m not going to let you get that far. You are exactly the kind of meatbag I was looking for to round off my collection. I am going to throw you in my dungeon and let you fight all my untrained minions so they can learn what a real scrap is. Then, you’re going to try something clever, maybe kill my warden, maybe break out. But you will be in my domain, where I am god, and where I’ll know all you did and ever will do. I’ll bring you back, and make you run the gauntlet again and again. Almost allegorical, isn’t it?”
The first ripples of her greater shard flowed through her body, turning her form into putty. That was when she felt it, a ripple of her own. It resonated with her entire being, moving in counter outwards, ever outwards. Rhuna stepped back as a familiar face slipped out of Elia’s, a perfectly sharp dagger made of see-through ice in its hands.
With one clean slice her neck bloomed red. But looking into those eyes, watching those movements, Elia felt another layer of cold reckoning suffuse her thoughts.
That was not Rye.
You have died
Divine grace protects thee, loyal undead
You have lost: Ring of Grace x1