It was terrifying how easy it was to kill people. For some reason, Mia expected it to be much harder than fighting monsters, and in some ways it was … but not by as much as she’d expected. In the end, she came to the conclusion that she’d either gotten super lucky with her Class — which was almost certain — or that the many magical fruits she’d eaten just put her a league above regular Rank 0s, which was also obvious when she’d put a moment of thought into it.
Her strength was half luck and half hard-earned. After all, it wasn’t like she’d been spoonfed her Levels or magical fruits; she’d earned most of them by delving into Rifts and completing Quests.
Still … all that was just rationalising. Murder shouldn’t be so easy; there was just something fundamentally wrong with it. A twitch of her wrist, a snap of her will, and her Spectral Blade went spinning towards the enemies like a horrible mockery of a Frisbee. Magical shields, armour, weapons raised in parry, flesh and bones, nothing could halt it. Slow, certainly, but halt entirely? No.
And it’s only going to become more and more deadly. Mia thought, her conflicted gaze flickering between the astonished eyes of a furred, feral woman looking very much like a humanoid panther lost in the depths of a frenzy and the mangled corpse of two soldiers at her feet. She was without clothes, wearing only the striped black and white fur that grew all across her body, but that at least did enough to cover her privates.
The woman had managed to react in time and attempted a dodge, but it wasn’t quite fast enough, and the spinning Spectral Blade cut off an arm and left a deep gouge in the left side of her torso. Mia’s eyes flickered to the woman’s silently moving lips and found blood marring the fur on her chin.
Her feelings of guilt didn’t evaporate entirely, but they faded into something dimmer, more like pity. She doubted the woman had been a cannibalistic serial killer before the System warped her into whatever she was now. The unnatural rage faded from her eyes as she stumbled and fell, first to her knees and then to her side as her blood pooled beneath her. A twitch of Mia’s wrist had the spell circle around her wrist spin backwards, and the Blade came flying back into her grip.
“Should we heal her?” Mia asked, feeling uncertain. That … that could have so easily been Carmilla’s fate, had Mia not stumbled upon her back then. Her girlfriend also suffered from unnatural urges and had a tendency to go on rampages.
“Just enough to stop her from dying,” Mia added quickly. “That way she wouldn’t be able to stab us in the back once we pass.”
Camie kneeled down next to the woman and touched her shoulder, her crimson mana spreading out like a blanket over the fading beastkin. “You cut her heart in half, and not cleanly. I doubt anything we have will help, unless you want to waste a System Potion on her?”
Her distaste for the latter option was clear … and Mia hesitated, then shook her head. There could be people further up ahead in dire need of those potions. People who weren’t murderous cannibals. Furthermore, Mia didn’t have any System Healing Potions anymore, and she had no right to ask others to give theirs up.
“Let’s go,” Mia said, banishing thoughts of the dying woman from her mind. She stepped around the soon-to-be corpse and gingerly approached the wide-open doors up ahead. Another four beastkin corpses were lying out there, most of them having arrows sticking out of their bodies, one through the eye, another two through the chest and the last one sporting no less than five all across the front of his body, barely penetrating thick, leathery skin. Mia averted her gaze and took a deep breath. “Seb? Rachel? Jasmine? It’s Mia, we came to help … please don’t shoot?”
Mia could sense the three familiar presences inside, and not a single other person, which was why she hadn’t been in all that much of a hurry. The furred woman had been the last of the beastkin alive on the way to the room Sebastian’s team occupied.
“Mia? Thank God, come in quick!” Sebastian’s voice sounded out from inside, and Mia did just that, though she held onto the Shield’s spellcircle tightly. They were allies, but they might get jumpy after being ambushed, and she refused to be caught off guard again. “Do any of you still have one of those potions? Jaz is … “
A wet cough interrupted him, just as Mia finally got a look into the room. Sebastian was kneeling over the bloodied form of the elven archer, the golden mana he wore around himself like an aura doing its best to heal the savage gouge across the woman’s chest.
“She’s not going to make it,” Sebastian said, his voice cracking as he glanced away from the pale face of the unconscious elf and up at them, a pleading look in his eyes. “I already fed her the two we had, but- but the bastard must have crushed her lung or something. It’s not helping.”
Carmilla repeated her earlier actions, checking up on the pale, shivering woman with her mana. A frown creased her face. “Her lungs are full of blood, and four of her ribs are in more pieces than I can count. The ribs had grown back, and her heart was unharmed, despite everything around it being ravaged. That’s probably thanks to the potions you’ve fed her. I can remove the blood from her lungs, maybe the pieces of bones too … but her body is not in a state to take my healing after that.”
“But it would be able to take a System potion?” Mia said. It wasn’t much of a question. Camie nodded, and Mia wanted to curse the System for not putting a single healing potion into the Raid’s rewards.
“I still have one,” Lina said after a few seconds of silence, sounding hesitant. Of course, she did; she probably wanted to keep it as a lifeline for herself, but was being pressured by peers to give it up. Mia grimaced, feeling bad for being the cause of that … but the certain death of a trustworthy ally right now won out when weighted against the possible death of a teammate in the future. “Here.”
Sebastian shot her a thankful look, taking the vial with great care. “I’ll repay it, I promise. Thank you.”
Mia made a promise to herself that she, too, would repay this … debt. Not that making sure every member of her team had at least a single vial of the best healing potion they could get their hands on was bad policy. She would have done so anyway, but now it would become a priority, especially if the beastkin were really sinking to new lows, ambushing the people who risked their lives to save them.
They’ll pay for that. Mia promised herself. She’d have been happy to sit back and relax for a bit, let the army handle the most recent trouble, but the beastkin had made it personal. They’d threatened her friends and family. That was not something she would take lying down.
“I’ll need you to make sure she swallows the potion when I tell you,” Carmilla said, her voice strained with effort. It must have been hard to overwhelm Jasmine’s spiritual resistance to take command of the blood in her body, even though the woman was out cold and Camie had been practising doing just that. “Not a moment before that. If you seal up the chest wound before I get it all out, we might have to cut her open again and then waste another potion to seal it back up.”
“Understood,” Sebastian said seriously, his blonde hair frayed and his once bright blue eyes bloodshot. The stubble on his chin that he’d gotten over the Raid was gone, but he still looked like death warmed over despite the Light thrumming just beneath his skin. “I’m ready.”
Mia turned away from the scene, feeling a bit squeamish despite everything she’d seen in the last few weeks. The way Camie made the blood erupt through the deep gouge on Jasmine’s chest looked like something out of a horror movie. Her gaze panned across the room, taking in the four beastkin corpses laid out around the fallen archer. Rachel, the trio’s scout — though she did her best to fit the rogue stereotype with her dark getup and broody demeanour — stood in a corner, a deep frown twisting her lips and her arms crossed. She gave Mia a silent glance, and what might have been the faintest hint of a grateful nod.
“Now!” Camie said, and Mia soon felt the potent magic held inside the vial mingling with Jasmine’s own mana as it suffused her body. “Good. I … think she’ll be fine.”
“I’m hearing seven- eight beastkin retreating up the stairs,” Mia said, her ears twitching while her fingers tightened around the hilt of her Blade until her knuckles turned white. “Jeff’s group forced them into a retreat; they want to escape through a balcony. Henri’s team is chasing them, but there are only three of them against eight.”
Mia remembered Henri, the stoic man who’d asked all the strategic questions before the Raid. Though she mostly remembered him for the Buddhist monk robes he always wore.
It seemed like whoever had assigned the rooms had spread them out all across the building. It made sense; it would be harder to take out the entire Raid team with a single well-placed bomb this way. They probably put Mia and her friends on the top floor because their room had a balcony and Helene could fly, while Lina could run on air. They could evacuate that way more easily than any other team.
A fat load of good that would have done if there were snipers or other kill teams hiding in ambush outside. That’s what Mia would have done in their place; it was only logical, and why she never even considered escaping through the balcony. Especially with the two avian beastkin that had tried to ambush them from said balcony. Not that those two in specific would cause anyone any trouble again in their current state.
“We should capture them, if we can,” Brent said before anyone else could respond. “We need information, and corpses don’t speak.”
His voice was dry and his words blunt, making it obvious that he was extremely unhappy with just about everything that had to do with the current circumstances.
“I- Right,” Mia said, blinking. “There are enough of us to overwhelm them; we should be able to manage.”
Mercy was the privilege of the strong. How did that one Batman quote go? ‘The stronger you get, the less you need to kill your enemies.’ Was it? Yet another reason to grow more powerful, killing people was horrible, and Mia loathed doing it, even if anger and panic could make that feeling fade to the background temporarily.
Mia let go of the spell circle, and the Spectral Blade shattered in her grasp, dissipating into the air as it reverted into mana. In a second, she had Arcane Shackles primed for casting. Brent had been right; there were enough of them to overwhelm a group of eight without killing them, especially if they managed to ambush them.
If they really are like Camie, suffering from new, feral instincts … I should reserve my anger for the one who decided to take advantage of them instead of helping them.
It was hard; the beastkin were right there, killing people, eating them, in some cases. It was much easier to hate them than some distant manipulative asshole, and hate them she did; it was impossible not to after what she’d seen. She just decided not to let that hate transform into a murderous rampage.
“We’re staying here,” Sebastian said, gently cradling the still pale and unconscious elf. “I’m not leaving her here in this state while those bastards are running amok. Fuck. Didn’t we have a damned protection detail? Guards or something?”
“We had,” Mia said, grimacing. “A few of them are still fighting. Most of them are dead. I don’t know where these beastkin came from, but they are reasonably strong. We’ll try to keep anyone from escaping up the stairs.”
And Zeigler probably didn’t give us his best soldiers as guards while he is fighting a mini-war. Reasonable, but it fucked us over pretty hard.
“Stay safe,” Brent grunted, then took point heading towards the stairs, Mark at his shoulder and the rest a few steps behind the two.
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“How are we going to disable them without killing them?” Mark asked. “Break their limbs? I doubt they’d be lucid enough to answer questions if we do that, it hurts like a bitch.”
“Tie their arms behind their backs?” Mia said, giving Nikki a glance. She should know how they did it in more established societies; there was no way they just killed every Classed criminal because they’d be too troublesome to keep contained in a prison. “Mage types should be pretty limited by that.”
“It’s the best we have,” Nikki said. “There are materials that absorb mana, enchanted shackles that keep you on the cusp of mana deprivation. We don’t have those, nor the spells that can suppress casting, or external expressions of magic. I’d say kill the brutes, keep the mages alive and interrogate them, though that’s going to be problematic. Mages tend to invest more heavily into Will than fighters, which makes them more resistant to torture.”
“We are not torturing anyone,” Helene stated with a note of exasperation in her tone, before growing a bit concerned. “Right?”
“No,” Brent said, and Mia shook her head at the same time.
“If they don’t talk, we can see whether Jeff’s thing can make them,” Mia said. Jeff’s borderline mind-control was extremely unethical by old-Earth standards, but it wasn’t torture.
Camie, Mark and Nikki stayed silent, but Mia could feel they wouldn’t have been against torture either. Lina was just numb, focused, but she looked most similar to how Mia felt. Angry. Miserable.
“Can you glean any information about them?” Brent asked. “Elements, strength, mage, elementalist, melee or ranged? Armour or no armour? Anything.”
“No armour, no metal or anything I could hear anyway,” Mia said, focusing on her Spirit Sense and the vague notions it conveyed about the eight beastkin. “One Level 10, two 9s, the rest are 8s. Two big ones, probably melee, the rest I don’t know. From feeling, they are all either elementalists or mages. A mix of fire, air, water and earth.”
Ki warriors were easy to differentiate; they had affinities, but it was so subdued in their magical signature that it might not even have been there. Mages and elementalists, in contrast, were impossible to differentiate, for Mia at least.
“They hear us,” Camie said, an angry note echoing in her voice. Mia’s hand found the girl’s and squeezed comfortingly, causing the vampire’s posture to relax in an almost comically swift fashion. It put a hint of a smile on Mia’s lips, despite the grim emotions still swirling around in her heart. “They have better ears than we; an ambush is impossible. They know they are cornered. Be wary.”
“Why not go towards Henri’s group then?” Lina piped up from the back. “Why come our way?”
“Because ‘that fucking demon’ is behind them,” Mia said, her mouth curling into a mean smirk. “Jeff made an impression, it seems. Enough so that they want to run away from him, even if that takes them through us.”
It didn’t matter that Jeff’s group wasn’t chasing them. The eight beastkin didn’t want to head back the way they came lest it end up with them back in Jeff’s arms.
Mia could understand it, having experienced her body disobeying her own commands in favour of bowing before Jeff’s. It was a repulsive sensation, not one she wished to experience ever again. She suspected she might have come to the same decision as the beastkin, had she been in their shoes.
The door came into view, just as Mia called out a hurried ‘five seconds’. She could hear it now, Henri’s group hurrying up the stairs and the beastkin leaping up five steps in their haste to reach Mia’s group with enough time to break through and escape pursuit.
“Stay back,” Nikki said in accented German, a hand held out and already alight with frigid mana. The team froze; they’d fought together enough with the girl to trust her.
The spell turned out to be a beam of icy mist, slamming into the floor and spreading a thin sheet of frost across it as wide as five metres. The entire area between the team and the door to the staircase looked like an ice rink or the face of a frozen lake.
How many spells does she have? Mia wondered. It was like she just pulled a new trick out of her sleeve during every other fight.
She didn’t have long to wonder as the door slammed open, crashing against the wall as a bulky beastkin barrelled out with a look of furious determination on his face … only for his eyes to widen comically as he slipped and fell, his head crashing into the floor with brain-rattling force. Even the sheet of ice Nikki had conjured broke from it, cracks like a massive spiderweb spreading for metres.
The next beastkin out was smaller, a wiry man with a runner’s build and fine sapphire scales covering his exposed skin. He managed to remain standing, though he slid forward, knees bent and feet spread wide for stability. He lashed out with a hand, webbed fingers held like a claw, and four crescents of watery mana snapped into being, already racing towards the largest of the groups: Brent.
Brent answered it with an upward swing with his longsword. It didn’t dissipate the attack, but it did break whatever magic held it in the shape of sharpened crescents, turning the conjured water back into regular liquid.
A lightning bolt struck the man, slamming him into the wall with the force of a speeding car … er, a small car, one of those silly beetle-looking ones.
Mark’s oversized mace of masonry and brick slammed into the back of the first man’s head as he tried to scramble to his feet, despite his arms slipping on the ice and the dazed look on his face. He groaned, but didn’t try again.
Sparkle and Helene’s Bonded sprites ambushed the beastkin from behind, lashing out with clubs made of arcane mana and paralysing lightning at the squishier rear guard. Four out of eight were already down, and none of them looked dead. Hopefully, none of them have heart problems, which would not play nicely with the lightning, or have internal bleeding in their brains from being clubbed on the head.
That left four more, one of whom was the Level 10, and three of whom were 8s. Mia’s eyes, narrowed and focused, traced the strongest one even through the walls, her fingers twitching as she activated her spell. A trio of arcane chains snaked across the ground, keeping low as they slithered forward.
Unfortunately, the woman who leapt forth wasn’t stupid. Mia only caught the growl reverberating through her chest and her wild mane of brown hair as it trailed behind her like a cape. She’d leapt from the last step of the stairs, over the ice, over the questing chains conjured by Mia’s spell, and she soared towards them. Earth mana clung to her, suffusing her body and likely making it as tough as a damned concrete wall.
Unfortunately for her, her chosen target was wearing an armour made out of the same thing, and her roundhouse kick wasn’t strong enough to do more than move Mark to the side a step or two. The dwarf grunted, then lashed out with an armoured fist as thick as a tree trunk, his foe too close for his mace to be of much use.
“Focus on the rest,” Brent said. “We got this one.”
By ‘we’, he obviously meant him and Mark, though he also gave Helene a brief glance and a nod, so maybe he also included her in that. Oh well, Mia decided to leave it to them.
Camie stepped forward, placing herself between Mia and the remaining three beastkin that were carefully emerging through the door. Two men and a woman, all of them with barely any bestial features and showing signs of obvious wariness on their faces. One had feathers for hair, another had his arms warped into looking like the legs of an oversized owl, and the third had a long, serpentine tail swaying behind her.
Lina’s magic slammed into the two men from above, knocking them to the ground, and Mia winced at the fountain of blood coming from Feather-hair’s face. Hopefully, just a badly broken nose. Mia’d heard that it could bleed something fierce. The other escaped with a grunt, managing to get his clawed arms up to brace for impact.
Mia had one of her chains curl around and between his ankles, tightening and tangling them up as much as she could manage. The last two headed for the snake woman, or girl, rather. She looked like she belonged in high school, not on a battlefield.
But while Mia hesitated, her spell didn’t; it followed her last command and the ball-shaped constructs at the end of each chain slammed into the girl’s ankles. She yelped, but at least Mia couldn’t hear that wet snap she’d come to associate with bones breaking, so there was that.
According to her will, the two chains quickly snaked around the girl, both curling and pulling her legs together before they snapped forward and curled around her wrists. In seconds, she was bound, hands behind her back and hopefully unable to cast. Just to be safe, Mia put the girl on her back, so she could only cast spells at the floor. Still, they had to keep an eye on her. Such countermeasures wouldn't have been enough to stop any of them from doing something. Mia and Helene had their sprites, Mark could manipulate the floor into striking them, Camie could tear it apart, Lina could suffocate them while looking like she wasn't doing anything and Nikki probably had another dozen tricks she could use if she was bound like that. Really, maybe only Brent would be inconvenienced by such a binding in any major way. This is going to make imprisoning people such a damned chore in the future.
In the meantime, Nikki had sent a rough chunk of ice at the feather-haired one, which knocked him down again. Since then, a sphere of Lina’s magic had condensed around his head, and he’d passed out from what was probably asphyxiation. The claw-handed one wasn’t so lucky, catching a kick to the side of his head from Camie when he tried to spring up and claw off her face. He was … alive. He had been hit with enough force to bounce off the wall, though, and to the head at that, so he might be dead if he didn’t get a potion shoved down his throat soon-ish.
The ferocious brunette, who, upon closer inspection, had wolf-ears and teeth, had half a dozen heavily bleeding cuts and had a badly broken leg. Still, she was trying to get up nonetheless, but Lina stopped suffocating the poor feather-haired beastkin once he passed out and switched targets. The woman was breathing heavily, gasping for air even before Lina got started, which was probably why she only lasted ten or so seconds before she fell to the ground, already snoring up a storm.
The aeromancer hastily dismissed the magic, staggering in place and almost falling on her butt, but Mia caught her.
“T-thanks,” the blonde said shakily.
“No problem,” Mia murmured, helping the girl sit down with her back against the wall. She had half a mind to plop down next to her and get a breather, but she could hear Henri’s group approaching. She had to make sure they wouldn’t kill their new … prisoners, and that their injuries didn’t either. Wasting System potions on them was out of the question, but regular ones were much easier to stomach losing to save their lives. Especially when she told herself that they were probably manipulated, brainwashed — either by their instincts, or by an actual mind-control magic skill or whatnot — and press-ganged into doing this.
If she thought of them as unwilling victims of this whole thing, her anger at them didn’t quite evaporate, but a good majority of it slid over to point at the perpetrator.
And if they weren’t … Well, then Zeigler could deal with them. He was supposed to be the legal authority in this shithole of a city, after all. Self-defence was one thing; executing prisoners for crimes they may have been pressured into committing was a whole other thing entirely.
Mia’s gaze flickered between the still-conscious beastkin. The teenage snake-girl, the one with the water-claws, and the one Helene’s sprite had ambushed from behind … though that last one was probably regretting staying conscious. The nasty little spirit was giving him little shots of electricity every time he tried to move. Which would have been prudent, had he not been lying face-down on the floor in a rather uncomfortable pose.
“Well, we have three people to interrogate,” Mia mused, striding over to the door while giving a wide berth to the teenage girl. She’d been disabled before she could show what her magic was, and she was still in the best state to be a problem, so Mia was wary of some trick or ambush. “Hi Henri, can you hear me?”
“That I can!” Came the shout from just out of sight, not a second later, the monk’s gloriously bald head poked out from behind the stairs. “Miss Vexley. You got them?”
“Yes,” Mia said, watching the man’s focused look relax slightly as he took the last few steps and finally laid eyes on the two men the sprites had ambushed from behind. Behind him came another man, long black hair up in a ponytail and a pair of scimitars held loosely in his hands, he stared at the still conscious beastkin with a frown over Henri’s shoulder, but didn’t say anything. “Managed to capture them without killing them, and we intend to get some information out of them, so we’d prefer if you didn’t stab them while they are down.”
“Agreed,” Henri said seriously. “Information is important, and we are no judges. However, there are still some more of them on the lower floors we will have to beat back. What will we do about them when we have to head down to relieve the others?”
“The fighting is dying down,” Mia said, her ears twitching, mostly for show. It made people notice them, acknowledge them, even if they’d overlooked them before or got used to them. “Jeff’s team headed downstairs and killed most of the ones they found, relieving whatever team they came upon, though many still managed to escape. Nearly all the soldiers that’d been guarding us are dead, though, the raiders came out … mostly fine.”
Mia could only hear a single team mourning their friend, but maybe another team got wiped out entirely. She would need to make a headcount based on the voices she could hear.
“That’s better than expected,” Henri said, then glanced down at the man at his feet, twitching again from another electric shock. “Well, let us help you out and make sure none of them try anything untoward.”
“You’re welcome to help if you want.” Mia shrugged, then gave him a wry smile. “Speaking of help, it’d probably be best if we hauled these two up the stairs and laid them out next to their friends.”
Henri just chuckled, grabbing both men by the scruff of their leather chest plates and stepping beside Mia, dragging both of them behind him with ease despite his wiry frame. Whatever class he had, it gave him some impressive Body stats.
The scimitar-wielding guy just gave Mia a respectful nod as the two of them followed after Henri, and Mia could hear the last member of their group, an archer, keeping watch of the stairs below.
Mia finally allowed herself a moment to relax, letting out a sigh that seemed to take most of the strength in her body along with it. She’d barely gotten three hours of sleep, and the four fights she’d been in since being so rudely awoken had made the maybe ten minutes that had elapsed since then feel like ten hours. But no, she couldn’t crash just yet; she couldn’t relax. She still had to make sure the captured beastkin didn’t pull anything, then … whatever the hell they were supposed to do after that. She couldn’t just go back to sleep in the bed she’d almost been killed in; it would never feel safe again.
Not that she felt like her sleep would be especially restful, or her dreams pleasant for a long time to come. She let out a shuddering breath, blinking away the mental image of wide, terrified eyes staring at her as they lost their glimmer of life.
Stupid brain. Why must you do this to me?
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