Devon watched from beside the makeshift bed as Trey awoke. Several hours had passed since healing pills had been administered and Trey had fallen unconscious. The healing item had taken care of the most critical wounds and stabilized his condition, but he still wouldn't be moving for another day until he went through as many courses of pills as it would take to return him to full condition.
Kal'o Kir's spree of heinous mutilations was yet more proof of how incredible the token the system had given him for defeating the monkeys was. The pills were miraculous items, yet even they had limitations that were becoming all too clear. In the midst of battle they could not be relied upon to fix everything and get you back in the fight.
"Shame… I was hoping there would be a cute girl to greet me when I woke up," Trey said.
"I could always use my disguise skill to look like one, if you want."
"Please don't. I don't need such a horrifying thought in my head." Trey looked around, "We're alone?"
"Susan agreed to let me have the room so long as I make you take a healing pill as soon as you wake up. She's keeping everyone else away so they don't disturb your rest, but it hasn't been very easy on her." Devon handed over a healing pill which Trey promptly took.
"I see. I'll have to thank her later."
They lapsed into silence before Devon's expression turned serious, "So, what happened?"
Of course, he wasn't asking how Trey had been tortured or how his team had been ambushed, though that would be good intel for later. He was of course interested in the vishan's tactics, but his more immediate concern was something else. Even in Trey's stubbornness in leaving on that expedition, he'd been amenable to tactical considerations.
In every kidnapping thus far it had been immediately obvious when someone had been abducted. It'd almost been impossible to miss, as the victims had blinded their acquaintances with messages pleading for help even as they'd been mercilessly tortured.
The problem was none of those individuals had been composed enough to rationally communicate while under the knife, leading to a situation where many people sought to help but were incapable of doing so because hardly anything comprehensible came through the system. It wasn't their fault, they could hardly be expected to think logically while being tortured.
When the second pair had been taken Trey had dispatched a squad to the first burrow that the traumatized wife had shown them on her map, but the location of the first tortures was empty. Kal'o Kir wasn't a moron, she was moving location for every new victim, making sure to leave no traces or hints in her wake.
And so when Devon had seen how determined Trey was to head out he'd suggested a contingency. In the event that Trey was captured he had a team on standby, ready to coordinate a search and assault of Kal'o Kir's new lair.
Unlike the individuals that had been previously taken, Trey had connections with nearly everybody in Plainstown and could remotely coordinate them if need be. And most importantly, he was good under pressure.
The specific plan was that in the event of Trey's capture two dozen squads of paired individuals would be dispatched into the woods. Those squads would utilize whatever means available to them to create as much noise as they could. If Trey happened to hear any of that noise he could communicate that and then they could begin the process of elimination on which squad's noise could be heard, giving them an approximate area to conduct a more thorough search.
But when Trey had been captured they didn't receive any message from him. Even hours after the defeated five in his team returned to Plainstown they received no messages from the man himself. The next time anybody heard anything from Trey was when he'd been found, his abducted partner carrying his abused body back towards Plainstown.
"Kal'o Kir used something on me that disabled most of the system's functions, it said they were sealed every time I tried to access them. The only thing I could use was the status page, so I wasn't able to send messages out as we'd planned."
"Same with the other one who was with you?"
"No, Jordan was unconscious the entire time. I think she force-fed him two healing pills to make sure he was out."
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Devon put his hand to his chin in contemplation. This was different from every other case so far.
Kal'o Kir's usual mode of operations was to force the second person to watch as she tortured, then occasionally swapping between victims to keep them guessing which would be worse off by the end. It was a psychological game that kept the victims in constant anticipation and fear. And then there was the matter of her having the ability to disable, or 'seal' as Trey said, parts of the system.
"Why only do this now?" Devon mused.
"Maybe she wanted to establish a pattern, then purposefully disrupt it at the most critical moment to throw us off?" Trey suggested.
"Maybe. But something about that doesn't seem quite right. My Jamming skill allows me to block any message attempts within a certain range, but that's the only aspect of the system it affects. Something tells me skills that interfere with the system will always be limited in some way, lest people figure out ways to circumvent the system's natural order entirely."
"It could be a conditional effect, like maybe it only works on people that are captured."
"But then why only use it on you? If that's the condition then why not also use it on what's-his-name? A double condition, maybe?"
Trey ignored the fact that Devon hadn't bothered registering the name of the man who'd dragged him away from that hell, even when Trey had just said it less than a minute ago. Instead, he said, "Whatever the case, I think it's important to know that it wasn't just you she was asking about this time. She also wanted to know about Eve."
Devon broke out of his mumbling trance at that, "What?"
"I think she'll set her sights on Eve next. She wanted to know as much as I could tell her about our wildwoman. Of course, I didn't tell her anything. Not that I really even know Eve that well, you've spent a lot more time with her."
"Did she give any hints or clues as to what she might know already?" Devon asked.
"Nothing, so far as I could tell."
Devon desperately wished he'd gone over to Arkania to hear the firsthand accounts from the forest victims. He hadn't heard any secondhand accounts of Kal'o Kir asking about Eve, but details could have been lost in translation.
The biggest concern was whether Kal'o Kir knew about Phil. If she learned about Eve's Achilles' heel then she could coerce whatever she wanted out of Eve.
"I need to go to Arkania and hear the firsthand accounts of the victims over there," Devon said, getting up. "Be sure to take your medicine."
"Hey," Trey said as Devon was about to leave, stopping him, "I didn't say anything. Even through all the pain and the unbearable agony I never gave you up. I just… wanted you to know."
Devon looked back at Trey, a small smile on his face, "I never doubted you for a moment, my friend."
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It took a while for Devon to ask around Arkania, but he eventually concluded that none of the victims from the forest had been asked about Eve. This should have reassured Devon, but it actually made him more anxious.
Why only ask Trey? As a part of the overseer's network, before she abandoned that title, she surely would have known that Eve frequents Arkania far more than Plainstown. So why wouldn't she have put any of the Arkanians to the question?
It was possible the vishan had only decided to target Eve after she realized that she wouldn't get anything out of even Trey, or that she was so lost in her passion for revenge that she wasn't giving any thought to her next move, but both of these trains of thought seemed wrong to Devon. The impression he'd gotten of the ex-overseer in that cave was too far removed from those possibilities.
And so he was ultimately lost as to her plans. All he knew was her objective, and all he could do was position himself in the best place possible to anticipate her actions. Despite the inconvenience, sometimes he had no choice but to use himself as a piece on the board.
He sat down in Phil's ramshackle establishment and ordered some food, using a face nobody had seen before. He blended into the crowd and soon enough nobody paid him a second glance.
Perhaps the thing that bothered him the most about the situation was that he wasn't sure how to feel about it. On one hand, he didn't want Kal'o Kir to learn about Eve's connection to Phil because it would put Phil in danger.
But on the other hand, if Kal'o Kir did happen to learn about Phil and she tried to use that information to abduct Phil she would be forced to attempt to invade the most hostile place in the tutorial for her. And Devon would be right by Phil's side, waiting for the opportunity to cut the mad overseer down.
When Kal'o Kir had first become an executioner he'd been somewhat happy that someone brash had taken the role upon themselves. He'd viewed it as a positive because they would likely piss off the camps even more before the end of the tutorial, further supporting the anti-overseer mentality that was growing within the camps. But the spree of tortures had gone far past his expectations, to the point that it was getting close to consuming the flickering resentment between camps he'd created.
In short, Kal'o Kir had proven to be far more of a problem than she was worth. It was annoying, but the ex-overseer was forcing his hand.
More important than gaining power, establishing a squad, or even creating animosity between camps… Right now the number one priority is to eliminate Kal'o Kir.
It was troublesome that he still wasn't back to full strength, but there was nothing he could do about that. He was back to around 70% of his peak condition. It wasn't optimal, but he figured it should be enough to stick a blade in the overseer while they were distracted with the camp.
Now all he had to do was wait.