When Corbin came to, it was in the middle of a panicked flight. What had— oh, he’d tried to take on the key holding guard all by his lonesome and been swatted down, hard. Kyessy had come to his rescue… the guard lay beside him, unblinking.

“Wake up, bird!”

“Huh? What’s–”

“Fly, now, and tell the others to take up defensive positions on the rock.”

“I can’t! You’re the only one who can talk to me.” He considered this. “Unless you give me my card.”

In a move that utterly flummoxed him, the ranger produced the card in a flash of holographic rainbow light and put it in his beak, and he launched himself upward.

“The key too!” she shouted, and he grasped that in his claws a moment later.

One glance spared back behind them showed something like three dozen soldiers all racing to kill her. Most of the column continued its orderly march, but this detachment brought up their bows, their spears, their gigantic mauls and their entirely-too-big swords.

“You know you can take damage for me,” he groused, nearly dropped the card, and dove towards his new friends.

They grabbed the key, and he handed the card to Rinna before explaining everything. Of course they’d already seen, and Hale was already cracking his neck in anticipation of tanking three dozen enemies at once. Rinna, meanwhile, began the healing process on their new allies. These were Fellwroth soldiers, most of whom immediately produced weapons and took up position on Hale’s shield side. Others made bows and arrows materialize out of thin air, from their inventories, and in one case a hand cannon. A literal hand cannon. Corbin was on the verge of inspecting him to see what in the devil that thing was, then he was roughly grabbed by Prissy and swung around in a circle.

“Oh muh gawd,” she exulted. “I thought I was done fer, knowwhamean?”

“Ow,” he groaned.

She loosened her grip. “Yer the best, buddy.”

“Course I am,” he managed, then realized she couldn’t understand him. She let him go, and he hopped up onto Rinna’s shoulder. “The felinian is Priscilla. Call her Cilla if you want, or Prissy, or Priscilla.”

“Priscilla!” the other felinian called, with his hands full of powder blue healing light, and his tiger eyebrow arched. As soon as her eyes fell on the tiger man, Corbin knew it was all over. It was like watching a cartoon or a bad rom com. It was possibly the fact that he was a bipedal Siberian tiger with a six pack. Corbin definitely believed that the former him might have had a bit of a furry kink, because he couldn’t really blame Prissy for her instant obsession.

“Go easy on her,” Corbin said. “Her ex-husband is a sixty foot tall embodiment of abuse.”

A thirty foot leap later, and Prissy was crouched just above most of the combatants.

Corbin told Rinna to relay his words. The tiger man said, “Remember the crocadillo? You’re going to want to give these soldiers the same kind of treatment. Right up the back door. Wait, bird, what does that mean? That is quite the turn of phrase coming out of a raven.”

“You’ll see,” Corbin said.

He didn’t have to wait long.

***

By the end of the battle, some thirty folks were dead, and Corbin had gone from level 3 to level 5. It was quite a massive jump, but to be fair, he had dive bombed several of the opposing soldiers in their faces with Kyessy’s Unerring Aim special attack. The sensation was a strange one, as magic propelled him like a missile straight into an enemy’s unprotected face. He very nearly died getting into their faces and dealing damage to himself, but to be fair, he ended up being a distraction that saved a lot of lives.

With a slight high ground advantage, Kyessy’s bow skills, Rinna’s healing, and the inability to get past Hale, the enemy quickly lost their morale. The neverending fear of having Prissy appear behind them, split off in four directions and stab the devil out of someone did wonders for keeping the Denspire soldiers from a relentless push forward.

The Denspire infantry had been made up, before they were brutally slaughtered by Hale and his shield wall, mostly of human and human-sized combatants: some fae, some felinians, with a central wedge composed of a dragonite and a pair of tieflings.

And what a battle it had been: shield wall up here on the rocks, damage counters flying here and there, spells and skills going up, then disappearing once one of them died, and Hale had conjured a huge spiky armor composed of rock at one point, then flung it out away from him before it totally ran out of defense HP. And here was the weirdest part: when men and women fell dead, Corbin could now see their spirits. Like it was a MMORPG and those who’d just died could stick around and see how the rest of the battle played out. Many of them were yanked back away from the battlefield, presumably to their spawn points, but others just… haunted the place.

Well, Prissy’s sneaky attacks, Hale’s tanking, Rinna’ healing, Kyessy’s sure shot, Drell’s manic attack and riposte, and a little bit of Corbin dive-bombing people had done the trick. He’d been awarded with thousands of xp, passing level 5 had given Corbin another skill point, it was hours later, and…

The Denspire soldiers were all dead now, save one.

“Stay back!” he shrieked, and held onto Corbin like he was a live grenade who might go off at any moment. “Stay back or the bird dies.”

“See if we care,” Kyessy said, and took the string off her bow. She then expertly slid the bow into a long leather tube of a case, and wound up the string to place in a special pocket.

But it seemed the rest of them did care. Hale, Drell, Rinna and Prissy all converged on the man, while several of the Fellwroth soldiers tended to their wounded and prepared to leave the mercenary scum to handle their own affairs.

“Seriously!” Corbin cawed at Kyessy.

“Oh stop it,” Kyessy said into his mind. “He won’t do anything drastic. He’ll be dead in a moment and you’ll be free.”

“And you know this how OWWWW–“

The soldier squeezed him painfully.

You have taken 5 damage!

Perhaps it’s not wise to freak out the man who just lost his entire company of fellow soldiers? Then again, it could be argued that it’s not wise to turn your back on living enemy combatants, but potayto potahto.

“Not another step!” the soldier screamed. “I’ll tear this freak’s head off, I will.”

“Could you give my card to the ginger felinian for a moment?” he asked Kyessy.

Kyessy hopped down, produced the card like a master magician (poof!) and handed it to the Shadow Walker.

Prissy seemed confused at first, then the card disappeared into her inventory and she equipped him.

Later, if he lived, he might get into the logistical and ethical quandary of the feeling and ability of ‘being equipped’ by someone. How demeaning and bizarre it was. For now though, he reached down and activated the Evoker’s Fiery Blade.

And he began to radiate flames.

Evoker’s Fiery Blade has dealt 6 damage to Denspire infantryman Hal Galliard!

Evoker’s Fiery Blade has dealt 4 damage to Denspire infantryman Hal Galliard!

Evoker’s–

Half a second later, the soldier had dropped him, and then another moment later Drell was standing on the man’s chest with a rapier poked all the way through him, in under the ribs and out near the shoulder blade. He dropped dead, and Corbin jubilantly hopped around on top of his dead body while the soldier’s spirit watched in shock and disappointment.

“You been bested by a raven, sucka!” he cawed. “You’re like a hundred times my weight. Eat my tailfeathers!”

He then turned back to Prissy. “Back to Kyessy, please.”

And wouldn’t you know it, but Prissy hesitated once again. Then, after a light sigh, she produced the card and handed it back to the ranger.

“No,” Kyesiara said. “I don’t want it.”

He flew up and perched himself on Prissy’s shoulder. “Look at me, whatever your real name is. I want you to look. I was born forty-one years ago in Assendanowhere Vermont, and I’ve worked at fail jobs all my life.”

His heart was beating really fast in his chest now. The words poured out despite him not remembering any of this before.

“I’ve worked at Blockbuster video. Do you understand what that means? Of course you don’t. I’ve worked at Radio Shack. I’ve worked, you’re gonna love this, at Circuit City. And that means… I don’t know what that means exactly about my choice of professions, but it does mean I’m a human, was a human… what’s so funny?”

Prissy was snorting laughter. “Did you really work at Blockbuster?”

“When I was like eighteen, yeah. What of it?”

“Wow, it’s like doom followed you everywhere you were employed.”

“Enough out of you, peanut gallery.” He turned back to Kyessy. “Can we make a deal? I can’t believe I’m doing this… whatever you want, I can help you get. See this felinian right here? She used to be super in debt to a third rate crime boss, and reeking of gutter filth. Now look at her… better cards, better equipment, she’s passed through a portal into a completely new world, and while she might reek of gutter filth a little, she’s had a bath in the past week. And to top it all off, she’s definitely got a thing for your tiger boy there–”

“My what now?”

“It doesn’t matter. What matters is I helped Priscilla get literally everything she wanted, she didn’t die once, not even when she got taken prisoner, and all it took was my brains and her tenacity. The only thing I got out of it was repeatedly demanding my freedom.”

The tiefling narrowed her eyes. Her skin was beginning to darken from a deep reddish to more of a purple. He was almost certain this wasn’t a trick his mind was playing on him, unless this entire farce was all an elaborate hallucination of his dying brain or something crazy like that.

“So what does that mean for me?” Kyessy asked.

“If we make a deal, I help you get what you want, and you help turn me back into a human.”

“Man,” Hale murmured to Drell, “can you believe the longest conversation Kyessy’s ever had was with a bird?”

“She also has very good ears!” Kyessy declared, then returned her focus to Corbin. “You’re sure you were a human?”

“Very sure.”

“And that’s what you want to be when you change back from a raven?”

“Why the sudden digs on humans?” Hale called out.

“You want me to be a male tiefling?” Corbin asked suggestively.

“Absolutely not. But you sound like a nellwynian. Maybe a gnomish.”

“So you’re saying you’ll do it?” he asked

“I will consider it.”

“Ugh. Okay, what’s the current quest?”

“First, you will explain exactly what happened to me three months and a week ago.” She waved her hands around like she was getting attacked by bees. “What all… this means.”

He blinked at her. “Riiiiiiight.”