Psycho sensed the attack even though he never felt an arrow fly past. He turned to see the king struggle a moment before falling to the deck. The queen screamed, but no one turned to investigate since it wasn’t obvious it wasn’t a reaction to the fireworks. The crowd before him had, at one time, focused on the archer, waiting for each new shot. Now, they kept their eyes trained on the air above the street, anticipating the next explosion.
“A third archer,” Psycho swore. There were only supposed to be two. At once, he knew it was more complicated than that. He should have heard and seen the arrow pass him by. As black and large as the shaft was, it should have been easy to see in the daylight.
“Legs!” Psycho cried, using his nickname for Esther. “Get up here!”
The woman responded, leaping out of her chair and hopping to the stage’s highest tier. Her eyes had been focused on the fireworks as well, and only when she stood over the fallen king did she see the arrow protruding from his chest. She didn’t waste time and activated her Quick-Change ability. Her red bodice and firey dress vanished, replaced by her shadow-scale armor, black skirt, hat, and all her magical trimmings. The queen cried out in further shock, stepping back from the striking warrior, who now looked much different from the harem girl she had pretended to be.
“Get down,” Esther said, shoving the woman in the chest so she flopped back in her chair. Esther turned to the open air above the street, raised her left arm, and activated her shield bracer. The dragon scale barrier wasn’t a tower shield, but it would make it much harder for any archer to hit her or the queen behind her.
Psycho backed up as well, his bow out with an arrow nocked, his eyes searching the buildings before him. He saw Jace at one window and Kai’s group at another. Those archers were down. This attack had come from somewhere else. Not seeing any other valid firing spots, he raised his eyes to the next row of buildings.
The distant church tower continued to chime, counting up to ten. In the street, the fire mages had synched their display, exploding spells at each toll, keeping the crowd’s attention away from the stage. Even the guards standing only thirty feet away had not yet realized their king had been shot.
On the seventh chime, Esther cried out, and Psycho spun to her. A black shaft protruded from her shoulder, her face a mask of pain and confusion, with her eyes showing a dazed expression. “Impossible,” Psycho said. Even he would have struggled to make that shot. Hitting the crouching woman with her shield raised from over 500 feet and still having enough criticals to Daze her was beyond impressive. He watched Esther lower her shield, struggling to stay conscious.
“No, Legs, keep it up,” Psycho said. “You have to protect the queen.” He crouched before Esther and pulled a healing potion, allowing her to keep her concentration on the shield. He knew it was foolish to turn his back on the deadly archer but believed shots like these would take several rounds to prepare.
He looked over to the king as he poured Gromphy’s magical elixir down Esther’s throat. Azurous wore a piercing protection ring, as Esther had said he would. Yet the shot still had enough criticals to knock the king unconscious. As an archer, Psycho innately had that type of protection too, guarding against at least one shot from an enemy sniper. But it only guaranteed he wouldn’t die.
Once Esther regained enough strength to hold her shield up, Psycho turned to the other women on stage. By now, they had figured out the king and queen were under attack, though anyone who heard their screams wouldn’t be able to distinguish them from the cheers everyone else offered for the fire show. “Run!” Psycho shouted at them. “Everyone, run for your lives!”
The women listened, and soon, only four characters remained on stage. Psycho stood and turned back to the open air before him. He hadn’t seen the first shot, but he hadn’t been looking for one. For the second, his eyes were focused intensely, and it still got past him. Esther hadn’t held still after the attack, so he couldn’t analyze the angle of entry to trace it back to the source.
“You won’t find him!” the queen shouted. “It’s the Shade Fletcher. He shoots at us from Hell!”
Psycho ignored her hysterical cries. This was no demon. Those were physical arrows. Magic was definitely in play, but this archer was from the physical realm. As his eyes played across the potential hiding spots before him, he found the top of the church tower, which had just finished chiming. He was pretty sure that’s where Draya and Gromphy were. As if in answer to his thoughts, he saw a tiny fireball bloom from the steeple’s apex.
“No, Red,” he said to himself. “Not now.” But he watched the orange glow bloom in size as it drew closer. He cursed. “Keep your shield up!” Psycho screamed at Esther as he raced for the edge of the stage. “Guards! Get down!”
The clueless soldiers finally turned around in time to see the large elf leaping from the stage. Then, a massive fireball detonated right on top of the royal couple. It drenched the platform in fire, sending the guards diving from their feet and finally drawing the attention of the crowd around them.
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“Make it stop! Make it stop!”
Draya crouched and hunkered down in the small stone room high above the street below, with her hands over her ears.
“Cease thy whining and offer aid to thy companions,” Gromphy said.
Draya managed to peer at him between the deafening peels of the bell just a few feet above them. He stood looking out the window, holding a pair of binoculars. Each time the bell rang, sapphire studs in his enormous ears flashed with magic, and the goblin didn’t so much as flinch at the noise.
“I can’t concentrate,” Draya shouted between chimes. In truth, she was Dazed, and had barely saved against being Stunned after the first chime. Since she had curled into a ball and placed her hands over her ears, she had managed to save against the succeeding strikes, but not by much.
“Then our friends shall perish,” Gromphy said. “A thrice archer hath entered the fray.”
As the bell sounded for what seemed like the 20th time, Draya wasn’t even sure she could count to three or even remember what numbers were. Her bones vibrated like tuning forks, and it felt as if her fingernails and toenails were going to explode like champagne glasses. Eventually, the cacophony ceased, but Draya stayed immobile, her body trembling as if she had been punched by a mountain giant ten times.
“Compose thyself!” Gromphy demanded and threw a vial of liquid into her face.
Draya coughed and sputtered, noticing that it wasn’t water the goblin had splashed on her. Magic flowed through her, and the ringing in her ears and trembling of her muscles vanished in a flash. She stood up and rushed to the window. Without the binoculars, she could barely tell what was happening, but she did see the king with an arrow through his chest and Esther trembling with her shield to protect the queen.
“Help them!” Gromphy screamed again.
“How?” she asked. Her head vaguely remembered Gromphy saying something about a third archer. Did the crafter want her to take him out?
“Throw thy fireball? Dids’t the bell erase thy memory? Follow Jace’s plan!”
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Draya couldn’t think and didn’t know what to do. She made eye contact with Psycho from 600 feet away and thought she saw the elf nod. Draya shrugged. When in doubt, listen to the goblin with 24 wisdom. She cast her Dragon Spirit and reached into her mental spellbook to pull the one she had prepared.
As a student, one of the first feats she had gained was Reduce Difficulty. This allowed her to memorize a spell with much lower difficulty than it would typically have, regaining five mana for each point of difficulty lost. For example, if she reduced a spell's difficulty by 20, she would get 100 points of free mana to spend on that spell. This allowed students to throw around dangerous elemental spells or control spells without the potential to injure other students while spending very little of their mana pool. The spells could still damage inanimate objects like walls or trees, but it gave the students a safer way to practice.
At level 19, Draya’s fire difficulty with her Daragon Spirit active was 87. A spell always had to have a minimum difficulty of 1, so she gained 430 mana to add to her already impressive pool. This was easily the most massive fireball she had ever thrown, yet it wouldn’t even hurt a child. As she released it, she recognized a look of dismay on Psycho’s face and hoped she hadn’t made a mistake. The elf ran to the edge of the stage and leaped as far as possible. Draya knew it wouldn’t be far enough and hoped the elf wouldn’t be too mad at her. After all, his armor would keep him alive, and at the end of the day, it was all Jace’s idea.
Just before her fireball hit, Draya saw a black arrow leap from Esther’s thigh as if it had sprouted from her body. The rogue staggered, barely able to keep her shield up as the stage exploded.
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“The Shade Fletcher,” Haggai said solemnly as he, Jace, and the other two guards looked from the dead sniper's window. A black arrow had sprouted from the king’s chest as the third bell sounded.
“What does this mean?” one of the guards asked, his face turning ashen.
“But I thought they were aiming at the queen?” the other guard questioned.
“He was to shoot the queen,” Haggai said, his foot nudging the dead archer Psycho had killed. “This was a coordinated attack. They hired regular men to kill the queen and left the professional to take out the king.”
Jace listened attentively as he watched the madness unfold on the stage across the street. Psycho took up an aggressive posture while ordering Esther to defend the queen. He thought Haggai had orchestrated this assignation attempt and listened to his explanation as if it were a confession.
“Who?” a guard asked. “Who would do this?”
“The Shade Fletcher is not from Madria,” Haggai said.
“He is from hell,” the other guard said, backing away from the window as if he might be the next target.
Haggai chuckled. “Almost. I heard he is from Jerisalem.” All eyes turned to Jace.
Outside, Esther had just been hit in the shoulder, and Jace desperately wanted to watch to ensure his prized rogue would be okay, but he needed to address the tension in the room. The three men slowly closed in on him.
“I am the one who brought this situation to your attention,” Jace said, already knowing what the response would be.
“A perfect alibi,” Haggai replied. “You did this knowing it would throw suspicion from yourself while still confident we wouldn’t catch the real assassin.”
“I don’t even know who this Shade Archer is,” Jace said, taking another step back toward the open door behind him.
“Shade Fletcher,” one of the guards corrected. “Don’t play dumb. Everyone knows who he is.”
Jace frowned, not knowing this phantom sniper was famous, and now he just made himself look more guilty.
“Arrest him!” Haggai commanded.
As the two level 10 guards closed on him, Jace cast Stone Flesh, protecting himself from any slashing attempts they might make against him. However, their swords stayed on their hips as they reached out to grapple him. He easily fought them off and was about to cast Granite Strength when he heard a pounding of feet behind him. He turned to see six more guards pouring into the small room. He needed his actions to fight, but as soon as three of them touched him simultaneously, their combined Grappling skill was enough to bring him to the ground.
“You will pay for your crimes,” Haggai said, walking into frame to look down at the pinned man.
Impossibly, half a dozen more guards entered the room, and Jace recognized the heavy hand of Ghandi at play. He was not meant to escape from this. They rendered him Helpless, and as he heard a massive fireball explode outside, his vision faded to black.
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“Excellent shot,” Gromphy said, looking out the church tower window.
“Thanks,” Draya replied, still not confident in a strategy that had nearly killed two of her friends. The wooden stage burned ferociously. Guards had been thrown in every direction, though none seemed injured, each easily making the saving throw against the fireball. Psycho lay motionless at the edge of the scorched grass, far enough away from the burning wood not to receive any more damage. He was alive, but barely.
Esther and the royals had also been thrown clear. She had ridden the wave of fire with her dragon shield acting like a surfboard and landed between the king and queen. Vasthi suffered no fire damage but hit a tree trunk in her flight and appeared Dazed or Stunned. The king remained unconscious from the first arrow, and as such, he didn’t get a saving roll against the fireball. However, his base magic defense was still enough for a critical success against a spell with a difficulty of 1, so he appeared unsinged. Seconds before the fireball, Esther had been hit with a second arrow, and it was that damage, not the fire, that rendered her unconscious.
Guards picked themselves off the ground and raced around the stage to their king and queen. Some organized a firefighting effort for the engulfed stage, while others called for priests to give their king and queen aid.
“We must make haste,” Gromphy said. “Our location shall not remain undetected for long.”
Draya agreed and turned to race back down the rickety stairs that had brought them to this tiny room several minutes ago. Three men blocked their way. Draya recognized them as Chi but hadn’t seen them before.
“Not so fast,” the lead man said. “You can’t throw a fireball against the royal family and expect to get away with it.”
“What dost thou know?” Gromphy asked. “Tis a three-minute climb to this tower with nary a window.”
Draya nodded at the clever observation. She had thrown the fireball less than a minute ago. These men couldn’t know what she had done unless someone had tipped them off. They obviously worked with Shinto and Chong, the two Chi Eunichs Kai had spoken to last night. The pair has apparently sent their own contingent to arrest the potential assassin.
“Silence, rodent!” the man in charge said. “I know what you’ve done, and you will pay for your crimes.”
“No, we won’t,” Draya said, raising her hands to blast them out through the back of the tower. She summoned fire to her fingers . . . but nothing happened.
The Chi man grinned. “We are a people of magic,” he said. “We are more than equipped to handle the likes of a young girl like you.”
Behind him, Draya could see the other two men wincing in strenuous concentration, their teeth grinding together as they jointly expended the magical energy necessary to keep Draya’s abilities confined. The mage thought back to when she had briefly been a prisoner of the Mongorians when Jace had traded her for a few crates of fruit. The magical slavers had enchanted a rope to Grapple her mana. Now it looked like the Chi could do the same thing, only it took two people’s full attention to restrain her.
“Can you handle this?” Draya asked, pulling her dragon bone staff from her side and activating the weapon. She didn’t get a chance to attack, as Gropmhy threw a bomb at their feet, and a small explosion tossed them against the wall. Draya felt her mana rush back in as the Grappling mages lost hold of their spell and crashed into the unyielding bricks.
“With haste!” Gropmhy cried, rushing past the Dazed men. Draya obeyed.
The stairway down was a dizzying collection of sharp left turns every ten steps as the path spiraled down the square tower. They didn’t make it far before voices above and below them started shouting for them to stop. They threw fire at the pair – a stupid decision. The attacks only refreshed Draya’s mana, and Gromphy was smart enough to protect himself from fire, knowing that he was partnered with the realm's most incendiary character. Draya replied in kind with precise fire attacks that burned through the Chi’s impressive magic defense and cleared the way before them.
However, she couldn’t keep up as dozens of enemies began appearing from nowhere, filling the stairs before and behind them – an impossible situation unless they were parachuting in through the tower window. “Ghandi is not playing fair,” Gromphy mumbled, adding his own bombs to the attack.
As impervious as Jace’s two companions were to the continued attacks, the stairs were not. Soon, the pair had to jump over weakened sections and find the necessary Dexterity to land unharmed. Neither were as nimble as Psycho or Esther and once Draya tripped, it was over. Multiple spider web spells hit the prone player, and she failed the saving throw. Gromphy’s Magic Defense could thwart any of their attacks even if he were tied up, but once the Chi only had to worry about his bombs, they felt confident enough to get closer. The small goblin was no match for them in melee combat, and he was quickly Grappled into submission.
The scene had to wait for the initial leader to make his way down to the captured pair to deliver the final line, as the game hadn’t equipped any of the mindless minions with meaningful dialog. “I told you we could handle it,” he laughed maniacally. The minions laughed as well, and with almost two dozen of them in the narrow stone tower, the sound was nearly as deafening as the bell had been.
Draya’s world faded to black.