Will

"Well, that was… truly illuminating." Will turned from the two sub-humans weakly twitching on the ground to focus his attention on the one that belonged to him. "Wesley, you're up. I hope you still have the knife I gave you."

The young man jerked up at being addressed. "Uh… I… Well, uh, the thing is…"

"It's okay. You're new to this, so I'll only make you kill one of them."

Wesley turned pointedly away from the torture victims. "I don't think I… can."

"It really isn't a complicated procedure. You even got a first-hand demonstration via Serene."

"I don't think I can kill someone."

"Nonsense. Everyone's got the capacity's for murder—it's in our DNA. Even a parasite like you, probably. What I'm hearing is that you're simply not motivated enough. That's on me. I apologize."

Wesley said nothing.

A short Dash bridged the gap between Will and Wesley in the fraction of a second. The kid actually tried to Dash backward on instinct to get away, but got tangled in his own feet and would have cracked his skull off a rock if Will hadn't caught him by the hair and hauled him back upright, ignoring Wesley's panicked squeals.

"Allow me to provide you with adequate incentive," Will bit out, holding the lad inches from his face. "Let's make this as simple as possible, so there are no misunderstandings. You owe me a life, Wesley. One way or another, I'm going to collect. Either you take it from one of these fine people over here… or I take it from you."

"No…" Wesley whimpered.

Will sneered with disgust. "Choose. Do make it quick, too—I'm just about fed up with your shit."

"Take it easy there, killer," Serene muttered off to the side. "Your inner psycho is showing."

Will ignored her. "Choose." He produced his flaying knife and pressed the point into the side of Wesley's neck. "Quickly."

Wesley trembled in his grip. His mouth worked gormlessly, but no sound came out.

"Choose!"

Will pushed the kid until his back hit a tree, then yanked his head back, pressed the blade down harder until blood beaded at the tip.

"I…"

"Last chance."

"I… can't do it."

Will growled, furious that this sniveling shit would repay his mercy with such an embarrassing display of cowardice, and was about to open his windpipe when a sudden wave of vertigo caused him to push out a low groan. His head thumped hot and hard, his brain feeling like it was ballooning against the inside of his skull. He gritted his teeth and tried to push through it, but the dizziness intensified and his limbs buzzed with increasing numbness until one of his knees buckled.

The next thing he knew, he was on his side with vegetation tickling his nose, trapped in the dark until he managed a cast of Detect [Air] on the third try to bring the world back in fuzzy waves.

Hacksaw sat in a deep squat beside him, one hand on Will's shoulder to keep him on his side while wiping vomit from his cheek with the other.

"Seizure?" Will groaned.

Hacksaw nodded. "Big one. You know, you could at least try to manage your stress." He got Will sitting and took one of his hands to place a spherical pill in his upturned palm. "Take that."

"What is it?" Will asked, rolling the little pellet between thumb and forefinger.

"Antiepileptic. You should've been taking them already, but I guess I was giving you too much credit thinking you'd actually refrain from running around like a maniac all the time."

Will popped the pill and swallowed it dry. "I'm working on it."

The old Physician snorted. "Ha! Sure, sure." He straightened out with a crackling of stiff joints, a hand pressed to his lower back, and dropped a small glass pill bottle in Will's lap. "One in the morning and one at night."

Will nodded. "Got it."

After a fortifying smoke break and a lot of spitting to work some of the acrid bile taste from his mouth, Will got up. He found Wesley about where he'd left him, curled up against a tree and weeping softly into his crossed arms.

Will found his knife fallen on the ground, retrieved it, and limped heavily toward the kid to finish the work he had started. The seizure had awakened all his old hurts and made them burn like fire.

"Wesley," Will said in a thin, strained voice. "Look at me now." He didn't have a good shot at the kid's throat with him all balled up like that.

"Nooouh…" Wesley sobbed, refusing to move.

Will peeled his lips back in a snarl, and he meant to aim a Dash-assisted knee at Wesley to crack his shell, but Serene stepped between them, a hand thrown wide to cover for the young man.

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"Enough," she said.

Will came to a reluctant halt, spinning the knife back and forth over his knuckles. "Why?"

"Because Sam wouldn't like this."

Will gave a half-shrug with his good left arm. "So? What Sam doesn't know can't hurt her."

"She's gonna find out Oatmeal died, you know."

"Died? What are you talking about? He ran away again, that's all. Too bad, so sad. Now, get out of my way."

He took a step to get around her, but she followed suit, sidling into his path while continuing to stare him down. "No."

Will sighed. He caught the knife in a white-knuckled fist. "Really. You're doing this."

"Yep."

"You know, Serene, I like you. You're doing an all right job so far. Don't ruin all the good faith you've earned by attaching yourself to dead weight like him."

"It's not about him. Do you really think Sam would be okay with you doing this?"

"I think she'd feel bad for a day or so. Then she'd forgive me."

"Would she?" Serene took a step closer until the point of his knife was nearly poking her stomach. She didn't seem to mind it. "You know what I think? I think if she saw the look on your face right now, she'd be fucking disgusted."

Will's lip twitched. He kneaded the grip of the knife, breathing hard. This woman didn't know anything about Sam. She'd been around her, what, a few weeks? Will had a decade's worth of seniority on her.

If killing her dad, if killing her wasn't enough to chase her off, what could he possibly do that Sam would not indulge, given time?

What face is she talking about, anyway?

One good thing about Detect was that, since it didn't rely on his own sensory organs, there was nothing preventing him from viewing his own face with it like he was looking down at himself from some outside source. It took a bit more effort than usual since it was an unusual way to perceive the world, but he eventually managed it just so he could see what Serene was referring to.

Ah.

After another few seconds of deliberation, he took a tiny step back, and made a show of sheathing his weapon. "Fine," he said. "You live, Wesley. For now. I'd suggest getting on your hands and knees to thank your savior when you get the chance."

Instead, Griff got to do the honors of putting the prisoners out of their misery. The only qualms he had about it seemed to revolve around taking orders from Will, but he hopped to it quick enough. A few sharp whacks to the head did the trick.

* * *

By the time they'd hauled the bodies back to the party it was pretty much night, and dinner had ended some time ago. People were nursing drinks and watching the entertainments being held around a fledgling bonfire. Will enjoyed the utter silence that fell over the crowd when he had the three corpses dropped unceremoniously to the ground in the middle of the yard for everyone to gawk at.

"Outrider Captain Ferry," Will said, indicating the dead man in question by giving him a poke in the ribs with his boot. "An Omen Bearer harbinger—in other words, an officer. Note the mark on his arm declaring his allegiance." He moved onto the second man. "Lieutenant Becker—subordinate to the captain both within the ranks of the militia and the Omen Bearers. He carried the rank of reaper—in other words, a foot soldier. I caught these two attempting to pass correspondence back to their organization containing sensitive information." Lastly, he gave the woman a poke. "And this one is just your average garden-variety spy sent from Drownport. Caught her trying to tamper with Sunny's drink." He smiled at the partygoers and offered a shallow bow. "You may all speak freely now. There are no more traitors among us."

The truth was unlikely to be quite so happy, but he was feeling dramatic.

With a quick skill cast, he confirmed that Serene had luckily seen fit to dispel the Illusion she'd left behind of him, meaning he would not need to provide any awkward explanations of why there were two of him standing around. Sam was there in the crowd, looking lost and flat-footed.

Buck came away from some pseudo-autobiographical tale he was in the middle of—no doubt grossly embellished—and came over to inspect the bodies. He prodded them aimlessly like he knew what he was doing before giving Will his official endorsement and thanking him for his service.

"Maybe we should take this someplace a bit more private so I can give a full report," Will suggested.

Buck thought that sounded like a good idea. Sam was taking a few hesitant steps toward Will, but he stopped her with a raised finger and tapped his wrist to indicate that he needed some time. She nodded and spared the bodies a long, lingering look before turning away to distract herself with Gug's semi-drunken antics. It seemed the troll had not taken any notice of the commotion at all, and was carrying on like a fool as usual.

They went inside the farmhouse to get some privacy. Will sent Serene and Wesley away, but let Griff and Hacksaw stay to make it abundantly clear to the former pair that they were squarely on his naughty list at the moment. Already knowing they'd be alone in the house before they entered thanks to Detect, he launched straight into explaining all that had just gone down, excluding only a few minor details.

While Buck digested the information, Will idled around the living room and found the completed drawing Sunny had left on the coffee table. His Detect [Graphite] was abysmal on account of being such a niche conditional, but at least gave him a clean enough reading to make out the main points of the picture.

She had drawn a bunch of people as messy shapes and out their names. 'Uncle Will', 'Aunt Ember', and so on. He laughed at Sam's outline, which the little girl had seen fit to render as offensively fat.

He frowned as he turned his focus to a small, formless squiggle at the top of the paper sheet. He had no idea what it was supposed to depict, but the text below it read…

'Bad bird'.

Huh? What the hell is a…?

It took him a second to piece things together. The hairs on his arms and neck prickled like he was crawling with spiders. "Oh, fuck."

His blind eye flew open, and he let the drawing fall as he went for the knife on his belt.

"What's the matter, One-Eye?" Buck called from the other end of the room where he was having a bit of a heart-to-heart with Griff, trying to iron out some of their differences. "You need a shit or something?"

"Fuck," Will repeated. He settled into a low stance with his knife in a reverse grip and extended a wide Detect [Life] net, but didn't sense anything out of the ordinary.

"What, what, what?" Buck whined as he began to slowly wander over. "Don't tell me there are more of those doodieheads around?"

"Bad bird," Will muttered. "I knew there was something off. Corvin. Corvinus. Crow."

"Wh—"

"Did someone say my name?" asked a new voice, uncomfortably close.

Will whipped around in the direction of the speaker with an instinctive swipe of his knife, but the dark shape that loomed on his left remained unaffected, and when he looked he found that the weapon had somehow entirely vanished from his hand.

"That wasn't very nice," said Corvin the Incomparable in his ugly wizard robe, balancing Will's knife on his extended forefinger by its very point. "Here I was hoping to make a good first impression with my favorite person's favorite person, but to be honest? You're being kind of annoying right now."

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