Chapter 91: Chapter 90 – Life in Service

I tried to attack first.

Stigma’s weight was no issue to me. This was a weapon designed primarily to behead horses, yet I could swing it around like a one-handed dagger. My speed and strength caught him off guard as I closed in and swiped at him twice from long range. Still, neither strike connected with him. He dodged both with some fancy footwork.

Then we stopped, neither of us willing to make the next move. He ducked in twice, juking me and trying to make me commit to an attack. I wasn’t biting. He grabbed the hilt of his sword with both hands and shuffled towards me in a wide duelling stance. We clashed swords, the ringing of metal on metal drowning out the deluge of thoughts in my head.

I entered something of a trance, focusing entirely on the movement of his weapon. Deflecting, dodging, pushing and pulling. It was a difficult fight. I sucked in a deep breath as the tip of his sword narrowly avoided slicing across my face and nose. I ducked under his range and tried to hit him with my body, but he wrapped his arms under me and used my own momentum to send me staggering through his position.

Turned around – I had no way of blocking the next strike. He brought it down against my chest plate and cut into my exposed shoulder. Blood started to seep through the hole in my clothes as he backed away with a confident smile.

“You’re gonna’ pay for that.”

“You can’t win against me. You don’t have my training.”

I charged in again with a roar of determination. He stood firm as I came down on him with consecutive hits. I could see his body shaking as the weight of the unwieldy weapon started to wear on his body. Each time I struck the bones in his arms rattled in protest. But I couldn’t rely on them giving up the ghost before he made his final blow.

Knowing when you were outmatched was important - especially to a rogue. Sometimes the best course of action was to drop your stuff and run for the hills, hoping for the heat to die down some time later. I wasn’t just throwing myself at him for no good reason. I was probing him and carefully observing what I saw. His form was that of an expert. I’d expected that from him as a Captain though. I wanted to know if I was capable of landing a hit against him.

I would conclude that it wasn’t possible.

His defence was ironclad. There were no gaps to exploit. Every time I tried to get close he’d strike back or move to a more advantageous position. He didn’t need to finish me off there and then. He was waiting for his backup to arrive and haul me off to my execution. He didn’t have any skin in the game, he wasn’t going to do anything that endangered himself unless he felt it necessary.

The only thing I could think of was using Stigma’s magic against him, but that would cost me another week. They’d add up if I relied on it too heavily. With no time to think about it, I slammed Stigma into the ground and mustered another burst of her dark magic. Time slowed to a crawl as the ground behind him opened up and revealed the reddened claw of an angry dragon.

But to my dismay, he merely stepped to the side and allowed it to slice through nothing but air.

He had dodged my trump card, and so easily at that!

He spat onto the floor, “I already know your tricks. You’ll have to do more than that to fell me.”

I couldn’t afford to do that again. I was hovering around a month’s worth of juice now, and every time he dodged it I’d just fall deeper into the hole. He pressed the attack again, slowly pushing me further back towards the main tent at the back of the compound. We were both covered in sweat, though I was not feeling the fatigue as he did. More cuts, more injuries, he even gashed my brow. A curtain of crimson blood started to drizzle down my face and into my mouth.

I gasped in pain and lashed out as another point pierced into my flesh. He was bleeding me dry with a thousand tiny cuts. In my head a new plan was gestating. I was desperate. I didn’t have any resources other than my wits and my stats, and what stat among them stood head and shoulders above the rest? My HP pool. The extent to which my body could accept this punishment before I died for real. But if I wanted the plan to work – I needed to do it quickly before he injured me too badly.

I had memorised his routine, the way that he moved from technique and stance to technique and stance. I knew the ways he would react to what I was doing. They were common practice; entirely rational decisions that kept him safe and put me in danger. The problem was that I was no mere human. The rational would surely become irrational if used on me. I could defy his training in a way that he’d never see coming.

I spat the blood from my mouth and charged. I swung from above to make him raise his arms and back away from me. That back step would be followed by him balancing his sword on his left forearm, pointing it towards me to prevent any follow up attack. He was coiled and ready to strike from the moment that I returned to my natural position. Unlike the previous time, I feigned impatience and continued to move towards him.

He stepped forth and thrusted with all of his strength, right into the window that I had given him.

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But I kept walking, even though it hurt so bad that I thought I would die. Step and step, I pushed myself deeper onto his sword. I could feel the length of the blade sliding through my body, pulling us closer and closer together until we were face to face. It stuck out from my back and robbed my legs of their strength, yet what he had not yet realised was that it was in my interest to get this close.

In that moment of triumph, he had let his guard down. Though it was a critical blow with a well forged weapon – my inhuman body had an HP value that exceeded the damage he could do in one strike. I dropped Stigma to the ground and reached up with my hands. He was so assured in his victory that he saw no reason to worry.

“May you live your next life in virtue.”

“Yeah, same to you.”

His eyes widened in shock. He had noticed his mistake too late – he had assumed a weakness in me that was not true. I could not beat him in a direct, fair battle, but since when did I care about fighting fair? No, I had used the one advantage I had over him. An advantage that he was not aware of, nor could he have ever predicted.

We fell down to the ground as my hands wrapped around his neck and squeezed for all they were worth. In a panic, he tried to wrench the sword free from my body and attack again. It was lodged too deeply to be pulled back without leverage now, and every moment that I continued to place a crushing amount of pressure on his windpipe was a moment where he grew weaker. He surrendered the sword and tried to rake at my eyes in a desperate effort to escape. Legs kicking, nails bared and tilling the mud beneath us.

Drool escaped freely from his mouth as he started to lose control. His eyes started to fade, and did his movements. I was nearly strong enough to snap his neck with my fingers, but for the sake of choking the life out of him they did the job just fine. I watched the last light disappear from his eyes as the lack of breath finally put a stop to his brain function. I didn’t know how long it took me from first taking him down to his final moments, but they felt like the blink of an eye compared to the true duration of our struggle.

I removed my hands and stared down at my handiwork. Vicious red marks circled his distorted windpipe. It was a truly violent way to go, and I had to sit there and watch every second of it. I had seen some terrible, awful things, but nothing so visceral and violent as what I had just done. Blood and gore seemed easy to stomach in comparison. A weapon made things feel so simple and impersonal. Killing someone with your bare hands was different.

I stared at his body and considered him. What was his story? How had he been led to this very moment? Did he have friends and family waiting for him back home? Maybe there was no reason to delight so much in his death. For us, it was a tragedy, for the men upstairs he was nothing more than a number in the margins. Another Captain given the requisite training and sent to do their bidding.

Without dismounting him, I reached over and took Stigma back into my hands. I spoke to his unmoving corpse, “Thank you. I’ll kill some of your friends with the things you’re about to teach me.”

I slammed the blade down into his torso and consumed him.

An Inquisitor captain was not to be trifled with. They were master swordsmen who trained from birth to dispatch evil wherever it may sprout. I could feel foreign concepts and experiences filling me. The years of hard work and dedication that he had put into the art, now mine to use as I please. That was the way of the world. It only took one person abusing the ‘system’ to make all your effort for naught.

I had done it. I had slain one of their ranking officers with only my own strength and some unorthodox strategy. I laughed again. My mind was filled with elation and relief, a powerful pain killing cocktail of euphoria. The gaping hole in my body didn’t feel so bad when I considered the outcome.

My psychotic episode was interrupted by the arrival of innumerable sounds. The clanging of our swords and the gurgling of his last seconds, replaced with dozens of armoured soldiers converging on my location. The rattle of chainmail and yells of vigour – they had come in many numbers. Yet their triumphant arrival onto the scene was not what they expected. Instead of a victorious captain, they found my half-dead and blood covered body draped over him like a vampire.

“Captain!”

I didn’t need to look to know. There were dozens and dozens of people watching the display from between the compound’s gates. I hobbled to my feet and wiped the blood from my brow. The sword, still impaled into my chest, was nothing more than a momentary distraction now that I had adjusted to it. I grabbed it with my free hand and pulled it back out again, discarding it onto the floor like worthless garbage.

Fear. That was the thing I saw waiting for me. What a monster I must have seemed. Consuming the soul of their Captain, walking around with a supposedly fatal wound like it was nothing more than an annoyance. They were in a state of shock and awe. What would it take to put me down? Would they even be able to do so without the Captain?  Petty King John was notable by his absence. He wasn’t going to risk his neck when he had an army of pawns to do it for him.

I glared upwards at the men in front and smiled. They recoiled and drew their weapons, while others shied away. It looks like they had decided to deliver my next meal right to my door. How considerate of them.

“Come on then, you gutless bastards! Who’s next?”

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