Chapter 18: A Hero Is Born

The first thing I did when I came to was to throw up. I admit that wasn't particularly heroic behavior but it came naturally. It also managed to help expel whatever crap the Dark Lord had drugged us with.

The second thing I did was open my eyes. One look at my surroundings and I immediately wanted to close them again. I was chained to a wall in one of the cells in the basement of the keep, Alisha to my right. We were still wearing our combat attire but our gear sat outside the cell, protected by a goblin guard.

Wow, they must have had a real manpower shortage if a single goblin was doing guard duty.

“Alisha, you alright?”, I asked and she groaned.

“As alright as can be, considering. Better than Selene probably.”

Shit. Selene. If I remembered correctly she was still in the throne room and they could have been doing gods knew what to her.

So I took stock of our surroundings. My bag of holding and all my other gear was out of reach, which was not ideal.

“Can you cast spells as you are?”, I asked Alisha quietly.

“The shackles aren't spell binding but without my rapier I can't use a lot”, she said.

“Enough to take out the goblin?”, I asked.

“Would that help?”, she asked back.

“Not right now”, I said. “But if I lure it in here, we can take the keys off its corpse.”

“Good idea”, she said.

So I started yelling at the little shit. I called it names. I called it a raping piece of shit and a shit flinging buttweasel. Then I remembered that shit flinging and raping were things they did for fun and thus not really insults so I called it a limp dick sell-out and told it that its nose was small and ugly.

That did the trick. It shook with anger and made high-pitched noises that were probably intended to sound menacing. Yes, they understood the common tongue just fine, they just couldn't speak it. So I kept the litany of insults up until it opened the cell door and started snapping its teeth at the air as if telling me it wanted to bite my dick off.

I let it come close enough to reach and then, just as I wanted to tell Alisha to kill it, it started choking and fell down as Alisha drew the air from its lungs. Except this time she didn't stop once her opponent was unconscious and kept it up until the little shit turned purple.

It took me quite a while to drag the little shit close to me and when I did it took a rather impressive feat of dexterity to lift it up with my feet so that I could grab onto it with my hands but when I finally had a proper hold on the green bastard it wasn't too hard to find the keys to our shackles on it. And once I'd managed that I had us both unlocked in short order and tossed the goblin off to the side, the body worthless to me now.

Once we'd geared back up again we started talking strategy.

“If we go in there again we'll just get drugged again”, Alisha said.

I shook my head. “This only happened because idiot me didn't prepare well enough.”

“This is not your fault”, she said, soothingly.

“It is”, I countered. “I was the one who told you two that there were trap master Dark Lords and then I didn't prepare for the possibility.”

“How could you have prepared for an airborne drug?”, she asked.

I gave a rueful smirk. “Do you know how to bless cloth?”

She blinked, then blinked again, and then she smacked her forehead, almost knocking the diadem out of her hair.

One of the most overlooked abilities that clerics possessed was the ability to bless things. The simplest application was to bless water, creating holy water, which was used as an alchemical ingredient and in certain rituals and was roughly as effective as high-grade acid when thrown at undead creatures.

Another was to bless weapons so they'd deal more damage to evil and undead creatures.

Yet another was to bless people, but that was nearly useless until a cleric reached Saint status. For a low level cleric the blessing did things like preventing a person from tripping or making it harder for witches to curse them while the blessing of a Saint or Great Saint was similar in effectiveness to an Enhance miracle.

But one particularly obscure application was to bless cloth. Normal armor provided roughly zero protection against freaky Outsider magic like the tentacle portals the cultists had been throwing at us, but blessed cloth protected against such spells better than a fortress wall. Much more interestingly, blessed cloth also purified toxins. Letting water run through it would filter poisons and impurities out of the water and breathing through it would filter poisons and other drugs out of the air.

So I pulled out a bolt of cloth from my bag of holding and had Alisha bless it before cutting and stitching three wraps of it that we could breathe through. If the cloth hadn't been sheer white we would have looked like thugs with the wraps covering our faces but as I'd said before, looking stupid beat being dead.

After that we grabbed our gear and once again cleared out the ground floor before ascending the stairs. There had only been a single goblin manning the kitchens and on the way upward we encountered two more. Neither of us spoke about what was happening to Selene and frankly I didn't want to think about it. I was fairly certain we hadn't been out for long and I was hopeful that the Dark Lord had waited for Selene to wake up before starting whatever it was he'd planned for her.

This time, as we approached the throne room I pulled out my longsword and my crossbow as well as one of my dispelling stilettos. Dispelling stilettos were very thin knives that carried a dispelling charge, able to outright destroy spells and minor enchantments and to turn off major enchantments for a while. Only mythic gear, the stuff the gods themselves carried, the stuff that took even Hephaestus, Goibniu, or the dwarven brothers Eitri and Brokk weeks to forge, was entirely immune to the effects of these knives. One poke and the effect would discharge, though unfortunately it took them a day to recharge once used.

After the number Alisha had done on the doors before they looked nowhere near as formidable as they had been so instead of having her blast them open again I put a boot on one side and kicked it open.

The sight was one I still woke up to some nights. Selene was shackled to the side of the throne, her armor gone. She was mercifully still wearing her undergarment, though it was soaked in blood. Her arms and legs were covered in lacerations, none deep enough to be dangerous but all deep enough to hurt like crazy. Her stomach was black and blue, one giant bruise, as if someone had used her as a punching bag. Jagged claw marks marred her left cheek and her right eye was black and swollen shut. She was crying and winced every single time a tear hit the wounds on her cheek, the salt reigniting the pain. I clenched my fists and growled, but then composed myself. Losing it would only lead to stupid mistakes and I couldn't afford any more of those. So instead of storming forward like an idiot I assessed my surroundings.

Of the half dozen goblins left alive after the ice storm only two were left, which matched the four we'd killed on the way up here. Less fortunate was that the two orc guards still looked perfectly healthy.

The Dark Lord smirked as he saw us, but I didn't want to let him run his mouth again so I fired the crossbow and put a bolt in his shoulder. I'd been aiming for his heart but oh well, it got the point across. Alisha moved in the same instance and fired two tight bursts of three air lances that each killed one of the orcs, though given the state of their corpses 'mangled' might have been a better term. She was somehow even more furious about Selene's state than I was. Before the orcs had even hit the ground she sent out a crushing wave that smashed the goblins backwards, turning them into ugly green smears against the wall.

By this point the Dark Lord had pulled out the crossbow bolt and finally stood up, as though we were finally no longer beneath his notice.

“Impressive”, he said and pulled the saber from its sheath, tossing the sheath aside as he did. Then he carved a rune into the air and intoned: “Loki Worldburner, I invoke the miracle of the sun flare you have gifted me!”

In response a sphere of fire, easily three feet in diameter, sprang to life in front of him and started drifting towards us, at roughly half my usual walking speed. I was going to mock it but as I stepped out of its path it corrected its course towards me. Alisha tossed an air lance at it that did absolutely nothing so I stepped out of the way again only to notice the floor tile I was aiming for had an odd blue coloration and I only barely managed to scramble away before an ice trap flash froze the area I'd been about to step onto. As I looked up I saw discolored floor tiles randomly dotted around most of the floor.

That fucking sadist had booby-trapped the entire floor and then sent out a dangerous but extremely slow-moving homing projectile to herd his enemies into the traps. Clever, but evil.

“Alisha, take care of this bastard, I'll run interference.”

She nodded at me and began firing air lances and for the first time I saw the Dark Lord actually act. The first two lances he dodged but then he drew what at first glance looked like a bundle of sticks until I realized it was a bunch of twigs of mistletoe twisted into the rough shape of a wand, which he used to contemptuously slap away a third air lance, causing it to swerve off course and hit a wall.

I, meanwhile, was almost entirely focused on avoiding the sun flare while purposely triggering as many traps as I could, slowly disarming the battlefield one square yard at a time. Whenever I had a few seconds I used them to fire crossbow bolts at the Dark Lord and a few actually managed to hit him, but not enough for a killing blow.

Only then did I realize what the Dark Lord was planning as he kept dodging and blocking Alisha's attacks while slowly closing the distance between them. He intended to work his way up to her and cut her down once he got close enough. I couldn't let that happen.

I decided to take a calculated risk and stopped disarming the field. Instead I threw my dispelling stiletto at the sun flare like a dart. I hadn't wanted to use it quite this early but this thing needed to go. On contact the sun flare collapsed in on itself and was gone. Unfortunately my poor dispelling stiletto had been warped by the heat and would probably be worthless even after recharging, but that was a worry for another time.

The Dark Lord had parried another volley of air lances and was now within a few yards of Alisha when I came up behind him and tried to stab him in the heart from behind. Only superhuman reflexes saved his life and he twisted away at the last second, but not quite fast enough to also avoid Alisha's next air lance, which slammed the mistletoe wand out of his hands so hard I heard some of his finger bones snap. He hissed in pain but drew a line on the floor with the tip of his booted foot. It began glowing red and I tackled Alisha away before the floor erupted in stony spikes that would have skewered us had we kept standing there.

I twisted out of the tackle with my crossbow drawn and fired another bolt that caught him in the other shoulder and as Alisha came up she sent out a hammer blow of air that smashed him into his throne hard enough to break the whole thing. Normally when you hit a person with furniture it was the person that broke and not the furniture, but in this case the construction had been rickety enough that he only suffered awful bruises instead of shattered bones.

Breaking the throne had the obvious beneficial side effect of freeing Selene and also revealed what the throne had been made of. Toenails. An entire throne made up of toenails. Wasn't there some story about Loki starting the end of the world by riding in on a ship made of toenails? I guessed that settled what god had chosen this guy to be a Dark Lord.

Thinking far more clearly than I'd expected in her situation, Selene grabbed the closest sharp object she could find, a jagged piece of rock that had been flung her way from one of the detonation traps I'd triggered, and stabbed the Dark Lord with it, screaming out her pain and hurt and fury:

“DIE!”

The Dark Lord yelled out in pain as well, then twisted away and jumped up and away from her. The piece of rock had pierced clean through his scale mail and broken open his ribcage. It hadn't quite pierced his heart but had exposed it to the point where we saw it beating in his chest.

He screamed out in anguish and then carved another rune into air. “Loki Shapeshifter, I invoke the miracle of Giant's Kinship you have gifted me!”

And immediately his body started swelling, his armor growing with him, though soon enough the saber clattered to the floor, too small for his new body to be useful as anything but a toothpick. When he finished growing he stood twenty feet tall and leered down at us, the grin all but splitting his face. Then he reached toward the stone statue behind the ruined throne and ripped the stone sword out of the statue's hands. It now fit him perfectly and I assumed that was exactly why that statue had been there, as an inconspicuous armory for his giant form.

Thankfully he retained all the injuries he'd accumulated during our fight, though I had no idea how to fight him at this size. He held the sword high above his head, the tip of it scraping against the ceiling, intending to chop down on Alisha and me.

In my panic I yelled: “Alisha, enhancement, NOW!”

I pulled out the shield I'd been using before and held it above me. A second before the sword made contact I felt the power of the miracle rush into me, saving me from being squashed like a bug. Impossibly I managed to stand against the giant and his sword, even managing to push him back, and Alisha peppered the area around his exposed heart with air lances, hoping to kill him outright, but he stopped her by stomping his foot and thereby creating a cluster of floating mines right next to her that she had to scramble to get away from.

I chanced a look at Selene who was using her piece of rock to carve a rune shape into the ground and a moment later an enormous lightning bolt crashed through the roof of the tower and hit the Dark Lord right in the head. He staggered backwards and I pushed up with all my might while Alisha fired off a hammer blow of air and together we managed to throw him off balance and onto his back.

Selene was climbing up his body, digging her hands into armor, cloth and skin, wherever she needed to to find purchase, while Alisha kept peppering him with hammer blows of air to the head to keep him from standing up. As Selene climbed I saw markings on her back come to life, glowing with golden light that became brighter and brighter with every inch she climbed. I'd seen these before, but with her back fully exposed I could see more of them than I'd ever seen on any other Chosen One before. They were the sign of favor of her goddess, etched into her flesh, empowering her on her quest, and now it was flaring brighter than I'd ever seen on any of the Chosen Ones I'd worked with.

“Selene!”, I called and as she turned around I tossed her my sword.

She caught it and crawled all the way to the wound in the Dark Lord's chest. Once there she rammed the sword down into his beating heart, screaming at the top of her lungs: “Die, you bastard!”

He thrashed in anguish but she kept twisting and wrenching the sword back and forth until he finally went still.

A second later his body started shrinking until Selene sat atop a normal human-sized corpse. The body had shrunk around the sword, which had widened the wound even further but also meant the blade was stuck and she had trouble pulling it out. Or at least that was what I first interpreted her spasms as until I realized she was shaking as she started crying.

I nodded over at Alisha who cast her healing miracle on Selene. I saw the warm glow wash over her and it closed all her wounds, though as with my arm it still left behind scars. Her arms and legs were crisscrossed with scars and the claw marks on her cheek were pale smears on her lightly tanned skin but thankfully the awful bruise on her belly was gone entirely, as was the shiner on her eye.

The healing did nothing to break her out of her anguish though as she just kept sobbing. I walked up close to her and just stood close. I wanted to hug her but wasn't sure whether she could handle skin contact right then.

Eventually her sobs subsided and she asked: “How can I even be a Chosen One after this?”

“You can't”, I told her. She looked up at me, a look of betrayal on her face.

“What?!”, Alisha asked. Her voice was shaking with anger.

I pushed on. “You were chosen to kill a Dark Lord. The Dark Lord is dead. Gods above, you killed him with your own hands, even. Your quest is over, so you are no longer a Chosen One”, I said, then held a hand out to her and added: “You, Selene, are a Hero.”

She blinked, then blinked again through teary eyes this time, and then took my hand and I pulled her up into a crushing hug. Alisha came up and joined in and we just stayed like that for a while. Selene was naked except for her undershorts but there was nothing titillating about the situation. Soon I realized how cold her skin was, so I looked for her discarded gear and found her bag of holding. I dug through it until I'd found an outfit for her and helped her pull it on. The tunic she'd been wearing had been shredded along with her pants.

Eventually, Alisha said: “If you want to, I can use Homeward and send us to your home right now, Selene.”

Selene looked up, panic on her face. A moment later she went still and asked in a small voice: “Would it be alright if we travel there on foot? I... I don't want to deal with all of that yet.”

Alisha looked over at me, pleading with her eyes as though I was going to refuse just because our contract had technically been fulfilled.

“Of course”, I told her.