"So, what am I keeping an eye out for?"

"Well, I'm listening for the right sort of sound - should be any minute now."

uuuuuuugh

Richard cocks his head to the left, gesturing, and the group turns towards the road.

Haru has a bad feeling about this.

There's a carriage approaching.

"Mr. Swan, would you do us the favor of stopping our quarry?"

"I'm sure I have absolutely no idea what you mean."

"You only have to stand in the road and draw their attention, it's really not a complicated task."

"My good opinion of you prevents me entirely from drawing any conclusions about your intentions."

"You don't think its a noble's carriage, do you?"

"My high opinion is not only of your gentility to your peers but also your noblesse oblige, please forgive me for implying anything less."

"... I think you slipped into Narnian Mr. Haru, for a bit there."

"Noblesse oblige is French, actually. Do you speak it or shall I translate? The literal translation is a little underspecified."

"I don't particularly care."

"Ah, well, to abbreviate it a bit," DRIVE FASTER, RANDOM CARRIAGE, "it means the obligations of the nobility, but the way the term is normally used refers not to anything that would go without saying like the management of demons or of fealty to those above, but rather of generosity and gentleness toward our inferiors."

"How quaint."

"We're going to miss them."

"Yes Viper I know - not that I don't enjoy your scholastic lecture but... well, actually, I suppose I don't enjoy it, and we have fun to have."

Richard goes to pat Haru on the back, evidently with enough force to send him flying for a dozen yards, landing right in the path of the carriage.

...well, he's going to do his best to keep rolling so they don't run him over and don't have to stop.

"Oh for god's sake." Richard will do it himself, donning a dark metal mask before kicking off against the ground to send himself barrelling forward and directly into the horses pulling the carriage, killing one instantly and the other a moment later with a casual swipe.

"I trust you know what this is," he announces to the terrified driver and unseen occupants of the carriage as his compatriots approach, two on foot and one hovering in the air, each wearing a mask of their own.

Haru has sat with acute backlash long enough for it to settle into a chronic state before.

It wasn't intolerable. A little uncomfortable, medically worrying if he hadn't had June waiting to take care of it once he got back to Toronto, but he could sit with it.

He still couldn't read anything that wasn't intended, communicatively, for him.

Any backlash at all will fence him out of a book, no matter how long he lets it sit. Even if it's just a little, just a flicker of invisibility or shrugging off a psychic touch.

And also these men have superpowers of their own - generously the fact that they're tortured about it every week contributes to their shitty personalities though he knows full well that normal nonmagical Earthlings can be heinous people too. So, he might need more than a little to - he's kind of low on nonlethal options. He could kill them, and never read a book again, and be implicated in a bunch of murders. They probably do this all the time, multiply whoever's in the carriage by let's say twenty over their lifetimes, and Haru may have already sabotaged his ability to get in good with the guy's portal-slinging father anyway - it's several dungeons' worth of people, certainly, but -

If Haru lives through this unbacklashed enough to function, he can if necessary make his way to France and start over. Lucette just happened to know a portal guy whose son just happened to be at her next social event. Maybe there's a portal guy in France, or Belgium. Maybe there's one in the Colonies.

Maybe he can get a portal open and get a teleporter a bead on this place and flood it with twenty-first century espers who have partners and can do something about it.

He wasn't particularly banged up by the fall, but he pretends, lying by the side of the road and catching his breath.

Then he'll be in a good position to see the door to the carriage crack open just enough to let someone loose a lit arrow, aimed nearly straight up. There's something attached to it designed to burn brightly, giving off a bright white light.

"Viper -"

A long purple tongue lashes out from the mouth of the floating companion, catching the arrow and pulling it back towards his mouth, where he extinguishes it with his hand, letting it fall to the ground.

"Of course, I-"

He is interrupted by a figure plummeting directly into him from above, smashing him into the ground with a resounding crash. The figure stands up, looming above Viper, with a blue cape dark enough to be missed against the night sky and armor considerably heavier and more elaborate than that of anyone else present.