Chapter 2 – Flip the Script Part 5: Of Heists, Hubris, and Hostile Negotiations

Part 5: Of Heists, Hubris, and Hostile Negotiations

“I am an antique,” Nith had corrected primly. “And I have standards.”

After what felt like an eternity of grueling, soul-crushing practice in the tomb, Renji could finally walk, swing the blade without falling over, and communicate with Nith in a series of sarcastic, mutually disrespectful mental shorthand. It was time for their debut performance.

"Okay, let's go over the plan one more time," Renji said, pacing the now-familiar floor of the sepulcher.

“What is there to review?” Nith's mental voice was laced with the profound boredom of an ancient being forced to attend a team-building exercise. “We arrive. We locate my teeth and my skull. We take them. We…” he paused, clearly struggling with the concept, “...do not kill anyone unless they are exceptionally rude.”

"No, no, no," Renji insisted, gesturing with a gauntleted hand. "It's not just about the objective; it's about the presentation. We need flair. We need style. We need to send a message that's clear but leaves them confused and arguing amongst themselves for weeks. We're not just committing a robbery; we're performing a piece of high-stakes political theater. Our brand is 'Intelligent, Theatrical, and Deeply Unsettling.'"

There was a long, static-filled pause from Nith. You are an incredibly strange human.

"Is that a yes?"

“...Fine,” Nith conceded with the mental equivalent of a put-upon sigh. “We will try your 'performance art' approach to larceny. But if it involves any form of interpretive dance, the deal is off.”

"Just follow my lead," Renji said with a grin he could feel even through the helm. He unrolled the Ancient Map one last time. The fang rune that had brought him to the tomb was now dark, its power spent. He carefully traced a new sigil—one shaped like a leaf pierced by a spear. Vyr Illúvien.

"One more thing," Nith warned as the rune began to glow with a soft, green light. "The sacred spring at the heart of their spire is a place of immense holy power. It is designed to repel beings like me. It will try to reject us. It will bite."

Renji’s grin widened, mirroring the fanged visor of his helm. "Then we'll bite back."

He pressed his finger to the rune. The world blinked.

And they arrived at dusk, under trees so impossibly tall they seemed to be holding up the bruised, violet canvas of the evening sky. Pale, magically lit lanterns were webbed through the high branches like captured stars, casting a soft, serene glow on the structures below. Graceful bridges, spun from what looked like living, pearlescent wood, arched from trunk to trunk like the ribs of some colossal, gentle beast. At the very heart of the grove, the Hallowspire rose—a single, breathtaking spire that had been grown, not built, its pale wood bleached to the color of bone by a thousand years of smug hymns.

At its base, a wide, circular spring mirrored the silver sky, its surface as flat and perfect as glass. The air was filled with the sound of an elven chant: high, sweet, and so pleased with itself that Renji felt an immediate, visceral urge to disrupt it.

“This place is offensively peaceful,” Nith commented, his voice a low grumble in Renji's mind. “I hate it with the fire of a thousand dying suns.”

“Then let's get to redecorating,” Renji thought back.

Elven wardens, clad in elegant, leaf-patterned armor that was probably more ceremonial than functional, ghosted along the boardwalks. Their longbows were slung across their backs like punctuation marks, and their smiles were as thin and sharp as scalpels.

They hadn’t been spotted. Not yet. "Fast, loud, and unsettling," Renji whispered to himself, flexing his gauntleted fingers. "No killing unless they make us."

“Define 'make us.'”

"They shoot first, we break their very expensive toys."

“An acceptable rule of engagement.”

The moment they stepped from the deep shadows of an ancient, moss-covered tree, they were seen. Stealth was not a service the Coilmail of Nithraga offered. A single, elegant horn blew, a note of pure, offended surprise that cut through the placid evening.

Renji didn't wait for them to form a committee. He strode out into the lanternlight, a monster of black-violet steel deliberately crashing their garden party.

An elven officer, his leaf-filigree pauldrons gleaming, stepped forward, his hand resting on the hilt of a slender, jewel-encrusted blade. “Mortal,” he sang, his voice dripping with a condescension that had been cultivated over centuries. “You trespass upon the sacred Hallowspire of Vyr Illúvien. Kneel, confess your transgression, and we may yet find a pretty, menial use for you.”

Renji raised a hand in a lazy wave. “Counter-offer: you drop the priceless, irreplaceable heirlooms we’re about to take, and in return, we’ll leave a scathing but fair review on your travel brochures.”

The officer’s smile became a needlepoint of contempt in the night. “How quaintly suicidal.”

Arrows whispered from the shadows. Renji felt Nith hum—a low, eager ripple in the breastplate, a deep thrill in the greaves. The world didn't just slow down. It clarified.

It was no longer bullet time. It was the intention time.

Lines of trajectory, the intended paths of the arrows, sketched themselves in the air before him like faint chalk marks. He saw not where the arrows were, but where they were going to be. And he simply stepped between them, as if he'd been practicing this exact choreography in a different, more violent life.

He moved.

He caught the first arrow on the back of his gauntlet, letting the shaft skid off the supernatural metal with a spray of sparks. He spun, using the motion to let the fletching of that arrow kiss the next one, knocking it wildly off-line. Then, he stomped.

Nith drank the kinetic impact of the step and returned it to the world with interest. The wooden boardwalk buckled in a violent wave, launching the entire second rank of archers backward into a stand of their own decorative lanterns with a crash of glass and surprised elven yelps.

“Show off,” Nith purred in his mind.

“It’s called brand building,” Renji shot back, and then he jumped.

The cape of shadows didn't allow him to fly. It simply chose directions, consequences be damned. He used it like a second, prehensile spine, whipping himself around a lantern post and slingshotting onto a higher bridge where three wardens with drawn blades were waiting.

He snapped the nearest warden’s bow with a sharp forearm block, then flicked the broken limb with impossible speed into the next warden’s shin, causing him to stumble. He leaned back, the third warden's blade hissing past his visor, close enough to feel the wind of its passage. Nith vented a short, sharp cough of black, acidic steam from the helm’s vents. The elven blade hissed, pitted with corrosion, and fell from its owner's hand in a shower of metallic glitter.

"Acid breath?" Renji asked aloud, genuinely curious.

“A form of pointed etiquette,” Nith replied calmly.

They flowed through the elven ward like a living, breathing argument that nobody had been prepared to win. Where the elves were clean, precise, and symmetrical, Renji was a messy, chaotic force of nature that made symmetry weep. Railing posts became vaulting points; the silken chains of lanterns became trip-lines; sacred prayer flags were unceremoniously used as blindfolds. He made mistakes on purpose, using the awkward recovery to punch harder and from an unexpected angle. All the while, Nith whispered corrections and criticisms in his head like a terrifyingly ancient and judgmental coach who had long since stopped pretending he didn't care.

“Your left shoulder is still open—for the love of the void, fix it.” “A good, solid stomp—do that again, but with more feeling this time.” “Less flourish, human. Save it for the killing blow you do not intend to make. It’s wasteful.”

Below them, the sacred spring sang its thin, silver thread of sanctity. Renji could feel it itching under the soles of his armored boots, a constant, nagging pressure, like a particularly pious rule trying to enforce itself on someone who had already read the terms and conditions and decided to set them on fire.

“Relics,” Nith said suddenly, his voice sharp with focus. “Below the main chapel root. The teeth and the skull are wedded to the living wood of the spire itself.”

Renji placed a palm against the massive, pale bole of the Hallowspire. “Shortcut?”

“Always.”

He didn't punch the living wood. He spoke to it, in a way. Nith, in his draconic nature, carried the old secrets of the world, and one of them was that wood and bone, at their core, remembered the same ancient lullabies of creation. Renji pushed, not with physical force, but with the focused, primordial intent of the armor's ancient nature. The Hallowspire shuddered, its ancient, slumbering consciousness confusing a memory of dragons with the sensation of pain, and a seamless section of the living wood receded, opening like a mouth that had been taught, through force, to say please.

They dropped through. The reliquary was like the belly of a leviathan. Great, curving ribs of living root formed the ceiling, the floor was a single, unbroken expanse of polished heartwood, and light from enchanted oils puddled in carved stone bowls like stagnant, liquid stars. The air tasted of old rain and ash.

On a central dais, they lay. A sword whose blade was a single, massive, perfectly honed dragon fang. A shield shaped from the bowl and ridged brow of a dragon's skull, its edge rimmed in silver that pulsed with barely contained sigil-magic. Two ward-mages, who had clearly been meditating in the chamber, spun from alcoves in the walls, their silken robes flaring like the angry pages of a book. “Desecrators!”

Renji didn't bother to argue. He threw the Stenchblossom. It hit the ground between them and detonated—a silent, instantaneous flower of smell so profoundly, cosmically vile that both mages gagged, their complex spell-casting forgotten as they clutched at their throats, their faces turning a pale shade of green.

Renji winced behind his visor. “Sorry. Science.” He slid on one knee across the slick, polished floor, grabbing the Fangblade from its stand. He felt it recognize Nith with a low, pleased purr, a vibration that ran up his arm like a file on steel. He kicked one of the oil basins as he slid past; the oil splashed, and one of the gagging mages slipped and toppled into a prayer niche with all the offended dignity of a cat meeting gravity for the first time.

The second mage, recovering from the olfactory assault, managed to form a sigil between his hands. A lance of pure, holy light began to coalesce.

Renji held up a hand. “Wait.”

“Why should I grant a defiler of this sacred place a final request?” the mage spat, his face pale with fury.

“So you can watch this,” Renji said—and he flicked the Skullward up onto his forearm. The crown of the skull-shield clicked firmly against Nith’s breastplate.

Something completed.

A circuit that had been waiting for millennia for a switch to be thrown was finally, irrevocably, closed. Power looped—from armor to sword to shield and back to the armor again—in a sudden, exhilarating rush. Nith’s laugh, for the first time, went bright and almost boyish in Renji's mind.

“There I am finally complete!” he said, and the lights in the reliquary guttered as if bowing.

The mage, in a fit of righteous panic, fired the light lance. Renji angled the Skullward. The holy energy hit the shield’s brow ridge and simply bent. It curved around him in a beautiful, impossible arc, like a rainbow that had instantly regretted its life choices. It slammed into the wall behind him, carving a fussy, absurdly expensive pattern that would surely make an elf cry later.

Renji pushed himself to his feet, feeling the new, balanced, and utterly perfect weight of the full armor set. “And we’re done here.”

They weren't—not quite. The entire Hallowspire was shivering now, a deep, resonant tremor running through its living wood. Above, the bells had changed their tune—from indignant to full-blown panic. The wardens were converging. The song of the spring climbed in pitch, becoming a weaponized shriek of purity.

“Time to ruin the water,” Nith whispered, his voice wicked with delight.

“We’re not poisoning it,” Renji muttered as they sprinted back up through the chapel's throat. “Let's just say, re-flavoring it.”

They burst back out into the open air. The spring lay below, a perfect, silver moral lesson in a bowl of white stone. Dozens of wardens now ringed it, their bows raised and arrows knocked, a porcupine of elven indignation.

Renji held the Fangblade and the Skullward high. “Excuse me,” he said politely, and stepped into the water.

It hurt. Not physically, but existentially. The sanctity of the spring hit him like a tax audit and a family dinner combined. It was a thousand tiny needles under his nails, a thousand prim, judgmental lectures whispered behind his eyes. It tried to define him as trespass, unclean, and unworthy.

Nith surged in response, the scales of the armor flaring with a dark, inner light. Renji exhaled, and from the vents in his helm, he released the residual vapors of the reagents from his pouch—a fine mist of Lavender for peace, then a soft kiss of Chamomile for sleep.

“Shhh,” Nith seemed to coo, not to Renji, but to the ancient spirit of the spring itself. “Hush now. Sleep. Dream of coils and shadows and things more ancient than hymns.”

The water, once a perfect silver mirror, turned dim. A shadow that wasn't a shadow uncoiled within its depths. The silver surface clouded to a bruised, lovely dusk. The chanting of the elves faltered, going off-key as their connection to the spring wavered.

“What are you doing to the sacred waters?!” the lead officer shrieked, his voice sharp with a cracked, horrified vanity.

Renji held his gauntlets up, letting the now-dark water drip from them like punctuation. “Rebranding,” he said, his voice amplified by the helm to carry across the entire grove. “For centuries, your holy water has only healed those you deemed ‘pretty’ and ‘worthy.’ Now, it will heal the desperate, the scarred, and the rude. Consider it an accessibility upgrade.”

He stepped out of the spring. The wardens took a hesitant step back, their arrows still aimed but now filled with a crippling uncertainty.

“Tell your queen,” Renji said, tapping the tip of the Fangblade against his visor with a polite tok, “that the Ambassador’s Seal she and her allies hold in such high esteem is currently being used to buy cheap sandwiches and forged shipping manifests all over the continent. A thousand perfect forgeries in a thousand petty pockets. Your trade routes are about to get very, very exciting.”

The officer’s perfect porcelain face went white with horror. “You—what have you done?”

“I have introduced liquidity into a stagnant and deeply elitist market,” Renji said cheerfully, and flicked the dark water from his blade. “Bye.”

He touched the rune on the Ancient Map, now held safely against the Skullward’s inner surface.

The world blinked yet again.

Part 6: Terms and Conditions

They arrived on a cliff overlooking a black, churning sea. The wind tore at Nith's shadow-cape, and the waves below beat against the rocks in a slow, deliberate, and deeply satisfying applause. Far off on the horizon, like a bruise held against the darkening sky, rose the jagged silhouette of Evelina’s Bastion—a fortress of shattered spires that had been accused of every sin and punished for more than a few.

Nith purred in Renji’s head, high on the feeling of being complete for the first time in ages. “With my teeth and my skull, I am whole again. I can feel my full power returning. We will take this pathetic world by its pretty, fragile throat and teach it how to breathe correctly. We will unmake its tedious gods and rewrite its cowardly histories. We will”

CLACK.

Renji held up a hand and slapped his own cheek soundly through the helm.

“Hey!” Nith protested.

"Focus," Renji said out loud, his voice firm. "The world is not our goal. Evelina is the goal!"

There was a long, sulking pause. “…That is a very small and emotionally complicated world,” Nith muttered, his tone now a rumbling bass of disappointment.

“It’s the only one I promised to save.”

Silence again, filled only by the wind and the salt spray and the sight of that distant, angular geometry of a future he used to blame on strangers.

Finally, Nith sighed, the sound like a great furnace being turned down. “Very well. We will take the small, emotionally complicated world first. And then, we will see.”

“Atta… dragon,” Renji said with a faint nod.

They stood there for a long moment, letting the cool ocean air wash away the heat of battle and adrenaline. Renji flexed his fingers inside the gauntlets, feeling the balanced, effortless strength that answered without strain. Down below, a lone fisherman’s skiff nuzzled a hidden cove, its occupant blissfully unaware that he had wandered into the establishing shot of a new villain’s story.

Then Nith spoke again, his voice quieter now, more introspective. “Your mind frightens me, human.”

Renji blinked. “Because it’s a dumpster fire of anxiety and waifu obsession?”

“No. Because it is so full,” Nith said, a strange note of wonder in his ancient voice. “And you keep giving it away. To me, to those around you. to her.”

Renji watched as a bank of clouds walked across the silhouette of the Bastion, momentarily obscuring its highest tower. “I’ve spent most of my life being a useless but passionate spectator to a story I loved,” he said, his own voice quiet. “I was waiting to be useful to a person who didn’t even exist. Now she does.”

Nith’s laugh was softer than it had ever been before. It was almost human. “Then let us go and make you intolerably useful.”

They turned and started down the long, winding road that followed the cliffs.

“Nith,” Renji said after a beat.

“Yes?”

“If the queen… you know… hugs me at some point for all this… please do not yell about—”

“STOP THE BONER THOUGHTS, HUMAN.”

Renji barked a laugh, a real, genuine laugh he hadn’t known the day could possibly hold. “You’re impossible.”

“I am an antique,” Nith corrected primly. “And I have standards.”

They walked. The cape chose a direction that looked an awful lot like drama.

Meanwhile,

Elsewhere, in a hall grown from living glasswood and ancient grievances, the Elven Queen of Glassgrove bit her thumbnail until it bled.

“Counterfeits,” she hissed, her voice a low, furious tremor. Her courtiers flinched, gracefully, of course.

“A thousand seals, a thousand lies,” she continued, her voice rising. “Our trade routes are choked with forgeries and thieves, our authority a mockery—and our most sacred Hallowspire… defiled.”

A steward knelt, holding out a scroll he clearly did not dare to read aloud. “My lady… the reports from the Hallowspire are… concerning. The springs run dark. And they… they heal the stable hands. The scar. The common.”

The Queen stared down at her hand, at the drop of blood welling at her nail. “Abomination,” she whispered.

From the shadowed colonnade, the Hero watched her, his expression one of bright, empty patience, like a sunbeam being focused through a magnifying glass. He folded his hands behind his back.

“Your Majesty,” he said, his voice pleasant and utterly devoid of warmth. “This new villain is clearly a creature of chaos and impurity. A threat to the natural, beautiful order of things.” He paused, letting his words hang in the air. “I believe I have just the plan to catch him.”

His smile did not reach his eyes.

End of Chapter 2.