Published at 3rd of November 2024 9:04 am

Book 3 Chapter 18: No Such Thing as Doom, No Such Thing as Fate

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Godfrey stood there for a moment with his calm smile. He was wearing a stunning red vest with golden flowers woven across it and held a thin rapier in one hand as he looked at Dantes, Gren, and Jacopo. His eyes lingered the longest on Jacopo, but when he spoke it was to Gren.

“So little mist, your master has chosen to make another move? I can tell you now that it doesn’t matter. With or without me pulling the strings Rendhold is doomed to fall. I just moved to make that fall as spectacular as possible.”

Gren flickered a bit. “No such thing as doom, no such thing as fate. They’ve been rotting as hells since long before your master split himself from his brother.”

Dantes loosed the pistol from his holster as they spoke, and Jacopo slipped his fingers through a pair of thick brass knuckles. They both knew what those coins across the floor meant. Their encounter last time had shown that Godfrey was able to teleport between golden coins. Dantes had only managed to hit him by tricking him into getting very close, and even then he'd had to run.

He forced himself to relax, being too tense would make him slower.

Jacopo took the opposite tactic, amping himself and readying himself to launch toward him the second he appeared somewhere else.

Godfrey shook his head. “Well, I’d say that’s enough talking. Time for you to ineffectually flail at me while I end your lives and less than lives one at a time.”

Gren faded into mist and rushed toward him.

Dantes began to summon in all of the rats and roaches he had managed to get on board, and began to have them swarm across the room and cover each coin with their bodies.

Just before Gren could reach Godfrey, he blinked back to Dantes’s left.

Dantes quickly raised his pistol and fired, but Godfrey was already behind Jacopo.

Jacopo whirled around and caught a flick of Godfrey’s rapier on his brass knuckles, parrying him.

Godfrey blinked again and managed to strike Gren with his bare hand.

Whatever essence Gren was made off seemed to burn where Godfrey struck, causing the scent of sulfur and blood to spread through the cabin.

Dantes pretended to stumble a bit from the rocking of the boat falling backwards and Godfrey quickly capitalized, teleporting in front of him and driving his rapier toward him.

Dantes blasted him with the concentrated mist from the purple marble Sunset.

Godfrey began coughing as he teleported away.

Dantes was watching his movements carefully. So far, he hadn’t teleported onto any of the spaces Dantes had managed to cover with vermin, that meant that either he couldn’t, or it was a feint.

The fight continued, with Gren, Jacopo, and Dantes taking Glancing blows as they slowly pushed Godfrey into a corner. He was uninjured and seemed nowhere near slowing down, but if they could pin him down to a single spot then the fight would be at its end.

Jacopo lunged toward Godfrey and his rapier, letting it pierce him so that he could slam a brass knuckle into his chin. There was enough force behind the blow that Godfrey stumbled back, losing his weapon, and Jacopo laughed as he followed up with a powerful uppercut that would’ve shattered a regular man’s jaw.

Godfrey teleported again, but found himself directly in front of Dantes who sent his will through a wand in his hand and sent an explosion of stone toward him.

He teleported a third time, but there was only one coin left to teleport to, in front of Gren.

Gren’s hand shot forward and pierced into his golden chest. Gren flickered a bit and pulled his hand away, looking at a pure black hand covered in liquid gold, his hand burning away a bit as if the golden blood was acidic to him.

“That was too easy.”

Godfrey smiled as gold poured out from his mouth. “Wasn’t it?” He vanished, and a single gold coin clattered to the ground.

Whatever it was that Gren was made of exploded outward for a moment like an intense flame as he let out something between a howl and a roar that made Dantes’s blood run cold.

Dantes moved and picked up the coin that had fallen, making it dance between his fingers before letting it fall back to the ground.

“It was a copy. Like the ones Mercedes made when we fought her,” he said to no one in particular. “He used it to throw us off. He’s probably long gone by now.”

Gren began to expand again, before pulling himself back, fixing the lapels on his suit and flattening out the wrinkles on his trousers.

“He’ll be back.”

Dantes moved over to Jacopo who was removing the brass knuckles from his hands, and feeling a bit annoyed at their lack of efficacy compared to claws and teeth. Though the feeling of impact when they’d hit had been satisfying.

“Stay still,” said Dantes, grasping the hilt of the rapier that was still embedded in Jacopo. He put one hand against Jacopo to brace himself, then yanked it out with a smooth motion. The rapier was very sharp, but he could feel no magic to it, nor did he sense poison of any kind along the blade. He tossed it to the side and turned his focus to Jacopo.

He began to channel energy toward the wound, and very quickly Jacopo’s smallest parts began to work quickly to mend the damage. It was far easier to heal Jacopo than it had been to heal anyone else. That made sense he supposed, that was the first thing he’d ever done for him.

Gren managed to calm himself and began brushing debris from the front of himself. “I will return to Argenta and inform her about what has happened. She will expect to speak with you soon as well, I’d imagine.”

“We’ll talk at the usual time. I doubt I’d have much insight that you don’t… Are you okay?”

Gren looked at him, a bit of his essence still seemed to be leaking from where Godfrey had hit him. “Aside from several thousand years of servitude? Yes.”

"Seems like a raw deal."

"Yes."

"I've gotten out of those a few times."

Gren's eyes seemed to twist as he laughed a bit. "I must go. I cannot pass the edges of the bay." He faded into mist and drifted through the ceiling.

Jacopo and Dantes went back onto the deck, stepping around pools of blood, and grinning corpses wearing golden masks. Dantes felt wasteful leaving all of the gold on board, but it had that same rotted feeling that everything touched by Greed seemed to share.

“I don’t think we could kill him,” said Jacopo.

“Godfrey, or Gren?”

Jacopo scratched his cheek. “Either.”

Dantes nodded. “I agree. They’re out of our grasp for now, but now we know a bit more about both of them. Did you see how Godfrey’s touch seemed to damage him? Not to mention his apparent inability to leave the bay. There must be a reason for that. Maybe it’s the way godstuff interacts with demons like him. I seem to remember priests at the temples making claims that even the dirt the gods had walked upon could hurt demons. I’d assumed they were just trying to sell poor people dirt, but maybe they were on to something." He shook his head. "Killing him... overthrowing Argenta directly. I'd rather find a more subtle way to make it happen. Another method of control."

Jacopo shrugged, licking some of the blood from his coat.

Dantes and Jacopo looked over the edge of the boat. A number of ships were moving to intercept it, and some smaller guard boats were moving up the shore toward them.

“Well, no reason to wait around to deal with all of that.”

Jacopo nodded, and they both shifted into pigeons to fly back to shore.

…

Dantes and Jacopo floated above a now very familiar scene. The man in blue with the smirking face sat next to the green woman with a feral smile and all of her pets. As with last time, they had switched which game they were playing, but this time there were two new figures at the table sitting across from them.

Across from the man in blue sat a man in a black cloak threaded with gold wearing a cruel smile that mirrored his brother’s smirk. Next to him sat a woman wearing a cloak so black that even just looking at it made Dantes feel as if he would fall into it. The man in black and gold he recognized from before, but the woman in the cloak of black was new to him. He looked at her closely and noticed small drops of moisture were falling from the blackness that was her face, like tears.

He recognized the game that they were playing immediately. The man in blue showed everyone two dice that he held between the fingers on one of his hands. One dice was gold with black marks, and the other was green with blue ones. He threw them all into the air, and caught them deftly in the cup. He then shook them in the cup, causing a rattling noise so loud that Dantes's eyes briefly opened in the middle of the dream before closing again.

The woman in green threw in a shining green coin that seemed to glow. The woman in black tossed in a black coin that seemed to eat the light around it. The man in blue threw a platinum coin, which Dantes found himself reaching involuntarily for. The man in black threw a gold one.

Before the man in blue revealed what was under the cup, Dantes felt eyes on him and looked across the table. Floating above it on the other side, behind the man and woman in black, was a man with a smiling golden face.

Dantes began to focus on that smiling face when a sense of dread began to fill him and a shadow fell across his back. He turned around to see a man holding an axe in the air behind him. Closer than he’d ever been before.

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