The song Alric launched into as they ran into the foothills wasn’t to Hirrus’ taste, but it had a fast tempo, which seemed to help Alric keep up with the panicked pace Hirus set. As they entered the forested foothills, Hirrus hoped that the terrain and foliage weren’t slowing him down too much. If he fell behind, or if he’d misjudged how fast Fire could travel, the window to catch them might pass. If Hirrus couldn’t intercept and stop them now, it was very unlikely that he could catch up to them before they reached Inoha.

Failure was not an option.

The forest was still full of scattered monsters, but Hirrus ignored them. Few of them seemed interested in matching his pace, even if they saw Alric first. Some of them threw Arcana attacks at them, but Hirrus ignored it all. A walking thornbush monster flicked thorns at him, and he didn’t even slow down. A giant orange-skinned toad lashed out at him with its tongue, but he ducked under the strike and kept running. Some kind of amphibious land-fish spat a jet of water at him with such pressure that it cut like a sword’s blade, but he accepted the damage and kept going.

Nothing chased them for too long, eventually either losing interest or falling too far behind to be seen. Alric said something about ‘training’ but Hirrus was more or less ignoring him. He didn’t even care if the man kept up with him. Hirrus’s largest concern was protecting Dahlia.

The forest eventually thinned as the mountains loomed closer, giving way to craggier terrain that was less hospitable to the trees. It also gave Hirrus a brief glimmer of hope. There were routes out here that looked like logging trails wide enough to be proper roads, but with all the hills and rocks and uneven bits of the land, these roads were winding and circuitous. He’d feared that the adventurers he sought would be on a direct route, beelining straight through the wilderness. This might mean that they were slower than expected.

His slim chance widened just a little bit.

Of course, a single ray of light casts long shadows. What if he was wrong about them leaving from Shemil, and they were on a dramatically different route? What if they’d already had someone stationed in Inoha, and Fire had sent that hypothetical agent a message the same way they’d sent one to Alric? What if they anticipated his attempt to intercept, and were riding freely down the Hari Path right now?

What if the only way he had to stop them was by asking GM Dave at this moment when he seemed to be unreachable? Was there any chance at all of success, or was it already too late? Did he-

The mountains threw a rumbling echo back at him. The unmistakable sound of a cart being pushed to an unsafe speed on rough terrain. Hirrus didn’t even know what he was going to do when he started running up the nearest logging trail towards the noise. He just knew that he could not - as Alric’s song had put it - miss his chance to 'blow.'

He saw the cart around the bend before the driver saw him. It was a smaller cart, not one of the large cargo carts the masked folk had been using to transport people, but they were usually capable of faster speeds and better maneuverability. The perfect vehicle if they were trying to get past a murderous guard. Despite the smaller size, the vehicle was packed, with three people crammed into the front seat, and four more in the second row of seats behind them. This particular cart had a front window but no roof, presumably to reduce the cramped feeling they no doubt felt with seven people in such a tiny space.

It was a vulnerability. One that Hirrus would exploit.

The High Jump Arcana sent Hirrus up in the air as the car came around the corner. It was moving fast, spraying dirt and dust as it skidded around the bend, but Hirrus had accounted for that. He came down in the middle of the back seat, his weight crashing down on the two people in the middle there.

“Holy shuckfit!” the driver shouted as the impact caused the cart’s skid to turn into a spin. He wrestled with the wheel right up until Hirrus’s axe smashed into it, locking it in place and entirely robbing him of control.

Hirrus tried to quickly identify the passengers and assess them as threats, but an Arcana hit Hirrus from the left before he could. It only did three hundred damage, but there was a knockback component that launched him up and out of the vehicle. He kept his grip on his axe, and his axe kept its grip on the wheel, ripping it off of the top of the mechanism that gave the driver control. Hirrus hit the ground in a roll, absorbing the impact and coming up to his feet in a run.

The spinning cart came to a stop right before it would have slammed side-on into a tree, but the occupants were obviously dizzy and disoriented. He could put an end to this in seconds, if they were unable to scatter before him like the vermin they were.

“Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!” Alric yelled, throwing himself in front of Hirrus, arms extended. “Slow the fuck down!”

“Get out of my way,” Hirrus snarled, raising his axe - with the steering wheel still tangled up in the icy blue head - to menace Alric. “If they escape now, I can’t be sure they won’t continue to Inoha.”

“It’s not them!” Alric shouted. “That’s not the guys, I promise!” He didn’t move out of Hirrus’ path, but he did raise his hands in obvious surrender. “Slow down for just one second, okay?”

“What the fuck,” the driver groaned. There was a fumbling clatter as he flopped his hands against the space where the steering wheel once was.

The other six weren’t quite as disoriented as the driver. The two seated behind him were slapping at his head and shoulders, trying to urge him to get out of the cart and start running. Three others - one in the back and the two in the front - were already using Arcana to empower themselves for a fight, glowing and sparkling with various power boosts. The woman in the leftmost back seat started to scramble, trying to pull herself up and out of the vehicle. Hirrus assumed she was the one who had used Arcana to launch him out of the vehicle. She was going to have to go first, or else her knockback ability might-

“Drop your weapons and stop casting Arcana!” Alric yelled over his shoulder at them. “His vision is based on violence! If you don’t try to fight, he can’t see you!” The man turned back at Hirrus and pointed over his shoulder at the cart. “Look at them,” Alric said quickly, as if sensing the growing murderous intent in Hirrus. “No masks! Driving a little sports car instead of a big truck thing! Come on. This isn’t them! You’re about to murder a bunch of innocent people!”

“Masks?” the driver said blearily, looking over at Alric.

“Get your shit together, James,” the woman seated next to him snapped. She grabbed him by the collar and shook him. “Stop acting like you were in a car accident. We didn’t even hit anything, and we are still very much about to fucking die!”

“We have to get the car moving,” the driver said, shaking his head as if to clear it. Apparently the intervention of the woman next to him was what he had really needed to sober him up. “We can’t let them catch up to us again, they’ll fucking kill us, right?”

“Who?” Alric said, turning around to face the car. “Who is going to catch you?”

“Assholes,” the woman said, though the word was clearly her response, and not the way she was addressing Alric. “We’re having a quiet drive out here to get to The Dungeon Of Voiceless Whispers and this truck comes up behind us and starts riding our ass like we’re doing fifty on eye-ninety-five.”

It was all gibberish to Hirrus, but Alric had a chuckle at that, so he assumed they were talking some kind of sense.

“Are we about to die horribly?” the woman from the backseat asked. She’d gotten out of the cart, and was crouched behind it, peeking up over the side at Hirrus with obvious terror.

“That depends,” Alric said. “The people in the truck. Were they wearing masks? What did they look like?”

“I think so,” the woman said. “I didn’t get a good look at them from here. But they started shooting spells at us when we didn’t speed up, and there’s nowhere to pull over out here, so...”

The driver made a gesture with one hand, covering both eyes.

Just like the masks on the people who had been unleashing monsters on him.

“They’re behind you now?” Hirrus demanded. “How far? Could they have gotten off this path?”

“Answer him,” Alric added quickly. “And you get to live. I promise.” With that addition, the fear in the whole group seemed to pause.

“James put the pedal to the floor, even though we nearly died on every bend in the road,” the woman said. “The truck couldn’t keep up with that so we left them in the dust. But we haven’t gotten far from when we last saw them. There weren’t any turns or side paths, so if they didn’t go off-road, they should be here in like three minutes.”

“Can I get that back from you real super duper quick?” the driver slurred, pointing at the steering wheel still stuck to Hirrus’ axe. “If you’re done with it I mean. If you’re not, it’s cool, man, I just think it really tied the whole car together. I miss having it, you know?”

“Get out of the car, James,” the woman snapped, shoving him. “You don’t get to act punch-drunk to avoid responsibility and then still get to drive.”

“I’m dine to frive,” James said as he struggled with the cart’s door-latch. Eventually the woman had to reach over and open it for him, and he immediately fell out into the dirt.

Alric yanked the steering wheel off of the axe and walked towards the cart to return it, exchanging apologies. Hirrus had already moved on, turning away and looking up the road. If the truck these people had described was them, then there was still time. In a few moments, they’d come around this corner, and Hirrus would slaughter them all.

Dahlia would be safe.

Behind him, he heard the cart restart and it started chugging down the path again. It was beneath Hirrus’ notice. A bunch of adventurers off on some frivolous trip was no concern of his. If they were living a normal week, that was actually a good thing in Hirrus’s book. It meant that Rumi’s near-obliteration of everything normal in this part of the country wasn’t drawing enough attention to make the other adventurers complain.

If GM Dave was to be believed, their complaints could be the stone that instigated his obliteration.

“That was close,” Alric said, stepping up beside Hirrus. “You almost committed an atrocity, bro.”

“Maybe,” Hirrus said.

“Also, uh, I think we’re not alone.” He gestured back at the forest. “I think that woman in the red mask is following us.”

“She’s no concern of mine,” Hirrus said, hefting his axe up to rest on his shoulder. “If she stands between me and Dahlia’s safety, or me and Rumi’s life, I will strike her down. Mercilessly. But anything that doesn’t wish to stand in my path is free to leave and live.”

Alric gave Hirrus an uncertain look. Hirrus guessed that the man was still worried that the people in that cart had nearly been killed simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hirrus could sympathize. They were like Alric. Adventurers just trying to enjoy their day. He tried not to think too hard about how he would have felt if he’d killed them and then found they were the wrong group. But he hadn’t. They were alive and mostly unharmed, and even now, he could hear the rumbling echo of another vehicle coming up the road.

He wasn’t going to cry over un-spilled blood.

Instead, he was going to find the proper blood to spill.