Chapter 29 - Who I Am

Thirty minutes.
We had thirty minutes until Willow’s Disguise evaporated and mine wouldn’t be much longer than that. If Willow wasn’t able to extract herself when we were getting close to that deadline, I was going to step in, regardless of how much she hated it.
“You’d think a community as rich with gold as this place would have nicer homes,” Gryphon said, walking along with his hands clasped behind his back. He’d briefly tried offering Willow his arm but when she pointedly ignored it, he surprisingly didn’t try to push it.
“Maybe… in my experience there are very few communities where the companies in charge of the main resource properly funnel those profits down to their workers. Plus I heard some workers talking of unsafe conditions in the mines lately when I first arrived,” Willow said, maybe a bit defensively. Gryphon didn’t notice.
I was walking a half a dozen meters behind them, trying not to look like I was following them. I might have tried to stay farther back, but unfortunately Eavesdrop was a spell that anchored into a single place and no amount of tinkering, training, or trying to exploit a loophole–like attaching the anchor to someone’s clothes–had ever let me get past that limitation. So unless I wanted to continue listening to the table Willow had occupied, I had to stay close enough and strain to listen in while not drawing attention to myself…
Which was only working because Gryphon thought so little of the people of Gold’s Lodge that he didn’t even seem to notice the few others on the streets that had looked toward me with mixtures of confusion and curiosity. Maybe I really had messed up with my own disguise.
We had talked about this possibility. That Gryphon would attempt to follow even when she tried to leave and I’d tried to account for it. The problem was that since we hadn’t wanted to alert anyone to what we were up to, we didn’t use Quiet and my wagon to get us out here. Instead, once the crew had started working on laying the planks for the inn, I’d made a comment about wanting to see if any new reagents had started to grow in the forest and Willow “insisted” she was going to help, quickly leaving Yurick in charge of the work for the day before she followed.
Then, once we were hidden from view, I scooped Willow up and used my Flight spell to speed us over to the town. And because of that… well, we had literally no wagon here that we could even pretend needed repairs.
The two talked mostly innocently, with Gryphon continuing his arrogant “be impressed by me” attitude and Willow politely trying to brush him off. I kept my attention on the ticking clock, roughly estimating how much time Willow had based on what I could see in my interface for my own.
I briefly started to wonder if I should try and get Willow to Activate for scenarios just like this when I brushed the idea off. Not only did I have no intention of letting this become a regular thing, I was already worried enough about the implications of three different residents of Danwood activating in the time since I’d gotten there.
Stupidly, I’d let myself get distracted by that thought for just long enough that a crowd of miners walked between us on their way back to the mountain after lunch, causing me to have to wait until the crowd cleared. My jaw clenched as I tried to look past them, only for the last to finally walk by.
“Dusk take me,” I muttered, searching the road for the pair only to come up empty. There weren’t exactly a lot of places they could disappear to but the clock was ticking and I needed to put eyes on them before something happened.
I moved with a bit more urgency, continuing up the road and looking down every alley and side path. We’d been heading south toward Alban’s workshop since that made the most logical sense, but as far as I knew, this road was the most direct path there. My gut twisted as I checked the time. We were already down to just fifteen minutes in the time I’d been following and I picked up the pace even more.
I was getting closer to the south wall when I finally heard something.
“Sir, what do you think you’re doing?”
“Come now, I think we both know you’re not the noblewoman you’re pretending to be.”
The hair on the back of my neck stood on end as I tried to isolate where it was coming from. We still had roughly ten minutes, so she shouldn’t have lost her disguise, but that didn’t stop the worry from starting to eat at me.
I turned back, the voices drifting from somewhere behind me and continued my hunt.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Willow protested, her voice a bit louder.
“No escort, makeup galore. We’re both adults, Miss Lena, we can be honest with each other,” Gryphon said in a tone that made me curse myself for the disguise.
“Sir! Get your hands off of me!” Willow protested and I heard a sudden, distinctly male, cry of pain.
I picked up the pace again, finding a stack of crates and garbage in one alley that had obfuscated the area behind it. And, just past all that, I could see Gryphon hunched over, his hands covering his groin as he spat curses.
“How dare you!”
“How dare I? I’ll do it again if you think you can touch me like that!” Willow snapped back at him. I was moving into the alley and could just make her out now, her eyes drifting over to me at the same time that Gryphon noticed.
“You there! Help me restrain this woman, she assaulted me! I’ll pay you for your assistance!” he said, his normally haughty attitude breaking slightly even as he straightened up. Though, he was notably keeping an eye on Willow as he protected his privates.
Willow’s eyes went a bit wide as I stepped forward a bit quicker. I grabbed onto the frilly collar of Gryphon’s jacket and shoved him backwards until he was pinned against the wall. While the disguise didn’t restore my strength to what it truly would have been had I not picked a Utility class, Gryphon was apparently weak enough that it really didn’t matter. But his class was also a Utility, and as a noble who thought he could buy all the protection in the world, he’d probably never cared to actually get stronger.
“Let go of me you brute!”
“Are you okay, ma’am?” I asked Willow over my shoulder, barely acknowledging Gryphon as—
I felt a sharp pain as Gryphon decided what worked for Willow would work for him, and he kneed me right in the groin. I won’t lie, it hurt, but I’d dealt with pain for centuries and I’d long since learned how to maintain my composure even when being attacked… mostly.
I released Gryphon’s collar with one hand, pushed harder with the other to keep him pinned, and then drove my fist into the side of his head before he let out a satisfying yelp of pain.
“Rootrotted nobles,” I growled through my teeth, shaking him but holding firmly so that he didn’t crumple from the attack. “Think the world belongs to them just because of who birthed them.”
“You… you’ll pay for this! I’ll tell my father, he’ll make sure you and everyone you care about regrets insulting the De Numont name!” Gryphon said, a bit of blood spraying out of his mouth with the words. He tried to struggle against my grasp again, one hand coming up and trying to grab onto my wrist. “You’ll never see the outside world again! I’ll have you hunted and hurled into–” I hit him again.
“You think I care about a threat from some entitled… crown-loving… boarshit-attitude… noble!” I said, my voice starting to get louder as I hit him again each time I paused. “You’re lucky I don’t-”
“Corbin!”
A pair of hands grabbed my arm before I could strike him again and my eyes refocused, seeing Gryphon’s face already starting to swell around the eye on the side I’d been hitting, blood leaking from his mouth.
I let go of his collar and he slid awkwardly against the wall until he was seated on the ground, still breathing.
“Y-You… M-My father… make… m-make… y-you p-p-pay…” Gryphon mumbled out, his eyes unfocused and looking more at our feet than us.
“Try me,” I growled and felt another pull at my arm. I looked back and saw Willow’s eyes practically bulging out which made me soften just slightly. I swallowed hard, trying to regain my senses before I looked back down at the man. “If you ever try anything like that again and I catch you, I don’t care who’s around, I won’t stop. ”
I spit on the ground in front of him, then turned and started to stomp my way out of the alley. Willow only let go of my arm once it was clear I wasn’t going to actually kill the man. My blood was practically boiling, even as we turned out of his line of sight and hurried down the road. We only moved up a handful of alleys before I dipped into another one, trying to catch my breath.
Willow didn’t say anything right away, instead she gave me a second to try and compose myself. I took slow, deep breaths in, closing my eyes and leaning my head against the closest wall. My teeth ground together as I clenched and unclenched my fists over and over again.
“Corbin?” she finally said, her voice light. I didn’t respond and a moment later I felt a shaking hand fall onto my shoulder. “What was that?”
“Me…” I said, low. I opened my eyes, looking back and seeing Willow’s disguise had faded. After checking my own status, I knew mine had as well. “That was me.”
“But…”
“I told you who I turn into, and this is the part of me that I hate… The part that makes me stand against Frederick time and time again,” I said before she could object. “Yes, it’s because of his relentlessness and the Relics… but darkness… Dusk really… well… it’s who I am.”
“Maybe part of… but not all,” Willow disagreed, shaking her head. “You hurt him… but he was being disgusting and I’m not sure what would have happened had you not been there.”
“If you hadn’t stopped me, I would have killed him, Willow. That rage… the impulse… I don’t know if those will ever go away,” I said, turning away from her again. “Maybe I should just pack up and leave… try to go isolate myself again. Even if you hurt him… you called my name… he’s not so stupid that he can’t put things together…”
“You’re not the only Corbin in the world… and didn’t you say you’ve tried running… won’t it just end up the same anyway?”
“Feels like it’s already going that way,” I muttered, mentally kicking myself over and over again. I really had felt like I was doing so well too. “Dusk take me… I think I just made this entire thing today pointless…”
“You don’t know that,” Willow said, but the small quaver in her voice made it clear that she didn’t seem entirely convinced. “He might still take the bait…”
I turned back to her, a brow raised in disbelief at her optimism.
“Are you crazy?”
“I followed my brother into an uninhabited area to start a new settlement, you tell me?” she asked, crossing her arms and staring at me.
“You know what I mean…”
“Look Corbin, what just happened…” She trailed off for a minute, eyes diverting. She swallowed hard, then looked back at me again. “I won’t lie, you went too far, he was already down and I could have gotten away after I’d kneed him and told him off. But nothing about it ruins the plan or the rumor I fed him. You were disguised and so was I. What’s he going to do, go to the Steward and tell him he tried to assault a girl that no one else has ever seen only to be attacked by an ogre that will never be seen again?”
“Unless…”
“Corbin!” she snapped before I could spiral even more. “You can’t let one setback convince you this is the end of the world… I know you like to pretend it’s not because of you, but look at how much better Danwood has become. Yes, Danny’s crew has really pushed… but without you deciding our ‘little, out-of-the-way’ home was the spot to hide… we probably would have abandoned hope by now.”
“Hope?” I asked, my hands finally relaxing. I still felt tense… still felt like I might pummel Gryphon if I saw him again… but it was starting to fade.
“Yes… hope. I don’t know of any story that says the Lord of Dusk inspires hope… so that means that Corbin is the one who gave us that.”
I didn’t say anything, instead trying to process what she was saying. Willow, to her credit, stayed where she was, though she was notably leaving more space between us than usual. Maybe that was fear… maybe she was just trying to calm me down because she finally saw how quickly I could snap… or maybe… just maybe… she was recovering from a spike of adrenaline, just as I was.
“I… I don’t know what to do…” I admitted, looking at the ground.
“Well… for now… we should get back to Danwood. Otherwise, Danny is bound to send a search party into the forest looking for us.”