33 Chapter Thirty-Three – Saying Goodbye to Auntie and Friends (1/2)

The shellycoat lived in a house of plastered reeds and mud, with an underwater entrance, something like a beaver dam. The trolls had a lair in the mud under a rock outcropping close by, while her ogres had set up in the roots of a fallen forest giant reduced to stump and roots.

And of course, there were Summons in the area. Water Elementals… and Fey. Interesting.

She'd brought in a rusalka, who was probably quite uncomfortable in such an unnatural swamp, but perfectly complemented it with her ability to wield the waters and her hair-fronds. In addition, a team of quicklings had been brought in as scouts to find me, and were fronting for two svartalfar, in from Nightmare and now in possession of a contract.

They didn't know who they were killing, only my appearance at best. Appearances changed, and names were powerful.

I hadn't given any of them mine. Maybe they listened to Fey gossip, maybe not.

The quicklings were naturally invisible, but that affected neither Tremble nor me. Tremble was always scanning for the living nearby, and could rapidly narrow down the nature of the threat. quicklings were also incessantly in motion, finding it very, very hard to remain in one place more then a few seconds, and even if they were faster then I was… it actually wasn't by much.

And so, I picked them off. Despite themselves, they tended to cling to trails and open pathways, since they weren't immune to physics, and running into or tripping over something could be harmful.

So could a taut wire stretched out at the level of their neck.

I killed three of the six with the same trick in the same location. They literally guillotined themselves on an anchored wire coated black and basically invisible in the shadows. It was no threat to slow-moving or large creatures, but they cut their own heads off running into it at something like eighty mph. The run through the rocks was innocuous and not a place where you could be ambushed, so they thought they were safe running through it.

Oops on them.

One was running across the water at top speed, and I simply reached up and tripped him at an inopportune time. He yelped and went falling head over heels in a big splash, and before he could get out of the water, the giant snapper turtle he crashed into reached over with a wide fey-chomping mouth and bit the short little bastard in two.

The fifth I saw coming, tracked him with Tremble's ability to sense evil, and step-flipped my buried Sword up at the proper moment. The quickling actually saw my foot come down, looked up and saw me, and then cut himself in two across Tremble's blade.

The last one came zipping in at the screech of alarm, shrieking in his own temporally-accelerated way. Him I actually sprang my Null on, and he gawked as his temporal acceleration curse was actually shut down in my Null's Interdiction.

So was his speed. His squeal wasn't quite as high-pitched as I caught up to him in ten steps, and chopped him immediately in two.

I faded into the stones nearby, waiting, and the svartalfar weren't long in investigating.

Of course, two quicklings burning down to vivus didn't leave them much to go on… and I walked an inch above the ground, I didn't leave tracks, nor, with my Vajra, did I leave a scent trail.

The jet-black figures, noted assassins renowned for their skill and magic, stewed over the site of the deaths for a few minutes, barely speaking, more gestures then anything else, and then departed as quietly as they'd come.

A minute later, one slid into the shadows directly in front of me, not making a sound as he did so. It was a nice spot, the shadows natural and aligned so that they didn't seem like shadows at all.

His stoic appreciation for the spot ended when Tremble was quick-drawn and politely lopped off his head with a One Strike + SA. I think he managed to blink in surprise before he died.

I let him fall and start burning. I did notice the metal of his sword and was very happy. Adamant was not easy to come by, and they'd just given me most of a sword's worth of the stuff. The alloy of it wasn't quite pure enough, but I could work with it, and Tremble was naturally delighted.

That naturally meant I couldn't let the other one get away, I wanted that metal. And even with an extraplanar touch to it, it was going to be supremely useful.