Chapter 51.2: That Bandit Jerk

In the norn’s wake, they crossed the eastern half of the courtyard. Somewhere along the western cliff face someone had spotted them and started taking shots. Penny heard the whizz of rifle rounds sailing past them, much closer than she was comfortable with. Another shooter alongside the bandit’s wagon took up aim at them as well, and the sounds of too-near rifle shots increased. Grabbing Jinkke by the collar, Penny pulled her aside, jogging them both one way before darting back the other: back and forth, back and forth they went, but never in a straight line for long; they were rabbits evading a hawk. Two hawks. With guns.

Fjornsson came to a stop, ducking behind the upturned wagon with their companions. Penny and Jinkke zagged around a dead man and joined him a moment later.

Scholar Yissa chirped excitedly, “My ears, you’re alive!” She was surrounded by scattered asuran machinery that Penny couldn’t make sense of.

“Not all of us,” Yult said darkly. He lowered Minkus to the ground.

Penny saw Jinkke watching the movement with pained affection, but she still couldn’t bring herself to look.

Whatever the little asura scholar had been doing, she stopped with a gasp, inching forward on hands and knees to look more closely at Minkus’ body. Penny glanced away— to assess their surroundings.

“My ears.” Yissa almost whimpered it. “His ears. His beautiful ears. What in the Alchemy happened?”

Penny hoped to any god that someone else would answer, that she wouldn’t have to.

“Dwayna’s light.” Jindel’s tired voice echoed the sentiment. She tossed a pistol aside and dropped to shelter behind a haphazard stack of crates that protected them—at least a little—from the humans at and beyond the other wagon remains. Her attention on Minkus’ form said she too was realizing what had happened.

Fjornsson, hunching to keep himself behind the beat-up wooden barricade, scanned the area, spotting every castoff rifle that Jindel had clearly collected, emptied, tossed aside. “All empty?” he asked.

Jindel didn’t respond quickly enough, missing the question, and he repeated it, more hotly and gesturing this time. “Are these all empty?”

She recognized his address this time. “Oh,” she said, shaking thoughts away. “Yeah, all dry. I’ve been grabbing whatever weapons they drop and firing back. Right now I’m just trying to support the sergeant, but I’ve run dry again. We can’t keep this up forever.”

The huge soldier huffed, his focus sliding past them all to the fallen man they’d dodged on their approach. Penny suddenly realized she recognized the human. He’d been the bandit overseer’s muscle in that blasted cave. She wasn’t sure how he’d died, but at least something in this mess could bring her an ounce of satisfaction.

Even as she thought it all, Yult moved for the man, reaching down and grabbing the bandit’s huge warhammer. The norn hefted it, and it suddenly looked substantially smaller than it had laid out beside its previous owner. Fjornsson rebalanced himself against its weight, but he still held it in a single, big fist, while drawing the smaller asuran hammer from his belt.

Penny craned her neck back in surprise. The huge man was wielding the pair of weapons like they were no more than wrenches, and he stomped off around the crates. She’d known the norn was big, but something in that determined movement seemed to bulk him before her very eyes. Of course some of that was the inflation of fat, corded muscle that flexed from shoulder to hand just to keep the two hammers aloft.

“Here,” Penny said, drawing a pistol and extending it to Jindel. “He’s a pain in the ass, but we can’t just let him die.”

With a nod, Jindel accepted the weapon, spinning the loader to count shots. Penny tapped the toolbag at her hip. “Don’t worry. There’s more. Just tell me what the hell is happening.” Dipping a shoulder, she slid her pack off and dropped it against the upturned wagonbed.

As best as she could, Jindel explained the situation, as the two of them sighted up over the crates: Penny at an approaching golem and Jindel trying for a shot at the stick of a man struggling to keep Ventyr from the man doing magical marionetting on the ground. As Fjornsson engaged the same bandit, Jindel’s work became even harder, and she joined Penny in fending off the golem, though gunshots at its stone shell did more to frighten the accompanying asura than to actually hinder the construct itself.

The two asura continued popping out and peppering the landscape with half-aimed shots that occasionally hit the underside of their upturned wagonbed, rattling the unsteady barricade and blowing chips of wood out the other side. Wherever a second or third shot hit near where another had, the residual energy sizzled, starting to eat holes right through the wooden planks.

That would have terrified Penny, had it not been for the eerie purple miasma simultaneously seeping out of crates in front of her. The vigilwoman had explained that, probably as well as any ordinary person could explain aerial rivers of tormenting psychic magic arching from crates of asuran tech to the hands of a human highwayman. Somehow, Penny realized, everything out here had been just as ridiculous as what they’d faced inside. Only, hopefully they could avoid any further…

No, she wouldn’t finish that thought. Instead, she cracked her knuckles and reloaded her sidearm. “So, that bandit jerk does magic now, huh? With the same purple stuff these asura used to power their crazy-guns?”

“That’s the way it looks,” Jindel affirmed, cracking off cover fire as Penny dug for rounds. She was down to regular ammunition now: no more trick shots.

“Well, shit.”

Jindel nodded. “Yeah.”

Penny paused, thinking about that, her empty gun still in hand. “And why in Torment are these crates full of magic to begin with?”

“Not the crates,” Jindel said. She leaned far left, trying to get a line of sight on something or someone. “The little golems inside them.”

That caught Penny’s attention. She looked around, suddenly realizing that where crates had broken open, padding and pill-shaped golems had spilled out. And inside each of them, just like in the big one, there had to be more of that heinous magic siphoned off the jade.

“Are you going to help me or not?” Jindel spat down at her. “Load your weapon!”

Penny jumped, returning to herself. She shoved rounds into her loader and locked it back in place before slipping off her toolbelt and laying it on the ground between her and Jindel. She paused again, though, snatching out the gas bomb that hadn’t served her any use against the golem enforcer. Here, she figured, it might serve better.

As if on cue, Jindel called, “reloading!” and the two switched places, Penny rising to take aim as the vigilwoman dropped to grab more rounds.

Penny sighted up on a pair of asura ducking in and out behind an approaching golem, one of those dome-topped ones that were so common in Rata Sum. Gods, she was glad to see something ordinary and unassuming—even if it was a golem coming to pound her into the dirt.

At the pressure her shots applied, the golem rotated slightly, putting more of its width between her and the asura under its protection. They refocused their attack on the three figures in a melee at the other wagon.

Penny hissed a curse, glancing over at Ventyr, Yult, and the bandit. Gods, that skinny, little man had guts, weaving between blows like a pickpocket through a crowd. It didn’t matter how much earth-breaking force the norn used, nothing seemed to touch him, and his returned strikes were pinpoint accurate, knocking the norn off balance every time he got in a blow. Penny couldn’t do much about that, but she could at least take the additional pressure of the asura off Fjornsson.

Resting the pistol on the crate stack, she hefted the gas bomb in her hand and pulled out a fire-starter: a palm-sized contraption of spring-loaded flint and steel she’d developed many years since. “You loaded?” she asked, peeking down at Crusader Jindel.

The other woman nodded, hopping to her feet.

“Good.” Penny lit the explosive’s fuse. “I’m giving you a shot at the asura.”

The soldier gave her an uncertain look, but Penny gave her no time for more, hurling the device. It arched through the air before hitting ground and bouncing another several yards to rest beside the golem—it wasn’t a half-bad throw. The fuse disappeared, and a cloud of yellow gas spewed out, hazing out the landscape and sending both the asura into violent coughing fits. In opposite directions, they ran from the cloud. And from their cover.

“You take the one on the right!” Penny barked. To her credit, Jindel obeyed without question, the two of them unloading their weapons at their respective targets. Both landed hits as the frantic, hacking pair fled, dropping to the earth.

The golem kept its course toward them, however, clearly sticking to whatever instructions the asura had given it before falling. As far as Penny could tell, this one didn’t have any offensive capabilities—at least not at range—but she had a bad feeling it would behoove them to put it down before it reached their ramshackle shelter. But how in Torment were they going to do that?

“Need a hand here!”

The call from beside her broke Penny’s concentration on the lumbering machine. She’d have to come back to it.

Penny turned her attention back to Jindel’s aim at Ventyr and the bandits, where she now recognized two additional fighters coming at the sylvari and norn from around the other end of the scorched wagon remains. The moving humans tossed rifles aside in favor of the axe and mace at their respective hips.

“Shit,” Penny spat, shaking a fist. “Nothing is ever easy!” Stopping the asura had taken just as much pressure off the bandits as it had off them.

***

Across the short gap, Christoff Veritas may have been engaged in the same fight, but he was having an entirely different experience.

He was in the middle of the most important, complex, and wearying spellcast of his life, and indeed he was executing it masterfully. The only hiccup was absolutely everything else; nothing in his proximity was working in his favor, not his opponents and hardly even his own people. One by one members of his cell were falling to the asura, for sheer numbers. The sylvari had razed his vehicle, and these Vigil interlopers wouldn’t give him a moment’s peace. He would weather it, of course, finishing his construct and further proving his superiority over them all. Until he did, he had little more than indignation to tide him over, but that indignation was hot.

He tried to concentrate again on the flows of magic, continuing to draw the Unseen Ones’ power from the technological abominations inside those crates. Each time he did, though, that cursed norn drove another oversized step toward him, pressing Remi back into Christoff until he could virtually feel the wind off the man’s rapid bobs and parries. He needed to focus.

“Quit toying with him and finish it, Remi!” he spat at his lieutenant.

Veritas had half a mind to stand up and end the galumphing, barbaric norn himself. Except, he was busy manipulating a magic eons more ancient than his entire house—than any of their houses—and it was demanding more of him than even his monster of a father could have prepared him for. The sensation was disorienting at best, even when he tried to attend to other matters. He could feel the swells of it surging through him: a heady, intoxicating, and yet sickening sensation. The individual strands of it he’d practiced with in the asuran lab were a drop beside the two—no, three—streams that he now funneled through himself and into the jade at his back. He’d felt the gentle thrill of that drop in the lab, like the first sip of a sweet red wine. But this? This was beginning to feel like every part of a revelrous night at the same time: the freedom, the disorientation, the power, and the nausea. He hadn’t been prepared for it.

“If you want, Boss, I could step aside and let you handle it.” Even as he sidestepped another heavy swing of a hammer and returned two sudden pistol shots from the hip, Remi’s frustrated disdain was clear.

Christoff shook off a fit of dizziness. “Just— look, I’ve already imbued some of the shards. Stab the brute with one, with two—however many it takes. Just get him away from me!” 

The man grunted something of a response, dropping to one side as a massive warhammer swung out at the spot where his head had just been. He popped back up, the momentum of the norn’s swing giving him a second of freedom as his opponent collected his balance for another assault.

Christoff tried to refocus on his spell work, but the closer his nimble, stick of a lieutenant got to the imbued jade, the harder it was to concentrate.

There was another wild, frighteningly powerful slam of the norn’s hammers: first the huge, two-handed one that had been Gregor’s only minutes before, and then a followup with the narrower headed, asuran-looking weapon. Remi ducked the first and spun, throwing up his rifle barrel like a quarterstaff to deflect the second, giving him space to slip aside while the norn stumbled and slammed into the remains of the incinerated wagon wall.

“Now,” Christoff barked. “Get him now!”

Surprisingly, Remi listened without further delay, leaping over the norn’s bald head and snatching a small fistful of charged jade pieces from the center of the pile. Strangely, Christoff could feel the loss. Small though the change was, he seemed to be able to track the position of those little, lost bits, sensing them just like he could the magic reservoirs in the asuran contraptions he was siphoning off. It stole his attention from his own work yet again.

The sylvari, still trying to get around the conflict between Remi and the norn, saw what was happening and called warning to the norn, but it was too late. Remi sifted for the right shard, dropping all others into a pocket. Then flipping it point down, he viciously jammed its jagged tip into the exposed meat of the norn’s arm.

The norn bellowed and fumbled back a step. Remi didn’t stop, snatching out two more shards and ramming their blade-like tips into fleshy gaps between sections of armor. Again, the norn screamed, and whether it was his own or that of the agony magic already twisting him, there was more rage in the sound this time.

Not even stopping to remove the violet gems embedded in his arm and leg, the massive soldier took three more swings at the lithe gunman, more feral and much less controlled. All three missed, but the third was so wild that the butt-end of the haft caught Remi in the chest on the backswing, knocking him aside, away from the pile of jade, and clearing the path to Christoff. The norn looked at him, one eye twitching, and the sylvari slipped around to join the attack.

“Unseen Ones’ grace,” Christoff spat, eyes widening in his own fury as he nearly released his control of the agony magic—this couldn’t happen to him, not now.

The norn, however, was already more affected than Christoff would have thought possible. Mumbling something to himself, he snarled rabidly at the sylvari entering his periphery and threw out a hand, gripping the walking shrub him by the face and neck. With a jealous roar, he spun and threw the sergeant back the way he’d come, before—thank the Unseen Ones!—he turned once more on Remi.

The big ox batted at his own head, eyes jumping to and fro in clear paranoia as he stormed toward the gunman, leaving Christoff entirely.

There was gunfire in seemingly all directions. Another of his people rushed past Christoff toward the rising sylvari. That meant, at the moment, that each member of the opposition was covered by someone in his cell. It was all he was going to get, and he would take it. Christoff closed his eyes, breathing a faint sigh of relief, and redoubled his focus.

That was when a new thought came to him. There was no telling when the chaos of battle would find him again—there were, after all, those two women behind the crates with their guns and asura still popping out of doorways. If he wouldn’t be given time to do his work right, then perhaps he could do it fast. With a groan of effort, Christoff recited the summoning incantation again, drawing a fourth thread of agony from another crated golem. It joined the others, hitting him like a dozenth shot of brandy on his wildest night in Divinity’s Reach. He suddenly wanted to vomit.

Instead he summoned a fifth thread. Then a sixth. And then a seventh.

It was at that point he began to feel something of what the norn must have been experiencing: a gnawing, raging, roiling anxiety gaining volume in the back of his mind.

Volume? Was that how he’d describe it? Maybe. He felt distant from everything, but oddly not alone. What had begun as only a rush of power and sickening nausea pressed further with each additional thread now. It was desire, voices, foreign sensations that he loved, hated, and feared all at the same time. Something under his skin, it burned.

What else was Christoff going to do, though? These people would not allow him the proper time to build the construct, so sacrifices would have to be made, even if some of them were his own. He could handle it; if a few moments of pain solidified his ascension in the Mantle, he could—he would handle it.

Then he would have his vengeance.