Despite his obvious importance and status, The Augur’s death was fast. Hirrus wondered why someone so important hadn’t invested the time to develop their stats. He worried that he might not be fast enough to avoid a mess from The Augur’s companion, but she seemed as resigned to her fate as he was. She was so utterly convinced that Hirrus represented an inescapable death that she submitted to execution without raising any alarm.

Even as it served his interests, it unnerved him.

With his work complete, Hirrus slipped out of the tent quickly, returning to Nidra and Alric as fast as he could without drawing attention.

“We need to get clear before someone notices,” Hirrus said.

“What did you do?” Alric asked. He gestured around them. “Because I’ll be honest, I’m feeling a little inadequate here.”

Hirrus looked around and noticed what Alric meant. This place had been busy with folk moving around when they’d arrived, but the fuss had redoubled now. In addition to people preparing for the coming demonstration, there were now groups of guards moving around with obvious intent. They were gathering together, arming and armoring themselves for battle, arranging themselves into formations and sending runners to try and figure out where to deploy themselves.

As he watched, he heard another soft ding sound, and the counter for creating chaos in the camp kept ticking up. It put Alric’s comment in perspective.

“All I did was tell them I was here,” Hirrus said. “I can’t take credit for the rest of this.” He gestured at the group of guards lining up in ranks and files in a clearing between two tents. The block of armed and armored men was forcing the rest of the traffic moving through the area to divert around, making things just a little bit more hectic.

“He’s right,” Nidra said, clapping a hand onto Alric’s shoulder and tearing him away from the spectacle. “If we’re near at hand when the alarm is raised, we will be caught.”

“Oy!” someone barked from nearby. “You three!”

Hirrus’s first instinct was to draw steel, but a sharp look from Nidra kept his blades where they were.

“Sir?” Nidra said, stepping past Alric and Hirrus and towards the speaker, straightening up at attention.

The speaker approached, and Hirrus saw that it was a guard in heavy armor, with her cloak cavalierly arranged over her shoulders to allow easy access to the greatsword sheathed across her back. She looked them over with a critical eye, and Hirrus found himself standing at attention as well. He elbowed Alric and the man suddenly jolted to mirror them as well.

“We’re behind schedule,” the guard snapped. “And with the false alarm, we’re shorthanded as well. What are you three doing?”

“Awaiting orders, sir!” Nidra barked, straightening her spine.

“At ease, recruit,” the guard said, her expression softening with a chuckle. “You’re not on trial here.”

Hirrus realized quickly what Nidra was doing. She was acting tense, anxious, and eager to please. She was playing the part of a green private. Putting on a mask to avert suspicion. It was so effective, the guard wasn’t even questioning all the evidence to the contrary - their strange outfits under the cloaks, or their shady behavior before being approached.

“We need a few extra hands over by the command tent,” the guard said, gesturing past the arranged formation of guards awaiting deployment. “Head over that way and go right inside. There will be a Captain there to give you further orders.”

She gave them a nod to dismiss them, and Nidra awkwardly slapped out a formal salute, almost making the guard burst out laughing. She managed to politely return the salute before moving on, presumably looking for more idle hands to put to tasks.

“This is good, right?” Alric said as Nidra started in the direction the guard had indicated. “If we’re going to the command tent, then we’ll be in prime position to fuck everything up at once.”

“It depends,” Nidra said. She gave Hirrus a sidelong glance, but said no more.

This area of the camp was much more organized than the rest. As it was centrally located, there were still people moving through it in preparation for whatever was to come, but the clean arrangement of the tents meant that the movements felt structured. It wasn’t a confusing knot of people, but obvious streams moving in a structured way. The only real complication was the block of guards assembled in the middle of it all, forcing those on the central thoroughfare to route around them.

This arrangement made it nearly impossible for Alric and Nidra to continue to sow chaos. There were clear lines of sight, and a huge army of guards were always only a few seconds away. But Hirrus noted, with a small sliver of satisfaction, that his objective to cause 10 unspecified units of chaos was approaching completion. He heard an alarmed cry from behind them - no doubt someone discovering The Augur - and the message turned gray and faded out, indicating completion.

They approached the command tent quickly. Nidra kept them moving through the crowds around them, and Hirrus guessed that it was to keep them ahead of word of The Augur’s decapitation. The command tent was impossible to miss. It was a larger tent roughly the same color as the cloaks everyone wore. The tent was large enough that it could have served as a home to three or four small families, with ample furniture to divide out the space inside. The buzz of activity seemed to be at a fever pitch here, and Hirrus would have believed that this was where the event was taking place, except that there was a cart near at hand, and people were visibly loading things onto it instead of off of it.

Hirrus thought they were going to break away and head back into the outer areas of the camp, but Nidra didn’t hesitate. She led the three of them right into the command tent.

The interior was roughly what Hirrus expected. There were a couple of tables scattered with maps and papers dominating the central area, with a few dozen figures gathered around having separate discussions about whatever logistical nightmares were going on.

One of the tables held a large hand-drawn map of the camp, and three armored men were arguing loudly, drowning out a lot of the other conversation as each one struggled to make the other two understand that their idea for camp defense was right. Another group were furiously arguing about the dangers a fire could present if one broke out in the camp and grew too large to contain. One insisted that they needed to move the camp into a stone structure to avoid the dangers of fire, and another was convinced that they needed the equipment on hand to take care of a proper blaze. One kept muttering something about an arsonist on the loose, but kept getting hushed by the rest.

Hirrus, Nidra, and Alric weren’t the only ones here to volunteer for errands. At least a score of people in the room looked like randomly-selected peons, and were being handed goods and crates to ferry outside. There was one that caught Hirrus’s eye. A bulky young man with a haunted expression moved through the tent toward the back wall.

Along the back was a sight that sobered Hirrus immediately. All the good humor melted out of him instantly as he saw the row of iron cells. They held… ordinary people. Not guards or soldiers, who could be commanded by a superior officer or a noble, but just normal citizens. Townspeople who were part of no chain of command. Their decision tree was affected by the actions of those around them, but it was flexible, and, sometimes, fickle.

Apparently the only way to deal with townspeople like that who had not yet been awakened was to arrest and imprison them. It was a mechanic Hirrus had used to help Dahlia get out of the burnt ruins of Yenon. The difference was that Dahlia had wanted his help. He had earned her trust by their time as friends - and not just the trust of her decision tree, but the trust of the woman beneath it. He had arrested her to protect her.

These citizens were clearly not here for their protection.

There were twelve of them of varying descriptions. A pudgy man with dried blood under his nose pressed himself to the back of the bars, curled up defensively despite his muscled arms and calloused hands. A teenage girl with a black eye leaned cavalierly against the front of her cell, though the haunted look in her eyes gave away the lie of her false bravado. A young woman in a simple dress was breathing heavily and leaning against the back of her cell, cradling one hand that looked to have been broken at the wrist. An older man with salt-and-pepper hair sat on the floor bearing an expression of utter defeat, with a huge raw spot on one side of his head where a fistful of hair had been ripped out by the root - along with some scalp, by the look of it. The others blended together as a horror show of simple folk who had been forced to endure an ordeal at the hands of cruel adventurers who did not see them as real people.

Hirrus tried not to see his neighbors and acquaintances from Yenon reflected in their bruised, cut, and battered faces. He did not completely succeed, but he could not tear his eyes away.

At the far left, there was a man.

An adventurer, clearly, with dirty blonde hair and sharp green eyes. Like Andrew, his face wasn’t quite right. His cheekbones were slightly too high and pronounced, making his cheeks look sunken.

He had one of the cells open, and grabbed the elderly woman within by her thin gray hair. Twisting her arm cruelly, he pressed her into the hands of a nearby guard. Before letting go, he twisted her arm just a little farther until she cried out in pain. The look of pleasure in his grin at that scream was unmistakable. This man was a monster.

Rumi.

Hirrus started to move across the tent, but Nidra’s hand caught his shoulder in a firm grip. He tried to shrug her off, but the next thing he felt on his back wasn’t a hand. It was a knife.

“Not yet,” she hissed into his ear.

“Why not?” Hirrus snarled. Despite his impatience, he kept his voice quiet to keep the conversation below the low roar of the argument taking place only a few feet away.

“We’ll be overwhelmed and killed in seconds,” Nidra said. “We won’t live to see the outside of this tent.”

“Why should I care?” Hirrus asked. “This is the point, isn’t it? Just that one life? What does it matter if we fall in the attempt?”

“Because we must succeed,” Nidra said with a sigh. “Here, surrounded by all the strength he’s built, he might slip through our fingers. We can’t risk failure.”

Hirrus gritted his teeth, but relaxed against her grip. He heard the sound of her dagger returning to its sheath, and Nidra took the lead once more, leading them towards a group that seemed to be organizing the logistical nightmare within the tent rather than focused on long-term plans for the logistical nightmare outside of it.

“Reporting,” Nidra said as she reached them. She stood up straight and did that same salute from before. Alric mimicked it, and Hirrus found himself doing it as well to blend in.

Nidra’s conversation with the captain fell into the background. Hirrus found himself staring across the room at Rumi. The burly young man he had seen earlier arrived at Rumi’s side, and the woman nursing her injured hand was yanked from her cell and handed over, though not without Rumi clamping a hand cruelly over the wrist of her broken hand. Hirrus’s vision blurred slightly at the sound of her yowl.

He forced his rage down. The time would come. They would do whatever tasks Rumi’s lapdogs gave them - and do them poorly - and when the time came, they would strike.

Until then, Hirrus would remember the hurts Rumi inflicted on these people. Because sometime very soon, he would repay each one tenfold.