197. Fruits & Labors (VIII)

“Senna!” said Vinicius. “You’re late, I’m afraid. As per usual.”

“Shut the fuck up,” said the pretty girl with her pretty parasol on her pretty tiger. She pointed it at the Prince like a loaded gun. “Yield.”

“So blunt! So forthright. So predictable.” Vinicius cocked his head. “You never learn, do you, sister? Some contests can’t be won by force alone.”

“It’s just us out here.” Senna flicked a switch on the handle. The parasol began to glow with frost, a full moon on a wintry night. “Father’s not here to save you, you smarmy little shit. If you die I’ll blame it on the Swamp. And you know I've been waiting to gut you. I’ll do it. You know I will.”

“Please. Save the posturing for someone who cares.” Vinicius sighed. “You won’t fight me here. We’ll lose our quarry in the squabbling! Besides, who knows what fell beasts the commotion might draw? Perhaps the skeleton-hordes of the bog. Perhaps the Coiling Dragon King. Perhaps the Guardian of the Dao Fruits herself…”

“Maybe, but I get to wipe that smirk off your face. A fair trade.”

Vinicius studied her face. Cold, flat, hard lines. A pause.

“Knowing you, perhaps you are silly enough to believe that,” he said. “Then again, you never were as hard a bitch as you let on, were you? Would you truly risk your bonded companion here? Our dear friend Fuzzy, was it?”

He nodded to the White Tiger, which growled smoke at him.

“You will address him by his proper name!” Senna gritted her teeth.

“Is Fuzzy not his proper name, given by you at the time of your bonding? I thought ‘Frostpiercer’ is but a nickname.”

“Why—you—” She spluttered. “I was five, you ass! It’s been forty years since I’ve had it changed—forty years, and you still can’t let it go! You little—”

“You make riling you up far too easy. It’s almost no fun.” He snorted. “Amusing as this is, we really ought to come to a resolution. It’s rather rude to keep our friend here waiting.”

For a second her face exploded with color; she went deep red. Her expression darkened. Then the emotion leaked away like water down a drain, sucked somewhere deep within, stoppered up. When she stared at her brother again her expression was somehow even colder. Only the hairs on her head were frizzled now, rising with angry qi, like she’d been struck by a lightning bolt. The aura leaking out of her dwarfed all but her half-step Empyrean mount.

“Enough,” she said in a low growl. “Yield, or I end you.”

Another pause.

“If you insist…” Vinicius snapped a gloved hand. His entourage’s auras flared out, none by themselves a match for the Princess’s, but none far off, either. They made for a formidable horde. “Can’t say it was a pleasure.”

“How about we run now?” whispered Sun.

“Just a second,” said Dorian. He was enjoying this, and he didn’t bother hiding it. It was always such a delight when others fought over you. Even if it was in order to kill you.

Then the third voice Dorian had been waiting for butted in.

“I have arrived!” it cried. “At last!”

Vinicius turned, frowning. Senna turned, frowning harder. Behind them all was a bedraggled minotaur, carrying what looked at first glance to be a soggy dog. It shook the water off itself, and revealed itself to be a man in what might pass for Princely garb, once upon a time. Now it was so torn and gunk-soaked it could’ve been dishrags sewn together.

The man the voice belonged to was so tired he could hardly glance up. It was Prince Iuno—the very same Dorian had met at the Swamp’s entrance.

He seemed astounded by what he saw. He looked at Vinicius, then at Senna, neither of whom looked amused.

The minotaur holding him by the collar sighed. He shook his head. “Ah. Sorry to bother you, folks.” To his charge—“We’re leaving.”

“To where?” said the baffled Prince.

“Home. Your siblings got to the target first. Nothing for it. I’ll say you fought valiantly.”

“Oh…Alright.” He didn’t look particularly disappointed. He yawned. “Will you give me a piggyback ride back, Cornelius? My collar rather chafes.”

“…Yes, my liege…”

They turned. So much for that. Dorian felt now was the right time to clear his throat.

“My, my. Lots of animosity! Say, why don’t you two settle your differences here?”

The two of them looked at him startled, like it’d just dawned on them he’d been standing there this whole time. “In the meantime, if you’ll excuse me—”

He leapt.

It took Sun a beat to realize that was meant to be her cue. With a cry she jumped after him. He saw Vinicius and Senna gaping at him as he thrust himself into what looked to be nowhere at all. It was only after a second of falling that a little niggle of doubt wormed its way into his mind—that perhaps blindly trusting Sun’s hadn’t been such a good idea. That perhaps he’d just thrust himself into a watery grave.

And then he fell through.

He landed in a crouch. Black sands. It was the right place. A moment later, a screaming blur fell through and landed facefirst in the sands. The screaming stopped suddenly. Sun picked herself up, spitting out a mouthful of shells and bone-dust and sediment.

“Err…is this the right place?”

The Isle of the Dao Fruits was that it looked nothing like its reputation. There were no towering trees. Before them was a tropical vision. The trees here were small and bright-green and strung up with little qi-lights. A sandy path wound its way between them. There were no serpent scales in sight, and certainly no locusts. The only insects were little bees floating happily on the winds. A sweetness bordering on sickening washed over the place. Above, you could even make out the Hellish sky.

“Yup,” said Dorian. “Nothing here is as it looks.”

“I smell the fruits!” Sun’s eyes suddenly lit up. “They can’t be more than a hundred paces off!”

“Patience,” tutted Dorian. He jerked his head behind them. There was a portal in the air behind them—a square of heatwave shimmer. Gunkwater flowed in and out of it. He stuck a thumb out, licked his lips, primed Dragon’s breath, and readied his Javelin and Yama’s Chains all at once.

“What are we waiting for?”

“There’s two possibilities.” Dorian waggled two fingers. “One, those two kill each other on the spot. Unlikely, and far too convenient. Two, they make a temporary truce and go after me first. What’ll they do before chasing a fugitive onto an infamously treacherous Island?”

“Send a scout, I guess? To check if the coast’s clear?”

“Precisely.”

It only took two more breaths. Plop.

A gargoyle in soldier’s gear fell screaming through the portal. Not one of their peak Gods, but certainly decent enough—mid-Tier. Dorian reacted before it’d even made it all the way through. His Chains instantly snagged it by the arms. His Javelin raced for the back of its head. In the same moment he unleashed a furious bout of dragon’s breath.

The poor fellow hardly had time to react. It barely managed to buck off the Chains before his Javelin pierced it in the back of its head. It spasmed, howling, and only then did it see the giant wall of legendary-beast Flames roaring for its head.

It got up a shield of stone qi too late. A glut of Tochdragon flame had already made its way through—a fire among the most heinous in all the Multiverse, heavy with Darkness, laced with Fire and Blood. After ingesting those three Eggs it had gotten quite a boost in Law. But the greater boost still was his new Bloodline, doubled in density, nearly at the First Form. The gargoyle lasted three seconds before its shields winked out. It was like dumping a vat of magma over a man’s head. Stone skin melted like candle wax.

Humming, Dorian went up to the corpse and wrenched off a piece of half-melted jaw bone. He wiped off the Fire Laws off of it. “Do you have leftovers from last night’s dinner?”

“Yep!” This time she caught on instantly. It was nice, not needing to spell things out. Out flew a stack of bones. A shin and a joint about Dorian’s size. A few rib-bones about Sun’s. Dorian liberated a thigh-bone from the gargoyle. One by one they sent them back out the portal. They vanished without a trace. They’d seem just like all the other poor intruders’ bones washing out of the Island.

“Let’s go. That ought to buy us a little time.” He set off up the beach. “Follow me, and touch nothing! So long as we stick to the path and piss nothing off, we should be fine. For now, that is. With any luck, those two will think we died along with their buddy as soon as we went through. With a little less luck, they’ll camp outside the portal for a day to make certain—there’s only one way in and out, after all.”

“Um. Knowing your luck,” said Sun. “It’ll take them all of three minutes to realize they’ve been duped. Maybe a little more if bickering slows them down. They’ll be on our behinds like hot on fire.”

“Sounds about right.” Dorian grinned as he dashed up the path. It looked like any old woodland trail, quaint, almost homely, padded with smooth river stones. “Not to worry. A truly great ass-pull has layers! You can’t count on everything to go right. You can’t count on everything to go wrong, either. For instance—if they think we’re dead, good! We’ve just lost our two most worrisome tails. If not—say, one of them has a Blood Compass—then it’ll be like the Taotie and the Ba Serpents all over again.”

"You really need to work on these analogies." Sun wrinkled her nose. "So…they’re the Serpents? We’ll use them to kill off the Guardian of the Dao Fruit?”

“Heavens, no!” Dorian snorted. “It’s the other way around. They’re royals of the Kingdom of Ur, aren’t they? If we can make them fall off the tightrope, so to speak, we’ll make a killing looting their corpses. And we’ll need all the money we can get if we mean to do well in the auctions ahead of us.”

“Ahhhh.” Sun beamed. “This whole time I thought you were just making stuff up! I guess there really is an art to this stuff, isn’t there?”

“So I’ve been telling everyone who’ll listen. For millennia. But no-one appreciates me. They just get mad and throw rocks at me.”

“What about the Guardian, then? What’ll we do about her?”

“Good question! No clue.” Dorian licked suddenly dry lips. “I…might have to make something up.”

“…Oh, c’mon! Really? Just when I was starting to respect you, too!”

“Well, the rock-throwers did have a point.”

Up ahead, the path curved around a thick little tree. In the distance stood a quaint little cottage in its quaint little wood. Happy tufts of smoke rose over the chimney. Nothing about it betrayed the slightest hint of danger, yet the moment he saw it all of Dorian’s senses screamed at him to run.