SOMD Ch 42 - Amulet (Patreon)

Of course the net didn’t only fall on Alice. Prim, as ever, sat on her shoulder.

Prim squawked and flailed, but was unable to move the net. However, the spacing was wide enough for her to squeeze through. 

Alice yelled, “Fly, get away!” 

She felt her dragon’s mental objection, but Alice’s command was firm and Prim wiggled out from between the wide netting, just in time for several men with the Worker tags to come running up to her.

Alice demanded haughtily, “What are you doing? How dare you?” 

It only took her a moment to remember that her visible class was a Maid, not an Apprentice Merchant. 

A Maid wouldn’t sound like that... but it had just come out so automatically.

The three men in Worker tags didn’t acknowledge her at all. 

“Stun her,” one said. 

Alice struggled and called out for help, but it was as if the fog had a dampening effect. Either that or people nearby heard the trouble and melted away. 

She could hear her dragons, especially Iggy, yelling from above, but to the untrained ear, they could almost sound like distant seagulls. She felt that Iggy wanted to come down and defend her, to fight and claw the Workers. 

No, she thought fiercely. You will not.

Because despite the fact she was surprised, she was not overly frightened. More importantly, she was safe as long as her dragons were around. 

Dolly didn’t tell her much about the mining operation, but if she could get inside somehow… 

I am safe, she thought. You will not save me until I tell you to.

One of the Workers stepped up and jabbed a wand she had seen the magical classers use. 

Something sparked from it, and then there was an answering spark over her chest, just where the amulet lay against her skin. 

“What are you doing?” Alice asked.

The Worker reeled back, his heavy eyebrows pulled down in confusion. 

“It didn’t work,” another said. “Hit her with it again, idiot. Jab her good.”

Again, the Worker jabbed Alice with the wand, and again, she felt that answering spark from the amulet against her chest. 

The amulet had protected her not once, but twice. 

Alice let her body go limp and closed her eyes, feigning being stunned. 

“That worked,” one of the Workers remarked. “Robbie, I swear, you’d lose your way in a burlap sack.”

One of them snorted, and then Alice felt herself being picked up and flung across the man’s shoulder. Up above the fog, she heard a roar of outrage from Iggy. 

“Cripes, did you hear that?” one asked.

“I heard nothing. Let’s get out of here. The cart’s almost filled up. This should be the last of them.”

It took quick work for them to remove the net from around her. Alice kept her body limp. Then she was carried like a sack of potatoes across the street. The next thing she knew, she was placed not too gently in the back of an enclosed cart. 

The door slammed shut behind her, and Alice opened her eyes to see it filled with a bunch of people. All were of the lower classers, and had just gotten off a day of hard work, judging from the smell of body odor in the air.

There were some children as well, quiet and scared and tied up, unlike the adults. 

Perhaps the stunning spell didn’t work on children, or perhaps being stunned was dangerous for them. 

Up to the front of the cart, one of the Workers snapped the reins, and the cart began to move.

“Where are they taking us?” Alice asked. Some of the adults looked at her, but there were no expressions on their faces. Their eyes were open and they could blink, but their bodies lay limp. 

One of the nearby children, a little girl with close-cropped short hair, said, “I don’t know. They said they’d kill us if they heard us speaking.”

Well, that explained why there was no screaming. “It will be okay,” Alice said, and mentally called her dragons.

A moment later came the sound of three thumps on the top of the cart. It was followed by a scrabbling sound of claws over wood. Then the sound of a jiggling lock at the back of the cart.

Alice acted fast. She was not tied up, and she reached into her pocket and pulled out her second amulet. Then, she pressed it against the wrist of the man next to her who had a Bartender tag. She felt a soft spark at the moment of contact. 

He blinked and immediately straightened to a more comfortable position.

“What was that?” he asked, looking down at the amulet with fear and awe.

“Magic. I’m getting us all out. Here, press this amulet up against other people,” she directed. “I think it needs skin-to-skin contact. I’ll start untying the bindings around these children.”

The knots were not tight, but they were depressingly professional. Alice figured out the trick of pulling one loop that stuck out to the right. It loosened the rest of the knot.

She shushed the children as they tried to speak, and meanwhile the cart trundled on. It seemed that the workers had a full load.

And soon, everybody’s stun was broken. The Bartender returned the amulet back to Alice with a bit of reverence in his eyes. 

They all looked at her. “Miss, what do we do next?” 

She checked her class and saw that it was still Maid, but everybody was looking at her like she was a leader.

“What’s going on around here?” she asked instead. “Did anybody hear where they’re taking us?”

“Someone said that we belong to the mines now,” one of the boys said.

“They didn’t tell us nothing,” said a General Laborer, and the rest nodded.

Two things happened at the same time. Alice heard a click, and then Numi said from the back door, “Alice, it’s unlocked.”

For a moment, Alice considered what to do: Should she get these people out, or wait until the cart traveled to… wherever the Workers meant to take them, then rescue more? The second option was far riskier, and would the people here listen to her if she told them to wait when freedom was only a few feet away?

And then someone from the outside screamed, and fire was visible outside between the slats in the walls. 

Iggy! She thought in frustration. He should have waited to attack!

The horses pulled to a stop, and there was yelling outside. Well, nothing for it now.

“Out the back door!” Alice yelled, pushing a woman with an Apprentice Weaver tag. “Hurry! Run, and don’t stop!”

The woman touched the door, and it swung open, thanks to Numi’s unlocking prowess. 

Immediately, men, women, and children scrambled out. The Workers didn’t try to stop them—from the sounds of it, they were distracted.

What is Iggy doing out there? Alice thought. She was the last out and when she turned, she saw it wasn’t her dragon at all.

No, three people with Elemental Wizard classes had surrounded the cart, front, right, and left, and were shooting magic at the Workers who were using wands to shoot back. The Wizards had glowing magical shields in front of them to block the return fire, and at glance, the Workers had something similar. Or, at least, the fireballs and lightning strikes didn’t seem to harm them.

Alice had time only for a glance. She took her own advice and sprinted until she reached a low half-stonewall someone was using as a property boundary. Ducking behind it, she watched the fight. It was all partially obscured in the thick fog, but she was close enough to see broad strokes.

She took a moment to change her visible class back to Apprentice Merchant. There was no doubt in her mind that the Workers had been hunting low classers, and she had made herself a target by being a Maid.

Never again.

Iggy landed next to her, practically smoking with anger. “They never should have captured you—never should have even touched you! If it weren’t for the fog, I would have come down and destroyed them all!”

Alice shook her head and rested a comforting hand on his back. His scales were hot, but thankfully didn’t burn her to the touch. 

“No, dear. You did the right thing. Because you listened to me, we were able to free those other people. Although,” she added wryly, watching the battle continue, “they may have been freed, anyway.”

But a moment later, she wasn’t so sure.

One of the Elemental Wizards cast a fireball wide, and it struck the cart. The spell was more like liquid than flames, and splashed against the face of the cart, which immediately started smoking. A moment later, fire caught the wood and started spreading unnaturally fast.

“No, you idiot! I wanted them alive—alive—alive!” a man yelled.

He had a hauntingly familiar voice, and Alice stiffened, trying to identify him through the growing gloom of fog and now smoke. Was that... Oliver?

One of the Wizards turned to snarl at him, “You know that stunning is harder than killing!”

“I don’t care. What do you think I pay you for?” the man snapped back.

The other wizards hesitated in their attack, and the false Workers took advantage of it. 

“Scatter,” one yelled, and they immediately did, jumping free. One knocked down an unprepared Wizard, and the rest pelted down the street, leaving the cart behind. 

“After them!” the familiar voice shrieked.

With a resentful look towards the speaker, the Wizards chased the false Workers. They were soon out of sight. 

Behind them came another man who darted straight for the burning cart. He was the owner of the familiar voice, and Alice received two nasty shocks.

The first was that it wasn’t Oliver at all, but Breyden, Dolly’s noble lover. The second was that he no longer had a Gentleman tag over his head anymore—the starting class for nobles. 

Now he wore an Apprentice Merchant tag.