Floor 27 – Chapter 3 – Heartbeat
"How did Rain end up out here?" Asuna asked from around the middle of the formation they'd found themselves in.
It was a good question, but not the one Jet would've asked – that one was "where the hell was here?!"
The sky shone purple in the twilight, and even the clouds were a dull grey, whilst the growls of creatures they probably didn't want to come face to face with rustled in the crevices below them. Wherever "here" was, it wasn't Aincrad, he was sure of that much – the fantasy aesthetic had completely disappeared, lost to a grim vibe that told him that whoever they came toe to toe with was almost certainly going to be a tough fight.
This place simply wasn't conducive to an easy life – most of this place looked like it hadn't seen the sun since the last Ice Age, and even the howling of the wind through the valleys carried a mournful tone to it…
"Rain?" Sanya shouted; her voice amplified massively in the valley. "Are you nearby?" She called, and Jet looked out over the valleys. Specks in the sky that had just turned around, as if they'd heard Sanya's cry and were now looking for the source of it.
"Uhh, Sanya? I think you might have just gotten us some unwanted attention…"
"Oh, be quiet, this place is deserted." She dismissed him. "See, no one here but us and that gargoyle." She stated, as if her point was proven… until realising that gargoyle hadn't been there just seconds ago. "Yebat." She cursed.
"Yup." He agreed as he pulled out his sword, ready for a fight…
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Inside the cave, Rain was doing her best to keep Mito's attention, but there really was only so much she could do. Every swing of that scythe left a trail of darkness in its wake, leaving blind before any follow up strike, though Eydis proved a valuable ally in defending her during those moments, and even getting a few good hits in on Mito, before she was unceremoniously thrown aside, and rendered unconscious.
Now fighting alone, the crystalline ice in the caves proved valuable to her, as she used them to detect an incoming attack seconds before it landed and put herself in position to counter the majority of them, but a fair number proved too much to block, and she was forced to break off her assault and go evasive during those attacks, putting her out of place for any follow up she might have taken during the counterattack...
Mito hadn't been this powerful when she was alive, had she?
Either way, she was struggling now – the battle had been going on for minutes at this point, and neither side were making any real progress…
"Mito, just listen to me!"
"I shan't listen to one from the Dark Territory!"
"Oh for- you aren't from here! Listen to me! Remember me?"
"No." Mito answered bluntly.
"Remember Asuna, Kirito, Koharu, Jet, your friends!" Rain pleaded.
"I was sent by the goddesses themselves. I have no memories of any friends." The way she spat that last line out would almost certainly have stung if she had time to process that. Maybe they weren't close, but the fact that she thought of them as enemies now certainly wasn't pleasant! "And I shall slay the sinner and the rogue element on behalf of them!"
"Then I hope your goddesses have mercy on you when I send you back to them!" Rain readied her swords, knowing one thing – this would be her last stand. Despite her big talk, she knew that she would struggle to win with Eydis out of the fight, and with Mito now knowing her style of fighting, she certainly had no more tricks up her sleeve…
All she could was hope for a miracle right now.
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The fight with the… whatever the hell they were had been brutal; they'd looked like gargoyles, but when killed, they hadn't disappeared into pixels as per every other monster, they'd faded into a black goo, and the fact that they had found themselves on the defensive, on top of a ledge only barely wide enough for two people to walk side by side on had forced them to stick to a single file arrangement.
It had taken a while longer than he'd have liked and resulted in them being covered in a lot more gargoyle goo than he'd have liked, but they had gotten a move on since and were now following the tracks left in the dirt of the ledge. Tracks that certainly looked like the ones he'd expected to see from Rain's boots, and Philia's tracking skill had confirmed were their errant friend's…
"Up ahead, I hear clashing!" Kizmel shouted.
Jet shook his head slightly – just what had Rain gotten herself into this time that she was now in what sounded like a fight for her life…
Or a military testing range, as an explosion rocked the side of the cliff ahead of them and threw them to the side. Thankfully, it was the side with a whacking great cliff face on it, rather than a sheer drop…
"The hell was that?!" Philia asked, picking herself up from the dirt.
"Either Rain has fused her swords with gunpowder… or we really must hurry!"
"Bit of a problem there, that blast took apart the ledge." Jet grabbed his hair in frustration – of course there had to be something like that, didn't there?
The gap between the ledge wasn't that large, but it was big enough that unless they planned to use him as the bridge, it was a perilous prospect to jump the gaping crack in the cliffside. Still, he questioned whether it was more perilous than leaving Rain in that fight any longer than they had to…
"Damn it. Ko, reckon you can take everyone else and find a way around? I can jump that with a bit of a run up, and run on ahead, let you know what you'll be walking into."
"Are you sure about that?" Koharu shot him a worried look.
"Don't worry about him, Koharu. I'll make sure he doesn't do anything stupid." Asuna told her, and almost immediately, everyone shot her a look of surprise.
"Okay…" Something about the way she said that told him that having Asuna with him didn't exactly reduce the worry in Koharu's mind, but he could talk to her about it later – with Rain's life on the line, that was priority number one here.
His own safety wasn't anywhere near the top ten anyway.
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Clearing the crevice, Jet and Asuna had made good progress in reaching the cave, and been greeted with the sight of…
"Mito?"
Wait, what!? was the common consensus amongst the monkeys in his mind. She had died, and numerous witnesses could attest to that – it wasn't like Diavel all over again, who had made a miraculous escape by teleport crystal… she had actually died!
"Looks like it, yeah." He said, trying to process his disbelief. Granted, he hadn't been present when Mito had died, but he was fairly sure she had actually died and hadn't had a miraculous escape.
Mind you, if she hadn't died, then he was sure that Asuna was going to kill her herself, especially given it had been nearly a month, and she had yet to reveal herself again…
None of that, however, answered why she was fighting Rain and a new girl in a fight that looked less like a duel, and more like a fight for survival…
Mito had been pretty skilled with the scythe of hers, but it was the epitome of a distance weapon – any tactic she relied on needed to focus on keeping an enemy inside a specific hitbox, around the head of the scythe, and then focus on evasion, should the enemy get past that box. Despite how similar her new weapon was, it was a considerable improvement in almost every way, even going so far as to generate a strange dull mist around it.
"Mito!" Asuna shouted out, trying to get the reaper's attention.
"How do you know my name!" The purple haired girl snapped back, a rage in her eyes that he'd never seen before, much less aimed at her former best friend!
"It's me, Asuna! Whatever happened to you, we-"
"Leave now, and I may not slay you. Do not tempt my wrath!" Mito warned, and based on how she was fighting, he didn't think that was an idle threat…
"She's your best friend, you utter bitch!" He told her, his fist clenched against his scabbard.
"You, however, shall not be so lucky!"
"Oh, I've been waiting for this for a long time…" Jet cracked his knuckles and drew Caledfwlch. If Mito wanted a fight – then she had picked the right time for it. He was having a very bad day and knocking ten bells out of her seemed like a bloody good form of therapy right about now!
"Stand at arms, coward!" He deliberately gave a half-arsed gesture towards her.
"Speak for yourself. I'm not the one who abandoned her best friend to die and couldn't even face themselves! Never mind becoming a mercenary. Mind you, if I'd done that, I'm not sure I'd want anyone knowing who I was either…"
"I would never!"
"Words are cheap, and your actions spoke volumes about you, Mito. The coward who would save her own skin but let her best friend die…"
"No, I-agh." Mito lunged at him, an easily countenanced attack that he was able to trip her up from. As long as he could keep her emotional, he reckoned he could win. It would be a close-run thing, but whatever he was fighting, he was sure it wasn't the Mito they'd known.
She was still as competent, fast and dangerous, but know she was far more headstrong, relying on overwhelming force to ensure an opponent was kept on the back foot, and for the first time, he actually felt like thanking his sister for lessons she'd taught him when he was younger: keep calm, don't let an opponent get under your skin… and know where you excel.
And where he excelled was talking.
"I always thought you were a wrong 'un, Mito. Guess I was right!"
"Be quiet!" She picked herself up from the crystal she'd fell into and began to twirl her scythe in a way that looked utterly ridiculous. "Release recollection!"
Ah. That probably wasn't good, was it?
"Dance in darkness!" She shouted, and as if by magic, the light of the surrounding cave disappeared, almost as if someone had found the light switch for physics and flipped it. Just what the hell had she done with that attack?
"Choose to be so arrogant now, I dare you!" Mito taunted, her voice disappearing into the darkened void they now found themselves in.
A fight in complete darkness; a darkness so dark it felt unnatural, wasn't something he'd ever prepared for, but he would be damned if he wasn't going to give it his all!
Every move was methodical and rehearsed… and if it had been a talent show, he would've been booed off stage more than likely. Those moves may have been methodical and rehearsed, but slashing at a crystal and causing his tinnitus to play up in the aftermath of the resulting clash of blade and crystal was getting annoying, as was tripping over his own feet in the darkness…
Asuna was almost doing well by comparison, having scored at least a few lucky hits on Mito in the darkness, but lucky hits were exactly that – lucky, and that required your luck to hold out, which it didn't seem to be doing, given Mito had them both on the back foot.
"Generate element – luminous!" A new voice shouted from somewhere in the cave, one that he really didn't recognise. "That should make this a little more even!" The woman shouted to them.
Now with at least some degree of light, even if it was only a little, they could actually fight rather than haplessly dance around where they believed an attack might come from!
"Mito, please! You don't have to do this, whoever's told you that you do is controlling you!" Asuna pleaded with Mito, though he reckoned it was hopeless – if she was under someone's thumb, she was too far gone for her pleas to be heeded.
"Whoever you are, I am Mito Synthesis Six of the Human Empire!"
"No, you aren't! Your name is Misumi Tozawa, and you were my best friend! You died though, fighting a monster that could control dreams!"
"No! I am the Integrity Knight assigned to defend this pass, and I will-AGHHH!" With no warning, the darkened void disappeared, and Mito suddenly dropped to the floor, clutching her head in agony as if suffering from the worst headache imaginable. Even if he hadn't been friendly with her, it was a horrific sight to witness someone he'd fought alongside writhing in agony like that...
Moving in closer on the incapacitated Mito, Jet noticed something – a blue light coming from her forehead, almost as if a crystal had been jammed into her frontal lobe without any thought for her health, safety or sanity… "What the hell is that?"
"Whatever it is, it's killing her!"
Jet looked around, a tough decision to make – remove the object, whatever it was, and hope it wasn't lodged so deeply that she just bled to death in front of them; or leave it on, and let her continue screaming in agony whilst it killed her…
"Asuna…"
"Please, just… save her." Asuna looked at him, almost desperately.
"Okay, I'm really sorry about this Mito, this is going to hurt like nothing else." He grabbed a hold of the crystal, and began to pull it out, the screaming intensifying as he did so. He really hoped this was the right call, else Mito would be the first person to die twice…
Struggling with the crystal, he eventually managed to prize it out from her forehead, and with a shrill shriek, Mito had passed out in Asuna's arms. "Is she…"
"She's got a pulse." Jet sighed in relief, and almost collapsed to the ground himself, clutching the weird crystal. Now it wasn't stuck in her forehead, he could take a closer look at it – vaguely hexagonal in profile and about the size of his hand in length, it had a dull blueish glow to it and he opened his menu to take a look at it. Assuming it was some kind of item, it should show up, but his menu simply read ? at the crystal in his hand.
Just what was this thing?
Before he'd really had time to examine it, he rushed over to check on Rain, who – other than being exhausted – looked to be a bit roughed up from the fight, her coat torn and one of her swords shattered besides her... "You okay?"
"You took your time." She laughed, before it turned into a cough. "Ahh, it's probably nothing." He checked his hand quickly as it felt sticky for some reason, before going cold at what he could see…
"Uhh, I don't think that's nothing, Rain. That's blood you just coughed up."
"I… didn't think we could bleed in here?" She asked, clearly disconcerted by that discovery...
"Nor did I."
"Let me. Transfer element durability." A white glow encompassed the new girl's hands and Rain's chest as her wounds began to heal at a rapid pace, far more quickly than any healing potion would do so.
"Thank you, err…" Jet realised he had no idea who this girl was. "We didn't catch your name."
"I didn't throw it." She grinned. "Nah, just joking. I'm Eydis, and if I had to make a guess, I'd say your name is Jet?"
He blinked rapidly whilst his brain momentarily reset. How the hell did she know his name – it wasn't exactly a common name either!
"How did-"
"Rain told me all about you. I can see why she liked you too, quite a pretty boy, aren't ya?" He went bright red and began to stammer incoherently. Behind him, he heard Asuna sniggering under her breath at his embarrassment…
"Eydis!"
"Heh, couldn't let that chance pass me by."
Thankfully for both his blood pressure and his sanity, the rest of the group arrived at that point, looking a little more ragged and out of breath. "We made… it?" Koharu began to say, before noticing both Rain and Mito on the floor, and him still trying to slap away his blushing…
"Uhh, Koharu, I'm going insane I think, as I swear I can see Mito on the floor there."
"You're not going insane, you can see her." Koharu answered, a look of equal parts confusion, surprise and happiness on her face.
"So, would you mind informing us of what happened?" Kizmel's usually neutral expression was also one of surprise – seeing a supposedly dead comrade alive and, well, not well, exactly… would have that effect, he supposed…
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As the group left the cave on the other side, Rain and Eydis filled them in on what had happened – that Rain had pursued the unknown man to the cliff edge they had come down themselves, that the man, Albion, was a player killer who seemed to have a penchant for talking people to their graves, preying on their emotions and manipulating them.
The more he'd heard about the man, the less upset he was that Rain had essentially thrown him off a cliff. Hopefully, that would be enough to end the problem of the despicable bastard permanently, but knowing people like that, he reckoned the man had a trick up his sleeve to avoid it…
That fight though, had ended in a conclusive victory for the good guys – Rain had knocked him into the abyss below, and that problem was momentarily solved.
Then came the discussion around Eydis, the girl who'd stepped in to help Rain in the fight and taken one of Albion's arms off in the process. During the fight against Mito, she had proven invaluable to not dying in the darkened void, and so, both he and Asuna were firmly in favour of joining the Concord.
Koharu seemed just as happy about that, and Philia was, by her own admission, glad to have "less testosterone around", before Sanya had pointed out that Jet was the only male in the group, with a half-hearted shrug and a quip about him making more testosterone than a small country…
He wasn't sure if that was a compliment or an insult, now he thought of it.
Either way, Rain was obviously onboard with the idea, having been the one to suggest it, and Kizmel offered no complaints to the idea either. In the end, the only hold out was Sanya, who in a rare case of savviness, had realised she was outvoted and gave up her objections… though not without uttering what he assumed were Russian curses under her breath as she did so.
Before all of that though, Eydis told them that she needed to sell the set of armour she'd "acquired" (stolen was probably a better description, but he chose not to voice that particular concern) to buy the medicine she needed for her sister, and then the siblings would be able to come with them.
"Something the matter?" Koharu asked, a look of mild concern on her face.
"Eh, it's probably nothing." He admitted. "It's just… something about this whole place feels… off. Like looking into the uncanny valley a little bit."
"Uncanny valley? Is that somewhere in England?" Koharu asked.
"No, it's like… remember the Dream Reaper clones?" She shuddered, and he felt guilty about even bringing that topic up again – she had suffered far worse than he had in that battle, after all – but it was the closest comparison that he could think of. "They looked almost right, didn't they?"
"Yes?"
"That's the uncanny valley. Something so close, but with something that's just… wrong about it."
"You think that's Eydis?" Koharu spared a look at the brown-haired girl, who simply smiled back at her innocently. "She seems pretty normal to me?"
"I don't mean looks wise, or even personality. It's just… something stood out when we were patching Rain up. We don't have a pulse, right?" Koharu thought about what he'd said briefly, and checked her wrist for her pulse, only to realise he was right.
"We don't have a pulse, yes."
"Both Eydis and Mito had pulses."
"Huh?" Koharu asked, surprise evident in her exclamation. "But if they have pulses, then they're not players, but… how? They can't be NPCs either – Kizmel doesn't have a pulse, I know that much!"
"That's the million-dollar question, Ko." He admitted. "Because I've got no idea."
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About a day had passed, and the Concord had been able to sell off the armour to a pawn shop in the nearby town and helped the local sage to obtain the stuff needed for the medicine, before settling down for the evening.
According to Eydis, wild and nocturnal beasts often roamed outside the town walls, so the residents practically stayed in their homes until the sun came up, which meant those homes were extremely well cared for – hell, Eydis' had more stuff in it than his did IRL! Let alone in Aincrad…
As partial thanks for her help earlier, he'd offered to cook a meal for them using whatever was in his inventory for the group and done his best not to go bright red at Eydis' teasing of him, Rain and Koharu in the process.
Yes, he could cook (now), it wasn't that rare of a trait amongst men, he'd thought to himself as he made the stew – hell, his little brother was one of the best cooks he knew, whilst his twin sisters couldn't so much as turn the stove on half the time!
Still, it hadn't turned out half bad, he thought to himself as he wolfed it down, table manners be damned! It had been a long day, and food was food regardless!
"So, that's the plan for tomorrow? We head back to the cave and back towards Ham's Stead." Asuna questioned, whilst the still comatose Mito lay on a set of blankets behind her.
Eydis may have had more stuff in her home than he did, but she didn't have ten chairs in the house – there probably wasn't much point when only two people lived there – so most of the Concord were sat on the floor in front of the log fire.
"Yup. With any luck, we'll make it back before-" As he moved his hand, he realised something - that his hand was numb. Not completely desensitised, but the type of numb you get after sleeping in an awkward position - pins and needles as he'd been taught.
"Jet?" Koharu looked at him, a sense of concern on her face.
"Err, I'm fine, just my hand feels a bit weird. It's nothing. I think I just sat on my hand a bit too..." He paused as he looked at his hand. First and foremost, it had shrunk slightly, as well as being a bit numb, before he turned it to look at the back of his hand. His nails were carefully trimmed, rather than the slipshod way his had become from the habit of biting his nails for years on end...
Above all else though, the skin tone on his hand and his wrist were different. A realisation occurred almost immediately - that wasn't his hand. "...long? The hell?" He grumbled, as his hand started to be engulfed in a white light. "Oo-kay, that's new?"
Her attention now piqued; Philia turned towards him too. "What, you don't recognise your-why are you glowing?!"
"If I knew, I wouldn't be confused..." The light died down almost as suddenly as it had started, and he took a glance at the hand in place: roughly trimmed nails, and a small scar between his thumb and ring finger. Yeah, that was his hand again alright.
"What was all that about?" Koharu asked, still completely confused by what had just happened.
"Your guess is as good as mine, Ko." He admitted, before going back to the previous topic of discussion… "But yeah, we should make it back before it goes dark."
Unsurprisingly, no one else was going to let the fact he just started glowing, and his hand morphed into someone else's go though. "You're just going to ignore that you just started glowing?" Eydis asked.
"Whatever it was, it's stopped now and I'm not likely to get any answers about it here, so kind of?" He answered. Whether he believed his own opinion or not, it didn't really change that he was kind of rattled by that – the visual effect looked almost like a teleport crystal, but he wasn't aware of any crystals that could teleport only parts of a person…
On the note of crystals, the free time had allowed him chance to take a closer look at the crystal they'd extracted from Mito, and whatever it was, Jet liked it even less the more he looked at it. The crystal, according to Eydis' sister Mary, was called a Piety Module and that name alone caused a short circuit in the alarm bells in Jet's mind.
Never mind Mind control, that was a way of keeping someone so thoroughly obedient that they were devoted to you! Something like that could be used to create an eternally loyal army, never once questioning a command, and slaughtering anyone who did…
He had no idea what had happened to cause Mito to "break" the module, but whatever it was, he reckoned it had to do with Asuna, maybe reminding her of her past life. A small trickle of memories; just enough to slip past the floodgates of the module's programming, but enough to remind her of who she really was…
"Who said the power of friendship was bollocks, eh?" Jet had said with a degree of pride in that statement, and a similarity to a certain Timelord that even he was starting to get concerned by…
That didn't answer the big question he had though – even if he knew what had been planted into Mito, he still lacked any knowledge of who had planted it in the first place. Mito had mentioned being "sent from the heavens" and "sacred power from the goddesses", so perhaps that was a good place to start any digging…
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A few hours had passed by, and now lying on a set of blankets Eydis had given them, Jet couldn't help but continue to think about something that Mito's not-demise suggested: that the deceased players in Aincrad were still alive and kicking in some way…
That, maybe, just maybe, Strea was still alive and kicking in some way, and that thought terrified him.
"Something on your mind?" Koharu asked, rolling over to look at him.
"Just… all of this. Mito still being alive, that we have no idea where we are, Eydis joining us, that whole Piety Module thing… it's a lot to take in in one day." He admitted, staring at the support beams on the ceiling.
"You think that maybe Strea's here too?" Koharu had almost read him like a book on that one.
"I…" He thought about it – as bad as it sounded, he wasn't sure he wanted to see Strea again. Not for anything she'd done, but for a purely selfish reason: he'd have to lose her again.
If the denizens of wherever they were, were NPCs, then clearing Aincrad would kill them. If they were, say, some kind of data ghost of the person, then clearing Aincrad would wipe that data, essentially killing them again. "I'm not sure I do."
"Why?" She asked.
"I never got to say goodbye last time. I don't think I could do it now, not knowing all of this. Besides, I know her, she'd tell me off for seeing her again – that I was being too reckless. I could do without the nagging…" He joked half-heartedly, and Koharu drew him into a hug. "I'm gonna go get some air. Be back in a few."
"Remember what Eydis said about creatures out there, Jet."
"Don't worry, I'll scream the place down if I see one…" He laughed. "Besides, I'll only be outside the front door, not like anything's gonna get that close without us noticing..."
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In Jet's mind, none of this made any sense whatsoever.
If Eydis and Mary were both human, then why did both remember growing up here? They hadn't been here that long, having not even reached the twelve-month mark yet, but they seemed to remember their parents, who – according to Eydis – were long since gone, yet had no memory of the real world.
Which led him onto his next conclusion – could they be advanced AI, similar to Kizmel? The fact they remembered their lives here seemed to suggest it was possible, but unlike Kizmel, there was something about Eydis in particular that made him doubt that.
She was too human to be an AI, in other words.
All of this hurt his brain, he'd decided as he walked outside to see the mysterious girl sat on the doorstep, staring off into the distance.
"What happened to "don't go outside in the dark", ay?" He asked as he took a seat next to her.
"Huh? Oh, you guys actually bought that?!" Eydis looked a little surprised. "Nah, just my way of keeping Mary safe and sound. Those growls are just the dogs over the way."
"Overprotective much?" He muttered.
"And you wouldn't protect your siblings?" A few weeks earlier, and there was a very real chance that his anger would've overridden his sense at that statement. Now though, it was just a pit of sadness instead that opened up at that thought…
"I already failed there." He told her quietly. "I lost my older sister, and who knows about the rest of them."
"Oh, I didn't mean to- I'm really sorry I bought that up." Eydis apologised, and he let a small smile come to his face, despite his sadness. "I just meant, Mary's the only family I've still got, and if anything happened to her, then… I don't know."
"Technically, Strea was the last blood relative I had. My mother-" He threw his arms up in defeat. "Who knows where she is now, 'cause I don't, and my father ended up lying in pieces on a mountainside somewhere. It's… kind of terrifying knowing that I'm the end of the line, you know?"
"At least you know what happened to them. Mine just left and never came back… I've looked after Mary since I was 8 now. Thirteen years… I don't even know if they died, or just left us."
Well, this was awkward – if they kept going, this wouldn't so much be a conga line of trauma, as it would be a game of Top Trumps… "I, uhh, I think you win this one." He joked, rubbing his hand against the back of his neck…
Eydis, rather than being insulted, just grinned smugly though, with a hand on her hip. "So, what do I win then?"
"Continued trauma and lifelong baggage?" He spoke before his brain had had chance to stop his mouth. Internally, the monkeys in his mind collectively facepalmed at that statement and how utterly insensitive it was.
Rather than slapping him into the next solar rotation as any sane person would have done, Eydis laughed loudly enough to wake up the huts next to them. "Well, that's no fun, I already had that!" He couldn't help but chuckle slightly at that reaction, before her tone became more dower. "Thanks for… well, everything. All of you."
"Why?"
"Would you believe me if I told you this place is boring?"
Jet looked around at the huts, and he was fairly sure he saw more than a few people peering through their curtains at the pair of them sat on the doorstep. Bloody nosey neighbours… even in, err, wherever here was, they were still a thing. "Yes."
"I know a quiet life's not bad, but… I just wanted to go make something of my life. See the world, save people, maybe save a few damsels and knights in the process…"
"You read way too many books." Jet told her, thinking of their adventures. "It's not all travels, heroics and cute guys and girls… we've fought creatures beyond our worst nightmares out there, and the very worst of humanity…"
"Ever heard of overselling things?" She smirked.
"I'm just telling you what to expect, Eydis." He told her, making sure his voice conveyed how serious it was. "It won't be safe; it won't be quiet and it won't always be fun…"
"I see why Rain thought you were some kind of hero… you practiced that speech, didn't you?" Eydis laughed. "Yeah, I know it won't be safe. As long as Mary's fine, I'm a-okay with putting myself at risk, and- can you hear that?"
It sounded like a child calling out for help – more importantly, it sounded like Mary calling out for her sister…
"Uhh, yeah, I think your sister's calling you."
"That's not coming from the house though, listen!" Eydis pointed towards the woods, before looking nervously to Jet. "She couldn't have gone out though. We're in the doorway…"
"Maybe someone else is out there?"
"Maybe, but-" Eydis' statement was interrupted as he felt a knife to his throat, and he spared a glance up to his HP – no status effects, and barely a drop off, maybe a single HP, from the brief cut.
Eydis, on the other hand, was nowhere near as calm, practically jumping to her feet as she looked for a weapon that wasn't there… and eventually realising she didn't have any real chance to fight back. "Now, there's a good little puppet. Stay still and keep quiet, or your friend doesn't end up with a slashed throat…"
He rolled his eyes. "You must be Albion, I presume."
"Oh, so the knight has heard of me? That is a most unexpected honour…" The man spoke with an almost unaccented voice – the epitome of Received Pronunciation English, Jet thought, and given how the knife was being held up to his throat, his attacker was shorter than he was… and needed a breath mint.
"A murderer and a manipulator with a silver tongue, yeah I've heard of you."
"You fell off a cliff… how are you here!" Eydis hissed.
"Teleport, my dear. Oh, of course, your people are too primitive to think of such devices, not like us flesh and blood humans." Hearing Albion speak reminded him too much of his uncle, a man for whom snide and condescending remarks were essentially all he could muster. Compliments might actually have killed him, he reckoned…
"Says the man who didn't bleed when his arm was cut off." Eydis told him, with a degree of hatred in her voice that he had yet to hear…
"Hmm, a self-aware puppet. That's rather interesting… perhaps you might be worth something to us, after all." Albion gave a rather arrogant gesture of looking pleased with himself, based off the nodding of his head. "Of course, the knight is still more valuable, but you might make a fun experiment for that mad scientist, Black…"
"Ex-experiment?" Eydis stammered, now clearly scared of what was being said, and he really couldn't blame her. Laughing Coffin were a group of thugs, rapists and murderers; their definition of "fun" was enough to terrify most people with even a shred of sanity…
"Oh yes, he is rather fond of the human form… and how to break it." Albion told her, trying to get under her skin.
"Has anyone ever told you that you need a breath mint?" He asked, trying to a rise out of his arrogant countryman, and break the tension a little bit.
"Has anyone ever told you there is a time and place for humour, you insolent brat!" It worked quite well.
"Yep, and if there's one thing an intelligent fellow like you should know… it's that you aren't the only one here with a silver tongue."
"You are as infuriating as XaXa said…"
"Oh, trust me, this is nothing, and I'm gonna bet you need me alive for some reason. I'm also willing to bet that reason is that boss of yours, Poncho Pilot." Jet offered a brief smirk, as if he was telling Eydis that he had this under control. He didn't, but that was rule 1 of keeping a group of people calm - always sound like you have things in control... even when you don't.
"Oh, I will rather enjoy breaking that spirit of yours. Perhaps start with you watching this one fight to the death, unarmed…" Albion smirked, and Jet found himself grimacing. He didn't doubt Albion would do such a thing either, purely out of spite – the man had left that young woman eviscerated, after all…
"Do that, and I rather imagine your death will be more painful than you can imagine!" Sanya was the first out the door, her blade pointed towards Albion, whilst the rest of the Concord were almost immediately behind.
"I believe you think you have me outnumbered, don't you?" Jet nodded, careful not to slice his own throat open – that would be really stupid, he'd decided. "Well, you would be mistaken. Whilst you were busy eating stew and carrying for stupid children, you may have wished to be watching the forest."
In the distance, he noticed multiple pairs of glowing red eyes become visible amidst the darkness of the forest, and grumbles become the angry growls of something advancing on the village…
That something being an absolutely colossal scorpion, easily twenty feet high with its tail, and ten feet long, with pincers that looked as if they could chew through metal like a pair of pliers through wet paper…
So much for a quiet night, Jet had soon realised!
{Author's Comments}
Sorry for the month long break to get this one out - I got sidetracked by other things; uni and other projects mostly. Carrying on, I'll probably swap to one update a month until the end of the uni year, when I'll have a bit more time to spare.