Advent of Dragonfire [A LitRPG Adventure]

I catch Dovik before he makes it all the way across the street. Ahead, the first floor of the building stands visible through the large windows facing the street. Spreading my presence through earlier already let me know that there is only one person inside, an older woman minding a counter, sliced deli meats in a cold box next to her. A trilling bell announces us as Dovik pushes open the door.

He opens his mouth to say something, ready to seep as much of his disarming charm into his voice as he can, only to be cut off by the woman behind the counter screaming. The eyes of faethian are solid in color, almost all the same cerulean blue, though I have rarely seen a few of different shades. You can't read emotion in them; it is simply impossible, but that doesn't stop my mind from trying to trick me into seeing unadulterated horror in those expressionless orbs. The old woman turns, knocks her thigh into a stand holding an assortment of sweet treats in wax wrapping, and scurries out of the shop through the back.

Dovik stands, a look of puzzlement on his face that I have only ever seen a puppy match, staring at the spot where the woman had just been standing.

I squeeze past him, flicking the flat of the sword he is carrying with a fingernail. The blade rings, a strange counter-note to the chime of the bell above the door.

"Smooth," I say, moving past and toward the counter. I have to duck three times to avoid wooden beams running across the ceiling of the first floor as I make my way to the counter. Unlike the rest of the city, this neighborhood–or this building at least–doesn't seem made with people of my size in mind. The realization comes with a sense of offense and the feeling of being a giant, which leaves me uncertain how to feel about it.

A swinging, wooden half door guards the entrance to the back room. I step past ahead of Dovik, finding the backspace a bit higher and more comfortable to stand. Dovik joins me a moment later, moving toward the metal door at the back of the large room that is something between a kitchen and a storeroom. The only other exit is a door that leads out the back of the building, and it stands open with an old woman slowly shrinking into the distance as she hobbles away.

"I can't see anything past this," I tell Dovik, motioning to the door.

His aura flares for a moment, splashing into the metal door like water breaking on rocks. "I wonder what this is made of." He runs his hand along the cold surface, looking at it for a moment before taking a step back. Dovik heaves in a big breath, gathering himself, and sinking all of his weight onto his left foot as he prepares to kick forward.

"Wait."

His foot swings forward, snapping at the open air as he falls backward at the sound of my voice. He stumbles, his sword dangerously flailing for a moment as he tries to get his balance. Dovik manages to recover just before his back hits the wall, but only barely.

"What?" he asks. There is still anger on his face.

"I just thought that we might need a plan," I say, moving over to him and letting my back fall against the wall. Crossing my arms, I stare over at the metal door.

"So, was that a bluff when you said these people aren't dangerous?" he asks.

I snort, a small laugh escaping me. "What? No. Asking around the Adventurer's League let me know that there aren't even fifty rank three magicians in the city. Faeth doesn't seem to have endowed of any kind. All I think we really need to worry about are wizards, but I doubt any would be in a run down place like this. No, I wanted to know if you were planning on just going in there and hacking everyone to pieces?" I say, motioning at his sword.

Dovik glances down, looking like only now he is realizing that he is holding it. "I hadn't really thought that far," he admits. With a twist of his wrist, the sword vanishes. "I can't believe someone would steal from me. From us."

"Nobody knows who we are here," I say.

"Does it matter? That penthouse belongs to your brother. Shouldn't that be enough?"

"It should, shouldn't it." I watch the door for a while, trying to sort out my thoughts. I'm not like Dovik. I have always known it, but standing here next to the man, listening to the long and forceful breaths he tightly controls, I find another point of difference. He is angry, smoldering with it, stewing in it, and no doubt thinking about what is on the other side of that door. Maybe I was like that too; I probably was, but I don't have it anymore, the heat.

"I've never dealt with this before," I tell him. "Thieves. What do you do with people like that?"

"Call the authorities, usually," he answers.

"Do you want to?"

"No."

"Me either. So, what do we do then? They stole from us. Came into our home and took what we have, took what we need. I don't want to forgive it."

"I'm not feeling all that merciful either," Dovik says.

"But I don't think we should kill them," I say.

His breath stops for a moment, and he falls back against the wall, looking down at me. "I was never going to kill them, Charlene. They might be criminals. No, they are criminals, but that doesn't mean we can just kill them."

"You're the one that stomped in with a sword," I say.

"I fight with a sword."

"I fight with fire. Doesn't mean I was going to start throwing it around."

"Fine," he says, pushing off the wall with a huff. "No fire and no sword. We get our things." Dovik stomps back over to the door and sets his feet.

I watch from where I was, wondering if he will actually be able to get through in a single kick. He sucks in air, sets his jaw, and is just about to swing at the door when he pauses. Air rushes from between his lips in a hiss. Dovik turns back, stomping back across the room and falling back to lean against the wall next to me again.

"This is more than just thieves," he says. "Probably, at least. That door looks decently expensive, and if the same metal is running through all the walls to block out presences then…Well, I don't know."

"Is this a gang?" I vaguely remember Jess warning me about gangs when we stayed in Grim for a little while. Apparently, in cities, criminals formed social clubs where they could coordinate their crimes. The whole thing sounded like banditry to me, except the criminals had actual homes to sleep in instead of tents in the woods. "I don't really want to get involved in gang things. It sounds like a waste of time."

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Dovik looks around at the kitchen, searching for something I don't have a clue about. "Maybe," he says with a shrug. "I heard there were a few on the lower platforms back home, but I never interacted with them. Should we contact the authorities?"

"Will they help us get our belongings back?"

"I don't know."

"Would they even take our word about what is going on? We aren't from here."

"I don't know."

"Then I don't really want to contact them," I say. "Gangs are professional criminals, though, right? Criminals have weapons. So, what do we do if they attack us with weapons?"

"You just said for the second time that you aren't worried about them being able to hurt us," Dovik points out.

"Yes, but I'm not just going to let them beat me with a club or a pipe or whatever they have. Like you said, I fight with fire. I don't really have a way to stop someone from hitting me with a nailed-through board without killing them."

"You just hit them, Charlene." Dovik holds up a fist to illustrate.

"I don't really know how to fight, not with my hands."

"You know that thing you do where you punch a monster with an explosion and either blow them up or launch them fifty feet? Do that, just without the explosion part," he says.

"And what if they still die?"

"Then don't hit them that hard. Start with baby taps and then hit them harder if you don't break anything or they don't fall down."

"You want me to punch them with baby taps while someone is trying to stab me with a rusty knife?" I ask.

"Where did you get these ideas about criminals?"

"What does that matter?"

Dovik stops, looking at me for a long moment, before smiling and shaking his head. "Alright, so, if we go inside, and if there are violent criminals in there with our stolen belongings, and if they try to attack us, would you like me to handle the fighting while you stand behind me looking pretty?"

I pat my hair, tucking away the strands that have come loose over the last half hour of hurrying through the city. "You think I'm pretty?"

Dovik rolls his eyes. In a flash, he vanishes from where he stands leaning against the wall, reappearing right in front of the door. His foot falls with incredible force, and to its credit, the door does not explode inward. There is a screech of metal as one of the bolts holding the topmost hinge together is sheared in two, leaving the door bending slightly inward from the top corner. My soul presence floods in through the crack, pouring into the hole like water and flooding the hidden rooms of the building. Twenty-four souls are inside, all tense, most flinching as Dovik kicks the door again and fully knocks it off its hinges.

"Aaaaaaaah!" A faethian man screams as he comes running down the stairs beyond the broken door. Three times, he nearly trips in his rush to get down the stairs. The clean and well-kept ax in his hand twists with every step he descends. As the dwarven man makes it to the bottom of the steps, his ax gleaming in the artificial light inside the stairwell, Dovik's fist snaps forward, flattening his nose bloody against his face. His scream dies to a gurgle as he falls back on the steps, groaning on the ground but not moving too much.

"An ax?" Dovik asks, looking back at me as he picks the weapon up off the ground.

"He's a criminal," I reply. Maybe there is a bit of smugness in my voice. "There are six more at the top of the stairs. They all have axes for some reason."

"Now that you have your presence inside, could you just…" He mimes pressing down with his hand.

"I don't want to bring the building down," I tell him.

He sighs before looking up the stairs. In a flash, he is gone, reappearing in the same instant at the top of the landing amidst a flurry of activity. I catch parts of it as I move into the stairwell and gently step over the moaning man on the ground. By the time I reach the top of the stairs, the fighting is wrapping up.

The second story of the building opens into a fairly large room. Wax wrappers from the various treats downstairs and transparent sandwich paper litter the floor and spill from two overfull wastebins in the corner of the room. Of the three tables, two are still standing, and a moaning man lies in the wreckage of the third. Dovik stumbles across the room, wrestling with the biggest dwarf I have ever seen, while another one punches the side of his knee. Two others lie against the wall, not unconscious, but clearly wishing they were, while the last rocks in a corner with tears spilling down his face as he holds his leg. Several hideous green wigs give color to the drab space. All my attention, however, is on the small safe sitting on the central table, a wedge of iron sticking up from a crack in its door.

I am so distracted by seeing the safe that I hardly notice the crossbow bolt flying at me from the right. My hand whips out to catch it, yet it perfectly slips through the crack between my middle and pointer finger. The head of the bolt cuts right through the fabric of my dress, cutting a line between my ribs, but failing to penetrate fully into my skin. I stumble back, hand clasped on the bolt, and notice the four men standing in the hallway leading to the side of the room. Behind me, there is the crashing sound of glass as Dovik hurls one of the men through a window. He screams for barely a second before hitting the hard ground outside.

"Reload. Reload. Reload," a man next to the one wielding the crossbow says in a rushed voice.

The bolt slides smoothly out of my skin as I pull on the shaft since the barbs didn't manage to bite. More pissed at having a bloody hole punched through my dress than getting shot, I hurl the projectile back at the crossbow-wielding dwarf. There is a pause, everyone other than Dovik and the hulking dwarf staring in wonder as the bolt stabs smoothly into the leg of the man I threw it at. No one is more surprised than I that it happened. He falls to the floor, dropping his weapon and wailing as his hands clutch at the bolt that digs more than halfway through his thigh as blood begins to seep from the wound. The now three remaining men seem to come back to themselves, and one starts running forward, screaming as he holds a rusty knife over his head. It is impossible to mistake where he plans to stick that.

The attempt to stab me is almost cute if it weren't so pitiful. He is just so slow. I have time to ball my hand into a fist, worry about breaking his face open, and flatten my hand back out before he makes it halfway to me. There is a second of triumph that appears in his eyes as he almost makes it to me, a sense of disbelief that he actually managed to do it. Then the flat of my hand lands on his forehead with a slap. His legs buckle as his momentum carries him forward, and he falls to the ground and rolls for a few feet before finally coming to a stop. His green stack of hair rolls flutters to the ground behind him, splaying out on the wooden boards like some demented and discolored dog. The last two men in the hallway both hold up a hand, showing me that they have no weapons, and start dragging away the man with a bolt stuck in his leg.

I turn just in time to see Dovik punching the big dwarf in the face repeatedly while holding his head in the crook of his arm. The dwarven man, blood dripping from his lips and his eyes unfocused, violently turns his arm, and brings his elbow back into Dovik's crotch. I can tell that he hit something important by the flash of rage that comes over my friend's face. Barely holding back any of his strength, Dovik grabs the man by the throat and spins, hurling him through another window to the sound of shattering glass. Dovik stands in the middle of the room, taking in deep breaths and gritting his teeth.

"I think you got them," I say, moving to the middle of the room and passing my hand over the safe. It vanishes into my vault in a blink. I feel a bit of trepidation at putting all the dangerous and unstable mana affixes that I was storing in the safe into my vault, but there is no way in three hells that I am about to carry the heavy thing back across the city.

"Yeah," Dovik says as he slowly brings his breathing back into order. "That was…harder than I expected." He looks me up and down. "You're hurt."

"Barely. Are you ready to go?"

"I think…I think that would be a good idea. Do you want to destroy this place?" he asks, looking around at the messy interior of the building. "Send a message or something?"

I shake my head, already moving toward the stairs. "I don't want to get more involved with these people than we already are. They would have to be stupid to try and steal from us again. Right?" I ask the man whining in the corner. He stops his rocking as he realizes I am looking at him, and begins to nod fervently.

We find Jasper out on the street when we make it back out of the front of the building. The two men that Dovik threw out the window are still lying on the sidewalk, one holding his shoulder and sobbing silently, while the other lies unconscious on his back. Jasper is looking down at this one, the big one, shaking his head.

"Didn't want to wait on the other side of the street?" Dovik asks, his bad mood gone by the time we make it outside.

"When people started flying out of windows, I thought that maybe I should do something. Then, you both came out before I could go in," he says.

In my head, I note that there was plenty of time to actually come inside the building, but I let him save face. "We found our things," I say. "Well, not the equipment, but we can purchase that again."

"That's good," Jasper says. "I have some bad news." He points down at the unconscious dwarf at his feet. "I know this one."