Only Villains Do That

After all my recent frustrations, it felt good to finally be kicking down doors. Literally.

The latch was already loose; it wrenched free of its moorings under the impact of my boot, tumbling to the ground in pieces as the door banged inward. I stepped into the room beyond, already spreading my arms in a grandiose gesture of greeting as the men inside whirled to face me.

“Good evening, gentlemen!” I called out. “Virya’s blessings upon you all.”

“So you can give a polite greeting, but you can’t turn a door latch?” retorted the fellow I decided must be in charge on the basis of his superior poise alone. While the other three present had sprung to their feet and uncertainly raised weapons at me, he was still seated, just now setting down his hand of cards on the table before him. “Look at that, we’re gonna have to have the whole door rebuilt now. Who’s gonna pay for that?”

“No one,” I said pleasantly. “Don’t trouble yourself over it, my good man. In five minutes’ time, this place will be burning down and you’ll all be dead.”

“Uh huh.” The leader made a wry face at me. “Caester, shank this idiot.”

“Oh, fuck me,” one of the other men suddenly whispered as the fellow I took to be Caester stepped forward with his sword upraised. “It’s him.”

The leader’s gaze sharpened and he finally straightened up in his chair, taking a closer look at my ragged coat and hooded cloak. “Caester, now!”

Slimeshot.

Caester was hurled across the room by the impact to his chest, hitting the wall with a groan and sliding down amid a puddle of destroyed slime, his sword tumbling away. The boss of the thugs scrambled to his own feet, drawing his sidearm.

“A bold move!” I congratulated him. “Let’s see how it works out for you!”

Immolate.

The little sitting area in the front wasn’t large; the flames and his flailing seemed to take up a lot of space, forcing the other two men to scramble back. I strode forward, ignoring the screaming thug boss.

The nearest of them rushed at me in panic and was smashed against the wall by a Windburst for his trouble; the other, near the stairs, actually dropped his sword and tried to retreat up the steps from me.

“Wait! You’re a Healer, aren’t you? Mercy!”

“Ooh, if only you’d asked me a week ago,” I said apologetically. “We’re fresh out of mercy. I do have a large backlog of ‘no one leaves alive,’ and we’re running a special on ‘nothing personal, but you’re in my way.’”

He turned and attempted to flee up the steps. I Slimeshotted him right in the small of the back and heard a distinct cracking sound. The poor bastard flopped bonelessly down the stairs, howling bloody murder; I stepped around him to ascend the staircase, right as a man who’d been stationed above came charging down, brandishing a club.

Given our respective positions, my next Slimeshot nailed him square between the legs.

He dropped his weapon and crumpled, emitting a high-pitched wheeze and doubling over himself. I grabbed him by the collar as he started to fall toward me, hauling his dead weight bodily up the remainder of the flight of narrow steps. That wasn’t exactly easy, but I was running on adrenaline and what seemed to be a bottomless well of eternally bubbling rage.

“On the one hand, I’d feel pretty bad for doing that to another guy,” I informed my whimpering victim as I deposited him on the floor at the top of the steps. “On the other, fuck you.”

This was a narrow, cramped structure wedged between two others on one of Gwyllthean’s backstreets, little more than two rooms below, the claustrophobic staircase, and the smaller windowless room up here on the second floor where the heart and soul of this operation sat: a large chest of pink and gold akorshil planks, locked.

“Boss, that guy you just set on fire is Blessed with Might,” Biribo reported, poking his head out of my cloak. “Not a very strong Blessing, but he might have an artifact.”

“Oh indeed? Thanks, Biribo, well spotted.”

“That’s what I’m here for, boss!”

I grabbed the chest by one of its handles and pulled. Damn thing was a lot heavier than the still-crying thug, who was clutching his crotch—and also bleeding from it, I noticed in passing while I dragged the chest past him. It would be a real pain in the ass to get this thing anywhere, if I was interested in doing things properly.

It was still a pain to shove it onto the staircase, but once there, gravity did the rest. After my final shove, the heavy chest clattered the rest of the way down in a cacophony of thumps, a few distinct splintering noises, and the almost musical jingle of its contents as they started to come loose.

I descended after it, finding the thing had landed upright surprisingly intact, though the lid had popped open and some of its boards were broken and bulging, emitting trickles of coin from inside.

“Jadrin, really?” I protested as she straightened up from slitting the throat of the guy whose back I’d just broken.

“Well, I mean, come on,” she said with a shrug, flicking blood off her dagger. The other guy by the wall was already dead, apparently from a clean stab through the heart. “You really wanna leave ‘em alive in here, considering what we’re planning to do next? Have a heart, Lord Seiji.”

“I suppose I take your point,” I conceded. “Any of these acquaintances of yours?”

“Rapist, dumbass, never seen that guy before,” she recited, pointing her dagger at each of the fresh corpses in turn, the last being Caester, who had taken a crossbow bolt in the throat which Adelly was at that moment pulling out. “And that’s Donon.”

“Wait, really?”

“No relation,” Adelly said, smirking. “It’s a common enough name.”

“Jadrin, you backstabbing little cunt,” the new Donon wheezed. His clothes were still smoking, and in the few moments I’d been upstairs he’d been shot through both legs by a crossbow. That’d be Kastrin’s work, to judge by its precision.

“Yeah, let it all out,” Jadrin sneered. “Get your talking in, Donon, that’s all you’ve got left on this world.”

“Ugh, I’m not calling him that,” I groaned. “From now on you’re Shitty Don, okay?”

“Hope you enjoy this,” Shitty Don snarled, clutching one of his bleeding legs. “Lady Gray’s gonna—”

“Lady Gray’s gonna burn just like you did, and then some. Several times, before I decide to finish with her. Biribo, see anything on him?”

My familiar buzzed out into the air. “Not directly, boss, but you can hide a lot under clothes.”

“You looking for his artifact?” Jadrin asked. “It’s a medallion. On a chain around his neck, under the shirt.”

“I shoulda porked and gutted you when I had the chance,” Shitty Don growled, glaring pure hatred at her.

“Prob’ly.” Jadrin gave him the sweetest grin I’d ever seen on her. “Never will now, sweetroll.”

“Found it,” Kastrin called, emerging from the door tucked beside the stairs, her crossbow in one hand and a hefty jug of asauthec in the other, bearing the traditional yellow warning mark.

“Ah, fine work, Kastrin,” I praised her. “Would you be a dear and finish this guy off?”

“Yes, sir!” She raised the crossbow one-handed, as it had a bolt already in place, and squeezed the trigger.

This wrought a scream of outraged pain from Shitty Don as the bolt impacted his shoulder.

“I missed?” Kastrin protested, scowling in outrage. “That’s not—oh, fuck you! I never miss!”

“That’s what you get for being cocky,” Adelly replied without sympathy. “Use the damn thing with both hands like it’s designed for.”

“Nah, the kid’s fine,” said Jadrin. “That’s his artifact. It gives him luck or something, dunno exactly.”

“Huh, now I wanna see how this works,” I said. “Slimeshot.”

I was aiming for his head, which at that range would’ve been an instant kill. That spell was deadly precise, as it seemed to inherently direct the flying slime to whatever spot I focused on without needing to be properly aimed, but this time it just grazed the side of his head, knocking him over.

“Damn,” I said, impressed. “Hey, this is fun! Who’s got a throwing knife?”

“Do we really have time to fuck around all night, Lord Seiji?” Jadrin asked pointedly.

“I suppose you’re right,” I admitted. “Biribo?”

“This guy’s Blessing is not strong enough for a powerful defensive artifact,” said the familiar. “Most likely it’s something affecting probability on a local scale, that’s not uncommon for cheaper amulets and the like. Get close enough to take any possible randomness out of the equation and it should work normally.”

“W-wait,” Shitty Don rasped, trying to pull himself back upright. “Listen to me, you’ve got—”

He fell silent as Adelly knelt and shoved the tip of her loaded crossbow directly under his chin.

“Goodbye, Shitty Don,” she simpered, and the weapon twanged. The bolt smashed cleanly up through his skull, its tip emerging from the crown of his head in a spray of blood that artfully decorated the wall behind him.

“Well, now you’re down a crossbow bolt,” Kastrin said, unimpressed. “I’m not pulling that one out.”

“Relax, we’ve got plenty at home.”

I strode over to join Adelly, bent, and reached into the neck of the dead man’s shirt. My fingers closed over a chain and I pulled, carefully dragging out the diamond-shaped piece of metal and pulling the chain up over the corpse’s head. And it was metal, not akornin; so was the chain. The thing looked rather plan, just a flat quadrangle of what looked like copper, inset with a round piece of glass in the center and with some minor decorative etching around the edges. Had I not been able to see the telltale glow of an artifact around it, I’d never have given the cheap-looking amulet a second thought.

“Meh, nothing special,” Biribo said dismissively, buzzing around my head. “It’s just an Amulet of Final Luck. It has a minor but relatively far-reaching deflection property; all it really does is ensure that any attack coming at you will miss a lethal blow. Does nothing to stop you from getting hurt, and if an attack is physically impossible to deflect or avoid anyway it won’t counter it, as you just saw. Also it’ll tend to be less effective on spells. In short, pretty much the kind of trash-tier artifact I’d expect a goon like this to have.”

“Except,” I said slowly, “if the person wearing it has the spell of ultimate healing, this particular piece of crap is a game-changer.”

Adelly let out a low whistle. “As long as you survive the first strike, you can Heal whatever it does. Damn, Lord Seiji, that thing’s almost perfectly designed for you.”

“Must be nice, having a patron goddess,” said Jadrin, “even if she is the crappy one.”

“Indeed.” I raised the chain and draped it around my neck, tucking the amulet inside my cloak. There was blood on it, but I’d have to clean that later. I was getting pretty accustomed to blood. “Verily, this is a boon from the goddess, whose favor we must acknowledge. Let us pray.”

I spread my hands wide, raising my face to gaze solemnly at the ceiling, and all three women lowered their weapons and bowed their heads respectfully.

“Oh Virya, patroness of assholes and dickheads everywhere,” I intoned, “we give thee thanks for this great bounty. In gratitude, I promise that when I rise up to destroy the gods themselves, I’ll do you last. Unless it’s more convenient to do you earlier, or if I’m in a real bad mood at the time, or I forget or something. I’ve got stuff on my mind. Amen.”

“Her will be done,” all three intoned, making in unison one of those Fflyr formal gestures which I’d been told was performed in religious services.

I really liked these girls.

“All right, ladies, you remember the plan. Kastrin, slosh that stuff around, and don’t forget the second floor. Oh, and be careful, I think the guy up there is still alive.”

“Not for loooong,” she sang, sauntering toward the staircase and somewhat awkwardly reloading her crossbow with the jug of asauthec tucked under her arm.

“Adelly, give me a hand with this.” I bent to grasp one end of the ruptured chest of coins. Adelly sighed, handed her crossbow to Jadrin (who had refused one of her own, preferring her knives and cudgel), and took the other.

The thing was impressively sturdy to have survived being hurled down the stairs at all, but it was in bad shape. It creaked alarmingly as we moved it, and every motion caused glittering coins to spill out of the widening cracks, leaving a trail to mark our passage as we shuffled awkwardly out the broken door into the street. Jadrin preceded us, sweeping Adelly’s crossbow this way and that, but no one was nearby.

After all, that was half the security of this little counting house of Lady Gray’s, a place where much of the income from her nearby businesses was tallied and sorted. The five men standing guard were, if anything, the lesser half of the defenses; the greater was the simple fact that everyone knew what this place was, and nobody in the Gutters dared piss her off by going after her money directly. The Olumnach bandit gangs didn’t penetrate this far into the city, so there were only Gwyllthean natives who knew better. Here, her reputation was a greater deterrent than any amount of guards. Even the Kingsguard wouldn’t dare antagonize her so openly.

Unfortunately for Gray, I wasn’t the Kingsguard.

“Here we go.” I shuffled to one side, Adelly moving opposite me as we maneuvered the chest of coins so that its length ran parallel to the street between us. “And one…two…”

We swung it back, then forward, gathering momentum as money sprayed out in every direction.

“…and heave!”

On my command we let go. The thing was heavy and didn’t fly far, but we managed to sling it almost to the middle of the street, where the poor beleaguered thing finally gave up the ghost. On impact it shattered, boards bursting apart and coins flying every which way, though most fell in a huge puddle amid the ruins of the chest.

“By all means, ladies, fill your pockets,” I said, noting the looks Jadrin and Adelly were giving the money pile. “Remember, the courteous thing to do would be to share the bounty with the others who weren’t along on this mission.”

“Yeah, well, I must’ve left my fancy manners in my other pants, along with my wooden tea set and the pony Daddy gave me for my fifth birthday,” Jadrin said cheerfully, already shoveling loose money into her pouch.

“Bitch,” Adelly snorted without any real malice.

“You say that like you’re expecting me to argue.”

“Done and done,” Kastrin reported, emerging from the door behind us. “I used about half the jug, and left the rest where you told me—oh, come on, you’re starting without me?”

She scurried forward to begin scooping up Lady Gray’s money.

“Fine work, Kastrin, thank you,” I said magnanimously, watching the three fill their pockets and coin pouches.

“It’s a damn shame, is all,” Jadrin said, straightening and regretfully tucking her bulging purse away inside her jacket. “There’s no way we could carry off even half of this, even if we’d brought sacks.”

“It’s not about the money,” I quoted. “It’s about sending a message. All right, ladies, pack it in. You’ll want to be at a safe distance for the important part.”

Adelly had already retreated; Kastrin grabbed a last handful and regretfully joined the other two as they scampered a few meters up the street. I remained behind, just close enough that I had a clear line of sight through the broken door at the trashed room just inside. I fixed my attention on the shiny puddle of oil visible at the foot of the stairs, glittering with fallen coins scattered across it.

Spark.

Asauthec was serious stuff; the flames caught instantly and spread fast, rising higher and burning exceptionally bright. This particular blend was for wall torches, which meant it blazed brightly but not too hot, and would last for a long span of hours. Fire raced across the trails Kastrin had left across the walls, up the stairs to the top room.

Structures made of akorthist and akorshil weren’t flammable, but a lot of the stuff in them was. Especially Fflyr houses, which were often as not full of books and papers. Especially a place like this, being used for accounting purposes; there was a lot of paperwork jammed in there.

There was one last thing to do: Summon Slime, Tame Beast.

I sauntered away from the merrily burning building, the rapid spread of flames across the asauthec puddles causing fire to burst from the upper room’s window even before I made it past the edge of the structure and the narrow alleyway separating it from the next house. All three girls fell into step with me as I reached them, and we went on our way up the street.

Behind us, a BANG sounded, followed by an echoing crash, as the flames reached the half-full jug of asauthec and all the oil’s potential energy was released at once, blasting the broken front door out into the street along with a gout of fire and a spray of burning paperwork, the meticulous records of Lady Gray’s operations disintegrating as they were flung in all directions amid the sparks.

“Ah, ah,” I chided as Kastrin turned to watch. “Bad form, Kastrin. Badasses never look at explosions, especially not the ones they cause.”

“Wow,” she said dryly, “I have so much to learn, Lord Seiji.” Jadrin snorted a derisive laugh.

My strategy meeting back at North Watch had been brief. There just wasn’t much to go over. We had few resources and no time, and were up against a single stark reality: Lady Gray kept succeeding because she refused to be put on the defensive, always adjusting the situation to keep the initiative and force me to react to her ploys. We each had too much to protect, me with the women of Cat Alley and she her already-battered organization. On the occasions I’d gotten the better of her, it had always been through the exercise of my sheer Goddess-given brute force over her admittedly superior tactics.

So I went with what worked. If I had to react to protect my territory, it would be by smashing the shit out of hers first.

“All right, back to the others,” I said cheerfully. “They should be in position to launch the main event by now. If not, Lady Gray has more flammable property that she doesn’t really need, and the night is young.”

I did not look back at the burning carnage in my wake, because it wasn’t my first night being a badass. But I knew what I had left there, held in place by my last command to it, waiting to be found when Lady Gray returned to sift through the wreckage of whatever money would still be there by the time she got around to it.

Atop the pile of coins, surrounded by burning rubble, a single slime. A little personal message from me.

No more Dark Lord Nice Guy.