Chapter 81: DD3 Chapter 027 – Rage

Arilla climbed down the stairs fully aware that she was walking into the open maw of a trap. She felt oddly calm by the prospect. She knew she was in trouble—destined for either captivity or an assassin’s blade—but from the moment she had taken that first step through the doorway, the chaotic storm of constant noise that roared in her ears had finally stopped. Her class no longer cried out in torment, and the twenty-two tethers tying her to her hateful subjects had been firmly blocked by a set of well-crafted wards she could feel if not see. Arilla was at peace and it felt good.

There were thirteen creaking steps separating the tavern’s basement from the ground floor where she’d already seen iron rankers lying in wait. Presumably, they were there to grab her should she try to escape, but Arilla had no intention of doing anything like that quite so soon. She was actually enjoying herself, savouring each precious second as she took her time on the stairs. Not-Myorik seemed to be getting increasingly agitated by her slow pace, but the woman posing as her friend could go fuck herself if she thought that Arilla was about to waste this opportunity.

The warrior quickly ran through the list of her enemies in her head and despaired at its length. Iron rankers were ruinously expensive, and notoriously hard to organise let alone motivate. The dozen or so she’d glimpsed could only have been bought by a truly large sum of gold, and unfortunately, factoring that in didn’t do nearly enough to narrow down who might have sent them. Her enemies tended to be both wealthy and powerful.

The Terythian Church, the Terythian Inquisition, Epheria, Erebus, the Adventurers Guild, the Alchemists Guild, Queen Constancia, literally any one of the nine Southern Lords who still formally opposed her—or a Northern Lord who’d found a way to fool the tether—foreign governments, or even a sufficiently wealthy mercantile group were the chief amongst her suspects. Any of them could be responsible for this and there was very little she could do to escape while she knew so little.

Regardless of how much she was enjoying herself, wandering off with ‘Myorik’ was an oversight Arilla couldn’t allow to happen again. The solution to preventing future incidents like this one wasn’t immediately obvious to her, but she was certain her Privy Council would have some choice words to share about her lack of a formal guard, or leaving her security arrangements to the rat.

Arilla clenched her fists and briefly marvelled at the sense of power she held there. This was hardly her first time being taken captive, but unlike before she wasn’t worried. While assassination did remain a distasteful possibility, her risen station made it far more likely that she was about to be taken hostage. 

Despite being outranked by the irons filling the tavern, she was hardly helpless. Arilla had killed those above her when she was at the cusp of pewter, and she could do it again now that she was edging on iron. If she could just get one or two of her would-be-captors, then she’d be able to cross into her fourth-tier where the only issue was being hopelessly outnumbered. The warrior tried to hide her smile as her class growled with delight at that entertaining prospect.

All too soon the thirteen steps were done, and Arilla had to deal with the unpleasant reality before her. She ignored Rolf’s condescending narration of her many inadequacies and focused her attention on the bound and gagged man tied to a wooden beam in the centre of the room. The innkeeper tag was there, floating above the man’s head which would have hung limply against his ropes if not for the tight fist made in his hair. 

The fist was attached to an iron-rank rogue and the obvious threat was augmented by a sharp knife against the innkeeper’s throat, but whether it really was Julian or not didn’t matter. Arilla already knew she wasn’t fighting her way out of this one—at least, not yet.

After her embarrassing mistake in trusting not-Myorik, Arilla couldn’t take the chance that it wasn’t really Julian. Her enemies were clearly adept with illusions, so she pushed mana through [Slayer’s Sight] just to be safe. That faint itch she was beginning to associate with that confounding form of magic faded, but for good or ill, the man before her stayed the same. It was him.

“Lay down your weapons or the innkeeper dies,” the rogue threatened while the woman—a mage—posing as Myorik finally dropped her illusory facade.

“Let him go, and I’ll do just that,” Arilla offered.

“You’re not in a position to make any demands here,” the woman sneered, catching Arilla off-guard with the amount of venom in her voice. 

“It's a simple request, one that doesn’t hurt you in the slightest. You obviously beat him to get information, aggravating the very real Caeber any further won’t earn you any favours,” Arilla warned.

“Please, the real Caeber’s passed out in a ditch two streets over. We’ll be long gone by the time he wakes. Now surrender, Your Grace—before things get ugly,” the rogue demanded. 

“And Julian?” Arilla asked.

“We’ll move him upstairs. This amount of warding is wasted on an innkeeper.”

“Very well then, but my compliance ends the moment you harm him any further. You’ll find my sword with my saddlebags outside. I’d ask you to leave my guards alive, but—”

“They’re already dead, the others will have seen to that. Now, raise your arms above your head while we search you for hidden weapons,” the rogue said.

Arilla rolled her eyes but did as she was told. The rogue's dagger never wavered from Julian’s throat while the woman behind Arilla patted her down. She could have been gentler about it, but at least she was professional, and after a span of seconds a knife was removed from both her belt and another from her boot, leaving Arilla completely disarmed. 

Julian was then untied and dragged to the side, allowing for her to take his place and be bound tight to the central beam with her arms restrained high above her head. A minute or two passed and a group of iron-rankers from upstairs came down to join them in the increasingly crowded basement. Three of the high-level classers peeled off from the group and took Julian away, leaving just two warriors behind to talk with the rogue and the mage.

“Any trouble?” the rogue asked.

“No. It went smoothly. You did good work, Hellyn,” one of the warriors said, nodding towards the mage.

“I told you it would be easy,” the woman replied. “Now do I get my hour?”

The two from upstairs shared an uneasy look, before the one who’d been speaking finally relented.

“Yeah, you’ll have it. The dragon’s taken the bait so I’m taking my team to reinforce the others. I’m leaving Laesil and his group behind to make sure you don’t get carried away,” he said pointedly while gesturing to the silent warrior standing beside him. “Other than his lot, it’s just going to be your team for a while… I hope I don’t need to remind you that we need Arilla alive and on a carriage heading south by nightfall. If you do anything to jeopardise that or cause any injuries our healers can’t fix, we’re going to have a very serious problem.”

“I understand,” Hellyn said begrudgingly.

“See that you do. There’s too much money riding on this for your revenge to get in the way,” he said.

They stuck around for a while longer and hashed out the boring details. They spoke in an almost code that consisted of numbered rallying points and adventuring bands that Arilla had no way of recognising. Even if she did, she was too distracted to pay attention. The talk of Hellyn’s revenge had sent Arilla’s normally guilty conscience spiralling into even deeper pits of despair. When the adventurers were done, the talker quickly checked that she was securely bound before he took everyone besides Hellyn and the man Arilla assumed was called Laesil back upstairs. 

She’d have liked to have been able to say that she then heard them leave the tavern, but with the heavy warding etched deep into the basement’s walls she couldn’t hear a thing coming from beyond the ceiling. 

The mage had been glaring daggers at Arilla all this time and while she recognised the look of genuine hatred, the mage was a complete stranger to her.

“Do I know you?” Arilla finally asked, and her question earned her a close-fisted punch across her jaw. Which… tickled. The mage clearly hadn’t invested much in her strength score, and judging from how she then shook her hand and swore, it was clear to Arilla that Hellyn had come off the worse from the interaction.

“You killed my father!” the woman screamed.

“Who?” An inarticulate howl followed and the mage progressed to lay into Arilla with a flurry of kicks and punches. Again, the impacts were barely worth mentioning and the warrior struggled not to yawn under the sustained assault. She patiently waited for the mage to tire herself out, and when the other woman was hunched over with exertion, the warrior spoke again. “Listen, I’m sorry if I’ve wronged you, but if you're after catharsis or contrition, you’re really going to have to remind me who it is you’re grieving. I’ve killed a lot of people’s fathers.”

“Eirme—his name was Eirme and you murdered him!” the woman said in a trembling voice that was made even shakier by her unsteady breaths. 

Eirme... 

The name felt vaguely familiar, but it wasn’t that uncommon and given the context Arilla’s mind drew a blank. She tried to shrug, but the ropes binding her to the support beam made the motion impossible and so she settled for an impassive look. 

With her hands still on her knees and her chest heaving, Hellyn looked up at Arilla with eyes burning bright with a combination of rage and mana. Arilla’s lack of recognition was obvious, and the mage didn’t take it well. 

“How can you not remember?! He was my father!” she asked.

“It’s like I said—I’ve killed a lot of people's fathers—sons too.”

“You’re a Monster!” Hellyn spat.

“Don’t say that. You were at Rhelea. You should know better than to throw that word around,” Arilla stated.

“How do you… Does—Does that mean you remember me?” the mage asked, sounding almost hopeful by the prospect.

“No, I don’t. But I can see it in your eyes. You were there. You saw what happened. Hate me if you like—call me evil, or a bitch—but don’t insult the people who died there by calling me a Monster, because we both know there are far worse things than me out there,” Arilla chastised.

“Are you actually lecturing me?!” Hellyn asked.

“Only a little, now can we get on with this? You’ve only got an hour and you're wasting time.”

Hellyn screamed with frustration and hit her again. This time she infused some of her mana into her strikes and it actually hurt, but after training with iron-ranks for months now, the mage’s best efforts left bruises smaller than what she’d usually get from a friendly spar.

“Are you done yet?” Arilla asked.

“Not even close! I’ve been waiting for this! Counting down the fucking days, until I got to see your face again. I will make you scream before we're done,” Hellyn threatened.

“I doubt it. You may hate me but it takes a special kind of sadist to actually torture someone. You don’t strike me as the type,” Arilla said with a conspicuous glance towards Rolf. “Have you ever actually killed anyone in cold blood?”

“No, I’m not like you. I don’t get off on hurting people,” the mage spat.

“It's a pity because that's what it would take to make me scream—unless you’re looking for a more amicable interaction, but judging from those claws you call fingernails I doubt that you have the talent or the inclination,” Arilla teased, earning herself a series of guffaws from the other warrior in the room while the mage screamed in frustrated rage.

“Get out!” Hellyn yelled at the man.

“Yaryn, told me to watch, and he’s in charge—not you—we voted, remember?” the warrior said.

“Fuck Yaryn! And fuck the stupid vote! No one’s in charge of me, and I will not tolerate you giggling like a little girl when it’s time for my revenge!” the mage screamed.

“If my laughter offends you, then maybe you should stop throwing a tantrum like one?” the other warrior suggested. “You’re an iron-rank mage finally confronting your father’s killer—who I might remind you is a high-bronze warrior—why are you punching her like an idiot? Use that triple-digit intelligence score of yours, and hit her with a spell already.”

“The man’s got a point,” Arilla agreed. “You are being quite idiotic.”

“Shut up!” Hellyn raged, this time extending her hand and firing a manabolt straight into Arilla’s chest. Hellyn must have had a decent affinity for wind magic as the unaligned spell naturally shifted to include blades of wind that cut into Arilla’s skin after making a mess of her shirt.

“Nice…” Laesil commented from the crate he’d chosen to make his seat, and both women did their best to ignore him.

“Maybe I was wrong about those fingernails…” Arilla trailed off, trying to keep a confident smile on her face despite the pain. [Slayer’s Steel] and [Slayer’s Resilience] helped take the edge off, but she knew that if the mage had really been going for the kill then Arilla would be dealing with a lot worse than broken skin. Hellyn’s hand remained outstretched, now uncomfortably close to Arilla’s exposed skin and the other woman's face portrayed a conflicting mixture of angry emotions. “Are you sure you’re here for revenge? I think Typh could be persuaded to take another mage into our bed if that’s what you’re really after.”

“Stop it! Stop talking!” Hellyn blushed. “I’m going to make you admit what you did—that you murdered my father!” 

“Do you want me to stop talking or to admit that I murdered your dad because I can’t do both?” Arilla asked. A second spell ripped out of the mage’s open palm as the other woman screamed an insult that was lost amidst the roaring winds. Fresh blood splattered the ground, and Arilla’s shirt just about gave up on holding any semblance of shape “Are you sure you’re not enjoying this?”

The warrior barely had the time to brace herself as a storm of riotous energy poured out from Hellyn. Arilla gritted her teeth as her health dropped precipitously and the razor winds sheared first skin and then muscle from her chest. It carried on for far longer than Arilla had thought it would—not stopping until Laesin stepped forwards and interrupted the mage with a firm hand on her wrist which lowered her attack until it fired into the ground. The spell cut out a second or two later, but not before it released a cloud of upturned dirt and fragmented stone into the air.

“Not bad,” Rolf commented, pressing his ruined face close to Arilla’s worsened wound. “An atrocious lack of style without even a hint of artistry, but a tolerance for blood like this is rare to see in an amateur.”

“Shut up,” Arilla grunted.

“Hellyn. You do that again and I’m calling in a healer from upstairs and ending this fantasy of yours. I’m not letting you butcher our cash cow, and frankly, this was a lot more fun to watch when her tits were hanging out. No offence, Your Grace,” Laesin said, addressing the last part towards Arilla.

“None taken,” she answered with a pained grimace. “I preferred it then too.” 

Arilla couldn’t see the damage, but looking at her health score dropping steadily by the hundred and feeling the amount of red trickling down her legs it was safe to say that it wasn’t good news. Her defensive skills had helped a lot—they still were—but Arilla had to take some deep, steadying breaths before she was ready to continue.

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“Are you ready to admit what you did?” Hellyn asked.

“I told you—I don’t remember a man called Eirme.”

“Well I’m going to keep hurting you until you do,” the mage threatened.

“Not if you do that again. Torturers usually start on the extremities, that way their victims are less likely to die on them. Casting a spell directly into someone's chest is idiotic. Doing so without a healer on standby is a good way to get yourself shanked by your colleagues,” Arilla warned. “Laesin, why don’t you tell Hellyn here what happens to her if she accidentally kills me?”

“This is your hour, Hellyn, but I’d get your team's healer down here if I were you,” the other warrior answered, and his tone all but confirmed Arilla’s statement.

“Gods, how I hate you,” the mage said with an accompanying glare.

“This not going how you planned it?” Arilla asked. “Now, why don’t you go get that healer? I’m only bronze after all—I could bleed out.”

“Not yet. Warriors are made of tough stuff. You can take it,” Hellyn replied with a wicked smile.

Well, fuck.

Rolf cackled while the mage laid into her again, only this time, Hellyn took Arilla’s advice and started on the extremities. She wasn’t a natural, and the mage had to frequently stop to vomit or recover her nerve, but Rolf had his vicarious fun despite Hellyn’s lack of artistry. 

***

“You sure you don’t want a proper drink?” Laesin asked, offering Arilla a cloudy glass bottle when she was finally done with the water. “Plenty of booze down here—decent skill-forged stuff—and I doubt the innkeeper will care after all that blood you’re getting on his floor.”

“I’m fine…” Arilla muttered. “Water’s good.”

“You sure? Because you sure as shit don’t look fine.”

“I don’t drink. I tend to get depressive, selfish, and honestly a little violent… Are you sure you should be offering? Won’t Hellyn get mad?”

“Maybe, but fuck her. She’s all torn up about her dead dad and isn’t seeing the bigger picture.”

“And that is?”

“Say we take you south, and let the Lords down there fight over who gets to hold you hostage. A couple of months go by and they force your dragon to sign a treaty, pay a ransom or some combination of the two. Either way, by the end of the year you’re back in bed with your draconic lover and you still have more gold than you know what to do with. 

“Then I imagine, you might want to start looking for revenge of your own, and I’ll tell you this for nothing: Hellyn’s team is hanging on by a thread. They used to have this father-daughter and friends thing going on back when Eirme was the official leader, but after you happened to him they’re mostly sticking around out of sympathy. Revenge is a poor motivator for those who ain't blood, and I can’t see them sticking with Hellyn after she’s finished painting a target on her back,” Laesin explained.

“Adventurers are ever the practical sort…” Arilla muttered disparagingly.

“Couldn’t have said it better myself,” Laesin said, misreading her tone. “Should that day come, and you’re looking for some hired hands, look me up. My team’s rates are very reasonable, and I’ll cut you a good deal on her on account of her attitude problem.” 

“Any chance we can speed that betrayal up by a year or so?” Arilla asked.

“Sorry, Your Grace. I’ve got a reputation to uphold,” the man apologised, and he surprised her by how oddly sincere he seemed.

“Pity.”

“Pity what?” Hellyn asked, descending the stairs in a rage with an iron-ranked healer in tow. Judging from how the healer-tagged woman reacted when she looked between Arilla’s ravaged body and her leader, the warrior believed every word Laesin had said about Hellyn’s team’s wavering loyalty. It was a small consolation, but Arilla couldn’t afford to waste a year being shuffled around from cell to cell.

“It’s a pity that your father's death was so utterly unmemorable—neither of us can remember who he was,” Arilla goaded.

An explosion of wind washed across the room from the mage’s position on the stairs, carrying dust and loose dirt with it while Hellyn clenched her jaw in anger. Her eye’s blazed a brilliant grey-blue and for a moment Arilla thought she’d strike her from the stairs.

“Easy, Hellyn. Let me fix her first,” the healer said. The woman then pushed past the furious mage and hurried to Arilla’s side. Soon, soft hands hovered above the warrior’s torn flesh, and beneath a warm glow of turquoise light, Arilla’s ruined chest quickly pieced itself back together.

“Gods, how I love iron-rank healing spells,” Arilla said with a shudder, revelling in the sudden absence of pain.

“You’re welcome. I’d say try not to get hurt again anytime soon, but…” the healer trailed off.

“Yeah I know,” the warrior sighed.

“Can everyone stop being so fucking nice to the woman who killed my father!” Hellyn raged and everyone—Arilla included—shared an unimpressed look that was directed at the mage.

“How much longer?” Arilla asked.

“Twenty minutes and change,” Laesin answered, an act which caused Hellyn’s eyes to blaze even brighter as the winds picked up dramatically within the basement.

“Everyone get out!” the mage demanded.

“I don’t take orders from you,” Laesin answered.

“Leave willingly or before I force you,” Hellyn threatened and everyone could see the building magic as the mage prepared to fight.

A tense moment passed when they very nearly came to blows, but whether it was the mana burning in her eyes or simply something else, the warrior caved.

“If you kill her, know that you won’t make it out of Helion alive,” Laesin warned, and then he obeyed the mage’s demand and left. The healer followed suit maybe a moment later.

“Alone at last,” Hellyn smiled, walking across the room to stand close to the bound warrior.

“Can I at least get another shirt before we go again, or are you really that desperate to sneak a peek?” Arilla teased.

“Haha very funny,” the mage deadpanned. “No one's going to laugh at your jokes and on the other side of my wards. No one is going to hear you finally scream, or come to stop me when I go too far.”

“So you’re going to kill me then?” the warrior asked.

“Of course I am. I have to avenge my father. Like an hour of torture could ever make up for the way he died,” Hellyn explained.

“And how did that happen?”

“Slowly. At your command and by a thousand different cuts.”

“Ahh, Eirme…” Arilla trailed off, her memory finally sparking with the slight detail. “The ranger. The idiot ranger I sentenced to death after he butchered a few dozen goblins on the eve of retaking Rhelea for literally no reason.”

“Them being goblins is reason enough,” Hellyn snapped, before breaking out into a wide self-satisfied smile. “It’s not quite the confession of guilt I was hoping for, but I’m glad that you finally remember him. It means I don’t have to draw this out nearly as much. I’ll end it once you give in and scream for me.”

“You know they’ll kill you for this,” the warrior warned.

“I can handle myself. I didn’t make it to iron by taking risks I couldn’t handle,” the mage said.

“Really? I assumed that your daddy simply power-levelled you.”

“That’s enough!” Hellyn snapped, raising an outstretched hand out towards Arilla. “Now scream for me!”

The spell that burst from the mage’s palm was different to those that had come before. In many senses, it was a much weaker spell, one that had clearly been chosen for its capacity to inflict pain over damage. Like Eirme, a thousand knife-blades raced towards Arilla, unlike him, these blades were made from condensed air and carried across the short distance by his daughter’s grieving rage. They cut into Arilla’s skin after a brief period of resistance from her skills. The depth of the incisions grew as Hellyn fed more mana into the spell and soon the pain resistance from [Slayer’s Resilience] was completely outstripped by damage coming from the spell. The short blades cut deep, opening up a thousand bloody ribbons across the surface of Arilla’s body, and not seeing a reason not to, she screamed. 

She screamed loud and hard, pouring in every ounce of the considerable resentment and rage she possessed. The infuriating pointlessness of the siege. The grim loss of life that occurred everyday in her city because people simply refused to get along. She grieved her conscience which she feared had died in the north and the decay of her relationship since Typh had refused to accept her as a King. She channelled both her and her subjects' hatred for one another, along with her own classes innumerable failings. 

Arilla was so very angry, and she put all of that fury into a single bellowing shout.

It was surprisingly cathartic.

The idiot-mage smiled for she didn’t know what came next, and Arilla could practically feel the pressure in the room rise as Hellyn built the spell. Her fingers twitched and Arilla threw herself down and to the side. There wasn’t much give in the ropes binding her to the beam, but between all the old blood and the better part of an hour rubbing Arilla’s steel-like flesh, there was enough. The warrior tore her right arm out of its socket in her haste to duck and the dislocated limb slipped easily from its bindings while her left was cut through to the bone by the speeding spell. Crucially, the wind blade that should have slit her throat open down to her spine, sliced cleanly through the wood of the support beam behind her.

“Oh…” Hellyn said.

“Yeah...” Arilla agreed.

The building above creaked ominously, and when Arilla pulsed stamina through [Slayer’s Blade] and used her legs to rip the rest of the beam out of the ground, there was only a second or two for the mage to panic before the whole thing came crashing down.

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