The air in the mine was cold, stale, and thick with unspoken plans. Two days had passed. Damian spent them in a near-trance state, cycling the thin, filthy mana of the deep earth to build a dam against the hollow chill gnawing at his core. His soul integrity was a fragile levee holding back a dark sea—it hadn't dropped further, but it hadn't healed either. 61.9% was a sentence hanging over him.
Mara was a restless shadow. She sharpened her staff's point to a needle's tip. She practiced controlling her flame until she could make a candle's worth of fire burn white-hot. She was honing herself, turning her anger and betrayal into a keener edge.
On the morning of the third day, the last of their stolen rations were gone.
"We need food," Mara stated, the obvious words loud in the silence. "And information. We're blind down here."
Damian opened his eyes. The dim light from her palm-flame reflected in his dark, hollow gaze. "The nearest settlement?"
"A shit-hole called Mossgrave. Half a day's walk east. More a graveyard with a tavern than a village." She stood, brushing rock dust from her trousers. "I'll go. You look like you'd start a panic just by breathing."
There was no humor in her voice, but the blunt assessment was almost comical in its truth. Damian knew he radiated a particular dark aura now, a residual stain from the Fiend-form and the soul-wound. "Don't use House silver. Use the copper."
She nodded, pocketing a handful of copper bits from the stash he slid to her. She paused at the mine entrance, looking back. "If I'm not back by nightfall…"
"I'll assume you sold the information for the bounty and leave," he finished for her, his voice flat.
A flicker of something—anger, maybe respect—crossed her face. "Yeah. You would." She vanished into the grey mist.
The hours crawled by. Damian practiced his sword forms slowly, testing his healed body. The movements were fluid, but a deep, spiritual fatigue made them feel heavy. He checked his Inventory, mentally cataloging the bloody trove from Ironfall: coins, cracked bracers, enchanted daggers, crackling gloves. Junk and treasure, all stained.
When the light at the crack faded to the deep blue of evening, he heard scrambling outside. Mara slipped back in, her face pale beneath the grime, her breath coming in short gasps. She wasn't being chased. She was scared.
She didn't speak. She just threw a crumpled piece of cheap parchment onto the stone floor between them.
Damian picked it up. It was a bounty poster, poorly printed. The artist had talent, though. The drawing showed the lower half of a face—a firm jaw, a unsmiling mouth, the edge of a high cheekbone. It was unmistakably his. The hood and mask had hidden his eyes and hair, but the artist had captured the cruel set of his lips perfectly. Above it, in bold, alarming type:
WANTED: THE IRONFALL BUTCHER
For Acts of Magical Terrorism & The Murder of Imperial Agents.
BOUNTY: 500 GOLD COINS (Alive: 600)
APPROACH WITH EXTREME CAUTION. CONSIDERED ARMED AND EXTREMELY UNSTABLE.
He stared at his own mouth, wanted across two kingdoms. A strange, detached part of him was impressed. They'd gotten his look of cold indifference just right.
"They're everywhere," Mara said, her voice tight.
"And the others?" Damian asked, folding the poster and tucking it away. A memento.
"There's one for a 'Windblade Assassin' and a 'Beast-Talking Saboteur'—generic sketches, no names. Bounty: 100 gold each. They're after the whole team."
Damian waited. There was more. He could see it in the tension in her shoulders, the way she wouldn't meet his eye.
"I heard talk in the tavern," she continued, her words dropping to a whisper, as if the rocks themselves might be listening. "The drunks were laughing about it. A beggar hit the jackpot in the Ironfall scrap district. Found a man in a refuse heap."
Damian went very still.
"He was babbling," Mara said, a tremor of revulsion in her voice. "About shadows that moved on their own. About fire that was black and cold. About a… a demon with horns." She finally looked at him, her eyes wide. "They said a street surgeon, a butcher who works on the poor for cheap, took him in. He's keeping him alive, dosing him with wakeleaf and drain-blood, selling his blood for alchemical reagents because it's 'still potent with battle-mana.' They're calling him the 'Babbling Fountain.'" She swallowed hard. "His name is Liam."
The image formed instantly in Damian's mind: the lean, tense swordsman with the steel affinity. Competent. Pragmatic. Now a drugged-out fountain of dangerous secrets, bleeding out story by story in a butcher's back room.
"Noah?" Damian's voice was ice.
"Captured. The Imperials bagged him alive on the Smelter Stair. No poster. He's in a proper cell somewhere." She hesitated. "What do we do?"
The options were clear. Run. Let Liam die, a slow, ugly death that might still spill his secrets before the end. Or…
"We go to Ironfall," Damian said.
Mara's jaw dropped. "Are you insane? The city will be crawling with Imperials looking for you! It's suicide!"
"It's maintenance," he corrected, standing up. "Liam is a loose end. A leaking one. We have two choices: plug the leak, or use it."
"Use it? He's a mutilated, drugged wreck!"
"He's a 2nd Order warrior with a Steel affinity who survived an Imperial ambush and lived long enough to have his arm cut off," Damian countered, his mind racing. "That's not a wreck. That's a resource. One that currently owes his miserable existence to a back-alley butcher. We offer him a real chance. A new arm? Maybe. Revenge? Definitely. A purpose? To serve me."
Mara stared at him, horrified and fascinated. "You want to recruit him? After what happened?"
A good craftsman doesn't throw away a damaged, high-quality tool. He repairs it." Damian began gathering his things. "And as for Noah…" A grim, utterly humorless smirk touched his lips. "I never liked that guy. Too shifty. His bird gave me the creeps. The Imperials can have him."
The sheer, casual callousness of it, delivered with such flat sincerity, broke the tension for a second. Mara let out a sound that was halfway between a gasp and a startled snort of laughter. She quickly stifled it, shaking her head. "You're a real piece of work, you know that?"
"It's been said." He slung his pack over his shoulder. "The butcher's location?"
"I got it. Cost me five copper and a promise I wouldn't tell the town watch about his still." She took a deep breath, steeling herself. "We go in at night. And we go in quiet."
"Agreed," Damian said. "This is a retrieval mission. Subtlety."
The return to Ironfall was a journey through a ghost town of their own making. They avoided the roads, moving over the rugged foothills under the cover of darkness. The city's glow against the night sky was a siren call of danger.
They slipped into the scrap district from the north, using a drainage culvert that stank of industrial runoff. The streets here were narrow canyons of piled, rusting metal and rotting timber. The air smelled of acid, ozone, and despair.
Mara led the way, her small flame extinguished, relying on memory and Damian's enhanced senses. They found the place: a leaning shack built into the side of a slag heap, a faded sign with a bloody cleaver painted on the door.
No light showed from within, but a low, rhythmic moaning could be heard from a back window, cracked open for the foul air.
Damian motioned for silence. He drew a single short sword like a craftsman selecting a specific chisel. He tested the door. A focused pulse of Earth mana against the bolt mechanism, a soft crunch, and it swung inward.
The smell hit them—antiseptic, blood, rot, and the cloying sweetness of wakeleaf smoke.
The single room was a horror show. Surgical tools, rusted and crude, lay on a stained table. Jars of murky fluids lined shelves. And in a cot in the corner, strapped down with leather belts, was Liam.
Or what was left of him.
His left arm was gone, the stump wrapped in filthy, oozing bandages. His face was gaunt, eyes sunken and glowing faintly with the unnatural green of wakeleaf intoxication. He was mumbling, his head lolling. "…shadows… teeth… the horns… cold, so cold…"
A fat, bald man in a blood-crusted apron snored in a chair by a cold stove, a bottle in his lap. The surgeon-butcher.
Damian looked at Mara and pointed two fingers at his own eyes, then at the butcher. You watch him.
He moved to Liam's side. Up close, it was worse. Infection was setting in. The man was being slowly milked to death.
"Liam," Damian said, his voice low but clear.
The sunken eyes fluttered open, swimming with green haze. They focused slowly, confusion turning to a dawning, drugged terror. "Y-you… the Warrens… you're the…"
"I'm the one getting you out of here," Damian stated, cutting through the babble. "Do you want to live?"
Tears, clear and incongruous, welled in Liam's eyes. The tough, pragmatic fighter was gone, stripped down to raw, broken animal instinct. He nodded, a barely perceptible movement.
"Then you serve me. From this moment, your life is mine. Your vengeance is mine. Do you understand?"
Another nod, more desperate this time.
"Good." Damian reached into his Inventory and pulled out one of the mid-grade healing potions from Elara's ring. He uncorked it and brought it to Liam's cracked lips. "Drink. This will fight the infection. It won't grow your arm back, but it'll keep you alive."
Liam drank, gulping the potion down. A shudder wracked his body as the healing magic, sharp and urgent, began to combat the poison and rot in his system. Some of the terrifying green haze in his eyes receded, replaced by pained, lucid awareness. He looked at Damian, really looked at him.
"Th-thank you," he rasped, the words thick.
"Don't thank me," Damian said, unbuckling the leather straps. "You owe me. We're leaving."
Just then, the butcher in the chair snorted, shifted, and one eye cracked open. It landed on Damian, then on the freed Liam.
"Hey! What in the blazes—" he started, heaving himself up.
Mara was on him in an instant. She reversed her staff and brought the metal-shod end down on the back of his head with a solid, meaty thunk. His eyes rolled up, and he collapsed back into the chair, out cold.
"Subtle," Damian remarked drily.
"He'll live," Mara muttered, looking slightly queasy. "Probably."
With Mara's help, they got Liam to his feet. He was weak, wobbling, but the potion was already giving him a thread of strength. He stared at his missing arm, a fresh wave of agony—emotional now—crossing his face.
"We'll find you something better than flesh and bone," Damian said, guiding him toward the door. "But first, we get out of this city."
They slipped back into the night, a broken swordsman between them, leaving a snoring butcher and a bounty poster with a familiar, cruel mouth blowing in the Ironfall gloom.