People parted in front of us as Vaozey and I marched through the streets in full armor toward Shahpao’s last known location. Even the guards didn’t dare get in our way, clearly identifying us as soldiers from our garb and wisely opting to avoid the trouble. Thankfully, nobody noticed that Vaozey’s sword wasn’t affixed properly and kept banging against her feet. She obviously didn’t need it, but it was an important part of the disguise, just like how I was displaying my pouch of hiltless daggers prominently instead of hiding it.

“Here it is,” Vaozey grunted, stopping in front of a supply shop. We were just outside the richer part of town where we had encountered Awptheyn the last time we were in Towrkah, and as such the building was well-maintained and largely made of stone. The door wasn’t, though, so when Vaozey shoved it open it nearly flew off its hinges. The inside of the bottom floor of the shop was a kind of display area and had two people inside. The first was the shopkeeper, a man who was just old enough to start having wrinkles and graying hair, and the second was a hired guard, as was standard in most shops.

“Can I help you-” the shopkeeper began at the same time the guard sprung into action to intercept Vaozey, holding out his hand.

“Stop,” he ordered. Vaozey didn’t stop, and instead continued towards him and placed her hand on his chest. His face went from confident to shocked as her fingers crushed a section of the cheap chain mail he was wearing into a clump, and before he could react he was flung into the leftmost wall at high speeds. The shelf he struck, along with the wooden boards around the impact point, split apart violently, and products on display nearby were knocked all over. I closed the door behind us once I realized how noisy the interrogation would probably be.

“You,” Vaozey growled, pointing to the shopkeeper. “There was a man, a military commander, in this store earlier today. Where is he?”

“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” the shopkeeper replied, stepping back from the counter with wide, fearful eyes. “We’ve had many customers today, I couldn’t possibly know who-” all the while he was talking, Vaozey was stomping closer to him, enhancing the force of her feet on the ground to leave cracked footprints on the wooden floor. He stopped speaking when she tore the entire counter out of its mountings with no more visible effort than she had expended in dispatching the guard.

“You had better start remembering then,” Vaozey advised, and I levitated a few of the hiltless daggers out of their pouch to form a ring around my left arm. I was still at the back of the store, ready to intercept any people who came in due to the commotion and stop them, but I saw the shopkeeper’s eyes focus on the daggers regardless. His expression told me all I needed to know, the very fact that I was using them made me, not Vaozey, the bigger threat in his eyes.

“You can’t just bully us like this,” the shopkeeper said defiantly. “You will compensate me for the damages you’ve caused.”

“I will consider it if you’re still alive by the end of the day,” Vaozey threatened. “My commander, where is he?”

“Damned thug,” the shopkeeper spat, earning a slap for his trouble. It was very light by Vaozey’s standards, barely enough to split his lip. “He was here, he left hours ago. What of it?”

“Where did he go?” Vaozey asked.

“How should I know that?” the shopkeeper snapped. At the same time, I heard the road noise from outside change a bit, and I opened the shop’s door to find two city guards standing outside. My left arm was out of view, so I pretended to be leaning on the wall with it to keep it that way.

“Is there a problem in there?” the one on the left asked. Both wore simple open-faced iron helmets and breastplates but otherwise appeared no more threatening than a civilian with a sword. The one who spoke had a rough blonde beard, while his counterpart had a red mustache.

“Nothing you need to be concerned with,” I replied curtly. “Military business.” Vaozey shouted something I didn’t fully catch at the same time I spoke, and the two guards glanced at each other.

“We’re going to have to ask you to move, sir,” the mustache guard said. “The military doesn’t have the right to operate like this inside the city. If this shopkeeper has done something wrong, you need to report it to us instead of taking the law into your own hands.” There was another smashing sound as Vaozey threw something across the shop. “You will also be required to replace anything broken, or pay for it.”

“Request denied,” I said. “Go on, report this to your captain or whatever it is you do.” Again, the pair looked at each other, and a larger group of pedestrians was starting to congregate to watch nearby.

“That wasn’t a request,” the first guard said, his tone notably less friendly. I let my left arm fall into view, hovering blades and all, and stared at him from inside my helmet, increasing the tension between us.

“Regardless, you aren’t coming in,” I said. There was a snapping sound, then a yell of pain as Vaozey broke one of the shopkeeper’s bones. “The law may favor you in this case, but it won’t prevent your deaths if you act stupidly.”

“Uttering threats against-” the mustache guard began to quote from memory before his partner elbowed him. The bearded man seemed to have more sense, and gave his less-intelligent comrade a look that clearly said ‘shut up’.

“This will be reported to our captain,” the bearded guard said. “Interference in the legal process of the city is a court martial offense, even for you.”

“I already told you to go report it,” I replied. “Why are you still here?”

“What’s your name?” the bearded guard asked. He sounded like he couldn’t decide whether to be firm or scared, and the combination ended up sounding more petulant than anything else. I raised my left arm and separated two knives from the ring of six, pointing them at each guard’s face as they hovered above my fist.

“Seyt off,” I ordered, and as though by magic, the two guards were suddenly dashing away down the road. I really hope Vaozey is right about the city officials not wanting to make trouble with the military, I thought with a sigh, lowering my arm and closing the door to keep prying eyes out, otherwise, this is going to be annoying. The shop guard Vaozey had brutalized began to stir, so I charged one of my daggers and shot him with it to put him down again.

“Did you get anything?” I asked, stopping to pull my knife out and wipe it off before joining Vaozey behind the pile of rubble where she had dragged the shopkeeper. In a few short minutes, the portly man had gone from looking dignified to half-dead, his clothes torn to shreds and his face bloody and covered in dust as he kneeled on the ground. He stared at me fearfully when I put the hiltless daggers away entirely with magic.

“Tell him what you just said, and speak up this time,” Vaozey snapped.

“I don’t know who it was,” the shopkeeper rattled off, speaking quickly and looking away. “There are criminals who operate around here, it was a few of them. I don’t know their names. They came in a few minutes after your commander, and then when he was talking to me about buying supplies they intervened and struck up a conversation. Then he left with them.”

“He wouldn’t have just left for no reason,” I said.

“I’m telling you, he just left with them!” the shopkeeper exclaimed. “They had gone over to the entrance and I wasn’t really listening because someone else came in. That’s all I know.”

“These criminals, you recognized them,”

“No-” the shopkeeper began, and Vaozey kicked him in the ribs.

“Then how did you know they were criminals?” Vaozey demanded. “You knew what they were, which means you recognized them. Were they dressed distinctively?”

“N-” the shopkeeper mumbled, rubbing his side as his bones popped back into place. He seemed to not know what to say to avoid getting hit again, so I gestured to Vaozey to step back. Reluctantly, she made some distance so I could approach.

“How did you know they were criminals?” I asked calmly, squatting down. My head was still well above his, but the gesture put me in a position where I couldn’t easily strike him, lowering his guard.

“How wouldn’t I?” he asked back. “I see them every day, skulking around out there. They come by every month or two and threaten us, just like you, but they demand money and break things. Of course I recognized them, but what was I supposed to say? Even this much will get me killed.” His words painted a very different picture than the one I was imagining, and one that was somewhat familiar to me.

“Do you know where they brought our commander?” I asked. “Do you have a suspicion about where they brought him, even?”

“They own a bar two streets over,” the shopkeeper sighed. “I don’t know anything else. If you’re going to kill me, just do it.”

“Gladly,” Vaozey replied, but I stood up and held my hand out to stop her. Out of the sightline of the shopkeeper, I flashed some words with light magic: We’re supposed to be on the same side as him, he’s probably not a willing accomplice. She paused as she read them, and I could tell she was grimacing under her helmet. Once the violence started, Vaozey’s older tendencies often took over.

“There’s no need for that,” I finally vocalized. “Shopkeeper, do the guards know about these criminals?”

“They pay off the guards,” the shopkeeper murmured.

“Do they pay them for protection or ignorance?” Vaozey asked.

“I doubt they have enough for protection,” the shopkeeper replied, his voice growing more confident. “What are you planning to do?”

“We’ll go talk to them like we talked to you,” I said. “Depending on the outcome, you won’t see us again.” I glanced back and saw the man push himself to his feet, then cough and clear his throat.

“And what about my shop?” he demanded.

“Did you lie to us?” I asked.

“No,” he said confidently.

“Will the criminals be civil when we ask them about where our commander is?” I followed up, and the shopkeeper scoffed in response. “Then you can consider this damage to be paid for by services rendered,” I finished. “Come on, let’s go.”

The “bar two streets over” wasn’t hard to find, the first person we asked about it pointed us to exactly the building we were looking for. With just two floors, it was short for a Towrkah building, but it looked to be quite old and made entirely of a different variety of stonework than the surrounding buildings. While most used cut stones of regular sizes, the bar was made by sticking stones of any size together with cement, giving it a more primitive look. Nobody was outside, so we let ourselves in through the heavy wooden entrance door.

This looks almost exactly like the Hatchet Crew headquarters, I thought as I got my first look at the inside of the building. About twenty rough-looking men and one large woman glared at us, reaching for various fighting implements at their hips or on the tables where they sat. The woman, who looked to be the leader of the crew and the barkeep, made a strange gesture where she ran her fingernails along the shaved sides of her head from front to back like she was moving nonexistent hair out of her face.

“Well well, what do you boys-oh I’m sorry, you two, what do you want?” she asked, attempting something like a smile and failing to produce one.

“Some of your people talked to our commander earlier today,” I replied, my eyes darting around to keep track of the motions of everyone. “They were the last ones to see him. We’d like to know where he went.”

“What’s his name?” the barkeep asked.

“Shahpao,” Vaozey said.

“Never heard of him,” the barkeep replied flippantly, levitating a few familiar hiltless daggers out of a pouch behind her back and holding them over her shoulders. “Now, you two want to get the seyt out of my bar, or is this going to be a problem?”

“We’re killing her, right?” Vaozey muttered, low enough that only I could hear it.

“Not until she tells us what she knows,” I muttered back.

“I ask because I think we could take this whole room pretty easy if you don’t care about keeping a low profile,” Vaozey murmured. “We’ll just have to take care of the witnesses afterwards.”

“You two just going to whisper back and forth?” the barkeep snorted. One of the men to my left began to approach, and a dagger flew out of my pouch, stabbing him in the throat. I didn’t charge it with electricity, still hoping to keep things from getting out of hand. To their credit, the men beside him quickly removed the blade and helped him up, and nobody else moved in to attack. Better instincts than most, I thought disdainfully.

“We have reason to believe you know where he is, so let’s not waste more time,” I said to the barkeep. “You will tell us where our commander is and return him to us, along with those who were with him, and that will be the end of this. Alternatively, you can try to resist, and we will kill everyone in this room besides you.”

“I love watching you military types,” the barkeep cackled, grinning. “You all think you’re so tough, Mehtsiyahns like you especially. You can’t even begin to imagine that someone might call your bluff when you make a threat. Well, let me fill you in: Everyone in this room is ex-military and we’re more than capable of handling you two, tinhead disguises or not. After all, if you were really that confident we wouldn’t be talking right now, you’d already have killed us.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Vaozey said, and I looked back to see her walking over to the bar’s door. Nobody stopped her as she moved to bar it and trap everyone inside. “We’re military alright, but neither of us are Mehtsiyahns. In fact, my friend here isn’t even from this country. No, the reason he wanted to give you one more chance to not lose your life today is because, unlike me, he had the patience to try to keep his cover intact.” I began preparing some magic, and as soon as the thick slab of wood clunked into place in the latch, the fight started.

In the blink of an eye, Vaozey dashed over to the two men closest to her and grabbed their faces, hooking her fingers through their eye sockets, then smashed their skulls together with enough force to send bone and brain matter flying across half the floor space of the bar. A moment later, two faint beams of red light lanced out from just below my eyes and struck the barkeep directly in her pupils, causing the knives she was in the process of launching to fly wildly off target and strike nothing. Then I learned why she had been so confident that she could kill us.

Two men, one from each side, came at me with their weapons raised. The one on the right had an axe, and jumped in a high arc from five meters away, boosting themselves off of the ground with magic. The left had a sword not unlike my own and kept closer to the ground, dashing at speeds that were only possible through the use of magic to keep one’s feet attached to the ground. Since the left was faster, I jumped into the air as well, sticking my hand to the ceiling with magic briefly to allow me to pull my body flat to the surface and avoid both attacks while I charged up my hands. I then let myself fall down again, catching both men by surprise and electrocuting them into unconsciousness.

There wasn’t much reprieve as a wave of tiny needle-like projectiles shot at me from behind, forcing me to spin around and face my attacker: another glass mage. A few of the needles had slipped past my armor and were quickly spreading a numbing feeling around their impact points, but some controlled bursts of healing magic slowed whatever poison the man was using to a crawl. As I drew my sword and formed a crude buckler out of hiltless daggers near my left hand, I noticed that the glass mage seemed clumsier than the one in Owsahlk, and wasn’t forming his needles on the spot but instead pulling them from a pouch.

Apparently shocked by the fact that I was still able to fight him, he didn’t provide much resistance as I dashed over and killed him, cutting him from under his right arm to halfway across his left shoulder. The two less-powerful fighters beside him were no better, swinging their weapons with barely a hint of strength and speed enhancement, not nearly enough to touch me. One lost his hands before having his face caved in by my boot, and I cooked the heart of the other while using him to block a crossbow bolt fired from a few meters away. Just as I was about to return fire at the crossbow wielder with my knives, an entire human body was thrown at him with enough force to shatter the bones of both men. Then a gunshot rang out, and Vaozey roared in pain.

Everyone else in the room was stunned at the volume of the shot, but I was more than used to fighting with guns, and I was on the shooter in a moment. A lanky man with a shaved head, probably still a teenager, had a shocked expression on his face as he held a smoking pistol and beheld a temporarily-cowed Vaozey clutching her left leg. That same expression became his last when I separated his head from the rest of his body, grabbed the other pistol at his hip, and turned to fire it at the barkeep as she began to recover from her blindness. I had intended to hit her in the lung, but the barrel of the weapon was so short that its accuracy was pathetic even at point-blank range, and the rightmost edge of her head was torn off, sending her spinning and spewing blood as she pirouetted to her final resting position.

Meanwhile, the wound did nothing to discourage Vaozey, in fact, it had quite the opposite of what its intended effect probably was. What began as a low grumbling in her throat turned into an animalistic vocalization somewhere between a roar and a shriek, and Vaozey burst into a different sort of violence, less coordinated and deliberate than before but no less effective. Everything within her reach became a weapon, including pieces of her attackers. As I dispatched another pair of swordsmen with launched daggers, I saw Vaozey plant her boot on a man out of the corner of my eye, ignoring a rain of blowing coming from other attackers around her as she ripped him in half with her bare hands and then used the piece she was holding to beat another attacker to death.

The few remaining criminals who were still standing tried to flee once one of them knocked her helmet off, but Vaozey wasn’t having any of it. The ones she didn’t kill she threw in my direction, and I quickly dispatched them with stabs or slashes of my sword. Almost just as quickly as it began, we were down to just one conscious fighter remaining, a red-haired man who was pinned to the stone wall behind him by the equally unyielding grasp of Vaozey’s left hand around his throat. I dispatched the two remaining unconscious but living fighters I had taken out near the start of the fight, then walked over to join her.

It was curious to watch as Vaozey, who looked as deranged as she did during the worst of her fits when I first met her, slowly let her anger fall away and her newer personality come back. The human side of me felt as though one person had just been replaced by another, and the change was also reflected in the general feeling of the room. Gone was the rough and worn bar that evoked a sense of danger from its patrons, and in its place was the site of a brutal slaughter with blood and body parts thrown about as though a pack of bears had run through in a fit of rage. The dank scent of humidity and food was now the metallic stink of blood mixed with the contents of guts, and the mumbling of the patrons had become deafening silence and wet dripping noises.

“Where is Shahpao?” Vaozey asked. The man sounded like he was trying to choke out an answer, but Vaozey didn’t seem to care, and she used her right hand to pulverize the bones in his left upper arm, then tear the limb away from its flesh. Unlike the clean cuts made by a sword, the damage Vaozey did took over ten seconds to fully heal over, and the resultant stump was mangled and swollen. The wound made the man clench his teeth so hard that a few of them snapped in half, then fell out as they were replaced with fresh ones.

“You might need to loosen your grip a bit,” I advised. “Don’t kill him, I’m going to pick up a few things.” Leaving the two to their chat, I went and fetched my hiltless daggers, then began removing potentially useful items from the ground. By the end, I had two pistols, four bullets and packets of gunpowder, a half bag of poisoned glass shards, a backup pouch of twelve more hiltless daggers, and a large sum of money. I carried Vaozey’s helmet back over to her as well after making sure the straps were still intact.

“If you’re not going to talk you can die like the rest of them,” Vaozey threatened.

“He’s with the boss!” the goon finally answered, and Vaozey pulled his other arm off in response, causing him to seize and turn red with pain as he tried to resist yelling.

“Where,” she whispered, putting her face right up to his.

“The Tawnay building, across town,” the goon whimpered. Vaozey drew her sword for the first time, and the man started to mutter something to himself that I realized was a prayer. Instead of killing him, though, Vaozey used the blade of the weapon like a wedge to cut both of the man’s legs off, causing him to scream out in a high pitch and begin to sob as the pain finally spiked too high for him to endure.

“You’ll be coming with us to show me,” Vaozey said, dropping the helpless man and taking her helmet from me to re-affix it to her head. She stared at the crying man for a few more seconds once her face was hidden, taking deep breaths, then looked at me. “Just checking, can you burn a pattern into skin with your magic?” she asked.

“Of course,” I replied. “Are you serious about bringing him with us? We’re going to have a hard enough time explaining what just happened here.”

“I have a plan,” Vaozey sighed. “I don’t like it, but it’ll work. We just need this to look a certain way. Burn marks of ire into the faces of everyone here, including him.” I raised an eyebrow, then remembered that my face couldn’t be seen.

“There isn’t enough left of some of them,” I said, gesturing to the puddles of gore left behind by Vaozey’s combat.

“It’s not like the city guard is going to wade knee-deep through gore to check every corpse,” she replied. “Just do all the ones with enough head left for it.” I nodded, then moved one of the pistols I was holding with magic into my hand, along with two bullets. It was so crude I could hardly believe it, essentially just a musket with the barrel sawed short and the stock cut off.

“Take this,” I said, holding it out to her.

“No, you keep it,” Vaozey replied. “You’re probably the only person in this city who can hit anything with one. Seytoydh headshot from across the room, unreal.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her it was unintentional, but I lowered my hand and stored the gun again as she requested, bending down to the live captive first to start the branding.

“Do it quick,” the man whispered. I obliged him, though he still screamed from the pain just as loudly as when his legs were cut off during the process, and continued to sob the entire time I branded the corpses of his companions, adding the final vile smell of the day to the air in the bar. Now this brings back memories, I thought as I inhaled, all it needs is some soil.