Outside Influences

Bel’s pulse thumped in her ears as she stared intently at the glowing orb of fire. It surged eagerly over the open hand of the aggressive, snout-faced woman like a hunting bird straining at its tether.

“Are you threatening us?” James challenged.

The woman snorted, sending her long snout twitching and tilted her chin towards the woods. “No asshole, they are.”

Bel and James turned to see where she was indicating, back in the direction of the clearing that they’d just run through. She could see a group of people closing in quickly, all dressed in the dark robes of Technis’ enforcers. Bel stepped back in alarm as she imagined the murderous intent in their eyes.

Bel froze, filled with the desperate need to act but overwhelmed with uncertainty. She wanted to return to Clearbrook and check on Ventas and the townsfolk, but now she was trapped, like a prawn squeezed between a crab’s claws. Ventas and the town may have been in trouble, but now she and her brother were powerless to help; they’d be lucky to escape this encounter with their lives.

Even as she watched, one of the enforcers reached into their sleeve and flicked their arm forward. The air seemed to shriek in protest as a small throwing dart flew towards them, closing the hundred stride distance in an eye blink.

Bel barely had time to flinch before the attack was intercepted by the well-dressed man. With the snap of his cloak he had moved in front of Bel and deflected the missile with a straight, double-edged sword. The riposte had been so fast that Bel hadn’t been able to track his movement.

“Holy shit,” James cried. Bel held up her short sword helplessly as the half-dozen enforcers split up and leaped through the trees and underbrush, moving to surround them like a school of hunting whales. The throwing man hurtled small spikes of steel with the force and volume of rain in a summer squall. Bel expected that they would be overwhelmed by the blurring barbs, but the mustached stranger with the yellow eyes – Nebamon – wove his own impossible blur of metal, intercepting every missile aimed at them.

Rikja stepped forward, but remained behind Nebamon’s protective sword. The air distorted around her hands as she lifted them into the air, and a moment later she threw a skull-sized incandescent ball of heat at the dart-thrower. The orb hissed and spat as it covered the distance, but its intended victim was saved by a large man who erected a shimmering blue barrier in front of the fireball. The ball flattened along the surface before splashing back to singe the surrounding underbrush, leaving the enforcers unharmed.

Bel had seen enough. She grabbed her brother’s hand and pulled him away from the conflict. They shoved past Crystal, who was busy assembling some long, metallic pole. They only made it another few steps before the large, hairy man caught them with a massive flex of his arms. Bel felt as though she was being squeezed by the sea itself and she was practically drowning in chest hair.

Her snakes flailed and she kicked frantically as she was lifted up and deposited back on the ground next to Crystal.

“Stay,” the hairy man commanded, before turning back to the fight.

Bel nodded weakly.

“His hair…” James groaned.

Bel looked up to see that four of the enforcers had taken to jumping through the trees, faster than a flock of falcons, to avoid the fireballs and metal spikes that filled the air at ground level. Two of them dropped to the ground a few strides from Nebamon’s group while the other two stayed in the trees, creating a three dimensional pincer attack.

When they landed, Crystal stepped forward and gestured with her metal stick. As if it had been waiting for her command, a curtain of dirt rose up, momentarily interrupting the continual onslaught of projectiles from the still-distant enforcer.

The two new arrivals leaped forward and Bel belatedly raised her sword, prepared to fight. Before she or the enforcers could reach one another, Nebamon took advantage of the sudden lull in missiles to prance forward and meet his adversaries. Before Bel had finished lifting her sword to the ready, he had already beheaded one of the attackers and had literally disarmed the other.

While Nebamon silenced his screaming victim, the two enforcers still in the tree paused, obviously caught off guard by the strength of their opponents. That made them easy targets for the hairy man, who swung his fist into a nearby tree, shattering the trunk into a cloud of tiny splinters. With an open hand, he slapped the thirty stride tall trunk, spinning it straight at the tree-bound enforcers. One man dove from his perch onto a lower branch and dove under the oncoming tree, while the second one frantically jumped to a distant branch clear of the destruction. The impressive acrobatics left the man too distracted to dodge the ball of fire that sent his body spinning through the air. The heat of the flames turned him into a charred corpse before he hit the ground.

Bel gagged at the smell of cooking flesh, and she pulled her cloak over her nose.

How strong are these people? They’re making the enforcers look as slow at tortoises and as weak as butterflies!

The surviving treetop enforcer lunged forward with his sword, apparently determined to take someone down with him, but his blade was caught in the hairy man’s enormous hand. Without the slightest bit of effort or indication of pain, he clenched his fist and shattered the sword. The enforcer’s expression told Bel that he didn’t believe what was happening. Those were his last thoughts: before he could move, the hairy man’s other hand shot forward, removing the enforcer’s face from his head with a devastating slap.

The wall of dirt finally turned into a shower of soil under the barrage of the projective throwing enforcer, but of the initial group of six only the dart thrower, and his guardian with the blue barriers remained.

Bel’s eyes whipped back and forth in a desperate attempt to follow all of the action. The air smelled of sawdust and charred flesh, and, save for the sounds of metal upon metal, the forest had gone silent. Despite doing nothing, she was soaked in sweat. A chill travelled down her back as she looked at the corpses strewn over the ground.

She was absolutely terrified: her snakes writhed and her breaths were shallow and weak. Bel had always thought that no one could be as scary as Beth, but each of Nebamon’s group was making her wonder if she misunderstood the world on a fundamental level.

“Got ’em!” shouted the scaled woman. Bel’s wide eyed whipped to her, wondering what terrifying ability she would display next. She watched in confused anticipation as the woman waved a second, longer metal rod around in the air for a moment before jabbing it into the ground in front of her.

Nothing happened, at least at first; the only sounds and movement came from Nebamon as he deflected a few more darts and Rikja’s fire orbs as they hissed and splattered against the enforcer’s barrier.

Then the ground rumbled ominously. The dirt to either side of the remaining pair of enforcers swelled like the sea, dipped down, and then rose up like a tidal wave of dirt. The enforcers had a moment to widen their eyes in horror before the ground crashed over them The enforcer’s barrier shattered under the sudden mass after the slightest moment of resistance. The pair disappeared below the surface of churned soil, leaving the world momentarily quiet.

“Holy shit,” James whispered hoarsely. “These people are–”

He froze when he saw the well-dressed Nebamon lock his yellow eyes onto them. He smiled like a shark, and Bel forced a lump down her throat.

At least we weren’t caught by the enforcers, right?

With a flourish, Nebamon flicked a few specks from his weapon and returned it to its sheath at his hip. “Rikja, Ken, drain their essence.”

He twisted the tip of his mustache thoughtfully as he looked Bel and James over. “Allow me to reintroduce my group. We are members of a virtuous group that we call the Righteous Memory of Truth.”

He paused for a moment as though he was waiting for a reaction.

Does he want us to praise him? It’s a terrible name, Bel thought.

Disappointed by their silence, the man finally continued. “I am Nebamon, group captain.”

He gestured to Rikja. “Rikja, our fire mage.”

“Ken, a natural warrior. Not much for talking.”

The hairy man lifted his chin and grunted.

“And finally, Crystal. She is an expert on…”

He looked at her for a moment, as if he was deciding what to say. “…well, on a variety of topics.”

Crystal had just unscrewed her rod into two pieces. She nodded eagerly as she shoved the halves into a small leather holster at her hip. “Hi! Hey, before we were interrupted I was asking about–”

“Later,” Nebamon commanded. He turned back to the siblings and smiled. “Now, I would like to once again invite you to join us. I hope that this,” he gestured to the death around them, “will help you to realize how much we have to offer.”

Bel shared a look with her brother. They really didn’t have a choice. Better to go willingly than to be dragged – and Bel didn’t doubt for a moment that Ken could drag the both of them for days without tiring.

She smiled weakly as her snakes coiled defensively around her head. “You make a pretty good argument. Going with you seems like a great idea.”

“Perfect,” the man replied. He twirled his mustache in delight, and his tail wagged slowly behind him.