Selene…
Her eyes slowly opened as she woke up in her bed to see Marcus walking out of the bathroom with steam spilling out. It seemed that he had barely finished cleaning himself up and getting dressed.
When she looked at his face she could tell that he was stressed out by something.
He turned to look at her as he realized she was awake and said, "Oh hey. How are you feeling?"
"Um...better I guess but I should be asking you that. You nearly bled to death," she said as she sat up and swung her legs off the bed.
"True. But the fact is that I didn't thanks to you. Do you think you're back to full strength yet?"
She looked down at her hand and clenched it into a fist while taking in a deep breath.
"No. While I was asleep I only managed to get maybe a third of my strength back. Why do you ask?"
"Because while you were asleep I removed the seal on Artemis magic. We're going to kill Jiroh before he can try and revive Malthael and we're going right now."
"You're going to kill him?! Marcus we...the brotherhood doesn't kill people or take assassination requests unless its specifically requested by the royal family. We can't just-"
"It wasn't a suggestion. We ARE going to kill him," he said and Artemis nodded her head in agreement as she stood up from her chair and rested her hand on the hilt of her sheathed sword.
"What is more important to you Selene? Upholding a moral standard or killing a man that kidnapped and possibly killed dozens of children just so he can revive a dragon capable of leveling an entire country?"
She didn't know how to respond to that and looked down at the floor in silence. She didn't want to know what would happen if they killed Jiroh and people saw her as a monster because of it.
Almost as if reading her mind he said, "If you are that concerned over what people will think about you if you kill him then I should warn you about how they might think of you if you don't. If we don't kill him and he manages to escape to go ruin the lives of many more families and innocent people then they will never stop hating you."
Her heart sunk as she heard his words even though she knew them to be true. If they didn't kill him there was a far greater risk of more people being harmed if he was allowed to escape but...
"I plan to kill him with or without either of you but I would feel a lot safer if you came with us and helped us take him down," Artemis said.
Selene knew what she had to do. She decided to ignore the idea of what people may think of her.
"Alright. Lets go kill Jiroh," she said with a look of conviction.
Marcus...
Just as the three of them were making their way to Lunaas he told them to stop.
"Hold on a moment. We need to change how you both look so they can't identify you right away. Put these on," he said as he made two masks and covered both of them in a thin layer of armor from his Dragon Glass.
"What about you? You're not going to disguise yourself?" Selene asked.
"No. No one really knows who I am so its not a problem but both of you are easily recognizable."
As the two of them put on the masks he made for them he noticed that the guards watching the entrance into town were gone. That didn't bode well with him.
As they made their to the mayors office and Artemis stopped in place outside right as they were about to walk in.
"What is it?" Selene asked.
"He's not here. His scent, its gone. I'm only picking up faint traces of it but he's not here anymore. I don't know where he is," she said.
As Artemis groaned in annoyance he looked around the street until he found one of the guards that was patrolling the town. Marcus squinted his eyes and realized it was the same guard that had first interacted with them when they first arrived and told us to talk to Jiroh as the mayor.
"I think we might be able to get some information out of him," he said as he pointed his gaze towards the guard.
A few minutes later and Marcus had finished grabbing the guard without anyone noticing and took him into the mayor's office. He then chained up the guard's arms to the wall.
"What the hell?! Let me go dammit!"
"Sorry but I can't do that. See, I need to know where your boss Jiroh went.
Marcus watched carefully as he made sure to read the guards' facial expressions and sure enough the guard's eye twitched to the left ever so slightly before he said, "I don't know who you're talking about."
"You don't? Hmm...I think you're lying. I think you know exactly who I'm talking about and that you know exactly where he is. Do you want to know how I can tell? Its your eyes, they give you away. I can read your body language and tell if you are lying or not."
Hearing that the guard went completely silent and refused to speak for several minutes no matter how many times he asked. He probably figured that if he didn't say anything at all then they couldn't pull any information from him but Marcus was counting on it.
"How about I give you some incentive to tell me. If you tell me where Jiroh is and how to reach him...," he said as he walked up to the guard and pulled off his arm while keeping it semi-connected via a small arc of electricity, "Then I'll give you your arm back."
"Ahh! What the hell?!" he shouted in protest as he tried to reach out for his arm with the stump of his shoulder. He waved his shoulder back and forth as if to try and grab his arm back.
Marcus then pulled back his own arm and smacked the guard in the face with his own hand.
"Hah! This must be humiliating for you, being smacked in the face by your own hand," Marcus said with a chuckle.
"Shut up damn you! You're the one hitting me!"
"Oh but its your hand not mine," he said as he smacked the guard with his own arm two more times.
Marcus had to suppress the urge not to say 'stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself'. Just the mere thought of it made him grin and and chuckle with every smack. He wasn't even hitting the guard that hard but he figured that it would be more painful to be humiliated in such a fashion rather than straight up beatings.
"Stop doing that!" The guard shouted in protest once more as he was smacked once again and this time instead of Marcus laughing, Artemis failed to hide a laugh of her own as she held her hand over her mask.
"That's not funny!" the guard protested.
Marcus smacked him again and the guard shouted, "Stop it!"
He couldn't resist it any longer.
"You stop it! Stop hitting yourself!" he said as he smacked the guard again with his own hand which caused the guard to shout in outrage and Artemis burst into laughter while Selene watched in bewilderment as both of them made fun of the guard.
"He looks so-," Artemis interrupted herself with her own laughter before finishing, "-He looks so ridiculous! Ha ha ha!"
After a few more smacks and after suffering Artemis laughing at him, the guard's spirit started to crumble and his defiant anger eventually fizzled as he said, "Come on...just stop!"
Marcus then walked up close to the guard and said, "I'll stop when you agree to tell us where Jiroh is. Do you understand?"
The guard looked Marcus in the eyes with a tiredness to him that told him that he never really wanted to be involved with this mess and so the guard sighed in exasperation as he said, "Alright alright...fine. I'll tell you where he is. Just stop smacking me with my own hand and give it back."
"Nope. Telling us isn't good enough. You'll escort us there on foot and I won't give you back your arm until after you've taken us to Jiroh. Then you'll get it back," Marcus said sternly and the guard sighed.
"Okay fine. But I can't take you there if I'm chained to the wall now can I?"
After taking off the guard's chains they began following him through the streets and Selene asked Marcus, "Can't we simply teleport there with magic? We could just ask him where it is instead of relying on him to guide us there the whole way."
The guard overheard her and said, "No, you won't be able to. Jiroh has rune formulas implemented to keep people from approaching under any means other than on foot and the terrain of the mountain is harsh enough as it is. There are no other options to get there other than to make the climb."
"Damn...that mountain has to be more than forty kilometers away. It could take us hours to get there...How long before Jiroh is finished with whatever ritual he's trying to bring Malthael back?"
"I...I don't know. It could be any day now since he stopped collecting people to sacrifice after that woman Artemis was killed...Wait a minute, weren't you the one that killed her? Why are-," he tried to ask but Marcus smacked him with his own arm again.
"I'm the one asking questions. Not you," he said as he shook the guard's arm at him as they continued walking.
Alta...
He was sitting at the same table in the same pub with the same drinking buddy looking at the same color of alcohol in his glass and he was bored out of his mind. He was tired of doing the same routine and wanted to do something different for once. Something meaningful with his life. He just wasn't sure how to go about doing that.
Just as he was about to say 'fuck it' and down the glass of liquor that had been poured for him he saw Marcus being led by a guard with one arm and two masked women walking behind him. Both women had armor that was colored as pitch black as the masks they were wearing but one of them was designed very similar to Selene's armor.
It had to be her.
He couldn't help but feel something was off about this but he was hoping for an opportunity to show itself anyways so he stood up from his seat and frantically ran out of the pub to chase after them. Gaiyen called out after him in a drunken stupor and fell over himself to follow after Alta.
"Hey! Marcus!" he shouted and Marcus stopped and turned around to face him. Apparently he was holding the arm of the guard in front of him.
Not disturbing at all...
"Uh...What's going on? What are you guys doing?" he asked.
Marcus turned to look at Selene and shrugged as he said, "We're making our way up the mountain to stop an evil war criminal from reviving the dragon Malthael before he can use it to destroy Duranell...wanna come with us?"
Marcus made it sound so simple and boring, as if he was listing off some errands he needed to run.
"Sure, why not," he said as he caught up with them while Gaiyen tagged along as well for some reason.
Alta had been waiting inside that pub for a moment like this to come along so he couldn't just ignore it. This was an important moment for him. If he let this moment go to waste then he would never be satisfied.