Tim's POV [level 47]
The maid delivered the message to me, as I returned with Hejinmal.
"There are Adventurers waiting for you in the office, sir"
I went to check with the mild curiosity, as I pushed the door open, and found Rigrit Barlette Caurau [level 51] and Evileye [level 50] sitting in the two chairs across from my desk.
I had been expecting this visit. Not today specifically, the timing was really bad for me. but the visit itself had been inevitable since the night in the Blue Rose meeting room, and I had spent a portion of the intervening weeks preparing for several different versions of how it might go.
Evileye pointed at my right hand before I had fully entered the room. Her finger tracked the ring with the precision, and the look she directed at Rigrit were the words of someone confirming a conclusion they had already reached.
Rigrit looked at me.
The look had the quality of someone who had a great deal of patience. She was very old and her eyes showed the accumulation of that age in the way that eyes showed it in people. She asked, with a pleasantness that was entirely genuine and entirely implacable, for her ring back.
I said no.
The pleasantness remained. Evileye's hand moved toward making a spell. I raised my hand and asked them, whether we could take this outside the city.
"I don't want civilians involved," I said. "Whatever happens between us, it should happen somewhere that doesn't produce collateral."
Rigrit looked at me for a moment, then stood. "Agreed, than."
---
We walked through the city. The children of the orphanage who saw us pass as they played, received no indication that anything unusual was occurring. I kept my pace matched to theirs and thought about what I was going to do.
Rigrit asked her question somewhere near the city's eastern gate. Why had I stolen the ring.
I told her the truth.
"Power is everything in this world," I said. "If I want to do any form of good, then I need power in all its forms. The ring is one of the few items in this world that helps with that. So I need it."
Evileye said that this fight is going to be pointless. As both she and Rigrit were each stronger than me.
"I'm stronger than I look," I said.
She appeared unconvinced. Rigrit appeared thoughtful, which was a different and more concerning response.
We went far enough from the city that the our battle can begin.
---
The fight began with Rigrit summoning simple undeads, as I understood that the undead were not going to threaten me directly but they would control space and buy her the time to do the things that would threaten me directly. Evileye began buffing simultaneously.
*Smite* on my blade.
The holy light covered the sword with the warm white glow that the paladin class produced, and I moved through the undead with the efficiency of that combination, the smite damage against undead was categorical rather than proportional, the evil-detection system of the ability responding accordingly. They cleared in seconds.
Evileye had her crystal wall up before I reached her, the spell forming between us, the crystal structure catching the smite-covered blade and distributing the force.
They both used Fly, as they went to the air.
I watched them rise with the assessment of someone calculating distance and trajectory and the gap between what I could reach with a jump.
As I jumped.
The calculation had been correct in terms of force, but was stopped by an undead that came under the ground, grabbing my legs in, as they held me long enough to stop me. I killed them and looked up at where Rigrit and Evileye were circling above me with the comfortable security of altitude.
Two on one, both airborne. My tier seven angel should help me greatly equalised this, as both Rigrit and Evileye have very low karma.
I reached for the crystal, and raised it to the air to summon my beloved angle.
"Time to make this a fair two vs two match, as flying is bullshit, and with that, I summon MY ANGL... huh?"
My hand was empty.
I looked at my empty hand.
Rigrit was holding my crystal, fifty metres above me, As She mocking saying something about this being the best spell she had made, as her smile had the quality of genuine satisfaction on it.
I had not seen her cast, was it a quick spell.?. I had not felt the effect land. The crystal had simply ceased to be in my hand and appeared in hers, and I had no idea when the transfer had occurred or what the spell's mechanism was, and this spell stopped me form using items, which meant I had a very serious problem.
Worse: if she knew what was in my magic sack, she would find the tomb's entire contents. Every player item. Everything I had taken from the Theocracy.
The calculus resolved instantly.
I had to kill her NOW.
I used Every Buff I knew. Limit Breaker, the familiar terrible clarity of operating without the brain's protective governors. Limit Breaker: Mind, and the world became very clear and very simple.
Rigrit raised the crystal.
The tier seven angel unfolded above the field as an enormous, luminous, the specific quality of something that existed at a scale the surrounding environment had to reorganise itself to accommodate.
She told it to use its strongest spell on me.
The angel charged a spell. I moved. another undead poped form the ground and grabbed my legs again.
The beam of pure light hit me.
---
White light. Total saturation. The specific quality of high-tier holy magic at full expression, the kind of light that didn't illuminate things so much as replace them temporarily with itself.
It passed.
I came out of it unharmed as I jumped up, the smite-covered blade aimed at Rigrit's neck, the trajectory calculated during the beam's duration, the movement beginning the moment the saturation cleared.
She teleported.
The swing passed through where she had been with the commitment of a strike that had been fully intended behead her, and I was already adapting, as I summon a tier one angle under me, the tier one angel materialised under my feet at my direction, the holy being providing the platform I needed, and I launched from its back toward where Rigrit had appeared, as I knew she can't teleport again, as there is a cool down to that spell.
The Crystal Lance hit me from the left.
Evileye's intervention. The spell connected with enough force to redirect my trajectory, and I hit the ground and rolled and came up already assessing the revised situation.
They were keeping distance. Much Higher. Moving to maintain it. The Limit Breaker was running and this skill would last forever, and they knew this, Evileye had said it clearly enough during my fall, the strategy of simply waiting visible in how they were managing the engagement. Keep distance. Let the timer run. Let the cost hit me.
I tried seven different approaches to closing the distance in the time that remained.
All seven failed in different ways. Rigrit's spell repertoire was deeper than I had assessed, and Evileye's crystal magic was better defensive support than I had given it credit for, and two people who had been working together for decades had a combat coordination that individual capability didn't account for, as I tried and failed my excape, Damn Evileye crystal magic, as the undead can't slow me down.
The Limit Breaker ended.
I had approximately two seconds of awareness of what was coming before it arrived, the simultaneous failure of every system the ability had been overriding, the muscles tearing in the comprehensive way that Limit Breaker debt always produced when it came due, the bones following, the body presenting the invoice for everything I had asked of it in the preceding minutes.
The grass received me.
The sky was above me and it was very far away and then it wasn't there anymore, as my world turned black.
---
Rigrit Bers Caurau's POV
I watched Tim fall and land in the grass with the weight of a body that had comprehensively stopped cooperating with its owner's intentions, and Evileye asked me if his skill had killed him.
this person who had stolen my ring and fought us with genuine killing intent, but had confirmed as genuinely good by the most objective moral assessment tool available, as the angle's holy beam didn't do any damage.
I found this interesting, a hero in the making, but he takes risks way too quickly.
I took the ring from his finger, which was bent at an angle fingers weren't meant to bend, and put it back on my own hand where it had been for decades.
I told the angel to heal the worst injuries that were going to kill him. Leave the rest. He had earned this beatdown.
Evileye asked why I was healing someone who had tried to kill her multiple times.
I explained the holy light didn't harm him at all, he most be a really nice guy, and I don't kill nice pretty young men.
Evileye looked down at the armour and said there was power magic on it. I told her to leave it, the dwarf kingdom's involvement meant the armour had documented provenance and taking it had diplomatic implications that weren't worth pursuing. The magic sack was a different option, if she wanted his coins than she can take it.
She declined. Saying the money in it was for the orphans. Said she had seen the orphanage and the children in it and had never seen a happier group of children in her long life.
Evileye had been an orphan. I knew this because I had known Evileye for a very long time and I knew most things about her that she had ever allowed to be visible.
I asked her if she has a crush on the young lad.
She ignored me and walked away down the road with the dignity of someone who had decided that ignoring the statement her best move, as she looked annoyed at my teasing.
I pocketed the angel crystal. The ring settled back onto my finger with the familiar warmth of the wild magic reconnecting. I looked at Tim in the grass, the tier seven angel's partial work visible in the places where the worst damage had been addressed, as his limbs bend back into place.
I followed Evileye down the road, thinking about what kind of place Tim grew up in, to turn him like this.
---
Tim
LeveL: [42]