Asher wanted to fill Moxy in on what they’d discovered while she was healing within his Personal Rift, but he didn’t get the chance. It seemed now that he’d rejected the Head’s offer yet again to join them, the Knuckles weren’t planning on giving him or his team any additional breathers.

  As soon as Wolf reemerged from his shadow, it was Owl’s turn to fall into the ground this time, the Knuckle reemerging behind them a few hundred feet away as he fired a silent arrow straight toward Samantha from behind. Relying more on instinct than anything else, along with Comprehend speeding up his reaction time, Asher lunged forward and cut through Owl’s arrow with Crescent, the brilliant blue blade leaving behind a beautiful arc where he slashed. He was more shocked than anyone when Owl’s arrow actually dissipated into tiny black motes of light rather than knocking his dagger out of his hand, but at least his team didn’t let the opportunity go to waste.

  While Moxy rocketed herself toward Wolf once more, eager to punch him in the face a second time, Samantha turned and fired back one of her own enchanted arrows toward Owl. Rather than slip back into the shadows under his feet and dodge the attack, Owl let the shot pierce straight through the center of his chest, ignoring the violet-tipped arrow and the hole it tore through him completely as he took careful aim and fired another arrow. This one was sent straight for Asher’s head, as though the Knuckle were challenging him to repeat what he’d just done.

  “They’re not even pretending to be real anymore!” Asher said, slicing through this attack just as he had the first. Owl seemed to be making his arrows slightly smaller now, no doubt in an attempt to make them harder for Asher to accurately stop. As they watched, the hole in Owl’s chest rippled and filled in with additional shadow, ‘healing’ as though he’d never been hit in the first place.

  “They’re not real?!” Moxy shouted back, twisting around the thrust from Wolf’s spear that had come from one of the shadows around her. The warrior launched a few well-timed punches in response, accurately guessing where he was going to reemerge for his next attack and ripping a few chunks of shadow off his body with her air blasts. “Alright, I think I see what you mean!”

  “Do we Recall?” Samantha asked, coating herself with a new layer of water as the two of them waited for Owl to pop up somewhere new and attack again. After exchanging those first two arrows, the Knuckle had vanished entirely, which was almost worse than if he’d continued firing shots at them. “If we can’t hurt these things, do we have any reason to keep fighting them?”

  “I’m not sure if we can’t hurt them,” Asher admitted, a bead of sweat dripping down his forehead as he waited for Owl to reappear like the world’s deadliest game of whack-a-mole. “I noticed something strange earlier, and I want to test a theory. Whenever we manage to take the fight to the Head one of these days, knowing how to defeat this skill is going to be critical!”

  Owl finally reappeared, popping up out of the shadows twenty feet to Moxy’s left, and with an arrow already pulled back and aimed at her. Asher didn’t even get the chance to shout a warning before the silent attack was launched.

  A preemptive Air Nova knocked the strangely-thin arrow off course the moment it left the bow, allowing a grinning Moxy to twist and, while ducking under the stab from Wolf’s spear, punch a bullet of air straight into Owl’s gut. The Knuckle took the hit head on, getting knocked up and off his feet entirely as he fell back. Not wanting to miss his chance, Asher lunged forward, reaching out with Distortion and stabbing at the Knuckle’s chest. Owl managed to twist in a way no human could ever hope to match, dodging Asher’s blow completely before landing and slipping back into the shadows on the ground.

  Yet despite his attack having been evaded, Asher grinned as his theory was all but confirmed.

  “My attacks hurt them!” he called out, waiting for Owl to emerge yet again and try his luck. “It has to be my skill’s new second-tier ability! If these things are a skill, then that means they’re made of tritessence! I can cut them!”

  He’d noticed something strange the first time Wolf had attacked, right after he’d lopped off the head of the Knuckle’s spear with his dagger. Wolf had taken the time to spin his spear around and regenerated a new head from the other end of the spear. The end he hadn’t cut through. He’d thought it was odd and almost dismissed it entirely at the time, but watching Owl tank Samantha’s attacks head on and then go through such lengths to dodge his own was more than a little telling. And if that wasn’t enough proof, seeing Moxy’s Air Nova completely deflect Owl’s weakened arrow certainly was. Each time Asher slashed through the Knuckle’s arrows, they grew smaller. He didn’t know how the Knuckle was conjuring them, but it appeared as though they had a rather limited supply of shadow to work with.

  “In that case, stop basking in your own genius and start stabbing!” Moxy shouted at him, laughing as one of her pelts latched down onto Wolf’s spearhead, diverting the thrust just enough that it only sliced through the edge of her bicep rather than lop off her arm entirely. Not one to miss an opportunity, Moxy followed that up by punching a blast of air straight down into the shadow it had come from, hitting Wolf in the face and tearing a good quarter of the shadows making up his head apart. Before Wolf could regenerate or slip away, she tore the shadow spear from his grasp, turning to throw it at Asher. “Here, catch!”

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  Not needing to be told twice, Asher lashed out with Crescent, cutting the spear straight down the middle and separating the shaft into two long halves. Upon hitting the ground, each half vanished into shadow once more, but the damage was done. Curious what would happen, Asher watched as Wolf finally escaped from Moxy and reemerged a good hundred feet away.

  Clutching one half of his spear in each hand.

  Owl joined his partner, emerging from the shadows directly beside him with his bow slung over his back. The two Knuckles stared across the field of grass, and only the sound of wind whistling through the stalks was able to be heard as everyone seemed to wait to see what would happen next. Asher half expected Wolf to switch to dual-wielding with the two halves of his spear, like a boss in a video game who had just had his second phase unlocked. Instead, the Knuckles seemed almost hesitant, like they weren’t sure what to do.

  “Not used to actually having something to lose, are you?” Asher called out, unable to help himself after all the pain the Head had put them through. “Don’t worry, it’s not the first time! The demons didn’t react very well to learning my attacks actually mattered to them either. I’m not surprised you’re a bit shaken!”

  Owl and Wolf continued to stare silently at them, almost like they were waiting for something. Asher was just about to shout out at them again, when they finally spoke.

  Only this time, the voice was different.

  “You are beginning to grow into something more than just a pain in my side, Reaper,” the new voice called out. Unlike when Owl or Wolf spoke through the shadows at their feet, this voice seemed to somehow come from everywhere and nowhere all at once. Almost like it was inside their own heads, somehow. Asher couldn’t tell if it belonged to a man or a woman, or someone young or old, but he immediately knew who it belonged to, and his friends seemed to know as well. Samantha gasped and Moxy grinned, but Asher merely stared at the two Knuckles as he tightened his grip around his daggers. After all this time. After killing dozens of random assassins, a handful of senior assassins, and even two Fingers by his own hand.

  It would appear he’d finally earned a meeting with the Head of the Assassin’s Guild themselves.

  “I’d like to remind you that you are the one who started all this,” Asher called back, curious to find that he wasn’t intimidated in the slightest. Here he was, actually talking to the person in charge of hundreds if not thousands of deadly assassins scattered all across the kingdom. And all he could think about was how his own skill had triumphed over the Head’s. If Sever the Thread was powerful enough to give even the Head pause, someone who he’d assumed all this time was probably well into the Stage of Power, then how scary could they really be? “If Eight hadn’t sent a parcel of magadrine powder to our house, all of this could have potentially been avoided!”

  “If you had simply accepted your position as Finger and played by the rules after killing him, all of this could have been avoided,” the head shot back. “I knew you were something special after you managed to take down Loratta despite her Slime element. But I never expected you to be this foolish.”

  “Foolish?” Moxy snorted, laughing directly at Owl's and Wolf’s faces without a care in the world. “Sounds to me you’re a bit butt-hurt over discovering you can’t rule from the shadows anymore with your super-special skill. Not a fan of coming out and fighting like a real warrior, are you?”

  “I let you live the first time you mocked me and spurned my offer to become something great, Moxy,” the Head said, sounding more disappointed than angry. “A mistake I intend to rectify here and now. The sole reason I have not killed the three of you already is that I would be a fool not to try and garner information about such a devastating skill before I disposed of you. Therefore, I offer one final deal, Reaper. Tell me the name of your element and skill that allows you to cut that which shouldn’t be possible, and I will make your deaths quick and painless. I pray that you trust me when I say the alternative is something no living being would ever wish to experience.”

  “You are really bad at bargaining with people, you know that?” Asher called back, making sure Moxy and Samantha were near enough he could grab them both and Recall at a moment’s notice if it came to that. “How about this for a deal instead? You stop trying to come after us, and I’ll wait until I’ve finally finished off The Council of Death before I come take your head as well. That sounds fair, don’t you think?”

  “It is a shame,” the Head sighed, the very air around them seeming to grow thick for a moment as they did so, and Asher could practically imagine them shaking their head, wherever they were. “The decades pass, but the fools who pop up with mere modicums of talent always let it go to their head. Never in all my years have I managed to find anyone worthy of working under me, and yet I still continue to get my hopes up every now and again. I suppose that is merely the folly of the flesh. Perhaps those annoying wizards are onto something after all.”

  Before Asher could call back out, there was a subtle shift in the shadows behind Owl, and eight more beings made of shadow stepped out from behind him. Identical to Owl and Wolf in every way beyond the weapons they carried, it wasn’t hard to guess how the Head was intending to finish them off.

  If two master assassins hadn’t been quite enough to do the three of them in…

  Perhaps ten of them could finish the job instead.

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