Chapter Two Hundred and Seventy-Eight - Disorder in the Port

I glanced back and forth between the entrance and the sylph who had decided to confront us. The entrance had security, who I imagined would probably not be super pleased that we’d maybe done a bit of trespassing.

The other sylph though, they were about as suspicious as people hiding in the shadows to ambush a group of girls could be.

In the end, it was Amaryllis that made the choice. She swiped a talon though the ball of light I was still holding onto, then she grabbed me and Awen by the scruff and tugged us back and deeper into the warehouse.

“Come on,” she said. “We’re getting out of here.”

“Right right,” I said as I turned around so that I wasn’t running backwards.

There was just enough light from the entrance that I wasn’t totally blind as I followed after Amaryllis.

The two sylph that had appeared were running back and to the end of one row of crates. They pulled one aside, revealing a hole in the wall partially covered by a piece of tarp to keep the light from the other side out.

They slipped through a moment before we arrived. Amaryllis dove in. Awen turned around and swung her arm out in a wide semi-circle behind us. Glass glinted in the partial light as a dozen little caltrops made of magical glass clattered to the floor.

That was a neat, if very mean, trick.

“Go go,” I said as I pushed Awen towards the hole. She nodded and squeezed through.

Then it was my turn. My upper body fit in fine, but then things got a little tricky when I was hip-deep in the hole. I grunted while pushing at the edges of the hole, tail squeezing down to try and pass.

I fell through with a plop, and got a quick notification for my efforts.

Congratulations! Through repeated actions your Proportion Distortion skill has improved and is now eligible for rank up!

Rank D is a Free Rank!

Well, that was one use for that, I thought as I rolled to my feet. We were in one of those thin alleyways behind the warehouses, old boxes against the walls and trash heaped up and rotting on the ground.

“There!” Amaryllis said while pointing down the alley. The two sylph were flying off in the distance, the taller buildings around us and the multitude of rails and poles above stopping them from gaining too much height.

We took off after the pair. I don’t know why, exactly. If our goal was to get away, then it made a heap more sense to not run after them and go the other way instead, then the guard would have to pick between us and them.

We spun around a corner, then darted across to the front of the warehouse. The two sylph gained some altitude and moved up a floor before flying through the alley between two warehouses across the street.

There was a carriage in the middle of the road, white, with the words Dock Security written on its side in blocky letters.

“Faster!” I said before I scooped up Awen mid-run. I saw some security guards spin around by the entrance as we shot by.

I jumped and landed on the floor above, Amaryllis followed me a moment later after she jumped onto the carriage, then used that to boost herself up to the second level catwalk. I made sure she wasn’t far behind as I continued after the two sylph.

“I think they’re thieves,” Awen said.

“Huh?” I asked.

“Those two! They’re thieves!” Awen reached out ahead of us, and a ball of magic shot out from her open palm. It rocketed past the sylph, who both ducked and started shouting some rather rude things about us.

“What was that spell?” I asked.

“Sparball,” Awen said. The one spell that wouldn’t hurt anyone, even if it landed a direct hit. So it was a distraction.

The sylph landed at the end of the alley and then turned left at the next intersection.

Amaryllis caught up just as I started to turn that way too. “The guards are after us,” she gasped out.

“Oh no.”

“Faster!” she called out.

I could hear the disorganised and confused call of guards trailing after us. The sylph took a right, ran past a road just outside of the warehouse district, then into another alley where I saw them take another right.

I kept after them.

“There!” Awen called out. She pointed to a small shack set up against the side of a rocky cliff. It wasn’t all that big, just a place where someone could store a few shovels and such, maybe.

The sylph disappeared through a window and then closed it behind them.

I slid to a stop in front of the window, then tried to open it. It wasn’t a glass window, but a set of steel shutters, and it was completely refusing to budge even as I grunted and gave it my all.

“Back up,” Amaryllis said.

I stepped back, especially when I saw electrical sparks racing across her feathers and hair.

A loud crack-boom later and the window was blown off into the shack. “Amaryllis! You could hurt someone with that!”

“We don’t have time!” Amaryllis said. She jumped forwards, into and through the window just before Awen vaulted in too.

I glanced back down the alley. The guards weren’t in sight, but I could hear them, and they were getting closer. So with a few last seconds of hesitation, I hopped through the window and into the poorly lit shack. Tools lay on the ground, along with bundles of tarp and broken shelves. There was a noticeable lack of sylph maybe-thieves too.

“Um,” I said.

“They can’t just have disappeared,” Amaryllis said. “Quick, check the walls.”

The shack’s outer walls were all made of tin over a frame of wooden beams, there wasn’t much to find there. But one wall, on the inside, was partially made of stone, the same rocky cliffside that the shack was pressed up against.

There was only one part that wasn’t just rock, a part of the wall covered by a shelf that, when Awen tugged back, swivelled out to reveal a square-cut tunnel cut right into the stone.

“Huh,” I said.

"A smuggler's tunnel?" Amaryllis guessed.

"Doesn't matter," Awen said, shoving my birdy friend into the dark. "Go, go, go!"

"I'm going, I'm going!" Amaryllis squawked. "Broc, hurry up!"

I could hear the guard's feet hammering the alleyway, but threw another glance down the tunnel. No telling what was down there, and I didn't want to be caught flat-footed again.

"Broc!" Amaryllis shouted.

"One sec; I need a weapon!" I called back as my eyes skipped over a scythe, some trowels, a few rakes, a hoe, wickedly-sharp gardening spears atop a tin bucket--

I grabbed the bucket and lunged into the cave after my friends, dragging the door shut behind me. Instantly we were plunged into darkness, so I summoned a light ball in my free hand, and pushed some magic into the bucket itself until it glowed ever so slightly. The tunnel cut into the cliffside for a dozen or so metres before opening up into a bigger, wider tunnel. That meant that I only had to crouch for a bit, after which I could almost stand to my full height--my ears were squished down by the low ceiling.

“A mine tunnel?” Amaryllis guessed as she followed after me.

The tunnel continued to our left, but only for a little bit before ending at a rough wall. It went on to the right for quite a ways, at least as far as I could tell. There were rails on the ground, and I could imagine a cart using them to ferry stuff back and forth.

“Do you think tunnels like these are common under Goldenalden?” I asked.

“Maybe,” Amaryllis said. “The city is said to have survived a few dragon attacks back in the day. Being partially underground might explain some of that.”

“And now that it’s abandoned, it’s become a super cool underground thieves' hideout,” I said.

“I don’t know if I would use some of those words to describe a grungy, poorly lit tunnel, but yes, essentially correct,” Amaryllis said.

Awen looked up and down the walls, especially at the large wooden beams set every couple of metres. “I wonder if they build things above knowing that there are tunnels down here. It could be dangerous.”

“Let’s not look too deeply into it,” Amaryllis said. “Knowing the sylph, they’d accuse us of plotting to make their city fall apart.”

“I’m sure they have inspections sometimes,” I said.

We started following the rails. The lack of dust atop them, and the bare, scratched metal on their surface, hinted that they had been in use recently. Likely by the sylph we were still chasing. It made sense, if their neat hideout had a system to carry stuff already in it, why not use it?

The tunnel curved, and we started down the intersection when I heard something thump behind us. I started to turn, when two sylph stepped out of the shadows before us. A third was blocking the way back, long shiny knife in hand.

“Who are you?” One of those in the lead asked.

“Hello!” I said with as much good cheer as I could manage, to put them at ease, of course. “My name’s Captain Broccoli Bunch, and these are my friends. We were, ah, well, this is a bit awkward.”

“What’s a bun doing here? With one of those chickens and a human girl of all things?” the sylph asked.

“That’s the thing, I’m not entirely sure. See, we were looking for some cargo in that place when two of you showed up, then the guards showed up and you ran, so we ran after you. I’m starting to think we might have made a mistake.”

“Yeah,” the other sylph said. “Your mistake was messing with the Mitchhum gang.”

I blinked. “Oh! You’re the Mitchhum family?”

“Who’s asking?” he snapped.

“I just introduced myself, but I don’t mind doing it again,” I said.

“You mocking me?” he asked, his knife waving in the air before him. I inspected him real quick. It wasn’t entirely polite to use Insight on someone without permission, but he was waving a knife in my general direction.

Gutter Thief, level 10

The other two weren’t much stronger than that. With our second classes, my friends and I had half a dozen levels more than them. “I’m not mocking you, mister.”

Amaryllis sniffed. “Perhaps you could consider helping us, instead of being quite so hostile.”

“And why would we help foreign scum like you, huh?” the first sylph to speak up said.

“Because the three of us are seasoned adventurers used to raiding dungeons far more dangerous than some old abandoned mine with a few scruffy thieves,” Amaryllis said. There was a smell to the air, of ozone and danger, and it was very clearly radiating from my harpy friend. “Because it would be much better for you to work with us, than against us, and because I have a notoriously short fuse and don’t appreciate being called a chicken.”

The thieves swallowed.

I grinned, even bigger and friendlier. “Come on, I’m sure working with us wouldn’t be all that bad! We’re nice people, I swear!”

***