The woman in the red hood seemed in a state of perfect calm. If Hirrus didn’t know better, he would suspect that she might still be under the thumb of her decision tree, secure in the knowledge that her actions were not her own choices, and therefore that she was absolved of responsibility.

It might also have been her complete confidence that she could kill Hirrus in a fight, but Hirrus was unconvinced.

“So you aren’t here to get in my way,” Hirrus asked.

“Quite the opposite,” she said. “I have been keeping track of your progress, and I’m only here now because you’re obviously struggling.” She shrugged. “I had hoped you had things well in hand, but it seems your priorities are at significant odds with your best interests.”

“If you have an issue with my priorities,” Hirrus snapped, “then I hope you understand that it reflects more poorly on you than it does on me.”

Alric let out a snort of a laugh. Even though it seemed combat was unlikely, he refused to leave his hiding spot. But he was still well within range to hear the exchange.

“This isn’t useful,” she said, narrowing her eyes at him. “Let me begin again.”

“If we’re starting at the beginning, perhaps we don’t have to stand here to do it,” Hirrus ventured. “I am possessed of the capacity to walk and talk at the same time. And, as you say, I do have a vital task ahead of me.”

Beneath her red cloth mask, there was a shifting. Hirrus easily identified it as a smirk. She inclined her head and turned, starting to walk up the logging trail.

There was a reluctance to put away his weapons, but it seemed the most diplomatic course. He didn’t trust her, but she wanted Rumi dead. As long as they had the same objective, he could entertain a conversation. As Hirrus took long steps to catch up to the strange woman, Alric scrambled out of his hiding spot, caught between his desire to keep his distance and his desire not to be left behind.

“Rumi understands how you were created,” the woman began as they walked. “Scores of innocents died in the agony of his experiments, but he developed a method to replicate it.”

“I had assumed,” Hirrus said with a grimace. “I have not encountered many, but more than one means what he’s done wasn’t a fluke.”

“His methods aren’t perfect,” she continued, as if he hadn’t spoken, “but they’re good enough. About one out of every five attempts ends in failure, but that’s good enough for him, so he hasn’t sought to improve them further.” She shook her head. “What he has continued to work on is his bedside manner. Every time, fewer and fewer of us turn on him. And as his following swells, fewer and fewer escape.”

“So he made you,” Hirrus said. It wasn’t a question.

“He did,” she said flatly. “I was one of the first, when he was lucky to get one of us out of every five attempts. My friends died at his hands. Their screams follow me in a way I don’t have words for.”

She fell silent for a long moment. Hirrus let her have it. He wondered if the screams in her memory were drowning out the crunch of their feet on the dirt road. The memory couldn’t have been that distant. Only a day or two at most. Even with her face obscured by a hood and mask, she looked haunted. Hirrus wondered if he looked the same way when he thought of Julissa.

“My name is Nidra,” she said at last. “And I escaped Rumi. I tried to kill him, but I was freshly-made. Surely you remember. When I returned, I was weakened, with lower stats, no gear, and without my natural abilities.” She stared down at her hands. “I failed to overpower him, and Fire and their ilk were able to drive me off before I could beat him to death with my bare fists.”

“I assume you don’t need me to introduce myself,” Hirrus said with a smirk. “Or describe what I’ve suffered.”

She let out a bark of harsh laughter. Just one, like a rock landing in wet snow. “Don’t worry, your reputation precedes you by quite a distance.”

“So you were happy with your decision tree?” Alric asked. He was following behind them, but keeping a slightly-awkward distance of about fifteen feet. “The others seemed happy to be free of theirs. What were you, then? Another guard?”

“I was not happy with what I was forced to do,” she snapped sharply, casting a withering glare over her shoulder at Alric. “But I couldn’t work for the man who murdered my friends and cursed their names for his own failure. Even if he had the worlds’ best interests at heart, I cannot suffer him to live.”

“I can guess at what came next for you,” Hirrus said, trying to change the subject. “You hunted. Grew. Picked off his followers where you could, learning their Arcana and stealing their gear.”

“It was mostly monsters,” she said, turning her attention back to Hirrus. “But yes. I picked off whatever adventurers I met out here, regardless of their allegiance. It made me ”

“So why do you need me?” Hirrus asked at last. It was the most relevant question, but she’d failed to even approach an answer. “You say you could kill me without difficulty. Unless you tell me now it was all a bluff, I don’t see why you can’t finish what you started. Perhaps with ease, now that I’ve removed Fire from the field.”

“I could have,” she said, with a sad tone in her voice. “If you had been faster. If it was still possible to get next to Rumi in one piece with all my Arcana ready. But for every five people Fire’s underlings deliver to Rumi, there are four more monsters like us between me and him. I’m not looking at sneaking past a handful of guards anymore. I need to penetrate an army.”

Alric snorted for some reason. Hirrus and Nidra ignored him.

“I could kill him in seconds,” she continued, “if I could get to him. But I can barely fight two foes at once, let alone a dozen. A score. A hundred.”

“Meanwhile,” Alric cut in, “my boy here fucked up a whole guild at once. You think he’s the rock to your paper and their scissors.”

“Please don’t interrupt with your adventurer gibberish,” Nidra snapped. “Perhaps you should-”

“Don’t,” Hirrus said, raising a hand. He stopped walking and squared his shoulders towards Nidra, drawing himself up to his full height. “Alric is my friend. Treat him with the same kindness as you would treat me, or this discussion is over.”

Nidra gave Hirrus a searching look, peering intently into his eyes. Hirrus met her gaze, though in her peripheral vision he could see Alric staring at him, too, in openmouthed shock.

“Fine,” she said at last. She turned to start walking again. “The long and short of it, in plain words, is that while I can kill one man in the blink of an eye, no matter who he may be, they have too many bodies between me and Rumi. Meanwhile, you lay waste to any challenge put before you, no matter the potency or number of forces arrayed against you.” She shrugged one shoulder. “Your only hope to fight me is if I miss the fatal blow by chance. My only hope to fight them is if they approach me single-file and wait their turn. Their only hope to fight you is to bury you with the weight of their corpses before there are none left for you to slay.”

“That’s kinda what I said,” Alric grumbled.

“I am unsure about my abilities on the scale you’ve described,” Hirrus admitted. “Certainly, I can fight a half-dozen adventurers at once. But you’re describing an army of unknown scale.”

“We can’t mount a frontal assault, anyway,” Nidra said. “Rumi must not be allowed to escape, and he would flee as soon as the alarm was raised. He sacrificed key components of his forces out of curiosity, sending them at you just to see how little they’d slow you down. He wouldn’t hesitate to throw every life at his command in front of you to give himself just a few more seconds to run.” She shook her head ruefully. “We need a more nuanced plan than that.”

“Hold up,” Alric interrupted. Nidra shot a glare at him, but held her tongue. “Are we actually about to start talking strategy right now?”

“Why not?” Hirrus asked.

“I don’t know if we trust her yet,” Alric said in a very obvious whisper. “She keeps saying she could kill you, and I don’t think that’s the best way to make friends. What if she’s working for Rumi and is going to deliver you on a plate as a part of some plan?”

“I don’t need her to be my friend,” Hirrus said. Though he was talking to Alric, he didn’t turn his gaze away from Nidra. “I need her plan to get me to Rumi. I don’t care if she’s going to betray me when we arrive. I just need to be in the same room with him, and I will… How did she put it? Lay waste to any challenge. Let him think Nidra is a handle he can affix to me to put me under his power. As soon as I see his throat, I will rip it out, even if I have to break his artificial handle first.”

“But what if-”

“This is just like the threat against Dahlia,” Hirrus interrupted. “If this is a trap, the bait is too good. The stakes are too high. Think of what information we’ve been given, Alric. There is an army around Rumi. How do you think I would handle an army?”

“Probably a lot better than you think you would.”

Nidra was the one to snort a laugh at that.

“Now how well I would handle it,” Hirrus corrected. “The method. Without this information, what would I do?”

“Uh,” Alric said. “Hirrus smash?”

Hirrus didn’t fully understand, but intuited that Alric was following what he meant. “I would cut my way through the army and pray that my love for Julissa would carry me through. I understand now that such a tactic would only be the beginning of my chase, not the end.”

“Fuck,” Alric cursed. “Yeah, okay.”

Hirrus took a deep breath. “So what is our plan?”

“First and foremost is the thing you’ve been doing the most wrong even since you left Inoha,” Nidra said, turning off the logging trail to cut through the woods. “Your travel pace.”