The man who I had not yet seen walked forwards, passing me a few meters away on my right as I stared down the knife-wielding opponent in front of me. He pushed someone out of their chair, then pulled the now-empty chair up to the edge of the roughly rectangular area where the fight was about to take place, and sat down. I stole a small glance, just to see what he looked like. He wore a padded leather vest and some kind of woven pants, with hard black boots on his feet. At his sides hung two ornate hatchets, metal dyed black and grips made of tightly wound leather straps. The most striking feature about the man, however, was that both his crew-cut head hair and goatee were the same flaming orange as his eyes.
“Alright idiots,” the man growled, “I heard enough from upstairs to know why you're fighting, but since you're in my house there's a rule. Don't spill too much of your blood, piss, or shit on my floor. If you do, I'll kill you.” A few of the humans behind the orange-haired man whooped and cheered. “That means you put those blades back where they belong and settle this like men,” he added. Neither I nor my opponent moved at first, though we both now had eyes on the orange-haired man and were no longer looking at each other. I could take him, but with all these humans behind him... I thought, Why am I even considering that? He’s probably the leader, we’re here to meet him. Eventually, I relented and put away my sword, and the man across from me gritted his teeth and tossed his knife down.
“And if I kill him?” I asked. The orange-haired man laughed.
“Cocky one, aren't you?” he hissed. “Think you can beat a man to death with your bare hands?” Something about his words, the tone of his voice even, flushed my body with anger that I held in check. I looked back at my opponent, and he looked at me. I could see fear in his eyes, barely restrained much like my anger, and I made my decision. The boss of the organization is watching, I thought, I should make a good impression.
I walked towards my opponent at a brisk pace, hands up in a fighting stance. The man kept his up as well, but his posture and technique were so poor that it was clear he never had any real training. My right fist struck first, crushing the bottom rib on his left side and opening him up for further attack when he flinched at the pain. My left was quick to follow, connecting with his right orbital and breaking bone. I could have gone for a simple knockout by rattling his brain with a different punch, but I had no intention of letting my opponent off easy. The follow-up right straight was aimed at the jaw since I wanted to avoid spilling “too much” blood.
The man tried to strike back at me but his movements were pathetic. Every clumsy haymaker was intercepted and responded to with an appropriate counterstrike. Pathetic hammer-fists missed of their own accord as I beat the man. I didn't go for anything below the belt. Normally, attacking pain centers like genitalia would be my main strategy in such a fight, but I wasn't sure if someone would step in when the man fell. Eventually, he fell anyway from losing his balance, and I stood over him continuing the assault. His angry yells changed into panicked cries when he saw that nobody was intervening, and I wasn't even nearing the point of fatigue, let alone exhaustion.
Bones broke, many of them. Teeth as well, though they stayed in the man’s mouth and were swallowed. The beating continued for so long that the bones I had broken managed to heal and be broken again many times over in some cases. Even with his formidable healing power, the man's body was dark red and purple from internal hemorrhaging that wasn't being cleaned out fast enough. I had long since realized that the reason I didn't lose as many nutrients and blue power when I was run through by the Steelheart mercenary on the road to Frahmtehn was because the blood had mostly fallen into my torso, allowing my body to somehow reprocess it. A similar process was going on with the moaning and sobbing mess of a man who I was abusing. He was losing next to no blood, so his body was just putting it back only to lose it again.
Several minutes into the beating, I broke his left forearm for the fourth time and noticed that it wasn't healing nearly as quickly as it had before. He's running out of power, I thought, quickening my assault. The man spat teeth from his mouth and tried to beg, which earned him his sixth broken jaw and a trip into unconsciousness. Taking a deep breath I paused the assault and took a moment to look around. The room, which had been noisy with cheers, had at some point gone largely silent. Some of the humans looked shocked, but the boss remained unimpressed.
“I thought you were going to kill him,” he snorted. “That much is just... sehpnvih. It's pointless without the satisfaction that comes at the end.”
“To be clear, if I kill this man there will be no consequences,” I said. It was a question, but also a restatement of the previous terms.
“Just remember the rules,” the boss replied, “you've already made a mess, just not a large one.” I looked at the ground to see that I had, in fact, spilled some blood from the man as well as a large amount of spit. I wasn't sure if the wetness in his pants was from urine because the whole building already reeked of it. Reaching down I gripped my opponent's forehead with my right hand, then reached out to an ability I hadn't had much use for in Vehrehr. With some difficulty I moved the target of my magic to the inside of my opponent's skull, then I flooded it with as much thermal energy as I could muster. I felt the heat through his skull as my opponent's body began to seize and buck, then went still around ten seconds later. Blood flowed out from behind his eyes from the increased pressure behind them, and I stood up victorious to face the boss.
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“Done,” I replied, “I assume this is to your satisfaction?” The boss eyed me curiously, his derisive demeanor having fallen away in favor of a more neutral one that was disguising curiosity.
“What was that?” he asked. “I know what it looked like, but I want to hear it from you.” Don't tell me this is another one of their stupid superstitions, I grumbled internally. I glanced at Koyl momentarily, seeing that he was looking shocked and dazed back at the counter.
“I cooked his brain,” I summarized, “you could probably eat it if you like, though I wouldn't advise it.” My attempt at humor didn't seem to go over well at first because nobody laughed, but then the boss barked out a series of cackles and stood up from his chair. He's only a centimeter or two shorter than me, I thought. As the boss walked toward me the lantern light illuminated his skin from many angles, letting me see just how much of a patchwork it truly was. Were he a warbreed, I would have thought he was literally taken apart and put back together. It seemed that not a single unbroken square centimeter of his skin was unscarred.
“Guess you're cocky for good reason,” the boss said, stopping around a meter from me to examine me. He tilted his head back to the counter and his neck crackled like an open fire. “Taaljheyz, have someone clean this up,” he said, then he looked back at me. “You, why were you working for Steelheart the other day?” he demanded. So he knows, I thought.
“Money,” I replied. The boss's eyes narrowed, and I saw many humans in the room tense up. They still haven't resumed speaking, I noted.
“Normally I'd gut you right here and make a show of it,” the boss told me. “I'd rip out your organs and feed them to your stupid friend over there, then cut his head off and have the boys play toytngehv with it. All that just because you're some worthless Steelheart npoyt who dared to set foot in here.” I wondered if the boss thought that what he was saying was intimidating. It's so excessive that I doubt he's ever considered the effort it would take to do it, I thought. “But,” he continued, “it turns out that you're a pretty sick ngaazmayjh, and you've got an uncommon amount of grit, so I think I'll hear you out. What are you doing in my guild hall?”
“Looking for work,” I replied calmly, “your man burned down the office that I was working for, so naturally I came here to find new employment.” The room was silent, Koyl was standing stone-still, and the boss's eyes bored into mine. Then everyone except Koyl and I burst into hysterical laughter at the same time, nearly popping my eardrums from the volume. Taaljheyz slapped her gauntlet into the counter and Koyl flinched away from it, then looked at me with pleading eyes.
“And Jhihroyjh?” the boss laughed. “You put a dagger in his chest! Literally inside of it! Why'd you do that?” The boss's white face was red from being flushed with blood. I don't get why this is so funny to him, I thought.
“I didn’t need it, and I wanted him to not be able to follow me,” I said. “Since I didn't want to kill him and attract guard attention, I just put it in his chest cavity to keep him from moving around.”
“You d-” the boss cackled, not even finishing his sentence because he was laughing so hard. He looked to the men sitting behind him and called out “He didn’t even want the dagger!” The men roared even louder, banging at the tables with their mugs and hands in apparent approval. The boss turned back to me and clapped his hand on my shoulder. I readied my heat magic in case he tried something, but the gesture was a friendly one. “You are a riot,” the boss told me, “what's your name?” I considered my answer and if I should lie, but then I remembered that the boss had somehow known I was guarding the east office, so it was possible he knew more than he was letting on.
“Yuwniht,” I replied simply. The boss tapped my shoulder a few times, then retracted his hand and the laughter died down to tolerable levels.
“Alright Yuwniht,” he said with a smile, “you just go ask Taaljheyz about whatever kind of work you want to do. Your scared-looking friend should probably leave, but so long as he's with you I'll let him stay in one piece. I think you'll find that you'll fit in with my crew a lot better than you did over at Steelheart.” The men once again roared, though whether it was in approval or derision towards the Steelheart Company I couldn't quite tell.
“Thank you,” I said, then showed a small smile to reciprocate the emotion I was receiving. The boss nodded and turned around, then headed back up the stairs. The room's atmosphere was now strangely jolly even though there was still a corpse in the middle of it. I walked back to Koyl and we exchanged a few looks. He was his forehead was beaded with sweat and his face was a mask of restrained anxiety and concern, but I couldn't even tell about what at this point. Taaljheyz smiled at me from behind the counter and licked her teeth.
“Yaavtey really likes you,” she said, “I have to say, you're growing on me too. I thought you were just a pretty boy, but it takes a special kind of man to do something like that.” Aside from the fact that I had killed an apparent associate of theirs, the social dynamic of the Hatchet Crew was far more similar to that of a warbreed camp than any of the others I had encountered so far. Still, I thought, I'm not here to infiltrate them, I'm here to see if I can make some quick money.
“What kind of jobs do you have?” I asked. Taaljheyz held up a finger in a gesture I didn't understand.
“For you? We've got a few people that could use the treatment you just dished out,” she said in a mischievous voice. “If you're willing to take pay for your play that is.”