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“Mark my words, vengeance will be mine.”
Her words left no room for doubt, no room for negotiation or mercy. Eula stared down these people, claymore gripped firmly in her hands, and she saw red.
She hardly noticed her own wounds as she stood between her fallen subordinate and the Fatui soldiers. She watched as they quickly remobilized after getting knocked back by her sweeping blow of Glacial Illumination, the pyromancer firing rapid rounds at her. She blocked the shots with the flat of her sword and then dashed forward with her own attack, unleashing blasts of Cryo joined by heavy strikes with her sword at the small horde.
“Cease and desist!” their leader, an Electrohammer vanguard, barked at her, as if he had any right to do so. “Come quietly, and Her Majesty will forgive your transgressions.”
“Too late,” she spoke through gritted teeth, her glare growing only fiercer.
Some nerve of them, when it was they who struck the first blow. Honestly, Eula had had enough of the Fatui’s insolence in general, lately. First they keep asking for their young people to join the Fatui’s ranks, citing over and over again the fact that their Harbinger, Il Dottore, killed a dragon, Ursa the Drake, for them. He made Mondstadt indebted to them, and that, truly, was a cause for vengeance. He was on her list. The one reserved for her enemies, specifically. She had two separate lists; they were quite different. If she had any doubts on him being on her list of enemies before, where he was accompanied by her clan and the Abyss Order and a number of other people of ilk, well, she certainly was placing him there now.
Secondly, the Fatui recently made the Knights do their work for them. A convoy of diplomats were killed within the city gates—the “Black Fire incident,” it was called. It was the obligation of the Knights to find the culprit and bring them to justice. As captain of the Reconnaissance Company, it was not Eula’s problem specifically, but it irked her that the Fatui would have yet another cause to make Mondstadt in debt to them. She did not trust them, not in the slightest.
Perhaps now, she found they she had good reason to be. Her company, while on its usual scouting expedition, found a strange base in the northern reaches of their land. They investigated it, as it appeared to be abandoned, but they were confronted by this Fatui regiment, while inside. They attacked the people placed outside on lookout duty without asking a single question.
They didn’t have time to see much, before this place erupted into a fight. Eula did, however, find a few things that even now burned relentlessly in her mind. A few suspiciously bloodstained tables, small windowless rooms with iron hooks on the walls, and instruments that might belong to a hospital ward.
“You trespass on Fatui property!”
The accusation came with a swing from the vanguard’s hammer. Eula mentally kicked herself, afterwards, for allowing herself to be hit by it even after the man foolishly announced himself as he did. Eula crumpled to the ground, a bloodstain smearing the floorboards where she skid.
“Captain!”
Eula got back up again. She felt disadvantaged in the cramped quarters that this empty room in the front of the facility provided. The brute strength of the Fatui soldiers meant that they could be far more reckless. Eula was usually very skilled at dodging attacks with her refined fighting style, but she was having difficulties. She was quickly tiring.
“Surrender now,” the leader spoke to her directly, tone commanding and firm, “and you will live. I’m certain we and the Knights can make an arrangement.”
Take them prisoner, then. Eula paused on the matter for only a moment. She knew very well the answer that her solemn vengeance demanded, but as her captain, there were other matters to take into account.
“Don’t do it,” Edolyne, who was positioned back-to-back behind her now, spoke quietly.
Eula glanced around the room to take stock. The fighting had paused, as if all were frozen in time. Ralph, Mika, Joanne, Hans, Martin. They were still standing. Bertholdt and Cora were down. The ones that were standing looked worse for wear, but from Eula could see, the fire for vengeance was still bright in their eyes. Locking eyes with a few of them was enough to tell her their answer.
The matters that needed to be taken into account were settled, then.
“We will never,” Eula spoke, her words loud and clear, their meaning just as final as the ones that came before. Truthfully, she would have loved to talk to that more at length at the grave heights of the infractions between them, but the leader’s hammer came swinging just after those three short words.
“You will regret this!” he said mid-attack. Eula lunged forward to meet him, acting as if she would meet him head on before deftly swerving around and dealing a strike, her sword finally finding purchase in his side, just beneath his armor.
The fight continued with Eula at full force, but for only a few short moments more, until she felt the encompassing sting of an electric shock from behind her. A Hydrogunner had just shot at her, and he was followed in tandem by a cicin mage from behind, shocking her to render her briefly immobilized, before the mage then, in a flash, plunged a dagger into her back.
“Captain Eula!”
Eula clutched her chest. She heard the sound of fighting behind her. Her world went dizzy, and she became suddenly much more aware of the many still-bleeding wounds marking her from her arms to her feet. She stood straight and took a bloody step forward.
When the Hydrogunner came for her, she fought him in turn. She did not dare stop. Her focus was shaky, her grasp on the battle around her fading, but the light from her Vision burned bright. She couldn’t stop, because they had already made their decision to not. If she failed, her men may die here too, and who would be there to take vengeance for them then?
Eula’s strength, however, could not match her will.
She felt herself grow weak from the loss of blood. She wasn’t even certain of what she was doing when it finally happened. Her body trembled, and her knees grew weak. As if in delayed reaction to getting stabbed, they buckled beneath her, with no conscious thought of her own. She fell to her knees and dropped her sword in the same motion, the claymore making a loud sound as it clattered to the ground.
That damned regiment leader, deeply wounded himself, came for her, ordering one of his men to stay back. He lifted the hammer high above his head with a wicked grin.
Eula needed to move, but she couldn’t. Her legs refused to support her, and all at once, her heart froze and her breath quickened. She had failed.
“Pathetic!” a voice from long ago yelled at her inside her mind. “Get up! Don’t you dare act weak on me!”
The voice belonged to her mother. If only Eula’s last thoughts could have been a little more pleasant.
Then the hammer dropped, and the man wielding it along with it. Through blurry vision, Eula just barely registered the leader getting stabbed in the back with a sword, straight through the heart.
She smelled smoke just an instant after that. She realized something was on fire.
“Captain, please! I’ll help you up. We have to go.” Edolyne reached out a hand for her. Eula took and fought to stay awake, fought to make sense of her surroundings.
“They’re retreating! We have to—”
“Martin, there’s no time!”
“Help, someone! Bertholdt’s too tall; I can’t…I can’t carry…!”
“What, Bertholdt’s still alive!? Hold on Mika, I’ll get him—you help Edo and the Captain!”
“Captain, are you…?”
…
…
…
Eula woke up with her head on fire.
Last she remembered, the building they were in was the thing on fire. It seemed as if the surviving Fatui members fled. She wished she knew their names specifically, so that she could enact vengeance on them.
“C-Captain!” Mika yelped in her ear. Eula looked up groggily to see her young surveyor hanging over her, eyes wide with fear and hope, a bandage wrapped around his forehead with a red blot where the blood persisted in bleeding. “You’re awake! I’m…I’m sorry…I’m so sorry…”
“Whatever are you sorry for?” she spoke with a groan, her skull still throbbing and every leaden limb throbbing along with it. In the past, when Mika had apologized to her for no good reason, she had told him that she would have her revenge on him for that, but he had taken her far too seriously with that statement, so she had learned to adjust her language accordingly, with him specifically. Everyone else could deal with it.
Mika appeared out of breath. “I mean…it’s…”
“How about,” Edolyne stepped in, “we start with explaining what happened?”
Her team relayed the pertinent information to her. She woke up lying on a cot underneath a tent in the middle of their field camp, but she pulled herself up for the purpose of the meeting. Hans and Joanne were gone—they were going back to the city to get help. From the sounds of it, Bertholdt especially was going to be hazardous to move over such a long distance. Edolyne said that his right leg was half-severed through, with the bone protruding at an unnatural angle; they will likely have to amputate it. Cora as well was in bad condition from the wound in her side and was still unconscious.
Apparently, the Fatui had set fire to the old facility themselves. It seems that their goal was to hide the evidence it held. Eula saw no further confirmation needed to be assured that whatever was going on in there, it was a criminal act. She just didn’t know what it was. It was infuriating, knowing how close they were, but the important thing was that, at the very least, her team was all still alive. The ones in decent condition had carried away their unconscious comrades (Eula included) from the burning building.
Hmph, preposterous, it was. Eula was the captain of this team, and here, it appeared she had to be carried off like dead weight by her own subordinates. They would all have to receive vengeance for this. They were on her list.
The good list, of course.
“I’m sorry,” Mika said again, looking thoroughly distraught. “I…I didn’t get a chance to tell you, before the fight started. They left some papers behind, and I grabbed them. But then, my pack was torn off, in the middle of the fight. It was caught in the fire, and I…only have fragments, now.” He shook his head. “It isn’t nearly good enough to be evidence.”
“Evidence!? What need to we have of that!?” Martin blurted out, looking positively furious. “The Fatui literally attacked us! They’ll have to pay for this!”
“Does…does this mean we’re going to war with Snezhnaya?” Ralph asked, seeming mortified by the possibility.
“I doubt it,” Eula spoke through gritted teeth. She had far too many questions, but unfortunately, she had a feeling that she knew how people like this worked. “Nothing will happen, because they will deny it. They will not admit their guilt, no matter what charges we throw against them. If we bring this to light, they could easily spin the narrative to charge us with the deaths of their soldiers instead. I don’t believe that is their intended goal, however. If their goal was to antagonize us to war, they would have picked a more lucrative—and more public—target. I believe all that happened today was that they noticed our investigation and were fearful of what we might find.”
“Then…what now?” Mika asked.
Eula thought on that, for a moment. Although the pain was blinding, fire still burned within her for vengeance. However, simply going after them right now seemed a foolhardy choice. Her team wasn’t even the combat-oriented one, compared to some of the other members of the ten companies of the Knights of Favonius. Their job was to scout and report, gathering information for the service of the others. However, they were trained for the possibility of something like what happened today. They would do it again, too, if they needed to.
They were also Mondstadtians. They made it clear to Eula long ago that they needed no other tie to bind them (as surprised as the notion made her, back then). Their purpose here was to protect their home from evil, and they were going to do just that.
Not today, but one day, they will face the Fatui again and surely do just that.
Eula held her head high, her gaze steady. “Then we wait for the day when vengeance will be ours.”