For a brief moment, Hirrus entertained the fantasy that Dahlia was safe. With Fire turned into a cooling pile of entrails on the forest floor, it was possible that there would be no more threats. But it was also possible that their surviving underlings might continue their attack against Hirrus’ friends, whether in retribution, or as a dead-man’s-switch in continuing their plans. Hirrus whirled away from the corpse, returning to the logging trail and moving quickly towards Alric.

“GM Dave,” Hirrus said, barking the word like an order. “Get him.”

“He’s been AFK, man,” Alric said. Despite his casual tone, he still flinched at Hirrus’ enraged expression. “I promise that as soon as he responds, I’ll make whatever demands you have, but I can’t help you yell at him if he’s just not fucking there.”

Hirrus felt his lips peel back from his teeth in a snarl, but he stopped himself before he could say anything unkind. This situation was beyond Alric’s control. It would be unfair to place the blame on him.

Instead, Hirrus turned away and glared at the ruined cart. It was damaged to uselessness now, but Hirrus knew there were more. There had been several at the last attack he’d faced, when he’d fought the gley and the captain. How many could there be on backroads like this? How many could be closing in on Inoha still?

He had to consider the idea that his hunt for Rumi might be over. There might be no other option but to return to Inoha to protect Dahlia. They might have beaten him.

“Wait,” Alric said, holding up a hand. “Wait. He’s back. He just sat down. It might be a minute but-”

There was a shrill, alien sound from behind Hirrus, and then the clanking of armor. Hirrus turned just as the red-armored form of GM Dave stepped around him.

“Okay,” GM Dave said, his tone irritated. “I come back and immediately I have three hundred messages. I assume this is important.”

“I didn’t-” Alric protested.

“Three hundred and twenty-three,” GM Dave snapped. “I counted. You’ve said enough.” He pointed at Hirrus. “You got my attention. Go.”

“Dahlia is in danger,” Hirrus said, squaring his shoulders and standing up straight. “If she’s not safe, I am going to turn around and go back to Inoha, and Rumi’s plans will proceed unopposed.”

“I don’t know what you want me to do,” GM Dave grumbled. “I don’t have a map with the location of every player as a little red dot. I can’t just jump out of the sky and smite all the dots moving towards Inoha from here.”

“That’s dumb,” Alric said.

“We can’t track players’ activities like that-” GM Dave began.

“No, I mean,” Alric started, but then paused and glanced quickly at Hirrus. When Hirrus gestured for him to continue, Alric said: “that’s a dumb way to solve the problem. It’s uh.” He glanced at Hirrus again. “It’s how Hirrus would do it. Just bludgeon the threat into submission. There’s a much simpler, more obvious solution.”

Hirrus wasn’t sure if that was supposed to be an insult, but he couldn’t dispute the point. Considering the carnage that surrounded them here, Alric had ample evidence to support his claim.

“Just pick up Dahlia,” Alric explained. “You can put NPCs in your little stone box. We know you can, because you jailed this fucker pretty easily. So just grab Dahlia, and maybe Barin, and put them somewhere players can’t reach. Either in your jail cell, or on GM island.”

“GM Island isn’t real,” GM Dave said quickly, in the tone of something he had said many times automatically. “Nevermind. Forget I said that.”

“There’s a video going around social media,” Alric stage-whispered to Hirrus. “It’s totally real.”

“Regardless. What’s the point?” GM Dave said, turning his attention to Hirrus as he made a rude gesture at Alric. “What are they going to do? Kill her? She’ll be back next week. At worst, they make her into another one of you, and then her fate is tied to yours. You have to stop Rumi if you don’t want to get yeeted into oblivion on the reset, and if they infect her, then she is at risk of yeeting as well.”

“Is it yeeted?” Alric asked, though it seemed to be directed at himself instead of GM Dave. “Or yote?”

“What would that do to her?” Hirrus demanded, focusing on GM Dave. “The infection? The transformation? I’m unsure if you noticed, but Dahlia is pregnant. What happens to that child?” He stepped up, getting in GM Dave’s face and fixing him with a glare. “Tell me, GM Dave, what happens to the only thing in this world that remains of Gier?”

Hirrus expected the man in red armor to stand strong against his anger, but he immediately flinched and looked away. Hirrus hadn’t pulled the punch at all. If GM Dave had any care at all about the citizens of this world, he couldn’t be heartless about the unborn child. Not when Dahlia’s husband was gone forever.

“I don’t know,” GM Dave said, his face scrunching into a grimace.

Silence hung between them for a long moment. Hirrus could see GM Dave’s mind racing through options, and eventually he let out a long, frustrated sigh.

“You’re right,” he said. “I can’t just… Stand aside and do nothing. Even if it’s just so that I don’t lose your help.”

“It’s going to be fine, then?” Alric said. “You’ll get them out?”

“Yeah,” GM Dave said, shaking his head as if he’d been beaten somehow.

GM Dave just turned and vanished, as if stepping around a corner that wasn’t there. Hirrus felt tension relaxing in his neck and shoulders. He hadn’t even been aware of how much it had crept up on him. Dahlia would be safe. She was out of reach of the cruel chaos of the adventurers arrayed against him.

“Okay,” Alric said. Where Hirrus felt the tension slowly melt away, Alric sagged immediately, nearly collapsing to the dirt road. “Okay. We did it. We’re okay! Everything’s great.”

“Thank you,” Hirrus said, reaching out and putting a hand on Alric’s slumped shoulder. “You did well to find a solution that hadn’t occurred to me.”

“And you hit GM Dave below the belt to make it happen,” Alric said, giving Hirrus a genuine smile. “When we get together it just all works out.”

Alric started to do a ridiculous little dance in place, singing something about opposites. It was more of his adventurer weirdness. Despite himself, Hirrus was starting to get used to it. For a moment he wondered how long the song would go on, but it didn’t matter. With Dahlia safe, Hirrus had only one remaining goal. Rumi had to die. And he had a cart’s backtrail to follow to get there.

Hirrus stepped around Alric, grabbing his shoulder and pulling him out of his little dance of stepping forward and back to get him moving. If the logging road went all the way to Shemil, then this might be their chance to get there without further interruption, if they hurried.

As they stepped around the half-destroyed cart, though, a new challenge presented itself.

She was standing in the middle of the logging road. A faint breeze ruffled the red hood she wore, though much of her other armor had changed. Like Hirrus back in Inoha, she was still amassing power; she was changing her gear as she gathered more powerful options. She was wearing mostly leather now, in dark browns and grays. She’d kept the red hood and mask, though. And just as before, on her hip was a wide-bladed dagger, with a glittering yellow gem set in the pommel.

Alric’s singing cut off abruptly, and the man made a frightened squeaking noise. He scrambled back and hurled himself into the dirt behind the cart.

“Well then,” Hirrus said, casually drawing his hooked blade and icy greataxe. “Are you done dancing in the shadows now? Is it finally time to fight this battle?”

“Please,” she said, arching an eyebrow at him. Her voice was like fresh snowmelt through a rocky streambed. “You do yourself too much credit calling it a battle. Or even a fight. If I wished you dead, you wouldn’t know it. And then, very, very briefly, you would.”

Hirrus wanted to shrug her words off as typical adventurer overconfidence, but he knew better. She was no adventurer. She was like him, and if she felt comfortable threatening him so openly, it was because she knew something he didn’t. It was an absolute fact that she did; she had been stalking them for a long while, and likely had seen him fight more than once. She had taken his measure. And he had no clue what she was capable of. If she believed she could kill him, it was possible that she was right.

There were options. Hirrus could find a way to stack the deck in his favor. He hadn’t pushed Mirrored Echo to its limits yet. It was possible he could use it to wear her down in ways she wouldn’t expect. And he hadn’t used his Merciless Transformation recently.

His mind raced through all the ways he could combat a superior opponent. He even had Fire’s Arcana now, and while their tactics were flawed, he could-

“My capacity is irrelevant, though,” she continued, interrupting his train of thought by forcibly derailing it. “Even if I wished to, I can’t kill you.” She carefully took her hand off her dagger, bringing her hands together with steepled fingers.

“What?” Hirrus asked, tentatively lowering his weapons. He watched her carefully, looking for any sign of the sudden use of an Arcana. “Why not?”

“Because we need you alive,” she said. Despite the mask hiding the bottom half of her face, Hirrus could tell her features were twisted into a grimace. “Otherwise you would find it quite difficult to kill Rumi for us.”