Corven dangled upside down, limbs useless as the rough-hewn stone cuffs locked them in place; courtesy of Sam. His face was bruised and pale, and just beneath his head was a small puddle of blood. A faint whimper slipped out of his mouth, but as it did, he caught himself and prevented yet another from slipping out.
Deacon leaned against a column opposite him, with his arms crossed, and a boot braced casually on the stone. Sam sat to the side, lost in thought while doing his best to go over the mana readings he'd catalogued while observing the barrier the orange banner created to block off the banshees. Jass, meanwhile, had her eyes on Corven the entire time, fingers tapping idly on the hilt of a dagger she'd taken off Deacon's belt five minutes ago, and had yet to give it back.
"So, let me ask again, are you in a team with Corben, Consta, and Conrad?" Deacon said, voice flat, more a statement than a question. "If you lie one more time, I won't stop my partner here from stuffing them family raisins of yours in your mouth."
Corven hesitated. "I–"
Jass tilted her head slightly, dagger glinting in the torchlight, while Deacon raised an eyebrow.
"Yes! Fine!" Corven spat out the word, trembling. "Yes, I was with them."
"…We were in the same Party, and part of the same household, Household Uppörvun… I'm sure you've heard of us; hence, you shouldn't kill me," he said, pleading towards the end. "Or, my cousins."
"Can't say we care," Sam grumbled without looking up.
"If you let me go," Corven pressed, voice growing more desperate now, "no harm will come to you. My household will not pursue you three, you have my word."
Jass actually laughed at that, mirthlessly as she then said, "Your word means less than piss in a bottle."
Deacon stepped forward, letting his arms fall to his sides. "What were those tattoos on your faces?" he asked. "And the Artifacts Corben and Conrad had on their fingers, Lyft Spellslings, boost casting speed and output by what, ten percent?" He asked, getting a noise of agreement from Sam. "Even then using those would not give them nearly enough power in a Manashield to block our attack for as long as they did, especially with how hastily it was cast."
"I– I can't say," Corven said quickly, eyes darting to each of them. "I'm not allowed to speak on it. I'll be killed if I do."
Jass's hand stopped tapping. She pulled the dagger free and flipped it once, blade dancing in the air before she whipped it straight at Corven's face.
It embedded into the wall with a meaty thunk, just a finger's width from his temple, causing Corven to shriek in fright.
Sam blinked, looking up at her in surprise. Deacon's head slowly turned to stare at the girl.
"What?" Jass asked as she went over to yank back out the dagger. "He said he couldn't talk."
"Nothin," Deacon muttered. She's doing pretty well for her first interrogation. Normally, it would be just me and Sam, but so far she's doing pretty good.
But Corven was already breaking. "It's –it's an Artifact, all of us born in House Uppörvun get one. Household Uppörvun uses it in a magical ritual just seconds after our birth. From then it becomes a part of our essence, becomes part of us, and amplifies everything about us; Magical prowess, senses, everything…"
"Consta didn't have one," Sam pointed out. "I checked and didn't see anything resembling the tattoos Corben and Conrad had on them. Why is that?"
"Yes, yes," Corven nodded quickly, still trying to catch his breath. "There were only three Artifacts left in storage at the time, and he was the youngest of us. Mother and Father did not know that they would have quadruplets at the time."
"And as the ritual could only work during the first few minutes after birth – during the Naming Rite, he did not receive the blessing of having them."
"Please," Corven said, pulling at the stone locks around his wrists. "I told you everything. I–"
The dagger left Jass's fingers before Corven could finish. It caught him in the center of the chest, right between the ribs. He let out half a gasp before his body went limp, head hanging down like a broken doll's.
Jass gave Sam a slow look, then turned to yank the dagger out of the wall and walked over to hand it to Deacon. He took it without a word.
She shrugged. "What? We said we were going to be tying up loose ends."
Deacon gave her a sideways glance, then sighed. "Fair enough… well, congrats, you've now become an interrogator equal to both Sam and me; aka you've mastered the technique of: tell me what I want or else I stab, and then punch and stab them when they don't."
"God, those interrogation classes Bonehead signed us up for were fucking useless," Sam complained as he recalled the day when Bonehead had forged both his and Deacon's signatures and forced them to attend Interrogation 101 for a year. "It was all bullshit theory and study hall."
Letting out a noise of agreement, Deacon turned to the far end of the corridor where a scorched green banner lay, half-covered in soot and gravel. Stooping down, he picked it up and gave it a cursory shake while looking at the golden embroidery on it, spelling out, House Uppörvun.
"Well," Sam said, stretching. "Three hours left. We've got more than enough banners. Let's head back."
Deacon nodded, shouldering the rolled banner as the three of them started moving down the corridor, stepping over Corven's cooling corpse without a second glance.
Then a soft chime rang in Deacon's ears as he received two System Notifications.
*[Human Lv 10] has been slain – Partial XP has been given.*
*Your Class has reached Lv 11 – Points allocated, +1 Free Point*
Deacon smirked faintly. "Level eleven," he muttered.
Together, the trio made their way through the winding corridor, banners in hand. Deacon carried House Uppörvun's, its fabric fluttering faintly with each step. Jass held the Rising Sun banner, and Sam gripped a third – one they had found slotted beside Uppörvun's – a vivid red standard embroidered in gold with the name Cappu.
With more than enough banners collected, they retraced their steps back toward the Grand Hall.
***
The moment the double doors of the Grand Hall groaned open, the stench of acid and acidized blood slapped the three of them in the face. Deacon squinted, taking in the carnage, three cadet corpses that were dragged and piled to the side.
"Well," Jass muttered, "looks like we missed a party."
Sam's eyes scanned the room. Atop the massive dining table at the center, three banners lay side by side – two he recognized, but not the third. To the left of the hall was Bonehead sitting cross-legged on the floor beside his cauldron, a sour green vapor curling out of its brim. Across from him, seated perfectly still with legs crossed and palms upturned, Esmerelda was mid-meditation, her brow furrowed in deep concentration.
Bonehead noticed them first. His head jerked up, and a toothy grin cracked beneath his hood.
"Ey! You're not dead." His voice echoed through the chamber as he waved, glancing at the banners slung over their shoulders. "Three? Damn. That's way more than what we need."
Sam stepped inside fully, Deacon and Jass trailing him as the doors closed with a dull thud behind them.
"What happened here?" Sam asked, pointing a thumb over his shoulder at the pile of semi-melted corpses. "Last we saw, this place was just filled with reanimated ghoul corpses, and only two banners."
"Oh, that." Bonehead stirred the cauldron once, gave it a sniff, then leaned back. "A group of four cadets came through about forty-five minutes ago. They probably saw the group of three that you guys beat up and knocked unconscious last time and decided to look around."
"All in all, in doing so, they must've thought they were hot shit with how obnoxiously they opened the door without even having the tank take the lead."
"And?" Jass asked.
"Not much really, both Esmerelda and I killed 'em," Bonehead said, gesturing grandly to the mess. "I killed the warrior and did some damage to the rogue and mage, but Esmerelda killed the mage and the rogue. The fourth one of their group was a female archer, but she ran away towards the middle of the fight – down the path you guys went down... You see her?"
Sam frowned, exchanging glances with Deacon and Jass. "Not that I remember," he muttered.
Just as Jass shook her head, Deacon snapped his fingers. "Wait. Yeah. Yeah, I think I did."
Jass turned toward him, frowning. "When?"
"Back on the way here," Deacon said, rubbing his chin. "While we were clearing those banshees on our way back, I remember spotting a corpse with long hair and in leather armor on the far left of the courtyard with three banshees hovering over her like vultures… I didn't think much of it, and the only thing of note about the whole thing was that the banshees looked like they were... I dunno, siphoning something from her corpse before they vanished."
"And you didn't think to point something like that out to us, cause that sure as hell doesn't sound normal," Sam asked, a bit surprised at how he didn't notice something like that.
"I mean, I dunno, not much to think about, she was dead?" Deacon shrugged. "And I didn't stop to inspect the body in case it would trigger something like a temple trap or something."
Bonehead made a sound halfway between a grunt and a laugh. "Still, four banners now." He glanced at the cauldron, giving it a slow stir before snapping away the flames beneath it and beginning to pour its contents into similarly shaped glass bottles.
"Alright, spill," Bonehead said, corking the last of the vials before leaning back against the cauldron, arms crossed, grin lazy. "What the hell happened to you three?"
"We got tangled up in some dumb drama," Sam said as he tugged off his gloves, slapping them against his thigh once. "Killed a couple people. Tied up a loose end. Got three banners for the price of two."
Bonehead let out a low whistle. "Nice."
"Yeah, but," Sam paused, shifting his weight, "I thought we wouldn't kill unless they threatened our lives or did something equally as bad. With the way you explained what happened, it sounded like you and Esmerelda went guns blazing the moment they entered. And we all know that you two could have easily taken out the four of them without killing them, it's why you two were left to guard the banners."
Bonehead gave a lazy shrug, head tilting to where Esmerelda still sat unmoving, steam curling around her like a veil. "She got a bad feeling."
That gave all three of them pause.
"Oh," Deacon muttered, accepting the answer without another thought. "Well, that's fair."
To the four of them, whenever Esmerelda would feel as though someone had bad vibes, it generally meant that person or persons had bad intentions toward the group – this was something that was proven time and time again to them all for as long as their friend group existed.
Back when a girl called Marilline Goobin tried to enter their group nine summers back and a couple months after Deacon was forcibly enrolled in the academy and recently joined the group, Esmerelda vetoed it, but majority vote won, but not long after the fact that she joined the group she tried to attempt to entrap Sam into putting him in an incredibly precarious position and have his family set up a marriage contract between the two.
However, after being caught by both Deacon and Jass, and firmly putting in the fear of fucking around and finding out, she left their group and never once approached them again.
A more recent bad vibe Esmerelda had was a couple months ago, with the person in question being their homeroom professor's assistant. At the time, they couldn't do anything drastic to her due to her being a professor, but she left the academy a month or two after midterms month.
Why? They did not know. But apparently it was serious enough that the academy did its best to keep the whole thing under wraps, and when Sam questioned his father in hopes that he would know something, his father told him not to worry about it and said nothing else.
But rumor had it that Professor Song was involved in some sort of cult, and every other rumor seemed to stem off of that.
These two events were among many more that had happened throughout their friendship and firmly placed the idea that whenever Esmerelda said she could feel bad vibes from people that they would either get away from said people or kill them if they tried something.
As they approached the large dining table with three banners embedded in its center, Esmerelda's eyes opened.
She blinked, then smiled faintly. "Welcome back."
"Hey," Jass said casually, hopping up onto the table with an easy grace and stabbing the yellow banner beside the blue one.
"And now we wait out the three hours that remain," Deacon said as he pulled out a chair and plopped atop it.
"Unless…" Sam muttered, eyeing the table for a moment before slowly hopping atop the table and stabbing the orange banner in his hand next to the yellow one Jass just placed down.
HIDDEN QUEST UNLOCKED!