Event complete.

The Silent Parnters’s stronghold has been overcome!

You may take ownership of this stronghold and all its contents. This will displace Silent Partners until such time as they can retake the stronghold from you. You will acquire the contents of Silent Partners’s treasury kept on this premises, which can be instantly transferred to your own stronghold, wherever it may be, and even if the stronghold is retaken, you will retain a Torn Flag as a permanent memento of your conquest!

You may unmake this stronghold. Its contents will be destroyed, along with the Silent Partners guild, but no other boons will be gained from this event. The Silent Partners guild name will be permanently retired, and all Guild Levels, Guild Reliquary contents, and Guild Trophies will be destroyed forever. Also, no doubt, you will make many enemies for life, who will not soon forget what you’ve cost them.

Hirrus was honestly surprised to see the message. After both Intricacy and Battle Orders had gone to great lengths to preserve their guild, it seemed endlessly foolish that Keynes had thrown all of his living officers in his path, not sparing a single soul to keep the guild safe from total destruction.

Nidra had been right from the start. Adventurers were full of nothing but pride.

Keynes had not believed for a second that Hirrus’s appearance could possibly end in his death.

And now his overconfidence would lead to not just his own undoing, but the undoing of his empire.

“Unmake it,” Hirrus said firmly. “My only regret will be that the collapse of this monument to the obliteration of Hari’s economy will be done by the system, and not by the hands of those wronged by it.”

[Global Alert]: Silent Partners has been Unmade by a raid group of one (1) members, led by Hirrus Callabryn! They are the 32nd guild Unmade on this server, and the 2nd unmade by [GUILD_%TAG_%NOT_%FOUND].

As soon as the message appeared, two things happened. The first was expected: the furniture in the room began to dissolve into dust, blowing away on an intangible wind. When he had destroyed Last of the Strong, it had started with Fidelis’s throne. But it was difficult to tell where exactly it began here. Keynes’s chair was naught but splinters and cloth fragments already. Hirrus was also distracted by the table collapsing under his feet as it turned to dust as well.

The second thing was the great fuss that kicked up immediately. Up until now, the place had seemed silent to the point that Hirrus suspected supernatural soundproofing at work. But as soon as the Global Alert popped up, there were shouts of alarm and cries of despair from every direction.

“Where’s my money? Where’s my fucking money!”

“What the fuck just happened? Where’s Bill? Bill should be- HOW IS BILL DEAD?”

“That means it’s still here! Run! Run while you can! It’ll destroy us all!”

Hirrus took a moment to wipe the blood and gore off of himself before leaving the conference room full of dissolving furniture. It wasn’t a perfect job, but it might make him look a little more like just another merchant scrambling to leave the building before the roof came down on all their heads. Keeping his head down and his weapons away, he walked quickly and purposefully out into the hall and back the way he’d come. He wasn’t sure how many of the stairwells he could trust to lead him to the exit, so he felt it was safer to just circle around to the way his guide had led him in.

The formerly empty halls were a mess. While Hirrus hadn’t seen another soul on his walk down, the hallways were punctuated now by knots of desperate adventurers who had rushed here in response to the notification. Some of them were trying to force open the vaults on this floor. Others had managed to get them open and were trying in vain to rescue the riches within. They grasped at bolts of cloth, stacks of metal ingots, and other goods, snarling in rage that they couldn’t get them into their inventories. More depressing were those who were clawing at the piles of disintegrating coins. All that came from those adventurers were wails of agony.

They were all so concerned with the wealth that they could not recover.

Hirrus, in his bloodied pea coat and slacks, just walked right by them unmolested.

It wasn’t long before he got to the stairs. A couple of bug-armored mercenaries were there, silently vacating now that their contract was dissolved. Hirrus imagined that he must have looked the same as them. Just another normal person whose decision tree had changed abruptly in the middle of their duties.

The stairs were clogged and crowded. Some adventurers were trying to force their way down to where the vaults were. Others were trying to force their way past the traffic to escape the building faster.

Hirrus was in no rush.

He was confident that if the building actually started to collapse around him, he could blast an opening with Civilization Buster. But until his hand was forced, he didn’t need to draw the attention of every adventurer in the area. He fell in line amongst the mercenaries and quickly but calmly moved up the stairs towards the exit.

The building stayed intact more than long enough for Hirrus to exit. By the time he exited onto the first floor, all of the furniture in the room where all the negotiations had taken place were gone. No more of the chairs, tables, or half-walls. There were some folk milling around - simple merchants no doubt receiving conflicting instructions from the decision trees - but the area was dominated by panicking adventurers, either streaming out of or shoving their way into the stairwells.

A handful of them had weapons drawn and were running around demanding to know if anyone had seen Hirrus. Though they were generally using “it” to refer to him, it was obvious what they sought. They wanted either revenge or glory. With his head down and his disguise on, though, none of them gave him a second look. Even with a bit of blood still on his clothes, he was allowed to file out into the city alongside the mercenaries.

Once he was out on the street again, Hirrus received the few Arcana that had been used in the fight. His escape from the premises was apparently a condition of gaining the Arcana. They were not worth mentioning, though. The Reflector ability that had redirected his Rapid Rip was just a slightly worse version of Cerberus’s Swat ability. And the Yojimbo Spirit Bomb was an Arcana whose multiplier was increased by consuming currency while channelling it. Neither appealed to Hirrus.

He couldn’t stop now, though. If he stopped to look back and watch the advertisement-covered building collapse back into an empty lot, it would have been obvious that he was no mere merchant. Instead, he turned his back on it and walked west, back towards the Field district.

There was only one more target to face.

He only hoped that Nidra learned something about how to find him.

It took a while to get back to the abandoned house where Nidra had made their new base of operations. When he arrived, he had expected some sort of fanfare. Instead, the place was quiet as a tomb. Nearly everyone was gone, though Kamar was seated in the dusty old dining room, leaning against the wall and staring sourly out of the window at the city.

“What’s going on?” Hirrus asked.

Kamar’s mood grew visibly worse at the question. He gave a noncommittal shrug, looking away to try and hide his sneer.

Hirrus wasn’t going to be brushed off so easily, and so just slowly crossed his arms, glaring at the man for as long as it took.

“The others are searching for answers,” Kamar said at last, once it became obvious that Hirrus wasn’t going anywhere. “Answers that Nidra thinks will not come.”

“Where is she?” Hirrus asked.

Kamar gestured at the stairs. Hirrus wanted to force a more coherent answer out of the man, but Kamar was not an adventurer. He was just a man who had endured countless torments and tortures. Dealing with his attitude would be a waste of time. It wasn’t as if they had more than a few hours before the end of their freedom and the return of their decision trees.

Hirrus didn’t find Nidra on the second floor of the building, but he did find a ladder in a back room that led up to a trapdoor in the ceiling. The attic was dusty and full of cobwebs, but similarly empty. At the south end of the attic, though, there was an open window. Hirrus poked his head out and found Nidra sitting on the building’s roof, staring out at the city of Denstad east of them.

“Hm,” Hirrus grunted.

Nidra made no verbal response, though she tilted her head to acknowledge that she heard him there.

It took a moment for Hirrus to squeeze through the window. His shoulders were much broader than any part of Nidra’s body, and so it was a brief struggle. But he managed to get through with a little effort. After years of the building being abandoned to the elements, the roof was slick with moss, so it took him a moment to get to her side without falling. Once there, it was much safer to sit than to remain standing.

“Kamar has an attitude problem,” Hirrus said at last, once it became clear that Nidra had nothing to say.

“No, he doesn’t,” Nidra said. She got a ghost of a smile for a moment. “He just hates you, specifically.”

“Why?” Hirrus asked.

Nidra’s smile turned to a look of complete bafflement. She stared at him for nearly a full minute, as if trying to decide if that was a real question or a joke.

“You slaughtered his wife,” Nidra said at last. She shrugged, as if the answer was obvious. “She was among Rumi’s faithful.”

“Hm,” Hirrus grunted. He probably should have guessed that.

But he wasn’t sure what to do with that information.

It brought a lot of things into perspective, but generally speaking, it was unimportant.

Hirrus knew that an apology wouldn’t bring the man’s wife back. And from experience, he knew that it wouldn’t cool the man’s grudge. The best thing he could do would be to give the man a wide berth and let him simmer in his anger until the Reset washed it all away.

“He said you think no answers will come,” Hirrus said. “What did he mean?”

“I underestimated their discipline,” she said. One hand began to fidget, picking a clump of moss off of the roof and sending it rolling down the gentle slope. “I thought JudoThrow would come to the aid of one of the other members of the council. Keynes, at least, should have earned his support. With the wealth of his guild destroyed, the financial gains of all the Shadow Council’s manipulations have been obliterated.” She shook her head. “If he didn’t come for Keynes… He will never come.”

“We’ll find him,” Hirrus said.

“No,” Nidra said firmly. “We won’t. Cerberus said that he’s not a normal adventurer. I only know how to hunt normal people. She said that he has no sleeping body. I only know how to find people who have physical presence in this world.” She shook her head, looking back out over the city. “I thought we could outsmart him. Make him come. Force him to stand against us in defense of his allies.”

“But he didn’t,” Hirrus observed.

“He’s gone,” Nidra said sadly. “Our time is over, and I have no other way of drawing him in. JudoThrow has escaped our reach. We’ve lost.”