Chapter 59: DD3 Chapter 005 – Coup

Arilla pushed her system notifications to one side while her class clawed at the potent mana that permeated the air. Already she could feel it being drawn away from her as it rushed deeper into the palace, the experience snatched from her grasp by the intricate focusing runes etched into the building’s very foundations. 

The network of arcane symbols, that spread from beneath the grand—if severely damaged—structure to reach throughout Helion, could only have been more impressive in their efficacy if they weren’t also so very dangerous. The speed at which the wave of power that accompanied her newly raised level receded served as an important reminder as to why the coup was necessary—why a few hundred had to die today so that tens of thousands could live tomorrow. 

Or at least that’s what Arilla told herself.

It would have been far easier for her to believe that all the killing she’d committed was the lesser evil if it didn’t also feel so very good. While the butchery may have made her sick to her stomach, she couldn’t escape the contented purrs that emanated from her class every time another man fell before her blade. Its urges grew more pressing with every new tier, and the satisfaction that she gained from fulfilling its wants only became sweeter. It hadn’t even been a year since the system’s magic had come to live inside her chest, and she had to wonder—sometimes in fear—what would it do to her after a century or more of whispering violence in her ear?

She could already feel herself tremble in anticipation of the changes that iron-rank would bring, not just the increase to her personal power, but the visceral sensation of it. The rush she gained with every five-level interval had long since surpassed the joy she used to receive from a long night of drinking and singing—before her inability to stop had stolen that pleasure from her. Even Typh’s sensual touch now seemed lesser than the pleasure she’d gain from a new level. She still delighted in sex, she wasn’t made of stone, but she’d be lying if the prospect of a high-level kill didn’t excite her more.

Would she have agreed to such a bloody coup if that wasn't all true?

Arilla clenched her fist until it hurt, using the pain in her hand to distract herself from questioning the necessity of the dead iron-rankers, or the bisected guards she had stepped over to get this far. She was so close to the end that she couldn’t let her resolve fail. If she faltered now then it would be worse than all the killing being for nothing; someday soon a Monster would spawn in the Royal Residence and her country would die. Terythia could survive a lot, but not an eldritch horror tearing its way through the seat of its government.

If she didn’t falter, if everything went right, her country still might die anyway. Arilla trusted Typh with her life, but the Gods alone knew what the dragon really had planned for Terythia. She had never been a forthcoming woman, and while they were finally being honest with one another, sometimes the warrior knew better than to ask questions she knew she wouldn’t like the answers to.

Arilla unclenched her fists, and instead tried to bend her ruined breastplate black into some semblance of a protective shape, but there was only so much she could do. The runes lining the inside of the thick steel were slagged. Her pale flesh below was a charred and painful ruin that all but guaranteed her a prolonged trip to a healer’s tent after all this was done. 

She ignored the pain. A traitorous part of her was thankful to Rolf for giving her the skills and the experience to do so with ease. After further examining her armour, she had to concede that it was a lost cause. Too much metal had simply melted away to ever be pushed back into place. In the extremely likely event that there was another fight ahead of her tonight, she would just have to deal with the glaring weak spot sitting in the centre of her chest.

Arilla looked up from her ruined armour and at the once opulent reception room which had been transformed by the fighting—and Typh’s shapeshifting—into a large sunken crater filled with chunks of debris and shattered pieces of furniture. The carnage extended out in every direction, bar one. Adjacent rooms and halls had fallen inwards towards the centre of the now concave floor. Very little could survive being hit by a lumbering dragon, or a missed spell, or skill-infused strike that had originated from a careless iron-ranker. Where the internal supports had failed, large chunks of the roof and ceiling had fallen inwards, scattering masonry below and revealing the clear night’s sky up above. There, hanging suspended above them, the moon loomed malevolently, as if casting its approval over tonight's bloodshed.

Amidst all the destruction, there was exactly one remaining door that stood tall amidst the wreckage. The wall it was attached to was just as miraculously unscathed as the door itself. It was broadly in the correct direction, leading deeper into the Royal Residence where the mana snatched from her class had fled. Its obviously magical resilience could only be attributed to the presence of the powerful runes peeking out from behind the charred wallpaper that lined the otherwise undamaged wall.

Ash crunched underfoot like snow as Arilla climbed the gentle slope leading towards the door. Typh followed close behind, trailing fine fabric over the broken and bloody floor. The dragon’s attitude had taken a noticeable hit since she had run out of dresses, and now wrapped in an antique tapestry depicting Terythian heroes standing triumphant over Epherian might, she seemed testy if anything. 

Arilla kicked the hardwood door and for the first time in their raid on the palace, her boot failed to open the way.

“Can you get us through?” the warrior asked.

“Of course I can,” the dragon answered quickly.

Typh approached the wall and extended a small hand. A heartbeat later and a stream of golden fire poured out from her palm. She waved her arm back and forth, coating the wall in flames that quickly subsided, leaving behind exposed brickwork that was completely covered in complex sigils that shone with an arcane light. 

While Arilla waited patiently in silence, the dragon stepped closer to the wall with an anxious frown on her face.

“Is there a problem?” Arilla asked.

“Yes—I mean no. Sort of,” Typh eventually admitted.

“Can you explain it to me?”

Typh sighed and stepped up even closer to the wall. She extended a painted finger to highlight one rune which to Arilla’s eyes looked very much like any other.

“This shouldn’t be here… it’s elvish,” the dragon explained.

“What do you mean?”

“Humans haven’t used this rune for a very long time. It’s only really used by elves as it feeds into their ridiculous beliefs about purity.”

“Couldn’t we have found it by ourselves? Helion—like Rhelea—was built on top of a ruined city, right? Surely humanity is capable of learning from the past,” the warrior offered.

“Several ruins stacked on top of each other, yes. Normally I’d agree with you but, it’s not a common rune, and this isn’t the first time I’ve seen elven work where it doesn’t belong,” Typh said.

“So what, you think elves have infiltrated humanity to bring about our doom?” Arilla scoffed.

“No. That's Erebus's insanity. But is it possible that a handful of elves might have meddled? They’re certainly capable of it, and no people are without a few bad apples.”

“Exactly how bad are elves?”

“Bad,” the dragon stated firmly. “but I suppose with everything else going wrong, they wouldn’t exactly be the worst of our problems.”

“But near the top?”

“Yeah. Right up there with the civil war we’ll have on our hands if this doesn’t go perfectly.”

There was a sound of a distant crash behind them. A wall crumbling or perhaps someone tearing through the debris they had left in their hurried wake through the palace’s halls. Their eyes turned towards the unwelcome noise, before meeting between them where they shared a look of concern. Whether it was a fleeing servant or a battalion of armoured knights didn’t really matter, they needed to move. 

“We’ll continue this later. Time is not our friend,” Typh said, before quickly searing new lines into the wall with her customary golden light. The symbols she carved shone brightly for a moment, causing those surrounding them to flicker dramatically until they stopped glowing altogether with an audible whine. “Try kicking it again.”

Arilla did, and this time her boot ripped the door clean off its hinges. It soared through the air for a handful of seconds before crashing into a far wall where it destroyed an oil painting and knocked over a large ceramic vase. Besides that little bit of destruction, the hall beyond was untouched, although with every passing second a thick cloud of scalding stone dust billowed out from the reception room and into the hall where it tainted the otherwise pristine air and slowly fell over the plush carpet. 

Together, they walked confidently through the empty doorway, trailing more blood and dust in their wake. The sound of Arilla’s clanking armour and Typh’s soft steps were the only noises to be heard beyond the crackling fires from the previous room and the distant sounds of hurried pursuit.

***

The Royal Residence was deserted.

Even if the King and Queen had already escaped, there should have been someone left behind. The royal consorts, the princes and princesses, maids, servants, guards, attendants, pages, valets. Typh’s spies had been resoundingly clear that the Royal Residence was a hive of well-bred activity with hundreds of occupants at any one time.

Somebody should have tried to stop them from progressing, or at least fled at their approach, but there was no one. Not a single soul.

For the first time since entering the palace, they decided to consciously slow down their advance. Even with the near-certainty of pursuers to their rear, the lack of resistance was deeply unsettling and it only grew worse with every empty hall and cavernous room they traversed. 

Arilla wanted to deviate from the path laid out before them, to ignore the steady flow of concentrated mana that led deeper into the palace to where King was supposed to reside. She knew that they were missing something important, something that could perhaps be revealed by searching the side rooms and adjoining halls for the suspicious lack of people, but they just didn’t have the time. 

They had already faced one ambush and she feared that the next one would be worse. Every second they wasted gave their foes more time to prepare, and just because they couldn’t see the noose encircling them, it didn’t mean that it wasn’t there. 

With their slower pace, Arilla couldn’t help but take in the splendour on display all around her. It was yet another show of ostentatious wealth that few beyond the staff assigned to clean it would ever see. The rich’s obsession with hoarding treasures was about as bad as Typh’s, but she was a dragon who struggled against her nature, whereas the palace’s owners were just men who had no such excuse.

How many times had she or some other unfortunate soul gone hungry so that their highborn masters could own another fine piece of art, or commission a mural of their ancestors’ historic achievements? Why was it that proclamations that announced a successful harvest always seemed to be followed by an increase in the price of grain, or a quiet reduction in the funds allocated to charity?

In the month since they’d camped outside of Helion, countless members of the city’s desperate poor had fled the slums for the dragon’s camp. It said a lot, that just the rumour of classes and a fresh start had lured so many out from behind the safety of the capital’s walls. When she considered that they were running towards a temporary settlement populated by what many still considered to be an army of invading monsters, it was astounding. She’d heard countless tales of the nobilitys’ excesses, the casual cruelties of the landlords who owned much of the city, and the indifference of those who were meant to watch protectively over the people. 

If she was being honest with herself she’d found some of it hard to believe.

Arilla had been raised to respect the crown and the rotating heads of the noble dynasties who took turns wearing it. While she’d never had any love for the nobles themselves, she’d always imagined that the King and Queen were different, but from what she was seeing—and what she’d heard—it was hard to think of them as any better than the rest of the political class that wielded power for power's sake.

A grand door loomed majestically at the end of another equally grand hall, and from the way Typh was subtly flaring her nostrils, Arilla assumed that the dragon could smell an increased concentration of wealth on the other side of those intricately carved doors.

This time succumbing to a hunch, the warrior tried the handle rather than her boot and the doors smoothly opened inwards. She stepped through into a spacious sitting room, where nestled between treasures and artefacts meant to inspire awe, was easily the most handsome youth Arilla had ever seen. 

He was so breathtakingly beautiful that she almost missed the four mid-iron knights standing protectively around him. The man’s face was regal and familiar, one she’d seen every time she’d handled a Terythian coin, be that a lowly obol, the familiar chalkoi, or a rarely grasped mina. 

[King level 98].

King Minervan of House Prieligona, Lord of the wealthiest city in the country bar Helion, second of his name, and undisputed ruler of Terythia, turned to face her. 

Immediately, Arilla felt her knees grow weak. A lifetime of lessons instilling her duty as a loyal citizen hammered home all at once. She was suddenly confronted with vivid recollections of the nuns who’d raised her, making her swear to follow her King's commands; to offer her mind, body, and soul up to his whims, regardless of the circumstances. 

Which was funny as she could have sworn that memory had been about following the Gods’ teachings. 

Clearly, she’d been mistaken. 

Her anxious thoughts slowed to a crawl while her heart thundered in her chest. She felt her cheeks flush with desire, butterflies swim in her stomach, and a growing warmth spread from between her thighs.

He hadn’t even spoken to her yet and already she knew that she loved the sound of his voice. That she couldn’t wait to submit to his demands. Creation took on warmer, softer tones. The bright magelights that filled the expansive room cast everything in comforting shades of amber, while her sword—suddenly far too heavy for her delicate fingers—fell from her grasp.

Arilla bit her lip with frustration and stared expectantly at his, waiting for the King’s perfect words to tell her precisely what to do. 

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Typh pushed past her seemingly concerned about something unimportant, but her hurried strides quickly faltered as the dragon fell to her knees. The tapestry wrapped tight around her shoulders loosened to display increasing amounts of her magnificent skin, and while Arilla didn’t know what would happen next, she knew that if her King willed it, she would be happy.

[Slayer’s Resilience] throbbed painfully in her chest and the warm veil that had settled over her thoughts cracked around the edges. Without her prompting its activation, her skill drank deep on her mana reserves like it never had before. The harsh light of an unwelcome reality forced its way into her head, painfully ripping away the delusions that were smothering her questioning thoughts. She felt raw by the abruptness of the transition and was suddenly aware of her class screaming at her to resist. 

She blinked, and the chestnut-haired youth was gone, in his place was an old man—gnarled and stooped with age. The King’s attention snapped from Typh to her, his thin hair fanning out with the suddenness of the motion, and she felt a fresh wave of impassioned loyalty wash over her. Her anger at the violation quietened but did not vanish. His open-mouthed leer, one she was far too accustomed to, morphed into a look of shock when Arilla pushed Typh to the side, scooped up her sword and threw it in his direction.

With her skills surging in her chest, her zweihander shot through the air like a missile only for one of the knights to bat it away with their shield. Terythia’s King fell to the floor in a panic when the loud noise of metal on metal rang out and the wave of whatever he was exuding stalled while his guards interposed themselves between him and her. 

“Typh?!” Arilla asked nervously, not daring to take her eyes off the knights as they cautiously approached her. 

The Noble Slayer steadily ramped up the stamina she fed to [Slayer’s Sight] and it was a good thing she did. Their ghostly before-images alerted her to their synchronised lunges before it was too late. Blindingly fast, their blades all went for the large rent in her armour and backpedalling as fast as she could, they only just missed a lethal strike.

Instead, she took a lesser series of painful stab wounds. The steel laced through her skin did little to stop the razor-sharp blades sheathed in different forms of crackling energy that gouged into her chest—searing, chilling, melting, and shocking—before a wave of golden force lifted them from their feet and slammed the knights into the far wall.

The plaster cracked around them as they tried and failed to peel themselves away from the sculpted stone. Solid bands of hardened light pinned them in place, visibly constricting around their limbs, and when Arilla looked over she saw Typh standing unsteadily on her feet. Her scavenged tapestry had been abandoned and the dragon was now clad in thick, opaque scales of arcane force. Despite not being able to see her expression through the armour she had conjured, the warrior could tell that Typh was pissed.

“Are you okay?” Arilla asked.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” the dragon spat, taking another step forwards and causing the immobile knights to groan as their armour buckled around them. “Get the King, he’s making a break for it.”

Arilla looked over to where Typh gestured to see the old man scrabbling away on all fours. She hastened to catch up with him and in two loping strides, she’d managed to grab him firmly by the collar, easily lifting the King into the air. The Noble Slayer was surprised at how light he was for a peak-bronze classer. Clearly strength, dexterity, and by the look of him, vitality, had not been prioritised in his build.

King Minervan looked at her and Creation warped once again. Honeyed tones rippled across her sight as the years fell away from his face and she felt her breath hitch in her chest. 

Arilla slapped him hard across the face with her plated gauntlets and knocked several bloody teeth loose. Reality immediately reasserted itself while the King of Terythia whined as blood spilled from his no longer perfect lips. A pained, disbelieving expression dominated the nobleman’s wrinkled face, but she paid him no further attention.

“What was that? Mind magic?” Arilla asked, looking over her shoulder at Typh for reassurance.

“No… just a lot of charisma and some skills,” Typh answered, as she continued to hold the knights down with her spell.

The doors behind them swung open, and four ranks of Alchemic Knights numbering twenty in total stormed into the room. To Arilla, their tags read as three question marks that put them all above level 188, but judging from how Typh paled while the King attempted a grin she had to assume they were in steel.

Before they could react with violence, Arilla drew a knife from her belt and placed the edge of the skill-forged blade against her hostage’s throat.   

“Lay down your weapons or the King dies. It’s over, we’ve won!” she announced loudly, and while the four suffering beneath Typh’s spell stopped their struggles, the Alchemic Knights did not halt their advance.

The King tried to say something, but the words were not ‘Do as she says’ and wary of a repeat of whatever it was he had done to her, she clamped a hand firmly over his mouth. 

The newly arrived knights who bore the mark of the Alchemist’s Guild on their armour, arrayed themselves defensively around the room’s only entrance. Four rows of five classers, the front two wielding spears, with the remaining fielding swords and shields, were an imposing sight. They had more than enough levels between them to make exiting the room considerably difficult, and that was before she factored in the King she held hostage. 

Sensing the looming difficulty, Typh released her arcane grip on the King’s original knights and came to stand beside Arilla.

“They’re all tainted,” the dragon hissed quietly and the warrior felt her heart fill up with dread.

“They’re still knights,” she responded with a confidence she didn’t feel, before turning to face the intruding classers once more. She let her knife bite a little deeper into the King’s throat, just enough to draw a trickle of blood before she spoke again. “I said, lay down your weapons or he dies!”

“I don’t think so.”

The voice was calm and collected, and the Alchemic Knights parted just enough for a pair of feminine figures to be seen standing behind the back ranks. Carefully shielded by a mage with an unknown level, and five of the knights whose shields all moved to protect her, stood the Queen of Terythia.

She appeared to be in her late thirties, which for a woman who was barely over the cusp of bronze would have been an impressive feat had she actually earned her levels. She was slender verging on the willowy and exuded an air of cultured grace that Arilla’s class wanted to aggressively devour whole. Having just shrugged off the King’s class skills she was in no mood to let herself be pulled into whatever mind-fuckery the Queen was capable of, so with a small amount of difficulty, she tore her attention away from the woman’s brown eyes and focused on her resolve. 

“We have the King,” Arilla tried again.

“I can see that,” Queen Constancia replied with a warm smile.

“I will kill him if you don’t surrender.”

“And I have already told you that I won’t be doing that. I have no desire to be a hostage, especially given the alternative.”

The King struggled weakly in Arilla’s grasp, and she found her eyes drawn to the collection of knights in the room. The four who had once stood protectively over Terythia’s ruler looked even more uncertain than the warrior felt, whereas the stoically silent Alchemic Knights—tainted with the blood of a true Monster—bore discreet signs of recent violence. It was subtle; a scuff on a breastplate here, a smear of blood there, or scratched paint on what looked like an otherwise new pauldron, but Arilla knew what to look for, and she recognised the signs.

Wherever they had been before now, they’d been killing.

Suddenly the oppressive quiet that had hung heavy throughout the Royal Residence felt far more sinister than it had previously. She inhaled the heady mana circulating in the room and questioned how much of it was actually her doing. 

“I should really thank you. I could never have done this without sparking a war that would have certainly seen me dead…” the Queen began.

The King thrashed in Arilla’s arms and she had to loosen her grip on his throat lest he cut himself open on the edge of her knife. The iron rankers readjusted their weapons, only this time half of them focused their attention on the Alchemic Guard rather than the ‘invaders’ in the room.

“But with you here to take the blame, I can finally act…” the woman smiled, pausing to nod her head towards the King’s guards.

A pair of Alchemic Knights from the front rank stepped away from the formation. Arilla tightened her grip on the knife and was only half-relieved when they did not approach her. Instead, they faced the iron-rankers. Their spears blurred and suddenly where the four knights had previously been standing, there were merely chunks of meat and deep scars in the stone.

The King froze, and Arilla felt a wet warmth drip down through the gaps in the armour of her leg.

Shit.

“Do you know what it has been like being married to him? Of having to put up with his horde of consorts and whining bastards? To say nothing of his hands…” the Queen continued.

The pair of Alchemic Knights quickly rejoined the defensive formation, and Typh moved to stand even closer to Arilla, her eyes darting around the room far faster than the warrior could personally process.

“Thank the Gods you and your dragon arrived. While I must admit I never expected you to actually take the outer-walls, this raid of yours works out perfectly for me…” the Queen explained.

Arilla stared into the noblewoman’s eyes and recognised the hunger for blood that lay beneath her calm facade. Worse, she felt the King see it too and tremble, she knew then that he was not surprised.

What the fuck have we walked into?

“We have more hostages than just the King. We have noble scions and patriarchs from more than half the great houses in the Kingdom. You should surrender. This won't end well for you,” Typh threatened. 

“Perhaps… but it doesn’t change what I’m going to do next,” she said, raising a hand high into the air.

“Please. Don't. You’re dooming us all. The wards—what the alchemists are doing to the knights it needs to stop,” Arilla pleaded, hating the weakness in her voice.

The Queen blinked once and smiled. She made eye contact with Arilla and for a second hope blossomed in her heart.

“I have their assurances that Rhelea was a blip. The Capstone solution has been sufficiently refined since then. And this wards nonsense, well, I’m sure if there is a real danger we’ll manage to deal with it, but I will not be scared away from my chance with tall-tales of tentacle monsters,” Constancia said dismissively. 

“You’re wrong,” Arilla answered.

“Maybe, but you’ll never find out.” 

The Queen’s hand dropped through the air and the front three ranks of the Alchemic Knights moved. The terrified King held in Arilla’s arms exploded into chunks of gore while sparks flew from what remained of her armour. The System sent another notification her way informing her of her part in the King’s death while Typh’s form blurred outwards. With the man who had in some way or another dictated the conditions that had determined her life still dripping from her face, Arilla had just enough time to see the Queen of Terythia wink at her before she disappeared behind a row of rune-carved shields.

Then everything got much, much worse.

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