Hirrus was disappointed. There wasn’t much in the way of Arcana to be had from the fight.

The Gley hadn’t used any such abilities, and those used by the captain were a far cry from what Hirrus already had. He’d employed some attack speed buffs, but their duration was too short to be worth Hirrus’s time, compared to Pumped Kicks and Electric Field.

The defensive effect was interesting, though. It reduced damage taken by magical sources by 90% for two seconds. That meant it would demand being used at the right time, but if properly employed, it could allow him to save himself from a larger Arcana effect, like the finisher from Andrew’s big wind-up.

There was gear to be had. And not just from the captain, but from the other masked figures he’d slain - as well as the one who had been obliterated by the Gley.

The Gley itself didn’t drop anything of interest, proving that it was not a real boss monster.

But before sorting through all the equipment, he had work to finish.

When the results of the fight had become a clear inevitability, the remaining masked figures had abandoned their posts. There was no sign of the survivors who had brought in the Gley, but also the carts they had been loading the civilians into had been abandoned by the would-be captors. Many of the folk who had been loaded up already had fled from the fight and the fire, presumably joining their friends and family in the group Alric had led away. There were a few still here, mostly staring in open despair at the burning town.

“Hirrus!” Alric called, running back up the Hari Path to join him. “I got everyone out. They’re setting up camp around the bend.”

“The threat is over for now,” Hirrus said, though he gestured at the burning buildings. “But I’m not sure what can be done for them. I’m not sure every fire brigade in the kingdom together could do much about this blaze.”

“That’s what they said,'' Alric confirmed, gesturing over his shoulder back down the Hari Path. “I’m not sure if they were the mayor or the alderman or whatever. But they were obviously in charge.”

“They will make do,” Hirrus said, more to himself than to Alric. He couldn’t afford to get bogged down here helping to build temporary shelters while Rumi was out there waiting to meet his axe.

“What I don’t understand is-” Alric began, but stopped abruptly, eyes glazing over in the far-off look of someone looking at their inventory.

Hirrus stared at Alric for a second, wondering what had stunned him to sudden silence. Was there something wrong with his gear? Had he earned some amount of experience points for the fight despite not participating? What was the question?

“Uh-oh,” Alric said in a quiet voice.

“What?”

“Uh-oh,” he said again, slightly louder, eyes widening.

“Alric. What is it?”

“UH-OH.” Alric was practically shouting. “Oh no. This is fucked. Oh this is giga-fucked. FUBAR doesn’t even begin to-”

“What?” Hirrus snapped, grabbing the man by the shoulders, giving him a firm shake. “Alric, for once in your life, speak sense.”

Alric’s mouth flopped open and closed like a stunned fish for a second, before he said one word that brought it all into perspective.

“D-dahlia,” he stammered.

Hirrus tightened his grip on Alric’s shoulders. “What? What about her? What happened?”

“Nothing yet,” Alric said quickly. “There’s still time. We can stop them.”

“Is it GM Dave?” Hirrus asked, letting go of Alric and starting to walk before realizing he had no idea where he was going. “What’s going on?”

“No,” Alric said, his eyes glazing over. “Dave’s not here, man. I’ve got his GM window open still, but no response. We’re on our own.”

“Okay,” Hirrus said, taking a slow breath. He felt a rising anger in his chest, and he needed to quiet it before he unleashed it on an undeserving Alric. “What’s happening? What do you know, and how?”

“I just got a tell from someone named Fire Pulmundo,” Alric said. He started slow, but as he spoke, his words grew faster and faster. “They say they want to give you a message. They’re the one who has been throwing this shit at you the whole time, and they’re impressed with your power, they’re not sure they could really fuckin’ stop you, yadda yadda yada, you know. Wasting our time with over-dramatic bullshit.”

“What does this have to do with Dahlia?”

“I’m getting to it, I’m getting to it.” Alric made a placating gesture. “They’re going to Inoha now. To the Violet Plate. Rumi tasked them with stopping you, not explicitly demanding that they kill you, and combat is obviously not working. So they say that they’re going to convince you to give up by finding someone you’ll listen to without a fight.”

“Dahlia,” Hirrus said. “They’re going to subject her to…” He looked down at his hands, and then over at the scaled corpse of the Merciless captain.

“They must have just left from Shemil,” Alric said. “If they got their orders direct from Rumi, that must be where they started. But they can’t be coming right down the Hari Path, right?”

Hirrus felt the pull to the north. The Hari Path had a gentle curve to it, leaving Inoha on a solidly east-northeast heading and eventually at a nearly straight-north heading at the end of its path in Thordal, past Shemil. If this person wanted to go straight from Shemil to Inoha, a straight route wouldn’t follow the Hari Path, but would travel just north of it through the foothills, where the cover of the hills and woods could protect them.

Could protect them. But would not. Hirrus was going to-

“This is a trap,” Alric yelped. “Holy shit, this is actually a fucking trap!”

“I know,” Hirrus snarled. “But it’s the best kind of trap there is. They’ve baited it with something I can’t ignore. I have no choice.”

“Of course you do,” Alric said. “You can just ignore it. Let them pretend to go to Inoha. That’ll just be fewer foes when you reach Rumi, right?”

“And what if they’re not pretending?” Hirrus roared. He took a breath, calming himself. “What if this Fire person goes to Dahlia anyway? What if killing Rumi promotes them to the leader of his little laboratory? What if they make her into something like me?” Hirrus felt his panic growing even as he struggled to keep himself from shouting. “What will that do to her? What will that do to her unborn child?”

Alric had no answer for that. He looked away, unable to meet Hirrus’ wild eyes.

“I do know one thing,” Hirrus said. “If Dahlia becomes a monster like me, and they put her between me and their continued operations, that’s the end of it. If they tell her that I could have saved her and chose not to, she will want to kill me. And I - knowing that it’s my fault - will want her to kill me, too.”

“Maybe Dave can-” Alric began.

“We can’t depend on him,” Hirrus interrupted. His voice was raised again, and he had to take another breath to come back down. “If he could do something, he would have from the start. He wouldn’t have needed me in the first place. I had the tools and knowledge to help Barin and Dahlia circumvent the limitations of their decision trees. I have neither to help GM Dave get around whatever rules bind him.”

Alric snorted at that, but was reluctantly nodding along.

“If this is Fire’s plan to buy time for Rumi, it’s succeeded,” Hirrus continued. “They’ve bet Rumi’s life on me wanting to save lives more than wanting to end them. They’ve bet everything on me not being like them. It means nothing to be free of my decision tree if I won’t use that freedom to do what I want. What I need.”

“You have to do the right thing,” Alric said.

Hirrus felt a little spark of warmth in his chest at that. Alric understood.

“So what do we do?” Alric asked, looking around. “Where do we go?”

Hirrus focused inward for a moment, consulting his mental map of Hari. This region was fuzzy in his memory, but he knew Rumi and his people were in Shemil. Drawing a straight line from there to Inoha went just north of the Hari path, as expected. He tried to imagine someone leaving there just moments ago, and extrapolate where he would be most likely to intercept them.

He almost started running straight north, but stopped himself when he realized he would be walking around one of their carts.

“We need to run,” Hirrus said. He adjusted his heading to the northeast. “They’ll be in a cart. As long as I can get in front of it, I can stop it. But if they pass us, we’ll never catch them. We can’t miss.”

“So would you say,” Alric said, smiling as he obviously tried to lighten the mood, “we have one shot? One opportunity?”

Hirrus pushed him forward.