“Ee’s o-er ere!” cried the wounded guard, trying to yell through the blood draining into his mouth.
Seeing that he wouldn’t make it down in time, Roan started back up. Above him was a thickening grey cloud that would soon become toxic. Still, he didn’t have much choice.
Once at the top, he stood and squinted through the smoke. He’d created a great distraction: three tremendous racks were burning like mad and, as there didn’t seem to be any firefighting equipment in the entire city, the whole building would likely be consumed in the growing blaze. Unfortunately, he stood within his own distraction and unless he could find a way out, he would die there.
He wouldn’t die alone. Foolishly, the thugs started climbing up after him. They could have just stood back and watched him die, but for some reason they had discarded their useless shields and now looked like black ants swarming up the racks.
Roan contemplated reloading his crossbow and taking a few shots at them. “But to what end?” A couple would die from his bolts instead of the fire. “So what?”
No, what he needed was a way to get out of the building before it went completely up in flames. The building was windowless, but did that mean it was completely inaccessible beyond the ground floor? The swirling smoke in the middle of the building told him that it wasn’t. There was a vent in the roof five racks away.
With the thugs after him, Roan climbed and jumped from rack to rack until he was directly below the vent—twenty feet above his head. He had no way to get to it, and worse, there was a fan with five-foot blades spinning slowly in its center. To make matters worse, he was now surrounded. Thugs were not only on his rack, but also the one in front and the one behind.
2—
Now, he unslung his crossbow, thinking that he would take as many of the thugs with him so that when he came back, he would have more thumbs to add to his total.
“No one said what shape the thumbs had to be in,” he said as he cranked back on the bow’s winch. The idea of presenting barbecued thumbs to Tarranon made him smile, grimly. The smile disappeared when he fumbled the first bolt from his quiver. He tried to grab it, but in the process nearly fell off the rack and ended up spilling half his bolts. Maybe worse, he dropped his crossbow and it ended up “dry” firing.
He would have to winch it back a second time. It seemed like too much work to him since, at most, he’d be able to get off only a single shot before the thugs forced him to use his rapier. Roan was just about to toss aside the bow when the thought came to him that instead of using the crossbow to shoot with, he could use it to stop the fan, thus hastening the destruction of the building.
Then an even better thought struck him. The smile came as he ripped the fifty-feet of rope from his pack and tied one end to the clunky bow.
“Please work,” he said, just as the first of the thugs climbed onto the third level of the rack. Roan heaved the crossbow up at the fan and watched as the bow sailed right through and disappeared, landing on the roof, he supposed. It was far too light to act as an anchor and he didn’t expect it to. Instead the fan took the rope that dangled down and began to slowly spin it.
Quickly, Roan grabbed the rope and, as the fan spun the rope like spaghetti, he was pulled from the rack lifted into the air, so that he dangled thirty-five feet off the ground. Perhaps driven by the thought of the reward, one of the thugs made an amazing jump from the rack and somehow caught the rope. Their combined weight stopped the fan and left them hanging there above the fire.
Roan looked down into the grinning face of the thug. He wasn’t a build like the others. Roan could see a spark of intelligence in his eyes and more of a bulge in his arms and judging by the fantastic leap he had made, he was likely, a higher level thief than Roan and if he could climb faster, there would be trouble.
“There is another way,” Roan said to himself as the man shimmied up the rope, monkey-like. “Tell me, can you fly?” he asked the thug as he slid out his dagger. The man’s eyes went wide when Roan took the razor-sharp blade to the rope and began cutting. Although the man made a heroic effort to get to Roan before the rope split, he failed by seconds and dropped, hitting the ground with an ugly thud(XP +65).
The death of this one man enraged the others, who began throwing things at Roan: daggers, plates, shoes and even their useless shields. He was hit a number of times(HP -3) but since the fan was doing all the work, he just had to hold on tight. Thankfully, the barrage did not last long. As he was being lifted into the smoke, one of the burning racks toppled over, hitting a second rack and killing five of the thugs(XP +150).
The rest fled from the building, leaving Roan to struggle up through the fan blades, which were moving slower and slower now that the rope had become caught up in the workings. Roan’s biggest problem was the choking smoke. It was like crawling up a chimney.
Practically blind and unable to stop coughing, he finally made it to the roof, where he crawled away from the fan. Quickly, he discovered that the heat baking up from below would make the roof a place of safety for only a few more minutes. After that, it would be like standing on a giant frying pan.
Roan staggered to the edge of the building and saw that there was no way down without a rope. Whoever had built the warehouse had done a credible job and when there were hand or footholds, they were so widely spaced as to make scaling the exterior nearly impossible.
And that left jumping as Roan’s only option. He went to each side, looked down and hissed, “Damn!” There was nothing to drop onto and, as all of the surrounding buildings were taller than the warehouse, there was nowhere to jump to. His “best” choice was to attempt a leap that would make a stuntman wet themselves.
Across a twenty-five foot wide street and down two stories was a window that was maybe five feet tall and three feet wide. It might be two inches thick as well for all Roan knew. He might just splat into it like a bug hitting a windshield before falling twenty feet to the cobblestone where, if he lived, he’d be set upon by the dozens of K Street Killers that now ringed the warehouse.
But more than likely, the glass would simply skin him alive and he’d bleed to death, half in and half out of the window.
This realization kept him from making the attempt until there was another tremendous crash from somewhere below him. Seconds later, the heat emanating up caused the air to shimmer and his vision to go in and out. He was down to it now. He had to either make the jump or clock out and start the game over.
“Some game,” he grumbled, going back to the edge and eyeing the jump once more. “Why did I pick extreme?”
3—
Roan backed from the edge, took a deep breath of superheated air and then let it out in a scream as he ran at the edge and jumped. There were very few things that his thief character could do better than his real life self could, but jumping was one of those things.
He sailed through the air, crossing over the street, and saw that he was going to come in high. The only thing he could do about it was to tuck himself in, so he hit the glass like a two-hundred and twenty pound cannon ball.
Glass exploded inward, slicing through his leather armor. A fraction of a second later, he hit a carpeted floor and rolled to thud against a wall (Damage -7 HP). Groaning, he reached into his pack for one of his healing potions.
“You okay, mister?” a young boy asked.
Roan glanced around and saw that he had landed in someone’s apartment. The boy was peeking out from behind his parent’s legs. “Yeah,” Roan said and drank the potion(Heal +4HP). It had been the watered-down version and Roan was forced to drink his last potion to get fully healed.
“Sorry about the window,” he said, tossing the man of the house a gold piece as he headed for the door.
“A gold piece ain’t gonna fix that window,” the man said, defiantly. In his hand was a club that had nails sticking from it.
“Too bad.” Roan wasn’t in the mood to argue. In his mind, the man was lucky he’d gotten anything at all. He slid the rapier from his
scabbard. “Go hide before I gut you.”
The man pulled his family into a back room. Roan watched him until he was out of sight, then he ran to the front door, unlocked it and charged out into the hall of an apartment building. He sprinted for the stairs, hoping to get out of the building before the thugs could trap him once more, but he was too late. From below he heard people screaming and men shouting orders. “Lock this building down and search every room.”
“Crap,” Roan muttered and headed up the stairs at a jog. He didn’t like the idea of jumping any more chasms or leaping from roof tops, but down was no longer an option. At the third floor, he raced to the end of the hall, hoping to find a fire escape or one of the footbridges. He found the latter two floors over his head.
Running back to the stairwell, he almost blundered into a group of K Street Killers. With his rapier out and his nerves keyed, Roan seized the initiative and stabbed the first of them before they even knew who or what he was. The blade slid through the quilted armor like butter and punctured both heart and lung(XP +35).
The thug fell back into the others with a gurgling death rattle. Instead of attacking the others, Roan ran up the stairs, while behind him the thugs shouted for help. Up and up he went until he made it to the fifth floor. Once there, he sprinted down the hall to the footbridge that led to the building across the street. It shook and rattled and swung under his weight.
He had opened up a lead on the thugs, but once on the footbridge his inexperience caused him to slow considerably. They were right on his tail when his feet hit the solid floor of the next building. Again his sprint opened up a lead. Once more, he headed upwards at the first stairwell he came to.
From the one footbridge, he’d seen another a floor up and stretching across an east-west street. This one was even more wobbly than the last and his feet slowed even more. He was half-way across when seven thugs rushed out onto it from behind and he was three-quarters of the way across when he saw five thugs waiting for him on the other side.
Chapter 16
K Street Territory, Oberast
“That’s a long way to fall, kitty,” one of the toughs in front of Roan said. “Maybe you should do yourself a favor and clock out. You could come back as a gnome somewhere far, far away.”
“Or maybe I kill you first, and then clock out,” Roan shot back. He stood twenty feet from the man, while behind Roan, the seven were slowly edging closer. “Come on out here and fight me man to man, if you think you’re so tough.” His only chance was to fight the thugs one on one. His skill and armor class were both too low for him to fight both front and back simultaneously.
The taunt did not work. The entire group of thugs closed in from both directions, leaving Roan only one option—and it was a very poor one. Raising his rapier, he brought it down in chopping motion, hacking at one of the guide ropes. With so much weight on the footbridge, the four ropes were especially taut, and the one strike severed the rope, causing the entire bridge to suddenly pitch to the left and then twist.
Three of the thugs were flung right off the bridge and hurtled, screaming to their deaths(XP +110). Roan, along with the other thugs, either grabbed the ropes or the wood planks of the bridge. Holding with one hand, his left foot snaked in among the planks, Roan hacked at the second of the two guide ropes. When it broke, the footbridge spun completely over.
No one, not even Roan had expected this. He had to drop his rapier to keep from falling. Along with five other swords, it fell to clatter among the cobblestones. Two people, one in front and one behind, also fell(XP +170).
Roan found himself dangling upside down but that didn’t stop him from pulling his dagger and slashing at the ropes. As the thugs screamed for him to stop, he cut first one and then the second. In a blink, he found himself doing an imitation of Tarzan as he swung towards the closer building. Since he knew where and how he was going to hit, he lifted his legs and took the impact on the balls of his feet.
The three men behind him didn’t stand a chance and all three fell(XP +120), while the lone man above him managed to hold on, he did so barely and hadn’t gathered his wits about him before Roan climbed the five feet between them.
He let out a startled yell when Roan grabbed his foot and began to pull down with all his might. He tried to hook a toe between the boards, but Roan yanked it out and down he went(XP +40).
There were now only three men to contend with and all were safely perched on the sixth floor landing; they screamed obscenities at Roan. Keep yelling, he thought. He needed to buy time to get to some sort of safety. As fast as he could, he began climbing down the rickety, swaying remnants of the footbridge.
It was more or less like a ladder and he had made it down to the fourth floor before the thugs realized that they could do more than just call him names. “Have a nice trip!” one yelled as he cut one of the remaining ropes. “See you next fall.” The ladder jerked down and to the right. The boards on it started to crumble in that direction.
Roan quickly reached out and grabbed the lone remaining rope and went down to the third floor so fast that his hands burned. There was a window he needed to get to before…the rope above him gave way completely under the thug’s knife. Without a chance at a handhold on the window’s sill, he flung out his hands, hoping to reach through the glass.
The pain was immediate and so intense that he had to grit his teeth against screaming. Both of his hands found holds, but in the process he had glass embedded deep into his wrists(Damage -3 HP). He couldn’t lift his impaled wrists; they were basically crippled. The best he could do was push forward and break the glass, further cutting himself. The pain was searing and yet, he had no choice.
As he kicked with his feet, he got one elbow up onto the sill and then a second. His next move was to fall forward and land among the shards of glass in someone’s kitchen. He was still groaning and trying to get to his feet when what at first appeared to be a monstrous hag raced into the room and began to beat him with a broom.
“Look what you did!” squawked what turned out to be old woman in a dull grey sleeping gown. She went on and on about him ruining her window. This time he didn’t leave any gold. His hands were like claws and he didn’t have the time to worry his pouch open with them.
At first, he tried to reason with her, but when she only swatted him towards the front door, he kicked her. “Open the door and let me out of here, or so help me!”
“Don’t come back, you orc-lover!” she called after him as he ran down the hall to the staircase. Above him the thugs were coming in a hurry, their feet drumming on the stairs as they raced along. They seemed fresh, while Roan was tiring after his very long and stressful night. If there were thugs outside the building and there likely were, he didn’t think he’d be able to get away.
He needed a moment to catch his breath. Turning from the stairs on the second floor, he began speed walking down the hall instead of running, hoping that this small amount of stealth would allow him to slip away. The thugs blazed straight down the stairs without even checking the hall.
It was a mistake they would likely rectify when they got to the ground floor and didn’t see him sprinting away. What Roan needed was a little luck for once and he got it as a door opened up the hall. A middle-aged man with a paunch and grey stubble on his cheeks poked his head into the hall.
“Five gold to hide me,” Roan said, immediately.
“Ten,” the man countered. Roan didn’t have time for haggling. He nodded and made to brush past the man, but he put out a hand. “Gold first.”
This earned him a glare and the man was lucky Roan wasn’t armed or he might have run him through. With no choice, Roan slowly opened his pouch and counted out the ten coins. The man watched, his eyes big and wet, as he saw the fullness of the pouch.
Once Roan was inside, there was a long silence between the two men. Roan glanced around noting the dissimilarity between the man with his pallor, his wet, hooded eyes and his crooked smile, with the apartment itself. Unlike s
o many other places, the front room was inviting: the walls were covered in pretty murals of horses and cats, the furniture looked soft and there were bowls of candy and chocolate sitting out.
The odd man stared at Roan’s wounds. “Hey, you know what? I got a healing potion. It could be yours for a hundred.”
With his hands almost crooked into claws from tendon damage, Roan needed the potion badly however something in those wet eyes made him hesitate before saying, “Sure, I can do a hundred.”
“Excellent. I’ll be right back.” He was just heading towards a back room when Roan stopped him.
“You’ll have to taste whatever you offer me, first.”
The man’s shoulders hunched. When he turned back, his smile was fixed. “Now why would you go and say a thing like that? It’s almost as though you don’t trust me. Didn’t I take you in? Didn’t I give you shelter in your time of need? Didn’t I rescue you?”
Roan didn’t trust anyone in Oberast. The city was a cesspool of evil. It was a cancer on the world. “You’re right, I don’t trust you and I trust you even less with each passing second, so why don’t you forget the potion.”
“No. You already agreed. And besides, you owe me. I saved you.” If there was a word Roan would use to describe the man just, then it would be possessive. He looked on Roan in the same way a child might look at a toy in a store window.
“I don’t owe you anything.” Without fully putting his back to the man, Roan stepped towards the door and tried to turn the knob, but it wouldn’t budge. It wasn’t his hand that was the problem. The door locked from the inside and there wasn’t a latch to release it either. Only someone with a key could open that door.
A key to open the door from the outside made sense, but one that was needed to open it from the inside did not, unless… Roan spun around and found the man leering at him…the apartment was a trap.
Infinite Assassins: Daggerland Online Novel 2 A LITRPG Adventure Page 15
