“I think you should punch him back.”
I sat in the workshop, in my spot at the rune carving table. A variety of stone slabs were piled around me, and the area was dusted with dust from previous carvings. I floated a chisel in the air as I grabbed the brush to clear some of the detritus out of the way, sweeping it into a hole in the table that led to a waste box. Aniya got annoyed if my mess spread to the other workstations.
“It’s not that simple, he’s my brother sure but he’s my boss too, you know?” Arryn’s voice came through slightly muffled, the Horizon connection struggling to maintain the connection over such a long distance. I had a timer imprinted in my sight, somehow stuck in my peripheral vision but never out of focus. We’d been talking for nearly an hour now.
“So what? Who wants to work under someone like that anyway?” I said, still feeling a bit foolish speaking aloud in an empty workshop. I didn’t often get calls like this, and I wasn’t used to talking when I couldn’t see the other person.
“Someone who wants to keep their apartment and be able to pay their bills, that’s who.” Arryn sighed. He was always so negative. “I don’t think anyone else will employ a mundane person for anything close to what I currently get paid now, and even that isn’t very much.”
“Yeah, well, you’re not mundane though, right?”
“I mean, I guess so. In a way. I don’t want to use my power for personal gain when half the peacekeepers in the city are out looking for Wyll, though.”
“Makes sense. Speaking of, you heard from him lately? I heard he was joining back up with Brimstone but nothing since then.”
Arryn clicked his teeth, which came though quite sharply in their mental link. “No. We had a bit of a disagreement after the last lesson with Fyron. I dunno, Dee, he seems off since that night you were ambushed.”
Dee, huh? Only Coach and Ani really called me that, but I guess I was fine with it. I had sensed there was something going on between Wyll and Arryn, but I didn’t think it was that serious.
“Yeah. Though going by what Fyron said, if the mental strain from the universe completing his spell for him is what led to all this ‘off’-ness, he might have gotten away pretty lightly. At least he’s not trying to destroy the moon or talk to trees or something.”
“Maybe… We should be careful not to make the same mistake though. Have you done much practice? You had that apple thing, right?”
“Ugh, don’t remind me. I’ve pulped about three bags of apples so far. I don’t think I can picture my telekinesis as anything but a bunch of hands, something sharp is just… I dunno. Hard to conceptualise.”
I could hear some noise in the background of Arryn’s end. Some people shouting, the slamming of a door.
“Sorry, things are kicking off a bit on my end. Been another attack near the branch.”
“Do you need to go?”
“Nah, that’s for someone else to deal with. I’ve been assigned the very important task of organising the documents in storage by date and category.”
“Joy.”
“Yeah…” he said with a deep sigh. “Anyway, don’t you have a bunch of gauntlets with bladed attachments?”
“I see what you’re getting at, yeah. That might help.”
“Glad to be of service.”
I absentmindedly levitated some of the stone tablets in the air. I’d been picturing my telekinesis as just generic hand shapes, like Lefty and Righty, but Arryn might have a point about repicturing them as my different gauntlets. I’d have to experiment with that later.
“How’s your task coming, anyway?”
“Uh, I kind of did it? Was kind of an accident though. I can pretty easily nullify magic things if I’m under pressure, but when things are calm it’s hard to bring out that kind of reactive control. I did manage to do something about the pain from getting my ass kicked though…”
Arryn explained the way in which he compressed his physical pain into a condensed point. It was fascinating, but concerning at the same time.
“Why a jellyfish?” I asked.
“I dunno. I hurt in lots of different places, and I pictured it like a jellyfish with its stingers all over my body. I wish I had a way to get rid of it completely, though. My hand is throbbing, and I tried to squish that pain into nothingness but it just focused it on a smaller area, like my hand went from being bruised all over to being stabbed with a big needle.”
“Ouch. Maybe you should give it back to Reggie, then.”
“Sure. I’ll use my illegal wild magic to attack my boss.” Arryn snapped. After a moment, he spoke again. “...Sorry. That came out a bit more aggro than I intended. I hate this place, and I hate my brother being here, and I hate that my hand hurts all the time now.”
“No worries. I get it.” I said. I wasn’t really sure what to say to any of that.
“I wish I could teleport like Fyron can. Just sneak back to Danmer whenever I felt like it. See my cat, watch some crappy TV on my hologram.”
“I mean, I’m pretty sure he’s coming to see my fight tonight. Why not ask him to bring you too?”
“He is?”
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
“Yeah, at least I think so. Has a weird habit of always being exactly where you expect him to be.”
“I suppose, I really don’t know if he-”
Arryn was interrupted by the sound of heavy knocking. It took me a second to realise it was on my end and not his.
“Hmm, I should go get that. Call me again later, this helped.” I said.
“Sure. I’ll see you at the fight, maybe.”
There was the faint popping in my ears of the mental link disconnecting, and the timer in the periphery of my vision flickered out. Someone impatiently pounded at the door again. I got up from my work nest, and made my way to the large steel doors that served as the entrance to the workshop. I slid it open, the door screeching on its wheels, and saw the last person I’d expected to see.
Don Alabaster was a heavy-set man, with a perpetually sweaty red face and neatly groomed pencil moustache. He had the large red nose of a habitual alcoholic, and a small pair of shaded spectacles perched on it. He had taken off his spotless white fedora to fan himself with it, and he looked like he’d run here. I spotted a wand-sized evoker tucked into the belt of his similarly spotless white suit trousers, and was immediately on guard. This man had tried to kill me just days ago, and now he shows up at my home? I didn’t visibly react, but I mentally lifted some of the sharper tools in the workshop closer, just out of sight of the doorway. I didn’t see any of his henchmen hiding nearby, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a hit squad out there waiting for me.
“Alabastard. What the fuck are you doing here?” I growled.
“Easy now. I wanted to talk, not fight.” he grumbled, in his Gotlan-esque drawl. “Way I see it, we’ve both got good reasons to be pissed off at each other, but I come here with a peace offering.”
“Not interested.” I went to slam the door in his face, but an immaculate white loafer blocked the door. I could have pushed hard enough to separate that foot from his leg, but this situation was strange enough to give me pause.
“Listen, kid. I tried to take you out of the picture. That’s true. I had a lot of money bet on the person you were going to fight against. They were one of my top fighters, but I respected your ability enough to not want a fair fight.”
I scoffed. Was this his idea of making peace?
“But then you and your buddies surprised me with some kind of magical explosion that levelled a city block. I have to admit, that wasn’t what I anticipated. Normally I’d up the ante for something like that, but I figured fair is fair. I took a shot, I missed. You shot back and hit. That’s on me.”
“I’m not hearing an apology.” I said, still wary this could be a trick.
“That’s because Don Alabaster doesn’t apologise.”
Of course he refers to himself in third-person. Prick.
“I came to offer you a warning.” he said conspiratorially.
Here we go. This is the veiled threats and blackmail I had been expecting.
“If you’ve come to tell me to drop out or you’ll tell the Peacekeepers about that night you can fuck right off. You know as well as I do that they’d love to get their hands on you.” I said.
“No, kid. You’re dead wrong. I’m not here about that night. As far as I see it, that debt is settled on both sides. I’ve come to tell you about your fight tonight. Public story is that I’m banned from the tournament, but that ain’t the whole story. You see, that prize fighter I mentioned turned up dead a couple days ago, and I think whoever did it is connected to your next opponent.”
Despite me trying to play it cool, that got a reaction out of me. Going up against Alabaster was usually suicide, never mind taking out a trained fighter.
“Start talking.”
I could see Alabaster bristle a bit about being ordered around, but he continued anyway. “We found his body diced up into fucking cubes. Never seen anything like it. From the way he was found, he would have been awake at the time, standing in his kitchen. The cuts were incredibly precise, but we found no traces of any spell we could recognise there. We’re scrambling to find who did, scrambling to find another fighter, I’ve got my boys running ragged all over town when suddenly-” he pauses for effect. “We get a visitor.”
“Lemme guess, they make you an offer.”
“Yeah. This dwarf comes in, big guy. Says he has a fighter we’re welcome to use in place of our original option. Now, I’m no idiot, and suspect something is up with him immediately, so I tell my boys to take him to the holding cells we have in our basement. I leave him there to stew for a bit, then later I go down to rough him up a little, see what he knows. When I get down there the dwarf is gone, and in his place was a metric shit-ton of gold. We counted it up, and it was exactly - to the copper - what we paid for our recently deceased fighter. That includes training costs, entry fees, even the odd potion we bought off the books to, ahem, help his odds. I wouldn’t have noticed this if we didn’t have a damn good bookkeeper, who went white as a sheet when he realised. Said that nobody should know that exact amount. Never mind how he brought in that much dough and snuck out again.”
“Seems like a decent deal for you. Full refund.”
“Yeah, well, we were due to make it all back and then some on the bets we’d placed on your fight. Since we were officially banned we were in the process of setting up proxies instead, to manage things in my place.”
“Right.” I should have known that any kind of official action against someone like Alabaster would be pointless. Alabaster owned half the fighters in any given tournament, and had most of the other coaches in his pocket too.
“But there’s more. My guy Tino goes to tell the fight organisers about the change in plans, and he looks confused. Apparently earlier that day Tino had already come in and registered a new fighter for tonight. Transferred all my bets over too, and paid a tidy sum for the transactional look-the-other-way fees. Very considerate, whoever this imposter is.”
This was a lot to take in. Someone had gone to great lengths to set up this fight tonight, but why? Rigging was fairly commonplace in this kind of sport, but usually that was to make money on the outcome of a fight. But this person was throwing a lot of money around in the process, and even made sure Alabaster still got his bet money if I lost. Why go through so much trouble? If they had that kind of operation, why not just rig the bets like normal?
“Sounds like you’re in a pretty good spot. Why tell me about it?” I asked after some thought.
“Well, I may have tried to whack ya, but I got a soft spot for spunky kids like you. Reminds me of my youth.”
I inwardly sighed in relief that elves don’t grow past adulthood, and I didn’t have to worry about getting red and sweaty like Alabaster in the future if I reminded him of a younger self now.
“Also,” he continued. “If you had any sense you’d forfeit now. Seems like someone is trying to stack this fight against you, and you’d be a fool to go in anyway.”
Ah, there’s the real reason. If I forfeit then he still gets to cash in on his bets. He still thinks I might win.
“Thanks, but no thanks. I want that prize money.”
“Ehh, I know. Everyone knows you’re in it for the dough. But it’s your funeral kid. Don’t say I didn’t warn ya. Should be night to remember either way.” he said, starting to walk away.
I slid the door shut again, and retreated back into the stuffy warmth of the workshop. This all seemed a bit too suspicious. My gut was telling me to withdraw, but there was something I saw in the glint of Alabaster’s eye. I wouldn''t put it past him to double or triple his bets on this new mysterious fighter in light of all this connivery. If I won, I could hit him where he hurts - his wallet.
It was time to get some revenge.