Two shotgun blasts going off followed by a blinding flash of light were bound to attract every other team of Huntsmen in a half-mile radius. As such, Mark clambered up the rusted fire escape leading to the top of the modest apartment complex far faster than was advisable for his malnourished body. He would be harder to spot if he hid at an elevation, could destroy the only visible path after him if absolutely necessary, and it would offer him a better opportunity to surveil the Primoi’s potential hiding spots around him. A win on all fronts, really.
Sometimes Mark wished he didn’t place his principles so highly. Stumbling on the fire escape’s final step and faceplanting into a four-year accumulation of ashen snow led to the most recent one of those times.
Mark picked himself out of the freezing slush and propped himself up against a rusted metal chimney. Ahead of him, he peered through the ocean of brick and concrete all around him, looking for the thinnest sliver of the river that he knew lay to the east. Nothing. He sighed and looked up at the sky, allowing the odd ash particle to come to rest on his mask’s visor.
He pulled his gun out of his waistband and held it up in the air, examining the foot-long cylinder’s flawless reflection of the darkness around it. He set it down on the flat cap of the chimney, using it to absent-mindedly sweep off the snow that had built up on top of the rusted pipe. After a minute or so of wondering if he would ever get out of this stupid city, let alone how, he froze when he heard something clang off the fire escape behind him.
Pulling his bowie knife out of his boot, Mark crept quietly towards the rim of the fire escape, staying low so that he wouldn’t be spotted before he could find whatever made the noise. He peered over the edge and looked through the thin bars of the metal staircase, spotting nothing that could have put any pressure on it…
Had that window two floors down been open when he had climbed past it?
“Lucky the drainpipe on the other side didn’t collapse, huh?” came a voice from behind Mark. “Sometimes it pays to weigh, like, thirty kilograms.”
Mark wheeled around and came face-to-face with the individual that immediately convinced him, then and there, that someone was messing with him in ways beyond his understanding.
“Evening,” said Yang, dangling Mark’s gun over the edge of the building.
Mark stared at Yang for a moment from across the building, then stashed his knife, turned around and started climbing down the fire escape.
Yang’s smug expression vanished in an instant. “Wait, no.”
“Nice seeing you,” said Mark, his head already disappearing over the roof’s edge. “Have to get going now. I’ve got a few bolts of lightning to get struck by.”
“Hang on, no!” Yang scrambled forward and looked down at Mark as he calmly made his way down the rusted stairs. “I–I’m not… gonna… Seriously though, where are you going?”
“Somewhere else.”
“N–No you are not!” Yang vaulted over the side of the building and landed on the landing in front of Mark. “I did not–”
The thin, rusted metal of the fire escape buckled under Yang’s impact and the equally degraded bolts holding it in place against the apartment building’s wall were ripped free one by one.
“You’re kidding,” muttered Yang.
Both human and demon leapt for something to hold onto as over a hundred feet of flaking metal peeled off of the building’s side and crashed to the ground, pulverizing half a dozen cars that lay in its wake.
Yang gripped a crumbling windowsill with one hand and held onto Mark’s gun with the other, straining as she hoisted herself up to a comfortable position. Halfway through achieving a sitting position, she yelped with surprise and leaned to the side as Mark swung for her throat from a balcony five feet away, his knife poised to kill. “Can you be normal for five seconds?!” protested Yang.
“When Hell freezes over,” replied Mark as he turned around, kicked in the glass door that led into the connecting apartment, and stepped through the resultant hole. “Sounds like a pretty charitable timeframe at this point.”
Yang groaned and climbed through the window into the same apartment as Mark, coming face-to-face with the visibly underfed man in a gas mask holding a knife. She held his gun out the window, once again visibly threatening to drop it. “Human, I’m trying to have a civilized conversation with you. Do you want this back or not?”
Mark took a step towards Yang. “Not crazy about it, to be honest.”
Yang stretched her arm further out the window. “There’s a fire hydrant right below here. I saw earlier.”
Mark took another step closer. “Cool.”
“This thing is going to fall right on top of it. It’s gonna get totally mangled, there won’t be any snow or anything to cushion it.”
“Great, do it.”
Yang froze, considered the outcomes of dropping it versus not doing so for a moment, then threw a thermos-sized chrome cylinder full of space-bending mechanical parts directly into Mark’s sternum.
Mark fell backwards, wheezing from the shock of the impact. Yang, meanwhile, ran to the side, sliding over the apartment’s kitchen counter and taking cover behind it. “This is stupid, human! I’d prefer if we kept the amount of violence here to zero. It isn’t my style.”
“Funny… way of showing it.” Mark coughed and struggled to his feet. “Do I want to know how you traveled across dimensions just to ruin my day specifically?”
Yang glanced at the door next to the kitchen that seemed to lead to the hallway outside the apartment. It also looked locked. “Oh, y’know. Bit of brains, lots of being in the right place and right time. A certain band of merry men drove down a lot of demand in the Down Below for mass exoduses to up here, but it’s been coming back in style.”
“Hence the fleet of flying squid that got blown out of the sky a day or two ago?”
“Exactly. I went–” Yang peeked her head over the counter, then immediately ducked back down when a shotgun blast vaporized the linoleum countertop. “Fun stuff. As I was saying before being so rudely interrupted–”
“Try to get out from behind there again and I’ll blow your head off.”
“…You got it, boss.” Yang shuddered at the sight of the dust now coating the damp floor around her. “I hitched a ride with a pretty big group from who-cares-where, managed to do it for free thanks to my totally useful experience as a former earthling. We came up in some place called, I dunno, Taxes, or Tesses or something a couple months ago, made some friends with the Servants there before they changed their policy to shoot-on-sight.”
“Surprised they didn’t open with that,” said Mark, gun still trained on the counter.
“Well, they sure changed their mind fast. I ended up hearing tell of a certain Burning One wreaking havoc up north, which sounded an awful lot like your skydiving lava friend. And what do you know, I just so happened to know a great spot for my travel friends to settle, and I must’ve forgotten to mention that said spot was right in the path that said Burning One was headed on.”
“Wow,” mumbled Mark, ejecting a chrome-plated shell casing from his shotgun. “You sound like such a trustworthy figure right now.”
“I’m afraid you don’t have much of a choice right now,” replied Yang. “I’ve got–”
“Oh, I have plenty of choice for what to do right now,” growled Mark. “Don’t act like you’ve got this all under control right now. I didn’t see any weapons on you.”
Yang clenched her fists until her knuckles were white. “Oh, and that didn’t tip you off that maybe I’m not here to fight you?! I could’ve thrown that gun-thing at your face and cracked your mask open, and you would’ve been dead in a couple of minutes, but I didn’t, because killing you defeats the whole purpose of me being here! I’m trying to save all of our skins right now, and you’re holding me at gunpoint behind a counter! Are you trying to avoid hearing me out on purpose?!”
“I’m not…!” Mark froze. Slowly and without moving his gun, he looked over his shoulder at the door leading outside. His mind went back to the Huntsmen, and he turned back to face Yang. He sighed and lowered his gun. “Start talking.”
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
Yang peeked her head over the countertop, noted that her head hadn’t yet exploded, and shot up to her feet. “That convinced you to hear me out?! Did I just need to call you stupid at the start to avoid all of this?!”
“Don’t push it,” said Mark.
Yang rolled her eyes. “Whatever. Look, I wouldn’t be dealing with all this…” She gestured in Mark’s general direction with both hands. “…If I didn’t feel like I absolutely have to. Look, it’s been a fair few months since the last time we met, and I’ve had plenty of time to think things through.”
“You mean after you spent half an hour in a giant castle trying to blow us up with a huge ball of lightning and only stopped when it turned into a big nightmare dog?”
“That… Yes. But that’s exactly what I’m talking about here.” Yang stepped around the counter. “I saw the giant fire monster rampaging through the city an hour ago and fighting your lava friend. We all did, it’s a tough thing to miss. And don’t you think that they seemed connected in some way? Similar to each other?”
Mark looked at the floor. “It was a Chosen. The Servants have a bunch of them lying around.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I don’t think they’re all ex-Primoi like yours was, but…” Mark shook his head. “The fire one saved my life earlier. It stopped a building from falling on me, then let me go and went right back to fighting Waia like nothing happened.”
“Waia,” exclaimed Yang, “that was her name, right. But you see what I’m talking about, right? I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, and the pieces aren’t fitting together right. You ever see anything about a person with a hood and sword? Weird silvery mask?”
“…Torch,” mumbled Mark.
“Yeah, exactly! I didn’t know if you’d seen them too, but I know they’re at the center of all this. They appeared right in front of me down in the DB, gave me a bunch of advice on what you were doing down there, then vanished. They were using me to stop you.”
Mark propped himself up on a nearby armchair. “And they’ve been up here leading the Servants…”
“What?!” Yang ran a hand across their scalp. “They’re… Of course, duh, that’s how they’ve got the Chosen. But you see what I’m talking about?”
“That Torch is out to get us?” asked Mark. “Yeah, I figured.”
“No, no, it goes deeper than that, okay? Stay with me here.” Yang sped over to the apartment’s window and looked up and down the street outside. “Look, I… At this point, everyone who stuck with me since I was on Thel’s side is dead. You don’t need to remember their names, it’s–”
“No,” said Mark, “I remember one. Uh, zh–Xiao, I think. The one who switched sides so that we’d help him kick you out of the city you took over. And then you killed him.”
“Good to see you remember, at least…” grumbled Yang, folding her arms across her chest. “Yeah, okay, I killed him. Long too before him, if not quite as directly. But, like… I think there was foul play there, too. When I was fighting Xiao, it was like there was this… voice in my head, one that wasn’t supposed to be there, but just blended in with the background noise too well for me to tell. And the whole time, it was telling me that it had to be this way, that this was what it took to survive, that…”
She shook her head. “It just kept on drowning out anything in my brain that might tell me that what I was doing was wrong, just screaming in my ear that this was how things were, and it only stopped and went away when victory was right in front of me, when I had you and your friends in my sights, and… I guess that’s why I didn’t go through with it. Took me months of replaying that whole day in my head over and over to even begin to realize that maybe it wasn’t just me telling myself all that. You’re welcome, by the way.”
Mark nodded slowly. “So… What? I’m all alone out here and I don’t know where everyone else is. What do you want me to do about mind control?”
“I wish it was controlling me,” mumbled Yang. “But… I don’t really know. But clearly, you’re all an important part of this too. Probably a lot more important than me. But you know me, I don’t take kindly to not mattering.”
“Mmm.” Mark looked over his shoulder. He could have sworn that he had felt someone watching him. “Someone’s out there messing with us, got it. Thanks for the tip, I guess.”
“You know it, bud.” Yang glanced at the door again. “Look, I know what I’m talking about. Game recognizes game, and all that. This isn’t just someone screwing with us for fun. This is a con. This is all leading up to something bad for us all, and it’s gonna be a lot worse for us than buying a bogus collector’s coin, I can say that.”
“If there’s one thing I can agree you have experience with, I suppose.”
“Yeah, sure. Considering our track record with each other, I don’t think I need to say that I don’t like you. But I really don’t like being on the wrong end of my own game. So that’s why I’m here: I’m finding an enemy of my enemy to let whoever’s pulling the strings know that they made a fool out of the wrong demon.”
A moment of silence passed after Yang said that. Slowly, Mark let out a quiet chuckle and looked at the cracked plaster ceiling.
Yang scowled. “Fine. Laugh it up. Sure. See if I care.”
“No, no, it’s just…” Mark set his gun down in the armchair’s seat and sat down on the floor next to it. “…Seems like it would be nice to have half the bravado you do. It would make this all a whole lot easier.”
Yang groaned at the human’s remark and leaned against the un-shattered part of the kitchen counter. “And here I thought there was starting to be some respect here between us.”
“No, no,” explained Mark, “that’s a compliment. You’ve been able to take on a full Domain of what I figure were some pretty major-league Primoi, take control of a whole magic city, and now you somehow tracked me all the way out here, all in the span of a year. Meanwhile, I’ve spent almost half that time wandering vaguely north without accomplishing anything, and now I’m all alone in some wreck of a city. That bravado’s certainly been keeping you afloat a lot better than me.”
Yang squinted at Mark, then looked around the apartment. “…I’ve accounted for Waia, but there were five of you in the DB. You, her, the blue eyepatch one who was also in Greece, then there was that green wizard girl and the one with two different eyes. Do I assume the worst?”
Mark shrugged. “Torch got that last one months ago, the fire Chosen killed Waia about thirty minutes ago, and I’ve lost track of the rest. I gotta be honest, you didn’t find me at a good time.”
Yang grunted. “Small miracle I found you at all. It takes more curiosity than brains to check out the giant flash of light that came a few blocks away two seconds after multiple gunshots. But hey, here we are, right? We take what we can get.”
“I’ll say,” mumbled Mark. “…So, uh, if you have any plans for how we’re gonna get ourselves out of this hole, I’m happy to hear them. I’m more the ‘plans guy’ of my group by process of elimination than anything else.”
“Absolutely nothing,” said Yang. “Seeing as it’s apparently literally just the one random human I’ve got to work with, what few concepts I occasionally thought of are already out the window. Did you and Waia have a plan when you came this far up, or did you just pick a direction and start killing Servants that way? Or I guess you could just live in the area. It’s been nine months, I don’t have a clue what you’ve been doing.”
Mark shook his head. “We had a… sort of plan. A gesture in its direction, anyway. This one incomprehensible shapeshifter guy gave us what were probably directions to Mount Rainier, a couple days north of here. Supposedly there’s some artifact Deus made up there.”
Yang scoffed and rolled her eyes.
“Yeah, yeah, I know. Plus we already lost someone when the last hiding spot for the Seraphium – that’s the thing, by the way – was a red herring. But considering the fact that the Servants blew up the house we were staying at ten minutes later, it’s not like we can pass up an opportunity to apparently re-summon everyone lost to the Nabbing. No matter how unbelievably stupid we would have to be to think that this colorful feather thing attached to a hook won’t turn out to be bait this time. Honestly, it’s more about just feeling like there’s something we can do than it is about actually having a decent shot.”
Yang nodded. “Yeah, it’s… It’s a lobster pot.” She buried her head in her hands. “Oh, we’re so dead.”
“Yeah, you don’t say.”
“No, it’s…” Yang sighed and pushed away from the counter. “Figures. I dunno, maybe I’ve just been running in circles this whole time. Seems likely, considering the culmination of all this planning and investigation has been me hanging out with loser human in an abandoned apartment in… where even are we? I left the navigation part of things to the monsters flying me here. I just know it’s the north-left corner of whatever country used to be here.”
“Portland,” said Mark. “And thanks for calling me a loser, by the way. Really makes me appreciate your company.”
“No, It’s a compliment.” Yang sat down against the armchair, right next to Mark. “Sort of. I mean, it’s not like I wouldn’t call myself the same. You said I’ve been doing way better than you this whole time, but let me tell you, it does not feel that way. I’m not anyone’s lackey anymore (that I know of), so there’s that, but… y’know. I got both my friends killed, and since then, I’ve spent almost every waking moment trying to track down some random people I met months ago so that they can actually fix things on my behalf. That’s not the schedule that belongs to someone who’s doing well.”
“Guess so,” mumbled Mark. “But… Hey. At least–”
“If you say ‘at least we have each other,’ I’ll kill you.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” said Mark. “You still suck.”
“As do you.”
“But at least there’s been someone to talk to about this.”
Yang glared at Mark. “You literally just rephrased the one thing I told you not to say and then acted like I wouldn’t notice.”
“Yeah, but now it doesn’t sound weird.” Mark shrugged. “With how long I’ve been alone out here, I was getting worried that it’d all just get stuck in my head and I’d die without really knowing what it all led to. I still don’t, not really, but it feels better. You know?”
Yang shrugged in turn. “Yeah, I guess.”
“And at least with how much I’ve got behind me, this is making me feel like I’m ready for anything. Like, it really doesn’t matter how much worse things get, I’m just going to go ‘whatever’ and walk around it. I’m seeing this through, one way or another.”
Anything?
“Yeah, anything.” Mark blinked. “Wait, you didn’t say that.”
“Didn’t say what?” asked Yang. She looked down away from Mark’s masked face and down at his legs. “Where’d that come from?”
Mark looked down to see a thin length of linen wrapped around his left ankle, one end trailing along the length of the floor until it vanished behind an ajar door. “When did–?”
The strand suddenly went taut, yanking Mark’s leg towards the door. His head slipped from where it had been resting against the armchair, striking the floor and making him go completely prone.