Discordant Note | TBATE

Chapter 36: Incentive

"What did the Joans promise you?" I said, leaning over. My breath fogged in the night air, lending a supernatural chill to my tone.

"They said they'd supply my fix for the rest of my life!" He cried, beginning to openly weep. "If I killed you! They'd give me enough blithe to drown in!"

I blinked, taken aback by the statement. But another matter took my attention away from the thug.

I felt an urgent hand on my shoulder shaking me. Wade was there, but he wasn't looking at me. He was nervously scanning the crowd around him, which had been watching with silent fear for the last minute of interrogation.

"What?" I snapped, angry at having the one blissful moment I had experienced in this world shattered. I remembered that dance, where I held hands with these people. It brought the closest thing I'd felt to happiness since coming to this world.

My anger shifted to anxiety as I took in the people around us again. Where before they all watched with pure fear, now there was a hint of hunger in many of their eyes.

'They'd give me enough blithe to drown in,' the man said. How many of the people surrounding me were blithe addicts? And how willing were they to attack an armed mage?

I saw it there, in many of their eyes. It wasn't the hunger of a predator stalking his prey. No, this was the ravenous gleam of a man who had been starving for weeks and was ready to take desperate measures for a meal.

Some of the other people were backing away, clearly recognizing danger when they saw it. A few young women were moving Greahd to her wagon, taking chance glances behind me. The mother with her son was among them, a worried look on her face. Naereni was still with them, but it looked like she was ready to cut her way through the people surrounding me.

I slowly stood, peering around me. I could get out of this, but Wade couldn't. He had no physical enhancement runes to speak of, and I highly doubted a small mob after blithe would be selective in their mage targets.

I kicked the man below me one final time in the ribs for good measure, leaving him to groan in pain. Then I squared my shoulders, staring cooly at the men that surrounded us. Maybe around ten people seemed interested in whatever deal the Joans offered the man whimpering at my feet. Twice that number was backing away with increased haste, showing good sense.

I could take ten nonmages. I could do that easily. But could I do it protecting Wade? Without lethal force?

"Toren..." Wade said nervously, shuffling on his feet.

"Don't worry," I said quietly. "We'll get out of this."

I cracked my neck, then reoriented my dagger. The blood leaking from my hand was coating it now. "You don't want to do this," I said, distorting my voice with sound magic. It took on an unnatural quality, resonating strangely and breaking every few syllables into different octaves.

If there was something I knew inspired fear, it was the uncanny valley. And what I just did to my voice sank into the deepest depths of that trench. Wade flinched away from me, clearly taken aback by the shift in tone.

"Maybe we do," one man said from the side. I oriented on him slowly, causing the man to shrink under my attention. "Don't know until we hear what that bloke has to say," he finished meekly, but speaking up seemed to instill courage into the men around him.

It was time to stomp out that bravery.

Fireballs slowly popped into existence around me, one after the other. There were ten men, and so ten flickering orbs of flame orbited me and Wade in a small radius. The men around us flinched back.