David had been doing a great job in the battle. He had kept his eyes open and surveyed the each section of combat, being rational and ready to adapt rather than headstrong in the overall fight.

Ian had started carving his way through the enemies. Clive was using his shoes to harass the enemies in important places. Joy and his team had started tracking down the woman who was wielding flames.

The entire field was in David’s eyes, he was a bird of prey, watching for his moment. Every time an enemy started getting too successful; he was there knocking them back down. Every time his allies faltered; he was supporting them. A hero to his allies and a villain to his enemies, he was nearly without peer.

There was one true thorn in his side in this battle. The woman who teleported all over the field and took his troops somewhere else.

He had seen The Heater get taken by the woman and felt quite bad. He wasn’t sure what the restrictions on the woman’s ability was, but hopefully it wasn’t instant death. The Heater had kept morale up, and it was a true loss to see her get taken by that woman.

So, he started devising a plan to remove that woman from the field. He conferred with Clive, who agreed with his assumptions.

There were little engraved stones all over the floor of the chamber they were in. The woman was using all the confusion and explosions to move the stones wherever they could do the most damage, but she could only teleport to those stones.

He had Clive start to collect as many as he could find while he started making himself look vulnerable.

David was hoping that he could fool the woman into approaching him, wherein he would use his superior skills to take her out. At the very least, he knew that her ability to teleport other people relied on physical touch, so as long as he avoided her, he would be fine.

Everything started going well. The stones were slowly being rounded up by the occasional shoe, while David himself was helping a small group of Freer Men combat the sins. The Freer Men were so fluid and beautiful, their physical acumen was what David strove for, and he had enjoyed this opportunity to spend some time with the church’s true elites.

They flowed as a perfect team. While a powerful person with a gift could decimate armies, these people were hit squads comprised of people who could think quickly on their feet. They would engage and adapt to whatever the enemy had, all the while at a total disadvantage. None of them could shoot laser beams, instead they brought fist to face with nothing other than pure skill.

The prince was a little biased when it came to them since he had based his original fighting style on theirs. Being told he was a waste his entire life and that any gifted person would defeat him in an instant, he looked towards the sect of warriors who refused to use their gifts as inspiration to be better.

He had grown out of using their style over the years. Now he used more of a blend of Ian’s style and dirty tricks rather than pure skill. No one expected their opponent to throw a knife at their crotch.

The style had also evolved because he wasn’t truly planning on being a frontline fighter, he was a leader first and foremost. He would never be a Bloody Ian, cutting down legions. He would lead his men to greatness instead.

David had been flourishing on this battlefield, helping those of his group that were weakened, while bolstering those who were strong. But he had slowly been making his way to one of the engraved stones that the wily woman could teleport between.

His approached was meandering and flawed; he did not want her to know that they had figured out how her gift worked, or that they were planning to ambush her.

David found himself nearby one of the stones. Slowly, laboriously, he turned his back towards the stone. Hoping that the target he was putting on his back would entice his prey to strike.

And strike she did.

In an instant she appeared behind him and reached out her hand. Her fingers were a hair’s breadth away from his face when he suddenly fell.

David had immediately started moving his body away when he felt the rush of air that signaled the woman teleporting behind him. As he fell, David kicked the woman in the stomach, sending her flying away and coughing.

The woman had a shocked look on her face as she was sent careening backwards. She schooled her face back to impassive as she went tumbling, then she reappeared next to the prince with all her momentum from the kick gone.

The prince had not been idle during this time though. He was stood back up and brandished his throwing knives. Once she appeared, a volley of them were thrown. But she wasn’t without her own tricks. She disappeared to some other place on the battlefield that the prince couldn’t see. He narrowed his eyes and tried to scan as much of the ongoing battle as possible without taking his attention off the stone that the woman could appear out of at any moment.

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His eyes narrowed and the woman reappeared. She blitzed him, forgoing all sorts of technique to make sure that she touched him even the slightest. However, the prince was no slouch and he twisted and turned around her wild strikes.

She grew angrier and angrier as more and more of her strikes were evaded. As her rage was reaching a new high, a small blade flew directly at her face. The woman barely jerked her head aside as the small knife flew by. A single cut was splayed across her forehead and blood started seeping into her eye.

The prince was celebrating in his head. A teleporter was dangerous and tough to beat through skill, but that’s where dirty tricks came in to even the playing field.

The woman had enough of playing the prince’s game, so she shifted her strategy. Her teleportation was not limited to only the stones themselves. The area around the stone was converted into her teleporting space. So, instead of teleporting between two separate stones, she moved herself inside of her area of influence.

She teleported directly behind the prince. He was somehow ready for this maneuver though. As soon as he saw her disappear, he dove to the ground in front of him.

Her hands grasped nothing but air again as her attempt was foiled. But this time David’s feet flew into her feet, knocking her off her feet. She stumbled and started to fall. David closed the rest of the distance with a quick turn and a dash.

His fist met her face with a resounding crack as he felt her nose break under the pressure. Blood started to gush out of her nose and tears formed in the woman’s eyes. Hoping to press his advantage, David started smashing his elbow into her face repeatedly.

It was brutal, but he couldn’t let up. His army needed him on the battlefield to support them, but this woman needed to be taken out.

In his brutal fury David forgot that the woman was not entirely incapacitated yet, and that her win condition was relatively small. Her hand brushed his leg and the two of them disappeared from the battlefield.

Once David realized he was no longer on the battlefield, he immediately ran. He disregarded the woman who was bleeding profusely and probably had a concussion now, he just got up and ran as fast as he could. Hoping that whatever spot he had been placed wasn’t a deathtrap.

Unfortunately for the prince, he crashed his head into a set of bars almost instantly. Disoriented he tried to sit down but tumbled into a man sitting on the floor. He was nude and had the physique of a man who used to be incredibly strong, but the muscles had long since atrophied. His beard was unkempt and there were stains across it. His eyes were the most striking feature though. There was nothing behind those eyes. He seemed entirely gone, they were the eyes of a dead man, his body just hadn’t caught up yet.

Once he regained his bearings, the prince tried to locate the teleporter, but she had teleported away. Leaving the prince in a small cell, with a crazy looking man.

“Shit.”

The prince couldn’t hear the sounds of battle. Which meant that the entire thing had tapered off or he was far enough away from the action that the sound didn’t carry to him.

Neither of those things were particularly good for him personally, but he hoped his men were doing well. If they were, they would hopefully come and save him. Ian would come at the very least, and he was basically a one-man army.

David despised not being able to do anything, so he started cataloguing everything he knew, and what he still had available to him.

He knew that there was one massive tribe that lived here in the frozen continent. That tribe was fractured in many ways since no one area could truly support the entire culture. Therefore, they were constantly travelling in smaller groups devised to help them survive optimally in these conditions. He knew that there had recently been a shift in the power structure of the tribe. The last head-honcho had mysteriously been taken out of commission and some new man had stepped up.

David even knew that this new leader was the person who had been sending the inky monsters, called sins, to the mainland to try and grab some nifty artifacts. The new leader needed materials and power; David assumed that the man had some grand master plan that was all coming to fruition. Unfortunately, this man was now searching for the Kingmaker, which put him directly at odds with David and what had led to him being put in this cell, with a smelly old man.

David then catalogued his items. He still had his combat robes on. They were comfy and allowed for ease of movement with powerful magical defenses. He still had many of his throwing knives along with his gloves.

His gloves were his personal weapon and were a matte black set of beautiful gloves. In lieu of a gift that allowed for offense, David had spent years searching for a powerful artifact from the first or second ages that would supplement his fighting capabilities. After an exhaustive search he had found these gloves that allowed him to conjure a sword into his hands magically. It wasn’t a super flashy ability, but it gave him a powerful weapon that he could constantly reconjure.

Despite its awesomeness, David’s sword would not help him out of this situation. He figured his best shot was to use one of his smaller knives to fiddle with the lock and hope that it unlocked magically.

The tribesmen were probably not going to eat him, probably. But he figured he should hedge his bets by not being in the cage when they eventually came back.

So, the prince of a continent started fiddling with a lock.

There was no good reason that it should have worked. The prince had no experience picking locks or using knives as lockpicks, yet somehow all the stars aligned properly to let him out of the cage.

He left the door wide open, hoping that the other man in the cage would use the opportunity to escape. The man’s escape with further camouflage the prince’s attempt to do the same thing, however the man just sat in the cage. His lifeless eyes staring out into the void.

The prince’s shoes muffled the noise of his footsteps as he started travelling through the layers of the castle.

He was obviously still in the massive castle that his soldiers had discovered, and where Sam had said that the kingmaker sat.

The natives had obviously been going at this expedition much longer than him and his researchers. But they still hadn’t found the artifact yet, which was a miracle in the prince’s opinion. Either these people were so incompetent that they were useless, or so unlucky that nothing worked out for them.

He wandered down halls and slid on snowy patches that weren’t well illuminated. He stuck to the shadows and made sure that he looked twice before every step. Being caught at any juncture was failure, and the prince never failed.

Eventually he heard the noise of a small scuffle and some shouting. The prince assumed that the jig was up, and that someone had finally noticed his absence. He had been able to hide for a long time, and his enemies would have expected him to run as far away as possible. But they didn’t know David. He was going to go into the belly of the beast to retrieve his prize, no matter what it took.