7 Chapter 5: Capture and Escape

Albana

I thought I'd gotten lucky. For three days we waited and no refugees came. Then, just as we were about to pack up and go home, he came.

A young man in leather clothing, with a machete on his hip and a lance on his back.

Immediately I thought: Oh no!

He was very tall. Taller than Vlado and Miroslav. But he looked very young. Humans age faster than elves, so maybe he is around 17 years old?

He looked very impressive and strong. And his face was kind of handsome. And him whistling and two Riding Lizards coming over looked really cool.

I could tell he was strong, but not strong enough.

As soon as he directly stated he was from the mountains, my heart skipped a beat. How could he be so stupid! But it wasn't his fault. He had probably spent all his life in the mountains and knew none of the rules in Llap.

I knew Vlado and Miroslav were going to cut off one of his hands. It's this disgusting tactic they love to do to opponents.

I had only gone on quests with these two beasts thrice, and they were always horrible people during the quests.

Beastmen are all brutes. And these two were nobility in their beast tribe, which meant they were arrogant and looked down upon everyone below their rank.

While I was healing him the place his arm was cut off, I started missing mommy and daddy so much. I just hoped they were still alive.

Arben

I added Oilyhair and Squareface to my death note.

Squareface tried to feed my severed right hand to Tailless and Speedy, but they refused to eat it, so he just threw it away into the fields. And we started walking north down the field roads.

"There's a small city nearby. Walk faster so we can get there before dark, all right Lefty?" Oilyhair said and kicked my butt.

I was walking in front, and the cute blonde elf and the two shitheads were walking behind me. Squareface was the one holding Tailless and Speedy's leashes.

"So what happened over in the mountains?" said Squareface.

I wanted to see what information he had, so I figured I'd talk.

"I'm not sure. One morning my village was just attacked. I think by the Hasani Clan, though I don't know. The army that attacked us was too organised and advanced to be a clan army."

"You mean Slobden Hasani right?" Oilyhair said.

I quickly added that name to my death note.

"He's starting to get a name for himself. An information broker told us that he had recently become top dog in his clan, and had started a war. But last time you mountain people had a war there were a lot more stupid refugees free for capture. I spoke with the other squads near our border zone, and they hadn't caught one refugee yet. It seems you're the only one who made it out alive. Which sucks for us because we wasted three fucking days expecting at least a couple dozens refugees. We never even got to use that wooden cages we made."

"What gonna happen with me now?"

"Shief said to sell the weak slaves at this town and bring the stronger ones back to the company in Gjilan. We might have kept you like Albana if you still had both hands," Oilyhair said with an ugly snigger. It made me feel like shoving a sword down his throat.

I looked over at the elf girl and we briefly made eye contact, then she looked away.

"I've never seen a pretty elf before, where are you from?" I said.

My legs were swept from under me. I tried to catch myself, but I forgot that I only had one hand so my face still hit the dirt road.

"DONT FLIRT WITH ALBANA, MUT!" God some assholes. I got up and started walking again. I could tell they had probably hit on her a lot of times and gotten rejected.

"Where is the nearest dungeon?" I said.

"Why do you need to know---"

"The nearest dungeon is in the city of Gjilan. Cities always develop near dungeons with lots of arable land surrounding them," Albana said, cutting off Oilyhair.

It was the first time she had spoken to me. Her voice was very feminine and naturally high-pitched, but I could tell she was trying to make it sound deeper. I thought it cute.

"It is the law that says any person who crosses from Dukagjina into Llap without a border pass from Drenica is free to be taken as slave," she said.

"Oh, I wish I knew that before I crossed," I said and shot her a smile.

Oilyhair and Squareface were getting angrier, and I wanted to avoid further damage to my body, so I stopped talking.

***

It was now night and we had arrived at the small town called Pasjan.

It was about the same size as the main village back in the Krasniqi Domain. There were a lot of brick buildings which I had never seen before, and a lot more people than back in my village. Oilyhair rented a stable and tied Tailless and Speedy there and had them fed and watered.

Then he rented a big room at the inn with four beds.

Inside our room, Squareface put his bed in front of the entrance, and Oilyhair put his bed against the only window. Albana put her bed against the wall right in front of me, and my bed was put against the opposite wall.

"As said, try anything and we will cut off your other hand. Maybe normally you could take us on and win if you are lucky, but right now you only have one hand so you will lose if you battle us. Is that understood?" said Oilyhair.

"Yes. Do we have any food?" I said. I was starving.

"Hmph! Yes we do, but not for you. You'll survive," Squareface said.

Even though these two brothers were shitheads, they were still tactically smart. They never underestimated me, and even validated that I was a danger to them. Also, I could tell that the reason for not feeding me that night was to make me slightly weaker in case of a fight later on.

All three pulled biscuits out of their backpacks. Albana gave me a quick glance. It looked like she wanted to give me some of her food, but decided not to after Squareface and Oilyhair sneered at her.

I jumped on my bed and startled the three of them.

Compared to the two last nights of sleeping in a tunnel and a cave, a bed felt like a heavenly cloud. I got naked and under the sheets. I could have showered and washed all the sweat, blood, and dirt off my body, but when my body hit the bed there was no getting up.

"Well, I'm fucking exhausted. Naten e mire!" I closed my eyes and fell asleep.

***

Everything is dark. Why is everything dark? I start moving around. I bang my head into some kind of wall. I am trapped. I start squirming. I can feel I am trapped inside some kind of sphere.Where am I? I start panicking and banging my body around inside the sphere. I hit my head really hard into the wall. Crack. Light floods in. I break out of the sphere. I can see now. It's an eggshell. Where am I now? I'm floating in a white room. I can now see myself from a third person perspective: I am a lizard. A really pink, baby lizard. I move my right lizard arm. I can see and feel myself moving my right lizard arm. Now a right chopped off hand appears out of nowhere and grabs my entire body in its hand. What the fuck! I can feel and see the hand holding me. But it's not crushing me, just holding me in place. A knife comes out of nowhere and chops off my little pink tail. What the fuck! I am so sad! The hand releases me and exits the room. Now a new sensation: My tail is growing again. I can feel it grow and see it grow. First it starts off forming a little pink blob at the place of the wound. Then that blob keeps growing and growing, and I can feel it grow. I've never had this kind of feeling before, an entirely new sensation. Now my tail is back. I am so happy!

I awoke, with my hot body drenched in sweat, as usual. Out of habit I got up, butt-naked with morning wood and oblivious to my surroundings, and went over to the bathroom to pee.

Peeing with a hard on is pretty hard. The secret to doing it is bending your upper body forward, which gives more space for the urinary tract in your penis while erect.

When I turned around and exited the bathroom, I found three new developments in my environment:

Firstly, Albana was blushing and looking away from my erection.

Secondly, Oilyhair and Squareface had their swords out, pointing them at my right hand.

Thirdly, I had a right hand.

"Hey, what's up? No pun intended." I thought I'd try to break the tension in the room, but all three of them were still deadly serious and looked at me in shock.

"W-What the fuck? Why is your hand back?" said Squareface.

The sword he was pointing at me was shaking. Why was he so afraid?

"I had this weird dream where I looked like Tailless when he was a baby. Was pretty weird."

"Only Grandmasters have the ability to regenerate body parts! This must be some kind of trick of his!" Oilyhair said.

Albana, still shocked, was starting to take a few steps back.

Squareface's right foot took a micro step forward, telegraphing his next move. My brain stimulated what was going to happen next:

Squareface lunges forward and strikes, I take a step back and barely miss it, Oilyhair lunges forward as well and strikes at me while Squareface is getting ready for his next swing, I take another step back and barely avoid it, now Squareface hits me. A similar scenario to last time.

Before that could happen, I instinctively used Wind Magic to dash back into the bathroom, and I hit the bathroom wall really hard and all the air in my lungs went out. And while Squareface and Oilyhair were following me, I closed off the bathroom entrance with Earth Magic.

"What the fuck he can do chantless magic!" I heard from the other room. I'm assuming they meant Imagination Magic.

What now? What do I do now? I could use an Earth Bullet like with the boar? No, it might miss or pass through Oilyhair or Squareface and hit that cute, innocent elf. She clearly was not bad, and I had taken quite a liking to her. What was the alternative?

In my moment of hesitation, Oilyhair smashed through the Earth Wall and swung his sword at me. I reflexively used Wind Magic again to dash to the side. The dash was uncalibrated and I again smashed into the wall.

Squareface followed in his brother's step and they were now both in the small bathroom with me, point blank range.

I uttered this weird happy sound when I realized this ideal position I was in: Without thinking about it, I automatically used my both hands as flamethrowers and roasted Vlado and Miroslav to death.

I used the Fire Magic for 3 seconds until I was conscious again and stopped.

What lay before me was an ugly scene: Two boys completely black. Though their armour and swords were unharmed, I guess they were high quality.

Revenge is sour.

To this day, I still regret killing them.

I've spent a lot of time rationalizing their deaths. Telling myself stuff like it was in self defence, they were trying to kill me, they cut off my hand, and so on.

I also later on learned about the horrible things they had done to other people, and told myself things like: If I hadn't stopped them, they would have hurt more people.

But in the end, none of that rationalizing has helped me. My body has a built in unchangeable belief that all death and hurting other people is bad.

I have hurt and killed a lot of bad people in my 100 years of living, but it seems this belief has never disappeared, as if it is the foundation upon which I am.

I heard from other people that the more they killed, the less problems they had with killing. But this seemed to never work for me. 84 years have passed, but this experience still leaves a kind of feeling of black goo stuck inside my intestines.

I see life as movement: You are moving inside your body, and you are moving outside your body. Constantly moving. To me there is something perverse and unsettling about one second moving like always, and then the other second never moving again. I have more to say about this, but I will stop talking about this moment in my life because it just makes me feel bad.

When I exited the bathroom I found Albana the elf girl standing still, holding her staff, and looking at the burnt corpses. I put on my pants to cover my dick.

"I'm sorry about your friends," I said.

"They weren't my friends..."

There was a moment of silence.

"Well," I said, "what are you gonna do now?"

"I don't know."

I thought for a moment. Then I said, "If you are willing to teach me about this world, and help me grow stronger, you can come with me."

At this she made strong eye contact. Then looked away. She spent about a minute thinking in silence. It was pretty awkward.

"O-Okay. I will help you if you help me. But first off, you have to change your clothing. Right now you are wearing leather clothes which they only use in the mountains, so you will draw a lot of suspicion and be an open target... First off, wash yourself. Then put on their armour and swords so you look like an adventurer," she said, gesturing to Vlado and Miroslav.

I did as she said.

I took off my pants and washed myself with Water Magic and dried myself with Wind Magic. Then I went over to the two burnt bodies. Their faces were entirely black and looked disgusting, so I covered them with Earth Magic.

The clothing on their lower bodies, that is, the boots and pants and socks and sword sheaths, were pretty much undamaged since I had aimed my flamethrowers up at their faces.

But the clothing on their upper bodies were burnt to a crisp. But their breast plates and shoulder plates had survived, and the two swords as well. I took all of the usable stuff off of them. Then I exited the bathroom and sealed it with Earth Magic so I didn't have to look at them again.

I put on one pair of pants, socks and boots. I used the same leather shirt I already had, but I put one of the breast plates and shoulder plates over it. And I stored the other pairs in the backpacks we had.

I got an idea with the swords: They were very high quality, higher quality than my lance and machete, so I thought it'd be a waste to not use them.

I attached the two sheaths to my back in an x pattern, so I could draw them from overhead. But since the longswords were slower to move around, I also kept the shorter machete to my left hip in case I needed something fast.

Then I attached the three daggers to my back as always. I decided to throw away the lance since it was made of wood, and I now had higher quality weapons. Though this is not saying I stopped using the lance fighting style I had created, I just replaced the lance with the longsword.

"What now?" I said.

"First off, we need to get away from this town. Eventually, the company will find out about what happened. Also, they will send people after me. So we can't go to Gjilan."

"Then where do we go?"

"We will go to Prishtina. We will take a carriage from here to Gjilan, and another carriage from Gjilan to Prishtina. And about your Riding Lizards..."

"Yeah?" I said.

"We can't bring them with us. They will draw too much attention."

Fuck. I was not ready to leave Tailless and Speedy.

"Jo bre! I can't leave them," I said.

"Listen, those Riding Lizards will tie you to the mountains and make us a target for slave-catchers. Also, they will tie you to Vlado and Miroslav's murder. When the company finds out about their deaths, and the beast tribe finds out, then that will be target on our back. Right now I will be targeted, but you don't have to be as well. Do you understand this?"

"Y-Yes..." I said.

"Another another important part, your accent."

"What about it?" I said, confused.

"In Llap and Drenica, the spoken dialect is Tosk, not Gheg. When you came over to us at the fireplace, that was another clear sign that you were a refugee since Gheg is only used in Dukagjina. Make sure to never use the Gheg dialect."

"Oh, I had no idea," I said. "Thanks for telling me."

I had only been exposed to Gheg my entire life, so I would have to study Albana's way of speaking from now on and imitate it. Luckily the only differences between Gheg and Tosk are few so it would be easy to make the transition.

We packed all of our stuff and left the inn hurriedly without checking out.

We took Tailless and Speedy from the stables and rode to the southern exit of the town with them. I could see the mountains of Dukagjina far off in the distance.

"Listen," I said to Speedy and Tailless while petting them and taking off their saddles and leashes, "You guys need to head over to the mountains, home. That way," I said pointing to the mountains.

I slapped them on their buts and said, "Ik! Ik! Away!" and they ran off in the direction of the mountains. It made me feel sad seeing them leave. I hoped I'd see them again in the future.

***

We were now in a crowded carriage headed to Gjilan

The carriage cost 2 euros per person, and for our luggage it cost an extra 1,5 euros.

"This leaves us at 40 euros. It is cheaper traveling from Gjilan to Prishtina, so that will only cost us 3 euros in all, leaving us with 37 euros.

We will be sleeping in the carriages and not stopping at an inn. Though we will still need food, which will cost us 0,5 euros per meal. When we reach Prishtina we immediately need to start dungeon diving to afford our inn. One decent room with 2 beds will cost us 20 euros a night. If we dungeon dive every day, we should make 30 euros per day."

"By the way," I said, "can you explain dungeon diving to me?"

"Oh yeah, I forgot you've never been to a dungeon before."

"I've never been to a city either. Last night was my first time."

"Oh, okay. Let me explain: Pretty much every major city has dungeons. Inside these dungeons are monsters and rare materials which can be sold inside the city. Some monster parts are valuable as well and can be sold. All the monsters and materials regrow after a set time. I don't know why this is, or why dungeons even exist in the first place, but I think it is the gods who made them. Anyway. A dungeon is divided into three parts: The upper, middle, and lower floors. The lower you go, the rarer and more dangerous the monsters, but also the higher the profits made. Prishtina does not have the biggest dungeon in Dardania, but it has the most."

"Okay I understand. By the way, what's your last name? And why do you have a Shqip first name when you're an elf?" I said.

"Half elf," she said. "Also, Albana isn't my real name, and I don't have a last name. I mean I do, but I don't know what it is, they captured me from my village in the Great Forest when I was 4. Currently I am registered in Gjilan as Albana Trepica Company, which is the name of the company that owns me."

"What's a company?"

"A company is a group of mercenaries that makes money through adventuring. That is, gathering materials, doing quests, and dungeon diving. Also, my company will be sending bounty hunters after me, so we have to stay low. And another important part. You said your last name was Krasniqi?"

"Yeah, Arben Krasniqi."

"Well Krasniqi is clearly a mountain name, so you should try to not use it as much as possible."

That hurt to hear. I had always been proud of my name. But she made a good point.

It was night when we arrived at the city of Gjilan. We disembarked outside the city gates.

"I have 200 euros in a bank box inside the city, and the news of Vlado and Miroslav probably hasn't reached the company yet, but we can't risk going inside the city," said Albana.

We got 5 pieces of gjevrek at a stall outside the city walls, and went on another big carriage headed for Prishtina.

Inside the carriage there were a lot of people. Albana yawned, which looked cute. I took our luggage and put it in the corner of the carriage.

"Sit there," I said to Albana, pointing to the corner of the carriage. I then sat right next to her and she blushed.

"W-What are you doing?"

"Go to sleep. I'll watch over us."

"Oh... okay," she said and closed her eyes.

When she fell asleep, I took a blanket from our baggage and put it over her.

One hour into the journey, the carriage shook a little from the bumpy road, and Albana rested her head on my shoulder while asleep.

I took this time to study her face: She had these pointy ears, and short blonde hair, with two locks around her ears. And a cute little nose. I thought she looked beautiful. Her hands were also small and feminine, and the nails unusually pink and well shaped. I remembered Elvana's nails looked very ugly from all the berry-picking she did. But Albana's elf hands were very clean and well kept, without any scars or calluses.

Back in my village, from the stories I heard about the elves it was a theme throughout them that elves were all beautiful. I guess this was true.