To my amusement, the first person to move after the trouble begins is one of the minotaurs. A woman with a chipped horn, who roars the second he lays a hand on me. She crashes into the guy with all the force of a wrecking ball - and he flinches slightly. His arm bends the wrong way for a second, moved out of shape by her mass, then it snaps back into place with a wrenching sound.
I hit him with [Suppression], and it feels like trying to hold down a moving ship with a flimsy rope. Sure, technically it slows him down, but the skill feels stretched and frayed the moment it takes hold.
Then the world tilts and my head slams into the floor.
Blinding pain eclipses my thoughts. My vision swims with white, my skull held in one piece by my heart score even as the world comes out of focus. Then, a moment later, Harry stands in front of the priest.
There’s strings wrapped around the scithian, too, but they shatter a moment later. Harry grabs his arm. “Now, now,” he says. “Don’t damage my inn.”
The bright priest tilts his head. “Huh? You gonna get in the way of Respitia, old man? In the way of Ezekiel Thorn?”
Harry huffs. “Who are you calling old, fossil?”
“Yeah!” Mike adds, waving a knife out from the kitchen on a scraggly arm. “No one calls my husband names but me!”
Scoffing, the scithian’s amber wings spread out, then flare with effervescent light. It pools around him, and I see it coalesce into two gems. My vision flickers for a moment at the brightness, before marks from above Harry and Mike’s heads. Amber marks, denominating them targets.
“Eliminate the targets,” the priest huffs with a chuckle. “Kill the rookie.”
And then, the enchanted walls shatter. The safety of the inn is broken, all at once, as more high-climbers pour in. Four of them, five, counting Ezekiel. Each one returns nothing but question marks. I grit my teeth, crawling across the floor.
Above me, carnage starts. Harry moves his hand, and the marks wash away like dirt under a shower. A woman with an enchanted blade waves her hand over it, envelopping it in a purple sheen that screeches and hisses angrily as it cuts the air. Harry sidesteps the cut, deflecting it with a rag of cloth.
The cut sinks into the floor, a step away from my legs, and it explodes. Arcane energy tears apart the wood, sending splinters flying. Mike finally leaves the kitchen, and he looks more like a beehive than a person. Knives orbit all around him, floating like angry stingers. There’s no hesitation as he directs them at another intruder, a mage, before a woman in armor directs a flying shield in front of them.
Metal rings against metal, the small blades plinking off. Then, the noise rises, as the mage casts spells. Her hair raises into the air with a crackle of electricity, and a bolt of lightning angrily lashes out at me. Another minotaur throws himself into its path, screaming as his skin charrs.
I watch as his body drops, eyes rolled back and boiled in their sockets, the voltage having torn through his muscles like tissue paper. I watch as smoke rises from his clothes. I frown at the sight.
Then, more minotaurs pour from the upper floor. Dozens of them, in fact. Almost all of them.
Slowly, I blink. Then, Harry pulls me to my feet. “Now or never, kid! Get the hell outta here!” he says, grinning brightly. “I’ll hold ‘em off!”
“Huh?” I ask. “Why?”
At that, he smiles. It’s so wide, and genuine, it feels unreal. His crystalline wings twinkle in the air behind him. “You made me wanna climb. Show me how it’s done, Snow.” For a second, he claps a hand on my shoulder, and I feel mana wash through me. Some part of me, some ephemeral mark, is wiped off, like a stain on a window. And then, he vanishes from my sight, moving so fast he blurs. Or maybe cleaning his own image out of the air?
This time, I don’t stay long enough to look. I run. Instantly. I signal the stupid distress beacon in the guild menu, I hear as people upstairs start struggling, and I watch as more and more minotaur bodies pool into the common room.
Even the descenders, which is what they have to be, don’t seem to have expected that. Bovine bodies pour from the staircase like a tide, rampaging through the room. They don’t have enough levels or power to make that much of a difference, but they have mass. They cause chaos.
And chaos is the great equalizer of combat.
They lose me. A minotaur crashes into the priest, and then Harry smacks him with a towel that flays his skin off. I see Ezekiel cast a healing spell, and the guard steps forward. The spellblade duels Mike, and the caster is trying to fire off spells that don’t incinerate her friends. Finally, there’s a fifth member of the descenders.
It’s a tall, pale sumeen. Their clothes are blood-red, and dance in the air. More than they should.
For a moment, those six, emotionless sight-holes turn to me. Then, the fabric around them stiffens, for all of a heartbeat. I see red ribbons of cloth streak towards me, curling in on themselves to form needle sharp teeth. For a moment, I toss a [Deconstruction] and [Suppression] at them as I roll out of the way. It buys me all of a blink, but that’s enough.
The wood beside me splinters again, and Amelie’s strings pull me to my feet. Then Opal appears next to me with a soft pop, brandishing their blade and striking aside the whips of cloth. This sumeen, too, seems tired. As if they don’t want to be here, half-heartedly fighting a yawn.
There’s a ringing noise, and I turn to see Inu get hit by the spellblade. A shroud of magic cuts into the tough girl’s shield, then explodes, tearing the metal apart in her hands and sending her flying - crashing through the wooden wall and into the outside.
By now, the walls are riddles with holes. Minotaurs pool on the cloth-mage as a horde, and the descender turns to fight those, instead of us, as if just trying to appear busy. And then, there’s a melodic note that reaches only my ears, carried by a whisper-thin string that connects to my earlobe like an old string-telephone.
“Run, devil of the third floor,” they hum with amusement. “I get paid for each day we chase you. Make it worth my while.”
I blink, as the cloth unfolds to wrap around a horde of minotaurs, perfectly hiding us from the sight of the rest of the hunting party.
Biting my lip hard enough to bleed, we run. Each and every one of us scatters like the wind, tearing out of the inn and into the undergrowth. It’s our only way out, since we have guides and they do not. Minotaurs pool from the holes like water from a broken bucket. It’s almost comical, watching us break through the canopy.
Amelie has it the worst, having a puppet hack out a bigger piece so her wheelchair can fall through - but her landing is the most graceful, as she slowly descends by a piece of string. Opal pops into existence next to me. Norman lands smoothly and gracefully, and I-
I slam into the forest floor like a sack of potatoes.
There were a few branches that did me the courtesy of breaking my fall, but all my ribs still ache. The earth beside me shifts, and Bile rises out from underneath. “You made it! Good, let’s move!” he demands, and we do not hesitate.
Not everyone is with us. Inu fell somewhere else. Bay and Jess were out on errands. But none of it matters.
More minotaurs fall around us, swinging down into the labyrinth using a variety of abilities. They grunt and moo and fan out. I see one of them shouldering Inu, running off into a different direction from me. They fan out in a circle, and we run.
I run, as fast as I can, the earth shifting to move me along. Norman sprints like the wind, easily keeping ahead of me. Opal blinks, and Amelie swings from the branches using thick strings, even as they cut into her arms and she grimaces.
We run. We run fast. We run far. And I make sure to engrave the face of the bright priest into my face.
[Respitia the Pure sneers at your cowardice.]
Once again, I’m reduced to a rat in a tunnel. But that’s okay. That’s perfectly fucking fine. I’ll be a rat. I’ll run, I’ll prepare, and I’ll cheat. Because I remember their faces. I remember their faces, and those pieces of shit who showed up to disrupt my party?
I’m going to fuck them up. I’m going to ruin them. Just you wait, Ezekiel.
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