Work Text:
Hurk rubs at his face with the hand currently unoccupied with holding his greatsword. “...So you’re telling me this entire time you’ve been leading us, you had no idea how the hell to read a map.”
He makes an attempt at heaving a steadying breath, but it only helps to call attention to how fucking tense the muscles were in his face. This damned brat led them through the stiflingly humid jungles on Crescent Moon Island while looking at the map upside-down. Without knowing what compass directions were. Or knowing what a map legend is. Or basic landmarks. They had departed from Malina at dawn, and now it’s nearly dusk.
Hurk turns his gaze downwards to the restlessly shifting urchin below him. He forces himself to speak through gritted teeth, blinking through a drop of sweat that escaped from his hairline, “Didn’t they teach you anything at the fucking orphanage?”
Sylas cringes and wipes his similarly sweaty forehead with the back of his hand. “Well, uh, be real with me Hurk— do you really think that I’d ever willingly stick around for something so brain-numbingly boring as basic geography?”
The witch doesn’t wait for an answer to his rhetorical question and, while intentionally not chancing a glance at seeing what type of enraged expression Hurk decided to sport for him, whips out the map. It takes Hurk a moment to notice Sylas’ problematic technique through the diminishing sunlight.
It’s upside-down again, and Hurk has to resist the urge to sock Sylas in the jaw for it. Kid might actually die if he does.
“And hey— you’re the one who asked me to duo Lakoria with you.”
Hurk barks out a laugh before clarifying, “I’m only keeping you around for healing.”
He gasps, “What?! If you wanted healing, you could have just asked Evie!”
“Sure I could’ve. But I’m tryin’ to basically solo this snake, and the amount of damage she’d wreak on this beast would mess up the estimation of my own damage.”
The brat scowls at him, squinting his eyes in contempt.
“And what exactly are you implying with that statement!”
Hurk smirks and points to Sylas’ weapon, “I’m sayin’ that that little featherduster has no chance of making a dent on Lakoria’s health.”
The kid surges forward with a fist aimed at Hurk’s chest. The man takes it with aplomb and Sylas yells when it feels like he’d thrown a punch at a brick wall. He shakes out the pins-and-needles feeling from his hand and mumbles something insulting under his breath.
He refocuses his attention on the map in his hand for a moment before he makes a trilling noise indicating a sudden spike of insight. As if the little idiot had a brain working in that head of his.
Sylas points aggressively at something on the map, “—No wait look, see! See? ” He raises the map up for Hurk to inspect, still instantly jabbing at a crude drawing of a sea serpent. A sea serpent. When they were looking for a land snake.
He grins and puffs out his chest in triumph, “I’ve been leading us to Lakoria this entire time! You love to think me incompetent, you brute, but you forget that while you were busy blacksmithing, I studied the— oh. Whew.”
Sylas huffs and takes one hand off the map to wipe at the sweat that is now pouring down his face, “Hey, is it suddenly getting hotter or something?” He lowers the map from where he’d raised it up to Hurk, unobscuring his face, and immediately regrets it.
Hurk’s expression is blazing, eyes literally glowing red and everything. His teeth are bared in a deep snarl, his brows pinched so that they're almost touching, and his nostrils flared like a bull’s. Sylas blanches when he realizes the heat he was feeling from before was literally coming from Hurk becoming a human furnace in his rage. The man’s gone berserk— so Sylas panickedly drops the map and phantom dashes a good few meters away. He holds his arms up in a defensive or placating gesture. He may be shaking a bit. Cowering? Nah, uh, he doesn’t cower. It’s uh— battle ready adrenaline, that.
Hurk is uncannily stock still in his anger. The grip he has on his greatsword is white-knuckled, and Sylas has to squint his eyes to see the man’s shallow breathing. Sylas eyes flicker to the man’s first display of movement— the further clenching of his hand which results in the leather wrapping around the handle to creak. Sylas takes another couple of steps backward.
He nervously rubs the back of his neck, not taking his eyes off of the man with the disposition of a snake ready to strike. “Alright, I— uh, now I know I did something exceptionally stupid this time,” he says mostly to himself, now wringing his hands.
Finally, Hurk closes his eyes, hiding their impossibly non-magical glow, and takes a deep breath, holding it. Sylas takes this as a good sign.
"Are you going to tell me what I did wrong...?"
Hurk slowly breathes out through his nose and opens his eyes. Which are still flaming.
“No.”
Sylas yelps, barely getting a chance to dash away before Hurk charges forward, roaring, and thrusting out his greatsword. The tip catches on one of the belts on the magician’s chest— and his stomach drops at the understanding that if he still had air in his lungs during that thrust, he’d have been skewered.
He continues to dash backward, backpedaling with his eyes trained on the berserking man currently deforesting a long line of innocent palms on his mission to murder him. In his haste to make distance from the imminent danger pursuing him, he doesn’t spot the knotted roots that make him trip and land on his back, forcefully expelling the breath from his lungs.
Sylas screams when the sharp edge of Hurk’s greatsword cleaves at a clump of dirt inches away from his face. Moist soil erupts from the sheer strength put into that swing, the impact blasting grass and dirt over the both of them. The resounding quake nearly topples Sylas right back onto his ass after he quickly backrolls up onto his feet.
He turns around, now, and keeps dashing— interweaving tosses of his phantom dagger with his dodges to speed up his escape, and also to clear the foliage blocking his sight as he surges forward without a glance behind him. He purposefully skirts around the palm trees as he runs, hoping that the solid obstacle might hinder Hurk in some way.
It doesn’t. Behind him, he can hear the thunderous boom of felled trees hitting the ground. He can feel each downed palm through the tremors that run through the ground and into the soles of his feet.
Still, Sylas chooses to weave his way through the trees rather than through them, sprinting until he runs out of stamina. While Hurk can fight through zero stamina at the cost of his health, Sylas cannot, nor does he want to. So he slumps forward, hands on his knees while he catches his breath.
As he watches the semi-dry dirt beneath him become speckled with the sweat dripping off his face, he realizes the jungle had become quiet. No booming or enraged shouting.
That is, of course, until he hears the distant shrill shrieking of the jungle trolls. He chances a glance backward, debating whether or not to go and help Hurk if he’d found himself in a situation.
He changes his mind when the trolls’ battle shrieks turn into frightened howls, and then nothing at all.
Sylas resumes his distancing at a jogging pace through the now darkened area. Night has fallen, and his path is solely illuminated by the phantom shards that orbit his person. Still, he can only really see about a foot or two in front of him, and he stumbles when his foot meets an unexpected drop into a shallow pool of water about ankle deep. He’s grimacing at the feeling of wet boots when he hears the vegetation rustle behind him.
Whipping his head around with his dagger out, his face pales when he sees two dim red dots emerge from behind one of the trees.
He begins to turn around to bolt once again, but a hand grips at the back of his collar and hoists him up, feet dangling.
Struggling to speak with the pressure of his own clothing at his neck, he chokes out, “Ah! Wait, Hurk– let’s think with a clear head, now, and— shit! ”
Hurk hurls him through the air and Sylas barely has enough time to summon an illusion shield to soften the impact. The shield instantly shatters as he swiftly comes into contact with a mortared stone wall. His body splashes in the shallow water below him.
Sylas coughs wetly and lifts himself off the ground with a groan. He starts to lift his gaze to meet Hurk’s, rapidly contemplating whether or not to begin begging for his life— and then he’s hit in the face with rolled up parchment.
He looks down to the paper, and then to Hurk, whose eyes are no longer glowing that angry red. Sylas’ brows furrow in confusion. Hurk points to the map.
With shaky hands Sylas unfurls the map and squints at it through the dim light provided by the now rising sun. He looks at the map, but still looks lost on what he’s supposed to be seeing.
The brat’s brain is still scrambled from probably being concussed, so Hurk looms over his shoulder to point at a structure on the map. Right next to the picture of a snake baring its fangs is a rectangular stone structure with two pools of water flanking it. Sylas looks around at his environment now that the sun’s rising. He’s sat in a pool of water. Got thrown into a stone wall. And.
He twists his head around and spots the giant snake— coiled up and resting, but still very much there. Sylas barks out a laugh, and simultaneously spits up some blood, but he perseveres.
“Ha! I totally knew where I was going, there was no reason for you to go berserk, you blockhead, and—” Hurk clocks him in the jaw, incapacitating him.
Hurk sighs and shuffles out of the pool. He gathers wood to begin making a campfire, and glances at Sylas’ passed out, floating body in the water.
“I know you can somewhat hear me right now. You’ll get the feather when I feel I need you when Lakoria wakes up.”
Hurk lights the campfire and sits down.