That didn’t last. Eventually, Alric started to sing.

And over the next ninety minutes, Hirrus decided that he liked Alric’s singing more than his yammering. Not that his singing was good - the man couldn’t carry a tune with both hands and a bucket - but the songs he chose seemed to tell more interesting tales than anything he could say plainly. Hirrus particularly liked the one about the bounty hunter battling a devil’s army of elves.

Though he could have done with hearing it only once. Alric really liked repeating that one, and now Hirrus feared the chorus would never stop ringing through his brain.

Just the same, Hirrus raised a hand to silence him when they arrived at the first town up the Hari Path from Inoha.

The sight of it was a sobering horror.

It was in ruins.

Entire buildings had been destroyed. The fires seemed to have burned down to coals now, but most of the buildings had been visibly damaged. Soot and ash clung to every standing surface.

Everyone in town was either dead or had fled.

Hirrus was struck by how much it looked like Yenon.

It had been a very small town - smaller even than Yenon had been - with maybe two dozen buildings total. Though it was hard to get an accurate count in the burnt ruins of what it had become.

Alric stood, frozen to the spot, the song having dried up on his tongue. “What the fuck…”

“GM Dave said that they were trying to recreate how I came to be,” Hirrus murmured, “I should have realized what that would entail.”

“Are you okay, man?” Alric asked. The adventurer tentatively reached out and patted Hirrus on the arm.

“I’m fine,” Hirrus snapped, shrugging off the touch. “The ones who did this to my home are dead, buried in the scattered rubble of their ill-gotten mansion.” He gritted his teeth and started to stomp his way towards the burnt-out husk of a town. “And the same will come to whoever did this, too.”

Alric made a sound like he didn’t believe Hirrus, but scrambled just the same to catch up.

The town was deathly quiet as they passed the first few badly-damaged buildings. Burned doors stood open here and there, and when there weren’t still coals burning within, they outlined darkness beyond.

Hirrus felt a sensation of being watched, but shook it off.

These eerie ruins were making him paranoid.

Alric started to hum the chorus to the song about the bounty hunter again, but Hirrus grabbed his shoulder.

“Be silent,” Hirrus whispered. “We may not be alone.”

He didn’t truly believe that, but it shut Alric up faster than anything else he could have said. Also, deep down, he hoped they weren’t. He wanted there to be something here. The painful reminder of Yenon made him want an adventurer to poke their head out for him to hack it off.

As they reached the middle of the small hamlet, where the buildings were almost entirely destroyed, the sense of being watched didn’t go away. Hirrus stopped and slowly turned in a full circle. There were certainly areas of cover behind which something could be hiding, but the buildings here weren’t intact enough to have an ominous darkness lurking behind doors and windows.

Was someone else actually here?

“Stay here a moment,” Hirrus whispered, patting Alric on the shoulder. “Shout if you see something.”

“As long as you’re fine if I shout if I don’t see anything,” Alric hissed. The man was clearly agitated, but held his ground as Hirrus moved away. “Because this place is fucked up and creepy and I’m going to wig out if a fucking butterfly comes at me!”

Hirrus left Alric to his mild panic. He had neither the time nor energy to deal with the adventurer’s nerves right now.

Their path to Shemil was to continue northwest, so Hirrus moved northeast. He could look through the ruins on this side of town, put his mind at ease, and then circle back to Alric to continue onwards.

Once he was alone in the ruins, the sensation of being watched redoubled. It felt like when he’d walked through Yenon after his rebirth as… Whatever he’d become. They called him Merciless. But he felt like a monster.

As he started to walk through the areas that had obviously been people’s homes, he felt like he knew what must be watching him.

Ghosts.

People had died in agony here, just like he had.

Just like Julissa had.

If he strained his ears, he wondered if he could hear them asking why. Asking why he had gotten a second chance when they were now nothing more than dirt and ash.

He didn’t know the answer, and moreover, he hoped nobody ever would. If the adventurer causing this mess learned how to harness Hirrus' power and replicate it, there was a very real chance his efforts would be finished before they even began.

Clink clink shk.

Brick shifted against brick somewhere nearby.

Hirrus would have missed the sound if he hadn’t been thinking about being judged by unseen spirits. He turned towards the sound, quickly appraising the ruins there. It looked like it had been a home, but it was just rubble now. Six charred wooden beams defined the corners of an L-shaped building, and the space defined was now just piles of broken bricks.

The way the shattered red blocks were arranged reminded Hirrus of snow drifts, the taller piles no doubt where there had been load-bearing beams and walls that had collapsed during the fires. Some of the smaller piles might have been furniture. There was a bent length of metal near the front jutting from the rubble in a way that rendered it recognizable as the pipe of an iron stove. Despite his caution, Hirrus approached the ruins, dropping to one knee at the spot that was likely the front entrance.

He closed his eyes and focused on his hearing.

Distantly, he heard a carrion bird caw twice.

Closer, the whistle of the wind.

There was a crunch of gravel far to his left that was no doubt Alric shifting uneasily.

Hirrus was momentarily impressed with the sharpness of his senses. He was at least a hundred and fifty yards away from Alric, and he could still clearly hear-

Breathing?

Hirrus' eyes snapped open, trying to find the source of the sound before him, but with his eyes open, his hearing seemed to lapse back to normal. His eyes wouldn’t close again though. Not when it was possible that someone was alive under this rubble.

Someone like Dahlia.

The ruins became an explosion of clicking and shuffling as he scrambled over the loose bricks on the surface.

“Is someone here?” Hirrus called towards the largest pile of bricks - the only pile high enough for an adult to be pinned under without having been crushed. “Are you alright? I’m here to help.”

There was no answer, but he was positive he had heard something.

As soon as he reached the pile he started grabbing at bricks and flinging them away as fast as he could. He thought some Arcana in his arsenal could have helped, but he couldn’t risk harming whoever might be beneath the rubble. If they were a guard like him, they could have endured some splash damage from whatever blast of energy could clear the area. But if they weren’t? Julissa’s hit points had been measured in hundreds, not thousands. The use of Rocket Burn might fling the bricks away, but it would easily do three thousand damage to a well-geared adventurer.

A random civilian would be dead instantly.

Hirrus surprised himself with how quickly the work consumed him. He couldn’t erase the memory of pulling Dahlia gingerly from the ruins of her home, knowing that if he had been slower, she might not have survived.

He was far, far slower to the ruins of this town.

The building had already collapsed, if anyone had been trapped within.

Gasping for breath, brick gave way to the charred remains of a piece of furniture. A twisted bit of metal slashed across Hirrus' knuckles. It was a bed. Despite the bloody line across the backs of his fingers, he reached into the twisted mess, grabbing a hold of a fistful of metal springs and yanking. The strength afforded to him by his inflated stats made the mattress shift easily under his grip, and he stepped back to fling it from the rubble, sending ash flying through the air in a cloud. He grabbed a hold of the box spring beneath and wrenched straight up.

Instead of coming up, it cracked and splintered. Dried-out and damaged by the fire, the flimsy thing came apart under his hands.

Hirrus opened up the space under the bed like he was cracking open the top of a cardboard box. He held up a hand to shield his eyes from the cloud of ash as he looked at what he’d uncovered.

Nothing.

No one.

Under the bed was ash-dusted floorboards and a single half-burnt slipper.

Hirrus snarled and whirled away from the empty space. The ash he’d stirred up was irritating his eyes, bringing tears to them. Surely that was it. Not tears of rage for the lives lost here. Nor tears of frustration for his inability to find a single soul to spare.

Everyone here had fallen. Died a victim to a madman’s dream.

As he stepped out of the ruins and back to the street - out of the cloud of ash - he took a few deep breaths, calming himself.

He would find who did this. And he would march on Shemil as a one-man army, obliterating whoever stood in his way.

Just as his campaign against Last of the Strong had begun in the ashes of Yenon, the ruins of this town had a transformative effect on his mission.

He no longer sought self-preservation.

This was revenge once more.

It all came back to the same flavor of violence.

And - no matter his disgust and disappointment he felt in himself - he would savor every taste of it from here to the end of the road.

The moment of reverie wasn’t to last though. A sound from the center of town drew Hirrus' attention sharply outward and towards where he had left Alric.

A scream.