His foes seemed willing - even eager - to maintain the standoff. It made sense. Even if these were cream of the crop, like Orlina’s raiders, it would take more than three of them to be a mild inconvenience. As soon as combat properly began, they would be dead in seconds. Why would they want to rush?

Unfortunately, they had one advantage. Time was on their side. Cerberus and her defenses were being relocated and assembled, and with every second that passed, their trail grew colder. The trio of adventurers were facing certain death, but it was death who would have to blink first.

So Hirrus blinked.

He needed this fight to go fast, so he started by activating Fleetness of Tonner. It would let him close the gap quickly, and if the fight started to drag, re-applying it to multiply its effects would put a very harsh limitation on how long his foes could withstand his attacks.

Stinker blinked second. Literally. His eyes flashed bright red, and Hirrus suffered a paltry four thousand seven hundred damage. Not even worth worrying about.

But his muscles locked up instantly. It was the effect they had used to freeze their victims when they had been kidnapping townsfolk. The debuff was called Paralytic, but it was only going to last a few seconds, which was curious, considering the bakers had been afflicted for several minutes. He supposed it was the dramatic difference in his ability scores.

“G-go! G-get him!” the short man shouted. “I don’t know how long it’ll hold!”

Hook roared and shimmering red energy suffused his body. With whatever Arcana he’d used empowering him, the large man lunged forward with his polearm, smashing the blade against Hirrus’s shoulder. It dealt only three thousand damage, but the potency of the impact sent Hirrus tumbling to his side, even as his body was stiff as stone. The polearm raised and fell again, hitting twice more at lightning speed, hammering more damage into him.

Line came next, dancing forward with a gleeful cackle. Her legs glowed, and while her feet stopped, she kept moving, a ribbon of red and blue energy rippled under her feet, and she slid into and through Hirrus. The attack ripped through him for nine thousand five hundred damage, and left behind a new debuff, which reduced his TEN and GLE, weakening his defenses.

The next time the halberd came down, it dealt four thousand five hundred damage. A significant increase, in the wake of the woman softening his defenses. The Paralytic debuff was fading fast, and they needed to hit him as hard as they could in this window. It was the only chance they were going to get to actually hurt him.

Then again, Stinker didn’t rush forward. His hands were pressed together and pulsing green energy surrounded him. Hirrus remembered his own Meditate Arcana, which would reduce the cooldown on any Arcana he had already used. Their plan wasn’t to capitalize on a narrow window and try to kill him in just a few seconds. They wanted to keep him permanently frozen so that he could offer no assistance.

As the woman blasted him with the same water-based breath attack she’d tried to strike him with when he’d come around the corner, the strategy seemed very sound. He suffered nearly twelve thousand damage from her attack, though the accompanying debuff didn’t stick, thanks to his legendary gauntlets.

“Not much time left,” Line barked, dancing away, putting some distance between herself and Hirrus. “Two second warning!” As she said it, Hirrus noted that it was exactly accurate. There were two seconds left on the Paralytic debuff right as she spoke. How powerful was the headband, that it was giving her so much information?

Hook grunted, and slammed the ground next to Hirrus with his foot before moving back as well. From the spot he’d stomped, a purple wave of fluid splattered out, bubbling and clinging to Hirrus. He sensed that there was another damage over time effect that was being stopped by his gauntlets, but an additional debuff afflicted him as well. Encumbered reduced his movement speed to a fixed 10% of normal. It would overwrite any movement speed increase as well. And the puddle applying it was still growing, meaning he would have to move a significant distance at a very slow speed to escape the debuff. Considering how much trouble he would be in if Stinker applied Paralytic again, this was an exceptionally powerful Arcana to stop him from killing the man before he could use the attack again.

That said, it was a gross underestimation of Hirrus’s abilities to think such a tool was enough to stop him.

Paralytic Faded, and Hirrus didn’t even bother to get to his feet. He pushed his head off the ground with one hand and unleashed Homaridiation. The Arcana blasted glowing green energy at Stinker - even catching Hook in the attack. To Hirrus’s surprise, it only dealt seven thousand damage to them - leaving them both alive. But to their surprise, when Stinker tried to glare at Hirrus with another Paralytic attack, it didn’t work. The ground at his feet glowed, shutting down the ability to use Arcana within the area of effect of the Arcana.

Once that threat was mitigated, Hirrus lunged to his feet. With his movement speed so restricted by the clinging purple goo, he could never get out of the bubbling morass fast enough to close the distance and shatter the strategy by charging at Stinker. But he didn’t need to. He had all the weapons he needed in hand already. All he needed was to use them.

A glittering green lariat of energy flew from Hirrus’s hand. Even though Zair Tether only did five hundred damage to Stinker, the man shrieked in almost inhuman terror. A flick of the wrist drew the man across the gap to stand directly in front of Hirrus, denying him the chance to inflict the Paralytic debuff again.

The small man in the red jacket started to say the word “please” as soon as he was before Hirrus. But the greataxe and hooked sword were already in motion. By the time the word finished leaving his lips, he was dead. His plea for mercy so slow that it went unheard instead of unheeded.

“Shit, he got Ed,” Hook cursed, confirming that they had actual names and not the ones the woman had given them as a joke. He lunged forward with his polearm, even though it was already too late to save his friend. “What do we do now?”

“Stand back,” Line snapped at him. “Don’t get any closer! That was Zair Tether. It has a forty-five second cooldown. Even with a CDR build, he can’t use it again for at least thirty seconds.” She waved Hook away from Hirrus. “Wait it out, and you can hold him here with another shot of Nectar. Buy the boys back home a full minute. More than enough for our job to be done.”

Hook stopped where he was, but he looked conflicted and angry. Of course he did. He was an adventurer. He thought he was entitled to victory. The idea that the best victory he could achieve was a slow death was antithetical to his experiences.

Line worried Hirrus, though. She was smart. She was the first adventurer he’d faced who understood what was at stake when facing him. No gloating or boasting. Just a wicked smile and an incredibly apt assessment of the situation. Combined with the legendary power of her disc-decorated headband, she represented the one quality he feared to see in an adventurer: intelligence.

She was going to have to die here. If she was allowed to escape this combat while Hirrus dealt with Hook - the obvious priority target due to his ability to limit Hirrus’s movement - she might become a true threat if she had the full resources of Battle Orders’s raid team at her fingertips.

It had been so long since Hirrus had feared for his life, the sensation actually thrilled him. The dark part of himself wanted her to escape. He wanted to face her with all the power she could imagine wielding. He wanted her to have all the resources in the world, and watch that cruel glint in her eye turn to horror when he smashed every strategy she threw at him and came for her at last. When he finally killed her, he wanted that vicious intelligence to recognize that she was beaten. He wanted her spirit broken before her body was at his feet.

But that was the monster talking. The monster he never wanted to become. Line would die here and now.

“I will do you a mercy,” he said as he turned away from Hook to face Line. “For your sake, and mine.”

“What’s that?” she said with a smirk. “Run in place for a few seconds for our amusement? I think I’d like that. And cardio is important, you know. You could probably stand to lose a few-”

The movement speed suppression of the purple goo stopped a lof of the things Hirrus could do to escape. All his physical buffs with movement speed attached would do nothing. Even Split Second was a movement speed increase. High Jump would only move him vertically. He’d gone through the same inventory of his capabilities when he’d been afflicted by Fearful Chill when facing the officers of Last of the Strong. But he had a new tool that he hadn’t had available to them.

Rapid Rip slammed into Line, dealing fifteen thousand damage. The Arcana was not a move speed increase. It only moved him a fixed distance. Line cried out in more surprise than pain as she fell to her knees, spitting blood. She was still alive, though. Hirrus suspected that this was a defense mechanism. Something to make her seem pitiable so that an empathetic foe might stay their hand from finishing her off.

For Hirrus, though, the empathetic action was to finish her now. The last thing he wanted was to give the monster within him the satisfaction it wanted to wring out of her. His icy greataxe finished the job with one vicious downward stroke for nearly eight thousand damage. She was dead before she could get in a snarky last word.

Hook had moved to stand on the other side of the poison puddle, putting it between himself and Hirrus. It wouldn’t save him. Not for very long. Hirrus could see the tip of the man’s halberd shaking. He didn’t like losing, but even worse, he didn’t like facing a foe alone.

“What is your name?” Hirrus asked, stepping over the pool of blood spreading from Line’s corpse. “Your actual name. What do you call yourself?”

“Ben,” the large man said. “My name is Ben.” He was at least brave enough to stand his ground, even if it was on the other side of a near-impassible pool of purple Arcana. “What are you?”

“You get to decide how long this part takes, Ben,” Hirrus said, ignoring the question. He activated Fleetness of Tonner, applying a second stack to it. He activated Terminus Grip as well, letting the sinister glow of the Arcana wash over him, making him all the more frightening. “This ends when I know what you know about where Cerberus went. Until then, you get to have the worst afternoon of your life.”