by Ennki Hakari
“No promises.”
Usually, I was the one charging into situations without thinking. She was more like me than she’d probably care to admit.
“Let’s do this!”
Ariane took off in a run, a smile on her lips, quickly closing the gap between her and the man closest to her. A moment later, the man’s cries were echoing through the street.
She moved past him, toward the rest of the group, sweeping her sword across. An instant later, three severed legs dropped to the ground. Before the other men could even respond, she was already closing in on them.
Her sword moved faster than anything I’d ever seen. I couldn’t tell if it was because she was throwing all her might into the attack, or because the Sword of the King of Lions lent her some unseen strength, but the men were no match for her.
Two of them, who’d been stabbed in the arms and chest, doubled over in pain. Moments later, another man took the broadside of her blade to his temple and dropped like a stone, his eyes rolling back into his head. A group of them rallied, rushing Ariane at once, but she was already darting away from them, focused on another trio.
As I listened to the angry screams reverberating through the street, I gripped my shield and advanced toward a large, brutish man in front of me. His face was a mask of murderous rage as he swung his weapon about wildly.
“Shield Bash!”
This was an incredibly basic skill from the Soldier class, which involved smashing your opponent with your shield. However, the mythical-class shield I had, combined with my immense strength, turned it into an incredibly powerful attack.
My shield glowed ever so slightly as it connected with the man, sending his weapon flying and him rebounding into five other men behind him, carrying them all into a brick wall.
Two of the men’s arms bent at strange angles, while another man, who’d ended up at the bottom of the heap, had twisted his neck in a way that looked quite unnatural.
“Sorry! I totally didn’t expect that!”
They couldn’t hold it against me if it was an accident, right?
I glanced around for my next target, muttering about not knowing my own strength, and realized that the thugs were all running away from me. Among them was the brutish man with short-cropped hair who’d been talking big just a few moments ago.
“The rest can go, but you’re staying with us!”
My eyes locked on his back as I took off in a mad dash after him. This time, I was careful to hold back as I hit him with my shield. He still went flying.
“Gyaaaaauuuuugh!!!”
The man let out an eerie scream as he tumbled through the air, landing splayed out on the ground like an upturned umbrella. He lay motionless.
I decided to avoid using my special fighting skills against normal human opponents in the future. Or at least, against those I wanted to survive.
I grabbed the man by the scruff of the neck, wringing a scream of pain from him as he pleaded for his life.
“Pleeeeease, stop! Spare me! I beg you, please, spare me!”
“Shut up, you prattling little thug.”
Ariane made her way toward us, staring at the backs of the fleeing men.
“What do you think, Ariane? Should we kill him? There are plenty of others who might be more willing to talk.”
I looked at the pile of men groaning behind her, many of them missing limbs.
“Are they even alive, Arc?”
Ariane gestured with her chin toward the men plastered to the wall.
“It just…kind of happened. Anyway, at least I found someone who might be able to tell us what’s going on.”
I held the wailing man out toward Ariane. Her golden eyes narrowed, as if weighing his worth. Blood dripped from the lion’s head engraved on the hilt of her sword, making her gaze even more intimidating.
A warm, wet stain formed at the crotch of the man’s pants.
I decided to try the kind of interrogation I’d seen in police shows on TV. Didn’t they always do a good cop, bad cop routine?
I whispered softly into the man’s ear, never letting go of his neck.
“Listen, you don’t need to be so scared. All you need to do is answer a few questions truthfully. But, uh, I should tell you now that you don’t want to make this lady angry. You’ve got four tries to get the answer right. Each time you answer wrong, she’ll be chopping off a limb.”
His face went pale and he began shuddering as I spoke, making me wonder just how well I was playing the good cop.
Ariane shot me an annoyed look.
I whispered into his ear again, in as friendly a manner as I could, while holding out his right arm.
“First up, a question for your right arm. Did you come from Nohzan to buy slaves?”
Ariane rolled her eyes, but lifted her sword above the man’s arm all the same.
“Eaugh! Y-yes! We came from a slave market in Nohzan!”
The man squirmed, desperately trying to pull his arm away as he answered. I nodded, lightly patting his cheek before moving onto the next question.
“Great. Next up, your left arm. I’m sure you’ll get this one. Have you ever abducted anyone from this town?”
I yanked the man’s left arm out. Ariane moved her sword over to it, tracing the tip across his flesh.
“Yes, we have! But it’s usually only refugees who don’t have places of their own here! Please, ya gotta believe me! We were just out to make some quick cash!”
“I see, I see. So, just to be clear, you’re saying that, on occasion, you do actually abduct people who live here?”
I brought my helmet even closer to the man’s face. His eyes widened, darting back and forth.
“O-only a few times! If we’d focused on citizens, we’d have been easily figured out! I’m tellin’ ya the truth!”
“All right then, on to the next question. Of the few times that you abducted citizens, did you happen to see a woman who looked like a chambermaid? A woman named Frani Markham?”
I spoke the words slowly, massaging the man’s stiff shoulder to try and get him to loosen up. His back was soaked with sweat.
“Never heard of her, honest! A chambermaid, you said? There’s no way someone like that would come wandering down ’ere!”
The man looked pleadingly between Ariane and me, tears in his eyes as he sniveled.
“Well, we’d like to see for ourselves. Where do you keep the people you’ve abducted?”
“Everyone’s already on a ship. They’re g-gonna make sail first thing tomorrow morning!”
“Will you take us there?”
“Are you mad?! They’ll kill me!”
I ignored the man’s pleas and instead turned and began dragging him by the neck back toward the port. Ariane sheathed her sword and followed us.
We made our way from the warehouse district to the piers where the ships were docked. Fishermen stared at the man flailing about helplessly as we walked past.
“Stop your ship at once! You haven’t been granted permission to leave port!”
Several soldiers were yelling at a ship off in the water, slowly making its way past the piers and out toward the sea. When the slave trader dangling from my hand caught sight of the ship, his face went white.
“Dammit! What’re they doing?! Are they just gonna leave me behind? They ordered me to go out and pick up the elf, but as soon as things went south, those yellow-bellied pigs turned tail and ran!”
The man continued yelling all manner of slurs at the escaping ship. I tapped him on the back of the head and he went limp, like a marionette whose strings had been cut.
The men he’d worked for, now that their secret was out, would be branded as criminals by Lord Petros and the Rhoden Kingdom itself. It made sense for them to run… But of course, I couldn’t let them get away.
“Ariane, keep an eye on this one for me, will you?”
I dropped the slaver at her feet and raced off at top speed toward the ship.
It had to weave in and o
ut of the ships still docked at the pier, which kept it from gaining speed as it tried to escape.
I could probably have reached the ship in an instant by using Dimensional Step, but there were too many eyes on me.
I leaped off the pier and onto a nearby ship, then jumped from that one to the one next to it.
Each ship shook violently as soon as I landed, causing the crews to scream and shout as many of them were tossed into the sea. I offered a quick apology each time—in my mind at least—before bouncing off again, traveling from ship to ship as I closed in on the fleeing vessel.
By the time its crew spotted me, shouting among themselves, it was too late.
I jumped onto the docked ship closest to the escaping slaver and, using it like a springboard, vaulted high into the air toward the ship’s bow, where I clung for dear life.
One of the crew drew his weapon and came at me. However, before he had a chance to strike, I grabbed his arm and flung him, sending him crashing into the sea.
I hopped onto the deck of the ship.
Men’s heavy footfalls echoed across the deck as they tried to figure out what was happening. One of them spotted me and let out a scream of terror.
“It’s him! He followed us!”
He must have been one of the men who’d gotten away in the warehouse district. He was wide-eyed, sweating bullets, as they say.
“Hurry up and kill the intruder!”
A large, hairy man shouted at the cowering crew to get them under control. My best guess was that he was the captain, though he looked just like a run-of-the-mill pirate. Some of the men calmed down enough to draw their weapons and rush toward me. I pulled my shield off my back and braced myself for the oncoming human wave.
“Shield Bash!”
Between the initial shockwave and the sheer force of the attack, most of the men were thrown straight off the ship and into the ocean. Screams of pain and surprise filled the air as, one by one, they plopped into the water, sending up spray.
The remaining men seemed to realize that they were no match and abandoned ship, leaving me and the hairy captain alone on the deck.
“I don’t know who the hell you are, but I’m not gonna go easy on ya!”
The tip of his sword shook as he screamed, spittle flying everywhere.
I approached him silently. He matched me, retreating step for step as fear took over his face.
I swung my shield wide and used Shield Bash to smash through one of the ship’s masts. A split second later, it snapped in two, showering the deck with splinters. The rigging went taut as the mast leaned precariously to one side, then the whole thing snapped off and splashed into the sea. A huge plume of water shot up.
A mix of screams and cheers erupted from the port.
I looked around, wondering if I’d overdone it.
The ship’s captain cowered at my feet like a frightened animal. At the very least, I’d stopped the slavers from escaping. Whether or not they’d face jail time was up to someone else.
***
The slave traders’ ship was pulled back to the pier, broken mast and all. Many people were found locked in the its hold. Just as the man we’d interrogated had said, most of them were refugees, though we also discovered a young woman who lived in Lamburt. The captain and his crew were arrested on the spot by Lamburt soldiers.
“Could you at least give me a heads-up before you go and do something like that?”
Gio approached me and Ariane, his eyebrows knitted in concern. I could tell he was annoyed by the vein bulging in his forehead. Arresting criminals was the purview of the local knights and soldiers, so I understood why he might be upset at some stranger doing his job.
Ariane, however, looked puzzled. “They’re all criminals, aren’t they? What’s the harm in capturing them?”
“We humans have rules! I… I’m sorry. Thank you for your assistance. I would like to offer my gratitude on behalf of Lamburt.”
Gio’s thanks still carried a certain bitterness, a deep frown on his face.
Ariane’s eyes narrowed. When Gio wasn’t looking, she whispered to me.
“Arc, there’s something strange about him. Right after we parted ways, another person, unrelated to the slavers, started following us. I think they may have been sent by Gio.”
I frowned. How suspicious was that though?
Gio had been assigned to guide us—two people who’d just shown up out of nowhere—when suddenly we asked to be left on our own. I could see why he might want someone to follow us around and see what we were up to.
But if he had ordered a knight or some other soldier to shadow us, then they almost certainly would have joined the fray once we were attacked in the warehouse district. Since that hadn’t happened, the next logical explanation was that some other lackey was following us on Gio’s orders. But it still felt like I was missing something.
I glanced at the slave ship’s crew as they were dragged away by Gio’s soldiers. “Well, we caught the slave traders, but we didn’t find Frani.”
Ariane nodded absently, her golden eyes fixating on something.
“Arc, there’s another ship that looks suspicious.” She tugged on my elbow, pulling me along with her.
“What’s so suspicious about it?”
“The people aboard have been watching us for a while.”
“We don’t know that these people are slavers, Ariane. We can’t be so brazen about going aboard.”
“What if we have proof that there are prisoners aboard?”
Ariane looked oddly confident as she moved through the crowd, heading toward a black ship docked at the far pier.
It was a merchant vessel, far larger than the slave trader I’d just been on. As we drew close, I could see many of the crew members watching us suspiciously as they moved out onto the pier to block our path. By the time we reached the ship, a blockade of ten had already formed up in front of us.
“What’s yer business with our ship?”
We were approached by a large, shirtless man, his muscular, scar-covered arms gleaming in the sun. He hawked up a glob of phlegm and spat, glaring daggers at us.
Rather than answering his question, Ariane held her open palm up to her mouth and blew on it, then whispered something I couldn’t make out. A moment later, a faint glow appeared in front of us, then dissipated.
Ariane looked back at the muscle-bound man and shrugged her shoulders.
“We just thought this was such an interesting ship. We were hoping to get a closer look!”
“If you’ve got no business, then get outta here!” Clearly annoyed at Ariane’s feigned cluelessness, the scar-covered man took a step toward us as he yelled. “Yer disrupting our work. And take yer friend with ya too.”
Suddenly, a well-dressed man—possibly a merchant—stepped from the group.
“Now, now. May I ask what interests you about this Deoin Corp vessel?”
The man looked at us intently, a warm smile plastered to his face.
“Oh, nothing in particular. Not quite yet anyway.”
The man’s eye’s narrowed suspiciously at Ariane’s reply.
A familiar voice called out. “Ariane! Arc! Wait up!”
I looked back to see Gio running down the pier toward us.
“Is something the matter, Sir Vizio?”
“Ah, Gio. No, it’s nothing. It just seems that these two here have some sort of business with our vessel.”
The merchant—Vizio apparently—shrugged dramatically, a disingenuous smile twisting across his face.
Gio stepped in between Ariane and Vizio in an attempt to smooth things over. “Miss Ariane, this is a Deoin Corp vessel, carrying out business on behalf of Count Ornaut from the Nohzan Kingdom. It has nothing to do with the recent…unpleasantness. Besides, we’ve already finished inspecting it.” He scolded Ariane, though her attention was focused elsewhere.
So, this vessel had to be handled with care because it was backed by a foreign noble. We probably wouldn’t be able t
o enter without some sort of evidence.
As Vizio and Ariane glared at each other, a sudden gust of wind blew up and the faint glow from earlier appeared again beside Ariane. No one else in the area appeared to have noticed it. They were too busy squinting against the wind.
Moments later, the glow faded again and Ariane turned back to the merchant, speaking as if the entire conversation up to this point had never happened.
“There are people being held captive aboard this ship. I would like to be allowed to inspect it.”
Vizio grinned sarcastically.
“As Gio here already stated, this vessel is from the Nohzan Kingdom and…”
Before he could name his supporters, however, Ariane pulled back her hood, causing the man to abruptly cut himself off.
A loud commotion arose among the other men as they discovered there was an amethyst-skinned woman with pointy ears in their midst.
“I am Ariane Glenys Maple, of the Great Canada Forest. Assuming you speak of the one and only Count Ornaut of the Nohzan Kingdom, then I ask you, is he truly prepared to stand against the elves?”
Ariane’s golden eyes bored into Vizio. Her defiant statement seemed to have shaken the merchant, judging by the grimace on his face.
“If there’s nothing improper going on here, then I ask that you grant me permission to board your vessel.”
Vizio’s face purpled with rage at the sight of Ariane’s smile, as if she’d personally insulted him. He screamed back at her.
“And what the hell gives a barbarian like you the right to talk to me that way?!”
The men grew tense at this eruption.
In a normal situation, it would have made no sense for someone like Vizio to let a stranger board his ship. In a normal situation, it would have made no sense for someone like Ariane to make such a request in the first place.
However, this wasn’t a normal situation, as evidenced by the curious grin on Ariane’s face.
In an instant, she dashed toward the scarred man, leaped into the air, and bounded off his head like a springboard.
“Get back here, hag!”
Ariane deftly darted across the pier toward the ship, leaving a crowd of angry and confused men behind. Vizio stood there stunned for a moment before screaming at his men in a shrill voice.
