While Hirrus had been unimpressed by the officers and leader of Intricacy, the guild’s true power was intimidating once unleashed. He had still been on the manor grounds when the proper alarm was raised, and the sight of hundreds - possibly thousands - of enraged adventurers pouring out of the huge building to converge on him had been a little bit frightening.

Once he’d managed to High Jump over the outer wall, the chase wasn’t over. As many had been on the grounds, there were scores more standing outside the walls, trying to get in to help. Hirrus had leaped out of one fight and landed in another. Fortunately, his arsenal of Arcana let him obliterate the adventurers by the dozen, and his Cosmic Barrette meant that he was never in any real danger.

However, it seemed increasingly impossible to actually mount a fight against such numbers. It wasn’t that Hirrus felt like the adventurers were a threat - some of his attackers weren’t even able to do double-digit damage to him - it was simply that the time it would take him to cut his way through them all was an unrealistic demand. He didn’t have all day to stand here and blast his way through the unending tide.

Rapid Rip tore through the crowd easily. With his foes so tightly packed, each use of the Arcana struck enough foes to fully reset its cooldown, allowing him to dash again, even as the adventurers he left behind hit the ground in red gorey pieces. A few more casts, and he reached the edge of the group. Another Rapid Rip - purely for distance - got him out onto the streets of Denstad, out of the mob’s reach.

Now he just had to get away from them.

Plenty of his Arcana could keep his movement speed up. The use of Pumped Kicks, Fleetness of Tonner, and even Electric Field would give him long periods of time with enhanced movement speed, while Rapid Rip and Split Second could give him brief bursts to keep his position unpredictable, with so many foes after him - and able to inform on his location - it seemed likely that more than a few of them would have similar Arcana to keep up with him.

There was one more tool in his kit that might help. Something he knew would dramatically increase his chance to escape.

As soon as Hirrus was out in the open on the streets, he ran. But when he reached the first intersection, where the street split, he did something that he suspected none of his pursuers could match.

He went all three directions at once.

Mirrored Echo let him send a false image of himself straight ahead and to the left, while he turned to the right. His focus had to split to keep the two false images of himself moving, but the outcry that came out behind him was reward enough for that. Glancing over his shoulders - and unable to stop his echoes from doing the same - Hirrus saw that the mob had to split to give chase.

Curiously, while each of his Echos had a healthy number of adventurers following, the lion’s share followed the center echo, disproportionately expecting that he would run straight away and jettison his illusions to the sides.

When he reached the next intersection, he split again, sending another Echo to the left while he turned right, circling back towards Intricacy’s manor. He didn’t dare split his focus any farther than three Echoes while he had to keep putting one foot in front of the other for four bodies simultaneously.

As anticipated, when the group chasing him split, most of them went along to the left, while the smaller group chased him. The adventurers’ expectations were easy to manipulate. They more readily believed that Hirrus would run his physical body directly away from them, and so he’d thinned their numbers tremendously by subverting that expectation.

Hirrus reached the guild manor’s wall and turned left. He suspected that some number of his pursuers would turn back at that point, anticipating him to be a decoy, as there was nowhere for him to run in this direction. The outer wall of the guild’s grounds went right to the river, cutting off any escape in that direction. Hirrus had one more trick prepared, and with only one or two dozen adventurers giving chase, it was unlikely any of those directly behind him could match it.

When Hirrus had fought Orlina in the heart of Inoha, she had used Vacuous One’s Buoyancy to stand on the surface of the river to escape his immediate reach. He hadn’t anticipated ever needing the ability to walk on water, but the extra Tenacity stat and cooldown reduction for having it equipped caused him to leave it on his active list. He was grateful for it now, though. Hirrus jumped down when the road ended and found the river’s surface to be as firm as hard-packed sand under his feet, letting him easily escape over the water while the adventurers were left standing on the .

“I knew it,” one of them cursed. “It’s an illusion. He just walks over the water.”

“There’s Arcana that could let him do that if he was real,” someone corrected.

“Occam’s razor,” someone snapped. “It’s gotta be the decoy.”

“Shut up and get in the boat,” another yelled. “I’m not gonna be the guy who let him get away.”

Hirrus glanced over his shoulder to see that a fifteen-foot longboat was now on the river’s edge somehow, and the adventurers were piling into it, presumably to keep up the chase. But the delay to their crossing was a reasonable chance to lose his pursuers. He just couldn’t think of how while he was still controlling three other bodies and sending them scattering through the streets, leading the rest of the guild away to try and make it more difficult for them to regroup on his true location when the deception was revealed.

The problem was that he had only bought himself a few seconds now and he didn’t know how he was going to use them to vanish. Even as he hopped up onto the far bank of the river, a second boat had appeared and was filling with adventurers even as the first was halfway across. He could have blasted one boat, but two meant that when the first boat went down, the second would confirm him as the true Hirrus and the jig would be up for his echoes.

“Tough day?” someone asked from nearby.

Hirrus was shocked to see a familiar red-armored figure near at hand, waiting around the next corner. GM Dave had his arms crossed and was tapping one toe as if impatient.

“Maybe,” Hirrus said. “Are you here to help or just to point and laugh?”

“Little bit of both,” GM Dave said with a grin. “I’ve got some information for you. But also this is pretty funny. Big bad Merciless One getting run down by a bajillion lowbies. It’s like watching forty naked level one characters take on the RM that spawns in the starting zone.”

“I’m not sure now is the time to talk,” Hirrus said, looking over at the river, where one of the boats was nearly across. The second was halfway now. “Unless you can move at a flat sprint in that heavy armor.”

“Don’t worry about the armor,” GM Dave said with a dismissive gesture. “When I want to talk privately, I get what I want.”

The GM stepped up to Hirrus, clapping a hand on his shoulder in a companionable gesture. But as soon as the grip closed, the world went black.

Hirrus had a strange floating sensation. It took a minute to remember what it was. GM Dave had done this to him before, back when they were enemies. In the black nothingness, letters began to appear, slowly spelling out a message he had seen before.

Now Loading…

When the text vanished, Hirrus found himself suddenly standing in a familiar stone box. Lit by a single burning brazier hanging from the high ceiling, the room of stone blocks was GM Dave’s mystical floating jail cell in the sky above Inoha.

“I don’t have time for this,” Hirrus snapped quickly, even before GM Dave appeared beside him as he looked around. “It will take too long to get back to Denstaad from Inoha.”

“News flash, asshole,” GM Dave said with a laugh. “I can put you back when we’re done talking. You’re on my side now. You don’t have to carve a hole and jump if you don’t want to.”

“Hm.” Hirrus crossed his arms impatiently.

“Good work on Ontario, by the way,” GM Dave said. “I didn’t get to sit and watch the whole fight, but the speculation around a giant laser blast breaking open one of their towers has been pretty wild.”

“What do you want?” Hirrus said flatly. “You said you had information?”

“Yeah, just something to think about,” GM Dave said defensively, crossing his own arms in a mirror of Hirrus. “An unusual event that’s probably important somehow.”

“What is it?” Hirrus asked.

“People are going missing,” GM Dave said. “No corpses. Just gone.”

“Adventurers?” Hirrus asked. “Did one of Rumi’s creations go rogue?”

“No, not players. Your people,” GM Dave corrected. “And right in Denstaad. Folks are just vanishing. It took me a while to realize it wasn’t just the same reports of the NPCs Rumi was snapping up. These people were present and accounted for when you were turning Rumi to chili con carne.”

“This isn’t sounding like a lead,” Hirrus snapped. “This sounds like a new problem.”

“I’m just saying,” GM Dave said, raising his hands defensively. “If someone is picking up where Rumi left off, this is exactly what it would look like.”

Hirrus bristled at that. Much of his time free of his decision tree was already behind him, all for hunting down Rumi. He didn’t have time to hunt down a copycat, especially if he still needed to kill Nidra’s enemies as well.

“But I don’t think that’s what’s happening,” the man in red armor added quickly. “I don’t think your existence is in danger again. I think it’s a trap. Someone wants to get their hands on you, and they know enough about what happened in Yenon and Shemil to know that when atrocities are perpetrated against innocent folk, the Merciless One isn’t far behind. I wanted to be sure you heard about it from me so you didn’t do something stupid.”

“So take me there,” Hirrus said. “Where did the last person vanish? When?”

“I just told you it was a trap,” GM Dave said with a disappointed shake of his head. “And you want to walk into it? On purpose? I was trying to stop you from doing something stupid.”

“People are in danger,” Hirrus said simply. “If this is a trap, they’ve used bait that I can’t ignore. Take me there. We’ll see if their trap is strong enough for the game they’ve chosen to hunt.”

“Didn’t you just complain about being busy?” GM Dave asked with a smirk.

“Adventurers aren’t as clever as they think they are,” Hirrus said. “If someone is trying to trap me, it’s because they think I’m a danger to them. I would bet every coin I have that the one behind this is a member of the Shadow Council I’m supposed to be hunting.”

“So you’re going to let them trap you.” Despite his disbelieving tone, GM Dave was smiling. “Smart plan.”

“And when they come to gloat,” Hirrus began. Instead of finishing his sentence, he held up a hand and slowly made a fist one finger at a time.

“Shit, man,” GM Dave laughed. “Twist my arm why don’t you. You want to investigate my GM reports about missing NPCs, go ahead.” A red-armored hand clapped over Hirrus’s shoulder again. “Get to it, Columbo.”