Chapter 56: This Is Why They Call Her a Calamity
Freya let the crowd carry her along, suitcase in hand, taking her time to study the real face of Evangel.
Why is everything interesting in this world underground?
Nymeria, now this place, and let’s not forget the most interesting of them all, my dungeon.
She caught herself seriously wondering whether the humans of this world might not have a family tree tied to moles rather than apes, before letting out a small laugh all to herself at the absurdity of it.
And it was at precisely that moment that she felt something tugging at her hand.
She turned and found a boy, all skin and bone and clearly starving, hauling on her suitcase with everything he had. He couldn’t have been more than eleven or twelve, with wrists thin as twigs and a shirt three sizes too big that had obviously belonged to someone else before him.
"Ooooh~ Now isn’t this a little thief we’ve caught red-handed?"
She seemed to consider it a moment, while he went on pulling without the thing budging so much as an inch.
"Well. Both hands, technically. Doubly red-handed, then?"
But between how utterly still she stood and how casually she joked about it, the boy slowly worked out that his easy mark was nothing of the sort.
Fear climbed into his eyes, so he let go of the handle and started to turn to bolt.
Which he never managed, because Freya, faster than he would ever be, had already caught his arm, and she felt beneath her fingers a bone she could have snapped by barely squeezing.
He pulled at it once, then twice, in vain, and when he understood he wasn’t getting out of it, the fear on his face doubled.
Freya then leaned toward him, gently, and whispered in his ear.
"...Hunger."
When she straightened up, the boy no longer showed the slightest trace of fear, but something else in its place. A fever, with pupils blown far too wide and a jaw working on its own, as though he were already chewing something.
He wasn’t even looking at her anymore, his head turning every which way, searching all around him, until his gaze snagged on a food stall fifteen meters off and his whole body turned with it.
A smile spread across Freya’s face then, and she let go of his arm.
He went.
It wasn’t running anymore so much as charging, so he shouldered two men aside, caught a foot in a basket, sprawled full length across the flagstones and slid a good meter.
He was already back on his feet before he’d even finished sliding, without a glance at his opened knee.
"Hey! Watch where you’re—"
He tore off again harder than before, shoulder first, shoving people aside as though they didn’t exist, so that a woman went down sideways swearing without him even hearing her.
Then he jumped.
He landed square on the stall, on all fours in the middle of the goods, and began cramming in everything he could grab with both hands, without chewing, his throat heaving in spasms that looked more like retching than swallowing.
"MY GOODS! GET OFF THERE!"
The merchant grabbed something from under the counter, but the child didn’t even lift his head and went on swallowing.
So the saber came out and came down in one motion, without hesitation, with the weary precision of a man who had already done this a certain number of times.
The small body pitched forward onto the stall, throat open, both hands still full.
The merchant swore, wiped his blade on his apron, then set his baskets back in place, while all around two or three people paused for a second before carrying on their way without a cry or a question.
Freya, for her part, pulled her gaze from the scene and resumed her walk, unhurried, suitcase in hand, her eyes settling on the window that had been displayed permanently since she’d arrived down here.
[ Word of Greed skill activated. ]
So this is the true power of my skill.
She noted something else in passing, something she’d never been able to verify until now.
The closer the word spoken sits to what the person already wants, the stronger the fever.
Because with Aldric, the word had pushed at something that was already there without ever making him lose the thread of his own thoughts, whereas here, on a boy who probably hadn’t eaten in several days, it hadn’t pushed at anything at all and had simply crushed everything.
And come to think of it, she couldn’t have dreamed of a better place to explore the question, since what gathered here was every illegal trade in the barony and well beyond, people drawn from across the entire kingdom, from every walk of life and every station, who had only one single thing in common as they came down those steps.
Greed.
A place held, according to Aldric, by three kings. Well, two kings and a queen.
Three monarchs reigning over greed, each seated on his own district.
Unfortunately for them, our little Freya had arrived, she who was the very personification of that avarice, the one who reigned over that sin, the Calamity herself.
Which was to say that the underworld of Evangel was, to her, a playground, and the word described perfectly what this place amounted to for the Freya of today, the one who hadn’t even registered, nor so much as thought to feel the faintest remorse, at having sent a poor child to his death.
After a few more minutes of walking through the lanes, weaving between porters and stalls that some merchants were already packing away, the gallery widened and the rumble of a crowd reached her, growing clearer with every step.
She was arriving where she’d meant to go from the start.
The fighting pits.
The gallery opened onto a pit carved into the rock, ringed by rough wooden stands thrown up in a hurry, so packed that people had sat down in the aisles and along the railings.
At the center stood a cage of blackened iron planted straight into the stone, its floor covered in thick sand that clearly hadn’t been changed in a long while, judging by the color of it.
Inside, two men.
The first stood a good two and a half meters, his skin cracked across the whole surface of his body to reveal gray rock beneath, so heavy that every step of his rang through the floor.
The second, by contrast, was far smaller, lean and wiry, his body run through with arcs of electricity that crackled from his shoulders down to his fists and set the air hissing around him.
The classic strength versus speed matchup.
Except here it’s mostly just wildly lopsided, given the elements the two of them are working with.
The stone man wasn’t moving at all, folded in on himself, shoulders drawn in and arms tucked across his chest, hunkering down like a boulder waiting out a storm.
The other circled him at a speed the crowd couldn’t follow, so that all anyone saw were blue streaks and the place he’d just struck.
Freya, for her part, followed him without any trouble.
BAAM
"Fight back, you coward!"
BAAM
"Yes! Like that, you’ve got him!"
BAAM. BAAM. BAAM.
The blows rained in from everywhere, front, back, along the flanks, each throwing a spray of blue sparks off the stone that then fell like rain across the sand, while chips broke loose here and there and white fissures ran up the forearms.
"He’s doing it! He’s actually doing it!"
"GO ON, MY GIRL!"
"Thirty more on the fast one!"
But Freya could see it perfectly well.
Looks like somebody’s already tiring himself out on thin air~
He was cracking the rock, that much was true, except rock didn’t conduct anything, so his entire discharge scattered outward on every impact, in spectacular sparks that served only to make the stands scream.
The gaps between his passes were already stretching out, with an extra breath between each series and a push-off that grew less and less clean.
He was spending everything he had chasing the appearance of dominance, while his opponent had bet from the very start on him running out of steam.
What an amateur...
And right on that thought, as the fist came in toward the stone man’s ribs, he opened his hand and plucked it out of the air.
The sound of the impact against his palm was sharp, then the fingers closed.
The electric man was stopped dead mid-charge, his shoulder wrenched back by his own momentum, both feet lifting off the ground before dropping back into the sand.
"...Ahahahah! Looks like you’re tired."
He pulled at his arm, once, then twice, bracing himself, driving his heels into the sand and throwing all his weight backward, without the stone arm dropping so much as a centimeter.
"LET GO OF ME!"
So he struck with his free hand, at the jaw, the neck, the shoulder, again and again, each blow glancing off the stone in a burst of blue that grew paler each time.
"LET GO OF ME, YOU BASTARD!"
"My daughter hits harder! Ahahahah!"
If your daughter takes after you that’s not exactly surprising, I pity her boyfriend down the line...
Seeing it was getting him nowhere, he changed tack and went after the hand itself, scratching, pulling, driving his nails into the joints of stone in search of a grip, a crack, anything at all that might give.
Two nails bent back and split against the rock, so that blood ran down his fingers and began to hiss where it met the arcs.
He kept at it regardless, eyes fixed on that hand, his breathing gone short and whistling.
"Let go... let go of me, please, let—"
The hand tightened.
CRACK.
"AAAAAAAAH!"
The wrist snapped clean to the side, and the scream carried through the whole arena, so shrill that even the crowd hesitated a second before starting up louder than before.
The stone man then lifted him by the broken arm, in no hurry at all, until his feet were kicking a meter clear of the ground, while the other went on screaming, his whole body shaking and the arcs of electricity dying out along his limbs.
"Wait, wait, WAIT—"
Then he threw him.
The body rose spinning end over end, three or four meters up, legs thrashing in the empty air, while below him the stone man planted both feet in the sand, turned his hips, gathered all his weight into his shoulder, and waited.
The body came back down, and when it reached his height, the fist went out.
The skull burst apart.
The headless body dropped to the ground with a wet thud, and blood spread across the full width of the arena.
"YEEEESSS!"
"I SAID IT WOULD END LIKE THAT!"
"No no no no, not my stake, NOT MY STAKE—"
The bookmakers moved along the stands then and began handing out winnings, fistful by fistful, under a barrage of protests, disputes and insults.
And it was in the middle of all that a single word made itself heard.
Because no, Freya hadn’t come here for the fight, but for the crowd.
She shouted it into the middle of them all.
"MONEY!"
A bookmaker stopped dead, hand still inside his satchel, and the man he’d been paying tore the whole satchel away from him.
"Give it—"
"IT’S MINE! ALL OF IT’S MINE!"
The coins scattered across the stands, and several dozen people dove after them at once.
"LET GO!"
"IT’S MINE!"
"YOU DIDN’T EVEN BET, YOU LIAR!"
One man bit his neighbor’s hand to make him drop a purse, while another was shoved off the second row and vanished underfoot without anyone stopping.
A little further along, a woman was slamming a bookmaker’s skull against the edge of a table, in steady blows, repeating the same word each time.
"My. Mon. Ey."
"IT’S HIS FAULT I LOST MY MONEY!" someone screamed, pointing at the arena.
They all turned at the same time.
The stone man was still at the center, out of breath, his fists coated in blood that wasn’t his, when the first one climbed the bars. Then ten. Then fifty.
"BACK OFF!" he snarled. "BACK OFF, YOU PACK OF—"
The first to reach him never had time to touch the floor of the arena, a backhand splitting his head open against the bars.
Nobody slowed for it, so they went over the bodies without seeing them, some of them still fighting each other as they climbed, hauling one another back by the legs to get ahead.
"IT’S HIS FAULT I LOST MY MONEY!"
"THIS IS ALL HIS FAULT!"
He crushed four of them, then five, then six, caving in a chest beneath his fist and sending a jaw sideways, before the hands finally reached him.
The legs first, then the arms, then the throat.
He went down to his knees, and a mass of bodies came down on him until he disappeared beneath it.
The blows rained in from every direction, bare fists, heels, planks torn from the stands, a stool, a knife that was useless against stone but that its owner went on driving in anyway.
They were still beating him long after he’d stopped moving.
And when there was nothing left to beat, the fever didn’t subside for it, so they turned on one another instead.
One man shoved another off the top of the cage to take his place. Two more strangled each other on the ground over an empty purse. An old man methodically emptied the pockets of a wounded man who was still groaning, before having his own skull opened from behind with a plank.
And a lantern fell from the ceiling and set a cloth stall alight without a single person turning their head.
Freya was already far away, having left the stands the second the word left her lips to slip against the current through the flow of those fleeing.
Looks like this skill really is the jackpot after all~~
She made her way back up the lane with a light step, all but skipping, suitcase swinging at the end of her arm, a smile on her lips and her gaze still trailing behind her over the smoke starting to gather against the cavern roof.
All around her, merchants were folding up their stalls in a panic, and nobody paid the slightest attention to the small figure moving against the flow, visibly in an excellent mood, while the din behind her faded to a distant rumble.
Then the atmosphere changed entirely.
The air turned warmer, thick with a sweet perfume, and the torches gave way to lanterns of tinted glass that bathed the whole lane in red and gold.
Women were leaning everywhere along the walls, against the hangings, on the steps, in the doorframes. Some wore silks that covered very little, others had their breasts bare without anyone seeming to mind in the slightest, and all of them had a smile ready for whoever passed within reach.
"So, big man, coming up?"
"Come spend the night with me, beautiful."
An arm slid against hers as she passed, a hand grazed her hip, another ran slowly up her back.
Freya carried straight on without slowing, letting the hands slide off her as though she were walking through smoke.
"Oh, this one’s shy!"
"Come back whenever you like, pretty thing!"
She passed half-drawn curtains, laughter drifting down from upstairs, couples disappearing behind hangings, a man haggling over a price under his breath with his hand already on a girl’s waist.
Then, right at the end of the lane, the door appeared.
Enormous, pink and gold, rising three times the height of a man, carved with floral patterns that spiraled upward toward the figure of a woman sculpted at the center, arms held wide open.
And as she drew closer, Freya saw that the petals weren’t petals at all, but open hands, carved one by one, every last one of them reaching toward the woman at the center.
Two men stood on either side, motionless, no weapons in sight.
Freya stopped in front of them, set her suitcase down against her leg, and smoothed a fold in her village girl’s dress.
So this is my target then, the queen’s palace.