My first thought as I moved to break the line of fire between myself and the attacker was that he was using a gun, but as with the time in the temple, I quickly remembered that it wasn’t possible. Still, the impacts of the projectiles were much heavier than what the glass shards of the temple yihzhae’s attacks would have produced, so whatever this person was doing was a different kind of technique. As I vaulted over the desk to join Aavspeyjh in hiding behind it, two more spots on the wall exploded, and I felt a piece of my ear get torn off before quickly scabbing over.

The attacker, stupidly, walked into the room immediately afterward and began approaching us with heavy footfalls. Concentrating magic in my left hand, I thrust my arm up over my head and pointed my hand backwards, then let out a concentrated burst of light, getting a pained grunt in response. Aavspeyjh, stupidly, had glanced at my hand as I cast the magic and also been partially blinded, blinking his eyes and trying to focus on something. I vaulted back over the desk, knowing my target was in the rough center of the room, and ran at them to perform a quick execution.

Despite being blinded, the attacker’s magic technique was still active, and I could see that they were levitating seven iron balls of some kind near the elbow joint on their right hand while holding a sword in their left to try to block incoming attacks. Same kind of robes as the other Rehvite assassin, I thought, simpler mask though. When they heard my footsteps, their right arm pointed in the direction of the noise, and then an iron ball whipped out, catching me in the kidney. Someone unaccustomed to pain might have been stopped by the attack, but the sensation of being shot was nothing new to me, and the ball failed to fully penetrate.

“Die you ngaa-” the assassin managed to shout before my sword made contact. At the last possible second, he seemed to sense that I was about to strike them with an overhead chop and moved his sword to intercept. Still, the force of my blow was far more than he was prepared for, and the flat of their weapon smashed him in the face, knocking him to the ground. Predictably, the assassin’s arm raised up to where a normal attacker would have been standing and two more balls cracked into the ceiling, missing me entirely because I had leaned to the right.

My sword plunged into the assassin’s chest a moment later, slipping under his ribcage and piercing his heart. Light twinges of electricity, his last feeble attempts to resist me, danced along my fingers as they were blocked by my artificial electrical resistance. When the iron balls clattered to the ground, and his body went limp, I knew the assassin had fallen unconscious. A few more seconds of my sword in his chest would kill him, but instead I decided to leave him alive for the moment.

“Seytoydh assassins,” Aavspeyjh grunted from behind the desk. I looked back to see him, daggers still in hand, squinting across the room at me. “Excuse my language,” he sighed.

“Do you want this one alive for interrogation?” I asked, gesturing to the robed figure on the ground.

“No, kill him,” Aavspeyjh replied. “Just make sure you don’t damage his cores, I’ll have Nahlao process him once this is over.”

After I killed the assassin, Aavspeyjh and I tentatively walked out into the lobby to find the steward and several other armed servants barricading the front door with planks of wood. A few corpses were also strewn about, common mercenaries with simple armor and armaments. Immediately upon seeing us, the steward led Aavspeyjh and me into a locked room that I hadn’t been able to enter before, revealing some kind of maintenance room with three exit tunnels, two on the back wall and one in the middle of the floor with a ladder sticking out.

“Sir, for your own protection you will be heading to the vault,” the steward said to Aavspeyjh, gesturing to the ladder.

“My wife?” Aavspeyjh asked.

“Already there,” the steward smiled. “Do not worry, there are only around fifty attackers, most of whom are similar to the rabble you saw outside. We are more than capable of repelling them.”

“Yuwniht,” Aavspeyjh said, turning to me, “take the tunnel to the right. You were supposed to be meeting up with miss Svaaloyweyl in the lobby, but that was not for another hour. The right tunnel will lead you to the armory which is just across the hall from the east worker’s entrance, where miss Svaaloyweyl was to meet with my steward.”

“You’re not asking me to wait for her, right?” I asked.

“No, just leave as quickly as possible,” Aavspeyjh said. “The most important thing is to ensure that the royal guard do not see you anywhere near this mansion. Upper-level captains are probably aware that you were still alive and staying here in secret, but anyone else will ask too many questions. Once you are off the property, head to Teyysao’s inn and find miss Svaaloyweyl, then immediately put as much distance between yourselves and this place as possible.”

“Understood,” I nodded, and Aavspeyjh began descending the ladder. The steward offered to give me a lantern since the tunnel I was heading down was unlit, but I made a small orb of light magic and gestured that I didn’t need it. The look on the old man’s face only betrayed his shock for an instant before settling back to normal. As I stepped into the musty wooden tunnel I heard the door lock behind me, then muffled shouting.

Two minutes later, the tunnel abruptly ended in a plaster wall. Not sure of what to do, I was debating punching through it when I heard footfalls behind, indicating that it definitely led into some kind of room.

“Look at this,” a deep male voice remarked. “Some kind of glaive.”

“This sword is made of gold,” another voice laughed. “What kind of poymawpjh would pay for something like that? I could probably break it with my bare hands.”

“I doubt you can even lift it,” the deep voice jabbed back, then both laughed. One human is about three meters forward, one meter left of me, I thought, trying to get a sense of the layout of the room on the other side. The other is about five or six meters forward, two meters left? It’s hard to tell at this distance, something about the acoustics is wrong. I could hear slow footfalls as the two moved around, and was waiting for one to approach the plaster wall when a third voice appeared.

“You yeyhhayseytoydh tawtzeytayb!” roared a woman from some distance straight ahead. Both sets of footsteps stopped, and since one was only about two meters ahead of me I decided to take my chances. Using my shoulder, I rammed through the plaster wall and then tackled a man who was almost my size from behind, throwing into a table in front of him and destroying it. Without even thinking about it, my hands grabbed the sides of his helmeted head and I twisted, breaking his neck and forcing him to look at me while I sat on his back. The shocked expression on his face was frozen for a moment before he fell unconscious.

To my left, Vaozey had also sprung into action, grabbing her opponent’s sword with her left gauntlet and caving in the front of his skull with her mace, splattering blood all over the walls and floor. While I cooked my opponent’s brain quickly, Vaozey smashed her victim’s head four more times, turning what was left of it into a pulp of bone and skin. With both mercenaries dead, the pair of us relaxed at nearly the same time and stood up, glancing at each other and the environment.

The Zae’ey’yaob “armory” was more like a display room for various weapons and pieces of armor. Tables lined the walls and a few more were arranged in a circle in the center of the floor space, each covered with ornate weapons or bits of armor. By my quick assessment, more than half of the pieces were purely ceremonial, either being shaped too impractically for use or made of materials chosen more for their aesthetics than function.

“You’re early,” I remarked. “Were you spotted entering?” She has more armor now, I noted, observing not only a new pair of gauntlets but also forearm and thigh guards on Vaozey’s body. She also had a metal face guard again, though she was still wearing a scarf underneath it.

“You seytoydh joking?” Vaozey scoffed back. “I was sitting out there for half an hour waiting for that nahldeylay steward to finally show up and let me in. What the seyt is going on here anyway? I heard some yelling out front, then, well…” Vaozey gestured behind her to the hallway, where I saw what looked like the corpse of a male servant.

“We need to leave, now,” I said. “Aavspeyjh told me to find you and then put as much distance between the mansion and us as possible.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” a deep voice intoned from the hallway. Two figures, both bearded and male, rounded the corner into the armory while Vaozey and I took up better positions away from the merc corpses. Both figures wore plate mail, though even just by sight I could tell it was of inferior make. Of the two, the larger one stood even taller than I did and gripped a long-bladed bardiche in his hands, while the smaller one was Vaozey’s size and held two battle axes.

“That him?” the bardiche man asked, gesturing to me.

“He’s the ‘jhaoyeyl’ all right,” the axe man replied with a smile. “And she’s the ‘madwoman’. Looks like we got pretty lucky.” He began to step forward, but then the bardiche man put out a hand to stop him.

“He’s got two arms,” the bardiche man said, looking at me suspiciously.

“So what?” the axe man grunted.

“Are you saaweymz going to talk all day?” Vaozey taunted. Both men glared at her, then the axe man started laughing.

“Alive, right?” he chuckled.

“That’s what it said, yeah,” the bardiche man replied.

“Doesn’t mean they have to have all their pieces then,” the axe man grinned. “Look, you two, you can make this easy if you want to and just give up. Or, and I would prefer this, you can fight back and make it interesting.” There was a moment of silence where nobody said anything, then both men charged us, with the larger man focusing on me.

I knew immediately, from the bardiche man’s size and how he moved, that he was using internal force magic of some kind to bolster his strength. As I dodged out of the way of his fist attack and watched it cleave a table to my right into splinters, I also knew there was no sense even trying to block. His weapon was solid metal and probably weighed fifteen or twenty kilograms, even if my body could resist such force my sword likely couldn’t. Still, even with force magic he was slower than me, so I countered his attack with a slash to his neck and felt my blade hit metal.

Grinning, the large man reared back for another strike, telegraphing his intentions so clearly that I waited until the last possible second to get out of the way, suspecting it was some kind of trick until the blade of the bardiche was actually moving downward at me. What is he doing? I wondered, attempting to stab him in the face and missing because the man managed to move his head in time. Another forceful, but extremely clumsy horizontal sweep nearly caught me in the belly because of the tight fighting conditions of the room, and I responded by hopping back and tossing one of the ornamental weapons at my opponent.

Meanwhile, Vaozey appeared to be faring well against the man with the axes, shoving him back to near the doorway and scoring several hits on his shoulders and arms, denting the soft metal plate protecting him. Are they amateurs? I wondered, glancing at the axe man’s movements. His motions are all wrong, and his footwork is terrible. Yet, I think both are using magic, so how did they learn it? My opponent swung at me horizontally again, drawing my attention back, and I saw that he too didn’t seem to understand how to position himself correctly. As the bardiche swung past me, I stepped in and kicked his knee, crushing it and sending him down to one knee with a grunt.

“Who told you about me?” I demanded, stepping back and taking up a more stable fighting stance. Predictably, my opponent sneered and forced himself back to his feet, then tried to tackle me. Positioning my sword straight perpendicular to the surface of his chest plate, I braced the pommel with my left hand and flexed my cores. Then, using the man’s momentum, my muscular strength, and an intense burst of force magic, I shoved the point of my blade at him. The bet I made, that his armor was softer than my weapon, was won, and like a combat knife through the exterior of a tin can my weapon slipped into his innards.

Using yet more magic on my feet, I held myself in place and shoved him back, throwing the now-roaring mass of flesh and metal to the ground. A bit low, I grumbled, seeing that my sword had probably missed his heart. Still, his legs aren’t moving, I probably got his spine. As I walked up, the bardiche man tried to swing at me from his ground position, and with little effort I ripped his weapon from him and threw it across the room.

“Who do you work for?” I growled. “You can't be a Rehvite warrior if you're this weak, so who hired you?”

“Zhahlzeyl!” the axe man yelled from behind me, and by the time I turned to look in the direction of the noise he was already too close and moving too quickly to avoid, with Vaozey just behind but unable to intercept. A painful rush of magic fuel burst out of me, and purely on instinct, I anchored my feet to the ground. The axe man’s right weapon was raised and coming down, and so I intercepted it at the handle with my left forearm, stopping it as though it weighed nothing. Then, my right fist flew forward in a blow charged with all my remaining excess power, slamming into the center of my attacker’s plate mail.

I expected my bones to break once I realized what I was doing, and they did, but that wasn’t all that happened. The metal plate on the axe man's chest caved in from the impact, almost completely inverting its curvature from the sheer kinetic energy applied to it. That same energy wasn’t expended merely by deforming the armor, and carried through the man’s entire body, lifting his feet from the ground and throwing him almost three full meters away, through a table and onto the hardwood floor below. The sound of the impact, a deep thump accompanied by the crunching of my fingers, echoed around the room, wiping out the other sounds of battle.

“Seyt,” Vaozey remarked after a second of everyone being stunned, letting herself relax. The bardiche man seemed too stunned to react, and the axe man had dropped both of his weapons as he gasped on the ground, unable to breathe because his armor was crushing his chest.

“You,” I said, turning back to the bardiche man as my right hand's bones crackled and popped. “Is anyone waiting outside for us?”

“Are you going to let me live if I tell you?” he asked. I saw him glance at the sword in his belly, but both he and I knew he wouldn’t be able to pull it out before Vaozey or I killed him.

“Yes,” I lied, “if you answer both of my questions.”

“There’s nobody except at the front,” he answered. “As for who we are, we’re just freelance mercs. Some robe-wearing npoyt gathered up a bunch of us to come over here, promising loads of cash if we caught you. Sounded too good to be true but we needed the money. Please, Laezheyv is suffocating. Help him, and we’ll both leave peacefully. This isn't worth dying over.” Freelance mercenaries that know force magic? I scoffed, Then again, I suppose I qualify as one, so maybe I should be more open-minded.

“Let me see that helmet,” I said, reaching out for the man’s head and readying heat magic. “Then I’ll let you go.”

Sadly, the bardiche man’s helmet didn’t fit my head properly. After I got done killing him and wrapping my face using the fabric of my arm covering, Vaozey killed the axe man using one of the nearby daggers, then we left before anyone else could show up. True to his word, nobody seemed to be guarding the east entrance, but we could still hear the sounds of fighting coming from the main one. Vaozey wanted to go fight more, but with some convincing she followed me to the wall around the property and climbed over it, dropping down into the street.

After that, I took out the letter of introduction from my backpack and found that it had a location near the northeast side of the city set up as a meetup point for the caravan. Seeing no better option, we headed in that direction, trying to look as inconspicuous as two heavily-armed mercenaries spattered with blood could look in the middle of a street. Vaozey had wiped herself off when we left, using a tapestry from the wall of the armory, but she still looked like she had just walked off of a battlefield. Thankfully it appeared that the royal guards were more concerned with the trouble at the mansion than us, paying us little mind.

When we arrived, it was still night, so we found a nearby alley to wait in. Though Vaozey didn’t appear tired, I was exhausted, and quickly fell into a nap. Nearly thirty percent of my magic wasted on two fights, I sighed, I need to pace myself better.

“The caravan doesn’t leave until noon, but I’m not waiting around here while you sleep,” Vaozey growled sometime later, waking me up. “They’re starting to gather now, get up, and let’s go.”

“Let me change into my gambeson,” I said, pushing myself up to my feet and flipping open the backpack again. The garment Aavspeyjh had procured for me was a deep burgundy, nearly the color of blood, and when I pulled it out I saw a piece of paper fall from inside the folded fabric. Another letter, I thought, picking it up from the ground and reading the name on it, to me again?

“Is that Koyl character coming with us?” Vaozey asked snidely. Ignoring her, I flipped the paper open and began to read.

Yuwniht,

I wish I had the nerve to tell you this to your face, but just the thought of it puts a pit in my chest. My father offered to send me with you when you leave in a few days, but I told him I didn’t want to go. It’s not how it sounds, I swear, so don’t tear this up yet or come looking for me until you finish reading. I don’t think you would but don’t do it anyway, read the rest, and don’t show this to my father.

I’m not like you, and I’m certainly not like Vaozey. There are people in this world who are made for fighting and killing, born with the aptitude for it. When I was a kid, I always used to dream about being like that, being a real warrior with a sword and magic and all that. It was so glamorous back then, but kids don’t really see the whole truth of things. As I grew up, and I realized what my family did for a living and what kind of person my father was, I couldn’t reconcile it with who I wanted to be, so I ended up leaving home. The sad part is, I turned into a scumbag just like him the second I got my hands on real freedom. Not as bad of one, of course, but that was probably due to lack of opportunity rather than lack of drive.

I don’t want this section to sound like I’m blaming you, because I’m not, but ever since I met you my life turned from a minor tragedy into a nightmare. Maybe that’s not totally accurate, before Yaavtey it was alright, but since then it’s just been one thing after another. Blood and murder and screaming and horror and pain and suffering the likes of which I never dared to imagine before experiencing it. I was just holding on ever since Pehrihnk, only getting out of bed because of the thought that I might be able to go home. If it weren’t for that, I think I wouldn’t have made it past Owsahlk. When I finally did get home, I couldn't even relax properly for days.

I can’t go back to the kind of thing you keep getting involved in. I’m not cut out for it, especially not this Rehvite business. They nearly killed you, and you’re the most terrifyingly strong person I’ve ever met in my life, so what does that say about them? Whether or not you realize it, you’re on a suicide mission. I just got my life back, I can’t throw it away like that. I'd try to tell you to give up too, but I know you well enough to know that whatever your reasons are, they're worth more to you than any words I can give.

I’m not going to leave you hanging out to dry though. Once I get my head right, I’m heading to Awrehrehzha by messenger boat. That’s the city near the noypeyyoyjh, in case you forgot, Rehvite territory. We would have sent you by boat ourselves but considering that you and Vaozey have prices on your heads you’d most likely be intercepted at the docks and killed. Anyway, I’ll meet up with you when, or if, you arrive there, and help you in any way I can.

Why? After Owsahlk, as long as whatever you’re doing is going to kill Rehvites, I’m fully behind it. There are people in this world who deserve to die, what happened in Owsahlk proved that to me definitively. Not to mention I owe you my life, even if it was kind of your fault I nearly lost it. Mostly your fault, actually, but let’s not get caught on details. I suppose I’m a coward for not wanting to kill them myself, but it runs in the family in case you couldn’t tell. Again, don’t show this to my father, I cannot stress that enough. Be thankful you're getting away from him before he can get his hooks in too deeply.

I hope to see you well in a few months, so don’t die,

Koylzmeyl

The writing in the letter was rough in places, as though Koyl's hand was shaky when writing certain words, but for the most part it was perfectly legible. When I got to the end, I found that I was gritting my teeth quite hard, and with a single magical flex I set the paper ablaze, incinerating it in seconds. Once the letter was gone, my mind was blank for a few seconds, and I found myself staring at the burgundy gambeson.

“That was from him right?” Vaozey asked. “Is he coming with us? I heard something about it but-”

“No,” I replied, interrupting her. “He’s staying in Kahvahrniydah. That was what the letter said.”

“Good,” Vaozey snorted, “not to disparage your ‘benefactor’ but his son is a niyzao. If you’re putting that thing on, put it on, then let’s get over there before I die of boredom.”