Author's Note: Not a lot to say right now, just reached the point where I can go to the next town again so I would appreciate it if anyone didn't trigger another Pandemic. Read, Review, Favourite, Enjoy and Please stay safe!


Chapter 4: The Generous Thief

"A good Hero is to a Villain what a artist is to their master piece. It takes a lot of blood, sweat and tears and we make each other great!"

Black Knight Corvo, The Sculpture


I walked through the Guild Hall and earned the stares. Decade as a named and people are still giving me funny looks when I walk by, some days it was really bloody annoying. No matter, I made my way to the counter.

"The usual Mr. Hood."

It took me a little while to get them to stop calling me Thief, longer still to get them to stop using Generous Thief, though that was mostly so that they would stop trying to rip me off. I reached for my Aspect and I dropped the dismantled remains of four snow rabbits, five stone bears, a sand lion and four storm hawks out of Hold onto the counter, admittedly it was a slow day.

"We'll get this all tallied up for you right away sir."

The receptionist left to get some help for the creatures I had brought. Dear gods these things never know when to quit do they? They reproduce like flipping Dwarf Spawn! I could wipe out nine tenth's of their population and they'd still be fine again come next year. Well I suppose it was good for the economy, in that there's a near limitless supply of animal pelts with the elements attached to them to use as raw materials in armour, magic items, moving banners, and good for the people's food supplies, in that we aren't growing much in the way of crops beyond fruits and veggies that we have to go into the monster infested territory to get anyway. Still just imagine what they'd be like if no one went in to deal with them.

"We'll need a few moments to have all this sorted Mr. Hood."

"Good." A familiar arm wrapped itself around my neck and put me into a headlock. "That gives us the chance to talk for a bit."

Great.

"You know being called The Beast doesn't excuse you for being a jerk Daring!" Once off to the side the big gorilla threw me out of sight and I salvaged some of my dignity after straitening out my clothes. "What hair brained scheme are you on now?"

"Somebody's trying to kill the Night Witch's daughter, I trust I don't need to tell you how well that'll turn out do I?"

I flinched, I'm not too proud to admit it. I heard what happened to the self proclaimed Merchant Prince that thought he could make stock in Bosheit go down by picking off one of the relatives of the throne after Morgan got her hands on him. He did not die easy.

"A few more dead merchants what about it?" I illustrated my disinterest with my finger in my ear.

"The way the country is right now? I like it. Everything's peaceful now, and we're getting lots of good stuff from Bosheit. But not everyone is happy about that, so they might wanna start a war, the biggest powder keg to do that is the Night Witch, and the shortest fuse is her daughter. You really wanna be here when it goes off?" Daring looked like his logic was infallible, I wouldn't go that far but he was definitely making a point.

"Alright so what do you want me to do about it?" It wasn't like he was completely useless in this regard.

"How hard is it to figure out who's gonna try and do her in?" I cocked a suspicious brow at the idiot.

"...we could do what old Black Knight Corvo use to do."

"Well what's that?" Bloody Hells Daring read a history book some time!

"He was the one who use to commission magic swords and sneaked them into Ever After to plant them into boulders, Named are the only ones who are strong enough to pull them out. Any would be Heroes in the area would hear about the sword, yank it out, cross the border to stab someone, only to suddenly realise that their weapons don't work any more when they fight one of the enemy Named."

It was damnably ingenious too. Yah know, until the Black Knight got blown up by unstable concoctions, and also that there were a hundred or so magic weapons lying around somewhere that are still perfectly effective against rank and file troops.

"So we set a trap for them then." Daring nodding in satisfaction while having not heard my internal monologue about the fate of the Black Knight. "Wait but how do we draw them out?"

"Daring, what do they want?" I asked the big lug while being as patient as possible. "Raven dead, apparently." It took him a minute to click. "Ohhhh!"


"Use Raven as live bait!? That's your brilliant idea!?" Apple snapped clearly not appreciating the risk reward gamble that was a well planned out trap. "Do I even want to know what he's doing with those!?"

"Do you mind not distracting me while I'm holding unstable dangerous chemicals?" I replied as I mixed together the Snow Genie blood from the snow rabbits into a nitroglycerine solution, suffice to say no sudden movements or loud shouting people right now would be something that's greatly appreciated by all the parties involved.

"The fact that you guys are doing this in my dorm room does not make me feel better." Apple stated having clearly not heard what I was just talking about.

"Alright lets focus on the situation at hand. You got anyone else to come help us?" Daring distracted the screeching thing while I finished my potion.

"Briar was willing but Cursed Princess doesn't exactly lend itself to picking off assassins." Almost a dozen Named and the first person she thinks of is the one who can barely stay awake? "What about your sister?"

"She took the big lizard out on a hunting trip." Daring replied awkwardly scratching the back of his head. "We're either going to have to ask one of the other five or come up with a way of figuring out who wants to kill Raven." Silence was Daring's answer, so I answered instead.

"First: who wants Raven dead." I clearly wasn't get any more work done, so instead I got out my black board and wrote down our directives. "First question. What will happen if Raven dies."

"Her mother'll lose her marbles. What's left of them I mean." Daring stated bluntly. "That much is for sure."

"And as a result of said lost of marbles?" I asked as I led my fellow conspirators to the answer.

"She'll hunt down anyone who's responsible and see to it that they die horribly." Apple stated remembering what happened to the one who planted the bomb at the winter Solstice.

"Now then how does someone benefit from this happening?" I then asked causing everyone to draw blank faces as if I asked a stupid question. "Lemme rephrase that. Who benefits from this happening to someone else?"

"...what does that mean?" Daring asked taken aback with confusion.

"Let us for however brief a moment imagine that one day Morgan bumped off the Hierarch of the Free Cities, the First Prince of Ghallan, Darkhun's emperor, or any number of world leaders." War, if you could kill Raven and it looked like it was one of the world's big wigs who did it, no it would be a gambit but if were one of those big wigs and you had it done yourself but if you had enough resources to throw at Morgan until she went down...

"Alright, so what does this speculation tell us about who would want Raven dead?" Apple quickly adapted to the situation after wiping tension away with her finger tips.

"Currently, good and evil between these two nations have been united as a singular force, for those working on behalf of above and below to settle their eternal debate, this can be interpreted as being a bad thing." I underlined the first point as 'debate.'

"Secondly is the concept of the war economy. Where there is demand someone will find a way to providing the supply, but what if there is no demand when there is a excess of supply? The answer is to engineer a scenario that is to your liking. Whether it is medicine, mercenary troops, weapons, building supplies, food or transportation to make war one needs these things and much more." The second point I underlined as 'Money.'

"The third issue here stems from the most difficult of all to deal with: revenge." Morgan killed a lot of people during the 13th crusade, at one point in time it was reported that she had opened up a hole in the sky and dumped a ocean on tens of thousands of people who even with priests to heal the injured and revive the dead still had mass casualties. To such individuals it may not matter that to anger below's champion is to court death, irrational people are by definition irrational and therefore will not care what will happen to them, to those around them, or what loved ones that they have left. It was this precise irrationality stemming from the lost of people close to you that they feared Morgan's wrath should she lose Raven.

"So what do we do?" Apple asked looking concerned.

"Educate them, that to do so is not worth the effort." I informed her bluntly. "As they appear we shut them down, the ones that are able to make it past the border anyway. We dispose of them quickly, quietly and most importantly without anyone ever noticing so that who ever sent them gets the message: don't."

Harsh. But maybe necessary all things considered. While thinking about that the sound of a bell going off was let out, looking outside I spotted a familiar bell ringing in the watch tower, rarely used, shined to perfection to grab as much attention as possible and of course only accessible to the guards which meant...

"There's a situation. Apple stay here, Daring you're with me." And so the two of us went out. I haven't had chance to fully restock my potion supplies either, thank you Daring you Miserable butt pain, I should have plenty of innate arrows stock piled, this was Bosheit after all non magical arrows were rarer then the magic ones, the armour piercing ones were on low supply I'd need a mage to enchant them for that.

"Unleash." Daring turned loose his first Aspect and as it turns out Beast was putting it mildly.

What Daring turned into was commonly referred to as a yeti, which is to say seven feet tall, covered entirely in white fur and roughly resembled what you'd get if you crossed a gorilla, a bear and a dear to together. Yeti Daring picked my up, threw me on his antlers, and then climbed the gate house and jumped over it to where the other guards and the rest of Charming's students were gathering, scaring the living crud out of most of them in the process. Charming wasn't scared, then again he usually wasn't.

"We've got spawn on our hands, dug their way to the surface a while ago and a chunk of them are heading our way." Spawn. Of all the thing's it could be it had to be Spawn. "Honestly? I don't care what any of you plan on doing but I'm going to have some fun, so hunker down, strategies, go out like Leeroy Jenkins for all I care just do something and try not to get killed in the process." On that note Charming left, taking a horse and riding off in the direction of the smoke where the Spawn were approaching from. Crud.

"Hold." Few Aspects were more common among the Names associated with grand larceny than Hold.

"You. Lemme know when the monsters are within 200 yards of us." And so with my unpacked alchemy set I resumed the process of turning the bloodline of gods into death on the heads of the enemies. Knowing what I was dealing with helped, the Spawn automatically took anything that wasn't fire proofed, armour piercing or 'holy' off of the table. The guard watching the area reported that most of the fires had stopped moving a while ago, that would be Charming, Daring and whatever forces had gone with them, leaving us to clean up the leftovers of whatever they let slip by or whatever they couldn't put down. Credit where do the buggers were distracted considering that it was three hours before the first of them arrived.

"Any Rat Kings?" I finished with my work and put them away as I looked over the Balcony. The answer to that was no, which was good since the short description for the normal version of those were 'Hard Buggers' and that's before you take your pick of them being covered in fire, rock or or straight up lava. The bad news was that they looked to be dealing with lava covered spawn, no undead but between the whole lava thing and probably being corrupted by demons really didn't help our odds if it came down to close quarters scrap. Welp time to bust out the Monster.

"Hold." I pulled out the mass of bone I had assembled by hand into a vaguely bow like shape, the most important and biggest being the wyvern wish bone that made up the bulk of the muscle and the whole thing bounded together via Tree Spider webbing. I made use of the compound method of stringing, which is to say that the draw string is wrapped around pulley's on either end of the bow and pulled tight, effectively giving the 3 foot long arming bow the power of a six foot war bow. That wasn't even the most bizarre feature though, that honour went to the speed loading ammo box I attached to the middle of the thing. Before I figured out how to Hold arrows into the thing it took me 3 seconds to load 5 arrows into the thing, 3 more to unload them all if I didn't bother to pick my targets, now I can reload in 1 second. Which now brings us to the walking balls of lava and brimstone that just entered my 200 yard range. I loaded in the box specialised arrows filled with my explosive ice cocktail in the business end and feathers of a Storm Hawk on the other.

"Any time you're ready Thief."

Ignoring the tool playing look out for me, I loosed the arrow guided by my aim and propelled by magical feathers at the mass of burning stone before me. One of the great mysteries of the world was that things which are extremely hot freeze a lot faster then things that are at normal temperature, why I didn't know, but watched as the compound in the arrow head exploded and froze the lot of them solid. Dozens of years of erosion took place in moments as the ice found cracks and expanded on them while the organic tissues inside were frozen and the entire thing collapsed under it's own weight. Some of them did any, others proved stronger as they broke free and harvested their comrades dead power into a massive fire ball. With a push and pull I shot it with another exploding arrow, not ice this time for I had expected that to have worked the first time, holy power and I watched as the masses of humanoid lava burned, screaming in pain. The remaining three were tipped with mere steel in case I needed to pick off any survivors. I only needed one.

"Apologies for doubting you sir." I unloaded my bow and put it back into storage as I resumed work. Until Charming and Daring came back to tell me otherwise we were at war and I didn't have the time for small talk.

"We'll need to send someone over to clean that up, I already blessed the area but try to send someone who can handle demonic material." On that note I needed to get back to work on processing what materials I had, if the horde does manage to break through then we were going to need a lot more than what I had done up already to wipe them all out, The Rat King's alone would probably need their own arrow. When the second group arrived my classmates down on the ground had apparently gotten wise, spitting out miracle barriers so that if the monsters had gotten too close to outright snipe them then those barriers would be the only thing able to stall them long enough that I could. Evidently the spawn had someone with a brain was leading the next group, which was likely given how big it was and their use of actual tactics this time. The Phalanx maneuver, that one where all the soldiers position their shields above and in front of them to make a wall that the enemy archers simply couldn't shoot through. They weren't wrong either, nothing short of the adamantine arrow heads could punch through five inches of solid stone and I wasn't using that up unless I had to, doubly so if I knew I couldn't get the arrow head back. Which now led to the current situation. I whipped out my other bow, iron wood, a six foot long war bow with none of the bells and whistles of the other one. I loaded the next ice arrow a few inches off from the centre, checked the wind...

"Curve." Spat out a lie and fired, my arrow curving around the enemy and hitting them in their vulnerable side with a loud explosion freezing the entire right Flank. They didn't bother putting a wall on the sides, they shouldn't have had to we're on a mountain pass. "Curve." With a second lie I fired off another curving arrow and collapsed the right flank of the enemy platoon, the centre having been caught between both bursts followed suit. I released a second mass of explosive holy water on them and once again blessed the entire area, the harvesting work would have to be left to the priests now.

"Your second Aspect?" The man who had been playing spotter for me asked looking down at what was left of the enemy forces.

"Bag it and tag it." What he would do if he knew I was lying through my teeth. Curving a arrow was as easy a matter as offsetting the arrow a couple of inches from the centre of the bow so that the wind pressure would change the direction of the shot mid flight and hit them in the side, he could pull off some particularly extreme trick shots by virtue of being hundreds of feet off of the ground where the winds could get pretty extreme. No matter how carefully he explained people still didn't believe him when he told them that it wasn't a Aspect he was using to pull off his trick shots, instead he decided to let them think it was one of his Aspects. Would be pretty nice to see someone who came after him thinking they knew what his Aspects were only to then discover a rather nasty surprise waiting for them. Speaking of nasty surprises...

"RRRAAATTT!"

My spotter got all into a panic as we saw a huge clump start to make it's way through the pass. The term Rat King is borrowed from the term used to refer to when a big bundle of rats all died off when they bunched together for warmth and then couldn't get apart because all their tails were tangled together. In this case when a huge mass of dead get tossed into a pit together and are risen all at once they sort of just do it as one huge mass. The common theory is that whatever force is reanimating them can't tell the different between them and instead just lumps them all together. Made as much sense as anything, the bones in skeletons were technically independent of each other but they moved as one entity, what this meant is that the monster had multiple points of failure that would all have to be taken care of one way or another otherwise it wouldn't stay down, and that was on top of the entire thing practically being a boulder with legs on it.

"Well... most of one any way." The good news was that it was heavily wounded, it looked like it side had been crushed while other pieces had been outright torn off. I put both of my bows away climbed down to go fetch the materials.

"Where are you going!?"

A huge boulder beamed the other boulder off the side of the head Daring in his Beast form roaring from above while he beat his chest in challenge, Charming in the mean time ran over and hacked it's leg off with his great sword and proceeded to carve apart the only one of the monsters that had managed to escape him. I turned in what pieces of the Spawn to the corpse dealer that I had no plans to use myself, which weren't many, and claimed my share of the bounty, the rest having gone to clean up the mess I apparently made from eroding the path with lava monsters and ice arrows. I had made a sizeable amount of cash from both my hunting earlier in the week and the bounty on beating off the Spawn horde and I intended to put it to use. Soon as I was able to get away I found the orphanage within Ever After that was set up after the Thirteenth crusade and proceeded to sneak in and sit myself in the office while the sister running the place filed her paper work.

"Sister." The startled woman turned around to face Sparrow and quickly breathed out trying to calm herself down.

"Stop sneaking in here!"

"My regular donation." I stated handing over a small satchel taken from the sum of the total and left it on her desk, anomalously of course. "Expect others to follow shortly." I couldn't be caught giving out any large amounts to the orphanage, I had to settle for being their third largest donor, one without a name attached to it. The rest of what they needed would come from a series of bribes, black mail, favours and threats. Gods it was hard work keeping this place above water.

"Brother..."

"I'm not your brother." I've never sworn anything to the house of light, and I don't plan to any time soon, for now the orphanage I had grown up in was just a unfortunate necessity, and if war was coming up it need to be one that was expanded and repaired soon. "I have more work to do, even then I was never here." Like that Sparrow was never at the Hood orphanage so there fore he never left it either.

"Gods he's asinine."


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