Chương 21: Chapter Twenty-One: The Wrong Sort of Enemy Entirely

She rolled on instinct. [Drop Safely] – Passive. Skill [Drop Safely] has leveled up! It bought her two feet and a face full of marsh grass before something closed around her collar and hauled. She was briefly airborne. Then she was not." Sprint!" she shouted the moment her feet touched the ground. [Sprint] – Active. She wrenched sideways as the skill activated, slipping the grip by half a foot, but it was not enough. His other hand caught her wrist.

The momentum swung her rather than threw her and she went back into the grass in a controlled crash, somehow managing not to break anything that mattered. She got up. He didn't attack immediately again. The gate to the city was visible but still too far for anyone to notice them fighting here, and too far for her to sprint all the way back. Even worse, he was already between her and the gate. Alice steadied herself and looked him over for a moment. He was a large man. This was the first thing to notice about him.

Short dark hair. Practical clothing, worn through and repaired. A length of rope at his belt. Likely working man somewhere past thirty-five, with thickness across the shoulders that came from hauling weight for years. He looked at her somberly, and did not seem remotely surprised at her skill. Alice tried to think this through.

She had never fought a human before and her inexperience was plain to see from how she had to burn through Vigour in mere moments, while he watched her do it with the eyes of someone who had seen skill use at her level before, and was not alarmed. Even worse, she had not seen the same from him. Was she even a challenge at all?

"You are a caster," he said. It was not a question. She went at him with the knife anyway, because she wasn't going to out-wait a man twice her weight with ten feet between them. Alice thought about taking the initiative. She could go in low and fast, the way she had learned to move against things faster than her. But this man was not a beast or a demon.

She did not have any special knowledge of easily accessible weaknesses she could take advantage of and even worse, he was definitely more intelligent than anything else she had fought before. Her tricks and tactics would likely not work. She whispered " Observe" because she had very little chance here and she needed to know. [Observe] – Active. A second of clarity.

He sharpened in her vision, whether his weight distribution, the deliberate placement of his feet, or even his expression, which was one of unhappy determination. She looked carefully and in the corner of her vision, the gold rectangle she had last seen on the Boggart's corpse appeared on a living target for the first time. On the screen she could see even less information about him than for the Boggart, but one number quickly caught her eye.

Level: 22 (Rank: Nota) Oh, that's not ideal, she thought, lips tight together. She was bleeding from her lip and her skull was doing something she was going to have complicated thoughts about later. She got her footing. He still hadn't moved toward her and was watching her with a patience that was, somehow, worse than urgency. But perhaps there was something here, something that could save this situation. They didn't have to end this in a fight. She had no clue why he was here to begin this.

They could resolve this some other way. This didn't have to be reduced to kill or be killed. Did it? She stood with the knife and did not move as well. It was the wrong choice. She barely blinked and he crossed the distance between them as if he could use [Sprint] as well, though he said no skill name out loud. He parried her attack with one hand and his other grabbed her throat. Sheer instinct and a fear of suffocation made her strike blindly, and somehow she managed to nick his forearm, but he tightened his grip.

She didn't have long to think, with each breath smaller than the last. His other hand moved. A crash. She did not get another chance.

She woke to reed water and an ache in her skull that extended quite deeply down her neck. Her hands were tied behind her back. She was on her back in the grass. He was sitting approximately six feet away, examining the cut on his forearm, annoyed but not worried. He had her knife by his side, which she found terribly frustrating. The sky over the reeds was still lit. It was late afternoon.

"You are not used to fighting humans," he said, without looking up.

"I noticed," Alice said, dryly. She wasn't quite sure whether finding herself tied up was good news. Good: it meant he likely didn't mean to kill her soon. Bad: she was a restrained woman in the woods alone with a man. She pushed those thoughts away quickly. That way lay despair. At least it wasn't the East-End Ripper. She was alive, after all. He looked up at that. Something in his expression seemed… conflicted?

"Hartley." He said it flatly, which she took to mean his name.

"Freelance collector, three years this winter." He went back to the forearm. It had barely bled from what she could see.

"I've been watching you for weeks."

"Alice," she said. It was good to humanize herself in front of a captor.

"I didn't realise I had an audience," she continued, looking at her status. If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. Attributes Vigour Lv. 6 (18/60) Acuity Lv. 7 (20/70) Those were not encouraging numbers. At least the attribute level up had increased her Vigour somewhat.

"You killed a Marsh Boggart today," he said, ignoring her words completely.

"Alone. With just a knife." He looked at her.

"That's a Nota-rank kill. From someone who clearly went through the gate for the first time in September."

"I had a good morning." He did not find this funny.

"You cast out loud. Movement class stuff, from what I could see. Sprint and Dodge, and something for the blade." He paused.

"Speaking the Angel's gifts into use. Only knights and formal guild fighters do that. And the church templars." He considered her.

"So what are you?"

"A flower seller," she said.

"With a freelance forager's license," some affiliation with the Compact might make him hesitate killing her, though she didn't really have a license yet.

"Newly registered. Which I believe makes my presence here perfectly legal and–""I'm not with the guild. Or the coppers."

"Oh, I didn't take you for one," she said. She needed to think her way out of this situation.

"You didn't show a badge." There was a brief moment of silence.

"You've been using the east waterway corridor every other morning and taking the best of the wild stock before I get to it. The Boggarts you've been clearing are ones I'd been leaving as a buffer. The mushroom clusters by the second bank have been gone twice when I came in for them." His voice was patient, though his expression seemed deeply annoyed.

"You've cost me, is the issue."

"You sell flowers?"

"Amongst other things, to the tradesmen, yes." He frowned. Oh, God, she thought. If I die over sales of all things, I will become a ghost and haunt this idiot. She tried to approach this rationally.

"The wild stock isn't exclusively yours."

"No," he said.

"But I've got history here, I have a zone claim, and there is a full rank difference between us." He set the knife, her knife, down on the grass between them, just far enough out of her reach that the gesture was clearly deliberate.

"Whatever you've got going on with the physical casting, you've been hunting in other's territory without knowing anything. I want to know who you are, where you're getting trained, and whether we've got an ongoing problem." She looked at the knife, then back at him. He was not unreasonable. He was territorial and annoyed about lost income and suspicious of an Ignota flower girl who killed Marsh Boggarts with spoken movement skills and a bone-handled knife.

These were, she could admit, reasonable things to be suspicious of. He had come to the entirely wrong conclusions, which was terribly inconvenient at the moment, and he wanted information that she would need to fabricate convincingly. He was not her killer and he was not connected to anything she was afraid of. She had been reading too deeply into conspiracies, when instead this was simply a man whose livelihood was being threatened and who had finally run out of patience.

"I had some help," she said, thinking on the fly.

"Early on. Someone who knew about casting." This was near enough true, and she couldn't believe she had only just learned what others called 'active skills.'

"I didn't know about prior-use claims. I genuinely didn't. I thought the outer section was open to any licensed freelancer." She kept her expression at embarrassed and honest rather than frightened, because the frightened are more likely to lie to save themselves.

"I'll make sure to move my foraging elsewhere in the future. Perhaps, further north, past the second waterway. I will have to make sure that no one hunts there too," she said calmly, and in future tense, as if him letting her go was the rational, foregone conclusion.

"That's… You're right that I didn't know, and I should have found out before I started." Would an apology seem too false? Hartley looked at her for a long moment. He seemed to be deciding how much of what she'd said was true.

"You are not a copper?"

"No," she said quickly.

"Absolutely not." Damn, why would someone fight and kidnap a cop in the middle of nowhere? This was not about some stupid sales no matter what he said. But how the hell was she involved in whatever this guy was hiding from the law? She didn't think she had noticed anything particularly strange in the past few weeks. Everything was equally strange to her! He took a deep breath.

"You're not with the guilds," he said." There's no casters in the guilds who don't know about claims, I don't think. Are you Inquisition?" He seemed to be talking partly to himself. She said nothing, because she didn't know whether admitting to not knowing what the Inquisition was, outside of the Spanish massacres of heretics in the late middle ages, would make her look more innocent or more guilty.

"Right," Hartley said, and seemed to reach a decision.

"I don't think I can let you go just yet. I have seen you. With the way you level up, soon you'll be stronger than me. Shouldn't I make sure you never get a chance for revenge?"

"Hartley," she said, almost in a panic.

"We don't need to be enemies over this. It was a misunderstanding. Completely reasonable. I'll move my foraging north. I'll stay out of the east corridor. I won't touch what's yours."

"I need to think about it," he said. Shit, should she try to use one of her social skills? But what if being a rank higher made him immune to it? Even, worse, what if he recognized the use of [Convince] mid-sentence? That could literally sign her death warrant. Alice decided to stay quiet for a few minutes, while Hartley continued bandaging his forearm. She had become emotional too quickly and would need a cool head to convince him.

Just as she had planned out a story and was preparing to get him to sympathize with her more, she noticed the sky. The light had changed. It happened rather quickly over the last twenty minutes out here, with no gas lamps or stacked buildings interrupting the horizon. The warmth was going out of it. The reed shadows were running long, pointed east, and the air had grown colder and more humid.

She had made sure ever since her first few days in this world, that she was never outside in the dark, without a light, candle or lantern, on her person.

"Hartley," she said.

"I need you to light a fire." He looked at her.

"What?"

"Or release me so I can do it. One of those needs to happen, and it needs to happen quickly." Her voice came out clearer than it was in her head. He seemed very befuddled.

"You're not in a position to give me orders. You are what… cold? Scared of the dark?"

"I'm not giving you orders." She kept her voice as level as she could.

"I'm giving you information. There are things that come out when it gets dark. Not Boggarts. Something else. They don't care about your level or how deep we are in the Marshes."

"I have [Dark Sense]." He said easily, and she would have loved to ask someone at depth about their skills literally any other time but this.

"It has a pretty good range. And I've worked after dark. I have never seen anything." She looked at him, and thought very precisely about what she could say. The only thing she could come up with was things she couldn't. She could not say ' they aren't coming for you' or' you are not my worry right now.' That would piss anyone off.

"Your dark sense won't detect these," she said instead.

"They're not natural creatures. They respond to light. You need a fire, or a lantern, before the sun finishes setting." She paused, reaching for vocabulary that might make more sense in this world.

"They're something like…

"and she could not find any words that would sound particularly familiar or convincing. The only word she had for these things was provided by the system."... Demons." He looked at her with an expression she easily recognized. It was the one people reserved for sudden unexpected religiosity from someone they had thought was otherwise sensible.

'Demons' sounded like something the churches would warn about, which was the problem, because that was all it was to him, church words, religious boogeymen, the general theological category for spiritual corruption and the adversary and the things the Angel's gifts were supposed to protect against in some vague doctrinal sense. Not a specific monster. Not something you fought by lighting a fire. The sun touched the top of the western reed line. She looked past the man, and carefully did not react to what she saw.

In the reed shadows to the west, something was still under the shade. It stayed at the absolute edge of it, almost as if ready to jump out at any moment, but currently waiting, patient and hungry. She looked back at the man who had captured her and left her defenseless and restrained on the ground.

"... Demons," he said, dubiously, as if to confirm he had heard her correctly. Oh, she was dead, wasn't she?