[IRP] Warpath of the Wolf: The Plunder of Khaltet

[Flying Magic User]

Fess was glad all of the insanity going on was out of her line of sight, as it sounded plenty horrible without visual aids backing it up. She was less glad about it when it apparently meant she was having some young boy thrown into her custody while this was all going on.

Poor kid was more rattled by this than she was. Neither of them belonged here, and that thought lingered as she considered what to do. Everyone else that was keeping her here was too busy now to do anything if she were to leave, but where would that leave this kid? She couldn't exactly just up and carry him off.

She placed a hand on his head, "I'm going to lift you up on this winged horse to sit alright? Climb on." She probably couldn't actually lift the kid on her own from there.

Robert tearfully looked up from Fess' skirt, cringing each time a sound came from beyond the wall. He reached up both arms to grab at Fess. "Alr-right..."

"Going up..." she got a hold around the boys arms and tugged up, grunting. Yep, too heavy to just lift him up, but the boy wasn't so paralyzed that he didn't get his own foot hold on the stirrup she'd left open for him, and after some effort he was seated.

After panting for a bit, Fess directed Belphe to walk down along the wall away from the fighting, and the light of fire. "Why are you out here?" she asked, gentle a tone as she could muster.

Robert shifted, turning so he could bury his face in Fess' shirt now that her skirts were out of reach. "I wanted to get help, so I ran when nobody was looking and I got lost..."

"Help for what?" she asked.

F-For my mommy and sister..." Robert started to sniffle again and hid away in Fess' shirt to mumble. "They already t-t-took Daddy."

Fess did not like where this was going, there seemed to be more going on here than she thought. "Who took him?" If he knew it would be a miracle, but she had to ask.

"I'unno." Robert muttered. He looked ready to say more, when the sounds of battle from across the wall were interrupted by Conall's shouted declaration. As soon as Conall spoke, Robert froze and gripped Fess' sides in a desperate hug.

Fess patted the boy again, giving him a bit of time before pressing again. "Do you know what they looked like?"

"Mmhm." Robert half-nodded. He refused to raise his face from Fess' shirt, though, and refused to let go. "Shiny. They hurt people with bright light."

Fess scowled, she had seen those arrows explode in light from those archers. Perhaps the people these Sacaens were fighting were worth dealing with after all. That was settled but... she still had this boy clinging rather closely still.

"Listen, I shall help you, but you need to let go of and me and trust me alright? You can stay here with the horse, his name is Belphe. Can you do that?"

"No! No!" Robert actually lifted his face up and stared up at Fess, crying and dripping snot from his nose and starting to babble senselessly. "You-you can't! They killed Daddy and-and I don't-Mommy and Annie are gone and Mister Salem left so you can't! Please don't go!"

What a pain, this kid was going to get them both in trouble if he didn't let go sooner or later. Needed to get away form him if she wanted to do anything usef-

"A pegasus?! It must be a Lycian scout!" A hoarse voice called out from behind Fess and Robert. "Don't let it get away or Mada will have our hides!"

Before the words even finished, a tomahawk soared through the air and narrowly missed Fess' head, smashing into the stone wall and clanging away.

Fess gasped as she felt the wind of the axe narrowly missing her. No time to think now! "Belphe, go! Keep clinging, kid!" she shouted as the pegasus began a slow start to taking to the sky with some sluggish flapping of his wings as Fess immediately fired off one of the few spells she had in memory, blowing an intense concentration of fine sleet towards the faces of her attackers to cover the escape.

[Velyoukai]

NIKANG POST

"Right!"

Nikang nodded as he sprung away from the armored soldier he'd been two-timing with Maynette. He shifted behind Maynette and tossed her his halberd while he removed his hammer from his back and into both hands. Smitty joined at his side and together, they eyed each other, then the burning building's wall.

Put simply, the building was a piece of shit even before Elisa and Fess went to town on the stupid thing. If anything, the fire was an improvement; even a pile of ashes would've been better than this heap of shitty, rotting wood and foul-smelling gunk. Still, no reason to look a gift horse's corpse in the disgusting mouth, so Nikang hefted his hammer, shared another look with Smitty, and got to smashing at the bottom of the corner support beam.

GM POST

Despite their backup, the two frontline knights remained stymied by the bandit forces. The knight that had faced Maynette and Nikang continued to stand strong, but even with his immediate threats reduced from three to two, the armored Lycian refused to lower his guard to Maynette. The Sacaen woman had already proved herself to be skilled enough to take his life with just the right chance with those axes of hers, and he felt not reckless enough to offer her that chance.

The second knight, on the other hand, had not been able to regain his composure following Salem's successful strike at the back of his neck. He had seen Clemens' own neck's blow that lead to the man's death, and the subsequent attack on his own combined with flames and the threat of death left his nerves shot.

Still, both knights lashed out at their opponents, the first aiming to bypass Maynette to stop her two accomplices and the second desperate to force more distance between his enemies and himself. For their efforts, the first knight was locked in melee with Maynette, and the second found his upper leg nearly crushed by Elisa's axe despite his armor's enchantments.

"Will you fools stop playing around and get back here?!" Conall shouted to his men, already working alongside the force's monk to create a curved wall of Light in front of them. Scowling, he summoned an orb of Light in his free hand and hurled it towards Elisa and Salem. "Hurry! Before they-"

A deafening crack overrode Conall's voice, found from the burning building that was no longer standing, but falling. Shouts arose from the Lycian knights as the building swayed forward from its broken corner, spurred by the wind and the weight of the flames' motion. With a groaning, black-smoked lurch, the building finally collapsed beneath the weight of its flame-heavy top, creating a burning line of flames and rotting wood that separated the Lycians and the bandits.

The force of the fall combined with the heat from the magical flames summoned a heated, breathless updraft that shot outward and dragged the air inwards. Said updraft swirled beneath Belphe's wings, distorting the air around the pegasus and his rider, dragging the both of them downwards to the nearby roof of the broken building, just in time to be missed by the nets shot by the newcomers that clattered uselessly on top of the stone wall.

[idoaltima]

"....... Oh."

Leaning rather casually over the borrowed halberd in hand, listening to how the roaring fire and settling debris drowned out the stymied Lycians' chatter, Maynette surveyed with raised eyebrows the flaming shambles of the house she'd directed Nikang and Smitty toward only a short while ago. She seemed a bit... surprised. "Shoddy house. Should have known. Seems there's a pattern here," the warrior mused, casting an obvious glance at the equally shoddy wall to her right, "Not quite the desired outcome. Perhaps the best, though."

Giving a light shrug as she stood upright again, May about-faced away from the new, fiery blockade, returning Nikang's halberd and shaking the dust from her bolero as she said, "Good work, all. We advance south and regroup. Quickly." Her voice had grown noticeably low again as she motioned to her comrades to draw nearer, throwing a backwards nod towards Nikang and Smitty's handiwork. "Noisy fight, noisier end. Unnecessary attention shall follow. Tarrying may mean being surrounded. Which is dumb. Besides..."

By now, Maynette was looming ominously over the downed form of the unconscious Smiths. She most certainly had forgotten neither the Lycian soldier's presence nor her planned use for him.

"We need to talk. Much to do and discuss. You, Smitty. And especially this one."

As the warrior knelt down, drawing an axe, she pointed with her free left arm to the overturned, wagon in the street between the ruined, blazing wreck of a house on the right and the... ruined wreck of a house to the left... what? She had not even noticed its state until now. Another trash heap. Is all of Khaltet in decay? May wondered with a slight grimace, having come to an odd pause when she had intended to speak. Strange, strange. Worthless as a stronghold. Then what is Khaltet worth?

"... First, someone, check that house," said the Sacaen woman after another moment, having shifted her finger from the wagon to the southern, dilapidated building after reconsideration. "Can we reach the street? If so, good. If not, clear that wagon. I will help shortly." Returning to her initial task, May swiftly began removing any belts or straps that she could find on Smiths' person, using them to fashion bindings for the man's hands, arms, and ankles. Ideally, she intended to have the man march once she slapped him awake, her first prisoner of war in months since that damned non-aggression pact.

She next set to work stripping Smiths of his top and the rest of his gear, but faint motion to the left in her peripheral vision stopped her before she could finish. Clearly feeling the loss of her tomahawk now, May whirled, expecting to find an errant and apparently patiently hidden archer just seconds from feathering her or her party members.

Instead, her eyes softened as they registered the form of a pegasus, looking slightly disheveled, within the collapsed building.

"....... Oh."

Sheepish realization washed over Maynette in that moment. Fess was the one detail that the warrior had in fact lost track of in the recent turmoil. Not that she would admit so openly, though. At any rate, May saw the pegasus but did not yet see the rider. She was not sure what to make of that yet. Perhaps even more curious was that the pegasus had clearly gone over the wall to get here. Why?

With Smiths bound, gagged, blindfolded, and leashed now, though, she could at least move with the party and investigate. Trying to keep noise to a minimum again—for Fess' sake and her own, the Sacaen was unwilling to test whether or not those still-very-much-alive archers could mark targets by sound—she hauled Smiths' limp form over to the building's smashed wall, holding the Lycian soldier down beneath a boot as she whispered into the breach, "Fess. Are you in there?"

[Flying Magic User]

A piece of rubble not far from Belphe lifted up from the ground as Fess pushed it away from on top of her, coughing as she did. Still attached to her like some sort of parasite, Robert clung even then coughing as much as she did.

"This is the last time I go anywhere when the lights are off," she grumbled to herself. Then she heard an unwanted yet familiar voice ask if she was around.

"I am, I am," she replied, memory of that blasted heat draft of air that pulled them down annoyingly fresh. She stood up and tried to dust her, well, mostly Robert, off. Then she remembered why they'd taken off to start with.

"There was more of them outside along the wall, we had to take off to get away only to get crashed right back down." She looked down, "At least this child made it with us, think you could peel him off of me?"

[Velyoukai]

"I got it," Nikang muttered, already on his way into the half-broken building on Maynette's orders. He climbed up over the fallen wall and pulled Fess and the kid down from the roof, then scrambled into the building through wreckage and shattered stone.

The inside of the once-home was crap, dusty crap and broken crap. Somehow, with a single broken table and what looked like a ladder leading up to the roof being the only visible items inside, it even managed to look worse than the hole in the wall that he sometimes slept in back in the mountains. The only positive part of the entire venture he could see was that there was a door on the opposite side of the fall-in.

Nikang scrambled back outside the wrecked wall to lean against it. "Got a door on the other side. At least a way further in, I guess, if we ain't skippin' and finding one of the other entrances."

[A Prolonged Affectionate Hug]

Oh. Light magic.

Of course it had to be light magic. Of all the arcane arts, Salem reacted to that school the worst. So it was only natural that his opponents here would be well-versed in its usage. He really should have seen it coming, in all honesty. At least he could be glad with the fact that he had been moving continuously during the sudden light-based assault, enough that his eyes didn't suffer too much damage. He wasn't blinded, but he was dazed, his vision was blurred and overall he was more than a little frazzled; to the point that by the time he came was seeing a little straighter, the Knight was dead and the axe-woman was demanding one of them pick up that leftover shield. His frantic motions, even with blurred vision, had apparently been enough to just barely avoid an orb of light -- presumably to the face -- from hitting him. Either way, upon Elisa's request, Salem did exactly that. He'd been meaning to buy a shield at some point in the near future, as his previous one had ended up destroyed, lost and misplaced because of reasons.

Preparation to hold out at the front as per the -other- axe-woman's request was soon contested with a loud, crackling noise; causing Salem to both wince and instinctively turn towards the source. Only to see it come tumbling down spectacularly, crashing not too far before himself and Elisa, and blocking the view and path towards the remaining knights with flames. That was probably a stroke of luck or genius, if it had been pulled off by one of the bandits. Which...Salem had a fair feeling it probably would have been. Still, sword and newly-acquired board in possession and ready for just about anything to jump out from behind the flames, Salem began to slowly back-pedal. Obviously, the first thing to do was to regroup with the rest of the bandits now that they had a brief moment of respite. And probably prepare for a second (most likely much more violent) engagement with the Knights. It was pretty obvious to Salem that Robert's father wasn't going to be around any longer, so...well. He'd have to take the kid back. This was all working towards that moment, naturally.

[idoaltima]

"Is that so?" sighed Maynette as Fess explained how and why she'd been driven over Khaltet's wall. Inwardly, the warrior now felt herself even further vindicated in ordering the party's withdrawal. While it was certainly possible that some of their own raiders had merely set upon Fess in error, not knowing the position she'd been put in by May, that scenario seemed hopeful at best, given the hostile, heavily-armed reception to Khaltet that the party was only now walking away from. Though the rider's intel was invaluable, its implications for her own end of the raid were one more frustration atop many.

By the time Nikang emerged from the ruined building and reported, Maynette's once-relaxed expression had darkened considerably. Being on the defensive was galling enough alone, but now she had to seriously consider joining with one of the other raid parties to wipe out that Lycian contingent—and even that assumed that the Lycians hadn't run into them first, or that even more soldiers lay in wait elsewhere.

"Tsk. Vexing," May muttered to herself, stepping off of Smiths and into the ruin, unceremoniously lifting the boy from Fess' waist before setting him on his feet and shooing him off toward that swordsman—who was apparently still here. She still didn't know what to make of the young man yet, but Smitty clearly hadn't offed him, so that had to mean something. It was a matter for later, though. Noting the standing ladder just inside the wreckage and where it led, the Sacaen woman paused to consider. Slowly, her scowl began to soften.

"Elisa. Can you climb? If so, reach the roof. Scout the area. Then report," May instructed as she ventured back toward the home's collapsed wall. She leaned out and hauled Smiths in by his bindings with one hand, pointing with her free hand as she continued, "Nikang. Try the door. But be silent. If it's stuck, come back."

Dumping the captive Lycian at her feet inside the building's broken walls, the warrior beckoned Smitty to her side with one finger, but not before she turned to regard Fess again. "No flying for now. Those archers still live. More may lurk nearby. We shall see, though," May remarked over her shoulder, having purposefully sent to the roof perhaps the sole member of the party who could properly respond to arrowfire, "And, good work. Your pains may yet be redressed."

The warrior deliberately neglected to clarify her intent in that statement, instead immediately returning her attention squarely to Smitty. "Finally. Now we may talk." Gesturing to the carnage just yards from the party's position in and around the collapsed building—and by implication, the Lycian unit hopefully still lodged behind it—Maynette asked, "Were they always here? Soldiers and no townspeople?"

"Everything you know. Tell me."

[Flying Magic User]

Fess listened to May but didn't heed it much beyond the no flying thing, which was pretty obvious when she had only managed to avoid being netted by pure happenstance moments ago. What she had listened to was May's question aimed at one of the other men, and chose to intercede.

"The boy said his father was killed by those soldiers prior to escaping to us. I am worried that they have slaughtered everyone," she said, no lack of worry in her tone. She had heard of some of the atrocities some among the Lycians had committed before, but there was not even battle here, why would they do this?

[Velyoukai]

GM POST

"M-May..." Smitty winced, holding up his hands in a please-don't-hurt-me way. He glanced around at the burning building and the soldiers he knew were on the other side and gulped. "Loo-No. No, alright? I dunno where these guys came from, because not even three days ago, this shithole was just Lycians and none of 'em were soldiers!"

"All our scouts came back with clean reports, so I dunno what's going on, May!" Smitty paused to breathe, panting from the stress, but kept his mouth shut when Fess actually had the balls to interrupt him and Maynette's conversation.

"The boy said his father was killed by those soldiers prior to escaping to us. I am worried that they have slaughtered everyone."

"Hah!"

The fallen Lycian knight, who had so far been silent, as though he'd been unconscious the entire time, started to laugh. His armor, shimmering in the distant flicker of the flamelight, shook as the man's laughter grew louder and more mocking.

"Slaughtered, you say, you simpering wench?" The knight spat, eyeing the two women and Smitty with a look of mixed pity and revulsion. "Slaughter would be a blessing compared to the fate of your low-born scum!"

[Ghost of Elibe Lost]

Elisa nodded, but rolled her eyes at being asked if she could climb. Climbing was how she ended up fucking up her arm in the first place...indirectly. "Gonna be rough with this damned hole in my arm, but I think I can manage it," she said. With that off, she made for the wall again and used the easy stone footings of the shitty structure to push herself up. For the moment, she left her battleaxe behind to reduce weight, and only pulled herself up on her good arm while using the other as a guide.

It took a bit longer than when she had rushed up the wall before, but she still managed to reach the top and look out over the shitty buildings and wreckage. She could easily see the soldiers on the other side of the burning remains of the building she'd set on fire, still huddled behind their light barrier. But, she took a quick look around the area for any more visitors, welcome or unwelcome, all the while staying low and close to the wall to avoid making an easy target of herself.

[idoaltima]

"Noisy."

A low, heavy thud followed before Maynette eventually dislodged her boot from Smiths' gut. Her gaze moving from Smitty's face to Fess', the woman contemplated her comrades' words for a moment, quiet intensity slowly giving way to curiosity. Truthfully, the wellbeing of the townspeople themselves couldn't have been any further from the Sacaen's mind—in fact, had the Lycian soldiers indeed put Khaltet's locals down to a man, they'd only done her a favor, really. Made the annoying civilian factor completely irrelevant.

But that was the real problem right there. Why would the soldiers even bother? The obvious questions about massacring one's own countrymen aside, what was there to gain without the townsfolk moreso than with them? Certainly not the dilapidated buildings and perimeter wall likely rendered useless by their own efforts... curious, curious.

Not even bothering with the knot, Maynette simply snatched away the clearly too-loose cloth gag hanging from Smiths' face in one savage motion, then stuffed the entire rag into the man's mouth afterward, stopping just short of blocking his throat. Smitty and Fess' comments lined up with what the woman had seen so far. That gave her only two out of three angles on Khaltet's situation, though.

Nothing useful had come out of that crowing Lycian's mouth. Yet.

Contemptuously wiping the saliva on her hand from Smiths' mouth into his hair, Maynette sank down onto her heels right beside her captive. Waiting until the party was past this ruined building was her plan, but seeing as Smiths had been so willing to interject earlier, May figured there'd be no harm in softening him up now to talk.

"Hey. Lycian," May said in a whisper with a new, strangely soft undertone, gazing ahead at where she'd sent Nikang further into the building, "Having fun, yes?" Her hand, having never left Smiths' head, slowly tightened into a vice around a fistful of hair. "Like telling jokes? Like to laugh? I want to laugh, too." An equally strange, soft smile was slowly spreading across the woman's face as she went on, her constricting grip on Smiths' hair starting to strain his scalp. "So. I've an idea. A fun game. Lots of laughter. Wanna play?"

It was a moot question. Maynette licked her lips and just went on smiling as she forcibly nodded the soldier's head in the affirmitive. No thanks to that dumb armistice, it had been far too long since she'd last had a prisoner of war to torment, be it for info or enmity's sake.

[Velyoukai]

GM POST

"Fittingly callous, Maynette."

A small group of men and women exited from the half-broken building, following Nikang who walked sullenly beside another man in typical Djute trappings. The group of nearly ten Sacaens approached Maynette's assembled group, the Djute leader joining May at the other side of the Lycian warrior while the others followed the stiff-lipped Nikang over to a not-burning wall near Smitty and a returned Elisa.

"We have no time for games, however." The man eyed Smiths, taking in the Lycian's injuries and Maynette's grip on his hair with a disinterested scan. "It seems that the pathetic scouts of our useless allies failed to do their jobs right. A full Lycian force appears to be nestled in this...Khaltet."