Take Down Chapter 77: Ready… Link Start!

Once on the doorstep of the house you recalled Ægir into your inventory and pushed the door open with your good arm.

Blood dripped all over the doormat and tiles as you walked in and over to the kitchen to try and find some scissors or a knife to cut the wire roping free. 

Blindly pulling draws open, one handed, you finally found a pair of scissors and hooked one blade under the wire, wiggling the scissors further under to get the wire to the back of the criss-crossed blades.

“Oww,” you hissed as the barbs dug in a little more.

With a determined nose scrunch you crunched the scissor blades down repeatedly until it snapped the wire, then you worked in a place higher up.

Dropping the bloodied scissors into the empty sink, you then slowly peeled the barbs out of your flesh, whimpering and tearing up as you did so. 

Once the last of them had been removed, you grabbed for some paper towel and patted as much of the excess blood off as possible so that you didn’t drip it on the carpet as you walked over to Migata’s empty avatar.

Stopping next to him you reached into his pocket and fished around, finding yourself another health potion.

Your health bar started beeping as you popped the top off and drank the liquid down- feeling almost immediately better as it potion replenished your system.

Once you had finished, you looked down at your arm and were delighted and relieved to see it was all back to normal again.

“Oh thank god,” you sighed internally, but then you looked back at the mess on the floor and your heart sank, “now I have to clean this up. If they see blood everywhere they’ll start asking questions.”

You walked back to the kitchen sink, being careful not to step on any of the pools of blood, and gingerly picked up the wire rope barbs in the sink and rinsed them off before carrying them to the front door.

It was a relatively easy fix to get rid of them… as all you had to do was walk to the edge of the floating island and throw them off the side- so that was the easy part.

Then it came time to cleaning. The blood had soaked into the mat on the front doorstep so you switched it for the mat at the back door and then just hoped that no one would question what the marks were if they ever went out the back.

After that it was just a case of finding the right cleaning products to get rid of the blood marks on the tiles.

It took you a while to figure out how to clean it off but once you had worked it out the rest came off pretty quickly. 

You were exhausted by the time you had the house looking clean again and logged out a little sheepishly.

“Well… won’t be going back in game until I’m with the rest of the team so that’s good. My avatar is safe in Butterfli3’s house.”

…………………………………….

“I thought you said you had seen a low Level player runnin’ about on her own!” The boss of the Tormentor’s growled at one of his guild members as he tended the slash wounds on his face from where you had hit him with your double fan attack.

“I swear she is. She can’t be more than a level 4 dancer!”

“The way she moved and the moves she executed we’re definitely above level 10,” another commented gruffly, “she’s either been training hard or she was just playing us.”

“Fucking bitch. I’ll make her pay,” the boss snarled, snorting back on his spit then hacking it into a ball and spitting it out of the side of his mouth.

“How we gonna find her though, boss,” another asked, “our plan was to catch her here. There’s no way we’ll be able to find her again.”

“Oh, that’s definitely not the case,” the boss sneered, “you’re gonna find her again and when I get her in my grasps she’ll never see the light of day again.”

Just then three more of the Tormentor guild arrived back in the head quarters.

“She left a blood trail,” one said, “there’s splatters on the teleport pad.”

“Go and check each fucking level’s teleport pad for more blood. Whichever level has the blood on the teleport pad- that’s the level she got off on… then we can track her from there.”

Small chuckles and snickers rippled through the ghastly lot.

“Spread out. Use our connections. We’re on the look out for a beautiful dancer with snake skin boots and a water horse,” the boss announced, “put a bounty on her head. 100k Mahi.”

“Do we even have 100k Mahi?” one of the members asked.

“No, but they don’t need to know that,” the boss replied, “when they bring her in we’ll PK.”

Another round of cackling ensued.

………………………………

Friday night, you slept, you had been so warm out by the scare in game that you were quite happy to just stay in your house for the day.

Saturday morning Mirio texted you and confirmed 4:30pm as the dive time and you responded as if you were excited. Truth be told though, you were less that impressed about the prospect of going in game again.

“I know I do stupid things at times but this has got to be one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done,” you thought as you made yourself some food to eat.

Close to 4:30pm Saturday afternoon, you arrived at the lab and put on your biggest, fakest smile…

That fooled Mirio immediately.

But not Hansu…

“We haven’t really spoken since the falling out in game,” he thought as he watched you get ready to dive, “I should at least clear the air between the two of us so that she’s not down about it.”

Hansu assumed that the awkward energy you were giving off was because of the tension between the two of you so as you lay down to dive he walked over and checked your leads.

“Hey,” he said softly to you.

You looked at him.

“Sorry,” he whispered.

You gave him a soft smile.

“It’s ok, I’m sorry too, it’s in the past, yeah?”

He nodded and gave you the thumbs up. “All ready to go,” he announced.

You looked over at Mirio and he grinned at you then gave you the thumbs up as well, “time to go and squish a spider, right?” 

You giggled genuinely.

“I’m sure it’s not going to be so easy…”

He grinned again. “Link start!”

“Link start!”

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