DISCLAIMER: I don't own this stuff. But if you, as a peer, want to use someone I created, you gotta ask first, mmkay?
The character I roughly base this story on is a Lv. 39 Assassin, named "TheDan" in Scania. Feel free to contact me, I'm usually not doing anything terribly important online and I'd love to see some peers or fans in-game!
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"I need to tell you something," I said, and I knew I was blushing. I had that warm feeling behind my ears that everyone hates, you know? But he didn't hear me.
"Don't bother," he said gruffly, each tone grating against my ears. "I know what you're doing and it isn't a good idea."
I started crying. I knew I was going to. Today had been such a good day, too... I mean, they said Hideval was dead, but we didn't know for sure, right? And anyway, the Ilbis really made Dan happy. I haven't really seen him like that ever since we last saw Conlan.
Dan opened his mouth to say something more, but the world exploded around me.
That's the only way I can think to describe it: The shearing pain on my skin, and then Dan on me, holding me down. Glass breaking, a sickening thump, several small sounds similar to a bolt finding its mark.
Dan's body fell limp. I could hear screaming and I realized it was me. I shut my mouth and found myself whimpering. Dans body began to shudder.
Blood flowed freely from behind his head. I peered my neck to look at him and noticed that my hands were dripping with his life. I gasped.
Something big had hit him at the base of his skull. Blood everywhere, some of it was already caking. But the most grotesue part was his back.
The high temperature of the explosion had cleanly vaporized most of his shirt, leaving singe marks down what was remaining of it. His back was red, raw, and bloody. There was a place were I could see the back of his ribcage. But something else was wrong. He started gushing blood almost everywhere, and I realized that our glass window had lacerated him in a thousand places. There were long cuts and scratches, as deep as the width of my finger. Some places there were glass bits embedded in his skin.
I turned away and threw up.
"Dammit, you pile of bloody entrails!" a voice was yelling. "You could have bloody killed them! What the hell where you thinking?!"
"You could have said something before I used the bloody spell, woman!"
Used the spell?
There was a moment that I don't rmeember in which I assume I picked up my crossbow and loaded an arrow into it.
"What the -" I hissed, putting either of the two's faces in my sights. "Did you do here?" One was a dark-skinned woman, the other was Renon from earlier.
He froze, but the woman dropped her wand and put her hands up. Renon did the same.
"I'm Hamina, and this idiot is my burden," she said. "I know Dan from school. This was all a mistake. Let me heal you two."
I cocked the crossbow. "Stay away from him." I noticed only then that warm tears were streaming down my face. I gasped audibly and realized that I probably wasn't as intimidating as I was aiming for. Hamina's face shuddered in my sights and I dropped the weapon.
I clamored to me knees in a mad attempt to pick it up, but Hamina had crossed the room. The end of her Cromi was under my chin.
"You have no choice but to trust me," she said solidly, and nodded to Renon. Renon held his bladed staff at my eye level, and Hamina quickly waved her wand. I felt an odd sensation around my face, and realized she'd healed my face. Only then did I notice that it was hurting. I guess it'd been effected in the explosion.
She stepped back. I tried to glare at Renon and felt my muscles quiver. I was still crying. Through my blurred vision, though, I could see Hamina going over to Dan.
"Please stay away from him," I whispered, unable to do more. It was like my throat had clamped itself up. Renon was going to kill me, as soon as they had robbed Dan.
I was so stupid to have given him my location, especially after telling him that my partner was an Assassin. It should have been obvious to me! All that these two wanted was money, and 'Sins carried lots of expensive stars, and I was only a stupid girl who couldn't keep her thoughts straight. I needed to focus.
"You battered him up, Renon," Hamina said through gritted teeth. "I don't even know if there's anything I can do with him."
Renon seemed to stumble-
It's my chance.
I made to stand but found that I couldn't. They made it look so easy in the movies! Fear was holding me to my spot. If only I could stand now, I could tackle him and he couldn't use a spell, and I could take a bolt from my hip and thrust it into him... But now it was too late, now that I was finally ready... And then I realized I had missed my only hope of survival. He was talking now, again in full control of the situation.
"Surely there's something you can do," he said quietly, high-pitched. He was worried. I started watching Hamina.
"Heal," she murmured, holding her palms to Joshua's back, half a millimeter from touching his skin. I gazed in awe as the green waves of pure magic washed over his body, speeding up a healing process. It was like watching one of those fast-motion films of a tree growing or a rose blooming.
Glass shards and splinters popped out on their own accord as the wounds they were sitting in started to close. Hamina watched with hawk-like eyes, picking here and there every now and then: Removing an embedded splinter with a swift motion, holding her finger to a spot where it had been infected, plucking out a large piece of broken glass the size of half a subi.
"This could have ended up in your throat," she said with a quick glance in my direction, tossing the heat-curved glass aside. "He saved your life."
"It wouldn't be the first time," I said, in a daze. Indeed it wouldn't... Compared to him, I was an utter klutz when we were hunting monsters. He'd be jumping around, throwing a Lucky Seven this way, a Drain that way. Stand next to me and cast a low-level Haste, and I'd feel that magical sensation as if gravity had temporarily forgotten my existence. He was so graceful in battle. I'd shoot a single Iron Arrow and sure, it might do some damage. Sure, it might hit a lot of monsters. But then they're all after me, and it's hard to shoot that fast with a crossbow. So I'd stand there and shoot and shoot until my mana ran out, or until I had to retreat, or until Dan showed up from Dark Sight behind a group and began to snipe them out.
"He's having trouble breathing," Hamina said, holding her fingers to his throat. "Good job, you dolt, you might've fried one of his lungs. If he was breathing in when you cast that Special Explosion spell, it might've burned him from the inside."
It felt like someone had submerged me in ice water. "Burned from the inside?"
Renon winced. "How do you fix that?" he asked.
"Surgery," she said with a solemn nod, and walked to the side of the house. I watched Renon watch her as she made up a stretcher using the bedsheets and wooden poles from the bed. She placed it next to him and nodded to me.
"Okay... We'll carry him. you pack up all of both of your belongings. Go quickly."
"Where are you taking-"
"If you want Dan to live," she interrupted me. "You'd better listen to every word I say. I say 'Jump,' you say 'How high?'. Got it?"
"Sorry," I said, and walked quickly into my room. Lucky for us, the window was opposite the rooms, so our valuables weren't touched.
I couldn't risk Dan's life... It just wasn't fair to him. I'd have to deal with these people until he came to. At the very least.
Um... Clothes. Yeah. Hunting Equipment. Our money... Our food.
"Where are we going?" I heard the man say.
"Away, for now. We'll go to the shack East of here. We can't stay in one place for too long, and you just gave everyone in the vicinity a pretty susupicious-"
"Fine, whatever."
I threw everything onto the bed and rolled it into an unused sheet. I did the same in Dan's room, taking special care with his armour. His Knucklevest emitted a sweet yet bodily smell that reminded me of him.
He's not gone...
I frowned at my mindset and folded it on top of the rest. He'd be fine. He just had to be.
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"So who are you?" I asked. "And why did you attack us if you were just gonna heal us later?"
We were walking away from El Nath, towards the East. Our belongings had been thrown onto Dan's legs on the stretcher. I was carrying him with Renon, for Hamina was busy killing the monsters in our way.
"I'm Renon," he said gruffly, in front of me. Dan was kind of heavy, but I think he was sort of milking it. "We've met before. And we attacked you because we thought you had information on Hideval."
"It's a longer story than that," the woman said, ahead of us, waving her wand like a musical conductor. "I'm called Hamina, by the way. Renon might''ve finished you guys off if I hadn't called out to him." Left and right, the monsters died around us. Her magics were strong... Magic Claws here, Holy Arrows there. She Transported like there was no tomorrow, and Healed herself constantly. Every now and then she'd pause and consume a potion or two.
"I knew Dan in school, and I only recognized him just before he used the spell," she explained. "And yeah, we were supposed to be looking for Hideval... We've known him for a while, since we were really young. He's been like a younger brother to us."
"We're brother and sister," Renon explained, nodding to Hamina ahead. "By marriage, though. We don't share the same blood."
"It hardly matters," Hamina scoffed, killing two Jr. Yetis in quick succession. "Brother is brother; Sister is sister. At any rate...
"Hideval, who could have been our brother, went missing one day in Victoria. He said he just needed to finish a quest and he'd meet us in a day or so. We haven't seen him since. Eventually we started asking around, and we eventually got to the Maffiya headquarters in Kerning."
"I talked to a secretary and she informed us that he owed them a huge sum of money," Renon reminisced. "It was outrageous, like ten million mesos or summat."
"Twelve million for some clothing or something," Hamina corrected him. "And on top of that an extra few mil for being late to pay. I had to pull Renon out of there before he got himself killed."
He grunted.
"So we've been spending the past couple of weeks asking around about him. We had pictures, personal information, the works. We took note of every bit of information we could gather from the population."
"And then I saw you at the Free Market," Renon said, embarrassed. "I mistook what you were saying. I thought you were a Maffiya member, actually."
"He doesn't have the best memory," Hamina sighed. "We examined the dialogue as he remembered it, and the way he wrote you saying a lot of the things gave us the impression that Hideval'd escaped from some sort of holding and you were looking for him. So Renon was convinced, and I decided we might as well give you a knock on the door."
"That's hardly what you said," he complained. "You nodded to me, smirked your sadistic smirk, and said 'Let's give them hell'. You ever once mentioned calmly knocking on the door or anything of the sort."
"No, but I assumed you wouldn't try to blow up the bloody house," she quipped, and Renon grunted again. "Anyway, this idiot took a special scroll with him. With a blood sacrifice, a bit of concentration time, and one hell of a lot of mana, he used a spell equivalent to a Level One-Hundred Mage's Explosion spell. We're lucky I wasn't around the immediate vicinity right then, else we'd have had two near-immediate deaths."
Renon looked down. "It was... Powerful," he muttered.
Hamina took out her frustration on a poor Jr Yeti. Several Magic Claws hit it before it could even fall over in death. "I cost us a bloody million mesos, too, and you went and botched the only chance we had."
Renon growled, which I found quite odd. I had only ever heard Dan growl before... It must be a thing for guys.
But my Brother never growled. No, he was far too dignified for such a thing. He never did anything out of the ordinary, now that I think about it. Sure, he was a prodigy in hunting, but what did that matter in the long run?
I sighed and stumbled on accident. Dan's weapon.. His claw with the Ilbis within, fell from its perch. We all watched as it dropped, as if in slow motion. And then several of the expensive stars sprung out of the end, flying harmlessly into a snowdrift.
"Are those...?" Hamina muttered.
"Ilbi throwing stars!" Renon exclaimed, obviously excited. "This guy used Ilbis? How much do these go for now? Fifteen mil?"
I didn't answer him. We set down Dan's stretcher and scooped up his Meba. Renon put two in his pocket. I didn't ask why.
Hamina pointed ahead, where I could see a small shack. It had several intricate Spell Tags stuck to the outside, and the monsters hardly took a notice of it. We all jogged toward it, trying not to jostle our Assassin.
"We're safe in here," Renon said needlessly as we shut the door behind us. He crouched by the fireplace and Hamina moved a coffee table nearer to it. With a wave of her hand, she swept it clean. Coasters, soda cans, and an old bowl of half-moldy Ramen crashed to the floor. I threw my mittens near the fireplace.
Hamina and I carried Dan to the table, and she told Renon to get an oil lamp once he'd finished lighting the fire. We couldn't find anywhere to hang the lamp, so we decided that Renon and I would take turns holding it up above Dan while Hamina operated.
She took out a small knife with a grim face and I turned away. No need to watch, now was there? I undressed to normal clothes, but left my Green Huntress Armour on. I would probably be sleeping in my armour for a while. I didn't trust these people, still. Their story made sense, I guess...
Hamina leaned over Dan, and made a quick incision to somewhere inside his ribcage.
I suddenly wanted to do one or all of four things: Cry, Look away, Run away, or Throw up. I ended up turning my head and gagging audibly.
An awkward silence followed.
"Er..." Renon tried. "Uh, you okay?"
"Yeah, fine," I muttered, and then looked again. There was blood on the table. "No, not fine... I don't know what you're doing and you could be killing him on purpose. I'm afraid but there's nothing I can do. Please tell me that I-"
"You can trust us," Renon said, raising an eyebrow. "We've taken you this far, haven't we? I mean, Hamina even healed the burns on your face before we left. We wouldn't have bothered if we were out to kill you two-"
"But even so, you could just be waiting for me to lower my guard," I inturrupted. "To make it look like an accident or something. Well let me tell you, I'm staying up late and keeping an arrow on you, so you'd best be-"
"I may have made the initial attack, but you're taking it too far!" Renon almost yelled. I gripped my crossbow. "You'd better be grateful! I should just dump you out there with the Yetis, we'll see-"
"Hush," Hamina said. "Renon, you sound like an idiot. Allie, you said it yourself, you have no choice. So just trust us and stay quiet. Both of you, please."
We did.
Renon's arm started to shake after about six minutes. Hamina couldn't deal with the lighting so it was my turn. Wizards are weak when it comes to this kind of thing, but I can hold a bow steady for a half hour.
I looked away at the beginning, because blood's always made me gag. But eventually the smell wafted up to me, and at first I held my breath whenever I could. I got used to it after a bit, and it was then that I couldn't help but peek.
Hamina's gloved hands seemed to be peeling back a part of Dan's ribcage. Blood was flowing freely. I knew that shouldn't suprise me... She was a Cleric, and she could fix everything as soon as she was done with what she was doing.
"Give me your hand," she ordered, and I did. She slipped a glove onto me, one of the rubber ones that I liked to blow up like a balloon when I was little. She placed my hand on the ribcage and told me to hold it up. It was kind of heavy, but I held still. I felt like Dan's life was in my hands now, and suddenly I felt much more motivated. I watched with further intensity, unable to do much more.
Quickly Hamina pinched off a nerve at the base of a lung, and it stopped inflating. Within a second she had made a small incision with an ungloved hand, and then stuck two fingers into the lung itself.
"Heal," she whispered, and counted to three before pulling the fingers out. The small wound healed itself just as the blood was starting to flow. She poked the nerve she had pinched off with her still-magic finger, and the lung began to inflate as Dan breathed.
She carefully held the ribcage and told me I was okay, and then I watched as she carefully put it back down.
"You did really well," she said to me, suprised. "You hardly flinched. Good job."
I smiled. "We're done?"
"Nope. Now put the light back up, I have to do the other one."
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Eventually I got tired and Renon took over for a few minutes. My arm was still shaking.
People say it can't be that hard to be a bowman or a crossbowman. All you have to do is aim and shoot. Yeah? Well aiming gets pretty damn hard pretty damn fast. All you have to do is cast a spell or swing a sword or dagger or spear. At least you give your arms a chance to move.
But no. No matter how much practice we force ourselves to do, Archers will always have trouble holding their arm steady for extended periods of time.
Don't believe me? Grab something that weighs about three to five pounds, hold it straight out in one hand, parallel to the floor, and don't let it down until you finish the chapter. Seriously. I dare you.
It was almost one in the morning when Hamina finished. We'd rotated the lamp job six times, meaning I only had to do it twice more. Nothing exciting happened during then, it was mostly Hamina trying to heal some wounds on Dan's back. She wouldn't let me help.
"Most of them are infected," she said, prodding at a dirty-looking black scab. "And the rest are magic-inflicted, so I'm useless at my level."
"Will they heal eventually?" I had asked.
"The skin, yes, in a month or so," Hamina explained. "But it'll definitely leave scars."
We all paused to glare at Renon, who looked at each of us in turn and then shrugged. "What do you want me to do about it? What's done is done. I'll apologize when he wakes up."
I was okay with that, but Hamina hit him across the head. I laughed. We stood up, the job doen for now. We were all tired. Renon from the spell he'd used, in fact he'd dozed off on the couch in his breaks. Hamina was tired from the meticulous work she'd just completed. And I was tired because, quite frankly, I'd gone through quite enough stress today for a lifetime.
It was a three-room house for travellers stuck in the terrain, but one of the rooms was pretty unusable. It seemed as if a... As if an overzealous couple had spent the night. The sheets were gone, the mattress askew. The curtains were half ripped. The lamp was broken; Upon further inspection we'd found it crashed on the ground.
"Bugger..." Renon mused. "What happened here? Some kind of murder?"
"There's no blood," Hamina said with a knowing smirk. "Not enough to stain, anyway."
"Oh..." Renon said, and snorted. I blushed and backed out of the room. I'd probably sleep on the couch tonight.
"But I'm sure you'll find other bodily fluids, if you were to look, Renon," Hamina said wisely.
"How clever of you. Now shut up."
I chuckled and pushed the throw pillows onto one side of the couch in the entryway. We'd put Dan on the carpet and pulled it in front of the fire. Hamina said he probably wouldn't wake up until midafternoon. Gave him some drugs or something. I'm not sure.
It was cold, but I curled up on the couch. The fire warmed me, and when I closed my eyes and thought really hard, it almost felt as if it were Dan there, hugging me and keeping me warm. Oh, if only he was right here, I could fall asleep next to him and I know that I'd be safe, since he was protecting me.
"Here you go."
I snapped out of my fantasy and saw Hamina, holding out a comforter, standing a the head of the couch in blue-and-green Magenta! pajamas.
The name was a part of a bigger brand, one famous for women's unspeakables. I never could figure it out. Sometimes it would say Magenta! on a pair of something that actually was magenta, but it was just as often to see it on white or grey or blue. The name brand was quite an odd one... I owned a Robeira's Classified bra myself, actually, and mum had bought me a lacy, more risque pair of underwear for my sixteenth birthday. I'm pretty sure it was still in its box back home. I might've thrown it out, though.
"Thanks," I said, and I felt that scary feeling that someone was reading your thoughts. "Er, g'night."
"Yeah," she said, and I knew she was smirking. I listened to her footsteps until she reached her door, and then she stopped. "By the by..."
"There's nothing between us," I said tonelessly. I knew what she was going to ask. "There never was. There never will be."
She couldn't hear my true emotions. I wouldn't let her. If I hid it from the others, I could eventually hide it from myself.
"I see... 'Night, Allie."
"Yeah."
She blew out the candle, and the room was suddenly illuminated only by the fire's hot embers. I gazed down at Dan's body, slowly moving with his breaths. In, out, in out. I tried to synchronize my breathing with him and found it fairly easy to do. That shouldn't have been possible. I was concious. He wasn't...
"Dan...?" I whispered in the darkness. No sounds, except deep breathing from Renon's room. That spell had really done a bit to him.
"Dan. Dan? Danny?"
No response. I looked the other way. Maybe he had athsma or something.
A gasping breath from his throat. I jumped ten feet and sat up.
And waited.
"Danny?"
Nothing. He must have been having a nightmare.
It was excusable... Hamina had said that Dan's pupils clearly told her that he had gone down in a lot of pain. It was pain itself that shut his brain into sleep mode. In fact, she said, the brain probably put him into a temporary coma. A short one, similar to being knocked out. He would stay in the self-induced coma until the pain levels resided. That's what the medicine was supposed to do. I realized that I was starting to trust Hamina and Renon, and I let my crossbow down on the side of the couch. I took off my Armour; Somehow the enchanted fire easily heated the room. With the comforter, I'd probably start sweating.
I'd slept in the nude whenever I could, assuming the door was locked. It was just more comfortable that way, I thought. But there was no door here, and I didn't feel safe with only the blanket. I left my armour at the foot of the bed, plenty content in my underclothes.
Dan made that subconcious moan that all people do in those seconds before they fall asleep. Maybe it was more of a mumble... I guess it depends on the person.
He'd thrown himself in front of me... Those glass shards would've torn me up. I wasn't wearing anything above my collar and I was looking up at his face, so my neck was fully exposed. The explosion replayed itself several times in my mind. Each time was different, but ended the same.
Dan's body is tossed form the sheer force, leaving me vulnerable. The window explodes. Glass rains into my face, my eyes, my screaming mouth.
Dan jumps out of the way instead of in front of me. The wooden bar hits me in my jaw, shattering it, and the glass penetrates the side of my face and neck.
But I couldn't image the pain. The pain of such a thing, so alien to my body. The closest thing I could think of was being pummeled by the Blue Mushrooms, but that had ended when I gave up and fell to the floor. I realized then that that was completely different form this, and then I got mad at myself for comparing such a stupid thing to such a dangerous thing.
He put himself in front of me. He's going through that unimaginable pain, just so I can be alive today. Not even that... Just so I didn't have to be the one going through that pain.
Hamina couldn't know what that meant to me, even if her eyes said they did. Her eyes could never see the true regret I have for being so weak, so slow to react. They couldn't see how I cared for him, how worried I was that I might wake up and he'd have stopped breathing.
She couldn't see my tears, either.
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