POV ???:
p The bulky man dressed in a black tunic with a scarf wrapped around his head held the small elven girl by her scruff, her legs flailing around as she kept kicking the man. The old staircase was creaking as more people were ascending it.
“I am over here; help me!” she shouted as loud as she could, hoping for the guards to hurry up.
“Guards? Most likely, it is just a backup sent by our boss. No guards will come after our… generous donation.” the men erupted into laughter as the small elf started to despair.
The footsteps and creaks on the staircase speeded up, quickly closing towards the second floor. Then four figures covered in black mantles, three of which had iron masks shaped like the heads of a dragon, entered the room. The last remaining figure had a brass mask with horns that looked like burning iron sticking out of his head. A long wooden longbow was hanging from his shoulder.
Two gangsters unsheathed their swords, pointing them at the masked figures.
Young enchanter realised that they weren’t working together, but that made her even more fearful after seeing their masks and robes, ‘This is simply perfect… It was already bad with just slavers, and now some insane cultists joined the party too.’
Two parties kept looking at each other, tension almost palpable in the room, with everyone looking for the smallest move of the opposing party, ready to counterattack immediately.
“You freaks, do you know who we are working for? Get out if you don’t want to end like a meal for rats.”
The masked cultists weren’t backing off. Instead, they made a step forward. Seeing that the man holding the elf dropped her to the ground as he never even thought about using hostages against insane cultists.
In an instant, three masked figures dashed forward, floor cracking under their legs as they launched forward. All three of them had big flamberges in their hands, glowing with energy passing through them.
Two kidnappers instantly rushed forwards and swung their weapons to counterattack. The blades met each other, loud clanging echoing through the room with wall paint falling off as the shockwave spread around.
One of the three attacking cultists sprinted around the kidnapper, jumping in front of the elf lying on the floor, shielding her, with his sword at ready.
At the same time, the brass-masked cultist grabbed his bow and put an arrow inside at an incredible speed. He pulled the string on the bow and then released it. The arrow flew across the room, igniting in the flight and leaving behind orange afterimages.
The pairs of cultists and kidnappers kept a fast-paced melee fight, their swords striking against each other and clanging with shockwaves destroying the room around them. The floorboards were torn out, and cracks were spreading through the walls.
Suddenly the burning arrow struck one of the kidnappers, flames immediately engulfing him whole as he turned screaming into a human torch.
The masked cultist fighting him immediately used that opportunity, widely swinging his sword and decapitating his opponent. A fountain of blood erupted out of his neck as both the head and the body fell to the ground with a loud thud, a puddle of blood quickly growing under it.
Soon after that head of the second kidnapper fell down, with even more blood splashing around the room.
The small elven girl was curled up on the ground looking with scared eyes at the corpses and puddles of blood in her room, regretting ever visiting this kingdom.
One of the masked figures fixed their gaze on the sack that originally belonged to one of the kidnappers lying on the ground. They bent and grabbed it before looking at the elven girl still trembling on the ground, already sure of her death.
‘Ohh no, damn it, getting kidnapped by some insane cultist is even worse than slavery.’ She felt her despair grow even more. As a slave, she would still have hope of escaping or getting freed by a kind master, but getting kidnapped by some cultists was a one-way ticket to a painful death.
POV Vesuvius:
The dragon flew above the tall mountains with snow-covered peaks, leaving behind a thick trail of smoke. He almost reached the edge of the mountains, seeing the green forest in the distance. A tall stone structure was rising from the ground. Its walls weren’t made out of bricks but a rough cliff-like-looking stone without any crevices. It looked as if it naturally rose out from the ground. It wasn’t complete, with only a rough shape of one wide and tall tower surrounded by four thinner but taller towers. It was connected by cliff-like walls, with many people moving around.
‘This was built with a magic, cheap and fast construction method.’
In Lorenia, earth mages were always considered to be weakest in direct combat, but they more than made for it with their support capabilities. With their earth magic, they could easily rise walls and build structures. Such structures, however, weren’t pretty nor sturdy unless a strong mage made them as the precision of magic control dictated the detail of a structure, and the strength of a created stone highly depended on a mage’s power. Also, materials shaped or created by earth mages would quickly lose their integrity and shape without proper magical maintenance, making them unsuitable for long-term construction unless they used much slower but lasting methods. Still, it was part of every battlefield, with a team of earth mages being capable of building a small fortress in a matter of days.
Vesuvius stopped his flight, flapping his wings and hovering in the place while observing the structure, ‘It isn’t hard to guess who did it. The only person here who has the power to hire a team of earth mages is that annoying baron… Why can’t he simply give up? Is it worth it for him to go such a way to hunt me down? What even is the point of this fortress? Is he expecting me to just rush there and attack it when I can fly around it? It would make sense only if he used my existence as an excuse for him asking for some gold from his superiors to build a fortress as a defence against me while pocketing most of the gold for himself.’
Vesuvius shook his dragon head and continued his flight to the hideout with the dracodactyl following behind him as he had more urgent stuff to do than care about some useless fortress.