Mitchell crouched at the ready just outside the entrance to the bandit cave. His heart was racing, but oddly enough, he didn’t feel scared. It was more as though he’d been plugged into a power outlet. Every sense seemed sharper. He felt like he could see as well in darkness as in daylight. The glow coming from the campfire inside the cave might as well have been a beacon. Was this a benefit of the heart stone? Was he only just now noticing it or was it a result of its body preparing for combat? He didn’t know.
As they paused to do a final check before rushing in, Mitchell suddenly started humming Master of Puppets, his sevith hand tapping the opening guitar riff on his leg.
“Duh!” then the dramatic pause. “Duh-duh duh!” His voice was a hushed whisper, but still filled with the frenzied energy of those first notes.
Allora turned suddenly from her position just in front of him, where she was preparing to cast her shield spell that would cover him as he got off the opening shots of the encounter.
“What are you doing?” she asked, her voice a harsh whisper. Her expression was one of incredulity. “You are singing now? Now?!?”
“It’s Metallica,” he told her as if that would explain it. “It’s a great song. Excellent fight music.”
“What in Stollar’s swinging balls is fight music? Are you sure you’re not a bard?” Lethelin asked from the rear.
“It helps me focus,” Mitchell explained. “Don’t worry about it. I’m fine. If I ever find a way to charge my phone again, I’ll play it for you.”
Allora rolled her eyes and, as she turned, the lights on her krisa began to glow. Mitchell saw the air in front of her shimmer as the spell took shape. Then it became mostly translucent.
The plan was that the elf would step just inside the entrance holding the shield and giving Mitchell time to fire off a couple of shots at the orc that had sight of the door, hopefully taking him out before he could react. Then they would close in.
Mitchell had learned from Allora that the shield was very mana intensive and required the caster to focus on maintaining the spell rather than launching attack magic like the fire or arcane bolts. Even using a physical weapon could cause the caster to lose focus on the spell form and lose it altogether.
“It is meant as a protection against a sudden attack,” she’d told him. “It is not something I can hold for a long time.”
Then there was the mana drain to consider as well as the increased rate of degradation to her gemstone. It would only be good for a few seconds of protection but, with luck, that was all Mitchell would need. The arcane bolt was no problem for him now, and his confidence in the fire bolt was also growing. So he had two ranged spells available, as well as his sword work.
Allora looked back and he gave the nod. She drew her sword, and it glittered harshly in the darkness, like the weapon of an avenging angel or a Valkyrie, almost dazzling to his improved sight. All Allora was missing were the wings and glowing armor. The image was so powerful in his mind it almost took his breath away. Watching the change that came over her as she took those last few steps to come around the cave wall, Mitchell began to finally understand what it meant to be an Onyx Knight.
She stepped around into the light of the cave mouth.
***
The orc, despite having been drinking, was not as intoxicated as they’d hoped. He reacted almost instantly, which Allora said afterward indicated he’d had some training. No mere thug, that one.
As soon as he caught sight of the invader, he let out a cry of alarm and his sevith was up and flashing. Lighting arced forward with an explosion of sound, filling the air with a loud crackle as it struck the shield. Even with the noise, Mitchell heard Allora grunt under the force of the attack, but her defense held. She even pushed another step forward under the assault giving Mitchell the space he needed to set up.
Crouching low behind Allora, Mitchell peeked the edge of the barrier and fired off three quick arcane blasts, and then followed that immediately with a fire bolt spell. He’d gotten significantly better since his first fight. Four attacks struck home. The orc was wearing some sort of thick hide that blunted the force of the low-level attack, but it was enough to send him staggering backward, and his spell lost cohesion. The fire bolt spell hit him on the left side striking the exposed flesh of his arm and he screamed in agony as his exposed flesh began to char.
The rest of the bandit crew were a little slower reacting than their lookout had been. Either they were significantly drunker or they didn’t have the orc’s tolerance for booze. As he bellowed and tried to put out the flames crawling up his arms, the rest of them jumped to their feet and were going for weapons. Allora dropped the shield spell immediately and they closed ranks. Mitchell went for the orc directly, remembering the fight with the one back in Phoenix. Wounds had barely slowed the thing. If this guy was anything like the one Allora had fought before, he needed to be dispensed with quickly.
“I’ve got him!” Mitchell called back. “Deal with the other caster!”
Just as he said that, an arcane bolt zipped past his head and struck the cave wall, exploding in a small shower of rock shards. Mitchell glanced and saw the human caster wobbling on his feet and trying to take aim again. Allora’s sword was up in a flash, deflecting the clumsy strike of one of the bandits with ease. Once he was off balance, she punched him viciously in the throat, and he dropped almost immediately. Then her arm came up, and he saw that same ripple along its length as he had in Phoenix against Ivaran’s men. A burst of force lifted the other caster bodily off his feet and flung him into the back wall of the cave. Mitchell didn’t have time to see if he got to his feet or not, trusting the others to do their job. The enraged orc was coming for him.
Not bothering to cast another spell, Mitchell’s opponent raised his sword, the blackened skin along his now-burnt left arm cracking and oozing, and brought it down in a vicious overhand blow. Mitchell caught it with his own blade, the shock of it shooting down his arms and into his spine as he diverted the blade away from him. He made a move inside the orc’s reach, hoping to deliver an elbow to the ribs, but his enemy was faster than the man in the town at been. He yanked the sword back, and Mitchell had to dive backward to avoid a slash across the chest. He and the orc stared at each other, the big creature grinning savagely at him. The cave echoed with the sound of steel on steel as Allora dealt with two of the attackers, and he could see Lethelin also engaging the last straggler. The mage hadn’t gotten up.
“You know,” Mitchell said with a pant, “You're the second burned orc I’ve met.”
Without waiting for the big guy to respond, Mitchell attacked, bringing the sword in low. The orc was there to meet him but Mitchell was counting on that. In a move he’d practiced several times with Allora, he twisted his wrist and circled his blade around the orc’s as they slid in close, locking them together and angling his body back to keep tension on the swords so they wouldn’t slip free.
Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.
The orc was several inches taller than Mitchell and a lot more muscular. In pure strength, he could surely overpower Mitchell and untangle the blades, but Mitchell only needed him still for a second. At the risk of losing his weapon altogether, he freed up his sevith hand and planted it on the big orc’s chest, firing an arcane bolt at point blank range into the leather armor.
His opponent howled in rage and pain as the magical attack broke through the thick hide protecting his vitals and released his sword, freeing him from the entanglement. Unfortunately, he used that new freedom to deliver a solid punch into Mitchell’s jaw, sending him reeling. Mitchell staggered back and fell to one knee, his vision blurred and his ears ringing. As Mitchell fought to clear his head, he saw the orc bring his sevith back up, the wound in his chest showing bone as blood poured freely to puddle at his feet. Still, he wasn’t dead yet.
“Oh fuck,” Mitchell said and rolled to one side as lightning exploded from the sevith to impact the ground where Mitchell had just been. Jumping to his feet, he swayed, then brought his own sevith around and fired three more arcane bolts at the orc, only the first one striking home. It hit the orc on the right side of his face, and it was enough to sheer off a portion of his skull. Even then, the orc didn’t fall immediately. It took a step forward, almost as if it was going to keep fighting, before finally pitching forward like an oak.
“Orcs are tough sons of bitches,” Mitchell thought to himself, but he didn’t have time to celebrate his victory.
Trying to shake off the punch, he grabbed his sword and went to help Lethelin, who was fighting the dwarf. Allora had already dispatched one of her opponents. The goblin lay in a bloody heap on the floor. Lethelin appeared to be having a little more trouble given the reach of her weapon, and the long-handled axe the dwarf had. But, she spun beautifully as he advanced on her, neatly side-stepping her enemy’s swing. Almost like she was gliding into his arms like a lover, Lethelin danced inside his reach and slid Mira smoothly into his throat. The dwarf gurgled, a look of shock in his bloodshot eyes, and he collapsed with a wet gasp as her blade came free. He kicked weakly, and it looked like he wanted to crawl, but his strength ebbed as his life bled onto the filthy cavern floor. A few more spasms of his legs and he was still. Mitchell looked around then to see that Allora had also dispatched her second bandit, and the only sound left was the crackling fire and their deep breaths.
All in all, the fight had taken barely a minute. Mitchell surveyed their bloody work. The cave stank of copper, unwashed bodies, and smoke. Allora stepped over and looked at the orc. She kicked him over and examined the gaping head wound and the gash in his chest.
“How is your hand?” she asked him.
Mitchell flexed his sevith hand and felt the burning along his exposed fingers. It was the second time he’d gotten that injury from using arcane bolt at such close range.
“I’ll be okay.”
“You will need to focus your spell work on some of the other offensive magic in your spell book. You risk destroying your sevith if you keep using that trick.”
“Yeah, I know,” Mitchell nodded. “I’ll start tomorrow. There are some interesting options in there.”
“You did well,” Allora told him with a smile.
He smiled back.
“Thank you. You did well yourself.”
“These lot were no challenge once the spell casters were dealt with,” she said.
“Them being piss drunk didn’t hurt, either,” Lethelin said as she cleaned off Mira and went to work searching pockets.
“Quite. Not the most honorable, but they will not be attacking anymore travelers and that is what is important.”
“Wasn’t there another human?” Mitchell asked suddenly. “Didn’t you say six?”
There was the orc, the other human caster, the goblin, the second human, and the dwarf accounted for. There should have been one more human.
Just then, a loud snore erupted from what Mitchell had assumed to be a pile of clothes against the far wall.
“Stollar’s balls,” Lethelin said, rising to her feet. “That filthy river slug slept through the whole thing.”
Mitchell walked over to the not pile of clothes and used the tip of his sword to pull aside the blanket. The grizzled man looked to be in his forties with salt and pepper hair and the fat red nose and swollen cheeks of a longtime alcoholic.
“Kill him in his sleep?” Lethelin offered from behind Mitchell. “It’s a lot simpler.”
“No,” Mitchell said immediately, although the thought did cross his mind. “I won’t do that. It’s not right.”
“As you like,” Lethelin replied with indifference. “I’m going to keep picking pockets.”
Mitchell looked at Allora who was studying him carefully.
“What would a knight do?”
“We would arrest him and bring him before a magistrate or justicar. He would have a chance to plead his case. Any evidence collected would be brought against him, and they would decide his fate.”
“That’s kind of what we do back home.”
Allora scanned around the small cave and looked at the assembled bundles of loot that the bandits had stashed away. It was a broad collection ranging from mundane items like farm equipment to what looked like expensive artwork and clothes.
“They may have just been thieves, but it is not hard to imagine that they were also responsible for the deaths of some of those they stole from,” Allora mused.
Mitchell pondered the drunk man and weighed her words.
“We’ll tie him up and wait for him to wake,” Mitchell said, not really liking his options. “We can decide what to do then.”
Allora nodded and fetched rope while Mitchell helped Lethelin search the bodies. Once they’d picked them clean of anything valuable, Mitchell carried them one by one out of the cave and a short distance off before dumping them into a shallow ravine created by the storms that had pounded the mountain side a few days prior. He wasn’t sure yet if they would camp in the same cave and if so, he didn’t want to bed down next to corpses. By the time he had returned from the last body, Allora appeared from up the slope leading the two yulops and their ferocious passenger, who was alert and sniffing. No doubt it smelled the blood. Once Allora came to a stop, the shadow cat bounded off the satchel and over to Mitchell where it began sniffing at his boots and probing with its tentacles.
Vras began to lick at the damp blood around his soles and Mitchell had to gently shoo him away.
“I saved you some, it’s inside. Go look by the fire.”
Vras’s golden eyes met his and studied him with far too much intelligence.
“By the fire,” Mitchell repeated, and gestured into the cave.
The cat turned its ears, then the little grippers at the end of its tentacles, and then its head and bounded off into the cave, its six legs allowing it to almost flow over the rocky surface.
When he looked back up, he found Allora watching them, her brow creased with worry.
“He understood you.”
Her voice was flat and even, which it often was when she was upset by something. Allora didn’t get frantic or shrill as Lethelin had a habit of doing when she was stressed. The knight got cold and contemplative. His human friend was all noise and movement, which he thought was uncharacteristic of someone that killed people for a living, but Allora was always deliberate in her words and actions.
Thinking about the contrast with Lethelin, Mitchell thought that maybe the killing and thieving weren’t stressful for her. Just then his mind flashed back to her stillness before she had killed Ivaran as he lay bound to the wagon wheel. You would have needed a mirror under her nose to know if she was breathing. He supposed that if she were ever going to kill him she wouldn’t do it in a fit of rage, at least.
“You said they were smart,” Mitchell replied, trying to ignore the obvious worry in Allora’s tone. He didn’t want to admit that Vras sometimes freaked him out just as much as it did the women.
“They are, but…” her voice trailed off. “Never mind.”
Mitchell grabbed a lead from Allora’s hand and they walked the animals inside.
Vras was by the fire happily pulling bits of flesh from the goblin leg that Mitchell had unceremoniously hacked off with the dwarf’s axe. That had not been pleasant. Then he caught site of Lethelin bending over their unconscious captive with Mira pointed at his face.
“Leth, do not stab the prisoner in the nose,” Mitchell reprimanded her, sounding more like his father than he wanted to admit.
She jumped and looked back with a sheepish grin.
“But it’s just so big and fat! I want to see what happens if I pop it.”
Mitchell arched an eyebrow and gave her a level look.
She relented and stood back up, sheathing Mira behind her back once more.
“You two never let me have any fun.”