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Chapter 78: Panic

“Certainly not a healthy one. You’d think I’d be exhausted by now, but my body just won’t accept it. It just kicks me back into awareness the moment I even start thinking about sleep.”

“It’s not just about Zeke, you know,” Lillia said. “You’re pinning everything on the Iron Hounds.”

Arwin let out a muffled bark of laughter, unable to control himself but still doing his best to avoid waking anyone up. “I know. I never said it was right. The Adventurer’s Guild is beyond me right now. I’m not strong enough to handle them yet. But the Iron Hounds – them, I can deal with.”

“And yet, they aren’t the same,” Lillia said. “You can’t treat one wound by healing another.”

“You think I don’t know that?” Arwin asked. He leaned back against the wall and craned his head back to stare at the ceiling – or rather, in the direction of the ceiling. It wasn’t like he could make anything out in the blanket of night enveloping him. “Nothing I can do can ever bring anyone back, but doing anything feels better than doing nothing.”

“Certainly not arguing that,” Lillia said. “I didn’t really have a direction I was heading in, if I’m being honest. I don’t have advice. If I’d been the one in the room with Tix, she’d have met the exact same fate she met at your hands. Maybe a worse one.”

“If that would have done anything to bring someone back, I would have done it,” Arwin said. “But I’ll settle for stopping the Iron Hounds from ever doing this again. It’s to protect other people.”

At least, that’s what I’m going to tell myself. Even if they never planned to kill another innocent, I don’t think I’d just let things go. Maybe I was never suited to be the Hero of Mankind at all. I’m not nearly forgiving enough.

Arwin and Lillia fell silent. There was nothing left to be said, and they were both lost within the maze of their own thoughts. The morning would come when it came, but it probably wouldn’t come anywhere near soon enough.

But, eventually, the night came to pass. And, when the morning did roll around, everyone was ready. Lillia and Arwin emerged into the tavern to find the others all waiting for them, determined expressions on their faces.

“I’ve mapped out a plan,” Rodrick said. “One that should utilize all of us as effectively as possible. We’re all going to split up and focus on watching a different person.”

“All of us?” Arwin asked, his thoughts drifting back to the overly complex map that Rodrick had drawn for locating Tix. There was no way the man was just a failed adventurer. He knew way too much about hunting people down, and Arwin wasn’t sure if he was glad to have Rodrick on his side or concerned as to why Rodrick knew all this.

“No.” Rodrick shook his head. “I should correct that. Anna and I will be watching Yul and Erik, respectively. Reya is going to be the intermediary, because she can’t be seen in public due to all the enemies she seems to have. She’ll be running around on the rooftops, looking for signs that Anna and I give her. She’ll then deliver that information to you and Lillia, who can close in on the targets.”

“Right,” Arwin said. “So what do we do in the meantime?”

“You’ll be lying in wait in an area roughly between Anna and myself,” Rodrick replied. “We’re going to want to move quickly, but we have to move at the right time. Not only do we need to kill two different people, we need to do it without people figuring out who did it. That means they have to go down while they’re close to each other, but not so close that they can help.”

“And you’re confident that situation is going to show up?” Arwin asked doubtfully. “Why would they be close but not together?”

“It would happen when they’re heading back to their guild hall,” Anna answered for Rodrick. "Most people eat meals at roughly the same time, but unless Yul and Erik are close friends, it’s unlikely they’re eating it together. As long as the timeframe for their meals isn’t too far off, we should be able to get them one after the other.”

“That’s a bit of a stretch, but I see where you’re headed with this,” Arwin said. “How do we keep the rest of the Iron Hounds from seeing this happen, though? If we do something that close to their guild hall, they’ll almost certainly have someone that’ll notice the sounds of the commotion.”

“I’ve accounted for that,” Rodrick said, a grim smile passing over his lips. “But I don’t think you’re going to like it.”

***

The wind rustled the hood of Reya’s cloak and nipped at her eyes. She stood at the edge of a roof, looking down at the city below her. It wasn’t exactly the tallest building in the area, but she wasn’t a huge fan of heights, so it was the highest she was willing to climb.

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Day had already turned to late evening. Reya’s legs were sore from running around the whole time, relaying information from Rodrick and Anna to Arwin and Lillia, but her work wasn’t done yet.

Rodrick had been right. Arwin hadn’t liked the idea at all, but he’d eventually come around. The plan was just too good, and Arwin didn’t have any good ways to turn it down. They all wanted the same thing, and she was done sitting around and watching other people do it for her.

I just need to keep myself from getting killed in the process. Just like Rodrick said, Yul and Erik have pretty close schedules. They’re somewhere around ten to twenty five minutes off of each other, which means I need a distraction that lasts for at least thirty minutes.

It’s a damn good thing that Rodrick helped me come up with some different potential distractions for different times. He definitely knows what he’s doing. I wonder if he was a master thief or something before. Maybe he was the guy that planned the heists, but his whole crew got caught and so now he’s going around adventuring.

As fun as that thought was to play out, Reya brought it to a halt. She had more than a job to do tonight. She had a point to prove – and she was in just the right spot to do it. The Iron Hounds’ guild hall was only about five minutes to her north, but she couldn’t head over quite yet.

Reya considered dropping from the roof to the ground below. It probably would have been a pretty intimidating move for anyone that may have been watching, but she settled for saving her kneecaps and climbing down normally instead.

Once she got down – in one piece, without any cracked bones from overeager jumping – she pulled her hood back and strode up to an old door in the side of a stone building. It wasn’t anything particularly special, but Reya recalled this particular door.

She’d been at it not all that long ago. And, while she didn’t remember exactly who was behind it, she was pretty sure they remembered her. Reya rapped on the wood several times, then took a step back to wait.

A second passed. Reya got impatient and knocked again.

The door swung open, revealing a rat-faced man with thinning brows and pinched features. “What in the – wait. You!”

“Hullo,” Reya said, slapping the man full across the face before turning and sprinting in the other direction.

“It’s the damn thief!” the man screamed, recovering from his shock with remarkable speed and darting out after her. “Nate, get the others and get your asses out here!”

Reya didn’t wait to see if the other criminals responded to the man’s calls. She still couldn’t quite recall his name, but it didn’t matter. What did matter is that she was faster than him.

She took care to avoid getting too far ahead, always giving her pursuer just enough time to see her back disappearing around a bend. Entirely unbeknownst to him, she ran him in a full circle, coming back out in the street just as a dozen other men poured out from the building, half of them drunk.

Reya blew a kiss to them, then jumped back as the rat-faced man lunged at her. His hands whistled through the air, catching nothing, and Reya took off once more.

“Get the little shit!” the man squealed, scrambling back upright and taking off with his horde at his heels.

Got them.

Reya skidded down an alley, then scrambled up a wall. She sat on top of it, waiting for the fastest of her pursuers to turn down the alley she’d run into before dropping on the other side. Curses rang out as the men climbed the wall behind her. Reya didn’t wait around for them. She was already almost to where she needed to be.

Almost as if on cue, Anna dashed out of the shadows, a cloak over her head and breathing heavily. She dug through her pockets and thrust a key on a necklace at Reya.

“Here,” Anna said between pants. “You make running fast look much easier than it actually is. I got them. If Rodrick didn’t plan the path for me, I would have been screwed. You sure you can stay ahead of these guys?”

“Me? Easily,” Reya said with a scoff. She took the key and returned it to her necklace. “I’m not that fast, but these idiots are slow – in the feet and in the head. Get out of here so they don’t keep thinking you’re me.”

Anna nodded, then ripped the cloak off and bundled it up in her arms as she strode off. Only a few seconds later, Reya heard the sounds of her pursuit gaining on her. She waited around a little longer, letting them catch one more glimpse of her before she was off once more.

It didn’t take her long to run into the other half of the plan. Another group of men headed down the alley straight in Reya’s direction, their eyes widening in shock as they spotted her right in front of them.

“There she is!” One of them yelled.

Reya jumped onto the side of the nearest building, climbing onto it and racing into the night in the direction of the Iron Hounds’ base – two different groups of thieves hot in pursuit. If she’d been much farther from the guild house, it would have been nearly impossible to pull off.

Fortunately, Reya had absolutely no shortage of enemies in the city, so it hadn’t been hard to find two groups in roughly the same area. Reya lowered herself to the ground on the street right across from the Iron Hounds’ guild house right as the first of the groups turned the corner.

“No more running,” the rat-faced man snarled, pointing a short sword that he must have borrowed from one of his colleagues at Reya. “You die here, you thieving little shit.”

“You’re thieves too!” Reya protested. “I don’t see the problem.”

“You stole from us! That’s the damn problem!”

Reya didn’t get a chance to respond. The other group sprinted out from the alley behind her, and she turned toward them with a wide, practiced smile. The men skidded to a stop, spotting the other group behind Reya.

“Get them!” Reya yelled, not giving either group time to process what they’d seen. And, on cue, a rock flew from an alleyway, striking one of the men in the second group in the head. He stumbled, letting out a slew of curses as blood started to trickle down his scalp.

It didn’t take both of the groups long to come to the exact same conclusion – that the opposing group had sided with Reya. If they’d stopped to actually say anything, the entire plan would have fallen apart in seconds.

Unfortunately for them, the victor of a street brawl was generally the one that struck first. So, as one, the two groups charged each other, all seeking the head of the woman who stood in their center.