Following someone that had a head start on her proved to be (admittedly unsurprisingly) challenging. People made for horribly unreliable witnesses—there were those that lied just because they wanted to feel like they were involved and there were those that were unduly confident in (at best) half-remembered details. Ranthia hadn’t really had much direct experience with this sort of thing, which meant that she got led astray more than once. Pupius would never have been sent on a wild raptor chase, but sadly it seemed she took after Tatius more in that respect.

  The only thing worse than being distracted from her plans for revenge against her mother was being distracted while experiencing nostalgia for the fathers that saved her from the fate that the damned woman had left her to.

  But, by the time she was entering Virinum, she was reasonably confident that she had finally caught up with the (presumed) surviving solo Ranger. Hopefully. The merchant wagon that she had passed on the roads had been helped by someone—and Ranthia was trying to not judge the man too harshly for continuing alone in spite of narrowly learning his lesson about the dangers of the wilds. “I have exactly six coins to my name if this cargo doesn’t sell” was, unfortunately, a somewhat valid excuse for not hiring protectors.

  Ranthia queued up with the others seeking entry into the city—at least this [Healer] seemed competent enough that the line was moving—to wait for her turn.

  “Oh… holy shit… Captain! Captain!” One of the younger guards was pointing right at her, even as his comrades started to freak out. One of them even drew his baton—why!?—and took a defensive stance.

  Ranthia just groaned and stepped out of line, turning slightly to keep her badge prominently displayed as she approached.

  “Sentinel Grace. I’m here following reports of an individual Ranger.” Ranthia explained in a loud voice.

  Several in the crowd had tensed up, obviously ready to flee, but the crowds of civilians started to relax after her announcement. That was good.

  The fact that the jumpy guard still looked terrified wasn’t. She was really starting to hate [Identify] and its ilk, even if her own form of it had saved her life more times than she could count.

  She wasn’t hypocritical, she was just frustrated.

  Fortunately, the captain of the guard arrived before the idiot managed to attempt suicide by Sentinel and straightened things out. The man apologized—obnoxiously profusely—for his people and, after wasting far more time than she would have preferred, Ranthia finally made her way into the city, armed with the incredibly useful intel that the man she was looking for was “probably” in the “undesirable” part of the city or “might have been there” at some point or another.

  Virinum wasn’t particularly massive, but it wasn’t a small city either. The guards’ intel proved to be about as useful as the average guardsman was—which is to say, not—and Ranthia was beginning to doubt that the stray Ranger was even in the city until she all but tripped over the man.

  A kid—er, okay, fine, he was probably at least eighteen—ran past her, followed closely by a bandaged man in mismatched armor. The fact that the bandaged man was wearing a Ranger badge was the only reason she let them both pass. Normally she would have grabbed the armed man chasing a child (still plainly an adult by all standards except her own).

  Besides, it was easy enough to circle around to cut them both off.

  The kid barely realized what was happening when she caught him by his tunic and interposed herself between him and the lone Ranger. Thankfully, the Ranger had just enough stats and presence of mind to bring himself to a stop before he ran into her—gods and goddesses, since when was a dual-classed [Warrior] at 221 and 204 disappointingly low tier for a professional?

  “Ranger, report the situation!” Ranthia ordered, falling back on her persona she had established during the hell months. The Ranger was presumably a first-rounder, after all.

  “Sir! The man that you apprehended is a known thief that has plagued the town! I was in pursuit to bring him to justice!” The Ranger that dressed like a new Adventurer reported stiffly.

  Ranthia turned her attention to the youth, who was plainly just starting to realize that he was at the mercy of others that dramatically outclassed him. He was too skinny, and his level was unimpressive even for his age. Plus, thieves were rarely [Laborer]-tagged.

  “Sick relative or just couldn’t find a job?” Ranthia asked the kid.

  “W…what?” He fumbled his response.

  “Asking why you started cutting purse strings instead of honest work.” Ranthia explained.

  “…M’da. Da’s a drunk. Lazy lout too. Everyone says I’ll be jus’ like him and won’t hire me. Finally got a job by the docks, hauling. Octavius dropped a crate, smashed it. Blamed me. Everyone thinks I did it on ‘urpose.” The kid admitted in a weary tone.

  Ranthia released him with a nod.

  “Stick around. I’ll be booking passage on a ship either way. And if you want a fresh start, you won’t have any reputation to overcome in Ariminum.” Ranthia offered, before she turned her attention to the Ranger.

  If the kid wanted to run off and play thief, she wasn’t going to stop him. Everyone was free to wreck their own lives. She was here for the person that she was professionally obligated to help.

  “Let’s grab a drink, Ranger.”

  When in doubt, she still tended to default to her Adventurer days. As much as she respected Green, and as much as she’d love to have channeled the woman and talked the man through things… it just wasn’t a skillset that she possessed. But sharing trauma over cheap wines or beers? Yeah, she still knew how to do that.

  The kid might have struggled to survive, but he knew his local taverns. Sure, it was presumably a gift that he picked up during his efforts to find which alley his father had passed out in, but it was undeniably a gift. The place he recommended had strong drinks, fair prices, and the lived-in vibe that ‘proper’ citizens mistook as seedy and avoided. It was the kind of tavern that she would have frequented as an Adventurer while she recovered from her latest job with a game of Tali and three or more ‘undesirables’.

  …Ugh, apparently, she was already old enough to pine for the ‘good old days’. The realization made her groan aloud, but she was still focused on her task. The Ranger was trauma-dumping in her general direction, through the gloriously lubricative powers of cheap booze.

  She lacked Green’s gift for helping him work through everything, but she had learned one trick from the woman: get it out. Even just rambling about the pain that she had kept sealed away helped, and she was hoping that doing the same for the Ranger would make him ready to listen to reason.

  She absolutely needed to get him back to Ariminum. Running solo had worked out for her after her Ranger Team 13 loss, but she was used to it and got lucky enough that she didn’t run into anything that she couldn’t handle. Yet another point in time where a slightly different flow of events might have killed her (don’t dwell on it, focus on the Ranger). But the young Ranger wasn’t a former Adventurer, he was yet another Legion-trained “promising candidate” that got fed to the Rangers because someone in charge decided he would be a bad fit for the front lines for some reason. Much like Lysia, back so long ago.

  He was going to get himself killed, but only if she failed to talk him down. The first step was simply just hearing him out. Unfortunately, his tale was fairly predictable. His Ranger Team 13 rolled into town just ahead of the first attack from the ornithocheirus flock. Two of their number were caught in the open, and their team leader made a snap judgment to try to fight their way to them while the city guard used spears from the guard barracks.

  Despite being extremely stupid as a notion, the plan was actually surprisingly viable. Four of the Rangers—including the sole survivor—were equipped with two shields, while the other two Rangers each took a spear. The idea was to be a mobile fortification that could reach the two stranded Rangers and rescue them.

  It was a viable idea. …But for the fact that two of the shield-wielders were [Mages] with poor physical stat distributions. The first dive-bomb that hit their shield barrier scattered them. Then one of the [Mages] panicked and unloaded his entire mana pool erratically, which killed one of their [Warriors].

  The survivor got lucky. The initial impact threw him near the guard barracks and he had a defensive Skill that let him endure everything in mostly one piece. He had foolishly bandaged himself without buying anything to treat the wounds though. He had enough vitality that he was fine for the time being, but Ranthia could already smell his untreated wounds turning bad. All the more reason to get him to Ariminum.

  Once the man finally fell silent, Ranthia gently shared her own tale of Ranger Team 13. Her victory over the kraken got largely glossed over. She wasn’t trying to one-up the man; she wanted him to realize that she understood. She focused on the loss of her team. The horror and pain.

  It was unpleasant for both of them, but she needed a bit of common ground with the man. And, if she achieved it, she fully intended to exploit it. Sure, she could have just ordered the man back to Ariminum (or outright hauled him back against his will), but she really preferred to convince him to go of his own free will. It was the only way that he might have a future as a Ranger and, yes, it was easier on her conscience.

  Late into the night, Ranthia finally called for sleep. She wasn’t entirely confident that the Ranger was ready to return to Ariminum—the man kept muttering about “making up for” surviving, which felt familiar enough to hurt—but she was (mostly) confident that he wasn’t going to sneak out during the night. The same tavern they had spent half the day in had rooms too, thankfully. The proprietor made a small ordeal out of it, since he insisted that they were his final three rooms which meant that he (with logic omitted) needed to add a surcharge. As if she was somehow unaware that there was no one else in any of the rooms. Not that it mattered much, five extra coins was nothing to her and, honestly, she was just fine with the man overcharging a little for rooms since he didn’t overcharge for booze.

  Everyone needed to make ends meet.

  A room for her, a room for the Ranger, and a room for the kid. Ranthia included the Ranger’s lost Ranger Team 13 in her nightly prayers to Xaoc (and, yes, she might have proven that Xaoc could still startle her by Speaking back to her while she was wrapping up her prayers—she was more than a bit mortified to have the Ranger pounding on her door to check on her after everything; she wasn’t that drunk). Then, with her completely routine prayers done, Ranthia settled in to get some sleep.

  Ranthia’s nightmares brought her back to the war. The troll twin fought her to a standstill while her base—her people—burned. The air was thick with smoke and blood as she struggled desperately, losing bits of herself in the process. A familiar pain that her dreams could effortlessly recreate.

  Waking up suddenly from the intensity of her nightmares was something that she had grown horrendously accustomed to. After so many years, she rarely even woke up in a cold sweat, let alone thrashed in her sleep. She had multiple witnesses that could attest to an uncomfortable expression on her face being the only clear sign of the quality of what her subconscious inflicted upon her.

  She was less accustomed to the nightmare continuing after her eyes were open.

  It was distant, but there was the undeniable stench of smoke and blood in the air.

  “Ranger! Gear up!” Ranthia roared as she snatched up her own equipment and worked to shift into a fresh body that had everything equipped.

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  Ranthia was about ready to throttle the city guard when she and Ranger… that guy (sigh) arrived at the governor’s villa to find it merrily burning and only one half-drunk guard staring confusedly at the sight. By Xaoc, why was incompetence so accursedly typical with guards?! The asshole wasn’t even trying to help the elderly injured man that was stumbling towards them from the estate.

  Thankfully, her Ranger was far less inept. The man rushed over to the elder, as Ranthia followed on his heels. A few moments later he had the man seated on the lawn a safe distance away and was encouraging their witness to take small sips of water from a proffered waterskin while plying him with questions.

  “She— she just started killing people.” The elderly man finally managed to get out.

  Yeah, that was enough.

  “Ranger, stay here,” Ranthia didn’t stop to let him protest. “I need you to gather a force of guards when they finally respond properly and come in after me. There should have been guards posted here, so whatever’s going on is blazing hot and I need to go fast and hard, and I can’t stay at your pace. Coordinated reinforcements are more valuable to me than a [Warrior] of your level.”

  “But you’re unarmed! At least take my sword!” The Ranger called after her.

  “I’m a Sentinel, I’m never unarmed!” Ranthia called back. She was already forming her knives as she ran.

  The entrance was awash in flames, but mundane fire wasn’t much of a threat to her vitality. Ranthia barreled straight through, and landed in a scene that felt like it could have been lifted straight out of her nightmares. There were bodies scattered about the grand open area of the villa—a mixture of slaves and guards—that Ranthia could see all too clearly through the smoke. [Vision of the Void] was proving to be something of a blessing and a curse.

  None of them were alive. There were no sounds of distress or breath from any of the immediate bodies. The only bubbles in the blood were from the heat of the encroaching flames. She was too late to do anything for these people, which meant that she needed to press forward. At the rate the flames were spreading, the villa itself would serve as the funeral pyre for the departed.

  Five more dead slaves. The wounds were brutal. A combination of blunt impact and tearing, but their throats had been slit too. Ranthia could only hope the slit throats came before the brutality.

  The stairs leading up to the governor’s family’s space had already collapsed from the flames, but Ranthia took a running start and leapt to the upper region of the home. The floor was a lot less stable, but (ironically) dancing mitigated the issue. [Rhythmic Grace] and [True Grace]—along with her raw dexterity—kept her footing light as she moved deeper into the estate.

  By that point, she had to hope the guards and the Ranger would have the sense to not try to come in after her—she had been wrong about the need for coordinated backup. Low-leveled people would only be needlessly imperiled with the villa in such dire condition. As the flames spread unchecked, there was a real risk of the entire place coming down on top of her. It was already dangerous enough to warrant a swift prayer.

  Please, Xaoc, let this place stand until I’m done. I really, really don’t want to find out if I’m durable enough to survive a collapsing building and the resulting blaze.

  A locked door was a promising sight, but when Ranthia sliced through the lock—there was no time to waste calling out for permission—she found only horror.

  The scent of blood and charring meat was omnipresent throughout the villa, and she had completely missed how badly the room reeked until after she processed what she saw through the thick smoke.

  There was a little girl, likely barely past her unlocking, laid on the floor with her head facing the wrong way. A once-beloved stuffed animal soaked with blood as it slowly charred to ash. A crib had been smashed.

  The baby was impaled on the broken wood of the crib.

  Fuck! Xaoc, please do what you can for these people… I… WHY?!

  Ranthia seldom lost her composure so utterly during prayer, but the sight was cruel and inhuman in the extreme. Children, brutally killed… There was never a justification. She wasn’t stupid, she knew that children died every day. Plagues, beasts, starvation, and tragic accidents were a fact of life. But such senseless cruelty… It grated on her in the extreme.

  Even the shimagu hadn’t been so damned egregious!

  Xaoc sent her a sense of comfort, which helped, a little, but she needed to proceed. She had to find who was responsible! The far door had been shattered, and Ranthia moved through it as fast as she dared. The estate was going to crumble soon, but she had heard a new sound that didn’t belong.

  Laughter.

  No matter what Xaoc had offered her, raw hatred was steadily filling her as she moved. She passed another dead woman—in once-fine clothes—whose body was already ablaze in a hall painted crimson with her blood. Then there was the corpse of another guard, in the finery that suggested he was likely the governor’s personal protector, that was missing his throat, and his spear was snapped in twain.

  But just beyond the dead bodyguard, the flooring had collapsed. She could hear the laughter from the room beyond. But a missing floor wasn’t enough to deter Ranthia. It was probably stupidly reckless, but she went through the walls necessary to circumvent the collapsed section.

  The room proved to be a bedroom that was once overladen with finery. Artwork, elaborately dyed draping cloths, and other treasures burned—fire cared not if fuel was valuable or worthless, it consumed all. But Ranthia only had eyes for a woman wearing a charred and bloodstained maid’s outfit that was laughing as she (poorly, which wasn’t entirely important) danced around a corpse that had been so brutalized that it was unrecognizable, cutting it again and again. The woman had two rusting iron chains wrapped around herself, and their ends snapped up to point at Ranthia as she tore through the wall, as if they were trained serpents.

  [Mage – Inferno] level 128, [Warrior – Metal] level 179.

  Ranthia’s role in such a situation was obvious. She was to identify herself as Sentinel Grace and demand the surrender of the obvious perpetrator. Questions could be asked after the woman was in custody.

  The thought never even crossed her mind.

  “Why?!” The word tore itself out of Ranthia’s throat as she came to a stop, glaring balefully at the psychotic maid.

  “Revenge.” The woman answered with a smile in the tone of voice usually used by women that had just fallen in love or gotten married or some other grand, intoxicating life event.

  “That’s not a fucking answer!” Ranthia all but snarled in retaliation.

  The smile disappeared from the woman’s face and her chains rattled threateningly. Yet she didn’t attack, instead she collapsed into a chair—as the floor creaked ominously—and sighed.

  “I used to ‘work’ here, you know. I was yet another slave, bought and owned. It was good, at first. I was his favorite.” She nodded to the remnants of the (presumed) man that she had abused. “I was young, I thought I was special. He touched me, he used me, the same as his wife. Our little secret.

  “And then he bought a new slave, younger and prettier. And I wasn’t his favorite anymore.”

  She barked a laugh that registered somewhere between bitter and utterly unhinged.

  “Things got bad after that. I never realized just how damned privileged I had been. Since I was no longer serving him, I became a tool. The other slaves hated me for what I had been when I was barely more than a child. They hurt me. But he… the man I loved like a fool forced others upon me at his whim. All while I had to smile through parties for VIPs. We hosted other governors, wealthy merchants, even a celebration for some Rangers who killed some stupid lizard. All while horrors continually unfolded between these same damned walls.

  “For twenty-four years I endured, unlike so many others, and then I bought my freedom. They were surprised when I came back for a visit. But not as surprised as I made them.”

  She smiled a pretty little smile, as if she was some na?ve waif and not a killer that had just brutally murdered thirty-two or so people.

  “And how does that excuse what you did to those children?!” Ranthia couldn’t even explain why she was engaging with the woman. It wasn’t like there was any possible answer that she could accept.

  “Oh, honey. I hated him. All of them. He ruined my life! I’ve thought of nothing but revenge since the day he threw me aside for that slut! His hateful face haunted me. Did you know he was dying? Some wasting illness [Healers] couldn’t touch. I only barely got my revenge in time! He couldn’t even come downstairs to greet me!

  “All the years I trained and fought beasts and plotted and struggled and bled and hated and he nearly took it all away from me!

  “I freed the other slaves the only way I knew how. They’ll never suffer again, though maybe I made a few that hurt me suffer a bit along the way. That was bad. But after that, I decided to pay a little visit to his family since he wouldn’t come to me. I hadn’t seen them in so long, you know. His lovely wife was always deaf to our screams. I made sure that I relished hers. Then there was pretty little Viria, the little tot that actually cried when I left! But I made sure she understood that I had never been her ‘friend’. And lo, he even had a son to carry on his wretched bloodline. No, that couldn’t be tolerated.

  “When something is rotten, you excise it. You cut away all the bad. Every last fucking bit. You don’t allow its seeds to sprout and fester and corrupt anew! What would you know?!”

  The woman suddenly found her feet again and moved closer to Ranthia. Her chains snapped taut, a mere hand’s breadth away from the Sentinel.

  The women glared at each other for a moment. Ranthia sorely considered putting a knife through the woman’s skull, but she began to speak again before Ranthia made up her mind.

  “I lived for this vengeance, Ranger. I needed it. I’ve got no quarrel with you though. I’m… done. It’s freeing. I planned for so long, I dreamt and hated and… I’m done.” The crazed woman sighed deeply as she stepped away from Ranthia.

  The woman was walking towards the collapsed floor. The fires had only grown grander and encroached further while the woman vented.

  “Have you ever hated someone so much that you felt a need to take revenge upon them? It takes something from you. You’re still young. Maybe remember that. Or don’t, what do I know, right?” The woman smiled a pained smile at Ranthia as she stepped backwards.

  The movements of a split-focus classer not yet level 200 felt glacial. Ranthia had plentiful time to make her decision. She could have captured the woman. The chains were likely obnoxious to most classers in Remus, but her Void-kissed adamantium would have made short work of them. She could have stopped her. She could have killed her and carried out ‘justice’ of some flavor.

  Instead, she let the woman throw herself into the conflagration below. Ranthia simply stepped close enough to watch the woman writhe in the flames until she was consumed by them.

  Bringing her in would have been pointless. A public execution was the only plausible outcome. Dead was dead, and the building was growing increasingly unstable. Hauling her out involved no small amount of risk.

  It was a rational decision.

  It certainly had nothing to do with Ranthia’s fleeting vision in the moment that the woman stepped over the edge.

  So, even when the building collapsed (an unnervingly short time after Ranthia leapt out the bedroom’s window), the fire still really wanted to spread. The fire brigade was a no-show since there was no profit to be had from the governor’s estate burning and the guards were incredibly inept. Ranthia even caught the captain of the guard ordering his people to make a wooden wall to try to contain the fire.

  Gods take guards. Seriously, she was done with them.

  Ranthia unceremoniously deposed the idiot and set the lone Ranger to work coordinating the guards. She just rushed between spreading flames and did her best to beat them back with the sodden blanket she wielded, while the Ranger tried to get the guards to choke out the larger blazes with buckets of sand.

  Ranthia could shift into clean bodies, but it seemed that her armor had absorbed the stench of smoke and ash. It was unpleasant, but she wasn’t about to forsake her armor for a tunic. She still needed to get back to Ariminum.

  At least her nameless Ranger seemed ready to go back too. Seeing her leap from a blazing building moments before it came down had bought one of them some proper sense.

  They took a quiet breakfast back at the tavern—okay, the food was bad, yes, but it was hard to care—then collected the kid and made their way to the docks after the kid retrieved a few belongings and decided against saying goodbye to his father (and after Ranthia bought some proper medical herbs to make a poultice to treat the Ranger’s old wounds). Once they got there, actually finding a ship bound for Ariminum proved to be surprisingly complicated.

  Yes, she had known that they would have to circumnavigate to the other side of the Nostrum, but she hadn’t expected “the winds are wrong” to be such an obstacle. Ocean might drown her (again) over it, but plainly she hadn’t paid enough attention during her sailing classes back in Ranger Academy a lifetime ago. The excuses from ship captains went over her head more often than not.

  The solution sat ill with her, but it was better than waiting indefinitely for a better wind or a higher-level captain that could provide his own wind. A ship with oars that extended from below the deck plainly meant that it was driven by slave labor, but it was headed west and planned to stop in Ariminum. It was their best solution, since she didn’t want to wait around, no matter how much she disliked exploiting slaves—even before whatever madness she had just witnessed arising out of slavery.

  The Ranger had recommended sending the kid to book passage, but unsurprisingly the kid got a “go away” price from the captain. There was a certain temptation to just walk up in front of the captain and casually drop 24 rods with a smile, yes, but Ranthia wasn’t carrying quite that much coin. Instead, she had the Ranger accompany her, while the kid trailed behind them, and they boarded the ship.

  “Good day, I was hoping we might negotiate a bit about the prices you quoted my assistant.” Ranthia opened cheerily.

  The captain (per the kid’s information) was staring at her with a stony expression. But the big, scarred man next to him went white as seafoam.

  No bet on which of them had [Identify].

  “Sentinel Grace. I’m accompanied by a veteran Ranger and my assistant here. I spent much of my life as an Adventurer, so I still have a decent sense of what a pair of classers are worth for added safety for the voyage.” Ranthia continued smoothly.

  The big, scarred man leaned in and whispered, far too loudly, to the captain.

  “I’ve never even seen red go that deep.”

  Seriously people, the hues and levels are not that complicated! Even if someone hadn’t seen a shade, she would have expected them to be able to extrapolate from what they knew. Also, seamen that travelled the Nostrum Sea were plainly spoiled compared to those that braved the Ocean.

  …So long as they didn’t enter the jurisdiction of the plant.

  “On both of ‘em?” The captain asked, his stony expression unchanged.

  Huh, maybe he just had resting stone face.

  “No, just the woman. The man’s about what you’d expect from a Ranger.” The scarred man clarified.

  The captain nodded.

  “A rod for the lot of ye.” He announced.

  “Thirty-two coins.” Ranthia countered. She didn’t care about the money, but the captain was plainly aiming to haggle. If she had just paid him the rod, he would have been unimpressed.

  She had gotten spoiled, but there were many in the world who derided those that solved all their problems with flagrant displays of wealth.

  “Fifty-six and I’ll feed ye once a day.”

  “Oh, only one meal? Sixteen coins then.”

  “Feh! Not worth my time or space. Forty-eight coins, two meals a day. Final offer.”

  Ranthia was on the cusp of reaching out for his hand to agree, but she smiled.

  “Thirty-six coins, and I’ll personally guarantee that no dangerous beast will even get to touch your vessel while I’m aboard.” Ranthia boasted.

  What were the odds of her regretting that on the Nostrum Sea?

  “Deal!” The captain announced just before Ranthia managed to realize (and regret) the implications of that thought.

  Oh Xaoc, she knew better than to jinx herself like that!

  fan content license provided by !

  https://patreon.com/CrimCat

  https://discord.gg/3BQB5YJpHs

  https://patreon.com/CrimCat

  https://ko-fi.com/crimcat

  Nozomi Matsuoka.

  Sarah "Neila" Elkins.