IiS Chapter 04 (Patreon)

It bothered me. Why wouldn’t they kill Ulfric right from the start unless they planned to let him escape somehow? The Thalmor was using him to deplete both the Imperial Legion and Nord forces to make them both easier to defeat if they went to war again. In the game, there are documents at the Thalmor embassy that Ulfric Stormcloak was an asset that has not yet been activated. It implied that he was put under a spell that could somehow influence him or that they thought they could control him in some way.

I don’t think Ulfric was an asset in the normal sense of being controlled by them, but as long as he was alive the Imperial Legion would need to fight against him otherwise the Thalmor could use that as an excuse to restart the war. That was why the lady who did not want to sacrifice him was a plant to keep the war going. How did I know that?

“It doesn’t matter if he’s on the list, he goes up next.” Well, her trying to kill me was a good clue that she was a Thalmor infiltrator. I point it out to everyone else. “Isn’t it odd that the usurper isn’t already dead? Ulfric Stormcloak should be killed right here and now if you don’t want the civil war to escalate. It just seems odd you want to kill a crimeless man over the king slayer. Like you’re waiting for something to happen that will let him escape.” 

Everyone looked at her all at once making it obvious they noticed the discrepancy now as well. I was the only one who knew that my death would be interrupted by a dragon but I didn’t want to get my knees dirty. I was myself and not a game character so I refused to sit back and head to the chopping block without making an attempt to not go up.

She disgruntly agreed. “Fine, Ulfric is up next, then you. Are you happy?” I looked at her confused. “No, I’m still going to die for nothing. Why would I be happy that I get an extra thirty seconds of life?” I asked the question in a condescending tone as no one noticed I was making my way closer to her. Everyone was more interested in Ulfric going towards the chopping block but because of the time I bought he didn’t even need to bend over before Alduin showed up and knocked everyone over.

As I fell, I moved my arms under my butt so I could get them in front of me from behind me. As everyone stood up I moved towards the Imperial woman and bit into her throat, as I did so I also pulled the sword out of her sheath with the hands that were now facing the correct direction to fight as I got them in front of me when I fell over. I see the shock go through her expression as the life starts to fade from her eyes. In the video game, one shots without weapons was very uncommon but in real life having your carotid artery severed meant death shortly after.

I kicked her in the chest as she desperately grabbed at me, perhaps just to hold onto something before she died. Her body crumpled lifelessly backward as I made my way to the tower. Ralof and Ulfric had a significant reaction to what I did. “Why send Ulfric up to get executed?” I couldn’t just come out right and say that I valued my life more than his, that would piss both of them off. “Because it stinks. The whole situation stinks like Thalmor wants this civil war to continue to weaken us.”

I wanted to set that seed in their head. The real enemy was the Thalmor… Well, they were the secret final boss but dragons could become a far bigger problem if they were left alive. Dragons could be infinitely resurrected, which meant if Alduin wasn’t an idiot about it he could send dozens of dragons in to wipe out a town before raising the ones who died in the fighting to live again. If he did that with every single city then there’d be no way for humanity to mount a plausible counterattack against the dragons. If he had five or ten dragons with him, even the Dragonborn wouldn’t be able to do anything against him except burn to death.

Especially if they ran away when they were injured instead of sticking around waiting to be slain and giving me their soul. They wouldn’t do that though, as smart as dragons were, there was constant infighting for power, if Alduin did something so cowardly many would outright defy him for being a pussy. That’s why they were going to lose.

The wall of the tower we were in exploded as Alduin cut-scened his way through the building. Jumping out I realized the little village was much bigger than it was in the game. I’d guess ten times the size which meant there were far more corpses littering the streets compared to what happens in the game. It was real life that didn’t have to cater to a gamified world. The guards still kept firing at the dragon as he picked one of them up and dropped him from a height he wouldn’t survive.

The murders weren’t as pretty as they were in the game. Most of Alduin’s kills came from him flattening buildings just by trying to stand on them. He looked more like a clumsy dog trying to stand on a cardboard box than one of the most deadly creatures on the planet but it was somehow more scary that even just his weight was a weapon. The run to the second spot where you choose Hadvar or Ralof was further away and the cutscenes that involved Alduin were completely gone, instead, I just needed to avoid clumping up with everyone else as he made a strafing run to burn the bigger groups.

The choice between Hadvar and Ralof didn’t matter much to me in the long run but in the short run, I needed to get on Ulfric’s good side for unintentionally antagonizing him. I had already gotten myself out of the bindings he normally would but that wasn’t the only thing that changed. When a gigantic dragon fucks up the town, most people aren’t going to immediately want to fight everyone on the opposite side of the civil war.

People didn’t behave like robots designed only to kill a person. That meant when the two in the room for the combat tutorial came at us the speed at which I dispatched his friend had the other imperial scared enough to drop his guard to Ulfric. That was just it, I might have not remembered everything, or even most of what I did in my previous life but fighting was instinctual to me now. 

I could block dodge and evade effortlessly at this point and while the throat slash I used against the imperial I was fighting didn’t kill him immediately unlike someone who could fight no matter how low his hp was the guard started to panic and flail in his attacks. It made landing another stab in his throat that much easier. I was efficiently brutal in my killing.

I didn’t even need to intervene in Ralof’s fight, only that I had dispatched my own enemy so easily made him wary that I would step in which gave Ralof all the opportunity he needed to get his sword into the other man's body. We made our way to the torturer’s room next… It wasn’t the PG version that Skyrim portrayed it as. The torturers were actually torturing people. Different Nords in Stormcloak armor lay mostly dead or in different states of dismemberment. The information they got most likely directly led to Ulfric’s capture.

It just meant one thing… They needed to die, no matter what I couldn’t leave behind people who were fine with doing that to another human to get information out of them. Not for the sake of them being evil, but because I wanted there to be fewer people who could torture information about me out of other people. They might have been good at torture but that didn’t mean they were skilled at fighting. I dispatched them even faster only letting Ralof fight one for a few seconds before I had mine dead and started attacking him. He might have thought it was because I deplored what they did and I’d let him believe that. 

I scavenged the magic book and robes off the dead man in the cage while stripping the rest of the area bare. Having 1500 carry capacity was a cheat in of itself and I was going to loot the place down to the floorboards before I left anything behind.