Edrelle winced, and cursed.

She hadn’t been putting weight on it, but her foot had hit a bump in the road. Nearly two weeks after the incident, and her leg wasn’t fully healed. Granted, she wasn’t expecting to be in fighting condition by now, but the poison—venom, she reminded herself—must have slowed down the healing process. At least she was able to wear a boot now without convulsing.

The night was young, and the moon was full, and Edrelle felt a primal urge for good wine, a nice warm bed, and perhaps a courtesan or three. In the city of Oste, all three to five of these things were available. Unfortunately, in the city of Oste, all three to five of those things required money to purchase, and Edrelle’s pecuniary situation was very dire indeed. She sighed. In wood elf country, the bed and wine would be free, and the courtesans…well, that was negotiable, and Edrelle considered herself among the upper echelon of negotiators. She eyed the precious bundle she carried beneath her arm.

The raincloak itself was nearly priceless—those ponchos were the one bauble that the Sutherlands never traded to outsiders. It was colorful, a blood red on the inside, lined with pockets. The outside was a treated oilcloth that was soft and almost leathery to the touch, like a bat’s wing, and it was a rich, earthy gray. It reminded Edrelle of her mother’s tombstone, a memory that brought with it great joy; her only regret was that she hadn’t been there to see the old hag die. It was decorated with turquoise-colored lineal glyphs, shapes that were aesthetically pleasing but whose meaning Edrelle did not have time or want to parse. Wrapped inside were the hatchet and hunting knife, their grips a raw, worn oak and their blades that strange black iron—Siderite—that Sutherland artisans wrought in secretive forges. Along with a few earrings, necklaces, and a strange, small keepsake consisting of a pair of twisted rings, she was looking at something close to five thousand pec, maybe more if she accepted payment in Dwarfish union scrip. She was counting her coin too early, though. She needed to find a buyer. She knew some collectors in Oste, but more pressing…

Five. No, Four humans, two halflings. One sword, on the leader. The rest…fists? Clubs maybe. Edrelle had her eyes closed as her long ears honed in on the sound of the brute squad coming for her. The fact that only one of them had a sword told her they didn’t know who she was. Not really. Good, she thought. She couldn’t afford Oste becoming compromised. Their beds were very warm, and their wine was very good, and the whores were very…competitively priced. She heard the rapid heartbeat and smelled the dehydrated breath of inexperienced thugs. Amateurs. So, not Tabor’s crew. These were small fries.

They rounded the corner, in a group movement that they had probably spent half of the afternoon rehearsing. Poor fools. Edrelle almost regretted what she was about to do to them.

The Northman at the head wore stained leathers, and at his hip was a simple blade in a leather scabbard that had a squared, chisel-like point and a straight flat edge. Standard issue Lirûdan army sword. This guy was probably their leader. He was wiry, but he had the swagger of someone who had washed out of the officer’s program in Lirûdan’s war academy. A dropout, or a deserter, trying to make his way as a street mercenary in the Midden. He had a smirk that was missing some teeth, and hair that, while not cut in a long time, was styled with care. The other three humans were probably locals; a woman with a hook hand, an older man that seemed far too old for street-thuggery, and a boy barely twenty. Sixteen? Edrelle was bad at counting human ages. They lived and died in a blink of an eye to her. The woman was unarmed (not counting her hook-hand), and the older man had a rolling pin (gods, where did they find him?) as his weapon of choice. The boy held a staff that may or may not have come from a broken shovel, or some kind of broom.

The halflings caught her attention. They had long ears, like rabbits, down to their waists, and and were barefoot, letting their padded, lapine feet carry them lightly across the steps. The more distinguishing things about them was that these two were twins, and huge compared to most of their kind. They were easily four and a half feet tall, and shaved bald, which made them look more ridiculous, considering the adorable velveteen rabbit ears that sprouted from their heads. They brandished metal bars as weapons.

“Oy! You there, elf!” The leader shouted. That Northman accent grated her ears every time she heard it, and this one was definitely one of the worst ones.

“Me?” Edrelle gestured to herself, quelle surprise.

“Yeah you. What’s your name, elf?”

“Kris.” Edrelle lied. She almost always lied. ‘Edrelle’ wasn’t even the name she’d been born with, but when one has lived as long as she had, one tended to get bored of using the same identity for more than a few decades.

The man smiled again, showing more gaps in his grin. “Don’t think so this time, Kris.” He spat the pseudonym out like it was gristle. “See, you’ve been around under that name. And the names Giselle, Dannakir and Mala, all with the same description. And you also ripped my client off under two of those names. And here you return to Oste, with a colorful and valuable cargo.”

Gods, Giselle. What a silly name, I had nearly forgotten! She stroked her hair mindfully. It was during a phase, but still there was no accounting for her lack of taste during it. She kept stroking her hair. It was time to change her look, apparently, and while she had been meaning to do so for a while she would miss the brunette bob. It looked so good with her current wardrobe. I suppose that’ll have to change as well, until after I lay low for a while. It had not been her plan—she had finally gotten to a point where she could go through with the next phase of the Project, but that would need to wait again.

“Oy! Are you listening?” The Northman shouted.

“Who is your client, again?” Edrelle asked in earnest. She didn’t remember who she had the balls to rip off twice in Oste. Maybe in Bel or Angmoon, but not Oste.

“That’s not how this works. How this works is you coming with us quietly, or you come with us dead.” The Northman pushed forward on the locket of his sword with his thumb. Immediately, Edrelle’s senses sharpened into crystalline focus. They had obviously never dealt with an elf, and she was most certainly the worst one to start with. The old man and the young human’s hearts quickened, and they stunk with perspiration. They would run. The woman with the hook hand seemed to have gotten excited. She was here for the fight. The halfling twins were awash with pheromones, they were an open book. But identical twins were always linked in that strange, mystical way. You can’t kill one without killing the other, as was the rule with twins. It was just cruel to leave one without its pair, honestly. The Northman had control over his motions, his breathing. Edrelle may have underestimated the amount of training he had. But you don’t desert the Lirûdan Army unless you sucked at something.

“Dead? This really is your first time with an elf. That’s not how this works, boy.” Edrelle’s voice dropped a bit. She really didn’t want to do this with a hurt leg—oh, there it is. Her pituitary gland dumped a cocktail of hormones into her bloodstream that made the pain vanish in an instant, the heaviness of her limbs turn into a vibrating tension, and sharpened her senses to the point where she felt practically omniscient. The cobblestone streets, dull gray walls, hanging plants, the signs swinging in their rusty loops of iron, even the people who were dumb or curious enough to stick around and watch, their breathing, burning and slow. Their heartbeats, electric and wet. She sensed them all as intimately as a lover, and then, as easy as turning a dial, tuned them out.

Torchlight and moonlight became background information funneled into her cerebellum as her eyes pierced the darkness, and she saw each of her assailants in crisp detail, her pupils dilating until her irises were amber rings around blown disks of void black—her field of vision expanded, and she felt like she had already memorized enough about each one that she could focus on them in her mind without needing to look.

She could feel their heartbeats reverberating through their arteries, through their boots and through the ground, she could hear the bacteria in their guts dying and birthing and blooming and eating. She could smell every hormone sliding off of them, radiating in waves of scent. She was a born and bred killing machine, her brain hooking her on the dying smell of others like it was drink and sex and narcotic. And she hated that about herself.

But she could stand to indulge it every once in a while.

“Aye, it’s my first time with an elf.” The Northman drew his sword. “But I promise I’ll be gentle if you are, sweetheart.”

Gross. I need to steal that line and use it later, The tiny little part of her that was still conscious filed the quip away for later use. For now, it was time for observation.

Her enemies moved. The hook-handed woman had already tensed up, like a cat about to pounce, and began to rush her as soon as the Northman finished the line that he had probably practiced in the mirror at some point. She was big. Not Sutherland big, but big. The young man started to move, but stopped. Wise. The twin Halflings were going to try and flank her—it was obvious by the movement of their eyes and the twitches of their ears and little motions of their whiskers. The older man had taken the opportunity to wet himself slightly. Fair, considering he was probably old enough to know what even a wounded Elf could do in a fight. The Northman charged head-on.

There were many ways to stop him, but Edrelle chose the simplest, and, to her, the funniest. She loosened the pack at her elbow, and let the ax drop into her hand from the rolled-up raincloak. She let the rest of the package drop, and flung the ax forward in a spinning arc that even her former combat instructor back home would have raised an eyebrow at (the closest she had ever gotten to praise). It buried itself in the Northman’s clavicle, and he spewed blood, a sight that made the reward center of Edrelle’s brain thrum, dumping oxytocin into her bloodstream the way it might reward a normal person for holding a newborn. Edrelle was a far cry from any normal person. She smelled the old man fully wet himself now. Poor bastard, The conscious stream in her brain said. You get to live tonight—provided you don’t do anything stupid.

The human woman was unfazed by the sudden death of her leader, which was off-putting. She was probably one of the Wild Folk from the northeast of the Midden, and her disregard was either from her comfort around death and bloodshed, or an abject hatred of Northmen. Both were equally likely, given the two human tribes’ rivalry. She swung overhand (overhook?), trying to gouge a bit of Edrelle’s shoulder with her prosthesis. Edrelle ducked low and fired a kick into her sternum from her left leg, and felt something crack and give as the woman was thrown backwards. Two down.

The boy, dumbass that he was, seemed to be galvanized enough despite the loss of the two lynchpins of the brute squad. Maybe he felt safer because he had a weapon—or in this case, a very long stick—but nonetheless, he charged forwards while the two Halflings stayed back, presumably to watch this very foolish young human die. He shouted something—the blood and heartbeat in Edrelle’s ears was roaring too loud for her to make sense of it, and the sensory part of her brain was too busy to care—and swung his homemade quarterstaff from the side, with form so poor it would have earned him a whipping if he were an Elder’s Peak trainee. She caught it, and pulled him forward, before pushing the length of it back through the crook of his elbow and using it as a fulcrum on his back, essentially pinning him at the shoulder. It was a non-lethal move, and she aimed to keep it that way…but just to make sure the boy knew better in the future than to mess around with gangs, she rolled the staff to dislocate his arm.

The crunching feedback that vibrated down the haft of the pole was enough to make her hormones spike again. She bit her lip at the pure, wholesome enjoyment she had for seeing humans in pain. It had been drilled, programmed, engineered into her, but she could at least savor her own curse at times. She let the boy go tumbling along with the stick, and turned to face her remaining opponents, stepping into a wide stance that was better for facing short folk. But when she planted her left foot, something felt wrong, like she was sliding off balance. Her sock felt wet.

Fuck. Your left foot, idiot.

She had undone the work of a very nice fool she’d met in the woods. Her adrenaline had erased the pain, but in the process, she’d forgotten that she had a gimp leg in the first place. She looked at the woman with the hook hand. She was already getting up. It wasn’t the human’s ribs that had cracked, it was…

 Edrelle looked down at her stance. Her ankle was shattered to pieces, and was kept together by the boot it was laced into. It bent at an unnatural zigzag before ending in the foot, which was pigeon-toed at an angle not found in non-broken legs.

“Shit,” Her senses focused, involuntarily, on the foot, “Shit shit shit.” The pain hit her and she nearly bit her tongue off. At least three compound fractures. Her foot was no longer attached to her body except by slivers of muscle, tendon, skin, and the surrounding boot. Not ideal. She picked up her leg, and the foot hung limply from the ankle, and her nerves screamed so hard that her vision swam. Really not ideal.

The halflings rushed. The adrenaline surged. Her alchemically-enhanced hypothalamus was good, but not ‘Suddenly Lose Your Foot’ good. It was enough to compensate for the pain, though. She yanked the boy’s weapon from the crook of his arm, causing another pop from his shoulder—he groaned weakly but offered no resistance—and propped herself up with it. The twins closed the distance, and the woman was up.

“Are ye ready to die, elf?” The woman sneered in the surprisingly soft accent of the Wild Folk.

Die? I didn’t spend forty of my sexiest years on a mountain learning from a bunch of High Elf pricks about the ‘art of martial prowess’ just to get killed by a couple of street thugs too cheap to even afford more than one sword before I reached my one-thirtieth, She thought. Then she remembered that her 130^th birthday was nine days ago, and couldn’t use that excuse anymore. Reaching what most of her peers considered ‘middle age’ wasn’t relevant to the battle, but it was the most damaging thing to happen to her that night, including losing her foot.

“Fuck it.” Edrelle said, as one of the twin halflings swung in from the right, his twin close behind readying an overhead strike. She disrupted the first blow with her stick, then went to her knees so she didn’t have to rely on one foot—she didn’t need the height advantage much anyway. Not for these amateurs. The first one was off-balance, and she thrusted her makeshift staff into the stomach of the second one. 

Block the overhead strike from behind, disrupt the second one’s counter. Riposte. Execute. She counted down each move in her head, whacking the first twin’s pitiful overhand away. He stumbled, gripping his broken knuckles and cursing. The second one went for a blind attack with his club, and she folded it aside before cracking him across the knee with her stick. The hook-handed human came from her periphery—another overhead strike. Predictable. Edrelle kicked off of the ground with her good leg, and rolled, spinning over and deflecting the hook while also braining the second Halfling with the momentum of her stick. He went down like a sack of potatoes, and Hook-Hand staggered behind him. It would have looked very cool if she had been able to stick the landing, but due to her bad leg, she broke her fall with her hands and scraped the shit out of her forearms. Great.

The halfling behind her wailed at seeing his twin go down. Epidural hematoma. Less painful death than most would get. Less painful death than you will get. She hadn’t decided if this was meant for the remaining halfling or the woman, but it was true nonetheless. The woman got up, with the Northman’s shitty sword in her one hand, and the halfling was getting over his shock and preparing to attack from behind. Not fast enough.

Edrelle rose with the help of the stick, her boot knife in her right hand. As both of her assailants moved, her brain formulated a plan, informed more by the sensory data coming in from her ears than her eyes. It all clicked into place. Execute.

The woman was swinging overhand again, proving herself incapable of learning from her mistakes. The remaining halfling was swinging for her liver, and was closer. He was first. Edrelle pushed herself backwards, burying her knife in the halfling’s clavicle. She felt the tiny fluff of hair that existed there matted against her hand with fresh blood. The gurgle from the assailant confirmed she had scored the right target. In one fluid motion, she pulled free from him, and pushed towards the human. She braced the elbow of the woman’s sword arm against her shoulder and twisted herself, letting her dagger sink just below the woman’s right ear, before dragging it through her neck, spinning around behind her and ripping the blade free. She felt the shower of blood from a partially severed head mist against her back. She desperately wanted to look back and check her handiwork, but the older human was still watching, still trembling and pissing his pants, and she wanted to look cool in front of her only living witness.

“Boo.” She said, winking at him. He fled.

Thank the gods, I don’t want to kill an old man armed with a fucking rolling pin.

She remembered her leg, and was suddenly very glad that the boy was kind enough to bring a walking stick to a street fight. She sheathed her boot knife, and picked up the raincloak, making sure to collect the ax from the shoulder of the very dead Northman lying in the street. A member of the Oste’s night watch approached, flanked by two comrades. They had no uniforms—only lavender-colored sashes around their waists. Oste was a Free Town, which had shaken off High Elf policing customs after the war. This also meant that they never intervened in street fights, but only watched to question the victor.

“They start this?” He asked. His hand was on the hilt of his knife, but he didn’t seem intent on using it. Just covering his bases.

“Yep.” Edrelle panted.

“Alright. We’ll bill you for the body removal at your hotel, my buddy here’ll get you to a doctor. What’s your name?”

“My name is Kris.” She lied, and took the assistance of the watchman, helping her limp towards a doctor.

Gods, I love Oste. She smiled, looking up at the moon. Now, about those courtesans…