Chapter 62: DD3 Chapter 008 – Roles

The sword felt unwieldy in her hands. It was a fine blade; skill-forged, Rhelean steel with monster slaying runes etched deep into the polished metal. Unfortunately, the damn thing was far too heavy for a bard like Eliza. Against magical beasts and high-level classers, that extra weight behind its edge helped to pierce through their natural defences, where lesser blades would merely glance off stat-boosted skin, scales, or whatever. 

For her current foes that extra weight was an unwanted bit of overkill that slowed her strikes down to something more manageable for the wood-rank warriors she found herself pitted against. 

The dragon’s policy of free classes for all was probably the only thing stopping the city from rising up against her. Despite the pervading military patrols, travellers flocked to Helion in droves to take her up on her offer. Most people were either too busy scrambling to claim a class or to take the coin of those flooding the city to cause trouble, but as always there were exceptions. Eliza had initially thought the literal and very active siege grounds surrounding the walled palace in the centre of Helion would be sufficiently off-putting, but the allure of all that potential wealth and power trumped petty little things like avoiding a warzone.

While many came and went, intent on taking their newfound classes back to their rural villages to live out their slightly enhanced lives, many travellers ended up staying in the capital. Merchant and trade classes were by far the most commonly taken up, with the criminally inclined classes being a close second. Why Typh refused to outlaw classes like Bandit and Smuggler, Eliza would never know, although the rumour-mill was abuzz with far-fetched explanations as to why.

The bard’s sword clashed with another, scoring a shower of sparks where polished steel scraped against a notched and rusted edge. From the pained grunt that escaped the man’s lips, she assumed that he too agreed that her sword was far too heavy. For a level 4 warrior the smuggler wasn’t much more dangerous than if he were unclassed, but while he was new to his class, he clearly wasn’t new to the sword. 

Eliza was faster than him or anyone else in his gang, but her meagre 10 strength did very little to bridge the gap that the men's bulging biceps typically provided. Given they were all passably competent in their weapons, she had been dismayed to find herself at a stalemate. If she had a lighter sword, a belt knife, or had taken up the sword lessons she’d been offered then the fight would have already been over, but as it was, what should have been a one-sided beatdown was stretching out into the tens of minutes.

Sword blows and cudgels swung at her and she deftly dodged out of the way. Her sword arm lagged behind her as she ran, weighed down by the weapon she knew better than to let go of. Her legs danced across the ground, rapidly putting distance and towering barrels of stacked ale between her and her pursuers. She chose to face them only one at a time and striking them unaware from the shadows when she could.

It was dark in the brewery warehouse. Tall stacks of ale-barrels obscured what little moonlight made it in through the small windows up high. Large shadows cloaked the narrow spaces where she chose to make her temporary stands, always retreating before the smugglers’ superior numbers could overwhelm her. 

Blades flashed and she ducked low. With a clumsy swipe her own weapon found flesh, tearing through worn leather armour to hack halfway through a knee. A twist of her wrist caused a shrill scream of pain to escape her foe, and she was moving again while a thin-faced warrior bled out on the muddy floor. 

Shouts of alarm soon echoed the scream, and Eliza swore upon realising that there were significantly more members of the gang than she had initially thought. The five smugglers she had believed she could handle had somehow swelled to an even dozen, not counting the man on the ground. With [Troubadour’s Ear] she could hear their heavy breathing as they searched for her. A motley collection of freshly classed men and women cursing under their breath while they raced forwards towards the scream, neatly cutting off her planned exit. 

It didn’t matter if it was by accident or design, but the converging warriors left her with an unpalatable choice. She could stand and fight, or she could run, and deal with the fallout of her failure.

Given her relatively dire-straits, and her abysmal lack of control over the sword in her hands the choice should have been clear, but Eliza didn’t know how to feel fear. Instead of mounting panic at the prospect of a fight she knew she couldn’t win, she felt calm. Her heart beat steadily in her chest, pumping hard like she’d gone out for an intense jog rather than thundering in her ears like it should have. 

That clarity was a gift, it stopped her from doing something stupid like singing, which was the other stupid thing she could do. The appeal of which largely came from the chaos that crept in while her class struggled to hold itself together beneath the strain of maintaining her four complimentary skills.

By telling herself that she held an instrument of violence and not a weapon in her hand, her strikes were clean and graceful when they really had no right to be. Her skill [Troubadour’s Instrument] added 42 dexterity along with an improved understanding of timing so long as she held her sword. While raw attributes were a poor substitute for her abysmal lack of expertise, they were considerably better than nothing.

With [Troubadour’s Ear] she could hear them coming, the skill having paid for itself several times over since Riyoul’s death. [Troubadour’s Presence] helped make herself small when she needed to be, and terrifying when she wanted, and [Troubadour’s Voice], well that was the only way she could talk now that her actual voice unfailingly summoned the chaos. 

She felt her options dwindle with every heavy advancing step. 

There was a role she could use that would almost get her out of her mess; the cornered spy lashing out in a valiant last stand against her attackers. Creation found it acceptable, the similarities were close enough to her situation that she could reach out and touch the words with but a moment's thought. But Eliza didn’t like the ending of that particular song and while she was technically a spy, her foes were hardly worthy of the role the song would impose upon them.

Better to leave them low-levelled thugs than mighty agents of darkness. 

The brewery floor was not the ideal place to fight, between the rat droppings and the puddles of stagnant liquid that smelt concerningly more like piss than they did ale, steady footing was hard to come by. Using the last few seconds she had before they found her, she ran to a relatively open space between leaning towers of stacked crates and barrels. A little patch of flat-ish ground where she could use her mobility best while they tried to kill her.

No sooner than she had arrived than seven figures stepped out from the shadows. As they fanned out to surround her, five more warriors came forwards to join them.

“I don’t suppose we can talk about this?” Eliza tapped. 

To give them credit they didn’t even blink at her unusual method of communication, her meaning carried over by the beat of her foot tapping against the ground. But then times were changing and she was hardly the biggest oddity she used to be before the outer-city fell. 

“Fraid not, Bard. You stuck your nose in where it don’t belong,” the leading warrior said, a patched mail shirt distinguishing him from the rest of his gang who were clad in homespun cottons and leathers.

“I have money. Enough to pay to heal those I wounded,” she offered.

“Pete’s dead. Ain’t no amount of coin that’ll fix that. Although Pete was an asshole so ordinarily I’d be tempted to look the other way for a big enough payout, but you pretty lady are worth way more than any amount of silver you could be carryin’,” the man threatened.

There was a time not too long ago when the smuggler’s words would have had a very different meaning, but from the way the man’s eyes darted hungrily at her tag floating above her head and not her chest, Eliza knew what was what. With her messed up class she wasn’t entirely sure if she was actually worth anything, but her tag remained largely unaffected.

They saw a level 42 bard, and wanted that kill-xp.

Whether they’d capture her and sell it on, or take it for themselves was hard to say, but either way she’d die if she fell into their hands all the same. 

Four months ago when Helion fell to the dragon and classes became ubiquitous, the experience required to level all the new classers did not magically appear. If anything the large nonhuman presence had only made it harder to level as suddenly not even a goblin was acceptable to kill for levels. Naturally, the blackmarket had stepped in to fill this niche, with frighteningly brutal methods that not even the new ratling guards could entirely stamp out. So far east from the Dragonspines, free roaming monsters were a rarity in the surrounding countryside, and few people had the courage to delve deep enough into the labyrinthian tunnels beneath the city to find one of the dungeons and lairs where hunting was fair game.

“Shall we do this then?” Eliza asked.

“You heard the lady, get her!”

A skill-enhanced shout washed over her while the others charged. The skill was weak and insipid, easy for her to shrug off, but between her ear and what was going on with her class she could hear the bolstering effect it had on the onrushing classers.

Eliza pushed out hard with her charisma that fueled [Troubadour’s Presence]. The chaos inside of her threatened to leak out but for now she had it under control. Fear and dread suffused the space between her and her low-level attackers, not enough to stop them—she was no mind mage—but enough to make them falter. Their hurried steps slowed for a second and before they could recover she darted forwards and swung her raised sword down on an unsheathed blade.

Steel rang out against steel, but with [Troubadours Voice]—the most fragile of her skills—consuming her stamina at a frightening pace, that ringing noise was deafening. The glass in the window frames lining the walls of the warehouse shattered, the eardrums of everyone surrounding her burst and it was only her own skills that protected her from receiving the same punishment. A dozen warriors staggered backwards with blood streaming from their ears and then a heartbeat later they came for her.

In the confusion she was able to put two down for good, but the remaining smugglers were able to push through the pain thanks to their HP pools. They were deaf and uncoordinated, but there were ten of them, each with more experience fighting than she possessed.

In a matter of seconds her sword skittered out of her hand, turning once end over end before it clattered noisily along the muddy floor. 

“ANY LAST REQUESTS BEFORE I GUT YOU!” The yelling was hardly pleasant, and was accompanied by a dirty blade resting against her throat, but considering that she’d deafened them all, the shouting at least was to be expected. Eliza opened her mouth and mimed a few particularly elaborate lines of profanity confident that her captors couldn’t lip-read. “WHAT!?”

She tried not to smirk as she did it again, slower this time, only to receive the same look of puzzled confusion. 

“SPEAK LOUDER YOU DAFT BINT!”

“She called you a cock juggling—he can’t hear me can he?” Xan sighed, appearing in the centre of the gang and quickly proceeding to take care of the others with lazy slaps that sent grown men sprawling into the dirt either unconscious or dead.

“No.” Eliza tapped.

“NO WHAT?!” the smuggler screamed unaware of the carnage that had just occurred behind him.

“Look behind you.”

“PULL THE OTHER ONE—” He yelped as he was effortlessly lifted into the air by the casually dressed inquisitor who looked around disdainfully at the entire mess. The smuggler struggled vainly against her grip, his face slowly turning purple while Xan held him by the throat. Eliza didn’t know why the other woman was playing with them like this, but she’d learnt the inquisitor’s moods well enough to know not to comment on it.

“I told you to wait for me,” Xan said.

“You were late. I didn’t want to miss the exchange,” Eliza tapped.

“And you still should have waited. You could have easily died.”

“I knew you were only a few minutes away, I was only going to watch anyway.”

“You call this watching?” Eliza squirmed uncomfortably beneath the inquisitor’s condescending gaze. “Did you at least get the priest?”

“Yes, or at least, they did. They have him trussed up in the back,” the bard explained.

“Really?” Xan asked with a raised eyebrow. “I take it there was a problem with the deal?”

“Yeah, the priest is broke. Seems when he weaselled out of Musama he had to leave his gold behind. He tried to pay the smugglers in ‘absolution for their mortal sins,’ needless to say that didn’t go down well.”

Xan laughed at that, throwing her head back and flashing her white teeth before she tossed the asphyxiating man she carried in one arm through a large barrel of ale. From the audible cracking of wood and bones Eliza assumed that the smuggler wouldn’t be getting up again any time soon.

****

The priest was more than a little worse for wear. Until Eliza had given herself away, the smugglers had been trying to liberally beat the location of their promised payment out of him. When Xan finally pulled back the sack-cloth hood covering his head, she revealed the assortment of bruises decorating his tanned face. Eliza had to firmly steel that part of herself that immediately tried to empathise with the bound man. 

She knew what came next.

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She reminded herself of the devastation she had seen in Rhelea; the streets filled with the dead and the hordes of tentacled horrors that threw themselves on the living as they reaped lives for their master. This man, this bound helpless man would do it again to Helion in a heartbeat. Whether it was a compulsion or just fervent belief that drove his insanity didn’t really matter—what did was that he was a danger to them all. 

The priest had died the moment the Inquisition’s spies figured out he had escaped their assassins in Musama by boarding a lumber barge headed for the capital. It was their hand that guided the blade, not hers.

Eliza was just holding the knife for a while.

Still, this wasn’t her first execution and there was an order to these things. 

Xan smiled sweetly at the priest. The most objectively powerful human she had ever met, suddenly appeared both sweet and demure as she tugged gently on her class skills. She’d already altered her noble tag, replacing her three question marks for a level indicator with a relatively modest ‘warrior level 38’ tag. To complete her illusion, the inquisitor’s presence had shrunk within herself, becoming less of an unstoppable force of nature, and more like a young warrior who had yet to lose their naivety.

The supreme ease in which Xan became someone else would have been terrifying to Eliza if she were still capable of feeling fear.

“Golly, are you okay?” Xan asked.

“Not really… but better now that you’ve rescued me. Thank you,” the priest groaned, the traces of his accent making themselves known with his rolled ‘R’s and heavy ‘y’s. It was a small detail, but it helped to assuage Eliza’s guilt knowing that he was definitely the right man.

“It’s okay. Killing bad guys is all in a day’s work for us adventurers, right Eliza?” the inquisitor asked, and as prompted the bard smiled. It came easy to her lips. Her years of living in terror had given her plenty of practice when it came to hiding her true emotions.

“I can see that… Adventurers you say… Can you… untie me?”

“Of course, sorry! It totally slipped my mind,” Xan answered, before proceeding to do just that, albeit very slowly.

“Is—is she okay?” the priest asked, directing his question at Eliza who was admittedly standing still with a stupid smile on her face.

“Oh don’t worry about Eliza, she can’t talk,” Xan explained, finally finishing up as the ropes she’d probably torn through out of laziness fell off the priest and onto the floor.

“A bard who can’t talk, how peculiar…” the man mumbled. 

“She makes up for it by being wicked good on the violin!” Xan cheerfully supplied.

“I see…” he said, gingerly rubbing his wrists before slowly coming to stand with Xan’s help. “You have my thanks. The Gods will smile on you both for this kindness.”

“It’s nothing. My Ma’ always told me to respect the priesthood, even foreign ones—no offence meant, Father. Is there somewhere we can take you? The church perhaps?”

“No! Not there!” he began before pausing to cough into his hands. His face was twisted into a grimace of pain and he leant unsteadily on Xan for support. “There’s a house a few streets over from here. It should still be safe there. The people can be trusted whereas there might be more… criminals waiting for me at the church.”

Eliza looked away while the priest gave Xan the safe-house’s address, and as the three of them slowly limped towards the warehouse’s exit, the inquisitor steadily ramped up how much charisma she was using. Soon the man had told her everything she wanted to know regarding code words, and alternate meeting spots should they arrive only to find the house raided by more ‘criminals’.

Having been forced to spy for Riyoul for so long, Eliza had always thought that she was competent, if not good, at subtly milking someone for information. At least she had been back when her skills were safer to use—but if she was good, then Xan was a true master. Eliza wouldn’t be surprised if the bookish looking woman had a few hundred levels of mind mage squirrelled away along with the rest of her other classes.

The elusive priest who had evaded the Inquisition’s spies and assassins at every turn, who’d either been travelling or running through a hostile territory for the better part of a year happily gave the jovial ‘adventurer’ everything he knew before they were even halfway to the door. Skills were used to aid her, and her monstrous stats certainly didn’t hurt, but there was real talent there intermixed with countless years of experience.

When Xan was satisfied, she gently placed a small hand on the priest’s chin and loudly ripped the man’s head from his shoulders. The sickening tearing sound cut-off the epherian’s ramblings mid-sentence and Eliza only managed to keep her lunch down thanks to her foresight in looking away.

“Well that was almost difficult,” Xan remarked unconvincingly while she wiped her hands clean on a silken handkerchief.

“It was gruesome,” Eliza tapped. “Why couldn’t you use a knife like a normal person?”

“Because I like my knife. Protocol is to dispose of any blades that aren’t rune-etched when dealing with someone who’s potentially been tainted,” the inquisitor explained.

“The priest wasn’t tainted.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“I did.”

Xan looked at her appraisingly for a time and Eliza blinked. She was acutely aware of her lack of fear as she stared back into those grey-brown eyes that seemed to search her for something.

“I suppose next time I’ll ask you whether it's safe to use my favourite knife then,” the inquisitor offered. Her warm smile fit her face perfectly, and was only ruined by the severed head at her feet.

“Are we done here?” the bard asked.

“Don’t be so sour. Killing that priest just saved every man, woman, and child in Helion. We should grab a drink to celebrate,” the inquisitor suggested.

“No thank you.” Eliza quickly tapped, well-aware of what Xan’s celebrations typically entailed. “So can we leave now?”

“Not yet. We still have to inspect the cargo and question the survivors,” she said, tilting her head to the 10 possibly alive smugglers who had yet to move from where Xan had slapped them down. “Alchemical Reagents are supposed to be hard to get in any real quantity these days and tracking down their supplier might lead to more priests.”

Eliza decided to stay quiet. ‘Talking’ and walking was hard enough these days and she could do with letting her stamina recover for a time. Together the pair walked back to where the smugglers had been holding the priest and began cracking open the small assortment of crates that clearly didn’t match those that belonged in the warehouse.

Amidst the cornucopia of exotic reagents which were heavily weighted in favour of dried herbs, bone shavings and copious amounts of bottled dragon blood, was something that distinctly did not belong.

Xan held up the vial of inky black liquid to the light only for the dim green glow of the moon to utterly fail to penetrate the pitch-darkness of the fluid.

“What in the Gods is this?” the inquisitor asked, but Eliza wasn’t listening.

She felt the contents of the vial call out to the bundle of chaos in her chest. The fluid that looked in every way to be inert reached for her and something inside of her reached back. Eliza felt the need to sing rise precipitously and the vial held between Xan’s thumb and forefinger lurched out of her grasp only to smash against a wooden crate.

The bard drew her sword faster than she’d ever done so before and moving swiftly forwards she stabbed at the inky-black puddle with the tip of her blade. The liquid tried to crawl away from her sword, but upon contact it boiled and was still.

“Well fuck,” Xan muttered, suddenly serious again.

“Is that all of it?” Eliza asked.

“Not quite,” the inquisitor answered, pulling back the lid of an open crate all the way to reveal stacked rows of similar vials that each visibly recoiled against Eliza’s presence.

“Well fuck indeed…” the bard agreed. “I think I’ll get that drink with you after all if it's all the same…”

“Silver linings I guess,” Xan said as she looked over at the smugglers appraisingly and thumbed the hilt of her favourite knife. “But we’re going to be busy for a while.”

“Okay, but one question though before we get started.”

“Oh?”

“Golly? Wicked good? Who speaks like that?”

“Shut up, Eliza.”

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