The Land: Alliances (Chaos Seeds Book 3)

CHAPTER 11

Richter couldn’t join his familiar in crowing as much as he might have wanted to. He hurriedly wiped his eyes free of Orvin’s blood and looked back up the hill towards where he had seen the Assassin. He saw that she hadn’t really moved, she was just carefully looking around. Richter realized with a sinking feeling that she was examining the traps that he had laid down. His jaw tightened in consternation. He had hoped the poisoned darts would take the woman out. She had much less than health than the Warrior. After a few darts, this fight would have been done. Instead of seeing a woman writhing in pain though, he saw her looking at him with that same horrific smile that he remembered gazing at helplessly while being castrated.

“Hello, love!” she called out with a cheery tone. “What did you do to poor Orvin?”

“The same thing I’m going to do to you, you fucking psycho!” Richter shouted back. He spit, clearing more of Orvin’s blood from his mouth. He had inadvertently swallowed some. His rising bile mixed with the coppery fluid to create a truly horrific taste. It did nothing to help his mood.

She stood in place on the other side of the traps, still smiling. “Well you let Terrod escape. That was very naughty by the way. You DO remember what I did to you the last time you were naughty? Not to worry though! Bringing him back was always just a bonus. YOU on the other hand, you tasty dish, will absolutely HAVE to die. How are you still among the living? I was sure you were dead. Or at least that you would at least have a very serious limp from now on! Haha. You must tell me how you did it! Was there a necromancer in your village? Oh nevermind. The good news is,” she reached into one of her sodden pouches and pulled out a small serrated knife, “this time, I’ll be able to use the right knife for the job!”

As she had been speaking, she had delicately stepped forward through the traps. Richter cast Slow Heal on himself, he also rebuffed with Barkskin, Minor Life Armor, and Haste. He then reached into his Bag for an item and whispered something to the invisible remnant. Prepared as he could be, Richter glared at her and his fury built. Her inane babble made him even angrier! Why did she even talk like that? It was like she was always trying to make people focus on the wrong thing. Academically, he admitted it was probably a good practice for an Assassin. She could keep someone’s focus misdirected until she struck in an unexpected way…

*Alma! Help!* Richter sent her a mental image of the wasp that had paralyzed him before.

She immediately dove and let loose a Psi Blast. It was the first time Richter had ever been inside the AoE of her mental attack. Even though the attack wasn’t targeted at him, he still suffered. It felt like his mind was a TV, but instead of tuning into a channel, all he got was static. Screechingly painful static!

Richter staggered, barely keeping his feet, but he was able to recover. He looked around to see if his hunch paid off. Sure enough, on the ground near where he had been standing was an oversized wasp, twitching on the ground. He smiled and then slowly twisted his neck to look at Sonirae. For the first time, he saw something other than a self-assured smile on her face. She reached her hand out in panic, her mouth forming the word ‘no’, but Richter didn’t wait. He stomped down with one reinforced boot. He felt its little body squish beneath his foot.

The Assassin screamed in rage. Her arm swung forward and with a flick of her wrist, she shot the small crossbow attached to her forearm. If Richter could have seen the projectile in flight, he would have seen the black fluid oozing from the tip of the bolt. At the same time, she activated a Talent. Focusing on Richter, she used Marked for Death which immediately increased all damage he received from her for a period of time.

Richter started contorting his body to avoid the shot and Alma once again came to his rescue. A white glow enveloped her as she cast Errant Wind. The bolt which was speeding towards Richter curved ever so slightly to the right. It wasn’t much of a change, but it let him avoid the shot. The bolt instead went through his cape, leaving a small hole. He lifted his foot and saw that the wasp was still twitching ever so slightly. He shouted out, “You missed me bitch!” Then he stomped down again.

That was when she got really mad.

“I’m going to cut your cock off!”

“It’d be all scarier if you hadn’t already done it. Get new material!” Richter spat back.

She drew two blades and started running towards him. Richter nocked and drew a Heavy arrow, and not having time to imbue it, just released. He planned to hit her with an imbued strike once he had her on the ground. She had other ideas though.

Sonirae activated her Talent, Shadow Form. Her figure darkened as if she was standing in the entrance of a shaded cave. The Talent not only made her harder to see in the darkness, it also increased her dodge dramatically. Just as Errant Wind had protected him, her Talent kept her safe. The arrow seemed to pass through the edge of her arm, but caused no actual damage. Then her high Agility brought her to Richter and she attacked with both of her large daggers.

She swung a wild slash at his face, her Shadow Form Talent making her hard to follow. Richter ducked and pushed his bow at her in a weak attempt to create space between the two of them, but she just spun to the side and followed up her first strike with a straight stab. Her blade hit him in the forearm, puncturing his armor. His health bar dropped slightly. Richter bared his teeth. Two could play at that game!

He drew his high steel longsword from his back and brought it down in a diagonal slash as the same time. She caught the sword on the cross guard of her right dagger. She then struck his sword in a downward chop with her other dagger, but closer to the hilt in a bid to knock it from his hand. Yoshi had often performed a similar move on Richter with his two swords however, and he was well prepared. Rather than continue to force a bad position, he stepped forward with the leg opposite the arm holding the sword thereby making it easy to both withdraw his blade and throw a punch at the Assassin’s face. He connected!

She had been spitting and screaming incoherently during the first blows of her attack, infuriated by the casual killing of her pet wasp. Rather than stoke the flames of her anger, his blow made her grow cold. Long had she been abused in her training to become an Assassin. She had learned long ago not to let her emotions rule her. She aimed a low kick at his knee and then feinted with both of her daggers. Richter stepped back to avoid the attacks, but she didn’t follow. Instead that damnably mad grin found its way back onto her face. Alma circled around overhead, but could not release her Psi Blast with Richter in such close proximity to his opponent.

“I’m going to have to hurt you for killing my wasp,” she said with a laugh. A trickle of blood was trailing down from her nose, the result of Richter’s punch. She didn’t wipe it away though, merely licked a drop when it neared her lip. Despite her suddenly calm demeanor, madness could clearly be seen in her eyes.

Richter stared at his hated enemy with no more than five feet between them. With his free hand he completed the hand gesture for Slow Heal. His fingers glowed gold and his health bar started rising slowly. As she looked at him with that insane smile, he decided to end this fight. He would be the one smiling in a moment! He threw his hand forward and cast Charm.

Her face took on a slack look and her hands dropped to her sides. Richter gave a satisfied grunt and raised his sword carefully in both hands in preparation for plunging it through her throat. Then she winked. Before he could move, she activated an Assassin specific Talent, Blades of Reaping. Her daggers stabbed forward together into his abdomen. The blades punctured his armor like it was tissue and then entered his body, the right piercing his spleen, the left entering the tip of his kidney. With a sharp twist of both of Sonirae’s wrists, the damage worsened by a factor of five. Then her knives withdrew and she was left back in a defensible stance again. The Talent attack took less than a second, her motions a blur.

Looking from the outside, the damage would have seemed alarming. He had two large holes in his abdomen and one blade had torn the skin raggedly upon exiting, leaving a gaping wound. If anyone were able to look internally however, they would realize that the full story was much, much worse. The true danger from her attack was not from the initial trauma, but the massive bleeding that ensued afterwards. The left dagger had nicked his kidney and caused internal bleeding that amounted to 7 health lost per second, but the right dagger had pierced his spleen. An organ which was basically just a bag of blood. The large gash left in that organ created blood loss at 22 health per second!

The savagery of the attack made him fall to his knees. Sonirae looked at him, her form still hard to see, and laughed delightedly. She opened her mouth to speak, but Richter wasn’t done yet. As soon as his knees hit the ground, he said, “Now!” The word was supposed to be a shouted command, but it came out as a pained whisper. He looked down and screwed his eyes shut.

Futen fulfilled the one order Richter had whispered to him before the start of the fight with Sonirae. The remnant had stayed close and unnoticed to the Assassin through the fight. At his master’s command, he let loose both the brightest light and loudest noise that he could create. The sound left her partially deafened, but the light was the more powerful attack. At a distance of only two inches from her eyes, Sonirae was left momentarily blinded and in pain from the mini sun that had appeared in front of her. She screamed in agony and flailed in front of her with both daggers, but Futen had already moved several feet above her head.

Richter did not waste his momentary advantage. Indeed, this was what he had been waiting for. He had harbored no illusions that he would have been able to defeat the Assassin in one on one combat. His only hope to quickly end the fight had been his Charm spell, but that had failed for some reason despite his mastery in Life magic. He also knew that running had only a small chance of success. He would have had to hope he could outrun her or hope that his Stealth skills would save him. The likelihood of winning a game of cat and mouse with a professed Assassin was virtually nil. He would almost definitely have been the mouse. So he had banked all of his hopes on his two advantages. One, she didn’t know about Futen, and two, Richter was willing to die to win. After all, the only person who could control Harley Quinn was the Joker. To take home the win, Richter knew he had to be crazier than this castrating bitch.

Reaching into his Bag he pulled out the adhesive fire trap and held it above his head. His head remained bowed. He realized how strange this tableau must appear, a screaming woman standing before him and Richter on his knees, hands raised in apparent supplication. He didn’t intend to worship this woman though. He intended to kill her. Richter triggered the device. As his finger depressed the mechanism he thought, this has to work, because I can’t think of anything bat shit crazier than detonating a bomb while you’re holding it.

The sticky acid flew everywhere. Burning gel fell on his hands and back. Richter could smell the hair on the back of his head melting before the red colloid reached his skin. Skin that immediately began to bubble. Some slid down beneath the armor covering his back and immediately began eating through his body. The acid ate through epidermis, dermis, and then started to work on the muscle beneath. The pain was indescribable and his already falling health dropped to dangerous levels. He screamed in pain and defiance, his hands still above his head. Nothing he was experiencing compared to what Sonirae suffered at the same time.

The gel covered her hands, chest and face. Worse her screams of pain from Futen’s attack had left her mouth open and the sticky fire had entered. The acid flew into her mouth and began to ooze down her throat. The pain she had been feeling from the intense light faded to nothing as her brain focused upon this new, and much greater, stimuli. The first sensation she had was of thick fire slowly eating through her eyelids and then into the white orbs beneath. A runny mixture of white ocular fluid and red blood began to flow down her face in small rivers.

The gel that had landed on her lips blistered and ate through the skin and teeth. One of her incisors shattered inside of her mouth, unable to withstand the intense heat. The hair on the left side of her head sloughed off immediately. The red gel that landed on her chest armor filled the air with the scent of burning leather. The smell of cooked meat joined the horrid olfactory mess as the acid oozed beneath and through her armor. She screamed in total agony until the sound cut off abruptly as the thick acid ate through her vocal cords. She staggered backwards, a grotesque and silent parody of a woman.

Despite the critical damage the Assassin had suffered from having the trap explode in her face, he could not take any chances. Sparing only a few brief seconds to swallow all three enhanced health potions from his Bag and cast Slow Heal again, he then rose back to his feet. The movement aggravated his internal injuries, but there was no time to worry about that.

Richter lunged forward with his shoulder leading. He caught Sonirae in a wrestler’s double leg and picked her off her feet. The pain in his hands was horrible, but he didn’t need any fine motor control for this. The blind woman drove both of her daggers down into his back, but Richter’s vengeance would not be denied. He ran forward with a roar and dove off of the embankment into the river below.

The two enemies fell the ten yards in barely a moment, the Assassin on bottom. When they hit the river, Sonirae’s body was smashed between Richter and a rock that barely pierced the surface of the water. The impact made Sonirae arch her back and release her hold on the daggers in Richter’s back. Taking advantage of her distraction, he twisted her in his grip so that he held her with his chest to her back. Then he wedged one boot under a rock to anchor both of them under the water. His hands clasping each other, he waited to see if this last ditched effort to kill the woman would work. He waited to see if she would drown before he bled to death. He did have one large advantage, his Fish Ring.

The last preparation he had made prior to his fight was to slip the ring out of his Bag and onto his hand. As soon as he was submerged, it started a three-minute clock that let him breathe underwater. If he wasn’t so badly injured, then the fight would now be a forgone conclusion. Despite his spell and potions though, her devastating attack was resisting the healing somehow. Much of the damage had been ameliorated and he had received a boost to his health, but he still had ongoing blood loss.

With each second the pain he experienced worsened, and the bleeding was also making him grow progressively weaker and light headed. To make matters worse, the acidic gel was not neutralized by being underwater. It continued to slowly eat through his body. Healing himself further wasn’t an option, he simply had to wait for the acid’s effectiveness to wane. He couldn’t spare a hand for the quick movement to cast Slow Heal again.

Sonirae’s throat was damaged from the acid, but not completely compromised. An explosion of bubbles sprung from her throat and she struggled to free herself. Her movements became stronger and more frantic as the panic of a dying animal took over. Richter strained to keep both of them submerged. He was so focused that he didn’t even stop to think and marvel that he was breathing easily beneath the surface of the water. He had less than 10% of his health left and the water was tinged red with their shared blood.

Richter’s rage had not expended itself, but his hate of the woman he was holding could not change reality. His grip weakened and his thoughts were growing cloudy. He looked up at the sun through a haze of cloudy red water, and he had an increasingly harder time remembering why he needed to hold this squirming woman. It was only pure spite that kept his hands clasped together. Sonirae struggled with renewed vigor and his clasp degraded from palm to palm to only having his fingertips locked together. The water flowed into his mouth as he struggled to keep the Assassin underwater. The sour taste of bloody water was appropriate to mix with Richter’s bitter taste of defeat.

Then a shape dove into the water suffused with gold. Richter felt strength suffuse his body and his health received a minor boost. Now that her master was no longer at death’s door, Alma wrapped her body around Sonirae’s head. Though the Assassin wasn’t stunned, the mental attack made her inhale sharply and take river water into her lungs. A few seconds later, she succumbed. Her body convulsed in death throes. Vomit thickened the water above Richter's face as the river flowed down into her stomach as well. With a last involuntary convulsion, she died. Unseen by Richter, one of the rings on her left hand flared and a small ball of black light shot into the air. It quickly sped to the west and disappeared into the sunlight.

Alma released her hold as her need to breathe drove her back to the surface. Sonirae’s body began to slowly sink contrary to every movie drowning Richter had ever seen. That’s so weird, he thought distantly. Then he realized that something was wrong. He shouldn’t just be okay with staying underwater with a dead body. With the last vestiges of reason that Richter’s blood starved mind could muster, he freed his foot from under the rock that had anchored him and kicked weakly to the surface. His last thought, before losing consciousness completely, was that it was so strange that there were two gold suns in the sky.