Hirrus wasn’t sure what to make of what he saw when he got back to the center of town. Alric was shrieking and running in circles, flailing at the air with his dagger. Behind him was another adventurer, dressed in the common mismatched gear Hirrus was familiar with.

This newcomer was chasing Alric, but not with intent. His pursuit was like that of a very persistent wolf, nipping at the heels of his prey to exhaust it.

Without a second thought, Hirrus rushed the newcomer. He knew he had a dozen Arcana that he could have used to interrupt whatever was happening, but his first instinct was, and always would be, to physically intervene.

Despite freedom from his decision tree, the habits it had ingrained in him were slow to change.

“Hold!” Hirrus barked as he lunged between Alric and the newcomer, setting his feet to accept the oncoming charge.

The adventurer didn’t even slow down. Instead, the gladius on his hip flashed up at Hirrus, lancing towards his face. Fortunately for Hirrus, after finishing off Last of the Strong, he had changed out his heavy axe for Fidelis’s hooked blade, which was a much lighter weapon, giving him the ability to swiftly interpose it to deflect the attack.

The blades met, and Hirrus was forced to do something he didn’t expect.

He was forced back a step by the impact.

His back foot set itself and Hirrus' free hand came up to grab the chainmail on the man’s shoulder, shoving him to the left and down, diverting his momentum. With his stance set and the move made, the man went tumbling into the ashen dirt.

“I said hold,” Hirrus said, raising his weapon and lowering his stance to something a bit sturdier. “I will not say it a third time.”

“I have my orders,” the man snapped as he scrambled back to his feet. “And I will obey.”

“Whose orders?”.

“Hirrus,” Alric said, still skittering away even with Hirrus in between him and the attacker, “Hirrus, look out. That’s not a normal dude.”

The man’s lips peeled back from his teeth in a sneer. A dark chuckle escaped him as he slowly rose to his feet, visibly basking in Alric’s fear.

Hirrus took the brief opportunity the man’s hubris offered to assess the situation. The courtyard was about twenty feet wide, though the terrain on the outer edge was littered with piles of ash and chunks of debris from the surrounding buildings. In the center of the area was a fountain that was caked in ash, its waters stilled by the debris that choked it.

The man himself looked about average for an adventurer. He was wearing leather gloves and a boiled leather cuirass, both in dramatically different shades of brown. He had an open-faced bucket helm of blued steel, in contrast as well with the greaves and boots he wore of dark iron. His weapon was a plain-looking gladius, with a dull-looking orange gem set into the guard.

The only thing unusual about him for an adventurer was his physical appearance. The man’s face looked uncharacteristically plain, with a nose that was a little too upturned, significant overbite, and a double chin. His build was unusual as well, with a bottom-heavy pear-shaped build rather than the usual V-shape of most men in the adventuring profession.

“Who are you?” Hirrus asked. It seemed a logical starting place.

“You know what the best thing about this is?” the man asked, ignoring Hirrus' question. He put a hand to his ear as if listening to something distant. “This part. This right here.”

Hirrus squinted at the man, confused. What was he talking about?

“What are you waiting for?” Alric yelped as he ducked behind the fountain in the middle of the courtyard. “Kill him! Kill him!”

“Why?” Hirrus demanded, though he didn’t dare take his eyes off the strange man.

“If we’re not killing him, say so now,” Alric snapped, voice slightly muffled by his cover. “Because then I’m getting a huge fuckin’ head start!”

Suddenly the situation came into focus.

This man wasn’t an adventurer. Not exactly.

“You’re like me,” Hirrus said at last. “Aren’t you?”

“I’m nothing like you,” the man snarled. “You lived your whole life in the sun. Even now, my decision tree tells me to yield. Obey. Answer. Everyone you’ve ever spoken to has gotten the same.”

That was confirmation enough. Hirrus had, in a way, already failed his objective. The adventurer behind it all had successfully replicated what happened to him. This man was no adventurer. He was a normal person who had been freed of his decision tree.

All it had taken was burning this town to the ground. Just like Yenon.

“Kill him or run,” Alric snapped again, “I’ve seen what you do to people, and I’m not sticking around like a fuckin’ dumbass to be on the receiving end of it!”

“We don’t have to be enemies,” Hirrus said, slowly returning his hooked sword to its spot on his hip, raising his empty hand to offer truce. “I’ve been through what you’ve been through. We can stop it. Work with me, and we can-”

The man lunged, and Hirrus barely ducked under the gladius’s edge as it sliced through the air where his throat had been just a moment before. Hirrus' hands came up as he called an Arcana, pelting the man with the pinkish pellets of TK Bullet. The knockback effect of the Arcana sent him flying back robbed of a little more than five thousand hit points.

“You’ve never been through what I’ve been through!” the man shrieked. As soon as he found his footing, he went into a charge again, rushing at Hirrus. “Don’t pretend you have!”

Hirrus had ample time to get his blade ready again, and caught the attack to deflect it away. Despite himself, he struggled to justify launching a proper counterattack. He had no dispute with this man, and the man had no reason to want him dead in turn. There was a peaceful solution to this, wasn’t there?

“I’m trying to help you,” Hirrus said, parrying the next flurry of blows from the man’s gladius. His experience as a guard far outstripped the man’s skill with blade, but what he lacked in talent, he made up for with single-minded fury. “You don’t know what’s going to happen if-”

“How are you going to help?” the man demanded. He backed off for a second, and then came in twice as angrily. He tried a clumsy feint left and then drove his blade forward in a thrust. Hirrus didn’t fall for the trick and ducked to the left, into the feint. “You want to cure me? Bring back my decision tree? Shackle me again? I would rather die!”

“I don’t have to,” Hirrus snapped. His patience was starting to wear as he realized how little the man had been told about his situation, but he reminded himself that if GM Dave could appear wherever he wanted to deliver a perfectly-packaged dose of explanation, this mess would have ended before it began. “In one week’s time, you will be returned to normal anyway. What I’m trying to do is make sure we’re still here when that happens!”

“Keep telling yourself whatever you want,” the man snarled. He redoubled the ferocity of his attack, though he was nowhere near approaching Hirrus' limits. “I won’t go back. I’ll never go back! Rumi saved me! Freed me! I would die for him! Kill for him! Starting with you!”

Rumi.

Hirrus had heard that name before. He couldn’t place where, exactly, but he knew there was only one place it could have come from. Last of the Strong. One of their members - someone highly-placed enough that someone would drop his name - must have fled Hirrus' wrath.

He had a name, at least. Even if he couldn’t make this man realize that they would share the same doom should Hirrus fail, it was more than he’d had before.

“Even now you mock me,” the man snapped. He planted both feet and gripped his gladius in both hands, trying desperately to land even one cut on Hirrus. The light weight of the hooked sword, combined with the attack speed from his gear and the skill from the fighting that had consumed his entire life, meant that each strike ended when blade met blade. “You don’t know what I’ve been through! You don’t know what I was saved from! You were given everything and now you pretend we were equals?”

“All our decision trees were prisons,” Hirrus said, trying to keep his tone even and calm. “I will not deny it. But there are fates worse than prison!”

“I know!” he screamed. He staggered back for a moment, wiping his brow. Even just a few seconds of exertion had him sweating. “I was in one! Every morning, with my head pounding and aching, I reached for a bottle of liquor. I didn’t want it! I never wanted it! I don’t even like it! But every second of every day, I had to be drinking. I had to be making a fool of myself. I had to be publicly urinating. I had to be staggering up and down the main street hiccoughing and reeking of ale!” He stabbed his gladius accusingly at the sky. “They decided your prison was to be a steady job as a respected member of society. Mine was one blurry horror after another for the sake of this world’s ambiance!”

The man’s body shuddered, and he clutched at his ribs for a moment.

“We will be erased,” Hirrus said, pleading, even as he feared what was coming next. “If Rumi is allowed to continue on this path, all of us will be erased. This freedom is our doom if we don’t stop him.”

“Then…” the man gasped, eyes crossing as his body shuddered again. “Then let it… Let it be so!”

Orange-yellow scales formed on his skin, crawling up his neck and over his face as the man took on a form familiar to Hirrus.

His face transformed, sprouting a scaled muzzle full of huge serrated teeth. His eyes clouded for a moment, and when they cleared, they were slit-pupiled and fire-red. The leather gloves protested for a moment before the material parted, long orange claws tearing through.

“If my only other choice is a return to the nightmare,” the reptilian Merciless said, his voice an octave lower than his human form. “Then let us be erased!”