The Monster was fleeing. It was a sight, one of the sights of all time.
It was also incredibly uncharacteristic of the monster.
If I had shattered its ankle, it would have been angry, but the cat, the fucking cat! Had somehow made it flee in fear like the four fucking horsemen were on its heels.
It charged through the line of guards like they were waving sticks at it, the halberds piercing and tearing, carving deep gashes as they bowed. Then they snapped, wood shattering some feet from the head, leaving the business ends of the weapon stuck in the creature.
The thing, frothing at the mouth, tore through everything in front of it, running on its four legs, broken ankle be damned.
Notably, the ankle was not healing; it remained misshapen, like a gall, but that and its arm were the only things that seemed to refuse to regrow. The rest of its body shifted, pulsing and regrowing, pulsing over and over with the beating of its heart, but the arm did not grow back, it seemed to writhe, presumably against unseen death magic. Neither did the ankle, which only got fatter, swelling like a bruise.
And it just ran. Fleeing. Its leg slammed into the ground as it shrieked in agony, its other leg getting better but still hurt, drag thumping over and over. Its arms smashed the ground as it bowled through the [Guard], smashed through the corner of a building and dashed off into the hot night.
And then it was gone, and so was the cat; its horrible, un-catly smile burned into my memory as I had stared into the sun.
It made my spine shudder and my skin itch.
We had ‘won’ though, in a way.
But we had also lost.
We had driven it off and given it a blow it would not soon forget; we had both stopped its advance and destroyed its undead.
But we had also not killed it. We had not found out what its goal was, assuming it had one beyond wanton destruction, and we had taken casualties. So many.
Dozens dead, the future [Lord] wounded, possibly dying, and next to nothing to show for it.
Oh and I didn’t know who was alive.
Wait… Where is Selly?
My heart nearly exploded, fear hitting my system so hard that I almost lost my footing as a sudden feeling of sobriety hit me over the head like a club. I almost felt my knees give out as I looked around at the carnage, and I cursed in Quilish, head turning back and forth.
I could see Clause and the [Guard], but I couldn’t see Selly. She had been on Clause's shoulder before he had been hit so hard that his plate had deformed.
“Selly? SELLY!” I called out in a panic, “Fuck, fuck-fuck… Where are!-”
But I was cut off by a slight noise, a tiny, Sprite sized “Calm your tits,” as Selly climbed out from under Clause's neck, much to the chagrin of Clause, who moaned.
“Ohh… Please avoid doing that,” he moaned, his face scrunched in pain.
Selly, aware of his words but aware of the extent of the damage, patted him on the top of his shoulder before leaning up to face me.
The relief made me stop breathing for a moment, and my heart too. I had come to care for the little stinker I called a friend, and seeing her die before my eyes might be a bit too much of a loss for me to handle, even if I couldn’t feel anything.
“Scared the shit out of me,” I told her as I got ahold of my breath again.
“I levelled! If you could believe it, I haven’t done that in a bit,” she said, a pair of hands on her knees.
“Good for you, now… There’s someone else that needs talking about,” I said, switching between Quilish and Common.
“Oh? Finally going to mention me, eh? Thought you were going to keep avoiding the subject,” he said, coming off as impassive despite his demeanor.
It was definitely a skill, the wincing and moans of pain aside, he should not have that kind of natural control over his speech as he was… Not unless he had stupidly high charisma and spirit stats, and that would mean levels, which would mean he should be stronger. Stronger he was not; it was the exact reason why he was on his ass.
“How are you doing… Er… Young Master Mynes? How do I even,” I said, falling into a murmur as I looked over his situation.
“Less than well,” he said passively, “More importantly, you intruded, even after I told Anna not to get involved.”
I looked at him, right in his eyes, which were a bit moist, as he blinked away the pain of having a metal plate turning his ribs into rubs, and I chuffed. I cared very little for his idiocy. He had turned men and women with families into dust, fit for only an urn. People wouldn’t even get their dust because it was mixed together. And after getting a near-lethal wound while bleeding out on the cobbles with no aid in sight, he was going to question my involvement.
“That’s the route you want to go down in this? You almost died. I told Anna I wouldn’t let you die. Or did you think you could win? Considering the moment I got knocked down, you got more than a third of your men turned to ash. I doubt it.” I told him.
“We were doing fine until you showed up, then he started throwing around skills,” he said, “You ignored my direct order not to come, came anyway, jumped into the fight, pissed it off, got knocked out for a few minutes, then got me injured!” he told me, his voice raising until it cut out, replaced by a wracking wet cough.
Shoot. Was I gone for that long? Go-er-sshh, that’s a long time.
It made sense, though.
The ash piles weren’t in the same line. It made a twisted kind of sense that I had been out for longer than anticipated. Whatever had hit them must have been spaced out. And that would imply a strange shape or multiple castings. I hadn’t checked how much black magic I had used my [Tenebral Bane] on, but I could only take his word on it now.
More than a minute? I was falling for a long time, true, but that’s still one of the longest I can think of. Not that I’ve died too much… No, wait, I totally have… I can’t believe I’m starting to think about dying like using a skill. Hells that’s not a good mindset to be in.
I turned my thoughts away from the somewhat disturbing thought that would need to get that plate off of him and let his ribs breathe… assuming it wasn’t punching a hole in something important.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
I forgot what Skipseo said about getting stabbed. Was it take it out? So you could fill it in with stuff? Or leave it in? Crap. I can’t remember. I remember packing a cut I got with healing balm once, but I don’t have any on me… I can't even tell what's being stabbed into him. Assuming he’s being stabbed at all. I smell blood, so something is bleeding somewhere.
Kneeling down, I placed my shovel down behind me and before he could start chewing me out, I started looking for buckles. Assuming I could take it off without moving him, I would. It stood to reason that it would probably be for the best.
“Yeah, well, a few things. When I got there, he was casting a spell, so you had that right from the start. And as for not listening to you, only listen to Anna and my conscience.”
“Ignoring my order could be considered a crime,” he wheezed.
“I’ll make sure Annas knows you are more concerned about following a list in a dusty book and placing your ego above your well-being. I hear you have a mom, so I have no doubt she’ll make your ears ring while you're in bed recovering.” I told him snarkily, unable to care about the pecking order at the given moment.
“You w-” he started, cut off by a cough, “You wouldn’t tell her. The fact you call her my ‘mom’ tells me you don’t know my Mother.”
He said the word like Anna had, with a capital M, like she was a thing of her own. I snorted at him, unamused, while I moved bits of fabric that were tucked up around the leather bits.
“Maybe, but you know how us women folk get. We always gossip, especially about young men doing stupid stuff. I tell Anna, Anna tells your mom, your mom tells you, and you never hear the end of it,” I told him. He seemed like the type to think women just gossiped all day so that would hit home.
He didn’t reply, though Selly chortled, and I told her, “Don’t you go laughing; you got chewed out by your mom last week.”
Selly stopped laughing and spluttered, but the talking helped me focus and the noise she made amused me, mellowed me out a bit. It helped me focus on the now, not the everything around me.
The conversation petered out while I went to undo the breastplate and stopped.
We would need to bring him to be healed. Would it be best to pick him up on a stretcher? If so, the breastplate could act like a cast.
Damn, but I wish I had better knowledge of this.
Gritting my teeth and thinking it over gave Clause enough time to find his voice.
“Why did the beast run? Everything after it hit me is a bit… skewed.”
“You got hit; I stabbed its hand, broke its spell, gave it a wicked backlash and dispelled the magic… Er. Explosively, and then had a standoff with it. A cat bit its ankle, and it ran off.” I told him.
He didn’t speak for a moment, but when he did, he wheezed, “A cat?”
“A cat,” I told him. “To be fair, it was the size of a mountain lion. It shattered the thing's ankle in one bite.”
“That’s not a cat,” he told me.
“Not a normal cat for sure. I don’t know what fresh hell it came out of, but if that thing wasn’t a demon I don’t know what it is.” I told him.
“Fantastic. Demonic cats. I’ll make sure to add that to the docket. Perhaps we can feed it our mice so it doesn’t eat my people or livestock,” he murmured darkly.
“Yep, it nearly followed me home to Anna… Not that it could get inside the Grove. Though I can’t well tell why it ran. It was in a right panic though.” I told him, figuring he might know more.
“A fear effect, perhaps? Did the wound heal? It resisted most of what hit it. Some kind of resistance skill or magic protected it.”
“It didn’t. Why?”
“It just makes the possible threat of that thing even worse. A possible demonic cat with fear skills and magical teeth. That will haunt my desk for days.”
He sighed the last part as if desk work were his bane, a terrible burden.
I could understand not wanting to sit at a desk all day, but it really wasn’t that much work, surely. Even my and Gunther's work took three people a few days, and that was by doing math, divining the future with cursed mathematical methods I remember hating in a search for the market prices of the future.
“Yeh? It sucks for you, I guess. Truly, you are burdened with a terrible life. The wrist pain must be terrible,” I bickered.
“I would beg your forgiveness, but I care little for it,” he said in just such a way that it took me a few seconds to long to realize it was a joke.
A joke!
“Funny,” I told him, “Now stop that, I’m trying to figure out if I should take the plate off or keep it on while we move you on a stretcher.”
“I don’t need a stretcher. Pull it off before it breaks my ribs,” he complained.
“If we take it off and carry you to the temples, you could bleed out while we carry you,” I told him.
“And if you raise my chest, you’ll shatter my ribs. You might as well save me the pain and give me the Coup de grace now. And before you start using that head of yours to plan anything, you don’t need to take me to the temples, just to my home. Just get someone else to lean on and take me down the st- street.” He said with a cough that he spat out, the spittle stained dark with blood.
Yeah… That is not good.
“We don’t have time to get you someone else; you can lean on me,” I told him.
“I was implying two people, one for each arm.” He complained, “Now get this thing off me; time is of the essence.”
I gave him a look and thought about it despite his words, but he was rudely interrupted by a voice beside me.
“May I be of assistance?” He asked.
The proximity and the suddenness caused my heart to kick violently in my chest and ruined what calm I had while I focused on Clause.
The voice and the lack of focus, coupled with a pending heart attack and the recent violence, made me jump and strike at my secret, unannounced visitor.
He nimbly… Or less than nimbly, stumbled-lurched back as if he knew it was coming.
And, of course, he knew it was coming. Because he could tell the moment violence jumped into my head.
Strause, the sneaky secret man, had a fake face that was just too tight in the eyes and mouth to be mistaken for his normal grin.
“Fucking Hells, man!” I said, placing a curled hand to my chest, nails pulling back into my fingers. “Don’t do that! Gods above, man, you are lucky I wasn’t holding a weapon.”
“Nothing lucky about it,” he said, “Besides, we need to help my dearest brother,” Strause started.
“Only Brother,” Clause corrected.
“Dearest eldest sibling,” Strause continued, “Back home. Don’t worry; we have ways to patch him back up.”
“And you came here while hurt to do that? Just like that?” I asked him.
“I’m the only one that can get around unseen,” he said, a tinge of smug getting through. “And besides… I can get you past the guards. You could go help Anna do her thingy.”
That was a tempting proposal. But more tempting was making sure her brother didn’t die on my watch, so I got to unbuckling. I didn’t know what they had, but knowing the nobility, it could be something like a personal [Healer] of some kind on retainer for when they stubbed their toes. But if they said they could get help there and died because they were morons all on their own, I would be disappointed in both of them.
“If you're just covering for your ego, I’m going to carry you around in a jar after you die so Anna can tell you just how disappointed she is every day.”
“That is… Unnecessarily cruel,” Strause told me.
“So is letting your ego separate you from your loved ones. You play loose with the least qualified emissary of a god to ever walk this valley, and I’ll keep you around.”
I was lying; I didn’t want to do that, it would just hurt those aggrieved, and I bet Strause could feel that, but Clause sure as hell didn’t, and he was the ego in question.
“You’re the only one of those I know of,” Clause snapped, “Now get me out of this before I die of old age.”
I did, Strause helping with his nimble, dainty man fingers, which was a weird thought, but it fit. He looked like he used ointment, which was more than Anna's, and her hands were soft already.
I dragged my thoughts away from Anna's soft fingers and towards my own, pulling open buckles before we pulled his helmet and chest plate off of him.
It was a mess of blood and sweat, with points where the plate buckling nocked free the back of the plate and pressed it through the padding under his plate. His chain was broken, and the links pulled apart and flat, sitting atop his belly.
The strike had hit his plate, pressed the links flat against his chest, which broke them, and then caused the plate to fragment through half an inch of finely stitched cloth and into his chest. Removing the plate would have done little to stop the bleeding, at least. I was more surprised his ribs had not been pressed clean into his lungs.
“How are you going to heal this?” I asked.
“Healing potions do wonders, as long as you get the metal out… And set the bones.” Strause said before standing and quickly going to get the [Guards] moving.
A few of them were standing guard around their young [Lord], while others were on the lookout for threats, while others still were mourning the fallen.
I tried not to think about how little I felt phased by it, unsure if it was the task before me, the part of me that was changed, or some broken part of me.
Even turning my mind from it, I could feel the death waiting nearby. I could feel it in my bones as they began to decay, and it made me twitch. All the life in them muting as their body began to understand they were already dead and fought desperately against the inevitable.
We hefted Clause up, his demeanour breaking for a moment as he cussed viciously, and I called over to Selly, who buzzed up on my shoulder.
We hefted him back down the street while the beleaguered guard collected the bodies and ash and made the last checkpoint for a clear path out of the city.
We had won, and lost, and now it was time to make sure we didn’t loose even more.