Chapter 17

“Violence is never the answer.”

—Lies the Elves Told Me, Fal’Vaelith

The blow hit him in the jaw, which, through the power of his embodiment, currently had the density of a compressed planetary core. A fist was really just a collection of small bones bound together with meat, and on contact with Sylvas’ chin, all those small bones decided to go their separate ways. The bald aggressor was now down a hand and bleeding everywhere, and Sylvas hadn’t even moved yet.

After the initial shriek of pain, the bigger man held up his stump and the dangling remains of fingers still hanging around it like a limp flower’s wilted blossoms. “Gah! Look what he’s done to me!”

Everyone in the bar seemed to be on their feet now, every one of them moving towards Sylvas and company, and the wards laid over the whole town were still alive and well, ready to collapse catastrophically if anyone threw any magic around. Sylvas rolled his shoulders, and halfheartedly brought up his hands before him. “I’m still willing to talk if you all are.”

“Past time for that!” The bald man’s friend growled as he took a swing at Sylvas, which the far more trained fighter stepped inside. Sylvas caught the punching hand at the wrist, lightly tapped his shoulder into the man’s chest and guided him across the room to collide with the rusted metal wall. 

The next attacker came on before Sylvas had a chance to speak and dissuade them. A fiend with a pair of sawed-off horns charged forward, only to be stopped abruptly by Kaya’s vlashgahr cup bouncing off his forehead. He staggered back, confused, and Malachai’s textbook-perfect rising kick took him under the chin and launched him across the room.

The fiend smashed through a table where it looked like a group of freighter captains had been in the midst of a game of cards, judging by all the cards and chips that went flying off in every direction.

“Guys, really. We don’t have to—” 

Someone threw a table at him. It was more of a barrel than a table, and it didn’t have much weight even before most of its mass had rusted out of it, but Sylvas still had to catch it or risk being knocked off his feet. From there, the next logical move was to then bring it down on the head of the next attacker—a dwarf who previously looked quite handsome with a smooth beard and afterwards looked like someone who’d been hit in the face with a metal barrel.

Kaya had launched her other cup into another face, climbed up on top of the bar, and launched herself bodily at the biggest huddled mass in the room. Malachai was continuing to go through what appeared to be the entire Ardent hand-to-hand combat manual, step-by-step, as he encountered each patron. Sylvas’ natural instinct was to call on his magic to do something big and dramatic enough to end the fighting, but he wasn’t sure that they wanted that kind of attention or if he could circumvent the wards in a way that wouldn’t bring the whole town down on them. The barrel was still in his hands, so he used it as a makeshift shield to block the next punch thrown his way, then brought it down on his attacker’s toes before jerking it up into her chin. She staggered back with a wail, broken teeth showering out of her mouth.

With the barrel in hand, everyone seemed to be giving him a wide berth, which, in turn, meant that his friends were being waylaid, so he threw it at one of the bar brawlers near the entrance and waded in.

Magical battles were often fought at the speed of thought. By comparison, this kind of fighting felt like it moved at a crawl. Every time a blow was thrown in his direction, he had all the time in the world to dodge around it and bring his own counter-strike into play. The few times he got into range before an opponent attacked him, he went for sharp, simple kicks to take them out at the ankle or knee instead of anything more elaborate, trusting in gravity and the fall to do whatever other damage was needed to take them out of the fight.

It was over almost as fast as it started, with every one of the bar’s patrons laid out on the ground and Sylvas’ heart thumping. At least for a fraction of a moment, before he asserted his will over his body, and everything fell back into its usual rhythm.

“Well, that’s annoying,” Kaya said, delivering a probably unnecessary kick to the jaw of one downed patron.

“I think it’s safe to assume that they all work for the Consortium.” Malachai was no less brutal in his own kicks, though they would probably have been better described as stomps, applied surgically to the temple, ensuring that whoever was lying on the ground would remain there.

Among them, Sylvas seemed to be the only one not committed to acts of violence against the fallen, though he had to admit that there was a temptation to give them a few extra knocks in hopes it would help them make better choices in the future. Had any of them even decided to use magic, they would have easily slaughtered all of them with a thought. 

“Probably.” He agreed with a sigh as he glanced over the prone bodies once more. “Shame they weren’t open to listening.”

Kaya huffed with laughter at that. “Wouldn’t be our luck if everything wasn’t a pain in the backside.”

At about that moment, the door to the back room swung open, and Hector emerged. He glanced around. “I thought I told you three to behave yourselves?”

Kaya crossed her arms. “Is anybody dead?”

Waving his hand as if he could push Kaya’s words away, Hector went on striding, heading for the door, pulling on protective gear as he went.

“Do we know where we are going next?” Malachai asked as they chased after him.

Hector paused by the doorway to fix his mask in place. “Off-world, I think.”

“But we’ve only just arrived?” Kaya looked dismayed.

“And then proceeded to knock out a whole bar of people.” Hector’s grin faltered a little beneath the mask. “We need to be elsewhere.”

“While I’ll admit we could have been a little more circumspect in our approach, I do not feel that there is any need for us to entirely abandon our mission simply because—”

Hector waved Malachai’s concerns away. “Our intel was bad. We need to get out, regroup, and—”

They’d scarcely made it a few feet out of the bar before Hector came to an abrupt halt, faced with a half-circle of similarly armored thugs, the smooth black tactical gear wrapped in the same layers of yellowed rags as everyone else on the planet. One of them stepped forward, and the blank faceplate of her armor irised open to reveal a face that was more scar than skin. “Hear that you want to meet Mr Saizen.”

Hector did a brief double-take, then nodded. Her faceplate slithered shut again, and then she gestured to them to follow.

Kaya and Malachai fell into step beside Sylvas with practiced ease as they moved forward, leaving Hector a couple of steps askew and ahead of them.

The comms spell whispered in Sylvas’ ear, “I’ll pull out bone-boy, and you hit.”

He glanced down at Kaya and nodded. Then they noticed Hector shaking his head at them almost imperceptibly through the bundled rags around it.

They headed away from the bar, away from the big tent, and farther away from the ship, too. Every step that they took was another that they’d have to fight to reclaim if this went against them, and Sylvas could feel the tension mounting the farther they travelled. The only thing stopping him from jumping into violent action was the fact that they were heading farther into the mass of tangled metal that was the town instead of out into the wilderness, where a sensible murderer would take them for an execution.

The buildings, if they could even be called that, started getting closer together and more substantial. There were some prefabricated buildings that had probably been dropped down from orbit when the planet was first colonized amongst them now. What had been the original buildings, storage, and shelters had been co-opted by the new owners, with ragged and piecemeal additions cobbled on to connect them up into larger, joined facilities better suited to the new business being done here.

They passed by one of the converted warehouses, and Sylvas felt a lurch in his core. Before, it would have been an itch on his arm as his body started manifesting etherium crystals due to their proximity to an eidolon, but now Strife responded to it instead. There was an eidolon inside that building, and given that there was no screaming or destruction raging on, he had to assume that it was being kept captive.

The mangle of wards ensured that there was a sort of cold war being waged between the Saizen troops accompanying them and the guards stationed around these warehouses. There was a lot of meaningful glaring, flexing, and posturing, but neither side seemed willing to actually fight if they couldn’t bring magic to bear. It explained why neither faction on the planet could brute force the other off, despite the tensions.

Eventually, they came out of the densest area of the town, where there were actually enough people on the streets for the planet to look like it was populated, and headed a little farther out towards what appeared to be a crashed ship. Despite having no landing gear down and having its nose burrowed quite deeply into the prefab building beside it, it didn’t look too badly worn. It had the forward-slung wings of a Dominion-built craft but the elegance of something elf-made. Most glaringly obvious, though, was the bubble of clean air surrounding it. As they stepped through that bubble, all the guards’ masks irised open, and Sylvas could hear a lot of big, gasping breaths as they entered. The docking bay of the ship lay open, and both crates and workers could be seen moving around inside, but the man that they were here to meet was actually sitting out front on a fold-out chair, drinking a bottle of what Sylvas’ senses told him was beer, inexplicably chilled down to just above its freezing point.

The scar-faced soldier turned to them with a snarl. “You treat Mr. Saizen with respect, or they won’t never find all the pieces of you. Got it?”

Sylvas had been in the process of removing the scarves veiling his face and now felt compelled to smile and nod. “Got it.”

Mr. Saizen was a squat human, so far as Sylvas could tell. Entirely devoid of any hair, even eyebrows, and slick with enough sweat that it made Instructor Fahred’s constant aura of moving water seem dry by comparison. He had foregone the tactical gear of his employees in favor of a collarless suit, which he was wearing without a shirt underneath. As they approached, he knocked back the last of his beer, tossed the bottle to smash into a metal barrel nearby, and then looked them up and down. “You want to talk, so talk.”

Hector had pulled down his mask and goggles to dangle around his neck, and he stepped forward another step. “Nice to meet you, sir.”

If they’d hoped pleasantries were going to make things go smoother, they were mistaken. “Time is money. Get to it.”

Hector smiled all the same. “From what I understand, you’ve been having some issues with the Consortium, and I was wondering if we might not be able to come to some sort of mutually beneficial arrangement in dealing with them.”

Saizen didn’t look impressed by the sales pitch. “What do you want?”

“Well, information. I want to know where the Consortium are operating out of, what they’re shipping, where they’re shipping it to—”

Saizen scoffed. “You want this for free?”

“Well, if we had that information, we might be inclined to interfere in their operations a little.” Hector was still smiling, and Sylvas started to get the sense that he probably shouldn’t have been. “Maybe disrupt their supply line and give you some opportunities here.”

There was a fraction of a second’s pause as Saizen weighed that, and then he asked, “What’s your angle?”

“It’s a good thing for bad people to owe you favors.”

There was an almost imperceptible clicking sound that drew Sylvas’ attention to the turret mounted on the side of the ship. It had adjusted, ever so slightly, to get a better shot at Hector.

Saizen leaned forward, sweat running down his face. “You don’t know me. You don’t know nothing. All you know is rumors you’ve heard. I could be an angel for all you know. But me? I don’t know you at all. We ran your ship, ran your faces, and we’ve got nothing, nowhere. You don’t exist. If you die, here and now, no difference as far as the universe knows.”

“I try to keep my business quiet.” By all rights, Hector should have been the one sweating with all the destructive power of the ship’s weapon systems focused on him, but he remained calm. “Something I thought we had in common.”

“I don’t know you, which means I don’t know what you want, which means I can’t trust you.” He sighed. “If I can’t trust you, you don’t get to go on breathing.”

The turret began to charge, and the miscellaneous guards who had been lounging around all suddenly became extremely attentive. Hector was more powerful than any mage that Sylvas had ever known if his covenant was as strong as he claimed, but it didn’t matter how strong he was if the rest of them got vaporized by who knew what kind of artillery shell that machine could bring to bear. 

So Sylvas decided to step forward. “I’ll tell you who I am.”

His friends attention shifted, Hector’s head snapped around, and there was a golden hue in his eyes that hadn’t been there before. A force of will that he was trying to use to pin Sylvas in place and keep him silent. Strife roared defiantly in the face of it. Whatever Hector was trying to do failed. Sylvas opened his mouth. “I’ll tell you what matters. The Consortium tried to kill me. I mean to return the favor. Does that tell you what you need to know, or do you want my whole life story?”

Saizen stared at him long and hard, and then with an almost imperceptible nod, the gathering of magic in the turret stopped, and the spells that had been building up to killing intensity within it dissipated.

“Eidolons and shikari are their big-ticket items. Stuff you don’t want to see selling anywhere. Stuff we wouldn’t be selling if we were running this place. Don’t know where they’re getting them, but the ships carrying them are coming in cold, and they’re coming in pocked.”

Sylvas wet his lips. “Pocked?”

Kaya was the one to answer, “Like they’ve been hiding out in asteroid belts.”

“You wouldn’t happen to know their angle of approach?” Hector chanced talking again.

Saizen spat, and it sizzled on contact with the ground. “This ain’t the Empyrean. We don’t got slate scratchers tracking every ship in orbit.”

There was a brief lull in the conversation, and Malachai drew himself up to his full height. Sylvas braced for the lecture on unlawful activity but was surprised to hear him say, “Thank you kindly for your time, we know that you are a busy man. We will be on our way.”

Saizen snapped his fingers, and one of the black-clad security staff shuffled forward to place another beer in his hand. Apparently, that was their dismissal because the other guards shuffled forward now to move Sylvas and the others away, leading them to the edge of the bubble, waiting for them to cloak themselves against the noxious storm outside, and then nudging them out.

They were about a street away with nobody obviously following them when Kaya clapped her hands together. “Well, that could have gone worse.”

Sylvas cleared his throat. “I apologize for speaking out of turn.”

Hector chuckled. “Kid, I should have trusted you to do the right thing from the start. Of course he didn’t trust us when we came dropping in out of heaven, offering him help for nothing. He needed something he could relate to, and damn, but gangsters can relate to vengeance.”

“Perhaps we should allow Sylvas to lead all future negotiations.” Malachai sounded like he was smirking under the blanket wrapped around his head.

“Please don’t do that,” Sylvas replied hastily, “I have no idea what I’m doing.”

“Hah.” Hector patted him on the back a little more forcefully than was really necessary. “Neither did I when I first started this gig.”