Sheriff Marcus x Reader

Thirty-One

With tense shoulders, you walked through the dark alleys, your eyes wandering over the faces of the hooded figures that passed you.

Singed had talked as if his life had depended on it. To be fair, it had been exactly the case.

All you needed was to find one Silco's factories, preferably all of them and cause a huge mess. Granted, the factories were Renni's territory, but she was just a small fish in Silco's pond.

With any luck, you might also find evidence of his guilt connected to the attacks. Then you would have something solid to present to the council. Everything else after that would no longer be your problem. Maybe they would wage war, maybe they would cut Zaun off once and for all.

You paused for a moment at the thought.

You were not aware of what would happen after the order was fulfilled. Neither Viktor nor Jayce had clarified what would happen after the job was done. At the moment, as long as the order was counted, you were allowed to be free.

Swallowing hard, you had to think briefly about whether it was worth it. But at the same time you couldn't just accept everything Silco did or would do. He had killed your parents and you were not willing to forget that. And Marcus had made himself clear enough. Without him, there was nothing to keep you in this town.

You just wanted your revenge.

After that, you might as well disappear. The best thing would be to just run away. Maybe you could find peace somewhere else. This town had nothing left to offer.

Neither Topside nor the Undercity.

A heavy sigh made your chest tremble. With narrowed eyes you shook your head and kept walking.

But when your eyes fell into a side alley, you stopped. For a moment you thought you saw someone in an enforcer uniform running through the alley. It was a girl, around twenty. Behind her followed another woman about the same age. Her hair was red and her pale skin was heavily tattooed.

They looked so suspicious that even the Undercity didn't seem a fitting place for this couple.

Irritated, you wanted to follow them, curious what they were up to. But when you looked around a corner, they were gone again.

"Strange...", you mumbled and looked at the ground.

But the mud clearly showed that you had not just imagined them. There were definitely footprints.

Your legs twitched, wanting to follow the tracks. But you had other things to do.

With a shrug of your shoulders, you burned their faces into your memory and turned your back on the tracks to disappear in the other direction.

Groaning, you climbed down into the mines that stretched through the earth under the city like worms. The air in Zaun was terrible, but in the mines one could hardly breathe unless they were born in this place.

Immediately the magic orbs in your back reacted and made your lungs breathe. At that moment you were quite glad to carry such a curse in your body, otherwise you probably would have suffocated.

You didn't have to wander long through the darkness when your eyes found rails on the ground.

"Interesting...", you muttered and looked around.

In the distance, hidden in the shadows, you could recognize people.

Like bees in a hive, they were running around, performing their tasks and working as if their lives would otherwise have no value. But it was not the people who caught your attention. It was the barrels full of explosives.

Smiling contentedly, you pulled your head in and walked toward the people as if it were the most natural thing in the world. When one of the workers spotted you, you nodded at him.

"The Baroness sent me.", you said, nodding your head at the barrels full of bombs. "To blow up the shafts."

The man frowned skeptically and rubbed sweat from his dirty forehead. He was poorly fed, scrawny and almost too weak to stand upright. His sunken eyes looked at you.

"You don't look like someone the Baroness would send.", he said with doubt shimmering in his eyes. "Do you have the thing?"

Briefly, a cold shiver crawled down your spine. The thing could be anything, a letter, a seal, or an object that was apparently completely useless. You had nothing and yet everything.

Suddenly a thought crossed your mind.

Quickly, you reached into your pocket and pulled out the bomb.

When his eyes fell on it, his eyebrows rose in surprise.

"That's...", he swallowed and took it. "You could have said that you were sent by him."

When he began to speak so strangely carefully, it caught your attention. Curious, you raised an eyebrow.

"I was not sent by him. The Baroness gave me this."

He looked at you.

"Then he told her to send someone."

"Does that make a difference?"

"No. You're going to have to work down here like anybody else anyways. Take some of these things and go see Ellis. He's in charge of taking care of the tunnels.", the man turned his back on you again, but stopped to look at you skeptically one last time. "Be careful, though. Many don't come out of the shafts again."

He made it sound like some good advice but you could tell that it was supposed to be a warning.

He was suspecting something but couldn't say anything against the proof you had handed him.

Satisfied with your small success, you nodded and went to work. As you picked some of the other bombs up, you noticed the similarities in them and the one you had just handed over. Strange enough, the man had not reacted to the symbols on the shell.

Maybe they were just decorations, but the symbol of the firelights was one of the most hated in all of Zaun, that was an open secret. So, the respect did not come from the paintings but the bomb itself.

Picking one out of the barrels, you twisted and turned it in front of your eyes. It was indeed the same model. And it was painted as well. But those were blue and pink paintings.

"Huh...", you chewed on the inside of your cheek. "Who made you?"