NOVEL NEXT Chapter 44: Tired!
If you want to read ahead by 15+ chapters from her you can visit my Patre-on.
[P] [A] [T] [R] [E] [O] [N]
https://www.patreon.com/Yggdrasil_Loki
-----------
Harry was only really concerned about the fate of the royal family.
It seemed that Queen Calanthe, true to her fiery "Lioness of Cintra" reputation, was not going to let her city go down without a bloody, desperate fight, and she, of course, seemed determined to lead that fight herself, right from the front lines.
Harry watched with a detached, almost clinical eye as the two opposing forces finally met just outside the city walls, their meeting marked by a great, deafening roar of steel, fury, and dying men.
Harry sighed, a long, weary sound that was lost in the wind.
To be completely, brutally honest, he was quite tired of wars. He had partaken in a few minor ones, here and there, while he had been in this world, for causes he had, at the time, felt were just.
Nothing major, not on the scale of his own war back home, but he had been involved enough that he was now just… honestly tired of seeing people die, of watching lives get snuffed out, all to satisfy some petty ruler's insatiable greed for more power and more land.
Nilfgaard, he knew, was no different from any of the other power-hungry empires he had encountered in his long life.
And he had a strong, gut feeling that sooner or later, he and they would inevitably come to blows. He didn't like their arrogant, "conquer the world" attitude, nor did he particularly like this "Emhyr var Emreis," their mysterious, ambitious emperor.
From what little he had gathered, the man reminded Harry, quite unpleasantly, of Lucius Malfoy. He was glad, at least, that Draco Malfoy had eventually, after much struggle, given up the whole blood purity nonsense and had just stayed out of politics entirely, content to live a quiet life. Lucius, however, had to die.
And he had, quite satisfyingly, done so by Harry's own hand. Emhyr var Emreis would probably, eventually, end up the same way.
Plus, there was the whole… rather disturbing situation of Emhyr being utterly, pathologically obsessed with Ciri. And Harry simply couldn't, and wouldn't, have that.
As he continued to stare down at the chaotic, bloody battle unfolding below, a sleek, black crow flew down from the sky and landed silently on his shoulder.
Harry didn't even bother to look at the bird as it leaned in, put its sharp beak right at his ear, and, surprisingly, whispered into it, its voice a low, raspy murmur.
'He has scouts in the city, searching for her now. The army is a distraction. They are heading to the North-East. We are tracking them.' the crow murmured, its voice a strange, multi-layered sound. It then hopped off his shoulder and took to the skies once more, flying off in the exact direction it had just told him.
Harry looked into that direction, to the North-East, and did indeed see a large, swirling swarm of crows circling high above a specific section of the city, further in.
He took one last, lingering look back at the brutal battle raging at the city gates, then, with a soft pop, he apparated away, reappearing silently on a high, slanted rooftop, right in the middle of the swarm of what, to anyone below, would just look like inconspicuous, ordinary crows. No one seemed to be paying any attention to the birds.
And they were also, thankfully, not paying any attention to him as he looked down into a narrow, winding alleyway below.
He saw three men, dressed in rough, local-looking clothes, moving in a panicked, yet purposeful rush, trying very hard not to draw suspicion, yet they were clearly, and rather foolishly, moving towards the royal castle, not away from it like every other sane person in the city.
His eyes never left the three men as they ducked down another, even narrower alleyway, probably not knowing, in their haste, that it was a dead end.
Harry apparated once more, this time appearing silently at the alley's entrance, and with a few quick, silent waves of his wand, he covered the entrance in subtle, but highly effective, Notice-Me-Not and compulsion charms, designed to steer everyone clear of it, to make them simply… not notice the alley was even there.
"Hold up, Kalisk, this is a bloody dead end, you twit!" one of the men said, his voice a harsh whisper, laced with a thick, unfamiliar accent. "If you can't read the goddamn map, then let me read it!"
"Hold on a moment, I know where we are," the man now identified as Kalisk insisted, pointing a grimy finger at a crumpled piece of parchment he had clutched in his hands. "We're here, see? We just… we took a wrong turn, that's all. But we're close, I tell you."
Harry said nothing, simply leaning against the cold stone wall, waiting patiently for the men to inevitably turn around and notice him. He didn't have to wait long.
"Wait a moment," the third man, the one who had not said anything yet, said, his voice suddenly tense as he finally looked back towards the alley entrance and saw Harry, simply standing there, a silent, shadowy figure. "Who's this?"
The man named Kalisk whirled around, his eyes wide with surprise. With all three of them now turned towards him, Harry could understand why their king would have chosen them for this particular mission.
They clearly weren't the sharpest daggers in the armory, but all three of them could, at a passing glance, easily pass for locals of Cintra, with their rough-spun clothes and their generally unremarkable features.
"Evening, gentlemen," Harry said, his voice almost pleasant, his tone light and conversational. "You wouldn't happen to be out and about, on this lovely, chaotic day, for a spot of… kidnapping, would you?"
The three men had an immediate, almost comical twitch at his words, a flicker of guilt and panic in their eyes that instantly confirmed his thoughts.
"K-kidnapping? No, sir. Of course not," Kalisk responded, trying, and failing, to sound casual. "We are just… just a little lost, you see. Trying to get out of town before Nilfgaard shows up, just like everyone else."
"Oh?" Harry asked, his curiosity feigned. "And how long have you gentlemen lived in this fair city?"
"Oh, uh, ever since we were little lads!" Kalisk said quickly, a little too quickly, as his two friends nodded nervously in agreement.
"Is that so? Yet you do not seem to know your way around your own home city, nor do you seem to be carrying anything with you to take on your supposed journey," Harry observed, his voice still calm.
"How… strange. I'm afraid I don't believe you, gentlemen. Which is quite unfortunate for you, since I am sure you can probably guess what happens next. Well," he corrected himself with a small, chilling smile, "you can probably guess the end result, at least. I highly doubt you would have guessed how, exactly, we're going to get to that end result. But no matter. Try not to scream."
"Alright, that's enough of this bloody nonsense!" the man to Kalisk's right snarled, his fear quickly turning to aggression. "Let's just gut the bastard and be done with this!" He pulled out a long, wicked-looking dagger. His two companions followed suit, their own blades glinting in the dim alley light.
Harry said nothing. He simply, casually, waved his hand. With a silent, powerful summoning charm, the daggers were ripped from their owners' hands, flying through the air to hover, menacingly, directly in front of him. The men started to curse, their eyes wide with terror now.
"Shite! He's a sorce—" Kalisk tried to say, but Harry did not let him finish.
He rotated the three daggers in the air with another flick of his wrist, so they were pointing back at their original owners, and then, with a powerful banishing charm, he sent them flying back with as much deadly precision as he could muster.
He was rewarded, a split-second later, with three, almost simultaneous, wet 'schlick' noises, as the daggers found their marks, embedding themselves deep in the men's throats.
Harry smiled, a cold, satisfied smile, as he gave himself a mental pat on the back. His precision work with telekinesis had definitely been improving lately.
Harry looked at the three dead bodies, now slumping to the ground in a growing pool of their own blood, and decided to simply leave them there.
The conquering Nilfgaardians would eventually find them when they finally took the city, or they wouldn't. Either way, Harry couldn't have cared less. With another soft pop, he apparated away from the gruesome murder scene.
-----------
If you want to read ahead by 15+ chapters from her you can visit my Patre-on.
[P] [A] [T] [R] [E] [O] [N]
https://www.patreon.com/Yggdrasil_Loki