Chapter 211: Location?
"Kill the brats and bag the pig!" the bald brute roared.
He never took a second step.
Eren and the golden mask moved in sync.
The golden mask surged forward low, her shredded white mantle trailing like smoke. The sword in her hand liquefied into a pale streak of light.
Three rapid-fire thrusts shattered the lantern light. The first mercenary blinked, and suddenly three crimson blossoms bloomed across his throat, sternum, and right shoulder. His weapon clattered to the flagstones before his knees even buckled. Gold didn’t wait for him to fall; she planted a boot squarely on his collapsing chest, using his body as a springboard to launch herself into the air.
Mid-flight, she twisted with grace, her rapier carving an immaculate, descending crescent that severed the hamstrings of a charging swordsman behind him. As the man shrieked and dropped, her free hand reached into her sleeve, flicking two poisoned throwing needles straight into the eye sockets of a thug raising a heavy crossbow..
Down in the center lane, Eren was conducting his own fights.
Activating his dance footwork, Eren closed the distance to two approaching club-wielders. The first thug swung a spiked iron mace horizontally, aiming to take Eren’s head off at the jawline. Eren dropped his center of gravity, sliding along the slick, blood-stained stones beneath the arc of the swing.
As he slid past, Eren drove the right hatchet upward into the underside of the man’s knee, hooking the tendon and ripping backward.
The thug collapsed with a choked wail, and Eren spun on his heels using the momentum of the slide, bringing the flat, heavy poll of the left hatchet directly across the bridge of the second thug’s nose. Bone shattered like chalk. The man flipped completely over backward, crashing into a stack of empty brine barrels that splintered under his weight.
"Behind you!" Gold’s sharp rasp echoed over the din.
Eren didn’t even look. He trusted the warning on instinct and leaned his upper body left.
A heavy, jagged sword cleaved through the air where his neck had been, the wind of the swing ruffling his dark bangs. Eren didn’t retreat; he stepped directly inside the mercenary’s reach, jamming the crook of his right elbow against the man’s throat to choke off his balance. Reversing his grip on the left hatchet, Eren buried the axe into the thug’s shoulder, using the leverage to pivot the man around as a human shield violently.
THWACK.
A crossbow bolt intended for Eren thudded dead-center into the hostage’s spine.
"Thanks for the cover, buddy!" Eren laughed, ripping the hatchet free and hurling the dying human shield straight at the crossbowman, bowling both men into a heap of rusted iron scrap.
Across the room, the bald leader was sweating profusely, swinging his oversized butcher’s cleaver in wide, frantic arcs. "Stay back, you masked bitch! I’ll turn you into ground pork!"
Gold parried it, the crystalline sword aura shrieking against the iron. The sheer weight of the blow drove her back half a step.
"Catch!" Eren’s voice came from behind, frantic.
He channeled a concentrated surge of fire mana into the hatchet in his right hand. The steel ignited into a blazing tomahawk, screaming through the air end-over-end across the warehouse.
Gold didn’t flinch. She ducked her head the exact microsecond the flaming projectile whistled over her crown.
CHUNK!
The blazing axe buried itself four inches deep into the bald brute’s right bicep, severing the muscle clean to the bone and cauterizing the wound in an explosion of sparks.
Before the screaming leader could process the agonizing heat, Gold capitalized on the opening with a lightning-fast thrust, pinning the brute’s neck to the massive chopping block behind him.
As everyone seemed to be finished, a whimper reverberated in the slaughterhouse.
In the corner, sat the weasel-faced lackey who had been checking the parchment for the bald leader mere moments ago. He sat on his butt, his skin drained of all the colours.
The golden-masked girl stepped towards him, ready to finish him also.
"Hold your horses, lady," Eren said, catching the fabric of her tattered white sleeve with two fingers. "Did your parents never teach you how to talk?"
She jerked her arm out of his grasp with an irritated hiss. "Dead men don’t sell coordinates to syndicate bounty hunters."
"Dead men also don’t answer multiple-choice questions, genius," Eren retorted.
Leaving her, Eren casually strolled over to the survivor and crouched in front of the shaking mercenary, flashing the warmest, most reassuring customer-service smile his handsome face could muster.
"Good evening, my friend," Eren said, his voice warm. "As you can see, my associate here is currently undergoing severe anger management issues, whereas I am a reasonable, law-abiding gentleman. So, let’s skip the part where you lose your teeth: who hired you to pick up our fat noble pig from this specific storage unit?"
The lean mercenary choked on his own spit, his jaw vibrating like a broken clockwork toy as he clawed helplessly at the wall behind him.
Gold pressed her sword tip against the man’s throat.
Eren let out an amused sigh, shaking his head. "See what I mean? She has zero patience. You have about three seconds before she decides your fate."
"W-We don’t know!" the man shrieked, tears and snot instantly breaching containment as he threw his hands into the air. "I swear, we don’t know! Our team received an anonymous courier contract ten minutes ago! The parchment just said: Wait at the meat depot and extract the fat nobleman in the silk trousers, and load him into the covered wagon heading south’! That’s all! We never met the employer! We don’t even know who the hell he is!"
Gold pressed her sword a little. "Fine. If you’re useless regarding the contractor... at least tell us where the hell this depot is. Which district of the capital are we in?"
The lean man blinked through his tears, looking at her as if she had sprouted a second head.
"D-District...? Capital...?" The man let out a ragged, hysterical gasp. "Are you mad?! You’re in Rujgard! There’s no district and capital in Rujgard!"
The world stopped spinning for both of them all of a sudden.
The sword slipped from the woman’s fingers, bouncing against the floor with a metallic sound. Her posture froze solid, her eyes widening behind the mask in paralyzed horror.
Taking full advantage, the lean mercenary scrambled onto all fours like a frantic cockroach and bolted through the shattered double doors out into the night.
Neither of them made a move to stop him. Neither of them even blinked.
"...Rujgard?" the golden mask whispered, her voice lost every shred of its cold, arrogant edge. "Did he just say... Rujgard?"
Eren slowly dragged both hands down his face, staring at the cavernous, meat-hook-lined ceiling with a gaze full of unhinged, cosmic despair.
"Fuck me sideways," Eren groaned from the deepest depths of his soul.
"In this massive continent, there are seventy-two sovereign provinces, and a million square leagues of habitable territory on this godforsaken planet... and that knock-off mage managed to banish us straight into the Rujgard?!"