Chapter Text
"I mean, a maple tree? On this side of the Jeralls? Right next to the road to Elinhir? That thing is ancient, someone would have noticed it by now!"
Bosmer, male, wearing a fur vest and pants, carrying a hunting bow and a dagger on his belt.
"Yeah, that's weird, sure. You know what else is weird? Whatever the fuck those things are!"
Orsimer, male, iron armor in the iconic Skyrim style, iron mace and wooden shield. Currently gesturing off down the driveway, presumably at my family's cars.
"Of course the elf would miss the real treasure for the trees."
Nord, female, fur... tube top and shorts - well, it's a hot day for me, must be worse for her - greatsword on her back.
"Let's not make this a mer versus man thing now," the orc replies casually as the wood elf sputters.
"Bah, you're barely an elf anyway, Grorum," she retorts, waving it off.
"I'm just saying," the wood elf rejoins with grit teeth as he pulls himself together, "this place didn't just get built since the last time we came through. A tree like that would have to have been relocated with powerful magic."
"Maybe," Grorum - apparently - answers. "Though I could have guessed that from those...dwemer?...whatevers. So we're either dealing with a mage or someone rich enough to hire them."
"Hmm. Can't be old money," the nord comments. "The gardens are a mess and the buildings are pretty broken down." Excuse me. "Old money would have staff for that, but new money might be crazy enough to waste it all on weird nonsense like all this."
"Especially if they were a lucky adventurer," adds the bosmer, face falling. "Fuck. This might be too dangerous for us."
Yes! Perfect, just leave.
"Are you serious, Cadein?" the woman mocks. "Afraid of some fool who probably just found some old jewelry in a moldering ruin somewhere?"
"Adventurers are no joke, especially if they're mages," Grorum comments.
"They're just folk. Bleed when you cut 'em."
"If you reach them before they cook you. And there might be traps, guardians. Those things could come to life and maul us."
"Bet?" She walks out of sight, and, from the sound of it, gives my stepfather's sedan a good kick. The others tense, but relax when nothing happens. "I think it's some kind of vehicle? It's got wheels, and seats inside, and a wheel inside like on a ship, for steering. No clue how it moves, though."
"I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't risk all our lives on a hunch every day," Cadein gripes.
"More than a hunch. Who puts glass windows on a sentry machine?"
"That's...actually a keen observation. Didn't know you had it in you."
The woman - whose name I still haven't caught - huffs as she walks back to the other two. "You cowards satisfied? Come on, think about it. First raid on a strange place like this? No way there won't be something worth our while. And the weirdness basically makes us adventurers on principle, which evens the odds, right? The three of us can kill whoever lives here, no problem."
The two mer look at each other for a moment, probably considering her bizarre logic. Then Cadein shrugs with a sheepish grin. "Too damn curious. Might as well!"
"Fine," Grorum replies with finality. "But if you get us all killed, you get to explain to the boss."
The nord laughs, and the three begin dropping their packs, readying their weapons, and looking around.
Fuck. Damnit. Well, time to make a choice.
Option one, I call out to them, play it friendly, give them whatever they want and convince them I'm too useful to shank. I can think of a few approaches that might work, but none are foolproof, and all likely lose me quite a bit of stuff, freedom, or, you know, blood.
Option two, try to stay hidden or sneak out. This would be better if they weren't planning to ransack the place, and if I wasn't trapped on the second floor. Go down the stairs, I run straight into them. Try to go out a window, make tons of noise, probably break an ankle, get shot in the back trying to hobble away. Lose all my stuff, freedom, and blood, or maybe switch to one or three but with a devastating penalty.
Option three, use the element of surprise and the meager weaponry and defenses on hand to kill them before they kill me. Odds aren't great, but they're not zero. If I'm very lucky, I keep my stuff - and get theirs - my freedom, and most of my blood. Lose my as yet flawless record of not murdering or being murdered, but, well. Even if they had left, I wouldn't be in a good position to keep that for much longer, not here.
I take a deep breath and let it out, eyes closed. This could be the last real choice I ever make. What can I live with, if I succeed? What can I die with, if I fail?
When I open my eyes and look down at them, I have to brush away the sensation of deja vu. I get it all the time, but really brain? You think this has happened to us before?
With another long inhalation, I draw the arrow nocked on my compound bow to my ear.
Three targets. The nord has the most skin exposed, making a disabling shot most likely. I don't trust the target points on my ammo to pierce the orc's armor and meaningfully hurt him; hitting his exposed neck will be hard but likely easier now than when he starts running. The wood elf's furs I probably can pierce, and he negates my range advantage, but I still have the height advantage, so maybe-
He's looking at me. The bright sunlight outside my dark room and maple leaves between us obscured me before, but now he's looking more carefully and his eyes are widening as he spots me sighting down on him through my open window.
That's a choice made for me. I loose.
The bandit goes down screaming, my arrow buried deep in his belly, only kept from piercing through by the steep angle I shot from. He crumples and curls up on his side, blood staining the plants under the maple tree.
"Cadein!" Grorum cries to no coherent response. The orc quickly spots where the shot came from and raises his shield to defend himself, not that I've managed to even think of shooting again by now.
"Come on!" The nord woman grabs him by the arm and runs around the corner of the house, out of sight, before I can gather myself and consider what to do next.
The elf is still gasping but he's no threat now, and while I hate to leave him in pain there's no time to put him out of his misery with his companions rushing towards the doors. I stumble out of my bedroom and into the hallway, managing to draw and nock another arrow on my third try. Five more shots.
The old front door of the farmhouse from before the extension was built, long before we moved in, is not only locked but also caulked shut and twenty inches off the ground with most of its old stoop missing, but I don't expect any of that to stop a determined orc from breaking through for long. Still, it holds up to his first few strikes; since the door is right at the bottom of the straight staircase, I have plenty of time to draw and line up another shot. There's a pause in the assault, and after a bit of unintelligible shouting, the nord runs off toward the porch and the unfortunately unlocked main door to the living room. Three more crashes and the door caves in, knocking aside the plants we keep in front of it.
All that time waiting, adrenaline pumping, and I'm not quick enough to realign my aim for his exposed neck before he can raise his shield. My arrow bites into and through the wood, but not enough to do any harm. Four shots left, but no time to draw another. For the first time in my life I sincerely wish I were the sort of American to own a gun despite living in one of the safest parts of the country.
I toss aside my bow through my sister's doorway and pick up my bokken. It's tourist tat I picked up at Mt Fuji when I was a teenager, and I have absolutely no sword training apart from a few weeks of foil years even before that, but it's still a sturdy-ish length of oak and the best melee weapon I have on hand. Doesn't stop my heart from feeling like it's trying to leap up my throat and out my mouth before my inevitable painful death, but I shakily assume my best attempt at a forward guard as the orc warrior charges up the stairs.
Eyes focused on me and preparing to bash aside my pitiful defense, he never notices the shampoo I've smeared across the top two steps. When he reaches them, his balance is ruined and he flails his arms to catch himself, reared back. Perfect. All I have to do is place the tip of my wooden sword against his chest and shove with everything I've got, and he goes flying back down the steep flight. He lands helmeted head first with a snap audible even over the crash of armor, grunts out his last breath, and lays still.
I wince, staring down at him. I'd long felt like those stairs were bound to kill someone sooner or later, but I'd expected it to be me, and never really pictured the aftermath.
"Bastard!" the last bandit screams from the direction of the living room, snapping me out of my daze. I glance at my bow, but in what seems like a heartbeat she's charged across the dining room, stepped over her fallen friend, and grabbed her greatsword halfway up the blade to use like a spear as she runs toward me with a battlecry.
The notion strikes me to throw clothes or blankets onto the stairs to make them harder to climb, and I curse under my already ragged breath for only having thought of it now, too late. Just in time, I turn her sword aside with mine rather than be impaled, but it slides down the guardless wooden blade, and the push cut of her continued charge slices into the meat of my left index finger. I scream at the pain, drop my bokken, and stagger back into the guest room doorway.
Whether by perception or dumb luck, she avoids the shampoo trap completely, and stops at the top of the stairs. The narrow hallway and door frame stop her from bringing her greatsword to bear, but not from delivering a left backhand to my forehead that lands me on my back on the guest room's double bed.
I gasp desperately for air, blinking at the blurry figure slowly stalking towards me, right hand groping for one of the kitchen knives tucked into my belt. My vision clears to the sight of her vicious, victorious grin. Even in the relatively open bedroom, she can't fully raise her sword for an overhead swing, but she's drawn it back for a straight thrust.
I lunge forward just before she stabs, batting the blade aside with my left arm and thrusting with my right. The greatsword mangles my forearm and bicep both, but my knife sinks into her guts.
My momentum carries me into her as her knees buckle, and we both crumple to the floor in a wailing pile of limbs. She's taller, but I'm heavier, and I'm on top. I landed on my right side; needing to bring my right arm to bear, I try to roll over her onto my left as she struggles to push me off of her. My ruined arm collapses under even a hint of weight, and landing on it hurts so much worse than the cut did, but somehow through the blinding agony I'm able to rip my knife out of her and bring it back down again, and again.
Her struggles to lift me stop. With a moan, I push against the embedded knife to wrench myself up onto my knees; the world almost goes black as my somewhat reduced blood rushes from my upright head. Moments feel like minutes as I sway against the side of the bed, but once light returns and I can see again - she's still moving!
Her right arm lies limp, hilt barely staying in her slack grasp, but her left is slowly reaching for her belt. I panic, groping for my own second knife, but she wasn't going for a dagger: a large red vial clears her belt pouch and tumbles into the expanding pool of blood on the floor. I stare numbly for a few moments before comprehension dawns, bringing terror and hope. With nearly everything I have left I turn and plunge my second knife into her throat, then scramble for the vial. Eventually I manage to pull the cork with my teeth, spit it aside, and pour the healing potion down my throat.
It's thin and lightly flavored in the way that always makes me shiver with disgust. Beyond the metal taste of blood that covered the vial it tastes something like watered-down beer, without alcohol. I struggle to swallow it all, but relief is quick: a wave of warmth shoots through my body and I can feel the wounds all over my left arm knitting shut. The magic leaves me with a dull ache and a bit of wooziness from blood loss, but I'm no longer bleeding. Relief floods my mind.
Coherent, conscious thought returned to me around the same moment the nord woman's gurgling attempts to breathe finally ceased. I swallowed a sudden sob as the weight of what I had done crashed over me. When I tried to stand, I slipped a bit on the blood and landed sitting on the bed. I killed her. I killed her, brutally, and I never even learned her name. I buried my face in my hands, staining it with her blood and my own, and lost myself to violent, wracking weeping.
After perhaps a minute or two, I got to my feet, wrenched my gaze away from the horror I'd done, and plodded out into the hallway. Sooner or later I'd have to clean up, but for now I needed to assess the situation, and give myself some time to refocus. Once I'd gotten my breathing under some semblance of control and fought off the urge to lie down for a nap, I slowly turned to look right, down the stairs, to my next murder scene.
The orc - Grorum - still lay in a startlingly unnatural sprawl, but at the very least there was no blood that I could see. That somehow made it easier to keep moving as I grabbed the banister and started to descend, just remembering to step around my own shampoo trap. My left arm burned a bit where it had been wounded, but it stayed strong enough to support me, and I most certainly needed it, still trembling and exhausted from the adrenaline wearing off, though I was recovering quickly.
Once at the bottom I spent another moment just staring at the corpse, wondering at how close I'd come to death. If Grorum hadn't fallen, or if he'd been able to get up again, would I have had any chance at all of fighting him off with a fucking bokken and two kitchen knives? I'm still not sure how I survived the fighting I'd actually had to do. Why the fuck had I thought this was anything like a good idea?
Finally I reached down, grabbed the rim of his shield, and jerked it upward to try to break it from his grasp. It had been laying on top of him, covering his belt; if the nord woman had a healing potion, he might have another, and anyway I wanted my arrow back.
Thud.
I blink. There are two arrows in the shield, and one of them isn't mine.
"S'wit!"
Or maybe, you idiot, the bandit you left mortally wounded but conscious had a potion.
He's standing in the driveway, out the still-open door, shaky and bloodstained but upright and reaching for another arrow. Energy spiking again, I dash to the side - shit, maybe I should have charged him - using the shield and the dining room table for cover. Another arrow crashes through the bay window - if he broke my sister's stained glass I'll kill him, I think, redundantly - but goes off course, way over my head and landing somewhere in the kitchen behind me. I make another dash through the doorway to the living room, twist, and slam into the wall between the standing coat rack and the open main door to the porch, knocking down the calendar we keep there. I stick out the shield at roughly chest level and sure enough another arrow slams into it, knocking it from my hand to bounce off the entryway flagstones and roll onto the living room carpet.
Can't let him pin me; it's now or never.
Sprinting out the door, I reach for the splitting maul but grasp the shovel instead, jangling the wind chime with its long handle. It'll do. Cadein already has another arrow nocked, and, with sudden terror, rushes to draw as I charge towards him. Before he can point it at me, I swing the long shovel like a baseball bat, catching him right in the ear with the back of the step. The arrow sails high and wild as he tumbles face first into the sand. Without hesitation I lift the shovel high and swing it down into the back of his head, then twice, three, four times, and finally, with a cry somewhere between a shout and a scream, stab down with the pointed blade.
My hands shook. All of me shook. His skull was a ruin. Blood had sprayed the sand, gravel, and sparse plants of the driveway. I let the shovel go, and it took its sweet time falling, coming out of the wound with a sucking sound that reminded me of digging in wet beach sand as a child. I turned around, took one step, fell to my hands and knees, and vomited.