Chapter 85: DD3 Chapter 031 – Runaway

Eliza peered through the wooden shutters at the torrential rain outside. The storm hadn’t let up since Typh had summoned the dark clouds over a week ago, and the sound of the relentless rain falling onto warded stone filled her with a profound sense of longing. With her skills, she could hear the people in the neighbouring buildings lament the lack of clear skies. Unobscured sunlight seemed like an increasingly distant memory, and Helion had taken on a gloomy atmosphere as a result.

Whether it was the Ashen King’s steady rise to prominence, or goblins’ committing mass slaughter against each other in broad daylight, people understandably kept clear of the streets, only venturing outside for work or trips of the utmost importance.

Eliza would kill to join them. The past few weeks had been rough—Gods' help her—the last few months had been rough. She’d traded the temporary captivity of the Experience Merchant’s cells for the indefinite ‘safety’ of an Inquisitorial safehouse. It was undoubtedly comfortable and secure, but so far she had yet to feel safe inside.

The bard turned away from the alluring prospect of outside and tried to distract herself from her ever-spiralling worries. This time she didn’t have her unique brand of magic to occupy her mind, and the hours crawled by with only the faintest glimmers of a reprieve. Alph was poor company, and his snake was worse. The alchemist constantly needled Eliza to experiment with her power, oblivious to the danger it put him in. She had tried to explain how it subtly twisted her perceptions, but the man and his snake were far more interested in her magic’s potential applications than they were concerned about how volatile it made her feel.

With a tired sigh the bard left her room behind, and stepped into the small living room she shared with the alchemist. Alph had already made tea, and he had the class skills to augment every stage of the brewing process. To call what he produced ‘divine,’ was an insult to his skills, and Alph’s herbal brews were by far and away the best part of cohabitating with the strange man. Eliza didn’t know why the System allowed an alchemist's abilities to work on boiling water and adding it to dried leaves—it didn’t seem particularly alchemical to her—but Eliza supposed she’d gotten an instrumental skill to work on a sword, so who was she to judge? The System’s rules seemed arbitrary and stupid at the best of times—and increasingly, she found herself thinking that they’d all be better off without it.

She wished she could talk to Phioplies about this, but her unclassed friend had been dead for most of a year. Feeling sullen, Eliza sat down on the sofa and accepted the cup of steaming tea that was handed to her.

“Ssstaring wissstfully outssside againsss?” the snake hissed from his seat atop the teapot.

“Everine, stop hissing. It’s fucking irritating,” Eliza tapped.

“You know… you were a lot more fun when you were trapped inside a cell. For a bard, you have a terrible appreciation for thematics,” the reptile complained, and Eliza only offered a hateful glare in exchange. “I don’t suppose you saw any small rodents lurking about while you were pining for Xan to come back?”

“I wasn’t pining. And no—I didn’t see any rodents,” Eliza said.

“If I could roll my eyes at you I would. You’re pining right now! Even Alph can tell—it’s that obvious!” Everine remarked.

“What’s going on?” Alph asked, looking up from a small, leather-bound journal he’d only started writing in a few days ago.

“Alph, can you please control your snake?” Eliza asked in turn.

“He really doesn’t do what I say. I find it best to ignore him,” the alchemist explained, and Everine attempted to show off a triumphant grin. Eliza looked at the snake’s brazenly bared fangs and barely suppressed a shudder.

As if to spare her from the arcane creature’s terrifying elastic jaw, the door to the room swung open, and Xan rushed in from the street trailing rainwater across the floorboards. The woman threw off her cloak and walked a few steps before finding a vacant seat around the teapot. The inquisitor's tag flickered as she relaxed, transitioning from the level thirty-eight warrior she often pretended to be, and into a series of question marks next to the word ‘noble’. 

Xan unceremoniously picked up the teapot—along with a startled Everine—and poured herself a large cup of tea. She drank it in a single gulp, before pouring herself another cup which she then sipped slowly. For once the snake didn’t complain about anything—or ask if Xan had any mice. Instead, Everine remained silent while the inquisitor spoke:

“My contact was a bust. No one is willing to help us.”

“So what do we do then?” Eliza asked, feeling her heart fall into her stomach.

“I don’t know... Typh has made it clear that she wants you in her custody, and she’s willing to burn bridges with the Inquisition to get you there. Given that the adventurers the south sent to steal back their hostages are now publicly following the ‘Ashen King,’ the Inquisition is understandably going along with the dragon’s demands,” Xan explained.

“So that’s it? The vaunted Inquisition is just rolling over now that the dragon has won the civil war?” Alph asked.

“It wasn’t much of a war. The palace is still standing in open defiance, along with the rest of the south, but yes—Typh has all but won. Everyone who matters is scrambling to get on her good side. The Southern Lords made their last play and they failed. Now all that’s left is for them to kneel when they’re asked to. After that, the palace’s fall will just be a matter of time. 

“Soon, we’re going to be left with no allies, and an unchallenged monarch who really wants you in a cage,” Xan said, addressing the last part towards Eliza.

It was bleak news, but Eliza couldn’t say that she was surprised to hear it. Since ‘escaping’ the auction, she’d been holed up with nothing to do but wait while Xan worked her way through her contacts, trying to find someone willing to help. That no one was up to the task was disappointingly predictable, but there was just one unanswered question plaguing Eliza.

“Why are you helping me, Xan? I understand why you’re holding onto Alph. He knows more about the Capstone Solution than anyone we’re going to find outside of the palace, but shouldn’t you have handed me over to your superiors by now?” the bard asked.

Xan was quiet, and for a moment Eliza wondered if she’d made a mistake. But she had to know. She could only think of one reason for the inquisitor to have avoided doing her duty, and she wanted it to be true so badly, that she was growing increasingly concerned that the possibility only existed in her head.

Eliza understood that she was dangerous. But the chaotic magic she held within her voice also made her useful. Whether it was Typh, the Inquisition, or some other political power, people would want to control her for what she could do. Xan would be able to relate to that. There weren’t that many steel ranks around, and fewer still were tame enough to be reasoned with. Xan was centuries old and inherently unknowable—but she was still a person underneath all of those levels. And people got lonely.

Of course, Eliza didn’t know that was true. She just wanted it to be.

“I’m helping you because—” because I want you for myself. I understand that we’ll never have sex. That we’ll hardly ever even kiss, but I like who you are as a person so much that none of it matters. I can’t bear the thought of you being taken from me. So stop asking stupid questions, and accept that I’ll take care of you, even if it means turning my back on my country. 

Much like the outside world she would like to explore again, Eliza would have killed to have heard Xan say those words. Instead, reality proved to be disappointing. 

“—you’re a weapon too valuable to be shelved. We very nearly lost at Rhelea. If a dozen different things didn’t go exactly our way, we’d all be dead and that Monster would have torn a path through Terythia. Now there’s another one, locked away in the Alchemical Stables—right next to the seat of our nation's power. If this goes south—and it always goes south—then I want you by my side where you can do some good,” Xan finished.

Eliza tried not to let her disappointment show on her face. [Troubadour’s Presence] and decades of hiding her feelings almost made it easy.

“I’ve told you before: it’s not a Monster. I’ve read the reports—the original ones the dragon sent, not the doctored ones the Queen put out—what we have is just a hand,” Alph interjected. “We’ve run tests. It isn’t sapient.”

Both of the women ignored the alchemist’s protests. Instead, Eliza stared silently into Xan’s impassive face and returned one of skill-enhanced neutrality for herself.

“I’m sorry about him. He can’t read the room,” Everine said.

“Why would I need to read the room? What’s going on?” Alph asked.

“Shut up, Alph!” the snake hissed, and Xan diplomatically cleared her throat.

“Queen Constancia has lost. Her back is up against the wall. Everything she’s worked for—killed for—is crumbling all around her and we have to ask ourselves, will she go quietly into exile or execution, or will she play her last card?” Xan asked.

“The Capstone solution,” Eliza tapped, and the inquisitor nodded. “I still think we should tell Typh. She’d take it seriously.”

“And I’ve told you. She’d destroy the palace and everyone in it the moment you did. And then she’d put you in a collar and a cage until she figured out how to control you,” Xan warned. “If you hadn’t forced our smuggler to ‘kill himself’ then maybe we could have proved your worth and solved the Monster problem in one go, but I don’t see how we can get inside the palace without fighting our way in, which is too much—even for me.”

“I could tell them to let me in,” Eliza offered.

“No. Unless you’re changing your story we need to save your voice for emergencies. We can’t run the risk that you’ll let the power go to your head and incite another bout of mass suicide,” Xan chastised.

They all paused for a moment, and Eliza tried to ignore how right it had felt in the moment.

“I still don’t understand why we don’t just use my route back into the palace. It was easy eno—” Alph offered.

“Alph! We discussed this!” Everine snapped. Everyone immediately stared at the snake who then broke out in a perverse attempt at an innocent smile.

“Gods that’s unsettling,” Xan muttered.

“Talk, Alph,” Eliza tapped.

“Well… I, Uhm…” the alchemist briefly looked to the snake for reassurance, and Everine attempted to roll his eyes. “I did sneak out of the palace, remember? It may not have worked out well exactly, but I do know my way back in. We’d need to prepare a few things, but I can get us back inside easily enough,” the Alchemist explained.

“You can?! Why the fuck didn’t you say so earlier?!” Xan roared.

“I did! I mean, I told Everine to tell you—I’m not exactly a people person,” Alph said.

“And I was going to tell you, but then I realised that I didn’t really want to. I found the whole ordeal to be quite unpleasant the first time around—especially the captivity. I was hoping you’d come up with something yourselves, and leave us both in a nice inn somewhere, preferably one with mice,” Everine explained with a shrug.

Xan glared at the snake and he promptly exploded into fine chunks of red flesh. Eliza startled in her seat spilling her tea, and Alph briefly let out a shrill scream. Eventually, everyone collected themselves and the alchemist spoke.

“I understand that you’re… justifiably upset with his omission, but I’d really prefer it if you didn’t do that.”

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“The little fucker is immortal. Now bring him back so I can do it again,” the inquisitor demanded. Alph took one long look at the steel-ranked inquisitor of legend and visibly slumped.

“Fine… just let me put down a cloth first. I’d hate to get any more of him on the tea set.”

***

The rest of the day was a blur of frantic activity which saw Eliza relegated to Alph’s incompetent assistant. The thin man routinely chastised her best attempts to help, and he generally took over the tasks he assigned to her within ten seconds of delegating them. Their small kitchen that had once smelled so pleasantly of herbal teas and rich spices quickly transitioned to a foul-smelling room that caused a distressingly large variety of pests to flee for their lives.

When they were finally done—and Everine had bloated his stomach with spiders, cockroaches, and a small family of partially fumigated dormice—Alph had managed to create a few pounds of an unassuming powder that hardly seemed worth the effort. Xan returned from a hurried trip to a leatherworkers a few hours later having paid a premium for a rush job. The resulting suits of leather armour looked odd to Eliza, as they appeared to have very little to do with protecting them from swords, and were clearly designed to leave no parts of their body exposed. Once Alph was done looking them over while he tutted appreciatively, he then did something with the powder and the hosing attached to the masks, and then they were ready to go.

It didn’t take their group long to find an entrance to the network of tunnels that ran beneath Helion. Eliza was honestly disappointed that their walk through the city’s streets had been so brief. It seemed like every time she went outside, Helion had changed significantly and not always for the better. She understood that she had arrived in Terythia’s capital amidst a time of momentous change, but for reasons she couldn’t put her finger on, this instance felt different. She wanted to feel the winds and the rain on her face one last time, but instead, she was protected from the elements by an ill-fitting leather mask that reeked of oil, urine, and alchemy. 

She didn’t know why it was resentful, but the bard in her recognised an ending when she saw one.

With a silent goodbye, she followed the others into the dark.

It didn’t take her long to start missing her window. The glass lenses in her goggles were poorly blown and cloudy. The flickering torchlight held aloft by Alph was her only source of illumination and it was warped by the imperfections in the glass. But that was the least of it. Frighteningly fast—especially when you considered how easy it was to get below ground—the stagnant air of the underground tunnels was replaced by a dense wall of yellow fog. 

Xan uncoiled a rope and proceeded to tie the three of them together, and then with Alph leading the way, they entered what he calmly referred to as the ‘blister fog’. His voice remained oddly confident as he described first the manufacturing process, and then the horrifically long list of symptoms you could expect to experience before it killed you. It was… an unpleasant topic of conversation, but it filled the silence and gave her something to latch onto while she walked across the uneven ground in a cloud of all-encompassing yellow.

The droplets of blister fog hung suspended in the air and burst as she walked through them. Eliza imagined that it smelt of mustard, but Alph assured her that with her stats the only thing she’d smell was her own melting skin should the fog get inside her suit. Eliza wasn’t scared by this prospect, but she was acutely aware of how reliant she was on both the diligence of the leatherworker she’d never met and Alph’s alchemical air filters to keep her alive. In many ways, it was a nice change of pace from relying on Xan, but honestly, she didn’t mind relying on the inquisitor all that much. 

The tunnels seemed to go on and on, and Alph’s continued assurances that all the monsters had left long ago were not particularly reassuring. It was one thing to walk through clouds of toxic gas with only the stitching of a pewter-rank leatherworker to protect you, it was another thing entirely when that same fog had once held goblins force-fed the Monster’s ichor until their flesh warped into an abhorrent eldritch-crab monster.

It was hard to know what she was supposed to be afraid of more.

“Alph, isn’t there a danger that all this fog will leech into the groundwater and taint the city’s water supply?” Eliza tapped.

“Oh no, I wouldn’t worry about that. Helion’s wells are properly insulated and warded to prevent any accidental contamination. The Alchemists Guild keeps careful maps of all their subterranean access points, and has been safely gassing the tunnels down here for decades now without incident,” Alph explained.

“Wait. What?! Why?”

“They do it to stop monsters—magical beasts—and the like from trying to enter the city through the tunnels,” Xan offered with a shrug.

“That’s a risk? Aren’t their tunnels under every city?” Eliza asked. 

“Yes there are, and it is technically a risk everywhere. Although it’s significantly exacerbated in Helion on account of its captive dragon and the dungeons below it,” Alph said. “Our resident dragon is… large to say the least, and while the harvesting teams try to be careful in their procedures, there is still a great deal of wasted blood involved. Dumping it into the river attracts predators that are too costly to deal with, so they pump it below and then gas the creatures that come up from the dungeons to feed on it.”

“Aren’t you worried that something will just develop a high-level skill for poison resistance?” the bard tapped.

“No. As long as we take breaks between the gas purges we don’t have to worry about that. Once the air clears, bigger predators who haven’t wasted a skill on tolerating poison emerge to eat those resistant to the gas. Then we gas those and it starts all over again. It’s quite simple really,” Alph explained.

“Haven’t they been pumping blister fog down here for weeks now?”

“Oh…” the alchemist said. He looked at Eliza seriously for a moment and then swallowed. “That would explain a few things.”

“Like what?”

“Like that thing standing behind you?”

Eliza turned her head quickly to follow the alchemist’s shifting gaze, and her vision was immediately ruined by the droplets of yellow that splattered against her lenses. She couldn’t see it, but she could hear it breathing, and it was large… until it wasn’t. By the time she’d wiped her lenses clear, Xan was already standing in front of Eliza with a drawn sword. Wet pieces of something pooled against Eliza’s leather boots, and when she stared at it, she saw that the vivid hue of the crimson was muted by the fog.

“It’s okay, I’ve got this,” Xan said calmly, and Eliza trusted that she did.

“I think I can hear more of them coming,” the bard tapped.

“How many?”

“More than ten? Less than a hundred? It's hard to tell in tunnels at the best of times, but this leather mask is making me less than useless.”

“Take a few steps back, I don’t want you getting hurt.”

Eliza hurried to comply, and what she witnessed fell far short of a battle. Ghostly figures raced forwards out of the yellow, gaining distinction and detail only to be pulped by the effortless strikes of Xan’s sword. One after another they came, and each one died before Eliza could even read their tags.

In no time at all, it was done, and Xan turned away from her butchery to face the others. 

“I’m afraid I had to cut the rope,” the inquisitor explained.

“It’s fine, we’re nearly there anyway,” Alph said.

“Gods, I just want to get out of these tunnels already. I can’t believe—”

Eliza stopped tapping with her foot mid-sentence when a sharp pain stabbed her in the ankle. She bent down to look as the sensation of burning flesh quickly spread from there, and a smell reminiscent of the same reached her nose.

She’d popped a small row of stitches on the leather of her boot and there was now a tiny hole allowing the gas to seep through. She quickly clamped her hands down firmly around the puncture, but it was too late. She could hear her skin bubbling and the pressure only made it worse. Pain started to spread up her leg and beyond, and as she flinched and cried out, her hands pulled back allowing more of the fog inside her suit.

Alph was there first, placing steady pressure around her heel, and then she was in Xan’s arms.

“Which way?” the inquisitor asked.

The alchemist told her, and then she ran. Eliza allowed her head to rest against the other woman's shoulder as the wall of yellow fog raced past. If it wasn’t for the sound of her own flesh boiling in her ears, then she could have allowed herself to believe that it was romantic. 

Eliza had never been in love before, but every bard knew that it was supposed to hurt.

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