Chaos in the House of Fortune
The mercenaries flung their money pouches aside and drew their weapons.
"Get him! He's the one behind all this!"
"Take him alive!"
Shouts erupted from every direction.
Arendt glanced briefly at the mercenaries charging at them in a mob, then flashed Merlin one last grin and kicked the table right beside him out of the way. Crash! Glass shattered and food rolled across the floor, splattering everywhere.
Thrown into sudden chaos, the patrons screamed and scrambled for the exits in a panic.
Merlin, snapping back to his senses, began shouting orders again. "Seal the exits! Don't let anyone out!"
"Quit your shrieking. Keep that up and you'll throw your back out. Whoops."
Arendt, never missing a chance to needle him, ducked cleanly under a sword that came slicing down at his head.
Driving straight into his opponent's torso, he drove his elbow up into the man's jaw, then hurled the staggering mercenary onto the gambling table.
The table couldn't withstand the sudden arrival of that massive frame and shattered with a splintering crack. Buried under the wreckage, the mercenary flailed his limbs and tried to push himself up — and in the next instant, Glenn's flying heel stomped squarely into his face.
Leaving the limp body behind him, Arthur seized the collar of another man charging head-on and knocked him out with a headbutt.
"Gwaaagh!"
In the meantime, one mercenary gritted his teeth, drew his blade, and lunged for the back of Glenn's head — only to crumple lifelessly under Ryder's clean, decisive strike.
"What the hell are you idiots doing?!"
Men toppled and spilled over one another, bodies rolling through the food strewn across the floor. It was pandemonium, pure and simple.
Merlin, raging like a madman, took a punch squarely from the elbow of a patron desperately fleeing the scene and went sprawling.
Here and there, patrons shoved and collided, tempers flared, and fistfights broke out among the customers themselves.
Standing tall atop an overturned table, Arendt smiled with deep satisfaction.
"Nice view."
He could see the mercenaries blocking the escaping patrons, sweat pouring down their faces as they held their ground.
And slipping quietly through that chaos, another group of people.
Several knights disguised in the clothes stripped from the gambling den's unconscious mercenaries, along with some of the prisoners posing as ordinary patrons. Under the protection of Saif and Richt's party, they were steadily inching their way toward the exit.
"That side's taken care of."
Arendt's gaze shifted elsewhere.
A small-framed boy dressed in a servant's uniform, and a few mercenaries moving with him.
It was the boy who'd been locked in the cell, along with Arthur's team. They were heading in the opposite direction from the ones making for the exit.
So far, so smooth.
"Grab that little bastard! Damn it, who the hell even are you?"
Merlin, his eyes now swollen to twice their earlier size, struggled up from the floor and screeched himself hoarse.
Asked who he was? Answering was only common courtesy.
Arendt booted the onrushing mercenary away with a hearty kick, drew in a deep breath, and let a resounding declaration echo through the wrecked pleasure palace.
"I'm the villain who came to rip the money out of you bastards' pockets! Hand over my cash, you fraudulent sons of bitches!"
Ryder nearly bit his tongue off at that thunderous proclamation.
"This lunatic, I swear!"
Even as he complained, his hands never stopped moving — snatching up a broken chair leg from the floor nearby and bringing it down on the back of a mercenary's skull.
"Gwuek!"
He honestly couldn't understand why the guy was enjoying himself so much. Apparently Arendt took great pleasure in the mayhem he'd personally orchestrated.
Ryder recalled how it had all gone down.
After knocking out the mercenaries guarding the cell block and stealing their clothes, Arendt had gone straight upstairs, lured a few mercenaries down into the underground level, and ambushed them.
Exactly the same trick he'd pulled at the East Vault.
Subduing the ones who'd been baited down to the cells was easy work.
A few of the patrons lounging around the underground's special spaces got snatched the same way, providing the costumes for this absurd little farce.
By now they'd probably be trussed up tight in the underground cells, kicking and squirming.
"Ugh, seriously. Why do we have to suffer like this? Why?!"
There wasn't much room left for other thoughts. Ryder deflected a weapon swinging in from his side, then kicked the attacker away to create distance.
The goal wasn't to wipe all of them out — it was, quite literally, to make noise.
Wreck the place as thoroughly as possible, draw every eye, pull their forces this way, so the others could do their parts safely.
In that spirit, he grabbed a chair and brought it down hard on a mercenary's head.
With a crunch of splintering wood, he gripped the snapped-off chair leg firmly and, just as Arendt had done earlier, bellowed:
"Come at me, you bastards!"
"...Stop learning weird things."
Glenn's tortured remark came from the fight right beside him, and Ryder immediately regretted it.
Even when Arthur had followed the boy, Enoch, up to the first basement level — where Arendt was stirring up his brawl — he'd still been half in doubt.
But Enoch soon led the party to the entrance of a hidden staircase.
The mercenary originally stationed to guard it had abandoned his post to join the free-for-all Arendt was staging.
"If you go down these stairs, you reach the staff area. There's a passage that connects to the kitchen... the rooms where the workers stay and the storage areas are down there too."
"Ah, so they built a completely separate entrance from the lower guest rooms and the cells. They're not ants — what kind of lunatic digs this deep underground?"
Arthur grumbled in irritation.
The others, who'd been hanging back, sidled quietly up beside them.
"Um... it's not really our place to worry, but will those gentlemen be all right?"
"All right or not, leave them be. They look like they're having fun."
Half sincere, half joke.
Arendt was always like that, fine — but Glenn and Ryder genuinely looked like men who'd set something down at last.
They looked like bandits, but they used to have at least some sense of decency.
Watching respected seniors get tainted one by one by a bad seed was more distressing than he could say.
But the precariousness of the situation was a fact he couldn't ignore.
They'd seized the initiative for now, but sooner or later those three would inevitably be pushed back. No matter how skilled they were, the gap in numbers was overwhelming.
On top of that, killing was to be avoided where possible — and human beings, however capable, didn't have infinite stamina.
"We move as fast as we can."
At Arthur's words, the party nodded with resolve.
When he turned the handle, the door opened without resistance.
Cracking it open and checking inside, he saw a quiet corridor. The staff who'd been standing by inside had all apparently rushed out to the brawl as well.
They slipped inside quickly and shut the door behind them.
Countless other doors of indeterminate purpose lined both sides of the passage.
"These are the rooms the staff use. There's another staircase at the far end that goes down even further."
Enoch spoke quickly and started forward to lead the way. The others followed behind him without another word.
"Are you all right?"
"Don't you worry about me — I may look like this, but I'm still hale and hearty."
The old man answered Richt's worried question with a wry smile. The girl who'd been clinging to her brother earlier was now helping support the old man's steps.
Arendt had picked out the finest, most luxurious of the stolen clothes and dressed the ones whose movements were most impaired in them.
Thanks to that, not a single soul had looked at them twice.
"Nobody leaves!"
"Weren't you told to keep your distance? Back to your seats!"
This time it was the knights disguised as the gambling den's own mercenaries, baring their teeth as they roared threats at the patrons. Intimidated, the crowd shrank back step by step.
Richt guided his group slowly through the path his comrades had carved open.
"Reinforcements?"
"What took you so damn long?!"
The mercenaries guarding the exit ground out curses and waved them over. It was a summons — hurry up.
"Move! Move it! Why won't you let us out?!"
"We told you, nobody leaves! Get back to your seats!"
The area near the door was a standstill of brawling arguments between the mercenaries and the patrons.
"You think I don't know you trash are trying to sneak out without paying?!"
"What? Trash? Do you have any idea who I am? How dare a common mercenary run his mouth at me?!"
When one of the mercenaries finally lost his patience and lunged forward, the crowd grew more incensed — but the mercenaries refused to back down either.
"Come on, then. I'll give you a taste of fists you've never once tasted in your whole pampered life."
"You think I can't? You ignorant thug!"
It was a powder keg. If even one person took a wrong step, a full-blown fistfight was about to erupt right there.
"Senior, what do we do?"
"..."
Richt watched the situation with heavy eyes.
As the standoff dragged on, the mercenaries and the patrons had split into two camps, glaring at each other like they were ready to devour one another.
It was impossible to move in conditions like this.
After a brief moment of deliberation, he let out a short sigh.
"No help for it."
"What are you planning to do?"
At his muttered words, Saif sensed danger and went pale with alarm.
Richt didn't answer. Instead, he calmly surveyed his surroundings — and spotted a man raging away right beside him, tenderly clutching a liquor bottle to his chest.
Like everyone else, he was already thoroughly drunk, face flushed crimson, screaming himself ragged at the mercenaries.
"Get lost! Rootless gutter-rats, how dare you block the path of your betters! ...Huh?"
"Pardon me a moment."
The man, who'd been pointing and yelling, turned back in puzzlement when the bottle suddenly slipped out of his arms.
A blond young man was unmistakably there, weighing the half-empty bottle in his hand and turning it over, examining it this way and that.
The drunken flush warped instantly into outrage.
"What do you think you're doing, whelp? Are you a thief?"
"Perfect."
Richt ignored him without a flicker and re-gripped the bottle. Wrapping his hand around its long neck, he measured the distance between himself and his target.
The target: the mercenary spewing curses at the top of his lungs.
The bottle sailed through the air with fine momentum and struck the man squarely in the face.
Smash!
The sound of shattering glass rang out with perfect clarity through a room filled with an odd, frozen silence.
The ambushed mercenary swayed — then toppled backward.
His fellow mercenaries nearby, and the patrons who'd been screaming curses at them, all wore the blank expressions of people who couldn't process what had just happened.
But the silence didn't last long.
Cold blue flames began to kindle in the mercenaries' eyes.
"You... bastards dare lay hands on people?!"
"What, the men who get paid to beat people don't like getting hit themselves?"
But the crowd, already worked up well past the boiling point, showed no sign of retreating.
In an instant, a brawl had broken out on this side too. The tangled mass of people grabbed each other by the hair, raked with nails, and even resorted to biting.
Crash, bang, thud!
The stunned gazes of those watching the squalid free-for-all from a safe distance turned toward Richt.
"Be careful not to get caught up in it. We punch straight through."
"...Senior, please stop spending so much time around that maniac Arendt."
He quietly ignored his junior's earnest advice.