Chapter Text
Within the ranks of the so-called Ubersreik Five, it was generally accepted that you left the group at your own peril. Even the lowliest skavenslave possessed an innate amount of instinctive cunning, and there were scores upon scores of ratmen that had further honed those instincts into a cowardly art form.
To head off alone was to invite a Night Runner’s dagger in your back, or a Packmaster’s polearm around your throat.
Despite all of that, Kerillian was one of the Asrai, the wood elves. If she had to constantly limit herself to the plodding, stomping pace set by her human companions, she’d go mad. And gods forbid she restrict herself to hobbling along after Bardin!
Furthermore, the skaven’s ‘Skittergate’ hadn’t quite finished exploding yet. The entire center of Helmgart had collapsed into the earth, but the odd plume of fire and skyward bolt of green lightning still shot out of the hole. As far as Kerillian knew, there wasn’t a ratman alive who would be willing to try his luck after such a thorough defeat, and that observation seemed to have been born out so far on this latest patrol.
So, while her friends (though she’d cut her tongue out before calling them that out loud) lumbered along the alleyways like livestock, kicking in doors and putting the shrieking skaven holdouts they found to the sword, Kerillian took to the rooftops to provide cover and scout for additional targets.
When she finally found one, she was positive that she’d stumbled across a trap. An especially large Stormvermin was sitting on an overturned crate, leisurely feasting on the dried fruit that had come spilling out.
Stealthily, Kerillian circled the area. Her dark eyes peered through the shadows, checking every nook and cranny for this vermin’s allies that surely were the cause of its uncommon bravado.
But no, nothing. Nothing but that one, singular skaven.
He must have traded what little brains his kind possessed for that extra brawn, Kerillian decided, and with a casual swiftness she knocked an arrow and sent it whistling down towards the ratman’s unsuspecting throat.
And then the bastard snapped his shield up and blocked it!
He even laughed as he finished off his snack, standing up from the crate. “Elf-thing thinks she’s sneaky-quiet, yes-yes? Elf-thing should know better!”
If he’d flung dung in her face, Kerillian could hardly have been more appalled. A skaven had blocked her arrow. A filthy, stinking ratman!
Biting back a snarl, Kerillian leapt down from the rooftop and drew her twin daggers. Calling for her companions might have been the smartest course of action, but if she needed help to kill a single, solitary Stormvermin then she hardly deserved to call herself an Asrai. No, she’d handle this discreetly, and be back on the rooftops over her companions before they even noticed she was gone.
Now that she was closer, though, Kerillian couldn’t help but notice that this Stormvermin looked different from his fellows. For starters, he was even larger than she’d first assumed, standing head and shoulders over even her own willowy form.
The second thing was even more surprising, and so unexpected that it took her a moment to realize exactly what she was looking at.
This skaven, among all of the other filthy vermin that plagued Helmsgart, looked clean. His weapons and armor were free from rust, his fur lacked tangles and crusted filth, and even his teeth were bone-white instead of sickly yellow.
It was a mystery that Kerillian decided would never be solved, as she leapt towards him without a word, intent on ending his miserable life then and there.
To her surprise and her growing frustration, however, it seemed that the interception of her arrow wasn’t a fluke. The Stormvermin was irritatingly light on his feet for such a large creature, and was able to ward away each flickering strike of Kerillian’s daggers with either his shield or his jagged saber.
Evenly matched by a bloody ratman! Kerillian cursed to herself. The only time she could ever remember being challenged like this by a singular vermin was Skarrik, and that bastard had been a warlord all of his own. This…rank and file nobody was far stronger and more skilled than he had any right to be, and Kerillian was only glad that her companions were off elsewhere rather than watching her fail to dispatch a singular Stormvermin.
Still, she was better than this filth. It would be close, but she could see an opening in his strikes to exploit. Very nearly- now!
Instead of catching his next slash on the guard of her daggers as she’d done before, Kerillian twisted away from his blade. She’d misjudged his speed, however, underestimating him yet again despite the ample evidence that this was no ordinary skaven. Rather than a clean dodge, his saber tore through the elf’s clothing as she just barely managed to avoid injury. There was no time to take stock of the damage, though, his guard was open for a brief moment as he overextended and Kerillian lunged into the gap!
Her weapon found a chink in his armor and bit through skin and muscle, sending blood spurting onto the cobblestones. Not nearly enough for her liking, a flesh wound at best, but it was a good start at least!
Or it was, until a gentle breeze left her far chillier than she expected and the elf took the risk of actually glancing down at herself.
Her leather jerkin had been slashed cleanly open, the wooden breastplate hanging loosely by her side. The blade must have come within a hair’s breadth of her skin, because it wasn’t just her jerkin that had suffered. Even her underthings had been parted, leaving her skin bare down to her navel.
Despite the absurdity of the situation, Kerillian found her cheeks filling with color. “Y-you…you foul beast! Y-you’re going to pay for that!”
The skaven peered at her, beady black eyes darting from her indignant expression to her uncovered chest, prompting the elf to wrap one arm around her breasts and somehow blush harder.
“Oi! Kerillian? You down this way?”
Whatever might have happened next, the sound the elf’s companions calling out for her shattered the hesitation each side shared. The skaven turned and ran, dashing for the nearest burrow. Kerillian was left with the choice to chase after him, or try to salvage her dignity before her allies saw her in her current state. With a frustrated snarl, Kerillian sheathed her daggers and hurriedly started to knot severed straps back together to give her poor jerkin some makeshift repairs.
In the privacy of her own mind, however, she made a vow to herself. That skaven, whoever it was, would pay in blood for each stinging blow to her pride that it had dealt tonight. She wouldn’t rest until she’d had her revenge, and by the gods it would rue the day it traded blows with her!
—--
Another day and another patrol. Helmgart was starting to calm down, but their work was far from over. There still wasn’t any sign of the Empire’s armies coming to retake the city, which meant it was still just them and the pockets of resistance they’d managed to keep alive throughout this whole nightmare. Even defeated and leaderless, Clan Fester was still a threat just because of how many of them there were. They may have learned to fear the Ubersreik Five after all the damage they’d done, but that just meant they were rooting Skaven out of hiding instead of engaging them in pitched battle.
Kerillian barely even glanced at her target before putting an arrow through its throat. Sloppier than normal, she knew, but her level of skill meant that even when she was worse off than normal, her clumsy and inept allies couldn’t tell the difference.
Something to be thankful for, as she did not want to explain the reason behind her distraction.
That damned Skaven.
He’d fought her to a near standstill, taken her top off, ogled her breasts, and lived! Her wounded pride stung like an ulcer, and for the entire day she kept one eye out for a tall Stormvermin with clean fur and armor. She would find him, kill him, and nobody would ever know what had happened.
A flash of light caught her eye. The setting sun glinting off of metal. She twisted sharply, and saw it. The last few inches of a tail vanishing down a side street, lacking the layer of grime and scum every other Skaven seemed to wallow in.
It was as though her thoughts had summoned him. She spared one, singular glance to her comrades, still plodding along on the streets below her. They weren’t paying her the slightest bit of mind. She could get this done before they even realized she’d slipped away!
Eager for vengeance, Kerillian did exactly that. She walked with feline grace among the shingles of Helmgart’s rooftops, not letting so much as a pebble shift at her passage. She crept closer and closer to the place she’d spotted her prey, her teammate’s good-natured bickering fading as she left them behind, breathing as silently as a ghost as she eased forward to take a look.
Nothing there! He must have kept moving, she could still pick up his-
The clack of two small bits of rooftop rubble shifting against each other was the only warning Kerillian had, but it was enough for her to whirl around and bring her blades to bear in time to intercept a surprise attack.
“You.” She hissed under her breath. There he was, the rodent bastard! Just as tell, just as groomed, just as damnably smug as he’d been the last time she’d seen him. Maybe even moreso, now that he’d successfully snuck up on her. By the gods, will humiliations never cease?
“Too easy.” He taunts her. “Elf-thing sees my tail-tail, Elf-thing comes scamper-running by herself!” He bared his teeth in a grin that Kerillian wanted to sink an arrow into. “Makes me think-wonder if Elf-thing enjoyed how last time went!”
As if it wasn’t unmistakable, he makes his point even more obvious by very clearly glancing down at her chest.
It was a wonder that Kerillian’s veil hadn’t burnt off her face with how red it was getting. “I’ll cut those beady little eyes out of your filthy skull, rat!” She hissed, then shoved his blade back with her daggers and launched into a furious assault.
She was honestly slightly surprised by how thoroughly she wanted him dead. She hadn’t hated an enemy like this before, no matter how repugnant. As disgusting as her foes had been, killing them had merely been a duty and a pleasure.
This perverted filth, though, roused her to genuine fury. How dare he ogle her like some tavern bar wench!? She couldn’t kill him slowly enough to pay him back for this insult!
Her daggers leapt at his throat like a viper’s fangs, but he twisted himself to let them skitter off of his pauldron as he slashed at her belly. Kerillian danced back out of range for just a moment, her elven agility propelling her forward again before her foe had even completed his swing. Yet again, she stabbed her daggers forward, this time reversing her grip and bringing them down from above towards a gap in his armor.
Victory was close enough to taste, but even if her fury had given her an additional edge in speed compared to last time, the skaven still had an enormous advantage in bulk. She was so focused on getting the kill that she was completely unprepared for him to simply drop his sword and lunge forward, slamming his armored body into her lithe form hard enough that she nearly bounced clean off the building. She caught herself so close to the edge that her heels were hanging off into open air, forced to awkwardly pinwheel her arms to keep from toppling over completely. It was a long fall to the streets below, and they were strewn with enough rubble and debris that the best acrobatics in the world wouldn’t save her from a broken ankle at the very least.
When his fist slammed into her midriff, Kerillian had half a second to level a final silent curse at her newfound nemesis as she fully pitched over backwards- and then abruptly jerked to a halt by a furry fist grabbing hold of her jerkin.
He must not have wanted to climb down after her , Kerillian thought to herself. Whatever the reason, it would prove to be a mistake. His sword was still behind him, so if he wanted her dead he’d have to use his claws! She tightened her grip on her daggers, waiting for him to reach his other hand towards her throat. She’d stab through it, and pull herself back upright while throwing him off the roof at the same time. A fitting end!
Except, she’d misjudged his intentions. Instead of going for her belly with his claws, the rat-man hauled her up with surprising strength, and then yanked his hand down and back as he hurled Kerillian behind him.
There was a moment of resistance and then the loud rip of tearing fabric, before Kerillian hit the rooftop hard. One of her daggers bounced out of her hand, sailing over the edge, but she managed to keep her grip on the other.
She would have traded it without hesitation for the other thing she’d lost, though.
The skaven dropped a wad of green cloth and leather scraps, leering at Kerillian with the closest thing his bestial snout got to a grin. “Elf-thing has pretty chest, yes-yes. Thanks-gratitude for showing me again!” There was a stirring in the lengths of chainmail hanging from his waist, the implication far too horrifying to accept.
Kerillian trembled with fury. “You… you…!” No insult scathing enough came to mind, so she simply yelled out a battle-cry and charged forward, dagger aimed like a spear towards the Skaven’s heart. She didn’t care if she had to force her blade through his breastplate, she didn’t care if it ruined her weapon in the process. She wanted him dead. Dead, dead, dead, dead, DEAD!
He grabbed her wrist and tugged her past him, leading her in a circle like some perverse parody of a ballroom dance. He swung her all the way around and tossed her back the way she came, his whiplike tail cracking across her ass as he let her stumble away.
Her whole body burned with shame and humiliation. Whirling back around to face him only gave him another chance to ogle her breasts, which he did so with relish. She quickly covered them with one arm, but the tear in her clothes left her bare from neck to navel, and he seemed almost as happy to drink in the milky-pale expanse of her midriff and shoulders.
Kerillian darted forward again, her lone remaining dagger carving glittering arcs through the air. She’d passed fury and gone into a zen-like state of utter hatred, clarity filling her thoughts. She slid under a swipe of his arm, jumped over his lashing tail, and held her dagger in both hands as she thrust it straight into his chest.
Against a normal Stormvermin’s rusty, shoddily-cared-for armor, her dagger would have punched straight through. In her eagerness to dismiss her foe as just another Skaven, though, she’d dismissed the clean state of his armor as unimportant.
There was a crack as the tip of her dagger bent and snapped off, a full inch of the blade spinning madly as it sailed within a hair's-breadth of her cheek.
She had no time to mourn the continuing loss of her armaments as she threw herself back from a retaliatory strike. That damned smug ratty grin was still on her enemy’s snout. Had he let her get this close, knowing his armor could take the blow? Oh, she’d make him pay for that arrogance!
All armor had chinks and gaps. She could see several already, places where dark fur or leather showed beneath the metal. He’d been forced to block strikes that aimed for weak spots already! She just couldn’t fall back on brute force against this foe like she could against his fellows.
She’d gone high before and failed. He was adept at blocking attacks aimed at his head and throat, true, but perhaps she could use his size against him!
With catlike grace, Kerillian bounced on the balls of her feet and darted forward, feinting high again and then thrusting low. Like all stormvermin, he had plates on his outer thigh and a curtain of chain hanging between his legs, but beneath that curtain she could slice clean through his inner thigh instead! Hamstrung and with a severed artery, she would dance away from his flailing death-spasms, laughing as screamed and died in front of-!
As her blade-hand swept beneath the curtain of chainmail, her knuckles slid across something solid, warm, twitching, and thick.
And then, to add injury to insult, while her mind was still shrieking in fevered denial about what she’d just touched, he almost contemptuously planted his paw against her chest and kicked her onto her back. “Elf-thing so stunned by Vyril’s breed-tool?” He sneered. “Do elf-men not possess such tools?”
Elf men did possess such tools, and Kerillian would never pretend that she was inexperienced in such matters. But elf men were equipped like elves, not like the beasts of the wood, and the thing she’d touched had been- no, no, not finishing that thought, NEVER finishing that thought!
She tried to scramble upright, but her state of shock was such that he was easily able to step onto her belly and pin her in place, leaning forward in such a way that made it impossible to keep the growing bulge beneath his chain-cloth out of her vision.
“Did Vyril’s cock make you interested-curious, elf-thing?” He chuckled down at her. “I think-think it did. So what fun-play should we do now?”
Kerillian thrashed beneath him, grabbing fistfuls of loose rubble from the rooftop around her and flinging it into the skaven’s face, or Vyril, whatever he called himself. As he closed his eyes to ward it off, she stabbed at his ankle with her dagger, but his greaves covered him much more thoroughly this low down and she only succeeded in chipping another few bits of steel from her already-weakened dagger.
In desperation, she tried to start sawing at his exposed toes and footpads, heedless of the danger from how closely they pressed into her skin, but Vyril growled at her and stomped down hard enough to make her wheeze and drop the weapon from spasming fingers.
“I think you need training-teaching, elf-thing.” The skaven hissed, lowering his head even further, and the bulge in his chainmail swelled another fraction. Practically kneeling on top of her now, he reached down and grabbed her exposed chest with greedy hands, kneading and mauling her breasts between his fingers.
Kerillian’s mind was alternating between a frenzy of indignant rage and a yawning pit of utter horror, especially as his touch sent unwanted jolts of sensation through her body. Asrai, like all elves, were gifted with the capacity to feel far greater heights of sensation than men or dwarves. A blessing, normally, that enabled her to experience the true beauty and splendor of her wooded homeland. In this case, though, it was only enabling her to feel each and every nerve in her bare flesh as he squeezed and clutched crudely at her sensitive chest. Against her will, a gasp slipped from her throat, and the skaven chuckled in response.
“You learn quick-quick. What else can I teach you…?” One of his hands reached higher, preparing to lift her veil away as the other started tugging at a strap of his armor…!
“Elf! Confound it all, where did you go!?” The flinty voice of Saltzpyre echoed from the streets below, and Vyril hissed in disappointed frustration.
“I saw her headed this way. Looked like she’d seen something. ‘Ope she didn’t find trouble.” Kruber gruffly responded, and there was an abruptly cut-off screech as an unseen clanrat met its end beneath them.
“Ach, the Wutelgi can take care of ‘erself.” She could practically see Bardin’s unbothered shrug as he talked to her other companions. “Though- ‘ang on. That’s one of her knives there, isn’t it?”
She locked eyes with the vermin above her, the same thought running through both of their heads. All she had to do was cry for help, and her companions would be upon them in no time. Her dignity would be ruined. They would see the state that a single Stormvermin had reduced her to…but if it meant avoiding whatever he had planned, she’d do it. Maybe he’d kill her for it, but it would be better than… that. She opened her mouth, steeling herself to do just that- and then the skaven stunned her yet again.
Vyril stepped back, freeing her. “Lucky-lucky, elf-thing.” He whispered. “Your teach-training will wait for another day.”
Kerillian nearly gasped in relief. “I-if I see you again, I’ll tear your throat out you wretched thing.” She hissed back.
The skaven only chuckled. Then, with a flash of metal and fur, he was over the opposite edge of the rooftop and vanishing into some unseen hidey-hole.
Kerillian took a moment to just breath, soaking in the blissful reprieve she’d been given, before mustering up her usual attitude and calling back out to her companions below. “Aye! I’m here! Just a moment and I’ll be down with you! Bloody dagger got knocked from my hand and vanished in all this debris!” Quickly, she found the cloth that had been ripped from her chest and used it to improvise a wrap, then affixed her wooden breastplate and adjusted it to cover as much as she could. It was obvious that she’d taken some damage to her wardrobe, but her modesty was intact.
“Your dagger’s down here, Kerillian!” Kruber called up to her. “Must have fallen over the edge! What happened?”
“I wasn’t expecting to find a rat-ogre nesting on a rooftop, is all!” She lied, quickly scaling the side of the building and rejoining her friends. “I won’t lie, it was a bit touch and go for a minute there.”
She could see Bardin and Saltzpyre both rolling their eyes, though Kruber at least had the grace to look concerned as he handed the blade back. “Bloody hell. That’s why you don’t run off on your own, Kerillian.”
She waved off his concern. “Ah, don’t worry about it, lumberfoots. Was only a bit of a shock. I handled it well enough.”
“If you keep this wandering up, we’re gonna find your half-eaten carcass in our path one of these days, Wutelgi.” Bardin grumbled.
“And my eulogy will consist of only a single sentence. ‘We told you so.’” Saltzpyre sniffed. Then sniffed again. “...Does anybody else smell something strange?”
Bardin frowned. “Aye. Like a…barnyard?”
“Nay, more like…well, there was this one time I was hunting a herd of deer. Must have been two dozen does, and just a single buck between them. Smelled kinda like this.” Kruber tilted his head. “You smell anything, Kerillian?”
To her horror, Kerillian did. And it was coming from her hand. The hand that had brushed the Skaven’s…body. The hand that, she only just now realized, was slick with the Skaven’s sweat.
She refused to believe that it could have been any other fluid. She simply refused.
“No, I don’t smell a thing.” She growled. “How could I, in this festering city? Come on! If we delay any longer, Sienna will have drunk all of Lohner’s next shipment of spirits.”
She stalked off ahead, and tried to surreptitiously scrub her hand off against her jerkin.
The trip back to the keep was thankfully uneventful, though her eyes flew to every shadow as she expected to see a gleam of shiny black fur within them.
When they arrived, the first thing she did was procure a bar of soap and scrub her hand raw, gritting her teeth as she fought to purge the events of the day from her memory. No matter what she did, though, it felt like a trace of Vyril’s scent still filled her nostrils, that foul skaven’s mark impossible to truly remove.
She scrubbed, sniffed, caught a whiff of his animalistic, masculine scent, then furiously started scrubbing again. By the time she was done, her hand was bright pink, sore, and she still thought she could sense traces of it.
Her dreams that night were troubled. She tried not to remember them. But she couldn’t forget the constant sensation of hands on her chest, and fur against her skin.
When she woke again, her resolve had hardened into an unbreakable drive. She would kill that skaven. She would find him, exact revenge for everything he’d done to her, and then bleed the life from his body. Slowly, and painfully.
He wouldn’t get the better of her a third time. It was simply impossible. After all…she was a Waystalker. A champion of Athel Loren! A paragon of the Asrai!
And he was just a lowly, disgusting, vermin.
Yes…their next bout would be different…