Curse of the Crystals

Chapter 16: The Fight Continues - part 4

His opponents remained silent, as expected. The first one, the tallest of the group, soon lunged in to attack him head-on, while his two companions went to attack Itzal from the right and left. Any normal person, no matter how well-trained they were, would die against this kind of well-coordinated attack. However, with a touch of magic, the entire battle was just a matter of carefully choosing the next course of action. He could dodge the sword of the guy lunging at on him from the front, and he spotted the man on his left was slightly slower than the one on the right, so he'd need to dodge to his right. As he did so, he was able to smoothly step past the blade of the man to his right, and slashed at the man's legs with his own weapon. Putting the now injured man in-between himself and the other two, he had enough time to turn around and dodge the next two attacks headed his way. One sword coming in low, another coming in high. Two daggers at the ready to lash out if he got close enough. Normally, that would work, but with his magic, they'd be too slow. Itzal jumped past both sword slashes with ease, and before the man closest to him could even swing his dagger, he had already gotten his arm slashed through by Itzal, making him drop the weapon in pain. The third man, now the only one fully capable of fighting, took a more defensive stance, but the same magic that allowed Itzal to dodge attacks allowed him to attack others at an equal pace. He approached his opponent, and smoothly managed to jump towards the man's left, passing him by before the man could react and slashing at the back of the man's knee, making him fall to the ground from having his leg sliced open like that.

Suddenly, one of them yelled. "Wait, we surrender!"

Itzal couldn't suppress a smile. If there was any point at which he wanted to kill these men, they'd already be dying to poison by now. That said, maybe he could get the answer to his question now that they were more subdued. "Tell me how you brought the house down so silently."

"Alright... We managed to pay off one of the people that surveyed this place before it was decided to use the city as an arena. They had thorough information about the entire city and the state of all of its structures. One of us used to work as a mason, so it was pretty easy to figure out that some structures were barely holding up. We didn't make a lot of noise, as a single hit in the correct spot is all it takes in places like this one, if you knew where to hit."

It took Itzal a few seconds to go from being content for having defeated his opponents and from having been given his answer, to being worried about what that answer implied. "Wait. Who was the one hitting that place?"

The man seemed to realize his mistake, as he was suddenly silent. It told Itzal all he needed to know. "You weren't the only team."

One of the other men spoke up. "We teamed up with a few other groups from New Haven, and we were lucky enough to end up in the same place with one of those teams."

Only one? Itzal gave a sigh of relief. Luna and the Alchemist wouldn't be brought down by a single team, especially not if they had the same kind of training as these guys, which both the Alchemist and Luna were also proficient at. All he had to worry about was whether or not they'd been hit by the rubble... All in all, it'd probably be best to finish things up quickly, so he could find a way to the other side and help out the others. "There's a Blue Guard post a few buildings to away from here, it's to the right if you leave the house. If you're smart, you drag yourselves there and surrender, before you bleed out or get murdered by someone more bloodthirsty than I am." While he was speaking his last word, he was looking for the quickest way to get to the other side of the house, which wasn't easy, as the nearby buildings had suffered a fair amount of damage from the recently crumbled house.

Luna and the Alchemist were right behind Itzal when the building suddenly started to collapse. Both instinctively jumped back, but the Alchemist was considerably more lucky than Luna. She could felt a sharp pain, as some of the falling debris slammed into her back hard enough to force her to the ground, after which she felt even more pain as her arms and legs were crushed by more falling debris. When the debris finally stopped falling, she realized she was lucky to be alive, but the pain she was in made it a little difficult to appreciate that.