The seven adventurers were spread out, which made Hirrus nervous. It was possible that they were anticipating a fight, and trying to stand where he couldn’t blast them all with one Peppered Breath and be done with them. He might be able to position so he could fry them all with Flames of the Apocalypse, but that was an unrealistic idea. Hirrus would need to use a handful of buffs in order to make the Arcana powerful enough to clean them up in one go, and it seemed unlikely that they would stand there and stare at him powering up until he was ready.

“What’s goin’ on?” one of the adventurers asked. “Just some randos?”

“They’re NPCs,” another said, “though they don’t look like it.”

“Why are they dressed like that?” a third asked.

“Do you think they’re-” the first one began.

“We’re right here,” Cedril snapped. “You don’t have to talk about us like we’re furniture.”

“Alright, fine,” one of the men stepped up to Cedril, kneeling down menacingly. The adventurer was burly and menacing, and the heavy ax on his hip was visibly bloodstained. “Are you him? Are you the Merciless One?”

Hirrus felt his eyes narrow at the assembled adventurers. Were they hunting him? If so, they’d just bitten off more than they could chew. Even if they had hundreds of allies lurking just out of sight, they were all only a few seconds from death. He readied himself to draw his weapons and attack.

Cedril was much more mellow than Hirrus could ever hope to be. He looked up at the man with convincingly feigned confusion. “The what? Who?”

“The Merciless One. The fucker who took out our guild and left us all broke. Don’t act like you didn’t get the global notification. Everyone saw it.” The adventurer leaned in close to Cedril, just shy of audibly snarling like a beast. “You better not be fucking with me. You won’t like what happens if you try to fuck with me.”

Cedril looked back down at his chicken-stuffed bread roll. Slowly, he took a bite. The man was thinking very hard about what he was about to say, and Hirrus was hopeful that it would diffuse the situation.

“Why should I take your word for that?” Cedril asked. He gestured with his roll at the other scattered adventurers. “Which of these are your partners? Can they corroborate how unpleasant relations with you would be?”

Four things happened at once.

First, three of the other adventurers let out simultaneous guffaws of laughter. Hirrus didn’t think the insult was that funny, but he could appreciate Cedril’s unique ability to play into an adventurer’s sense of humor.

Second, the burly adventurer reached for his bloodstained axe with a snarl of rage. His other hand reached out to grab Cedril by the collar, but he fumbled. The open chest of the man’s armor made it hard to gauge where to grab it.

Cedril twisted away and threw himself backwards.

Third, as Cedril twisted, he shoved away from the man. He did this without dropping his hot meal, and he smashed the steaming-hot mass of horseradish sauce directly into the man’s face.

Before anyone could draw a weapon, Cedril drew first blood, dealing a small amount of damage from the heat of the cooked bun. And no small amount of discomfort from the spicy sauce being pressed into the adventurer’s nose and eyes.

Fourth, Hirrus stood up.

Zair Tether did negligible damage. Seeing the glittering green lariat only do six hundred damage to the adventurer attacking Cedril made it feel all the more unfair that it was the ability that had directly led to Alric’s death.

What was not negligible about it was that it bound the man briefly, stopping him from drawing steel. Hirrus jerked his hand back, and the man was dragged across the clearing to him, as if he weighed no more than a down-stuffed pillow.

Hirrus’s icy greataxe smashed into his chest as a seven thousand damage critical hit, which felt like a much more appropriate beginning to this fight.

The man cried out in surprise, and raised his empty hands defensively rather than finishing drawing his own blade.

Hirrus reared back and smashed his foot into the man using Hiden Sokyaku. He went flying backwards, suffering another five thousand damage. It was just enough to finish the job. The adventurer’s corpse rolled across the clearing, limbs flailing bonelessly until it came to a stop. He had gone from menacing to dead in under a second.

“You seek the Merciless One?” Hirrus shouted. “I’m right here. You have a new choice now: find your escape or find your death!”

“Holy shitballs,” one of the adventurers cursed. “Fuck shit ass balls!”

“That’s the guy!” another announced, either ignorant or apathetic towards the redundancy. “Get him!”

“Nope!” another adventurer announced. “Nope! Nope! Nope!” She turned and walked back into the treeline at a surprisingly calm and confident pace, still repeating: “Nope! Nope! Nope!”

She was apparently the only one among them with an accurate sense of the futility of their attack. The other five drew weapons and charged. Three more emerged from the treeline, having maneuvered to flank Hirrus when the time came.

Hirrus used the moment before the fight started to apply some buffs. There was no time to apply X’ruhn’s Balance and blast away at this range, but there was plenty of time to get his physical buffs in order. Pumped Kicks and Terminus Grip were likely enough by themselves to deal with this group, but he had time to add Going Ape and Fleetness of Tonner before the first foe got in striking range.

The first man that stepped up was wearing heavy armor and wielding a titanic greatsword, incredibly disproportionately large to his size. And he was not a small man. Hirrus’s icy greataxe cut across his chest as he raised the weapon high to strike, and the critical hit dealt fifteen thousand damage, with his combined buffs. Terminus Grip’s additional critical rate and critical damage multiplier was brutal, especially combined with the added multiplier from the Crushing Blade buff.

The titanic greatsword never came down. Instead, the man fell to the ground in two pieces after a single strike.

“Oh, shit on me!” one of the adventurers stammered. “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!” He had been charging in with a pair of wickedly curved daggers. He immediately turned around and bolted for the treeline, abandoning the attack. “Good luck, fuckers, I’m going back to fighting bunnies outside Inoha!”

“Coward!” another adventurer bellowed. This one hadn’t charged for Hirrus, but instead went for Cedril, swinging the spiked head of a morningstar around in a high arc.

The bare-chested Awakened was scrambling away with obvious fear of the approaching adventurers.

Hirrus wondered why. These were just random adventurers from Last of the Strong. The dregs who weren’t strong enough to be sent to their deaths before, nor influential enough to be present for the officers’ sacrifice. None of them should have been more than a match for even the weaker Awakened.

As the morningstar blow came down on Cedril’s leg, the man cried out in pain. Hirrus didn’t know how much damage it did, but the spray of blood indicated that it was a lot. More than it should have been.

Hirrus was about to hack down another adventurer, but the moment’s distraction left him open. A man with a spiked wooden club knocked him in the left shoulder, dishing out just under two thousand damage - chump change compared to his total hit points - and danced away just as Hirrus’s hooked blade lashed out. He wanted to follow up and take out the man, but Cedril was in danger.

In addition to the one with the morning star, an adventurer in robes was also approaching Cedril from the opposite side, cutting off his escape. Hirrus tried to will the man to stand and fight, and seemed to get through. Cedril pulled out a spear and started flailing it at the adventurer in robes. The lack of training was nearly painful to watch. He only got one good strike on the robed adventurer, and it didn’t even slow him down.

The man with the morningstar was making a show of lining up his attack, aiming for Cedril’s head.

Hirrus gritted his teeth and activated Rapid Rip, launching himself across the clearing. Two of the adventurers standing between Hirrus and the man with the morningstar were instantly obliterated by the strike, taking just under twenty thousand damage. The very end of the dash attack hit the man with the morningstar, and eighteen thousand damage was more than enough to reduce him to scattered chunks of flesh and a splatter of blood that coated Hirrus from the neck down.

“Cedril,” Hirrus said, trying to sound calm. “What are you doing?”

“Holy fuck! What the fuck?!” The robed adventurer immediately fell on his rear end trying to jump back, presumably startled by seeing his ally suddenly reduced to a large red smear across the scrub grass. “How the fuck! Hacks! Has to be! He can’t-”

Cedril tried to straighten up and make a proper attack against the robed adventurer, but the panicked man was trying too hard to escape, crab-crawling back away from Hirrus.

“Use an Arcana,” Hirrus prompted Cedril.

Suddenly this was no longer about obliterating all resistance.

Something was wrong, and Hirrus needed to know what.

The adventurer got most of the way to his feet as Cedril lunged. Hip checking him with the boar charge Arcana. If Hirrus had used the Arcana, the damage from it likely would have finished the man off. But instead he only stumbled and fell on his face. The impact didn’t even seem to draw blood.

“This wasn’t supposed to be like this,” one of the other two adventurers in the clearing said. “Jimbo said we were going to kick ass and take names! The officers gave us all this raid gear! Why do we fucking suck so hard?”

“Shut the fuck up and help!” the robed adventurer shrieked, scrambling to get to his feet as Cedril ineptly smacked him around the head and shoulders with his spear.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to be.

Rumi was supposed to have trained his Awakened to make them an army. He was supposed to have accumulated gear to make them a threat to the Shadow Council. The Arcana Hirrus and Nidra had helped them get was supposed to bridge the gaps in Rumi’s preparations.

Why was Cedril such a poor combatant?

One of the other adventurers charged at Cedril, waving a longsword at him like he was waving a broom at a wild animal encroaching on his lawn. Cedril stopped battering the robed adventurer and tried to bring his spear up to stop the man’s charge, but it was swiped aside easily as the adventurer closed the distance.

Hirrus just watched, stunned.

The adventurer’s movements were sloppy. This group was clearly from Last of the Strong’s last-ditch defense. The officers had issued gear to their underlings, whether or not they were of any value in a fight, in hopes of them creating a barrier of flesh to keep Hirrus from assaulting their headquarters. These people were probably just like Alric: low-level adventurers wearing high-level gear, without the hit points or the skills to properly employ the tools they’d been gifted.

But Cedril was a mess. He was sweating and struggling to deal with even this one opponent. As the robed adventurer found his feet, Cedril was visibly in a panic, expecting to be outnumbered shortly.

Hirrus had seen enough. His own use of the Boar Charge Arcana dealt over ten thousand damage to the robed man, sending his shattered corpse bouncing bonelessly across the clearing. His hooked blade swept up and cleft the other man in twain with a double-strike proc dishing out ten thousand damage even across the two blows.

The final adventurer babbled to herself wordlessly for a few moments. She dropped her weapon - a large broadsword decorated with dangling blue ribbons - to the ground and raised her hands in surrender.

Hirrus ignored her, looking at Cedril instead.

“What was that?” Hirrus asked. “What did you just do?”

“That was my best,” Cedril snapped, gasping for breath even after this brief scuffle. “What more do you want from me?”

Hirrus blinked for a moment, overwhelmed by the confession.

If this was the best Nidra’s army could offer, he may have made a fatal mistake.