Chapter 7: 6: An Unnecessary Altercation

“Shit,” I said. “Jasmine, get up!”

I shook the noble in question. She looked so much more at peace when she was sleeping, like she’d dropped a layer of defense that I hadn’t even noticed was there. I felt kind of bad waking her up, but then again, the area that had used to be our door was a flaming wreck of charcoal and black smoke.

Jasmine grumbled, rolling over. She made some sound that might have been an attempt at speaking.

A beam of wood, weakened by flame, fell from the ceiling and landed on the stone floor with a resounding crash.

In the span of a heartbeat, Jasmine went from groggy and more than half asleep to fully alert, almost jumping out of the cot.

“What’s happening?” she asked, wiping the sleep from her eyes.

“I don’t know either,” I said. “But we need to get the package out of here.”

“Right.”

If we let the package get destroyed, we would fail this mission, not get paid, and probably lose some of the MC points that we needed to progress with the TAG. I wasn’t sure what would happen if it was moderately damaged or on fire upon arrival, but I was pretty sure it wouldn’t be anything good.

After we took a few brief seconds to put on our belts and grab our weapons— a revolver for her, four knives for me— Jasmine grabbed one end of our package with one hand, and I took the other. It was just heavy enough to be a bit of a pain to carry, but between the two of us we had more than enough strength to carry it without serious impediment to our mobility.

“The door is still on fire,” Jasmine pointed out dryly. “Were we planning on using it?”

“Hold on one second,” I said, pausing to cough. There was more smoke now, putrid black clouds flooding the room, and it wasn’t very conducive to speech. “I’m not sure if this’ll work.”

I freed up one hand and began forming unstructured magic in my hand, manipulating the threads of the world in just the right way to ensure the end result of this magic had the effects I needed.

“Your ball of darkness,” Jasmine said. “I thought you used that as a light.”

“I did,” I grunted, finishing the working. “It’s dark enough to absorb darkness.”

I tossed the ball at the flames still licking at the shattered remains of our room’s door. Where it passed over and through fire, it left behind naught but still air and ash. Once the worst of the flames engulfing our exit were gone, I dispelled the ball, letting the ruinous darkness dissolve into wisps of nothingness.

“My focus is ruin,” I said. “So I thought-“

“The darkness ruins light,” Jasmine said, a tinge of curiosity and awe coloring her words. “Your oath has so much versatility.”

With that, we lifted the package and stepped through the remnants of the door, taking care to not bump into the visibly crumbling doorframe.

Another crash sounded, not very far from us.

“The fire might have taken out something load-bearing,” I said. “We need to get out of this inn.”

Jasmine nodded her assent. There was more smoke in the hallway, enough that we had to duck down low in order to breathe and see without impairment. It was hard to tell which way was which, the smoke was so bad.

“Out the main door,” Jasmine said. “We need to get to the stable.”

I stifled a cough. “I’m not sure which way that is.”

As if the world had heard my words, the issue was resolved a moment later. Just a meter or two ahead of us, a wall all but disappeared. I felt a shot of adrenaline jolt through me as a human-sized figure, clad in familiar light armor, was thrown through the wall separating the hall from the outdoors, landing almost right in front of us.

“That’s-“

“One of the adventurers,” Jasmine said. “They’re under attack.”

They brought their enemies with them. Now they’re our problem, too.

Jasmine set her end of the package down and kneeled next to the downed adventurer.

“Are you alright?” she asked, raising her voice to be heard against the din of… well, the building around us collapsing, I supposed.

“Nnnnn…” the adventurer groaned. “One second.”

The adventurer muttered something. I couldn’t quite make out the words, but it was definitely in the oathtongue.

A swirl of sickly green and blue light formed around the adventurer, incomprehensible patterns creating a ring around their body. The arcane ring tightened and sank into them. An oathholder to Nacea?

It looked like they did in fact have an oath to the god of mending, because within moments they were standing and ready to go again.

“Hold on a second,” I said. “Tell us what’s happening.”

“Other mages,” the adventurer said, already on his way back through the hole he’d made with his body. “Ran into them on our job. Didn’t know they would pursue.”

With that, he ran out into the still-dark street outside.

“We should go,” I suggested. “This isn’t our fight.”

“Yes it is,” Jasmine said. She didn’t elaborate, and she didn’t pick the package up again, electing instead to draw her priceless revolver from her waist.

I sighed deeply. If I fought her over this now, we’d waste crucial time that we could use to run away. If we fought with the adventurers, we’d be risking our life for little gain, but if the opposing oathholders beat them out while we were arguing we might have to fight them anyway with no support. That would be an embarrassing way to go out.

Still, this was the adventurers’ job and if it got them killed, that was on them. I had no enmity with the other mages.

“We’re going to have words about this later,” I warned her, wishing I could put a little more sincerity into the glare I aimed at her.

Jasmine did not seem suitably terrified by it, unfortunately.

“Help me get the package out of the burning inn first,” I said. “At least get it to the wagon.”

“I can do that,” she said.

Jasmine did not put her revolver away, opting to use only one hand to hold her end of the package.

We exited through the same hole that the adventurer had created. It was still dark outside, pitch black but for the illumination provided by the moon and the flames that I could now see had originated from the other end of the inn.

Well, that and the ongoing battle between what had to be at least ten oathholders. A cursory glance told me that the adventurers we’d seen earlier weren’t faring too well. They had been five. Now they were four, counting the Nacea oath we’d seen get thrown through a wall, and they were visibly losing.

I looked up for just a brief second, searching for the light of the moon, and the action nearly cost me my life. I wasn’t focusing on what was happening in the fight between the adventurers and the mysterious third party, and I almost missed the stray expansion of magic travelling towards us through the ground, a fast-moving pattern outlined in deep red that made it seem as if the earth was bleeding.

“Voci oath!” Jasmine shouted. “Move!”

I didn’t hesitate to follow her order, allowing her to dictate where we were going and sprinting in the same direction she was pulling the package.

Voci had the focus plague. From what I remembered, that meant quickly-spreading effects that tended to cover large areas. More devastating if it applied to something that spread person-to-person— I remembered my childhood tutor using a lightning storm that chained through people as an example, though it could be something as unimaginative as a literal fast-working plague— but still usable as a knock-off of Und’s magic, which had the focus of tempest and was actually designed to affect large areas.

The attack that was still rapidly snaking through the ground was still apparently a spell from a Voci oathholder, though, which meant that if one of us got hit, the other would almost definitely get hit a moment later.

I watched the pattern slide past us and ultimately make contact with a wall and fizzle out. Nothing seemed to be different with the wall of the inn it’d hit, but…

The wood creaked, and it sounded ancient. A portion of the wall crumbled in on itself, unable to support its own weight.

“I recognize this,” I said. “A Naan’ti aging plague.”

If that had hit us, we could have been dead or senile.

“Not a Ceretian school of magic,” Jasmine said. “Are these foreigners?”

Only Tayan was a massive proponent of the Ceretian school and subschools. Different nations preferred different theories of magic, and this particular spell belonged to a long-erased nation in the east.

“Discuss later,” I said. “All you need to know is that they’re probably at least class six or seven. That was advanced magic.”

Our little manuever to dodge the spell hadn’t gone unnoticed. One of the oathholders that I was pretty sure wasn’t an adventurer— they had blue circles around their arms and legs that illuminated them, and their deeply red armor was something I hadn’t seen before— peeled off from the main fight and started sprinting towards us.

He’s fast. Too fast. A Ditas oath, likely. Ditas had the focus body, and his oathholders excelled at enhancement magic.

“Incoming!” I warned.

I dropped my end of our package and pulled a knife from my belt, pushing unstructured magic into it.

I was too slow. Far too slow. If I had known an actual spell or two, I might’ve been able to create the pattern and cast in a quarter or even a fifth of the time I needed to push my god’s ruin into my knife, but the latter was all I could do and it cost me.

Before I could finish enhancing my knife, the Ditas oath was on me, arms crossed together in front of his chest.

My blade glanced off his arm and spun away, and then he collided.

Contact. The ground was up and the sky was down and my body was rattling and there was a second impact and somehow I was back inside the inn and everything hurt. The whole sequence of events took such a short period of time that I couldn’t process what had happened before my focus dissolved into a hundred thousand stimuli.

I’d been punched before. I’d lost alleyway fights before, kicked and beaten and angry. This was nothing like anything I’d ever been hit by. There was a mess of burning nerve endings where my ribs had once been. I tried to cough and regretted it immediately, a breath catching inside my lungs and splintering into a million red-hot fragments inside my chest.

I couldn’t tell what was injured because everything hurt. While I could usually tell what was wrong with myself, right now I had a hundred individual injuries, each major enough in their own way coagulating into one massive patch of pain, ebbing and flowing with the beat of my heart. I was pretty sure at least one of my legs was broken from the looks of it. Not that I could actually feel them at the moment, everything below my waist feeling more like an unrelated chunk of flesh glued onto me than anything else. Breathing was difficult. A weight was pressing down on my chest and slowing the flow of air into my lungs to a halt. I tried to untense my body, was partially successful, and took a slow, shallow breath. Okay. I hadn’t completely lost the ability to breath yet, so there was that.

I felt something damp and hard make contact with my torso and looked down. There was something glistening and solid and dripping sticking out of me at an odd angle. It probably wasn’t wood. The texture was wrong. I tried to touch it and had to bite back a scream when my left arm proved unusable, as if a block of iron had dropped onto my elbow and turned the entire limb into a doll’s, limp and motionless. Instead, I tried moving my right arm, ensuring I did it carefully so as to not accidentally move myself and worsen things. I managed to shift the thing in my torso just a little bit before I could feel it, a hard and slick object protruding from my skin. The next onset of pain was so sudden and so soul-shakingly sharp that I couldn’t fully suppress my voice. A strangled scream tore itself from my throat, followed by another one as the action of screaming jostled me.

Okay, that’s not supposed to be outside of me.

I moved my eyes, since that was all I could move safely at the moment.

Assess the situation. I’d added another new hole to the inn, adding onto the one made by the Nacea oath earlier. I’d been thrown maybe fifteen meters, and back where we’d been Jasmine seemed to be doing fine. She was standing in a small crater marked with scorch marks and the Ditas oath was literally smoking down on the ground, so maybe she was doing more than fine. As I made eye contact with her, she was already sprinting to me. Even though their teammate had just gone down, the rest of the oathholders seemed preoccupied with fighting the adventurers, so she made it to me without incident.

“Don’t move,” Jasmine said. “And don’t look down.”

“Too late,” I gurgled, my words coming slow and labored and wet.

“I’m so sorry I dragged you into this,” Jasmine said.

I shook my head slowly. “No… no problem. You.. get him?”

“I got the fucker for you,” Jasmine reassured me. “Two fireballs and he wouldn’t go down so I shot until one of my bullets made contact. My raw magic’s less powerful than yours, though, so he’s really hurt and probably a little on fire internally but he’s going to be able to get up soon.”

I could recognize what she was doing. Trying to keep me engaged, to keep me from slipping into the welcoming grasp of unconsciousness.

But there wasn’t anything she could do for me right now, was there. “Go… help them.”

Jasmine shook her head. “I can help you. I, ah, haven’t been the most forthcoming with you.”

Before I could muster the strength to ask her what she meant, she incanted something in the oathtongue. Light formed around her hands, blood red and pure white.

It formed a connection with me and leeched into me slowly, wisps of light travelling from Jasmine’s hands to my body.

I could almost feel a weight lifting from my body, replacing pain and pressure with an intense itching that I really wanted to address but couldn’t, given that it came from within me.

“Don’t move,” Jasmine warned. “This oath is damaged. Any sudden movement might break the spell.”

I could breathe normally again, and my thoughts cleared a little. Her healing spell, presumably the standard one that healed from one end of the body to the other rather than bettering the entire body at once.

Jasmine’s healing spell. Jasmine’s healing spell.

“You have a Nacea oath?” I asked. “What the fuck?”

“It’s a long story,” Jasmine said.

Right. She’d said this oath was damaged. Nacea oaths usually only experienced damage or breakage if the oathholder started killing people. Something to take note of, but not deal-breaking. After all, I had my fair share of skeletons in my closet.

No, the anger and distrust came not from Jasmine being a killer but her unnecessary secrecy. It warranted caution. If she had hid an ability as large as an entire oath, one apparently powerful enough to restore my broken body, there was no telling what else she hadn’t been letting me in on.

That was an issue for later, though. For now, we had a bunch of malevolent oathholders to fight.

The magic circle’s wispy lines travelled their way down my body, and as it did so I could feel shattered bones forming back up into solid, usable limbs.

I flexed my arms. “Having functional limbs is really something you don’t appreciate until you lose them.”

Jasmine exhaled hard, and I couldn’t tell if it was her laughing or letting out a tired breath. “There are some conditions that come with this.”

“We are definitely going to talk about this later,” I glared at her, my gaze sincere and venomous this time.

Jasmine put her hands up. “I’m sorry. I’ll clear this up with you after, I swear on my life.”

She said the words with such conviction that I couldn’t maintain my anger in the moment. “Thank you.”

“As I was saying,” Jasmine continued. “Conditions.”

“Conditions.”

“The healing is fragile. I need to refresh it every six hours or you’ll start regressing. We’ll get you to a real Nacea oath as soon as we hit Yelian.”

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Fuck. That gave her far more control over me than I was comfortable with. If it had been anyone but her, I would’ve taken my odds with my shattered body. I’d fought with Jasmine by my side before, though, and it felt different somehow. She was on thin fucking ice with the hidden oath, but I was willing to extend her just enough trust to make it through this.

“Alright,” I said, with some effort. “Anything else?”

“Uhh…” Jasmine winced. “Yeah. If you get more than moderately injured again, everything is going to come back.”

Ah. That would indeed be a problem if we were going to get into a fight. Still…

“I don’t like the idea of just sitting aside and looking pretty,” I said. “Magic is meant to be used.”

“They’re not looking to fight us right now,” Jasmine said. “I knocked out the Ditas oath and the rest of them need to consolidate to fight the other adventurers.”

I considered her words. It would be better for me if I was off to one side, but then I had no influence over the fight.

“If you die or get seriously hurt, I’m dead,” I said. “I’m coming.”

I don’t care about her wellbeing all too much, but if she gets hurt so will I. Even as I told that to myself, the words rang false inside my head. Gods damn it all, I was getting attached to this girl.

Something exploded a hundred meters away from us, back where the fighting was.

“Shit,” Jasmine said. “Fine. I can’t stop you. But please, Lily, don’t get yourself killed.”

“Yes, my lady,” I said, making a mockery out of a bow.

Jasmine chuckled at that. “Are you ready?”

“I don’t have my flail,” I said. “The stables are nearby, so I’m going to put our package away and grab it.”

“Alright,” Jasmine said. “Stay safe.”

“Same goes for you, princess,” I said.

We split up, her sprinting off towards the fight and me towards the crater she’d made.

Remarkably, the package was still intact, the coffin-sized chunk of wood scorched by oath-created flame but still closed. I grabbed it with both hands and started dragging it. It was still awkwardly heavy, but I could manage on my own as long as I wasn’t attacked.

I heard the telltale sound of a classical fireball detonating in the distance as I hauled the package. Impatience swelled up in me, a bitter and all too familiar feeling of uselessness joining it. I should have kept my flail with me. I should be out there with her.

One more step. Another. The package was digging into the ground, the wood churning up grass and dirt as I pulled. My arms burned with effort, but what was a little burn when they had just been shattered to pieces minutes ago?

Thank the gods, the stable was just around the back of the inn, which wasn’t too far away. It still took me a painful minute or two that felt orders of magnitude longer.

I didn’t bother trying to load the package into the wagon— it was far too heavy for me to lift that high on my own. Instead, I let it drop and retrieved my still-bloody flail.

I started sprinting back immediately. The fight had been taking place in a small field, but by the time I had rounded the corner of the inn, it had advanced further away. The bulk of the fighting was taking place near the treeline that Jasmine and I had come from just a few hours ago, but there was an isolated duel between what appeared to be two Caël oaths in the air, each of them taking strides off trees with inhuman force and gliding through the air, casting spells at each other.

I elected to ignore the duelling flyers and sprint towards the main fight. It wasn’t hard to find, even in the dark. My eyes had adjusted a while back, and all I had to look for was the brightest source of light in the area.

Earlier, there had been thirteen or fourteen oathholders fighting. Now, there were nine. Two of them had gone off to duel, and Jasmine had downed one. Significant developments seemed to have taken place in the meantime.

On one side were Jasmine and three adventurers. One had a massive frame and a similarly huge sword and shield. One had no weapons and was casting spells on his allies instead. I recognized him as the Nacea oath from earlier. The third adventurer, dressed in a silvery suit of chainmail that caught the light of the moon, had what looked like an open metal lunchbox with them. The four of them were in defensive positions, flitting from shed to tree to ditch as pieces of cover were destroyed by the crossfire.

The opposing side wore uniformly crimson, whether they were adorned with a hooded robe or heavy armor. I couldn’t differentiate them much, but there were three robed and two in armor.

The chainmail-lunchbox adventurer reached into their box and pulled out a fistful of something. I squinted. Was that meat?

They threw the fistful of flesh and it sailed lazily through the air before seemingly being caught by an invisible hand at the peak of its arc. After hovering for a moment or two, the chunk accelerated in a straight line, headed towards one of the robed enemies.

A crimson shield intercepted the fist-sized chunk. I had a moment to wonder why they were blocking a meat projectile of all things before it exploded, magically-enhanced force and heat flattening the grass around the armored oathholder that had intercepted it and blowing them back a step. No lasting effect, unfortunately.

I looked at the meat thrower again. Probably a Ditas oath, then. The focus on the body wasn’t limited to enhancements— manipulating a modified piece of flesh and detonating it from the inside with a classical fireball wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. It would be a high level oathholder to do that, though.

I was still half a hundred meters from the fight itself when I saw the meat mage take out a knife and slice his own hand off, letting it drop into the box next to him.

Even as far back as I was, I could hear the oathholder shout. “Help me out! I need a hand!”

Moments later, the stump of an arm grew back its hand as the Nacea oath with them shouted something.

Was the box an Aedi oath’s creation, then? Something to make his former body parts easier to manipulate?

I shook my head. I was getting off track and I had some oathholders to kill. I started passing unstructured magic into my flail, unwilling to repeat the same mistake I’d made earlier.

The scene looked less like a truly even fight and more of a fighting retreat, Jasmine’s group using up every single piece of cover they could and slowly backing up into the woods where presumably they would be able to split apart and evacuate. I was approaching the fight from an angle, but I was still definitely behind the mystery group. I would hopefully be able to ambush them if I—

I wasn’t stealthy enough. Maybe it was the volume of my running, maybe it was the effect of an oath, maybe one of them just had a hunch, but one of them noticed me, pivoted, and threw something in my direction. A knife, if I saw the glint of moonlight off steel correctly. It flew towards me in an unnaturally straight, unerring path, resembling an arrow more than a dagger.

I reacted, arm moving before I made a conscious decision to block it. I swung the flail out in a wide arc, spiked ball blurring with speed.

I heard the clink of weapon on weapon, followed by a screeching metal sound that made me phsyically cringe. I ran with the momentum of my swing, jumping into the air and twisting to ensure I didn’t fall.

To my side, rusting pieces of what had once been a dagger had been scattered across the ground, its magic neutered and shattered. I didn’t know what oaths the enemy had, but I knew that at least one of them had an oath to Voci, so I really didn’t want to get hit by anything they threw at me.

There were five of them, loosely spread out across twenty or thirty meters of space, and they were moving towards Jasmine and the band of adventurers at a leisurely pace, their confidence that they would win out evident in their strides.

Two of them turned towards me, breaking off from the rest of the group. Two for one woman and three for four others, huh? Maybe they hadn’t seen their one teammate brutalize me earlier and were treating me as a potentially extremely powerful unknown. Maybe they just really wanted me dead.

I honestly had no issue with these mages, but Jasmine had wanted to save the lives of the adventurers so I supposed they would have to die. Just bad luck, really.

I wouldn’t be able to help Jasmine until I dealt with these two. My eyes had adjusted to the low light, but it was still rather dark outside. I thanked the gods that there was enough moonlight to make out the dimly crimson figures of the two mages moving towards me. If tonight had been moonless, I wouldn’t have stood a chance.

As it was, there were still two unknowns walking towards me. The one who had thrown a knife at me was robed, the other armored, and I had no clue what specialization either of them had.

The robed mage didn’t draw another weapon, instead dropping to one knee and placing his hand on the ground, chanting something.

Voci and Und oathholders will almost always try to set up a ritual or complex area-of-effect spell. Never let them finish. A memory rose, unbidden, of a lesson that had been given to me a lifetime ago by a long-dead oath tutor whose face I couldn’t even remember.

I swapped my flail from my left to right hand, drawing a dagger from my belt in the same motion. I threw it, years of practice guiding my left arm, wrist snapping forward in just the right way to send it sailing. I didn’t have time or resources to pump it full of unstructured magic. Maintaining the working permeating my flail was taking a lot of concentration, so I let the blade fly as a mass of steel rather than an embodiment of ruin itself.

Before it could make contact, though, there was a muted thump like a sandbag had just fallen from the sky, and suddenly the armored mage was standing there instead of the robed one and the dagger glanced off harmlessly. I swiveled my head around, noticing that the still-casting robed oathholder had replaced the armored man.

Aedi, Caël, or a non-core god. None of the other core gods can pull off a teleport.

The armored oathholder’s suit of crimson was glowing a little, providing illumination in shades of blood red. The former, most likely.

Alright. There was an Aedi oath that could swap positions with their allies and—

The other oath finished casting, a burst of purple light accompanying their spell. The light didn’t travel towards me and dissipated harmlessly into the air instead.

If that’s a Voci oath, that hit the air. I hadn’t been close enough to view the pattern of the magic used by this oathholder, so I couldn’t be sure if the spell had been cast on the air or into the region around them. There was a chance that this was an Und oath, after all.

The armored mage charged at me, their teammate still kneeling in the midst of their spell.

Mistake. The trajectory of something this large and fast wasn’t something that could be changed easily.

I brought my arms back, gripping my flail so tightly that I feared the handle might splinter.

Three. Two. One.

I swung with all the force I could muster. The chain of the flail pulled taut with my swing, and the spiked ball at the end of it bristled with magic power.

The mage’s armor was thick. I felt the blow vibrate through my weapon, through my arms, through my body. My teeth slammed together inside my mouth and I nearly bit through my tongue, but thank the gods I’d landed a hit.

The Aedi oath roared in what might’ve been anger and might’ve been pain as their armor shattered where I hit him— it was a him, I was pretty sure now. It looked like a battering ram had hit him head on, a massive part of the armor on his side crumpled and cracking. Lines darker than black were spiderwebbing out from the point of impact. That suit of armor, Aedi-built or not, wasn’t going to last much longer.

I had to give these oathholders some credit. Even when the mage in front of me had to have been rattled by the damage output of my flail, he was still charging at me, hands held out in front of him. I brought my flail around and pulled it back sharply, angling it just so.

The spikes of the ball grazed a part of the Aedi oathholder’s exposed skin as I pulled it back, targeting the same spot I’d just hit and drawing blood, and I knew he was dead.

From the bone-chilling scream he let out, he knew too.

And yet he wasn’t done.

He would be losing energy by the second, his internals falling apart from ruin, but he was close and a second was all he needed.

He brought his arms down upon me, and there was no strength in his blow. I blocked it, but then—

A crushing weight. A sudden wave of nausea, as my senses processed that my position had changed.

The Aedi oath gurgled out a final choked scream, blood spraying from his mouth, and then he keeled over, dead.

I’d taken one out, but he’d hit me.

It had been an Und oathholder, I realized. With his last breath, the Aedi oath had grabbed onto me and exchanged the position of himself and me with that of his compatriot.

I finally recognized the spell. A circle of increased gravity. From the looks of the flattened grass beside me, it stretched out nearly five meters.

I tried to take a step, stumbled, and fell to my knees. The weight of the world was pressing down on me, and I couldn’t push back hard enough.

I fell flat on the ground, hard, and something in me went.

My leg disappeared, replaced with a mess of burning nerve endings, and I knew what had happened.

I’d passed the threshold for Jasmine’s oath. My injuries were coming back.

With a gargantuan effort, I managed to tilt my head around, bringing myself to an angle where I could see the fight between the remaining oathholders. If Jasmine wrapped this up quickly, then maybe she could—

They had lost. The other group was only forty or fifty meters away from me, and every single oathholder on our side was lying motionless on the ground. Accompanying them on the ground was another armored enemy mage, but that was little comfort.

I saw movement, saw light. Fire.

Jasmine was still alive, and she was still fighting.

But everyone had their limits. Igni oathholders performed worse in the dark, in the absence of the sun. Jasmine cast spell after spell, but each one came weaker and slower than the last.

Powerless to help, I watched as she threw a fireball and gestured one more time, shouted one more spell.

I watched as she searched for one more favor, one more burst of magic from her oath. I watched as she tried to cast one last spell and nothing happened.

I watched as an armored gauntlet struck her to the ground.

She didn’t get up.

The Und oathholder that had trapped me ignored me as they walked by my prone body and called out to their teammates. “What do we do with the others? They weren’t targets.”

Someone responded in the distance, voice loud and cold. “Execute them all. For the rising god.”

“For the rising god,” the Und oath replied, placing a fist on their heart.

They’re going to kill her.

Where earlier there had been ambivalence, rage burned in me. Anger at the enemy. At myself. They’re going to kill her, and it’s my fault.

I wanted to cry, but I searched for tears and found nothing but raw, unfiltered emotion.

They’re going to kill her.

Hot rage turned to cold hatred in a heartbeat. This, I knew, I could handle. It was almost a comfortable feeling. It was, if nothing else, a familiar one.

I want to kill them.

I want to kill them all.

Even as my injuries continued returning, I felt a surge of magic power flood through my bones. Somewhere deep in the back of my mind, an unfamiliar man’s voice resurfaced, speaking of “oath alignment”, but the words were drowned out by one bitter refrain.

I’m going to kill them.

I ignored the screaming in my legs as I stood. The Und oath’s spell made it hard to move, so I stretched a hand out and ruined it.

As my body fell apart, I moved towards the scene, burning hatred and the magic of a nameless god keeping me on my legs even if they refused to stay in one piece.

I’m going to kill them all.

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