Finding Elonwy’s house was harder than I expected. Which, reasonably, should not have been the case. Not that it shouldn’t have been hard, but that I expected it not to be. Randomly figuring out where someone lives without asking them SHOULD be difficult, but for some reason I had just assumed it would be a piece of cake.
It wasn’t. After getting my friends home safely (with the help of the Asura), and getting some rest, I woke up the next morning and stockpiled my scrolls ready to take on the day. I wasn’t sure what the red door was, how it was connected to the Void, or what exactly Elonwy had to do with it, but I wasn’t afraid to find out. I was ready and motivated, and I was going to get the answers I needed by hook or by crook.
That motivation lasted me through about lunch time. At that point, I ended up at a cafe where I ordered a huge coffee and a big piece of tiramisu and decided to try to eat my feelings while I came up with a different game plan.
After that, I called the professor, and after a bit of pleading, he told me where to go after I explained my concerns. Finally, I ended up in the front yard of an innocuous looking house in Common City with an overgrown front lawn. Since Elonwy was nominally a staff member, she was technically entitled to live in Moment City, but most of the people she knew were staying in the A-rank residences, and Common City made it easier for her to commute back and forth.
Oddly, the thing that shocked me most about this was the car. Based on the setup as communicated, there was a decent chance Elonwy could actually DRIVE between cities. That was kind of amazing.
My awe stopped at the car, however. When I arrived at her place, I found myself pretty disappointed with the aesthetic. It looked old and run down. Not just an overgrown yard, the wooden boards on the house were uneven and bowed, some places had been inexpertly patched with cheap pieces of poorly matching wood or plastic.
I frowned, because this didn’t really seem like Elonwy. Sure, her car was a mess, but that was research stuff. She was always pretty well put together in terms of organization from what I’d seen. I climbed the creaky porch stairs, careful not to make too much noise, then I knocked on the door.
There was a brief paused, then the door was yanked open and a spiky haired woman with dark purple eyes the same color as her mane glared out at me. “What?” she snapped angrily. I blinked, not expecting a stranger. She appeared to be A-rank, and not low into it, but something about her was…off. She was thin, almost unnaturally so. Not ‘I work out a lot’ thin, more like ‘I forgot to eat this month and also have a tapeworm’ thin. Almost skeletal.
Her nose was pieced with a dark iron hoop and she was wearing a lot of eyeshadow. I cleared my throat to stop myself from dwelling on the alarm bells she was setting off. She felt familiar, and not in a good way. It wasn’t the Void though. It was something else. Someone else.
“Hello,” I said pleasantly. “I’m looking for Elonwy.”
“Why?” she demanded hostilely. “I don’t know you. What do you want with El? She didn’t tell me anyone was coming over.”
I chuckled sheepishly. “Ah, sorry, the Professor asked me to come get her. He had some research tasks he needed her for and he’s too busy to come himself. You know how he gets when he’s working.”
Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Yeah,” she said after a moment. “I guess. I’m Janet, her roommate. If you came here for the professor… fine, come inside.” She didn’t seem particularly enthused about that. I got the impression she was more worried about getting Professor Hawkins attention than me coming in though, probably because I was a B-ranker.
I stepped into the house, and was almost immediately hit in the face by a wall of scent and offensive sights. Trash, cobwebs, books and papers, all strewn about on the floor, haphazardly pushed against the walls to make little walkways through the filth. This wasn’t disorganized, this was…wrong. No one should be living like this.
My mask covered the disgust, thankfully, and the woman didn’t seem to notice. “She’s busy right now. Working. I have to go downstairs and get her.” She gave me a nasty smile. “You know how she gets. Stay here and don’t TOUCH anything.”
“Yeah,” I said blandly as I pushed a blackened banana peel away from my foot. “Wouldn’t want to make a mess.”
She ignored me, turning to stalk off down the hall. I waited for about ten seconds, then triggered Murmur along with my staff and followed her. With my stealth form at A-rank I was sure I would be impossible to detect, especially in this mess, but I still went slow, making sure I gave the form time to bake the stealth into itself.
Creeping slowly down the hall after the woman. I followed as carefully as I could, trying my best to avoid stepping on anything that might give me away.
Following her trail wasn’t hard, especially not in Murmur. I made my way to the end of the hall she’d gone down, and I came to a halt right at the end. Where I found a door. A red door leading into a basement. It was closed, and I waited a minute to open it so I could have the most information for stealth and prevent detection.
Pushing it open, I stepped onto a set of rickety wooden stairs bolted into the wall, slowly creeping down to peer into the basement.
Janet was on her knees next to a figure sitting in a chair. “Shit, shit, shit,” she was muttering. “Why didn’t you tell me you were having people over? Why did I latch this thing so tight? And will you STOP CRYING YOU STUPID BITCH!” She screamed the last part hysterically as she fumbled at a large dark device wrapped around Elonwy’s neck.
My friend was sitting in a chair, staring straight ahead. Her face was completely blank, but tears were leaking from her empty, unfocused eyes, and she was making faint whimpering sounds. My knuckles cracked as I stared down at the scene. I didn’t know what that collar was, but I was doubting it was anything good. Clearly, it was only usable here while she was home, probably to prevent the Professor from noticing.
I was already walking down the stairs, staff coming to my hands as I prowled forward. I got closer, taking my time, slowly closing the distance. When I got close enough, I called for Mephistopheles, my most dangerous form, and triggered the staff to push him to tier 9.
Stepping forward, I lashed out with my staff, focusing all of the ruin flame into the butt as I slammed it violently toward the base of Janet’s skull.
Janet, however, was not a pushover. A-rank or not, she was on a level far above where I was. I might be swinging A-rank right now, but this was an A-rank who had subdued Elonwy, even if I was pretty sure she cheated. Even from perfect stealth, with an A-rank staff infused with A-rank ruin phoenix fire…I missed.
Well, I partly missed. Something alerted Janet, and she turned in time to notice and backpedal, but the densely packed sphere of ruin fire grazed her eye as she did, and she clutched her head screaming, stumbling back as my staff sailed on and smashed into the black metal of the collar she’d been undoing.
Of course, I was already triggering Mornax alongside my staff, and it turned out to be just in time to prevent myself from being eviscerated by a literal SCORPION tail that shot out from behind Janet, slamming into my gut hard enough to send me flying.
“Godsdamnit!” she screamed, clutching her ruined eye. “You stupid little shit! Now I’m going to have to kill you, and then her, and then go underground, and the Lord is going to be furious.”
I coughed, climbing to my feet. Mornax and the Seal had protected me, but that had still hurt. She was STRONG. Whatever her racial trait was, it was clearly high tier. “The Lord?” I asked wryly. “You realize that Void Child probably cares less about you than a dog cares about a literal flea, right?”
She sneered. “Moron. You think you understand anything? We were CHOSEN. He called for us and we came. That forms a bond.”
“Yeah, I’m sure the trip from two towns over was filled with hardship,” I sniped.
“You think his reach is limited to just this?” she giggled madly. “You think the call only went out to students? To faculty? He’s been SCREAMING for millennia. The rest of the idiots have just been too blind to hear it. But we heard. Across so many planes and realms. We heard and we came to his aid. We are his faithful, and we will free him.”
Just like that, something I had put out of my head finally clicked. And my blood turned to ice. Deveskane. The god who had manipulated us into helping him summon the tower. I had been wondering how he’d known. Been wondering what he hoped to accomplish here. Was it just about the thesis? But now I had another idea about why he might be here. A horrible, terrible, gutwrenching idea.
Deveskane was a god of sealing. But he’d proven that with the proper preparations he could also UNSEAL. Unseal trapped things that had been contained by forces much greater than himself. Things like Void Child Overgods that had apparently been talking to people in several realms.
Janet seemed to take my silence as surrender, and her gaunt face drew up into a cruel smile. “Now you see how futile it is. How we’ve prepared. There’s nothing you can do to stop what’s coming, and you will die knowing everyone you love will follow soon after.”
I blinked. “Wait…what? No, I was thinking about something else. I’m not worried about you anymore.”
She sneered. “Bravado or idiocy? I wonder. Do you want to die with dignity, or do you truly think you can destroy me because your little sucker punch earlier did some damage. Even with one eye and all your little tricks I could swat you like an insect. My eye is already healing. Your flame is terrible, but I have my own countermeasures to such things.”
“Oh that?” I asked as I pointed to her face. “Yeah that isn’t optimized for use on people. Like sure, it will do some damage. But that’s not what it’s FOR. The Ruin attribute was grafted onto the black armor piercing flames, which means it’s more properly meant to work on objects.”
Smiling sadistically, she stepped forward, raising her tail as if to strike me down. “Ah, so bravado then. You’ve accepted your death and plan to be put down gracefully?”
“No,” I said patiently. “That’s not what I meant at all. Though I do appreciate you letting me monologue. I was trying to come up with a way to stall that didn’t involve getting my ribs played like a xylophone, and your condescension really helped.”
“A fool after all,” she said, scorn dripping from her words. “What good would stalling do in this situation? Charging another attack to use against me after the first one missed?”
I grinned beneath my mask, eyes sliding past her at the figure slowly standing from the chair, hands clutching the shattered remnants of a black iron collar. “Nope,” I said cheerfully. “I don’t need another attack. Because I didn’t actually miss the first time. I just wasn’t really aiming for you.”