Chapter 23: 23: Chance Meeting

Using the little crystal lantern thing turned out to be as easy as Singer had described it. Just slice and dice some monsters and let the little thing hoover it all up like I had a pocket vacuum cleaner from ghostbusters. Whatever the hell those things they used were called.

Lark’s dance lessons were coming in handy too. While I was still mediocre on the dance floor, the process of learning it had indeed helped me with a lot of aspects of combat, like positioning myself better and keeping track of where my feet were.

Honestly, I treated my days down in the ruins like exercise, but with a little added danger. Nothing was actually able to hurt me, not really, so why get all worried about it?

Didn’t stop me from finding the remains of those who weren’t shadow fae. Pathfinding was a lucrative endeavour, if you were good at it. Unfortunately, many got into the profession simply because it was their only way to have a chance at bettering otherwise miserable lives.

I was currently on the second level, slaughtering my way through a strangely large number of gurg that had ventured up into this level. Something had pissed them off bigtime, judging by the ferocity with which they fought.

Slicing the neck of the last gurg, I turned to survey the carnage around me. Gurg looked a hell of a lot like stereotypical orcs, although with grey skin rather than green. I’m not talking about the hot kind of orc either, where the girls were all just buff women with tusks. Nah, this lot were huge and brutish, regardless of gender. If they even had genders… I certainly couldn’t tell.

The whole group had been strange, more ferocious than others I’d met and far more coordinated. Not just their behaviour had been different though, no on top of it all they had real weapons and armour on them. Specially crafted for their frames as well, not human stuff they had beaten into a shape that might fit them. It was like they were a real military unit, as opposed to just a warlike tribe. Pity they hadn’t been trained to deal with an angry shadow.

Except, I hadn’t been a shadow on that last one. Right as I’d finished the second to last gurg, the last one had levelled a crossbow at me. Staring down the shaft of that bolt had done something to my shadow form. Rather than simply turning incorporeal, I’d gone somewhere other than… here.

One second I was in the ruins, the next I was in some sort of hellish monochrome version of those same ruins. The gurg had appeared as a vague white silhouette, while I had been made of pure shadow. I’d walked up to him, realising he couldn’t see me, and then around behind him as I felt my departure from that realm coming close. Simple as that, I’d popped back into real space and run my blade across his windpipe. It was a filthy ability, and one I planned to abuse to its fullest. I just had to figure out how to control my entry and exit.

Maybe this was the shadow-but-more that I’d sensed back during the heist? Running with that logic, I went through the mental motions of becoming a shadow, only I pushed harder, further. There was a breaking sensation, as though I’d just jumped head first through glass, and when I opened my eyes, I was in the strange shadow place again.

I explored a little while I was in there, finding strange wisps of white smoke coming up out of the ground in some areas. After a few seconds, I reappeared back in normal space, having travelled the same distance I’d done in the strange place of light and shadow.

Next, I tried ending it early, and found that it was as simple as doing the same thing with my shadow form, but again with more oomph. This was going to be truly disgusting once I learned how to integrate it properly into my fighting style.

I was excited just thinking about it, especially how it would look to others. Yeah, it was edgy as fuck, but I’d long past the point of being able to do anything other than embrace the edge. I mean, I turned into shadows and apparently also went to the shadow realm or some shit, which looked like I was doing the ol’ teleports behind you meme. Except, it was basically just blink from dungeons and dragons but with shadow aesthetics. I guess this reality or dimension or whatever was ruled by the rule of cool.

Now that figuring out my newest and greatest ability was finished, at least for now, it was time to get back the task at hand. Namely, figuring out what had all of these gurgs so pissed off.

To do that, I’d have to move in the direction that had been heading when I’d jumped on them, down a wide passageway like every other on this level. I did so, cleaning and sheathing my knives as I walked. I really needed something with longer reach than these things. Sometimes a situation got just a little hairy when I was getting into tickle fight range to deal damage.

Not too far down that passageway I found a human body surrounded by a squad of equally dead gurgs. Judging by his armour and gear, he looked to be a pathfinder, and a look at his hand revealed the distinctive copper ring of a low ranked member. The body was fresh too, blood having barely coagulated.

Closing the poor dude’s lifeless and terror filled eyes, I stood up and surveyed the scene. There was a lot of gurg blood around, easily identifiable with its darker hue and faintly brown tint. The gurg bodies trailed a little from the direction I’d come, a few having been felled by arrows, while others lay dead with large gashes. One had even had its head almost severed clean off, only meat and gristle holding it in place.

It looked like a fighting retreat, the way the melee casualties trailed a little down the hallway. That, combined with the very human blood that led off into the dark, and I knew where to go. Just follow the wounded pathfinders, I guess?

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Barely a few more minutes of walking and I began to hear the sounds of battle. The gurg sounded closer, shouting and screaming in their gurgling language, which was apparently why they were called gurg.

The cries of human warriors were fewer more distant and unmistakably desperate. Sounded like the pathfinders were losing. My pace sped up before I even realised that I’d made the decision to intervene, feet pounding silently against the cold stone to the beat of the panicked human cries ahead. Guess it was time to be a hero, cape and all. Well, except it was a cloak, but who was counting… paying attention… whatever. Killing time.

I burst into the sight of the battle like a silenced bullet, taking in the scene in the few seconds I had before I’d hit the rear of the gurg lines.

The chamber was large, a massive dome of grey marble and blue accents, columns rising up to the ceiling around near the edge. It was also one of the rooms with a massive staircase upwards, a main thoroughfare for pathfinders to go deeper into the ruins. In this case though, it appeared that the pathfinders had been trying to escape when they were cut off by waiting gurg.

Surrounded now and pressed up against the wall to might right, the thirty-odd strong force of humanity battled against a sea of grey armoured flesh. Mages stood back, lobbing spells through the gaps in the fighting wherever they could, while their mundane ranged counterparts slung arrows and bolts in a similar manner. Heavily armoured knight looking people held the front line, taking a massive beating as they tried to keep their squishier fellows safe.

That was all I saw before I was amongst the monsters, dancing to the beat of the song my blades sung using the sound of parting flesh. They might have been wearing armour, but armour had holes, weak points to exploit, and I dropped them as though they wore none.

An axe attempted to end me, and I bent over backwards to dodge it, kicking the wielder under the chin in the process. Opting to go with my momentum rather than fight it, I flipped full over, slinging a throwing knife into his newly exposed throat in the process. I really liked that move, it was the perfect mix of usable and outrageously showy at the same time, especially at the speeds I was beginning to move. That was one thing I’d noticed improving actually, raw speed.

Chaos began to spread from my position as the gurg realised they were being hit from behind, and it was then that I spotted something that was both scary and an exquisitely juicy opportunity. The gurg had officers, and they were trying to get their grunts to turn around and deal with me. Their very existence raised alarms, but now I had targets. Yummy yummy targets.

I pushed myself into the strange other realm, ghosting through the fray until I stood right in front of my newest victim. The monster’s eyes widened in surprise at my appearance, then horror took over as a stiletto was rammed into one like I was a lazy dad putting a tent peg into the ground sans hammer.

The blade came out with a sucking slurp, which was very gross, but I ignored it as I looked for another officer to shank. Oh, there was one. Hello evil monster officer, meet your new friend, my knife.

Watching the panic spread through the ranks of the gurg was sweeter than any of the chick’s drinks I’d been laughed at for ordering at clubs Honestly, I was having a lot of fun instilling that fear in them, blinking in and out of existence and killing random officers and grunt soldiers without any way for them to counter it. Each target was chosen at random, on a whim. I was RNG death, with each lottery winner getting a one way ticket to hell. At least, I hoped they went somewhere like that.

Now all that needed to happen was a blow big enough to break them, something that would send them over the edge and into a rout. I had just the thing.

Positioning myself dead in the middle of the largest grouping of gurg, I took a spinning leap into the air, my perception of time slowing dramatically as I began to pick out who would die. That, of course, was every motherfucker within range.

Dark spikes of shadow tore out in a spiral of gore, the largest penetrating multiple bodies deep before the raw mass of meat brought them to a halt. The devastation was massive with such a tightly packed group of enemies, and the wave of death brought the battle to a pause.

A pause in which I landed in a low three point crouch, hood up, mask on and staring right into familiar eyes behind a steel helmet.

Leon blinked in shock, recognition dawning behind his eyes. “D-dan?”

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