Prologue
The small and run-down shack that I was in was rapidly burning to the grown, and fading away into the dark and starry night. It was far from a peaceful night out, mind, the screaming from the locals outside was accompanied by all of the falling chunks of wood and rock that have been set ablaze by me and my associates. They gave me no choice. They refused to give up this individual that I’ve been looking for, and even though this man has done things far more heinous and deplorable then I ever did, they still defended him saying ‘He’s a good man!’, and ‘He’s done nothing but help all of us!’, and my personal favourite ‘How can someone who has a daughter do something like that?’.
“So I’ll ask you again, where did you hide the book?” I asked.
The bloodied and bruised man who sat on the floor, pressed up against a charred wall, gave no answer apart from his rapidly shifting eyes and shallow breaths.
“Alright... You wanted me to be the bad guy, so...”
With a swift raise of my leg and a crashing heel straight to his face I finally got him to make some noise.
“Oh! That one felt good! Did I break a nose with that one?!”
I certainly broke a nose with that one.
“Bullseye! Man, I love a good heel to the face!”
My ecstatic voice shoots out. The bearded man groaned and grabbed his nose as it quickly started to release a stream of blood. This man has eluded me for several months now, jumping from one city to the next, however this time he settled in a smaller village making him much easier to track down. To be fair it wasn’t him who we first spotted, but instead his daughter who was carelessly running around with the other kids, so we put two and two together and we quickly made our move.
“I found her boss!”
A large bold headed man ducked underneath the half collapsed doorway, dragging a small girl by her arm. The kid was indeed the daughter of the bearded man, but there was nothing she could do against anything that was happening all around her. But lucky for her, it was ‘me’ who was leading this raid, and not some savage animal.
Seeing the defenseless girl trashing and crying as she did her best to fight for her life, made my eyes spark with unyielding rage. With a swift and ever so trained draw of my gun a blast rang out and before anyone even noticed my arm move, the fat man was already on the ground, with a hole between his eyes.
The kid dropped to the floor and pushed herself up against the charred wall.
“I do apologize about that,” I turn back to the man on the ground. “I made myself very clear that when your daughter is found that not a single finger was to be laid on her, but it seems that some people are built for violence and not much else... quite hard to find any sensible mercs these days.”
“Before we get to the main topic at hand,” I continued. “Does the girl have any relatives that would take care of her?”
The man was wide-eyed, constantly switching his sight from me and his daughter. Any pain that the broken nose might have caused was completely overwritten by the need to protect his daughter and the need to get as far away from me as humanly possible. Eventually, while looking at his daughter, he did speak, telling me that she has a grandmother in West Wind Harbor.
“Wonderful!” I exclaimed. “Razor! Take the child to West Wind and leave her with her grandmother, am I understood?”
The cloaked figure behind me gave a quick nod before ushering the girl out. The man tried to push himself up off the floor to get his daughter, but a swift kick to the centre of his chest sent him back down.
“I give you my word that she will be delivered to her grandmother without any issue, let’s face the truth here, you are not surviving this night. So with that bit of knowledge do you really want your daughter to be left here in this glorified pile of ash?”
He thought to himself, knowing full well that I was right, but not being able to stomach the wordless farewell to his daughter which he will never see again. I thought about letting him walk, letting him leave with a stern slap across the wrist, but then I remembered why I hunted him down, why he deserved to die above everyone else. A bad guy killing even worse guys... that’s how the world always worked, but at least I was going to make him give me the answers I needed.
“So without further-ado, how about we get to brass tax? You are going to give me the book, and you’re going to tell me every little thing that you know, about Hell...”
