GENTLEMEN, THIS IS A GARDEN, NOT A KILLING FIELD
“Where is she?” the big man, the one Conrad was sure was The Tower himself, demanded.
She? Was he looking for Eloise?
On either side of The Tower his companions fanned out, just enough to show menace but not enough to demonstrate they were genuinely attempting to encircle Conrad.
He watched them, calm on the surface but mind whirring as he came to realize that in facing down three men, he might have bitten off more than he could chew. He was ready to activate Adrenaline Rush and get out of there if he had to - or take as many of them down fighting as he could.
But The Tower had thrown him off with that question.
Silver Tongue activated and Conrad’s mind cleared enough to give him perspective - when you lack information about a counterparty in a transaction, it’s best to keep silent and let them fill the void.
He exited the Horticulturalist’s cottage, shield held loosely in one hand and casually guarding his midsection and upper legs without appearing as if he was doing so. Concealed behind it, he made a subtle check for Mara’s knife, secure in its sheath, and brought his mace from his inventory and into his hand.
Taking up a relaxed posture and leaning against one of the supports of a decorative wooden overhang that fronted the building, he took in The Tower and gave him a questioning squint.
“Where is Eloise?” The Tower repeated.
“You with Barrett?” One of the cronies asked. He wore a red bandana over his face and carried a cleaver. His armor existed but only barely so, and consisted of a few plates of poorly attached scrap iron and some leather sewn onto what was definitely a blacksmith’s apron. Conrad was reminded of his own makeshift armor he had put together in defiance of the Seekers.
If these were the same men who had robbed his parents’ store, they should be much better equipped than this. And who was Barret?
Conrad made eye contact with Red Bandana, then lazily moved his gaze back to The Tower. He tilted his head forward slightly, eyes up, inviting more information from the man he believed to be in charge of the group.
The Tower shifted slightly under Conrad’s gaze. That was interesting. Nervous for such a big man.
He stayed quiet, and the third man wearing a breastplate filled the silence, “Not one of the out crews. Look at that kit.”
He gestured with a short sword, middling quality by the look of it but still dangerous. His equipment told a similar but less tragic story than Red Bandana’s, but Conrad couldn’t be sure just yet what it was.
“Eloise was protected,” The Tower said, voice a rumbling baritone, “Off limits.”
Did they think he had done something to the Horticulturalist, Eloise?
“Off limits?” Conrad asked slowly, as if the very concept was puzzling to him.
Short sword huffed and brandished his weapon, “Yeah, off limits. As in, this whole operation has rules. As in, Barrett made promises and –”
“Shut up,” The Tower said, cutting the man off and looking aggressively at Conrad, “Speak, stranger.”
What information the silent gambit had gotten him seemed to be all that Conrad was going to get from it, so, maintaining his air of casual confidence he replied, “How do you know Eloise?”
They all looked at each other at that question, “Not one of Barrett’s,” The Tower rumbled.
So much for not giving away information, Conrad thought.
“If he’s not one of Barrett’s men then… Adventurer?!” Short sword said, “Shit. Shit!”
“Adventurers? You said they never responded to quests out here! What’s going to happen to us?” Red Bandana said, voice nervous, “If he’s here then one of the other crews is what did all this. And he promised, Karno, he promised!”
“No names,” The Tower, Karno? Growled.
“Didn’t have to be Barret,” Short Sword said, “Coulda been him. Maybe the rest of the band is skulking around in the woods. Karno we got to do something about this.”
Conrad abandoned all pretense of relaxation then, taking a more ready posture but not yet revealing he was armed already. Something was unraveling here.
“I said no names!” The Tower said.
“Like it matters!” Short sword growled back, “They’ll hang us if we let ‘em take us back to Edge.”
“Hold on,” Conrad said, “Nobody’s hanging anybody.”
“Then who are you? Where is Eloise?” The Tower demanded.
“I came out here to answer the exact same question,” Conrad began, but was quickly interrupted.
“Right,” Short sword said, taking out a dagger to compliment his longer weapon, “Karno, time to face facts. We tried to do it your way, but he’s here, and that doesn’t work for us. Any of us! How’s he come all the way out here to check up on your girl, huh?” Short Sword reasoned, agitated, “Either she’s two timing you and he’s here for a visit, or he’s been following us and this is where he and his guild buddies take us in.”
Karno, The Tower, glared at the man and unslung his shield from where it was secured on his back.
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“El’s a sweet girl,” he said, backpedaling, “So my money is on the guild. But if one is here, others will follow unless the trail ends here.”
“Oh, Dirk, we can’t… I don’t want to… we can’t kill nobody!” Red banda moaned, “We always said we wouldn’t.”
“You want to find out what Barrett does when we come back trailing adventurers from Edge? No choice now,” Short sword, Dirk, said.
“Nobody needs to die!” Conrad interjected, “Just explain what in Order’s name all of this is about! We can find a way around it.”
“You listen to that mercenary,” Dirk, said, “You hang. Edge’ll consider it quest complete whether it's them that tighten the noose,” he pointed his sword at Conrad, “Or him. And the longer we wait, the more time for his friends to show up.”
He took a few steps toward Conrad, and, reluctantly, so did Red Bandana. The Tower remained behind, still hesitating. Though it wasn’t lost on Conrad that he now had his spear in his hand.
“Hold on,” The Tower said, but Dirk wasn’t hearing it.
“Not dying for this, Karno,” he said.
“Come a little closer and you will,” Conrad said, taking up a fighting posture, mace out and ready.
“Get some, guilder!” Dirk yelled and charged forward. Red Bandana ran screaming in with him.
And in a moment they were on him.
Conrad swept aside the initial overhand swipe of the short sword, dodging back to escape the follow up knife slash. It wasn’t a bad attack, but when Dirk followed up with a windmilling series of strikes that Conrad was able to either dodge or block without ever engaging a skill, suspicion transformed into certainty.
With Conrad’s new knowledge of fighting from the skill book he could see immediately that this man had never had any proper training. His job had been to intimidate farmers and homesteaders into giving up what they had.
And he was out of his depth up against somebody like Conrad.
They could still end this without killing each other if Conrad could manage to subdue him or to incapacitate him somehow. That way they could all figure this out with words instead of weapons.
He dodged another attack, this time from Red Bandana. The masked man had pulled another weapon from his own inventory, an iron club much like what Conrad had first used in the dungeon, and like Dirk he was swinging wildly.
One man was easy enough to hold his own against without using too much force and accidentally killing him, but two? Even with the clumsy nature of the attacks they were coming in much too fast for Conrad to parry, dodge, or block all of them and a few began to land. His armor was fairly lightweight for travel, but the partial chain covered all of his joints and the steel plates worked in concert with hardened leather to turn all but the most determined attacks.
But good armor was small comfort against men intent on killing.
He activated Adrenaline Rush and Defensive Aura, then, dodging another full force strike from the short sword wielding Dirk, pulled back his mace for a solid swing at the man’s exposed leg.
Then a spear flashed across his vision, scraping his cheek and missing skewering his head by millimeters. The Tower had joined the fight, and slowed in the fast-time of Conrad’s skill as they all were, he was now contending with five weapons striking at him at once.
Even with his momentary skill advantage, Conrad found himself pressed back by the onslaught of attacks. His bolstered defenses were high, more than enough to counter most of the attacks, but he was beginning to take small wounds. His heightened Toughness and armor were putting in work, but even they couldn’t stop raw power.
A powerful thrust of The Tower’s spear slammed into his chest plate with enough force to run a normal man through completely. All the air from Conrad’s lungs left him in a whooshing wheeze and he was knocked back sprawling into the ground.
He rolled to his feet, and the three men were there, eyes mad with the frenzied need to kill.
“Wait! You don’t have to do this!” Conrad yelled, but The Tower only clanged his shield in response, sending a wave of force that shoved him back again, slamming him into the side of the cottage and knocking his shield from his hand.
“Fuck you!” Dirk growled, charging in, “We’re doing this!”
There was nothing Conrad could do. He wanted to reason, to just figure out what the hell was going on. He didn’t want to kill these men.
But this wasn’t the bargaining table. These were adventuring stakes - kill or be killed. And Dirk wasn’t about to let him just walk away.
With the wall to his back the one advantage Conrad has was there was no longer room for all of them to surround him, so it was only Dirk who came on for the killing blow.
He swung wide, full arm and body committed to the attack, determined to take Conrad’s head off at the neck. And so when Conrad slipped to his left, dodging the attack completely, it was with the taste of victory not yet having left his tongue that Dirk died.
The sword gouged a furrow in the wood of the cottage, the excess strength and fury of it sending Dirk completely off balance. Conrad, now on Dirk’s left, engaged Imbued Strike and Psych Up. With a cross body back handed blow he slammed his mace against the back of Dirk’s head, magically enhanced energy and strength causing it to burst so completely that bone fragments stung Conrad’s cheek as he followed through with the attack.
He turned to his remaining foes and thrust out a hand toward The Tower. He invoked Restrain, his Officer’s class spell, and instantly the huge man was rendered harmless, paralyzed for a maximum of ten seconds. It seemed like plenty of time but Red Bandana had followed up Dirk’s death not with terrified running or utter shock, which had even gripped The Tower before Conrad paralyzed him magically, but with action.
He had decided that this was the moment to strike, and it nearly cost Conrad his life. The man brought his cleaver down in a savage overhand swing that managed to fall just where armor left a gap between shoulder and neck.
The blade bit deep into Conrad’s collarbone, eliciting a grunt of pain and shock. He genuinely thought he had been killed, bested by the least threatening of the three men, but his health registered only damage, and not critically so. Toughness once again saving his life.
“I’m a hard man to kill,” he growled.
Conrad seized the weaker man’s arm, wrenching it into an awkward angle that forced his hand open. With a quick movement, he swapped his mace into his inventory and snatched away the cleaver. Adrenaline, shock, fear, and the sheer animalistic anger of killing something that was trying to kill him swept away any vestige of mercy Conrad might have had for the man in the red bandana. Still gripping the man’s arm in a twisted agony that forced it out straight, Conrad swung the cleaver down hard, cutting straight through it. He tossed the limb aside and with the same motion unsheathed his dagger.
Red Bandana held out his stump in shock, but before he could even scream, Conrad, willingness to talk to henchmen all used up, plunged his dagger to the hilt through the man’s nearly useless chest “armor”, putting him down for good.
Both edged weapons in his hands Conrad rushed to The Tower. With his foe completely helpless for a few more precious seconds, he took no chances. Adrenaline Rush came off cooldown and he activated it, increasing his speed over 100%. Both knives in hand and in less than two full seconds, he severed the tendons in the back of The Tower’s knees, yanked away his weapons, and shoved the crippled man to the ground.
The effects of Restrain faded and The Tower lay toppled, disarmed, and helpless.
“Now,” Conrad said, face bloodstained and holding both Mara’s knife and the dead man’s cleaver, “I’ve got a few questions I’d like to ask.”