Chapter Text
She suspects he’s some poor bastard left behind from Elturel who’d wandered onto the wrong battlefield, at first.
It’s so rare to see a human in these parts who isn’t some soulbound husk panting after a cambion or a screaming echo of a person swirling around in the Styx. A few seconds fighting the man quickly dispels the idea that he’s just desperately hacking his way through the Hells — this stranger is targeting her, Karlach, specifically, wielding a sword like he was born with it. He’s imp-fast, dodging her axe once, twice, thrice, grinning wider each time he escapes her weapon. The stranger — his leather armor cleaner than any mere guard or foot-soldier’s, his hair tied in neat twists, his body moving like a dancer’s — even takes the time to yell taunts at her as they struggle: ADVOCATUS DIABOLI, YOU MEET YOUR END HERE AND NOW and TASTE THE STING OF THE BLADE and ENJOY EVERY BREATH, KARLACH, FOR YOU’RE SOON TO TAKE YOUR LAST.
“What the fucking—" Her axe catches his hip but fails to find purchase, and somewhere on the wind, Karlach hears a high-pitched giggle. “—kind of two-bit action novel dickhead are you?!?”
It goes on like that for what feels like hours, evenly matched: her brute strength and fiery rage against his clever swordplay and crackling spells. Thing is, Karlach’s got the advantage of knowing her terrain, and eventually she’s got the man stuck between a gurgling mass of blue-black pitch and rust-red boulders, and — C R A C K.
Even when random humans muck about, the Blood War is still Blood War-ing, and a personal duel is not liable to stay one for long. A horde of fleshy, mouth-leaking lemures followed by a whip-wielding balor bear down on them with enthusiasm from one end of the asphalt covered field, a shrieking bone devil leaps its way towards them from another. Even worse, pain shoots through her skull as Karlach’s least-favorite archdevil casts her fucked-up version of Sending:
-GENERAL MOXXANT KILLED BY UNKNOWN ABBERATION WITH TENTACLES. SUSPECTED ABOLETH. AT SOUTHERN FRONT. REPORT IMMEDIATELY. ELIMINATE THE THREAT.-
What a bitch.
Karlach knocks the would-be dead man with the butt of her axe, sending him flying arse-first into a puddle of slick tar. These fiends can take care of him while she fucks off to do Zariel’s bidding.
—
When the self-professed Blade of Frontiers finds her later that day, she’s had it with unwelcome surprises: it wasn’t an aboleth that killed Moxxant at all, it was a mindflayer, toothy and tentacled with a group of walking brains at its floating heels. Silver blood still dots her axe and boots as this — Mercenary? Warlock with a death wish who somehow knows her name? — man comes at her looking only a little worse for wear and spitting a threat to cut out her heart with his rapier.
Her heart, which was stolen from her. Like the last ten years were stolen from her. Karlach is tired, so tired, but this persistent, cocky fucker makes it so easy to dip into her ever-present rage and let out a ground-shaking roar. The infernal engine kicks about in her chest and steam emits from the vents in her shoulders and she wants this man dead already.
(She doesn’t. Not really. What she really wants is an out.)
The three devils she’s with do nothing to help her, amused by this strange foolhardy human and his boasting and camaraderie isn’t a thing in the infernal armies, fuck you, puny tiefling, et cetera. The Blade of Frontiers throws an eldritch blast so raw and powerful that she can taste lightning. That same curious laugh echoes around her head and then —
— the air above them opens up.
Purple flashes of psionic energy, the same kind that the mindflayer she killed was throwing at her and the devils, pulses around this huge weird flying squid with cannons mounted on its sides, thick smoke spurting from structural damage to its black-brown outer shell and shiny spikes. Karlach makes a few calculations, eyes darting from her fellow soldiers, to Mr. Frontiers, to this airship with giant flexible limbs undulating overhead. If that ship could open a portal to Avernus, she thinks, it could bloody well open one out.
She still has the advantage of knowing her terrain. She also has the advantage of being a hair shy of absolutely fucking crazy, and its both of these things that helps her cut down the dickhead fiends and sprint away from the human over to a nearby cliff, waiting for just the right moment until she can leap.
As the arm of the squid ship scoops her into its squishy embrace, Karlach imagines it surging higher and higher until it surpasses the hazy miasma that passes for a sky in Avernus and smashes through to the Material Plane. It’s not how the bloody geography even works, but it’s such a hopeful thought that it keeps her from panicking as she’s wrenched toward the ship and through an opening at the stern. She spares a backward glance at the man she ran from, his features frozen in anger and shock and for the barest, briefest of moments, hellfire eyes lock with grey stone and deep brown.
Gods, she manages to think, before wet darkness swallows her whole. He looks so young.