I knew, before he'd said a single word, that this wasn't about the order.
I didn't know how I knew. Something about the way his hands were shaking, the way his jaw worked like he was chewing on something too big to swallow. It didn't look like a man about to reprimand someone. It looked like a man about to lose something, and not knowing yet what that something was.
"You disobeyed a direct order."
Varkas's voice had none of its usual polish left in it. He stopped a foot from Alara, close enough that she had to tilt her head back to keep looking at him.
"I saved him," Alara said. Her voice was steady. Her hands weren't.
"You abandoned your position. In the middle of an active engagement. Because you decided your judgment mattered more than a direct command from the operation's senior officer."
"He was being absorbed."
"He knew the risk when he signed on for this work." Varkas took a step closer. Alara's back found a curled tree trunk before she seemed to register she'd been moving at all. "Everyone in that fight knew the risk. That's what makes it a fight. You don't get to unilaterally decide whose life matters enough to break formation for."
"Someone had to—"
"I decide that!" His voice had risen, cracked at the edges, gone somewhere well past professional. "I decide that, because I am the one who has to live with what happens when the formation breaks. I have done that math before. I have done it more times than you can imagine, and every single time it cost something, and you—" he was close enough now that his shadow fell fully over her, close enough that there was nowhere left for her to go, "—you decided you knew better."His sword raised. It looked to me like he was moving to put it on his back, but Alara definitely saw something different.
Alara's eyes went somewhere else. Not distant — worse than distant. Present, but present somewhere years and miles away, her back against unforgiving bark, a much larger figure closing the last of the distance between them with nowhere left to retreat to, raising a blade.
"Alara—" I started.
I don't think she heard me.
Her hand came up, fast, desperate, aimed at the only thing in front of her.
"Arcane Art: Sever! ACTIVATE!"
A blade of pure force tore out of her palm and caught Varkas across the shoulder, and the sound it made going through enchanted plate was a sound I never wanted to hear again — metal shrieking, then something wetter underneath it. He staggered back with a shout, one hand clamped over the gash, blood already welling thick and dark between his fingers.
For a full second, nobody moved.
Then Varkas looked at his own hand, at the blood on it, and something in his face went past fury into something colder. His sword ignited with that white, holy fire.
"You—"
He didn't get to finish.
Hask crossed the space between them faster than I had ever seen him move, and I had seen him move very fast. He didn't draw a weapon. He didn't need one. His hand closed around the front of Varkas's breastplate and he simply threw him — one motion, no wasted effort, the kind of throw that looks almost casual right up until you register the distance covered.
He threw Varkas so forcefully that I could almost see the wind rushing to get out of the Paladin's way.
Varkas hit a curled, ancient tree trunk clear across the hollow, hard enough that the whole canopy above us shuddered, bark and moss raining down in a wide arc. The tree did not survive the impact intact. Neither, from the sound of it, did several of his ribs.
"NEVER," Hask roared, "TOUCH HER AGAIN."
I had never heard him raise his voice. Not once. Not in months of training, not in the Ebon Maw, not standing over Fenn's body three days ago.
Varkas came up out of the wreckage of the tree with his sword already in hand, gold light bleeding off the blade, whatever remained of his composure gone entirely.
"You put your hands on me."
"I'll do it again."
They met in the middle of the hollow, and it stopped being a conversation.
I don't have good words for what the next several seconds looked like. Hask fighting without a weapon at all, using his fists and his forearms and, once, what looked like the sheer immovable weight of his own body to turn aside a blade that should have taken his arm off. Varkas moving with that same too-fast blur I'd seen him use on the Boss, except now every strike was aimed at a person, and every block Hask managed came a hair's breadth from not managing it at all.Hask sent the magical purple greatsword flying with a swift backhand. It landed with a splash in the swamp. Then they grappled, Hask sweeping Varkas's leg from under him. They went down together. Hask began to speak. Not the visceral roar from before, but something furious and deadly. We could still hear him."YOU WANT TO SAY LITHWELL KNEW THE RISKS?!"He began to mercilessly punch Varkas in the face, his fists like hammer blows on a forge. We could hear the impacts, even at this distance."YOU. SAID. THAT. ABOUT. SOMEONE. ELSE. REMEMBER, VARKAS?!"
The ground shook. The black water of the hollow rippled outward in rings with every impact. Somewhere behind me I heard Tessa scream something, heard Kael shouting, heard Veyla's voice rising in something that might have been a spell or might have just been pure panic.
For a moment, the Paladin couldn't react, but somewhere around the eighth blow, Varkas got his booted feet under Hask and pushed hard. Hask was thrown forcefully away, landing into a combat roll and standing back up. Varkas hauled himself up as well, and his sword returned to his hand."How dare you. HOW DARE YOU?!"They clashed again, neither of them seeming to tire. Their rage was only escalating."I DID WHAT HAD TO BE DONE, YOU KNOW THAT!""YOU DID WHAT YOU WANTED TO BE DONE, VARKAS!"They broke from the bout, about five feet apart, breathing raggedly, bleeding and bruised, but not showing any signs of stopping.I understood, distantly, that we were about to watch two people who could very easily kill each other actually do it.They spoke simultaneously."Paladin Art —""Combat Summon –"
I didn't remember deciding to move.
I remembered the total clarity that arrived a half second before I did — a strange, cold awareness of exactly where Hask's next step would land, exactly where Varkas's blade was already committed to going, exactly how much space existed between the two of them and exactly how little time I had to fill it.
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"Shadow Art: Night Step. Activate."
I was between them before I finished the word.
I didn't feel the ground under my feet arrive so much as I simply understood, all at once, that I was standing in it — hollow, exhausted, my whole body one long ache from the fight we'd already survived, head down, close enough to both of them that I could feel the heat coming off Varkas's blade and the tremor still running through Hask's clenched fists.
Neither of them moved.
I didn't look up at either of them. I don't think I could have.
"That's enough."
Two words. I said them quietly. I'm not sure I could have said them any other way.
The hollow went silent.
I felt, rather than saw, the exact moment it registered with both of them — what they'd been about to do, who they'd have had to go through to keep doing it. Varkas's sword arm didn't lower right away. Hask's hands didn't unclench right away either. But something in the air between them changed, some enormous pressure releasing all at once, and I understood that whatever had almost happened here had just stopped happening, and if it hadn't, I'd have died.
Slowly, Varkas straightened. He looked down at me — really looked, the way I don't think he ever had before — and something crossed his face that might have been calculation, or might have been the beginning of fear.
He sheathed his sword.
Hask's hands unclenched, one finger at a time, like it cost him something to do it in that order.
Neither of them said anything for a long moment.
"We're done here," Varkas said finally. His voice had gone flat, controlled again, the mask sliding back into place over whatever had just cracked underneath it. "Silver Fang will file our own report on the day's events."
"You do that," Hask replied. He spit a glob of blood into the muck.
Varkas looked at Alara once more — something unreadable, something that might have been an apology if he'd had any idea how to give one — and then turned and walked back toward where Veyla was still kneeling over Uld, his shoulder still bleeding freely through the gash in his armor.I rushed to Alara, who was curled up against the tree, sobbing brokenly into the bark. I knelt beside her. She acknowledged my presence by throwing herself into me, her cries of anguish muffling against my jumpsuit. Tessa and Kael came shortly after, wrapping their arms around us as we all just huddled there together.
I caught Veyla's eye one last time; Silver Fang had gathered around her. I heard her voice in my head."I'm so sorry. I'll find you soon. Please keep my sister safe."With that, the adventurers teleported from the hollow. Probably out of the dungeon.I heard Hask's footsteps approach, followed by the sounds of him sitting heavily beside us.I could have cut the silence with a knife, it was so thick.Then –"You kids okay?"Nobody answered him right away. I don't think any of us knew how to make that question true yet, and Hask didn't push for one. He just sat there with us, solid and quiet, letting the silence be whatever it needed to be for as long as it needed to be that.We eventually were able to calm Alara down. She caught her breath and dried her puffy eyes, and as she pulled her face away from my chest, she looked at me in a way I had never seen before. I couldn't fully read it, but it made my face flush.
It was several minutes before anyone spoke again, and when we did, it wasn't about being okay.
Tessa was the one who finally said it, her voice hoarse and flat. "The Core's not going to reset. Not partially, not eventually. It's just broken. Which means we can't reset the Boss encounter either — there's nothing for its death to feed back into." She looked toward the hulking, half-submerged ruin of the creature at the center of the hollow, still faintly glowing that same sick color. "And I wouldn't touch that thing if you paid me. It's still connected to the Core. Whatever's wrong with the mana, it's wrong in there too. Trying to clean it could do anything. Wake something up. Set something off. I don't know, and I'm not going to be the one who finds out."
Nobody argued with her.
Which left the only question that actually mattered, the one I asked without much hope of a good answer.
"Can we still warp out?"
Tessa shook her head slowly. "Warping needs a stable Core to anchor to. This one's not stable. It's barely a Core at all right now." Hask nodded resignedly. He stood, wiped his hands futilely on his filthy jumpsuit and looked out into the swamp beyond the hollow."Best get walking."
Getting back through the swamp wasn't quite as difficult as we had thought it would be. Since we didn't have to cover the entire dungeon, we made a beeline for the spot where we entered. Hask handled the minor premature respawns we encountered.Our horse had not only not been eaten, but hadn't gone far; we found him grazing happily on a questionable patch of cordgrass not far from the cart.And so the journey home began. Hask guided the horse from the driver's box, refusing to acknowledge the many wounds, cuts, and likely broken bones he had suffered in all the fighting.In the cart, I struggled to find the words needed to provide the comfort the others desperately needed. Alara looked lost. I'd never seen her so emotionally shattered, not even when Hask nearly died after the Ebon Maw incident. She was past tears, past putting up walls. She was empty. I had never been more worried about her.Tessa, conversely, had not been able to keep her lip from trembling or her eyes welling up with tears since we left the hollow. She had not even once attempted to start a conversation to distract us.Kael had not taken his eyes off of the crumpled metal form of SCRUB. We'd heard neither a beep nor a boop of any kind for hours, and all of us were feeling that absence. He cradled the broken bot in his arms, jaw set so tightly I thought he might snap a tooth.
Everything had gone so devastatingly wrong from the outset on this dungeon run. I had managed to stop Hask and Varkas from killing each other and possibly destroying the dungeon in a deity-level adventurer battle, but had I been smarter, or faster, that never would have had to happen in the first place.I shook my head. Wallowing in guilt wouldn't help.I tried to break the silence."Alara…"Her tired eyes fixed on me. "Hm?""What was that Skill you used to save Kael?"Her lips pursed. She didn't look angry, more like she was deciding whether to answer me. It took a while."I unlocked it before I came to the guild. In the Scholars Enclave."I remembered Tessa and Kael telling me about that when we all first met. Alara had joined the Enclave – a group of mages and clerics dedicated to discovering the mysteries behind dungeons. Whatever happened that brought her to the Janitors had been bad. The Janitors Guild or prison, those had been her only two options. Her coldness and indifference had made it so I had filed that information away and never looked at it.I wasn't about to ask her now, but it did come to mind. "You were amazing."She looked away, not responding."He's right." Tessa's voice was quiet. "You saved Kael. You saved me.""And you took that blowhard Varkas down a couple of pegs." Kael said without looking up from SCRUB.Alara looked incredibly conflicted, but the faintest traces of a smile played on her lips. "You know we're going to get in so much trouble for what I did to him, right?"I shook my head. "I doubt it. He would have to give a detailed account of what happened. Then the Guilds would talk to Hask."If there was one thing I knew for certain, it was that Varkas didn't want the Guilds talking to Hask.
We reached the Guild Hall as the last light went out of the sky. All I could think of were the several mugs of ale I would be having at the Final Yak, and the soft bed I was going to crash into afterwards.
I thought, foolishly, that the worst of it was over.
I was going to be wrong about that. But not for another week.