Despite his new form - and the persistent sense of adrenaline-fueled power that accompanied it - Hirrus appeared to be fine in the aftermath of the battle. Just… unchanged. The form didn’t melt away as combat ended.

Without much else to do, he took the time to pick the bodies clean of gear, including the gloves of the woman in red robes. They were a legendary item. Not visibly impressive, of course - mostly just a series of jewel-encrusted leather straps that decorated her hands with artistic flair. Hirrus wondered if all legendary items were as simple as the ones he’d found so far.

Borghertz’s Healing Handwraps

Hands

Ilvl 70 (Legendary)

+350 ATT

+350 TEN

+700 Cooldown Reduction Rating

+700 Critical Rating

Special: When restoring an ally’s hit points, reduce all active Arcana cooldowns by 1.5%

Hirrus declined to equip them immediately. The boost to his statistics would be welcome, but he needed to resolve the issues with the gearing strategy he’d adopted before committing to individual pieces.

He also gained a large number of new Arcana, but the adrenaline rush that accompanied his Merciless form made him feel antsy and unable to focus.

Rather than review everything at the moment, he found himself storming through Orlina’s house. Hirrus rifled through cabinets and overturned furniture, desperately searching for any clue that may have been missed, either to the location of the Last of the Strong’s manor, or to where Orlina herself may have hidden.

After a few minutes of fruitless search, Hirrus felt a deathly chill. It lasted a few seconds before it dramatically intensified, driving him to his knees. His whole body shuddered as a wave of muscle weakness and cold washed over him.

He didn’t even realize that his vision had blanked out until it started to return.

Once he could see again, he noticed his hands on the floor before him. No longer did the wield vicious red claws but instead human fingers. He’d always believed that his hands were the strong and rough appendages of a working man, but after having claws and leathery hide, they suddenly felt soft and frail.

He had a debuff now, called “Inoculation,” but examining it revealed that it wasn’t making him actually weaker. All the debuff did was inform him that he was immune to the Merciless plague for its duration - and that the effect would end upon his death or the death of the Darkwater Monarch.

Hirrus didn’t know who the Darkwater Monarch was.

The only Monarch he knew about was King Larisa Bors, the ruler of the Kingdom of Hari. It wasn’t obvious to him if King Bors had any aquatic proclivities, dark or otherwise. Regardless, Hirrus didn’t have a lot of motivation to hunt down and kill his own king for the sake of the debuff.

Inoculation had a duration as well, and would only last for one hundred and twenty minutes - two hours - which dramatically reduced the urgency of hypothetical regicide.

He assumed that to an adventurer, two hours was a prohibitively long time. But for Hirrus, it was only an extraordinarily long cooldown. If he needed to employ the incredible power it afforded him more often than that, it meant Dahlia was right and he was truly in over his head.

A part of him wanted to experiment to see if he could remove the debuff in other ways - one of the Arcana he’d earned from the woman in the red robe had a clause saying that it removed negative effects. But he didn’t want to go about resolving all his problems with Arcana. Becoming addicted to their power was a real risk, and depending upon them would be disastrous for him in the long term. What if he was driven to acquire a new Arcana that required him to do something monstrous to learn?

Like, as a random example, obliterate a town full of innocent people.

Being human again had its own benefits. Adrenaline no longer clouded his every thought, and he was able to examine his new Arcana briefly.

There were a lot of options. The adventurers had used so much against him.

Hirrus paid the most attention to those he felt he might actually use:

Hiden Sokyaku

+3 SUP, +32 Attack Speed Rating

Damage: 1xBUR + 1xSUP

Cast time: 0.125 seconds

Cooldown: 15 seconds

Added effect: Lash out with a vicious kick. Knock back enemies 5 feet and interrupt any Arcana the target is casting.

Icy Grief

+5 TEN, +45 Cleave Rating

Damage: 0.5xATT + 0.5xRES

Cast time: 0.25 seconds

Cooldown: 10 seconds

Added effect: Affected enemies have their move speed reduced by 40% for 15 seconds.

Metallic Shell

+10 GLE, +102 Crit Rating

Damage: 0.5xATT + 0.5xRES

Cast time: 0.5 seconds

Cooldown: 20 seconds

Added effect: Generate a shield equal to the damage calculation of this spell that lasts 10 seconds. When the effect ends, this spell’s damage is done in an area around the caster.

Shining Sprocket

+10 TEN, +32 Attack Speed Rating

Utility

Cast time: 0.125 seconds

Cooldown: 30 seconds

Effect: Gain 10% TEN, ATT, RES, and GLE for 20 seconds.

Meditate

+2 ATT, +32 Cast Speed Rating

Utility

Cast time: Channeled

Cooldown: 2.5 seconds

Effect: While channeling, cooldown rating is doubled.

Ancient Stream

+5 RES, +32 Cast Speed Rating

Utility

Cast time: 0.125 seconds

Cooldown: 30 seconds

Effect: Heal an ally for 1xATT + 2xRES. Removes most negative status effects.

Blessed Medica

+5 RES, +120 Cast Speed Rating

Utility

Cast time: 0.75 seconds

Cooldown: 60 seconds

Effect: Heal all allies in a medium radius for 1.5xATT + 3xRES. Each ally healed who is currently afflicted by a status ailment reduces the cooldown of this ability by 2 seconds.

Spark of the Divine

+10 RES, +86 Cooldown Reduction Rating

Utility

Cast time: 1.5 seconds

Cooldown: 15 seconds

Effect: Heal an ally for 0.5xATT + 2xRES. If this is cast on a different ally than the last time it was used within 60 seconds, gain +30% RES for 7 seconds. Cannot target self.

Most of the other spells were nothing more than stat boosts to him. There were a series of spells with a theme to them that were interesting in what they said about adventurers as a group: Rock, Rock II, and Rock III were all ATT and RES governed damaging spells that did incrementally increasing amount of damage, and had an additional effect that reduced the cooldown of any spell with the word “Rock” in the name by 5 seconds. Of course, the person using them had also loaded themselves up with spells obviously outside of the intended scope of the Rock spells’ effect, but would nonetheless be affected, like Rocket Burn, Shamrock Shaker, and Crockery Fling, not to mention the Shiny Sprocket spell he’d decided was noteworthy.

Hirrus mentally filed them all away - along with the assortment of weird low-multiplier low-cooldown beam spells from the other adventurer - in the back of his mind for the event of a fight that required him to fling damage across a distance beyond the reach of his physical arms.

But with no further clues to be found - and no further furniture to overturn and destroy - Orlina’s house didn’t hold anything else for him.

But he wasn’t without a plan.

Hirrus knew exactly where he was going next.

This whole venture had been a setup, and someone owed him an explanation.

Walking through Barin’s guards unmolested for the third time was almost comical. A part of him wanted to start making conversation with them so that he could greet them by name the next time. But considering Barin had been waiting with a weapon on his previous visit, he couldn’t dawdle.

The longer the time between walking in the door and setting eyes on the man, the more time the rumormonger would have to do something stupid.

Bursting into the man’s bedroom sent the man tumbling to the floor. Barin appeared to have been pacing the room, and went white as a sheet again at the sight of Hirrus.

“You-”

Hirrus felt a snarl lift his lips away from his teeth. “Yes. Me.” He crossed the room quickly to stand over Barin before he could recover his feet.

“Uh-” Barin raised his hands protectively but made no other motion of self defense.

“Surprised?” Hirrus almost wished he could use the Merciless buff again. Ripping the rumormonger apart with his claws would be a treat. “You set me up, Barin. You thought they would kill me. Instead, here I am, ready to even our account.”

“I didn’t!” Barin’s voice cracked. His eyes were wide, and Hirrus could see true fear in their depths. “I didn’t set you up! Promise! Orlina did!”

“And how, pray tell, did she accomplish that?”

“Look behind the chair!” Barin said, pointing, even as he closed his eyes and looked away, as if bracing for a physical blow. “Where I was sitting last time!”

Hirrus wasn’t sure what game Barin was playing, but with all of the various Arcana at his fingertips, he wasn’t afraid, either. He walked to the padded chair and took a look behind it.

For a moment, it was unclear what he was supposed to be seeing. That didn’t last long. His inner investigator assessed the scene with brisk efficiency.

There was a small cut on the back of the chair.

Three inches long. About a quarter inch, maybe more, in width.

Poking his finger into it revealed that it went all the way through the chair, including a tiny pinhole in the front, right behind Barin’s back, aligned with where his heart would have been when seated.

“Orlina was here,” Hirrus said.

“You arrived when she was demanding one good reason to keep me alive,” Barin said, his tone slightly less panicked, now that Hirrus was no longer towering over him in a murderous rage. “She made me set you up. If I had said anything she didn’t like, I’d have been dead before you could have even readied a weapon.”

Hirrus looked around the room with a critical eye. He thought of the guards outfront, who had done nothing to stop Hirrus. And likely nothing to stop Orlina, either. “You’re not safe here. Not anymore.”

“Absolutely not.” Barin let out a sigh of relief, presumably because he believed he wasn’t about to die by Hirrus' hand. “When she - or anyone from Last of the Strong - comes back, the only way I’ll convince them to let me live is if I luck into yet another way to sell you out. And that’s if you don’t kill me first.”

“I’m not a monster.” Hirrus hesitated. He remembered the drunken feeling of power that thrummed through his body while the Merciless transformation was active. Of his immediate desire to ride that high once more as soon as he saw Barin. When he thought he had been betrayed. “I’m not a monster who kills for fun,” he said, correcting himself.

Barin didn’t seem to catch the distinction. “What are you going to do, then?” The rumormonger laughed, dismissing Hirrus with a wave of his hand. “You can’t trust me. And now that you know that, you won’t fall for any traps they use me to set. I’ll be dead before the sun comes up.”

“I can protect you.”

“How?” Barin gestured around the bedroom. “I’m bound by my decision tree, you know that. I can’t leave. I can’t act against them. I’m just gonna pace back and forth here until my time comes. It’s all I can do.”

“I have an answer to that,” Hirrus said, stepping up to stand over Barin again. The man flinched, and Hirrus reached down to grab him by the wrist, hoisting him to his feet in one smooth motion. “Barin Fleming, as a guard of Yenon, I’m forced to arrest you.”

“This is preposterous,” Barin said, though in his eyes he went from fear to confusion to sudden elation. He couldn’t hide the hopeful glee in his voice as he finished the line dictated by his decision tree. “I’ve done nothing wrong!”