This Quest is Bullshit - Chapter 177

Chapter 177 - A Footrace with Apocalypse

Eve raised the cup to her mouth, scowling and wrinkling her nose as the fiery liquid within crossed her tongue. She groaned.

“Why does Gregory buy this stuff, anyway?” she asked, glancing down at the cheap bottle whiskey. “You’d think with how much money he made adventuring he’d be able to afford booze that doesn’t taste like a horse shat in a campfire.”

“Says he prefers it.” Wes clumsily leaned forward to snatch the bottle off the table between them. He glanced down at the label while he spoke. “Apparently he’s been drinking this stuff for half a century.”

Eve let out a laugh. “We need to buy him some better whiskey. This stuff is vile,” she said, taking another sip anyway.

Wes snorted. “I’ll toast to that.” He raised the bottle, seeming to forget he held a half full cup in his other hand. Eve clinked her glass against it, and they both took a sip.

Preston, especially exhausted after the day’s adventuring spent herding steelcats, had taken an early night, leaving Eve and Wes to raid Gregory’s liquor cabinet alone. That was Preston’s mistake.

Wes’s mistake was, at twice Eve’s size, thinking he could handle taking one sip for every two of hers. The trouble was, with Eve’s natural resistance to alcohol and the simple fact that Wes’s mouth accommodated far bigger sips than Eve’s, the man was absolutely sloshed.

As the evening progressed and the conversation waxed and waned, Wes seemed to grow quieter and quieter, a distant expression landing on his face as he seemed to stare through the floor. For her part, Eve was content to let him ponder whatever was on his mind in silence, at least up until the point she began to suspect he’d somehow passed out with his eyes open. It was only as she shifted in her seat to get a closer look that he finally spoke.

“I need to ask you a favor,” he said, his eyes not moving from their spot on the floor.

Eve sat back. “Is everything okay?”

“You… you can’t tell Preston I asked you this, okay? He doesn’t understand.”

“Wes, what’s wrong?”

Wes still stared with vacant eyes towards the ground. “If I lose control, and Art can’t stop me or he isn’t there or god forbid something happens to him, I need you to kill me.”

“Wes, I can’t—”

His gaze swung up to finally meet Eve’s. “Promise me, Eve.”

“Wes—”

“Promise.”

Eve gulped.

“Please, Eve,” Wes said. “You’re the only one I trust to do this. The only one who I know can. I need to know that if it comes down to killing me or letting the Devouring Flame go free, you’ll do the right thing.”

Eve snatched the bottle from his hand, forgoing her glass to pour altogether too much of the cheap liquor down her throat. It went down easier than the words came up. “If it comes to that. If we’ve tried everything and nothing works for some reason. If there’s no other way—”

“Eve.”

Eve exhaled, her shoulders sagging into leather chair behind her. She glanced down at the floor, then forced her gaze back up. She’d look him in the eye when she said the words.

“I promise.”

——

Eve ran.

Such seemed to be a recurring theme in her adventure. Eve spent a lot of time running. Running from the hydra with Wes on her back, running in circles from a rapidly accelerating foot elemental, running headlong into traps, battles, and more walls than she’d care to admit. She’d run for her life. She’d run to save another’s. She’d run to buy scones before the bakery closed. She’d run with the wind in her face and the sun on her back, careless and free as any mortal had ever been.

But she’d never run like this.

Her heart stampeded in her chest as her feet pounded against the ground with incredible speed and force. Her stomach churned. Her brow dripped with sweat. An ear-bursting roar sounded out around her, like a rolling thunderstorm just beside her head. Eve knew anything with functional ears could hear her for miles. She didn’t care.

She ran.

All around her, Leshk passed in a blur. She skirted around villages and farmhouses. She plowed right through the Cherry Woods, trees falling and exploding into splinters as she obliterated them with the force of her passage. Whatever malevolent spirit controlled the woods didn’t even try to stop her.

She leapt over hills and dodged around boulders and ran directly across ponds and rivers. She avoided the Great Crossing at Ilvia, keeping south of the trading hub and not even sparing a glance for the towering monument in the distance. She ran over the Ilv like it was any other stretch of road.

She ran and she ran and she ran. The Songbird’s Hills where Preston had first found Reginald passed in a blur. The gleaming glass walls of Lynthia sparkled in the setting sun, Eve passing close enough to catch a whiff of the city’s stench.

She ran to Wes’s aid just as ferociously as she ran from her own thoughts, from the nagging reminder in the back of her mind that she had no plan. She had no strategy. She had no ideas. Her one tool, her one ability that she’d always hoped would work as a last resort to save Wes, ticked away on a thirty-hour cooldown. Without Defy, Eve had nothing. Less than nothing. She had a memory of a conversation she and Wes had once had, of a promise she’d made.

Gods alone knew if Wes even remembered it given how much he’d had to drink, but Eve did. Hells, she wished she didn’t.

Eve knew she was too late when she was still over a mile out.

The sky above Ponsted glowed red, a pillar of black smoke blotting out the setting sun. Eve clenched her jaw tight when the firestorm came into view.

She Jetted to a halt in the middle of the dirt road, where a large crowd of people stood and gawked at the distant firestorm, faces pale with shock. Eve at the roar of her approach, only a few of them peeled their eyes away from the blaze. “What happened?”

“There was a dragon,” a man in an apron answered. “It came from the north. Then one of them high-level weirdos that moved in recently ran into town screaming that we needed to leave.”

Eve paused relief from a worry she hadn’t realized she’d felt spreading through her. “He evacuated the town. Good job, Wes,” she breathed before returning her gaze to the helpful civilian. “Is everybody out?”

The man frantically cast his gaze from side to side, taking in the crowd. “I… I think so.”

Eve nodded. “And the dragon?”

A little girl silently pointed towards the firestorm.

Eve jumped into the air, running Mana through her eyes as she looked past the crowd. Sure enough, just outside the growing blaze sat a mass of black scales and singed bones, twisted and broken and eaten by the flames.

The blightmaw dragon was dead.

Eve gulped. “Okay,” she addressed the townsfolk, “here’s what you’re going to do.” She pointed behind her. “Your home is gone, and that firestorm is only going to grow. I’m going to do what I can to stop it, but I can’t guarantee I can or how big that blaze is going to be by the time I do. All of you need to get as far away from here as you can. Head towards Lynthia. You can find shelter there.”

“We can’t just leave,” a woman protested.

“You can and you will,” Eve insisted. “It’s not safe here. It might not be safe anywhere, but Lynthia’s your best bet. Maybe the enchantments on those walls can stop it.” She knew they couldn’t, but these people needed to leave. If a little false hope is what it took to get them moving, Eve would give it to them.

The little girl tugged at Eve’s belt to get her attention. “Are you gonna save us?”

“I will.” Eve looked down long enough to meet the girl’s frightened look and pat her on the head before returning her gaze to the raging inferno in the distance. She clenched her jaw. “Whatever it takes.”

With that she Charged forth, leaving the fleeing villagers behind as she crossed the open field. She materialized the Ar-gold scepter as she ran, emptying it of Mana to overcharge her pool to five times its normal capacity. From there she absorbed both the crown and the scepter, using them to story everything that couldn’t dissolve with her. She’d lose access to their powerful enchantments, but where she was going, enchanted gear wouldn’t last long.

The air itself seemed to singe her skin as she approached, parching and charring her throat and lungs with every breath. Eve pressed on.

The blaze dominated her field of view, a fiery curtain that obscured all within behind a blanket of destruction. Eve stepped up to it, whispered a prayer to any god, demon, or eldritch monstrosity that would listen, swallowed back the knot in her throat, and leapt into the fire.

——

Wes tried to scream, but his mouth refused to obey.

The fire raged around him. His fire. He’d failed. He couldn’t fight with the devouring flame. He couldn’t reason with it. He couldn’t even run from it. Somehow, fire had found him, carried directly to him on the breath of a dragon. He hadn’t even had a chance to reap the reward from completing his life quest before the voice took control.

At least he’d gotten the villagers to safety, for what little that would do them now that the devouring flame was loose. Now, there was nothing he could do. All that was left for him was to ride along, a passenger in his own body, and silently match the flames with rage of his own. He raged at the unfairness of a world in which this could happen, at the Questing Stones for starting him down this path, at the devouring flame for its very nature.

Most of all he raged at himself, at allowing himself to fall down this rabbit hole, at refusing to leave adventuring behind until it was too late. Now the world would burn.

Look who it is, the whispers pulled Wes from his fury. More fuel for the flames.

Wes froze. He knew of exactly one person who would willingly step into the inferno, and his entire being agonized her presence. Right there, for a brief moment amidst the apocalyptic firestorm he’d brought into being, not even the devouring flame could stop a tear from falling down Wes’s cheek as the thought crossed his mind.

Eve, I’m sorry.

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