Chapter 85 - Aftermath (Patreon)

Zeke clutched his shoulder, which still bore the wound from the crossbow bolt which had taken him unaware. “I hate poison,” he muttered. He couldn’t be sure, but the bolt seemed to have been coated, either magically or with something more mundane, with a poison that had simultaneously weakened him and caused excessive bleeding. However, his new resistance to poison had reduced the effects to the point where they were little more than a nuisance.

The woman, Shonda, had been a different story altogether. Until that moment, Zeke hadn’t encountered anyone that could take a blow from his mace without showing at least a little damage. Even the drachnid queen’s carapace had cracked a little under his attacks. But the muscular woman had shrugged him off with little apparent injury.

Of course, she’d been similarly unable to hurt him, so they’d fought one another to a dead heat. At least, that had been the case until Abby had managed to get the upper hand against her own opponent, prompting the tall, gaunt woman’s surrender. Abby hadn’t accepted it, instead opting to tear the woman’s throat out with a swift strike from her [Venomous Hatchet]. The shock of seeing that had given Zeke the opening he needed, which he used to attack Shonda’s knee. And when it buckled, she’d lost her grip on whatever skill she’d been using to withstand his blows, allowing Zeke to end the frustrating fight with the swift descent of his club.

But now they had another problem.

“Don’t let her up, Pudge,” he said, approaching the spot where his companion had tackled the small woman whose skills were responsible for the raiders’ shields. Then, he turned to Abby and asked, “You okay?”

Abby’s chest still heaved with every breath, evidence of just how worked up she was. In one hand, she held her hatchet. In the other was a simple, double-edged dagger that she held in a reverse grip. Both dripped dark blood into the night.

She looked up, her eyes glinting in the flickering firelight. “I didn’t hesitate,” she said.

“She tried to kill us,” was Zeke’s response. For whatever reason, his rebirth into the new world had come with a ruthless mindset that went a step further than the doctrine of an eye for an eye. He knew he shouldn’t be so comfortable with killing, regardless of the reason, but he just couldn’t bring himself to feel guilty about taking the lives of people who had attacked him with the intent to kill. If he wouldn’t have unlocked the resistances that had enabled him to resist the poison on that crossbow bolt, Zeke had no doubt that the raiders would have killed him, Abby, and Pudge without skipping a beat.  So, it seemed perfectly appropriate that Abby had done the same, even after their leader had surrendered.

Clearly, Abby didn’t feel the same lack of guilt. But she’d done it anyway, which Zeke considered progress.

“I know,” Abby responded. “It’s just that…it’s a war crime, right? Killing people who’ve surrendered, I mean. I remember reading that it was.”

Zeke shrugged. “We can’t afford to take prisoners,” he said. “And if we had let them go, we’d just have another group attack us in a couple of days. We probably still will. So, as far as I’m concerned, it was necessary.”

And he couldn’t deny that there was a part of him that took things a step further than that. He liked having turned the tables on their attackers. It gave him a certain sense of satisfaction to think that they’d come to kill him and his friends and had instead found themselves on the losing end of the battle.

Zeke didn’t think of himself as a bloodthirsty person. It wasn’t like he was running around and murdering innocent people. But monsters that had attacked him? People that had tried to kill him? Slaughtering them brought with it no guilt at all.

Abby’s eyes found the woman Pudge had pinned to the ground, and Zeke followed it. There was still a telltale blue glow of a shield clinging to the woman’s body. Abby stepped up beside Zeke, asking, “What are we going to do with her? That shield is incredibly strong if it can keep Pudge at bay. And it stopped my arrows, too.”

Zeke’s brows furrowed. “I don’t suppose it lets her breathe underwater, right?” he asked. “How do skills like that even work?”

Abby shrugged. “I don’t know,” she stated, her voice still quivering a bit. Killing that tall woman had shaken her, whether she wanted to admit it or not. “But at her level, I think it would require a lot of concentration to keep it up on anyone else. That’s why it dropped off her friends when Pudge tackled her.”

“Makes sense, I guess,” Zeke said, nodding. It was something of an exaggeration. Despite having lived in the new world for almost three years, Zeke still didn’t know much about how everything worked. He could slaughter his way through a horde of monsters, but the intricacies of how other people’s skills worked eluded him. And he had no idea how to rectify his ignorance. “What do you think we should do with her?”

“Please, let me…let me go!” the woman pleaded from beneath the bear. Pudge wasn’t fully grown yet, but he was still more than big enough to pin the petite woman. “I’ll…I’ll do whatever you want. Just…j-just don’t kill me!”

Zeke frowned, trying to go over his options. Despite her powerful shield skill, Zeke knew it wouldn’t be difficult to end the woman’s life. Already, he’d thought of a half-dozen ways to get around her ability to block attacks. They could drown her, bury her alive, or just burn her at the stake. And even that might’ve been giving the skill too much credit. A few minutes of uninterrupted assault from his mace would probably do the trick. But was killing her the right choice?

For most of his time since being reborn, Zeke had been reactionary. He hadn’t planned much, and most of his decisions had been made in the heat of the moment. He desperately needed to change that. So, he stared at the woman for a long moment, lost in thought. He would’ve taken even longer if Abby hadn’t interrupted his reverie.

“We should at least interrogate her,” she said. “See what she knows about our mission. Maybe figure out why the Crystal Spiders sent them.”

Zeke sighed. Abby was right. But that didn’t mean he was looking forward to it. He thought the woman would probably be cooperative, but he didn’t really trust himself to ask the right questions. For all his fighting abilities, Zeke was a straightforward man.

“I hate this kind of thing,” he muttered, already striding forward. “Why can’t people just let us kill the monsters and save the princess?”

“The princess?” asked Abby from beside him. “You know the girl isn’t a princess, right?”

“Yeah, I know,” was his response.

Regardless of what Talia Nightingale’s title actually was, she was a princess in Zeke’s mind. After all, she was the daughter of the woman who ruled over the Radiant Isles. Lady Constance hadn’t been named queen, but that didn’t alter the nature of her power. So, the title of princess seemed fitting for her daughter. And he had been tasked with saving her.

His mind went back to his first meeting with Constance, where she’d told him the nature of her request. Talia and her squad, which had been led by a man named Abdul Rumas, had gone missing while hunting undead in the Farindale Forest. Through some unknown means, Lady Constance had deduced that they had been taken captive by the forest’s lord, who was named Abraham Micayne. When Zeke had asked why Lady Constance didn’t send someone from her own Radiant Guard to rescue them, she’d said that they were compromised in some way. As outsiders, Zeke and Abby were well-suited to the task at hand.

Or that was what the woman had claimed. Zeke didn’t really believe a word Constance had said, but considering that he’d always intended to head north to grind experience on the undead, he’d agreed to the mission. And as such, he would try to complete it to the best of his ability; after all, saving the princess was likely to come with a Framework quest, right? Maybe he’d even get another achievement. Whatever the case, the girl needed help, and Zeke couldn’t resist the urge to play the knight in shining armor.

“Do you want to do this? Or do you want me to?” Abby asked, tearing him from his thoughts.

“Together is probably best. Pudge, drag her into the cottage,” he said.

The bear complied, rolling off of the petite woman and wrapping his jaws around her ankle. Due to the shield that hovered a hair’s breadth above her skin, the bear’s teeth didn’t harm her, but she was powerless to resist. Not that she didn’t try. She flailed, trying to escape, but it was useless.

Abby and Zeke followed the pair through the door, and Zeke shut it behind them. “Let her go, Pudge,” Zeke commanded, and his companion did just that, retreating a few feet away and sinking to the floor on his haunches. But his eyes never left Tabby, the shield caster. Zeke dragged a pair of chairs to the center of the room, setting them up to face one another. Abby grabbed her own chair, and Zeke helped Tabby to her feet and into one of the roughhewn chairs. The woman was terrified, shivering uncontrollably.

“Why did you attack us?” Zeke asked, fixing her with best cold-eyed stare.

“I…w-we were paid…it was just a job,” she said, her voice quivering. “We do that sometimes. It wasn’t…it…it wasn’t personal or anything…”

“Felt kind of personal when someone shot me with a crossbow bolt,” he replied. “Do you think you might take it personally if someone tried to kill you?”

“I…I don’t…I don’t know…”

Abby spoke up. “Who hired you?” she asked.

“Carla,” the woman said. “We’ve worked with her before.”

“Killing people, right?” Abby asked.

“S-sometimes? I don’t know,” Tabby responded. “I just cast my shields. I’ve never…you know…I don’t kill people…”

Zeke snorted in derision. “Yeah, that’s not going to work,” he said. “Just because you weren’t the one to strike the killing blow doesn’t mean you’re not equally responsible. You’re a murderer just like those dead idiots outside.”

The woman seemed to shrink further into her seat. Beneath her hood, Zeke could see that she was young. Almost innocent-looking. She wasn’t a great beauty or anything, but she wasn’t ugly, either. Not on the outside, at least. How many people had she ambushed? How many had she helped assassinate? Zeke’s hands were likely coated in just as much blood, but he’d never attacked anyone without reason. Everything he had killed, he’d done so after they had either attacked him first or killed innocents.

“Carla is one of the Crystal Spiders, right?” Abby said, driving the interrogation forward.

Tabby nodded. “Sort of,” she said. “She works for them. Not quite a member, but still part of their organization. Shonda and me, we just wanted to get paid…”

“And the other one?” Abby asked. “What was his name again?”

“Rafe,” said the hooded woman. “He…h-he wasn’t a regular. I don’t know much about him.”

Zeke shook his head. “Doesn’t really matter anymore,” he said. “His brains are splattered across my porch.”

At the mention of how Zeke had dispatched the big man, Tabby’s trembling got worse. Abby asked, “How did Carla know where to find us? And why are the Crystal Spiders after us? We killed a few of them on the road between Beacon and Bastion, but nobody should’ve known about that.”

“It was…you were asking questions in Beacon,” Tabby said. “People noticed, and they figured you were the ones who killed them. That’s when Carla got her assignment. It came straight from the top. She thought this was her ticket to becoming a proper member. And n-now…now, she’s dead. And you’re going to kill me, too…”

Zeke sighed. He didn’t really want to kill the scared woman. She was helpless, and it went against his every instinct to just murder her in cold blood. However, she had tried to kill him. He wasn’t so naïve that he thought that letting her go wouldn’t come back to bite him. So, what was he supposed to do?

As if reading his mind, Abby said, “You know we can’t let her go, right?”

Zeke nodded. “I’m aware,” he responded. “But it just feels wrong to kill her like this.”

“Could just tie her up and leave her somewhere,” Abby suggested. “Maybe she’d survive…”

“This far from Beacon? She’d get eaten by a monster,” Zeke said. “It would probably be kinder just to end it quickly.”

Abby shrugged. “There’s a waystation a few days from here,” she said. “We could leave her there and let the authorities sort it out. Most of the time, people don’t mess with the spiders, but…well, she’s just a bandit, right? She doesn’t have any real connection to that assassin’s guild.”

“What would they do to her?” he asked.

“Depends on who’s in charge,” she said. “Some Watchers are more brutal than others, especially when it comes to bandits. With her skillset, though…they’d probably put her to work. Some kind of indentured contract or something.”

“What are those like?” he asked.

“They’re Framework contracts, so you can’t break them without serious consequences,” she said. “I once saw a man who broke one. He was blind and deaf, and he just sat there screaming. They had him confined to a room in one of the waystation keeps.”

“God…why didn’t they just put him out of his misery?” he asked.

“He was an example,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t know what kind of contract he’d been under, but breaking it resulted in the death of the waystation’s Watcher’s son. Needless to say, he was a bit vindictive after that.”

“That’s horrifying,” Zeke said. Then he sighed, massaging his forehead in frustration. There didn’t seem to be any good choices available to him. “Fine. I’ll let her decide. Tabby, you’ve got a decision to make.”

“M-me? What kind of a decision?” she asked.

“First choice,” he said, holding up one finger. “I kill you. I’ll make it as humane as possible. You can drop that shield skill, and it’ll be over in a second.”

“Uh…”

“Second choice,” he went on, trying not to notice the terrified look in her eyes. “You refuse to cooperate. I take you back to that stream we passed yesterday, and I hold your head underwater until you drown. I don’t want to have to do that.”

The girl bit her lip, her eyes darting to the door. It was obvious that she was thinking of making a break for it. Zeke ignored it. If she chose to run, it would make his own decision a lot easier. He didn’t even consider the possibility that she might get away. If she had the capability, she’d have already used it.

“Third,” he said, holding up his third finger. “We tie you up and keep you prisoner while we make our way to the nearest waystation. What was it called again, Abby?”

“Redoubt,” she said. “It’s the last waystation before the unsettled northern territories.”

“Right,” Zeke said. “We’ll take you to Redoubt and turn you over to the Watcher. After that, you’d be his problem. I don’t know what he’ll do with you, and honestly, I don’t care. So long as you understand that if I ever see you again after that, I won’t hesitate to kill you and anyone else you’re with at the time. What’s your decision?”

“I…I want to live…”

Zeke felt almost disappointed, but strangely relieved at the same time. “Fine,” he said. Then, to Abby, he asked, “Watch her while I go get the rope?”