Technomancer: Birth of a Goddess

Chapter 130 – Dead or Alive

Leaving Podrick to his own devices, Emily deftly weaves away through the crowd, borrowing from her observations of The Crystal Skull’s members to slip unnoticed between the densely packed people. She heads deeper into the bustling market before moving towards the edge and following a shady-looking, cloaked figure, slipping into a side alley close behind them.

She walks silently through the alley as it curves away from the market street, pressing herself flush against the wall and hiding in the shadows when the person ahead glances back to check for a tail. Having failed to spot Emily, the cloaked man turns to stop before a door and flips his hood down, revealing a rough face with a gnarly scar running from his chin to his ear. He knocks on the door twice before pushing it open and vanishing into the building.

The moment he leaves the alley, Emily quietly approaches the door he entered, scanning her surroundings for onlookers and finding nothing. She looks over the worn wooden door with a rusted dagger bolted in the centre, seeing no gaps or peepholes to spy her through, before pressing her ear to it. Inside the building, she hears faint music, overwhelmed by the sound of heavy boot-fall, indistinct chatter, and the occasional crash or shout.

Standing away from the door, Emily reaches for the handle, twisting it slowly and pushing, to find the door completely unlocked.

Music and an open door. Hopefully, this is a pub or something, not a private organisation’s gathering point.

Emily pushes the door open, reaching up with her free hand to adjust the scarf wrapped around her head, narrowing the slit she can see through to make sure nothing but her eyes are visible. As she steps inside the sound stops abruptly and the room falls into complete silence. Her gaze quickly darts about, and she takes in the large room filled with tables and shifty, rough-looking people with an assortment of weapons on display, along with the busy, well-stocked bar and quickly confirms her guess.

A pub.

She steps forward into the room and shuts the door behind her, and the music instantly starts again, the small three-person band standing on a raised stage in the corner beginning again without hesitation. No one else returns to their usual activity though, all of them silently watching Emily with bated breath, hands reaching for weapons, as she slowly walks towards the bar.

With a silent, relaxed gait, Emily calmly moves past tables, filled with bulky men and women twice her size, without sparing them a second glance, her eyes locked on the bar ahead and the large board beside it covered in neat parchment. Nobody moves to attack her, but every eye in the room follows her with dripping caution and hostility, and a few knives are drawn by the small group who move to block the exit.

“Excuse me, but it’s common courtesy to remove your face covering before entering,” the scrawny barkeep says with a tight smile as she approaches.

Emily doesn’t answer straight away, instead, she scans the parchment wall. She reads several notes offering jobs to protect certain buildings, protect merchant crews on their travels, hunt certain desert creatures, and even a few to kill particular people. Pinned at the top of the board, however, is a particularly ornate note, with expensive-looking gold detailing and two crests: one of the royal family; and the other of house Hedera, the house with ruling rights to Ashdon. The centre of the parchment has a well-drawn sketch of Emily, her hair still as long as when she returned from The Glade, and the rest reads:

Wanted (A):

Dead or Alive

Emily Coldstone

Reward: 5,000G (Or resource equivalent)

Description: 17, 180cm, brown hair, green left eye, blue right eye

Notes: Always armed; highly dangerous; warn closest noble family if found, do not engage (1/5 reward to informant upon successful capture).

Crimes: Treason, mass murder, mass destruction of property

They got my height wrong. Guess that’s probably the boots.

“It may be,” Emily finally responds as she looks away from her wanted poster, the tension in the bar palpable. “But I doubt you’d like what would happen if I did.”

The barkeep finally meets her eyes, his focus flickering between both her exposed irises before he glances at the poster she was just staring at and recognition dawns on his face. His whole body goes taut and a bead of sweat rolls down his brow as he flicks his hand in a dismissive gesture and turns to point to the wall of bottles behind him.

“Can I interest you in anything?” he asks with a nervous cough to clear his throat.

Emily slides into an empty seat at the bar, ignoring the quiet mumblings returning to the room as the tension relaxes and everybody finally looks away from her, the people blocking the door returning to their seats with their weapons stowed.

It seems he has control over everyone here despite how anxious he looks.

“Give me something a little, dangerous,” she says, distorting her voice with a touch of machina to emphasise her words with a cold, inhuman hiss, enjoying the visible shiver that runs down the barkeep’s spine. “I want something to properly compliment that warm welcome.”

The barkeep nods without a word and manages to keep his hands stable as he grabs a wide glass and sets it down in front of Emily. He picks up two bottles of liqueur and pours them both into the glass, forming a murky blend of amber and white before crushing up a dry, pale root and dropping it in. Next, he reaches under the bar and lifts up a large jar of a translucent, blue-tinted liquid with a fist-sized, black and brown scorpion suspended in the centre, twitching occasionally as its tail leaks a bright blue venom that falls to the bottom of the jar to create a deadly layer of toxins.

The barkeep opens the lid and carefully dips a small shot glass into the shimmering liquid before placing it on the bar in front of Emily, beside the first glass.

“That’s a venom bomb,” he says while closing the scorpion jar, visibly relaxing a little as he starts to explain. “You drink it by dropping the smaller glass into the larger and drinking them both. If you drink them separately you-“

“Feel your throat close up for a few seconds before the antidote works, right?” Emily cuts him off, keeping him on edge as she picks up the shot glass and pulls her scarf down to uncover her mouth before downing it. “That’s a desert choker you’re extracting venom from.”

She sets down the empty glass and, to the horror of the barkeep, she slowly raises the second to her nose and takes a deep breath in.

“Then this is the antidote,” she whispers in a dangerous hiss, swirling the drink and forcing her throat to remain open as the venom tries to close it. “I’m guessing the white liqueur was made from acradine petals, the yellow burnroot sap, and the root is from a starving mesquite.”

She takes a long, slow sip from the glass, letting the cold liquid soothe her throat before she sets the empty glass back down.

“Am I right?”

“Y- Yes,” the barkeep stammers, visibly unsettled by her display. “The liqueurs hold all of the ingredients to make an anti-venom. Most of my customers just assume the root I drop in is the antidote, never realising that it’s the many pieces coming together in harmony that truly saves them.”

“It’s a very smart drink,” Emily praises, a predatory grin stretching her lips as she fixes the man with a cold stare and gestures to the room around them with a nod. “Do you believe your many pieces could come together in time to save you?”

“No,” the barman says with a shake of his head, reaching up to loosen his collar. “Some poisons are too strong for normal ingredients to combat.”

“Very smart indeed,” Emily says with a nod, lifting her scarf to cover her face again.

The barkeep takes her gesture as a good sign and lets out a tired sigh, his tightly strung shoulders dipping as he seems to deflate.

“Look, I understand the danger of an A rank threat. If we try to attack you, we’ll all die. Despite having the poster up, we really don’t want any trouble with you. As far as we’re concerned, you were never here. Any enemy of the kingdom is a friend of ours,” he says, mixing another venom bomb for Emily as he continues, the action helping to calm him down, aided by Emily’s lack of immediate response. “Please just tell me what you want and then leave. No one but me even saw your eyes or face, and I won’t say anything to the Hederas about you being here. None of my patrons will bother you while you're in the city too, I can promise you that.”

Emily stays silent as he finishes, watching him add the final touches to the drink he slides across the counter to her. She picks up the shot of venom slowly as she considers his request.

It would reduce the risk to our crew if I either kill him or reset after I get what I want, but I doubt we’ll be able to hide our route from the kingdom even if we don’t visit any cities on our way, so it probably won’t matter even if he tells someone I was here.

She drops the shot glass into the larger glass, watching the swirling white mist within the amber liquid take on a blue hue as the venom disperses.

“Tell me everything you’ve been told about me,” she says, looking up from the glass and not drinking it yet.

“Of course,” the barkeep says with relief, polishing a glass to keep his hands busy. “I don’t know much honestly. Some enforcers from house Hedera came in and gave me that poster, and all they said is that you’re an enemy of their family who destroyed one of their allies.”

“So, you weren’t told anything other than what’s on that poster?”

“No.”

“What does the poster tell you that makes you so scared of me then? What does that A rank mean?”

“A rank means a threat that could level a city. The only people given that ranking when they become wanted are powerful nobles or soldiers from other countries, and even then, it's rare. I’ve only ever seen two posters with the same ranking, and one of them was when a bounty was placed on Morzea’s guardian, Bellmont.”

Emily raises a brow at the name, pride pulling at the corners of her lips.

Christian Belmont, the right hand of Morzea’s current leader and a fourth circle mage. Did they give me the same danger ranking as a fourth circle mage?

“Even with everyone in here,” the barkeep continues, “I’d never risk an A rank request. Maybe a B at a push if the reward was worth it. Speaking of the reward, that’s the other thing that flagged you as an unapproachable threat. If the rank wasn’t enough, the note about resource equivalent is a dead giveaway that you’re one of those with special powers.”

“Special powers?” Emily inquires.

“Yeah, special powers. You don’t stay in this business for as long as I have without realising there are strange forces at work in the world,” he says with conspiratorial enthusiasm, leaning towards Emily despite his obvious fear of her and speaking faster. “There’s a lot of debate over what it is exactly that you noble folk do: some say it’s magic; some say you breed with monsters and aren’t even human anymore; some say you’re all aliens and never were human in the first place! Hell, I think a few of my best patrons are less than human, but they refuse to tell me anything when I ask. They get really touchy about it. Anyway, no matter what it is, the existence of these special powers is kind of an open secret, and that suggestion of equivalent resources lets other special people know they’re after one of their own.”

So, the criminals of the country do know of magic, but not what it is. I guess only normal commoners are still in the dark.

The bartender goes quiet, setting down the glass he was polishing and picking up another, waiting for Emily to say something. Silently, she picks up the mixed glass on the table and swirls it around, opening a tiny hole in the net of machina around her heart to let out a small stream of mana.

They aren’t giving out any information about me at least, and even my description isn’t completely accurate. It seems like they’ve just given the bare minimum for people to report when they see me, and if they suspect I’m on Calypso, they still haven’t publicly announced it. I guess it’s reasonable since no mortal or weak lone mage would be able to stop me.

“Is that all you know?” Emily asks, noticing two of the bar’s patrons flinching and glancing over as her mana signature is momentarily revealed.

“Yes!” the barkeep responds with a firm nod.

Emily recovers her heart and directs the released mana to her hand, focusing on her understanding of ice and attributing it as it flows from her skin, wrapping the glass in a frigid air that forms condensation on the outside and small crystals of ice in the liquid within. The bartender’s eyes open wide as he watches Emily raise the glass to her lips, pulling down her scarf before downing the drink and setting the ice-cold glass down.

“It’s magic,” she says with a nod and a dramatic flex of machina in her voice, before covering her face again and turning to leave.

The barkeep stands in stunned silence with his mouth slightly agape as she walks out, and none of the bar’s patrons move to stop her. The room goes quiet again as she opens the door to leave, but after she shuts it behind herself, she hears the hubbub quickly build within. She moves away from the pub with purpose, walking further away from the market and pretending not to notice the two forms that follow her out into the alley.

I guess these are his less-than-human patrons. So much for none of them will bother me.

Emily slips out of view into another alley and waits for her pursuers to catch up while using her machina to burn off the remnants of the alcohol she drank.

I didn’t think it would affect me at all, but I guess mixing a magical venom and several other magic plants boosted its strength.

Emily presses herself into a shadow against the wall as two people in dark cloaks come round the corner, moving closer with hurried steps.

They aren’t very good at tailing someone, I could hear their feet from across a field. And they aren’t observant. They aren’t professionals.

The moment they step within a few metres of her, Emily bursts out of the darkness, her arms reaching forward to clasp both men by the throats. They both panic and start struggling, grasping at Emily’s hands instead of attacking her.

“Idiots,” she mutters, clamping down harder and ejecting the blades at her wrists until the cold edges of her Claws press against their throats. “Stop struggling or these go through you.”

Both men freeze immediately at her threatening hiss, raising their hands up in surrender.

“Remove your hoods.”

They both comply as Emily eases her grip a little, letting them breathe but still holding fast. As their hoods drop, recognition flashes through Emily’s eyes and she can’t help but laugh.

“Jeremy? Kyle? Haha, this is too good,” she says as she releases them and steps back. “Did you guys get kicked out of your families or something?”