Chapter Two Hundred and Seventy-Eight — Disorder in the Port
Chapter Two Hundred and Seventy-Eight — Disorder in the Port I glanced back and forth between the entrance and the sylph who had decided to confront us. The entrance had security, who I imagined would probably not be super pleased that we’d maybe done a bit of trespassing.The other sylph though, they were about as suspicious as people hiding in the shadows to ambush a group of girls could be.In the end, it was Amaryllis that made the choice. She swiped a talon though the ball of light I was still holding onto, then she grabbed me and Awen by the scruff and tugged us back and deeper into the warehouse.“Come on,” she said. “We’re getting out of here.”“Right right,” I said as I turned around so that I wasn’t running backwards.There was just enough light from the entrance that I wasn’t totally blind as I followed after Amaryllis.The two sylph that had appeared were running back and to the end of one row of crates. They pulled one aside, revealing a hole in the wall partially covered by a piece of tarp to keep the light from the other side out.They slipped through a moment before we arrived. Amaryllis dove in. Awen turned around and swung her arm out in a wide semi-circle behind us. Glass glinted in the partial light as a dozen little caltrops made of magical glass clattered to the floor.That was a neat, if very mean, trick.“Go go,” I said as I pushed Awen towards the hole. She nodded and squeezed through.Then it was my turn. My upper body fit in fine, but then things got a little tricky when I was hip-deep in the hole. I grunted while pushing at the edges of the hole, tail squeezing down to try and pass.I fell through with a plop, and got a quick notification for my efforts.Congratulations! Through repeated actions your Proportion Distortion skill has improved and is now eligible for rank up!Rank D is a Free Rank!Well, that was one use for that, I thought as I rolled to my feet. We were in one of those thin alleyways behind the warehouses, old boxes against the walls and trash heaped up and rotting on the ground.“There!” Amaryllis said while pointing down the alley. The two sylph were flying off in the distance, the taller buildings around us and the multitude of rails and poles above stopping them from gaining too much height.We took off after the pair. I don’t know why, exactly. If our goal was to get away, then it made a heap more sense to not run after them and go the other way instead, then the guard would have to pick between us and them.We spun around a corner, then darted across to the front of the warehouse. The two sylph gained some altitude and moved up a floor before flying through the alley between two warehouses across the street.There was a carriage in the middle of the road, white, with the words Dock Security written on its side in blocky letters.“Faster!” I said before I scooped up Awen mid-run. I saw some security guards spin around by the entrance as we shot by.I jumped and landed on the floor above, Amaryllis followed me a moment later after she jumped onto the carriage, then used that to boost herself up to the second level catwalk. I made sure she wasn’t far behind as I continued after the two sylph.“I think they’re thieves,” Awen said.“Huh?” I asked.“Those two! They’re thieves!” Awen reached out ahead of us, and a ball of magic shot out from her open palm. It rocketed past the sylph, who both ducked and started shouting some rather rude things about us.“What was that spell?” I asked.“Sparball,” Awen said. The one spell that wouldn’t hurt anyone, even if it landed a direct hit. So it was a distraction.The sylph landed at the end of the alley and then turned left at the next intersection.Amaryllis caught up just as I started to turn that way too. “The guards are after us,” she gasped out.“Oh no.”“Faster!” she called out.I could hear the disorganised and confused call of guards trailing after us. The sylph took a right, ran past a road just outside of the warehouse district, then into another alley where I saw them take another right.I kept after them.“There!” Awen called out. She pointed to a small shack set up against the side of a rocky cliff. It wasn’t all that big, just a place where someone could store a few shovels and such, maybe.The sylph disappeared through a window and then closed it behind them.I slid to a stop in front of the window, then tried to open it. It wasn’t a glass window, but a set of steel shutters, and it was completely refusing to budge even as I grunted and gave it my all.“Back up,” Amaryllis said.I stepped back, especially when I saw electrical sparks racing across her feathers and hair.A loud crack-boom later and the window was blown off into the shack. “Amaryllis! You could hurt someone with that!”“We don’t have time!” Amaryllis said. She jumped forwards, into and through the window just before Awen vaulted in too.I glanced back down the alley. The guards weren’t in sight, but I could hear them, and they were getting closer. So with a few last seconds of hesitation, I hopped through the window and into the poorly lit shack. Tools lay on the ground, along with bundles of tarp and broken shelves. There was a noticeable lack of sylph maybe-thieves too.Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.“Um,” I said.“They can’t just have disappeared,” Amaryllis said. “Quick, check the walls.”The shack’s outer walls were all made of tin over a frame of wooden beams, there wasn’t much to find there. But one wall, on the inside, was partially made of stone, the same rocky cliffside that the shack was pressed up against.There was only one part that wasn’t just rock, a part of the wall covered by a shelf that, when Awen tugged back, swivelled out to reveal a square-cut tunnel cut right into the stone.“Huh,” I said."A smuggler's tunnel?" Amaryllis guessed."Doesn't matter," Awen said, shoving my birdy friend into the dark. "Go, go, go!""I'm going, I'm going!" Amaryllis squawked. "Broc, hurry up!"I could hear the guard's feet hammering the alleyway, but threw another glance down the tunnel. No telling what was down there, and I didn't want to be caught flat-footed again."Broc!" Amaryllis shouted."One sec; I need a weapon!" I called back as my eyes skipped over a scythe, some trowels, a few rakes, a hoe, wickedly-sharp gardening spears atop a tin bucket-I grabbed the bucket and lunged into the cave after my friends, dragging the door shut behind me. Instantly we were plunged into darkness, so I summoned a light ball in my free hand, and pushed some magic into the bucket itself until it glowed ever so slightly. The tunnel cut into the cliffside for a dozen or so metres before opening up into a bigger, wider tunnel. That meant that I only had to crouch for a bit, after which I could almost stand to my full height-my ears were squished down by the low ceiling.“A mine tunnel?” Amaryllis guessed as she followed after me.The tunnel continued to our left, but only for a little bit before ending at a rough wall. It went on to the right for quite a ways, at least as far as I could tell. There were rails on the ground, and I could imagine a cart using them to ferry stuff back and forth.“Do you think tunnels like these are common under Goldenalden?” I asked.“Maybe,” Amaryllis said. “The city is said to have survived a few dragon attacks back in the day. Being partially underground might explain some of that.”“And now that it’s abandoned, it’s become a super cool underground thieves' hideout,” I said.“I don’t know if I would use some of those words to describe a grungy, poorly lit tunnel, but yes, essentially correct,” Amaryllis said.Awen looked up and down the walls, especially at the large wooden beams set every couple of metres. “I wonder if they build things above knowing that there are tunnels down here. It could be dangerous.”“Let’s not look too deeply into it,” Amaryllis said. “Knowing the sylph, they’d accuse us of plotting to make their city fall apart.”“I’m sure they have inspections sometimes,” I said.We started following the rails. The lack of dust atop them, and the bare, scratched metal on their surface, hinted that they had been in use recently. Likely by the sylph we were still chasing. It made sense, if their neat hideout had a system to carry stuff already in it, why not use it?The tunnel curved, and we started down the intersection when I heard something thump behind us. I started to turn, when two sylph stepped out of the shadows before us. A third was blocking the way back, long shiny knife in hand.“Who are you?” One of those in the lead asked.“Hello!” I said with as much good cheer as I could manage, to put them at ease, of course. “My name’s Captain Broccoli Bunch, and these are my friends. We were, ah, well, this is a bit awkward.”“What’s a bun doing here? With one of those chickens and a human girl of all things?” the sylph asked.“That’s the thing, I’m not entirely sure. See, we were looking for some cargo in that place when two of you showed up, then the guards showed up and you ran, so we ran after you. I’m starting to think we might have made a mistake.”“Yeah,” the other sylph said. “Your mistake was messing with the Mitchhum gang.”I blinked. “Oh! You’re the Mitchhum family?”“Who’s asking?” he snapped.“I just introduced myself, but I don’t mind doing it again,” I said.“You mocking me?” he asked, his knife waving in the air before him. I inspected him real quick. It wasn’t entirely polite to use Insight on someone without permission, but he was waving a knife in my general direction.Gutter Thief, level 10The other two weren’t much stronger than that. With our second classes, my friends and I had half a dozen levels more than them. “I’m not mocking you, mister.”Amaryllis sniffed. “Perhaps you could consider helping us, instead of being quite so hostile.”“And why would we help foreign scum like you, huh?” the first sylph to speak up said.“Because the three of us are seasoned adventurers used to raiding dungeons far more dangerous than some old abandoned mine with a few scruffy thieves,” Amaryllis said. There was a smell to the air, of ozone and danger, and it was very clearly radiating from my harpy friend. “Because it would be much better for you to work with us, than against us, and because I have a notoriously short fuse and don’t appreciate being called a chicken.”The thieves swallowed.I grinned, even bigger and friendlier. “Come on, I’m sure working with us wouldn’t be all that bad! We’re nice people, I swear!”
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Chapter Two Hundred and Seventy-Nine — Ganging Up
Chapter Two Hundred and Seventy-Nine — Ganging Up “So, are we going to relax, just talk things out?” I asked. I really hoped that they’d agree.The sylph glanced at each other. They shuffled their feet, and I felt a tingle in my ears that felt like bad news.Mitchie, who seemed to be the one in charge, more or less, pointed towards Amaryllis. “Her first,” he said.“Me first what?” Amaryllis asked.The nearest sylph’s reply was to pick up a long piece of wood from the ground and run towards us while screaming.“Are you all daft?” Amaryllis snapped. She flung a hand towards the sylph rushing her and a crack-bang filled the mine as a bolt of lightning gripped the sylph mid-motion and sent him convulsing to the ground.“Don’t kill them!” I said even as I sent more mana into my bucket and moved up between my friends and the remaining thieves. One of them threw a knife our way, but it wasn’t the best or fastest toss. I smacked it out of the air with a swipe of my bucket.“I won’t kill them,” Amaryllis said. “Just make them reconsider some of the mistakes they’ve made.”“Get her!” Mitchie shouted, and the sylph next to him took off running after me. Meanwhile, Mitchie himself spun around and ran in the opposite direction.So much for honour among thieves.The sylph charging me screamed.I threw my bucket. It hit him in the face bottom-first with a heavy bonk before bouncing back into my arms. I grabbed it by the lip, and when the sylph came closer, stumbling and holding onto his nose, I brought the bucket down atop his head with a heavy metallic clang.“Oh, sorry,” I said as he crumbled to the floor.Awen sighed and stepped around me before kneeling on the sylph's back. She had a rope-somehow-that she tied around one of the sylph’s wrists, then she looped it around an ankle and finally his other hand. “We don’t want them getting away,” she explained at my confused look.“I’m more surprised you know how to hogtie people,” I said.“Hog tie?” She glanced down at her knots. “I’m just tying them so that they can’t move.”“Girls, let’s focus a little, shall we?” Amaryllis asked. “We should catch up to that moron that took off.”“Yeah, someone abandoning their friends like that, it’s just wrong,” I said.“M-Mitchie would never abandon us!” the sylph on the ground said. “You’ll regret this!”I squatted down next to him. “Hey, you wouldn’t happen to know what we’re going to find deeper in that passage, right?”He squirmed around so that he was looking the other way. “I’m not telling you nothing.”“That’s a double negative,” I pointed out. “It means that you will tell us something.”The sylph squirmed the other way to look up to me. He seemed pretty confused. “What are you talking about?” he asked.“Oh, nevermind.” I bounced back to my feet, swept up my bucket, then pointed deeper into the tunnel. “Come on, let’s go see what’s down there.”We left the two sylph-the one Amaryllis zapped was waking up, though he was a little groggy-and started down the tunnel. It wasn’t hard to follow the rails running down the centre of the passage.The rails curved into a large room, and ended in a pile of sandbags, the cart sitting there all nice and quiet. Next to that was a wide entranceway, framed by wooden beams. I crept along the wall and the leaned over to peer into the room, folding my ears back to keep them out of sight. Inside was a weird mirror of the inside of the warehouses we were just in a few minutes ago.Shelves lined the walls, but the middle of the room had couches and chairs, a firepit in the middle was surrounded by a few sylphs, Mitchie among them. Stacks of pallet wood and broken crates nearby hinted at what they used to feed the fire.A few tents were pitched at the far end of the room, and there was an improvised kitchen to the side as well. Clearly, this camp had been lived-in for a while.Amaryllis tugged my sleeve and I slunk after her until we were behind the cart. Awen only had the top of her head poking over the metal rim.“I counted seven,” Amaryllis whispered. “Two of them have gotten past their first evolution.”“What’s the plan?” I asked. We weren’t exactly great at stealth, so I figured we didn’t have a lot of time to come up with something.“I’m all for walking in there, spells flying,” Amaryllis said. “They have knives and clubs, and only two of them are on our level. We can take them.”“That sounds dangerous.”“We’ve fought worse,” Amaryllis said.“I meant for them,” I said.She sniffed. “They’re thieves.”“Ah, thieves don’t usually get treated very well where I’m from,” Awen said. “We’re just here for the grenoil’s stuff, right? Maybe Broccoli can negotiate and convince them to give us all of that, then we leave?”"After we smash them, we can negotiate from a position of strength," Amaryllis pointed out.I felt my nose scrunching up as I considered it. On the one hand, taking things that weren’t yours was wrong. Thieves should at the very least be punished. On the other hand, I didn’t want to see anyone get hurt. Then again... “I’d rather not fight if we can avoid it,” I said.“Fair enough,” Amaryllis said. “But if that’s the case, then you’d better be ready to be extra persuasive this afternoon. I don’t think they’ll be keen on just giving us what we want.”“They might be,” I said. “It’s not like it belongs to them in the first place.”"They currently possess it, so I think they will argue that it does belong to them, by default," Amaryllis said.I shrugged, then stood up and walked around the cart. I didn’t want to spook anyone, so I didn’t make any effort to be quiet as I walked to the entrance of the hideout. “Hello there!” I called. “My name’s Broccoli, and I’m here to, ah, make you an offer you shouldn’t refuse.”Mitchie spun around and pointed right at me. “That’s one of them!”This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.“Hello,” I said again. This time I added a happy little wave with the hand not holding onto a bucket. Was there blood on the bottom of my bucket? That was nasty. I made sure to clean it off before anyone could notice.There was a sylph in the group that seemed different to the others. While most of the sylph in the hideout wore simple clothes, often on the dirtier, threadbare side, he had full leather armour, darkened and covered in little pouches and pockets. He looked like a proper rogue. His hair was peppered with grey, and he seemed a lot more dangerous than the others.“Who are you?” he asked.“I-I just said, my name’s Broccoli.” Maybe he was going hard of hearing in his old age? “Look, mister, my friends and I are looking for something, and we think you might have it. We were wondering if maybe you could let us take that thing back?”“Oh?” the older sylph asked. He stalked forwards, the other sylph parting to let him through. He only paused next to Mitchie to pat him on the shoulder. “You think you can steal from the Mitchhum family?”“Of course not, stealing is wrong,” I said.He looked baffled. “What?”“I’m sorry, but it’s true. Taking things that aren’t yours isn’t nice. It makes people very upset. Ah, I’m sorry, but I didn’t ask you what your name was?”“I’m Marvin, Marvin Mitchhum,” he said. He stood tall and proud before me, which meant he came up to about my chin. “I’m the patriarch of the Mitchhum family, a family on whose ground you’re standing now.”“Oh, really? Gosh, we kind of broke into your house, didn’t we? I’m sorry.”Mister Marvin stepped a few paces ahead of me and squinted at me, then at my friends standing behind me. “Who are you? No, not your name, you’ve said that twice already. I mean who are you. Weird foreigners don’t just follow my boys down mine shafts for fun.”“We’re just some explorers,” I said. “We come from here and there, and now we’re in Goldenalden trying to stop a war. To do that, we need the contents of a crate that you might, maybe, have taken without permission. So if you could give it to us, that would be awfully nice of you.”“We don’t just give people anything,” he said.“Come now,” Amaryllis said sweetly. “You’re thieves, you don’t just gather things and let them collect dust, you have to be reselling them to someone. All we want are the crates you stole.”“And maybe for you to reconsider a life of crime,” I added. I couldn’t see Amaryllis, because she was mostly behind me, but I knew she was rolling her eyes.“Well well, you want to buy right from the source, huh?”I glanced back to Amaryllis, and she nodded once. It was probably a better idea to just buy things outright than to fight for them, even if the things we were buying didn’t belong to the people we were buying them from. They’d still end up in the hands of the right people in the end.Marvin glanced back to Mitchie, then to us. “Fine. Mitchie, go check on your brothers. We’ll see how roughed up they are. There might be an additional fee, for damages, you understand?”“I guess,” I said. “But your, uh, friends attacked us first. So it was all self-defence.”“I’m hardly one that’s well-versed in such lawful matters. I couldn’t tell ya what is or isn’t self-defence. But I know that I’m not fond of folk that hurt me and mine,” Marvin said.I crossed my arms. Mister Marvin was really quite rude.“So, what’re the goods you’re looking for?” he asked.“We know the name of the cargo, and probably the numbers on the crate, but we don't know what’s in it,” I said.“You don’t know? You're going through an awful lot of trouble to fetch something that isn’t yours,” Marvin said.“We’re doing this as a favour,” I explained. “And, you know, to stop a war. I’m not too sure, but I think wars are bad for people in your line of work too.”He sniffed. “Wouldn’t know.”Footsteps sounded out behind us, and Mitchie burst into the room, breathing hard. “The guard,” he said.“What?” Marvin asked.He pointed down the tunnel behind him, then to us. “They brought the guard with them!”There was a split second of calm before everything went to heck in a bucket. Marvin shouted a few orders, and sylphs scrambled across the room. There were more than we had guessed, sleeping in the tents at the back, or hanging around quietly and minding their own. They seemed to know what they were doing as they rushed to pick up a few items and ran towards the back where a part of the shelves covering one wall were moved aside. A second exit?“Kill the three of them,” Marvin said while pointing right at us.“Oh no,” I said.I stepped back as a sylph swooped down from above with a long staff that smacked into the ground, right where I was standing. Another two ran towards us, long knives poised to attack.“Guys!” I shouted before I had to use my bucket to block a stabbing strike from a knife. The knife planted itself hilt-deep into the bucket and stayed lodged there.I kicked at the shin of the sylph trying to turn me into a bun skewer, then backed up some more. Lightning cracked and a pair of sylph fell before a third summoned a thick dark fog. Magic!Of course a few of them would have sneaky magic, it just made sense.I countered the fog with some cleaning magic, just in time to see a sylph, running around to flank us, step onto a glass caltrop and crash to the floor with a piercing scream.And then the rattle of armour and weapons sounded out behind us and a dozen guards, with short swords and square shields, formed a barrier behind us. There was a paladin at their head, one who looked very unamused at what they saw.“Drop your weapons!” The paladin ordered, a shouted bark so loud it made my ears snap back. My hands went numb, and my bucket thumped to the ground a moment before I raised my arms in surrender.“Oh no, I’ve never been arrested before,” I said.
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