Chapter 118. Nicole’s Post Battle

With a heaving breath, James pulled out his spear out of the White Knight that had the golden patterns on his armor, and then cleaning the blood with a swipe to the side.

I was shaking my hands from side to side, trying to cool them after using so much fire. Thankfully, neither of us got actually hurt in this battle, but there had been a lot of knights, like, a lot. None of them were trained it seemed, because even when their weapons fired a super powerful holy beam, usually they would miss, or they would panic when we got close to them.

Only a handful of them were able to do something about us, and even then, we were able to take them down easily. The only one that knew how to fight was the one that seemed to be the leader. He left a bunch of scratches on James’ armor, but I was unharmed by that knight. James appeared to be trying extra hard on that guy, as he would attract his attention whenever he aimed a spell at me.

Not that I needed protection, mind you! I was pretty capable of taking him down myself—no, not even me, my True Fire Phoenix, Miss Pepi, was more than enough to do this mission! But… it seemed like even she didn’t have the power to continue, as after giving one last sweep on the remaining bodies to turn them to ash, my summoned Miss Pepi disappeared in a few motes of orange fire.

“Wha-what’s left…?” James asked, taking in air.

Like him, I also took in air and looked around. The glass room-like places were broken down or melted from our fight, but it seemed like there were still a few things to take care of, so I pointed a hand at one of the few remaining projects and melted them down.

“Go to the back of the hall. There should be another room like this one, beyond some doors,” Salrak said and I felt like dropping to the ground.

“Are there going to be more people like there were here?!” I exclaimed, dropping my shoulders and dragging my feet.

“No. Most of them came here to take you down, and it seems like there won’t be any more coming for now. Still, the alarms are going to be kept inside the building for only so long, and the people on the outside are soon going to figure out what is going on here, so make haste,” Salrak replied with his ever bassy and calm tone of voice.

As we jogged over to the other side of the room, James asked, “What about Althea? Is that fool still alive?”

“For now,” Salrak said but refused to elaborate on it.

I wanted to ask if she was okay, or if she needed us to go back up to her, but it was better to hurry with our side of the mission. If we were fast, then we would be able to join her faster, so I rushed ahead and opened the thick metal doors at the back of the hall.

A similar place to the last one spread in front of us. The only difference between this one and that one was that this place looked more like a factory than anything else, with a bunch of machinery moving pieces, loud stuff hitting other stuff, and weapons with all sorts of shapes being transported from one side to the other.

“I guess this is the weapons factory, huh,” James said, taking a step inside the room.

As soon as he did, a middle aged man with short black hair and dressed in the typical factory worker attire popped out from behind a machine with his hands raised. “Wait! Please don’t hurt us!”

“Hm?” James replied, tilting his head to look at him. “Who are you?”

I was amazed to see that James didn’t immediately pull his weapon out and threatened the man with the question, but I guess he was either tired or felt like the man wasn’t a danger. Still, from the way he was standing, I could tell that he was ready to attack if he needed to.

“W-we’re just workers here!” the man replied, lowering his head several times as he said that.

“‘We’?” James asked, turning his head all over the place.

From behind the machinery that were still making loud noises, people started walking out. All of them dressed the same as that man, and all of them with their hands raised in the air. They were of different ages, but they all looked like normal people; with no magic power, or even the looks of someone powerful and wealthy.

“Why did you have to go and reveal yourself like that?!” asked one older woman as she made her way to the middle to be with the rest of the people.

“It’s better this way!” the man that came out first loudly replied. “If they found us hiding, then they would’ve killed us.” Saying that, the man once more turned to look at us with a pleading expression. “Please. We mean you no harm. This was just a job for us.”

“Hm…” James considered for a moment, “I don’t know if we should let you go… you might go out there and say who we were and what we did…”

“No! Please!” pleaded the man, dropping to the floor to his knees and his torso bowed. “W-we won’t say a thing! Please spare us, we have families!”

“See?! I told you we should’ve stayed hidden!” the woman replied, but like the man, she and the other people dropped to the ground to plead with us.

“We should just let them go… You know as well as me that they don’t have any power, and they seem to just be workers here. Right, Salrak?” I said with a wry smile turned to James.

“That seems to be the case… mostly…” Salrak said with an uncertain tone.

“What do you mean ‘mostly’?” James asked.

“Well… some of them have done some petty crimes… but overall, they just got this work because the company needed workers that couldn’t complain nor say anything about it,” Salrak said.

“You mean, like their families are in danger?” I asked with a tilt of my head as I looked at all the people bowing.

“One might say that. With these sorts of things, the threats are usually veiled, but the meaning is understood,” Salrak replied, and both me and James just looked at the people.

“Please…” I heard the man plead once more, and I just couldn’t take it anymore.

“Just go,” I said, causing the people to look back up with both surprise and relief.

James, on the other hand, snapped his head to look at me. “Are you serious? They’ve seen both of us, especially you! If they talk about some ‘cute girl with dark brown hair that has orange tips, wearing a nice black dress surrounded by fire’ then everyone is going to know what happened here!” He snapped his head to look at the people that were frozen once more. “No, we have to do something about them.”

‘Cute girl?’ I thought, but I quickly shook my head once I noticed that he was about to do something he shouldn’t do. “Wait—Okay fine!” With a sharp turn to look at the people, I ignited my dress as strongly as I could, and then I created a wall of fire behind me. I pointed a finger at them and proclaimed, “If any of you talk about me or what happened here, then you shall face the fires of hell!”

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“Hiiii!” the man that pleaded at the start exclaimed, scrambling on the ground to go backwards.

“T-that’s right! There won’t even be, like, ashes! Or anything like that!” I continued, stumbling a little with my words. “So once you get out of here, you better try to find a better job!”

“Y-y-y-y-yes! W-w-we will!” shouted the man, and the other people nodded along, moving their heads at high speeds.

I turned off the flames behind me, crossing my arms under my chest and nodding my head. “Good! Then you should run away now!”

Without waiting one bit after I said that, the people started rushing to get away from here, running past us to go to one of the elevators that we didn’t break. Though, I wasn’t sure if they were actually going to be okay once they left this place… Still, better that, than to be killed.

And yet, while they were running away, James suddenly grabbed the woman that had spoken before from the arm and I couldn’t help but turn a surprised look at him. He ignored me as he pulled the woman and looked at her closely. “Is there something in this place that we should know about?”

The woman looked with widened eyes at James, and I noticed that a couple of people stopped to look back at us, just as surprised as the woman. She lagged in her response, and James harshly shook her, which is when she just shook her head. “There’s only the machines that we use here and nothing else—at least, I don’t know anything else. I don’t even know what these machines are for, I just do what I’m told and that’s it! I swear!”

“Are you sure…?” James asked with a slow, threatening tone of voice.

The woman didn’t reply as she simply nodded her head. I thought about getting in the way so that James stopped bullying her, but as I took a step in their direction, one of the people that was running away took a couple of steps towards us instead.

“There’s something else I know!” he said, causing us to look at him, and James to let go of the woman, who quickly ran past him and away from us. “There’s a… hidden room, that way,” he pointed his finger to a corner of the room, where a large machine was making noise. “I once saw one of those armed men move the walls there and go somewhere deeper. But I don’t know what’s in there, though.”

“Good. Get away from here now,” James replied, waving the man away with a dismissive move of his hand.

The man didn’t say anything else, and like the woman, just ran away from here. I kept my eyes on him for a moment and all the other people, and quickly realized that they were just standing by one of the elevator doors, while a couple of them just looked up through the open one that we came through… I wondered if they were even able to get out of here without help but as I was considering that, James moved away from it, unconcerned about that.

“Hey… maybe we should—”

“Destroy all the machinery and then check what that man said, yes, I agree,” James said and started throwing his spear at the few machines.

With loud booms and glowing lights, the machines were being torn to pieces. There were still a few, so I joined him in destroying them, creating my own fireballs and throwing them at the ones on the other side. Explosions and fire melted them, and in just a few seconds, the whole place was already quiet, since not a single machine was working anymore.

“Time to check that man’s claim,” James said, walking to the corner that the man pointed out.

I followed behind him while glancing at the people that were still at the elevators looking our way. “I think they need help getting out of here…” I said, but James ignored me and kept walking to the corner. “Did you hear me?”

“Yes. But we’ve got important things to do here. Our mission is to destroy their weapons production, and if they’ve got something else hidden here—like a secret weapon of sorts—then saving these people would be meaningless,” he said, carefully inspecting the wall once we got there. “If you really want to help them, then the faster that we do this, the faster that you’ll be able to do that. So how about you get to it?”

I wasn’t wholly convinced about what he said… I had the feeling that he was just going to leave these people to their fate… But he was right. I should do what I came here to do, so I also looked around the wall.

It didn’t seem like there was anything in there, but after a few seconds of carefully looking, I noticed that there was indeed some sort of cut in the wall. I didn’t mention that to James, and just threw a fire punch at the wall. It exploded and the rocks all crumbled inside into another passage.

There were some dim lights inside the small passage, and just a few steps ahead, there was another metal door. James walked inside with his spear ready. “Seems like that man was right.”

He charged Holy Magic into his weapon, and with a powerful thrust, he burst open the door. It fell with a loud thud on the other side, and there were a couple of gasps that could be heard from inside. We quickly rushed in to see who was there, and found something rather appalling.

There were a few people that looked like scientists. Some of them were using tools and other equipment on their hands, while others were working on computers and other machinery… but the most important thing about this place was the people that were trapped inside tubes, floating inside a liquid while wires, cuts, and all sorts of things were connected to them.

“What the—”

Was all that James said as he looked at the people inside. They weren’t demons, goblins or anything like that. It was just humans and a couple of elves. Though, I quickly figured out what they were doing here when I looked at one of the stunned scientists. In his hands, he carried one of the weapons that the White Knights used against us, while one of those tubes was connected to it with a few wires.

It seemed like they didn’t stop the process despite us being in there, as soon after, a light appeared inside the tube, and the naked Elf woman inside painfully screamed, creating an even more powerful golden light that activated the weapon in the scientist's hand. The man was seemingly surprised by it, as he quickly let go of it, causing it to drop to the ground and making us snap to our senses.

“Well, this is fucked up,” James said as if he was grinding his teeth. “Time to end this shit.”

“Salrak?” I asked, but there was no response. “Salrak.”

“I don’t know what this is,” he said as James rushed ahead and started cutting the scientists down, “There seem to be rather good defenses in their systems and I’ve been unable to get in…”

“What about the people that James is killing?” I quickly asked, unsure if I should stop him or not.

“I’m not sure,” Salrak confessed. “There doesn’t seem to be anything weird with them in the public records… So… I’ll leave it up to you to decide what you’ll do.”

I couldn’t decide. I didn’t want to disappoint Althea if these people just turned out to be normal scientists… but I didn’t even need to worry about that, since James took care of all of them in the time I asked Salrak about them.

With a tight-lipped smile of regret I walked into the room, my gaze set on the people inside the tubes. “What should we do about them?”

While heaving and cleaning his lance, James looked at the tubes. “We get them out, of course.”

“How are we going to get them out…? They’re… strapped all over, and there’s tubes and wires going into their bodies…” I said, getting a closer look at them.

“We just… take them out,” he said, and with his spear, he broke open the tube that contained the elf woman.

The liquid poured out, and the woman sagged to the front, but James took hold of her. He quickly, and carelessly removed all the things that were hooked up to her, causing a mess of blood to pour out of her, but as soon as he did, he glowed with a distinct green light, and the wounds on the woman were healed just as fast as they were created.

I stopped myself and just looked. There wasn’t really anything I could do to help here… my fire would just burn these people, so I just took the woman from him as he went to do that to the handful of people that remained.

After just a few minutes, he was done, and all the people that were inside the tubes remained passed out on the floor. We couldn’t carry them with us, but I guess we could ask the few workers outside to help us. “I’ll ask the other people to help.”

I rushed out and went over to them. A few of them seemed to not want to help, but after a couple of glances from me, some men agreed to help. As we carried the people back to the elevator, I wondered how we were going to get them out of here.

“I’ll activate the elevators now. It’ll take them back to the garage where they should drive out of here as quickly as they can,” Salrak said, and with a nod I relayed that information to the people, before Salrak spoke once more. “Hmm… there’s something strange.”

“What do you mean?” James asked, a passed out man wrapped in clothes on his shoulder.

“There’s still messages saying that the Hero of the Holy Gods is about to strike here but…”

“Didn’t that already happen?” I asked, accommodating the elven woman in my back. “Isn’t that Althea?”

“It should be… but—Oh no!” Salrak exclaimed, rather unusual for him. “Get back to Althea now! Go as quickly as you can!”

Without thinking about it, both me and James passed the people we were carrying with us to one of the workers, and then we jumped into the elevator shaft, flying up as fast as we could to meet with Althea. Judging by the tone that Salrak used… it seemed like she was in trouble. Hopefully, we’ll be able to get to her before anything happens…