No Perfect Plans
Among mercenaries, there was a saying that circulated as a half-joke: there is no such thing as a perfect plan.
No matter how carefully you scheme, things go sideways eventually — so give up, shrug, and leave it to the gods!
...Even so, this was too much. Things had gone sideways past all reason.
"Why the hell are there so many people at the magistrate's manor!?"
"Th-there were supposed to be nothing but a handful of guards! You said so yourself!"
"Quiet. We've come this far — there's no backing out now."
When a manor that should have stood empty began roaring with noise like some banquet in full swing, the mercenaries who had crept up through the secret passage reacted with pure horror. Not that they could simply turn around and leave.
The defense captain came up with a scheme.
"We take the servants in the kitchen hostage, then use them to pass a message to the magistrate. Soon as he steps outside, we flee together."
"And if he doesn't come out? He's being treated as an honored guest in there."
"Stop yapping and move!"
Left with no choice, the mercenaries did as the captain said and headed for the kitchen. If raising a ruckus loud enough for the whole manor to hear would only draw more people, it seemed better to try handling things quietly.
Of course, the world does not bend to anyone's convenience.
"Why the hell is a knight in here?!"
The mercenary's cry was desperate. Then someone spoke up.
"Kill him! The bastard's unarmed!"
"...!"
Backed into a corner, the mercenaries flailed about until they found their answer. Terrifying as the man was, weren't they all killers who had spent their whole lives cutting down enemies? And their opponent was, quite literally, unarmed.
This might even be a blessing in disguise. The only chance they would ever get to put down that demon!
Johan sighed. The situation was such a clusterfuck that, oddly enough, it left him feeling calm.
I have absolutely no idea what kind of madhouse I've wandered into.
Servants were screaming, an assassin was straining at his bonds beside him, Karamaf was growling, and now a pack of random raiders had burst in raising hell... It was in moments like these, more than any other, that he had to stay cool and level-headed. Johan slammed his hand into the assassin's neck. The man dropped like a puppet with its strings cut. There had been plenty Johan wanted to ask, but there was no helping it now — if the man was lucky, he lived; if not, he died.
"Karamaf. Make sure he doesn't crawl away."
Grrrr.
The mercenaries charged across the kitchen with bloodshot eyes. The servants screamed and scattered to the sides. They rushed in fearlessly because they knew Johan had no armor and no weapon.
Clack.
Johan grabbed the nearest thing at hand — a ladle. When the grimy, tarnished ladle rose out of the soup pot, revealing a blade of astonishing antiquity beneath the muck, the mercenary could only gape.
What is he trying to...?
Once, twice, three times. The blows landed faster than the man could react, and sparks flew off his steel helm. Blood streaming from his eyes and nose, the mercenary collapsed.
"You fucking Virg—!"
The ladle swung again. The crumpled, ruined implement cracked against the mercenary's temple and ended his life. Johan released the handle with a flicker of regret.
With two men down and blocking the way, his odds of taking a blade had actually dropped considerably.
Johan seized a fallen mercenary and shoved the corpse forward like a shield. The men behind him hesitated, suddenly without room to swing their weapons.
Get close enough, and edged weapons only get in the way. Johan hurled the body aside, reached out, and wrapped his arm around another man's throat. With a scream cut short mid-syllable, the mercenary's neck snapped.
Naturally, the dead man's short sword found its way into Johan's hand. The moment he gripped it, the mercenaries went white as sheets.
"Intruders! We have intruders!"
"Forget the knight, run! We have to get the magistrate no matter what!"
The defense captain's voice was a tangle of despair and desperation. Behind him, Johan could see mercenaries slipping away. They didn't show it on their faces, but they were relieved to go.
"Hey, you dogs!! Where do you think you're— ghk!"
When the mercenaries ran, Johan ran too.
Cold logic said that if the mercenaries had thrown themselves at him ready to die, they could have wounded him. However spacious the kitchen, it was still a confined space, and Johan wore no armor. Fatal blows might have been beyond them, but deep gashes to his limbs were not.
Yet the mercenaries were terrified. Johan caught the ones trying to flee one by one and cut them down.
At the sight of him rampaging like some vengeful spirit, several of the servants fainted dead away. It was hard to tell which they feared more — the raiders, or Johan.
"Intruders! Protect the lord!"
"You bastards! Do you know where you are?!"
The manor's corridors were chaos incarnate. Given the rank of those gathered here, bodyguards had been standing by — but the raiders' numbers were far beyond anything anyone had expected.
Where in the world did all these men pop out from?
There was a secret passage?
"Grab anyone worth taking hostage! Kill the rest!"
"Magistrate! Magistrate! Come out! We've come to save you!"
The magistrate spat out a curse. Nobody had asked to be rescued — and wasn't this whole circus only making his death more likely?
"M-my lord..."
Several of the guards lay fallen. At their words, Johan nodded. Ahead of him, mercenaries were struggling to force their way down the broad corridor and into the great hall.
A few knights and mercenary captains who had been at the table had thrown on their arms in a hurry and barred the door. The mercenaries could do nothing but scream curses — they couldn't get through.
CRACK!
From far down the hall, Johan saw a towering knight swing a battleaxe and cleave clean through the skull of a mercenary who had poked his head out at the wrong moment. Brunhilde.
She's a joy to watch.
Johan relaxed. If the entrance hadn't been breached, the people inside were safe. The mercenaries, for their part, were as good as cornered.
"Spare my life and I'll reward you!"
"What the hell are you— kill him!"
Someone else had shared Johan's bad luck of being caught outside when the raid hit — and he was shouting at the top of his lungs even as the mercenaries leveled weapons at him, eyes rolling murderously. Quite impressively insane, this one.
An orc of House Alifam!
Even in that desperate moment, Johan's body moved on its own. In that instant, Brunhilde saw mercenaries flying in all directions from the far end of the corridor.
...Is a boulder rolling this way?
The short sword had already snapped, so Johan came in pummeling the mercenaries down with his bare fists. The orc screamed out to heaven.
"O God! F-fucking God, save me!"
"Found religion, have you?"
"If you're a demon, take the souls of those other bastards! Mine's worthless!"
"Cut the noise and stay close to me!"
Johan swung his fist and shattered the skull of a man rushing at him. Only then did the orc seem to realize that Johan was a human being.
"Johan of House Yeats?"
CRUNCH!
"I've heard so much about you, and you really are incredib—"
THWACK!
"......"
CRUNCH! THWACK! CRACK!
Is that a knight or a butcher?
Johan was violence itself, wearing the shape of a man.
A few of the mercenaries holding the corridor were so terrified they ended their own lives on the spot. Never had the lack of spears and crossbows been so bitterly regretted.
Johan threw his sword and skewered the throat of the defense captain as the man charged. In truth, he wasn't even sure the man was the captain.
With two unfamiliar weapons in either hand, slicked head to toe in blood, Johan came to a stop. At the sight of him, the mercenary captains in the great hall blurted out before they could stop themselves.
"Sir Knight! Sir Knight! We're on your side! Please, stand down!"
"I'm perfectly sane."
"R-right, of course you are."
The way he stood there holding weapons, it was clear as day they'd taken him for a madman. Johan tilted his head from side to side with a creak and asked:
"Anyone get inside?"
"N-no, sir. No one."
"Good. Go out and fetch the soldiers."
There was a servant standing right beside him, but the mercenary captain didn't even think to delegate; he bolted out the door at a scramble.
"M-my lord. I could have gone..."
After scrubbing away the layers of blood with a wet cloth, Johan looked down at the magistrate, who was still trembling beside him, and asked:
"When did you collude with them?"
"...!"
"Those men didn't fall out of the sky. They came out of a passage somewhere near here — and you can't possibly have been unaware of it."
Despite all the commotion, Lepiata's expression had barely changed. From Johan's standpoint, that was a mercy. If the boy had been weeping and clinging to him in terror, it would have been a headache in every possible way.
"I d-didn't know anything! I was locked up — I couldn't have met with anyone even if I'd wanted to! How could I have colluded with anyone?!"
The magistrate cried out in a voice thick with injustice. And it was sincere. He had never once imagined his defense captain was plotting anything like this.
"My lord. May I interrogate him?"
"As long as you don't kill him."
The moment Johan laid a hand on the man's shoulder, the magistrate screamed.
"I truly know nothing! Truly! I swear it on God! I simply never thought of a passage! Spare me! Spare me and I'll serve you with everything I have, body and soul!"
"...I've only put my hand on you."
He was convulsing so violently that Johan, who had done nothing but place his hand there, began to feel embarrassed. Johan withdrew it. The man didn't seem to be lying.
"Will you be relocating elsewhere for now?"
Lepiata shook his head.
Can't tell if that's detachment or fearlessness.
"Right now..."
"?"
"...I believe we are safe here."
"You're rather talkative today?"
At Johan's joke, Lepiata laughed — a small, quiet sound. It was the first time Johan had ever seen the boy laugh, and it left him taken aback. Lepiata beckoned Johan closer.
"Please ask him about the Kingdom of Slovek."
"Understood."
Johan approached the magistrate. The magistrate shrieked in desperation that yes, he'd had a few dealings with the Kingdom of Slovek, but nothing close — he was really, truly, absolutely uninvolved.
"We'd be well within our rights to carve off one of that son of a bitch's arms or legs! Nobody would say a damn word!"
The mercenary captains who had returned roared furiously. They'd come for a single meal and nearly died — of course they were livid.
Using the magistrate to run the city had its merits, but keeping his own men's grievances in check mattered too. Johan glanced at Lepiata. Lepiata gave the faintest shake of his head.
"I asked. He seems to be telling the truth."
"How would you possibly know that?!"
"I told you — I asked."
"...When you put it that way, I suppose so."
"Much obliged for your understanding."
Johan gave the magnanimous captain a pat on the shoulder. The captain nodded back, his face frozen stiff with fear.
The uproar at the manor left the people of the city more frightened than ever. A single stray spark could have set off a massacre of hundreds without anyone finding it strange.
And yet, rather than seizing the people and stringing them up, Lepiata showed them mercy.
"By rights I ought to have finished my preparations and been gone to the village already. Instead, we've become a nuisance to one another."
Johan said this as he looked down at the assassin, whose hands and feet were bound. Beside him, Karamaf bared his teeth and glared.
"But just as your business is your business, mine is mine. I can hardly let stand an assassin who was skulking about right in front of me."
"Kill me, then, if you intend to."
The assassin's face had changed again — now it belonged to neither a maid nor a manservant, but to someone Johan had never seen before. He'd swapped faces sometime in the interim.
The assassin kept his head bowed in silence. A captured assassin was executed on the spot. Johan could have cut him down with a single stroke and no one would have said a word.
Johan examined the small bottles stopped with cork. One look was enough — deadly poison, every one of them. It was the faint scent seeping from these that Karamaf had caught.
"If I wanted you dead, you'd have died right there on the spot."
"Wasn't that exactly what you were trying to do?"
The assassin glared as he spoke. His face made his meaning plain: you beat me half to death and now you claim you weren't trying to kill me?
"I've crossed paths with an assassin of Nessos' Deadly Poison before. Your kind aren't exactly paragons of discretion, are they."
You think the guild keeps its clients' secrets locked down tight? Please. What honor do assassins owe anyone? The only reason they keep their mouths shut is because they know talking gets them killed. Give them the certainty they might live, and they'll open right up.
Nessos' Deadly Poison had always been more myth than reality — a reputation blown far out of proportion. Some of that inflation was deliberate, cultivated by the assassins in its ranks. It was the only way to attract contracts from the powerful.
But in truth, Nessos' Deadly Poison was nothing more than an organization built from selfish men thrown together.
There were rules, yes — but the members trusted themselves more than they trusted any rule. What held the guild together wasn't regulation but structure: a loose web of cells, each one as isolated as a cell could be.
The assassin remained silent. Johan demonstrated a simple trick. When a dagger that hadn't been there a moment before materialized in his hand, the assassin's eyes went wide.
How?
Ah. Damn it. I could've just used the whip on my belt.
Johan realized only now that during the brawl at the manor, he'd never actually needed to fight with his fists. The dagger had been at his waist the whole time.
"Now do you believe I've met an assassin before? I owe your kind a debt, and I mean to repay it. This is your last chance. Unburden yourself and be forgiven — or choose death. I won't ask again."
"...I will talk."