Mage X Orc Chapter 21-A Interlude: The Old Hunter Senta

Senta dived forward to take the woman in the doorway out a the knees. After a brief struggle she snapped the traitor's arm at the joint and tossed her thrashing body back towards her pursuers.

The plan had gone sideways the moment her feet touched the roof of the suspicious buildings. She had passed through what she suspected was the first layer of defense, which felt like a feather running up her spine, but the second layer nearly dropped her.

It had dropped her daughter. Necun had folded like fresh sheets a heartbeat after Senta had landed. A second attack had followed, a strange shimmer that settled around them both like mist. While the attack was unfamiliar the old Hunter's aura had hissed and spat upon contact. She was in no hurry to learn the full effects.

Senta couldn't simply leave her daughter, nor could she carry her out quickly enough. but she might buy her enough time to break whatever charm was placed on her mind.

Spending precious heartbeats the old Hunter dragged her daughter towards a chimney, dropping her into the soot stained bricks and securing her weight with a climbing hook attached to an armor strap. She hoped it would hold, but her aura felt more fragile with each breath, and she could hear heavy footsteps rushing up a nearby ladder.

Moving fast, Senta bolted towards the noise, arriving just as the first traitor raised her head above the edge of the roof. The tip of the Hunter's blade drove into the woman's eye, and her body fell back onto her shocked companions below.

From that moment it had been a running fight, Senta knew every heartbeat she kept them focused on her drew attention away from her daughter. The strange haze that weakened her came and went as her pursuers tried to keep track of her location in the sprawling set of buildings.

The traitors had hollowed out what was once a nice set of cozy apartments, knocking down as many walls as they could without risking the structure itself. In place of children's play areas and communal dining halls they had dug fighting pits and erected armories. The weapons were makeshift, clearly not the work of a trained smith, much to Senta's relief, but the sheer amount of steel on display was chilling. They had been amassing for a war not seen since the last splintering of the clans. And unlike those bloody days were not inclined to follow any rules of that war. The killing of random farmers showed their stance of civilians quite well.

It was all the more galling to Senta, because the more she fought them the more she came to believe the prisoner's stories about being recruited from street sweepers and clanless. She had yet to encounter an aura she would consider combat worthy. Each traitor she felled wielded their weapons the way a sweeper might wield their broom. Skilled in some cases, but lacking the extra spark an aura provided when fighting for ones life.

It would make the attempted coup significantly less threatening if she hadn't also spotted vast stores of pitch while leading her pursuers in circles.

The black oily substance had a caustic smell which alerted her to it's presence in a huge stack of barrels. Many were leaking, their seals not handling the fluid well over such a long period. They had made for a good hiding place while she caught her breath, no one had been enough of a fool to have lanterns near such a product, leaving the area drenched in darkness.

So they'll burn down the city, kill everyone important in the chaos, then blame the corpses for the fire when they seize power. Senta thought, working out the traitor's plan. Not bad, certainly not something Malla saw coming. This level of foolishness is beyond planning.

Fire was an ever present threat in the city. Every neighborhood on every level had a fire crew. Everyone kept buckets of black water to douse any blaze before it could spread. But everyone was in their homes, told not to go out without good reason. Brave women who were usually spread out in the city, and could assist with fighting the fire were hunting traitors instead. Well placed and lit simultaneously the barrels could start an inferno unmatched by any they had seen. It went beyond a foolish plan, it was rank madness.

Senta slid around a corner, head twisting to check on the women at the head of the pack closing in. She missed the presence of the ambusher until the woman's makeshift spear rammed into her side. The armor barely caught the sharpened iron tool and it skidded down, scrapping across her hip as it went. If her aura was at full strength, or even in a halfway decent condition, it would have scratched skin and little else. Instead a weeping line of blood welled as the sharpened tip slashed a vein.

The old Hunter flicked her blade at the first woman to draw her blood in cycles, but only found air as the traitor danced back, dropping her spear as she fled. For a moment Senta thought her just another coward, if a lucky one, only to spot a flicker of movement in her foe's hands. She ducked just in time to avoid the spray of glass and dust the woman tossed towards her eyes.

She wanted to close in, to hack the clever murderer apart, and her aura sang with her. The approaching pack of traitors complicated things, and the haze was already settling again, twisting to avoid the clever ambusher even as it sought to engulf Senta's own aura.

And so the old Hunter fled yet again, throwing herself through the next doorway and over an interior balcony to reach the lower floor. She needed to find the Mage who kept throwing the rot damned haze at her before the traitor's managed to corner her. In her condition she wouldn't last long even against their makeshift weapons.

She wondered, distantly, if she should have brought her daughter's human along after all.