Cicada1317
Miri gritted her teeth as she struggled to decide what to do in her current predicament. If she were to make any sudden moves, the man holding Anne hostage was most definitely going to faux-kill her, eliminating her from the competition. Heck, the two rogues were probably going to kill Miri as well afterwards just to make sure she couldn’t get back at them ter in the competition for revenge.
On the other hand, if Miri were to let the two rogues take the two star runes, Miri and Anne could potentially be spared so that they could stay in the competition to fight another day. However, that would mean that all the hard work Miri and Anne had gone through to try to kill that basilisk was all for naught. Miri hated the idea of putting in all that effort just to receive nothing in return.
“So, what’s your answer going to be, mage?” the female rogue asked with a steady voice, carefully leveraging the redhead’s fear of having her partner potentially faux-killed because of her rash decision.
“You guys…you like fighting dirty, don’t you?” Miri growled, gring between the male rogue and the female rogue. “Waiting for us to do all the hard work in taking down the basilisk and then swooping in to steal our reward? That’s low!”
“It’s not against the rules,” the female rogue remarked with a casual shrug. “This is the Pentacle Trials after all. Many contestants here will not hesitate to use every dirty trick under the sun in order to win. Besides, we actually came here to fight this basilisk long before you two have arrived. If anything, that basilisk should have been ours.”
“Wait, you did?” Anne asked.
“Yeah. Haven’t you noticed the rooster that we brought here?” the male rogue added, pointing to the rooster in the cage at the center of the chamber. “Initially, we tried fighting the basilisk on our own. However, we soon discovered that it’s simply way too strong to be a 2-star monster. So that got us thinking that maybe it was a mistake on the organizers of the trials that such a powerful monster was beled with such a low star-level. Or maybe…there is a trick in defeating the basilisk—an exploit that we could use to make the monster much easier to defeat.”
“I see. So that’s why you brought the rooster,” Anne said. “One of the weaknesses of a basilisk is a rooster’s crow, the sound of which can cause agonizing psychological distress to the basilisk itself—in some cases, even enough to cause it to pass out. But I’m curious about one thing: where did you two get the rooster? There’s none on the list of star-marked monsters and we weren’t able to find any farm-reted ndmarks on the map. Did you two happen upon the rooster by chance while wandering the wilderness?”
“We have no reason to expin it to you if you don’t already know it yourself,” the female rogue said to the cleric before turning back to the mage. “Suffice to say, you have a choice to make: the runes or your partner’s life. Which will it be?”
Miri took a long moment to ponder that choice, even though it was already obvious what that choice was.
“Take the runes and leave. Let Anne go,” Miri finally said with a begrudging tone.
“Miri…” Anne muttered, feeling guilty that her partner had to make such a choice for her sake.
“Very well then,” the female rogue said.
Then, after giving a hand gesture to her partner, the two of them—along with the caged rooster—disappeared in a puff of bck smoke, leaving Miri and Anne alone inside the dungeon.
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