Muffled, gurgling groans escape between John's fingers, more blood than voice making it out to soak into his black gloves. He drives the knife a few more times into the man's stomach, shifting his head to avoid his spasming arms as they claw and paw at his face.

  “Fuck’s sake.” John grumbles to himself. He was getting sweaty under his simple mask, a few spurts of blood that managed to streak across his face now soaking through the thin balaclava and getting into his beard.

  “You good, Jonny boy?” Shellshock asks from around the thick hedge, voice muffled from the foliage and the masks.

  John pulls the knife out and shifts his hand, the man underneath him trying to scream, but John cuts it off by driving the blade through his throat, putting a sputtering end to his movements.

  “Yeah.” John continues, crouching as he tries to wipe the blood from his knife and hands onto the grass with little success. “Fucking hate quiet missions.”

  “What, blowing up that compound in Portugal not enough action for ya?” Kane rounds the corner of the hedge, not nearly as bloody as John was.

  It was hard to see the man in the dark camouflage, which means it’s working pretty damn well. He doesn’t particularly like not being able to use his newest armor system but it’s still in testing. He would have also felt better with the new guns, but this anomaly doesn’t have durability so suppressed Williams rifles are the name of this particular operation.

  “I'd like to blow up this compound. I’m a door kicker damnit, let me kick fuckin’ doors.” Rising back up, John swaps the spent mag on his rifle and handgun and sheaths the knife in its place at his shoulder.

  “Right, I would too trust me, but the boss wants clean.” Kane doesn’t bother to hide his dissatisfaction.

  “You two and your explosions.” Cat huffs as she slinks from somewhere in the shadows to join them at the hedge.

  “I distinctly recall you watching it too.” John lets the shadows hide his eyes as they follow the flow of her body.

  Cat shrugs and offers an innocent smile once she is close enough to be seen.

  “The left wing is clear, we are good to make our approach.” She shifts her focus to looking out at the large hotel left entirely abandoned at the top of the hill. Only a hundred feet away, all seven stories of it rise up impossibly tall, and warped ever so slightly, like it was stretched into the sky by some unseen hand. Small fragments of the roof sit floating in space, drifting under no gravity.

  “Copy.” John presses his finger to his ear. “TOC, this is Chimera Actual, sector one clear, ready for approach.”

  “TOC to Chimera Actual, hold position, waiting on the clear from Serpent.”

  “Sure as shit taking their sweet time.” Kane grumbles, performing a quick check on his gear.

  “Chimera, this is Minotaur Actual.” Broncos voice comes through the coms next. “Make sure Serpent's performance is reported in the debrief.”

  “Fuck you.” Spaz shoots back over coms.

  “Sorry, who was that?” Bronco presses.

  “Minotaur Actual this is Serpent Actual, fuck you,” Spaz corrects.

  Bella stifles a laugh and Kane lets a snort slip.

  “Maybe we should tell papa Casper to come back and give you a hand?” John asks, adding fuel to the man's fire.

  “I got this, dick!” As Spaz says it, John can hear two suppressed shots whisper in the distance, followed by a pause. “TOC, this is Serpent Actual. Sector 3 clear.”

  “TOC to Ground—about fucking time,” the admin in the Tactical Operations Center huffs.

  John pulls the attention of his team, and signals them to follow in as they push from the hedge to the door, linking with Serpent team—composed of Spaz, Kid, and what would have been Casper were he not on leave. Minotaur team approaches from the other side, visible behind the corner—composed of Bronco, and Blackbeard.

  With a few more hand signals, Bella readies herself at the door and on another signal she opens it.

  John and Kane clear the lobby, rifles snapping to any and every position a body might be, but instead of finding any more resistance, they are met instead with corpses.

  Six lay crumpled on the ground in every location John expects, each one leaking blood into still growing pools beneath them.

  “What the fuck?” John grumbles, keying his senses into all of the sounds around him as he approaches one of the bodies, and uses the muzzle of his rifle to prod at the corpse.

  It flips over, lifeless, one single bullet hole—far too large to be Williams—making a clean entry and a particularly brutal exit at the back.

  “Clear. Three down over here, but not from any of us.”

  The others file in, rifles in low ready.

  “They the same as all the others?” Cat asks, taking a position near John as she looks at the body on the ground.

  “Yeah, same as all the others, save for the gaping hole in the back of his head…”

  The humanoid entities in this area are all the same. Same face, same hair, same eyes, same freckles, same scars. At first John thought this anomaly was connected to Iraq, but after the debrief they confirmed that the bodies in Abu Gahr were all different people, with the knowledge of teleportation circles now, it made it clear how they managed to get that many people into a compound that could fit only a quarter the volume.

  This is different, these bodies are all the exact same—damn near clones—and the anomaly around the hotel itself, is not devil related based on their detailed observations.

  “Maybe they got bored of standing guard for the past few days aye?” Kane asks, miming a suicide.

  “Caliber of their weapons don’t match the entry or exit wound.”

  Cat scowls, her attention now set above them, higher up into the hotel. “Someone else beat us here then.”

  “Beat us? Not possible, we are the biggest badasses this side of fuckin’ everywhere.” Kane counters, getting a couple “rah’s” of support from the others.

  “Eyes up, Cat’s right, looks like we got company, and I'll be damned if they make us look bad. Let me.” John orders, raising even more “Rah’s” From the teams.

  “Cat, Kane, on me, odd floors. Serpent you’re even floors. Minotaur run perimeter, if another team is in here I don’t want them getting out without a stern fuckin’ talking to.”

  “Copy.” Bronco gives a casual salute and moves to begin making around outside.

  John begins to make his way up the stairs to the next level. Flanked by Shell and Cat, he is able to keep his eyes just on his field of fire, scanning 60 degree angles on approach and trusting fully that the two people by him are just as diligent.

  They skip floor 2 and head straight to three, only to see more of the same situation as the lobby. Dead bodies, the same dead body, shot in the head.

  Whatever team is here has some serious operators to make a mess this big without them noticing beforehand. If there were muzzle flashes inside the hotel they would have seen it before entry. If there was another team on this op then the spooks back in their TOC would have let them know to expect company. These people are quiet, professional, and damn efficient.

  John cracks a grin at the thought of meeting whoever was responsible, after all it’s rarer and rarer to find anyone even close to the team's caliber, even among the highest ranks of the world's special forces.

  More floors pass with no change, which causes them to accelerate their push, especially as the blood spilling from the corpses is fresher and fresher every time. By the time they reach the 13th floor Johns blood pumps hard in time with his rushed footfall— sprinting to the very top, only to stop as the world itself seems to shift around them.

  John loses almost all sense of balance as the hallways stretch out unnaturally long around them, spinning into a corkscrew as it extends for—seemingly ever.

  The ceiling here isn’t much better, stretched so high it feels like it goes on even further than forever. Pieces of it are fully removed, lifted up into a hole where the clouds never quite reach, revealing a starlit sky above despite the local time being exactly noon.

  “Why is it always some spooky shit,” Kane shudders, looking up to view the hole in space.

  “Or ritualistic? We are positive this isn’t devils?” Cat asks, her rifle aimed down one of the halls, though she seems distracted by small writing on the walls spanning the length between hotel room doors.

  “You see something?” John asks, moving to the wall to investigate the text while Kane keeps his rifle trained down the other hall to provide John cover.

  If there was one thing he learned in his time with anomalies, is that the details fucking matter. This text might not help them deal with the other team here, but it sure as shit might save their life if it was relevant to the anomaly.

  The text is written in English, though it’s so tiny it might as well be from a book. Entire sentences, paragraphs, novels worth of words are carved into the wallpaper.

  “Don’t keep us waiting, we need to move.” Cat purrs, and John rolls his eyes, refocusing on the text to read it aloud, honing in on what appears to be the start of a paragraph just underneath the room number—displayed as “0000000000000000000”, the engraved numbers trailing off their placard and overlapping with some of the words. They are meandering, stream of consciousness nonsense. Abstract imagery about something, a thing beyond, but it remains entirely unclear.

  John rubs his eyes, trying to make sense of what he had just read, though when he goes to confirm it, the text changes, the words different than before.

  “Feels devilish to me.” Kane notes casually.

  “Feels like fuckin’ nonsense.” John stands and shoulders his rifle, looking back up to the ceiling above—or rather, lack of ceiling. None of the stars make sense up there. It isn’t as though this section of the hotel was simply trapped in night time, it seems trapped somewhere else entirely. He can’t make out or recognize any of the constellations above him, and the more he tries to focus his vision to see then, the blurrier they appear to get, before eventually shifting entirely.

  “Contact left!” Cat shouts, snapping John's attention to her, his rifle already pointed down one of the halls as a door opens, and the silhouette of a man appears, handgun in one fist.

  John can’t make out any details, not as the shadows seem to cling to everything down that twisting hall, but he can see the gun he uses, a massive magnum with an even larger suppressor on the end, exactly the right caliber to match the damage done to the bodies they found.

  “Drop the weapon!” Kane orders, rifle shifting in his grip.

  “Where is the rest of your team!” Cat adds to the shout.

  John tears his attention away behind him, looking for any sign of additional people, but finds none.

  Is it possible this one man cleared the entire place by himself? Shit, he would need a dozen mags if he is using just that gun…

  John looks back down the hall, the man's hand still loose around the grip of his magnum.

  “Drop it!” Kane demands, bringing the figure into his sights, Cat following close behind, though as her eye peers through her optic, her voice catches.

  “Shit” She whispers.

  A whisper passes through the hall as Kane pulls the trigger, sending a round into the heart of the man in the hallway, followed by a brief pause, and then three more shots.

  The rounds pass through his chest, his neck, and ping off something metal around his face. Sending sparks flying, illuminating him for only a moment, a moment long enough for John to see a metallic mask in the shape of a skull.

  “No fuckin’ way.” Kane grunts, watching as the man doesn’t move, doesn’t fall, doesn’t die. Instead he reaches into his coat pocket, and in a blur of movement sends a grenade to the floor.

  The three of them drop as the grenade hisses, and then pops, releasing a flood of smoke into the hallway.

  “What the fuck is that!?” Kane shouts, scrambling back to his feet, and hauling John up with him, who in turn goes to grab Bella, only to see she is back on her feet before the both of them, rifle gripped tight, eyes locked forward.

  Cat grimaces. “We need to stop him.”

  “No shit!” Kane charges forward, and Cat follows him, John hot on their heels as they sprint through the smoke, and emerge on the other side just in time to watch the man slam his way into one of the hotel rooms.

  Kane slides across the ground and uses one arm to anchor himself to the door, spinning inside he pulls Cat in after him, and Cat pulls John after her, the three entering into the room that stretches on forever, the figure only a few feet in front of them.

  John pushes himself hard, leaps over a couch in the room's center, smashes through a table and lunges out ahead of Kane and Cat, his rifle pumping rounds through the man to no avail. He doesn’t slow even for a second, even as the bullets pass through him to crash into the wall directly in front of him, showering the man in shrapnel and debris.

  The man shoulders though the wall, John hot on his heels, only to regret the decision as the wall gives way to a black pit of nothing.

  “Fuck!” John scrambles at the air, twists, turns, and reaches out as Kane grabs his forearm and stops him from plummeting into the endless abyss below.

  John's shoulder nearly pops from its socket as his weight takes Kane to the ground, and he is left dangling over the black.

  Pop — Whzzzzzzz

  A metal grappling hook lands next to his hand, digging into the wood floor as its cable goes taut, and John sees the man swinging from the grapple deeper into the pit below them to slam through the wall section directly below him.

  “Come on!” John releases Kane's arm, holds tight to the edge of the pit and swings himself forward to follow the hole the man makes as he crashes through the wall.

  John tucks and rolls as he lands, only to be sent flying through the air as gravity catches him at an odd angle, sending him tumbling into the walls of the twisting hallway.

  Cat flies in behind John, able to right herself instantly, and pull John to his senses just in time to catch Kane who falls twice as bad as John did.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

  The figure has gained on them now, his feet pounding hard against the floor of the hall, which transitions to the wall, and then the ceiling as it swirls on and on and on.

  Kane levels his rifle but John forces the muzzle down.

  “He ain’t affected! Plan B!” John calls, and charges after the man, taking the lead.

  “We need it for the anomaly!” Cat calls out from behind him, though John has a difficult time hearing her as blood thunders through his ears at the exertion.

  “He is an anomaly! Deal with him first!” John responds.

  The man leaps over nothing a few feet ahead, John's eyes tracking his every move, though he can’t see why he jumps until he takes his next few steps. The hallway breaks apart underneath him, stretching out into another yawning pit underneath, or maybe it was above him now? It was hard to tell which way was up.

  John puts every ounce of strength into his legs and launches himself over the materializing gap, only to get the wind knocked out of him as the man brings the gun under his arm and fires blindly behind him.

  The massive round smashes into John's chest armor, stopping him short of the end of the gap and ruining his jump.

  John grunts, and scrambles for the edge as he pulls his knife from its spot on his shoulder and drives it into the floor, stopping him from falling for a second time today.

  Cat completes the leap in front of him, ducks another shot that fires off from the man's gun, and in retaliation fires off the knife attachment of her handgun, sending the blade zipping down the twisted hall, its path spinning with the rest of the hall until it sinks into the man's leg.

  With a press of a trigger the blade extends, and goes taught, locking itself into his flesh and snapping the bone, sending him crashing into the ground.

  “Help!” Kane shouts, and Cat spins around, bringing her second handgun out of its thigh holster to fire off another blade inches from Kane's head.

  Kane grabs hold of the wire and Cat grunts against his weight as he slams into the side of the newly formed pit next to John.

  “Move!” John scrambles up and extends a hand to Kane who takes it, and in one smooth motion he pulls the man up and out of the pit.

  “You got him!” Kane shouts, looking as the man struggles on the ground, Cat's blade lodged in his leg.

  The enthusiasm is short lived however, as the man grabs the wire lodged through his leg with one hand, and pulls a taser from seemingly nowhere with his other hand, slamming the electric current down into the wire.

  Cat grunts as the electricity arcs through the wire, her gun, and into her gloved hand, burning away the material and sending the firearm haywire, forcing it to reel itself in, sending the gun straight to the man on the ground.

  “Go go go!” John calls out, as the man rips the blade free of his leg like it’s nothing, and uses Cat's gun to fire the knife edge to the end of the hall, planting the blade into the room at its end.

  He leaps and pulls the second trigger, sending him launching forward as it reels him in.

  The man smashes through the door moments before the three of them emerge after him, John tackling the man to the ground as he throws his entire body weight at him.

  John grunts, the man underneath him far from comfortable as they slide along the hardwood floor, crashing into a large window at the end of the massive room they have entered.

  As quickly as he can manage, John grabs their experimental anti-anomaly restraints and slams them home onto the man's wrists, watching as they flicker to life with a red glow.

  Using his other hand, John slams the man's face into the ground, his metal mask making a thud, while he lets his rifle drop over his body and brings his pistol up to the back of the man's head instead. Pressing the muzzle there, finger dancing along the trigger.

  “Healer huh? I imagine like all the others that stops when your fucking brains are splattered against the floor.” John grunts, watching as Kane levels his rifle at the man's head as well, while Cat scans the room, her eyes fixed on a different figure staring out the window just to the right of where John and the man are on the ground.

  The other figure in the room doesn’t move, or even acknowledge their presence, instead he simply stands looking out the window, watching the anomaly of the hotel spread out across the landscape beyond.

  “You might be surprised.” the man says casually from under John's grip, evidently unbothered by the press of metal into the back of his head.

  “John…” Cat stutters out, her eyes flickering between the man he has on the ground, and the anomaly in front of her.

  “Orders to eliminate, pop its fuckin head and then lets deal with this one.” John looks back down at the man, who tears his hands through the restraints, leaving only twisted meat and bone as he degloves his own hand.

  John's eyes go wide, watching as the man heals almost instantly, and brings his newly formed hand to John's gun, forcing him to pull the trigger.

  His brains splatter, deflected by the metal mask and send the gore directly into John's eyes, which makes him reel as bone fragments, teeth and blood saturate his vision.

  John recoils, desperate to wipe the gore from his eyes. “Fuck!”

  A shot rings out, shrapnel rains down around him, and by the time the blood is gone from his vision he sees the man holding Cat's gun, forcing it upwards with one hand as he reaches out and grabs the target anomaly with the other, pulling him in close.

  John doesn’t have to call Kane's name, as he is already lunging at both, his gauntlets aimed directly at the mystery man's chest, but before he can make contact the man knees Kane's strike, deflecting the punch up into the open air inches from the top of the man's head.

  The sonic boom shakes the ceiling and sends it shattering into broken fragments that act as a screen for the man to escape behind.

  He pulls the anomaly in, covers him entirely, and then throws himself from the window, sending glass shattering out to the ground below as he tumbles through the air.

  John scrambles past the falling debris to look out the window, rifle raised to end the target anomaly, only to watch as the mystery man raises his weapon to fire on Bronco, who is only now bringing her own rifle to level.

  John switches his target, and shoots the gun from the man's hand a fraction of a second before he pulls the trigger, sending the weapon flying from his hand in a twist of metal onto the ground.

  Bronco fires her full mag into the man as he sprints through the hedge maze just beyond them, disappearing into the overgrown foliage.

  What the fuck was that!” John calls out, trying to track the movements of the edges, watching for shifts or signs of the anomaly and the man who stole it from them, but is unable to find anything as the shadows stretch on, clinging to every corner like cobwebs.

  “That… It couldn’t be…” Cat mutters, lowering her own rifle as she stands where the window used to be, looking out over the anomaly that now appears to be retracting from the horizon.

  “Couldn’t be fuckin what? It ain't like you to be vague.” Kane scowls, looking at the dent in his gauntlet from where the man kneed him.

  “He, he should be dead…I remember hearing stories of him when I was a girl…The Reaper, they call him. But he was old even when I was young.”

  “Evidently he is an anomaly.” John spits and reloads, his attention also turned to the horizon.

  Despite the anomaly still being alive, the affected area seems to be clearing. Blackwood would have their asses for letting whoever this Reaper was get away with their quarry, but without their special weapons or armor they simply can’t deal with a healer that potent. John’s never seen a non-devil healer survive getting their brains blown out before. Whoever he was, he had to be functionally immortal to survive something like that.

  “What the fuck does he want with this anomaly? Why not kill it?” Kane asks, bringing one fist to his mouth as space shifts dramatically around them, the hotel shifting and snapping and twisting back into the shape it used to be in.

  “Nothing good,” Cat mutters.

  ***

  John has a harder time than normal bringing himself to relax in the hours after debrief. It was one thing to piss off Blackwood, but it was another thing entirely to see his face contort at the sound of the Reaper's name. John felt more than a little out of place being one of the few who didn’t know it, but then again it came out that he was some famous merc, and John was still relatively new to this life, especially compared to the more seasoned contract killers.

  A man so old he’s been talked about for well beyond the hundreds of years in hushed whispers within the teams. It seems like very few have first person accounts, it's always stories from the friend of a friend who knew someone who heard of him. It isn’t long before the brief leaks, and the other mercs and staff on site learn some of their very own had a face to face encounter, which means the questions never stop, not even as they go to the T1 bar where they aren’t supposed to ask questions, so instead John makes his way to the workshop to tinker away at his newest tech.

  “Huh, Shocked to see you here.” John regards Bella as she sits with Kid at the workstation, their attention fixed on her handgun.

  “Kid is helping me tinker…” She sighs, motioning with a dramatic flair to the disassembled firearm.

  “John! Think you can give us a hand?” Kid rubs his temples, his third cup of coffee forgotten nearby.

  “I can try, what do you need?” John brings his own hands down on the table next to Bella's, who inch towards him ever so slightly.

  “After the fight with the Reaper, she had the idea to integrate an electric charger into the grapple knives, you know, for extra stopping power.” He points towards the system, showing a battery location near the back of the mag well with nodes to transfer a charge into the spooling line. “But I'm not too confident in its position so close to the firing mechanism, just in case you know… kaboom?”

  “Could run the batteries in place of the rail system underneath here.” John points to the corresponding segment of the blueprints.

  “I was thinking that too, which could work fine, but it's then it will run hot along the length of the spooling system.”

  “Insulate the... no no I see the problem” He rubs at his brow, trying to work through it logically, though he finds his mind wandering back to the metal mask the man wore, and Bella's expression when she saw it.

  John and Kid go back and forth for a while, but John is too distracted to be as helpful as he usually is. Kid catches the memo, and allows John more time to relax and think as the three work.

  He thought distracting himself with the tech in the shop would help keep his mind off it, but even as the two of them get a draft model printed and ready to piece together, he can’t help but drift away.

  “The Reaper is bothering you.” Bella says, and it isn’t a question.

  “It’s not bothering you?”

  “It is.” She confirms, passing him a screwdriver as he takes apart the spooling mechanism for the tenth time to try and get it to lock properly in the new frame.

  “This is the first mission I’ve failed here, and I would be lying if I said it didn’t bother me.”

  “That I can understand, though against the Reaper, it is no wonder we could do very little… it was very unfortunate we encountered him on this charter.”

  “It’s more than that…We are tasked with eliminating anomalies, it's what we are meant to do, but what the hell happens when we can’t kill one? What happens when we encounter someone like the Reaper again and nothing we do can stop it?”

  “You worry too much John, there are plenty of anomalies we cannot kill, they are as plentiful and varied as animals on the land, in the air, and under the sea. We let Lilith go, no? This is similar in a way.”

  “Maybe. But this one is also very different, this one worries me more.”

  “A mercenary worries you more than a devil?”

  John shoots Bella a look, and she in turn lets her eyes drift somewhere else as she rocks her head back and forth. “I suppose we are worse.” She admits, miming consideration with a finger to her lips and her head cocked upwards.

  “Mercenaries are definitely worse.” John chuckles. “Devils are tricky sons of bitches but their contracts don’t lie, and they are forced to abide by them. Mercenaries? Well...” John slots in a rebuilt spooling mechanism into the grip of the gun and tests it with a trigger pull, sending the blade and wire out and into a wall, before pressing a button and watching as electricity arcs out from it, crackling with the smell of burnt ozone. “We lie all the fucking time.”

  “The project looks good.” She sniffs with satisfaction as John deactivates the electricity and zips the knife back into its slot on the gun.

  “It will take a minute longer to fine tune, but yea, I’m happy with it.”

  “For a door kicker, you are smart.”

  “For a French woman you sure are brave.”

  “We helped build your country!” She protests, crossing her arms with a huff. “We retreat once and forever, we are cowards.”

  “Once is all it takes.” John teases.

  “Why don’t you tell me of Vietnam then hmm?”

  John goes quiet for a moment, trying to find something clever to say, but can’t conjure anything up in time.

  “This is what I thought.”

  “Alright alright, fair enough. Allow me to make it up to you.”

  “Oh? Please, I will gladly accept your apology.”

  “How about dinner on me the next time we are back in a country with decent food.”

  “America has decent food.” She cocks an eyebrow.

  “Yea but we are in Wyoming. There is fucking nothing in Wyoming.”

  “There are.... Cows?”

  “Want me to go out and shoot one to grill some burgers?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not happening.”

  “Coward.”

  John chuckles and rolls his eyes, standing from the workbench and stretching out. “We aren’t supposed to be operating in country, the last thing we need is someone seeing me drop a cow for a burger.”

  “We aren’t in country though. Our contract says we are in the Dominican Republic, we can evade even the American special forces, you are saying you are not good enough to evade a farmer?”

  “I am saying mercs are liars, and I'm not too keen on being any more of one than I have to be.”

  “I am fucking with you John.” She huffs with an overdramatic sway of her body as she spins around and saunters away, intentionally swaying her hips as she walks. “I will take you up on that invitation to dinner though. What would you like to eat?”

  John is about to say something highly inappropriate, but stops himself. Bella evidently picks up on the pause, and brings a hand to her mouth in silent surprise and winks with a smile.

  “Fuck you!” John calls out.

  “Come to my room then.” she teases, doing that thing with her tongue.

  John can’t manage a reply in time as she leaves.

  “Don’t let Casper see you two like this.” Kid whispers conspiratorially.

  “Like what? We are fucking around, we are team mates.”

  “You’ve never invited me to dinner.” Kid notes.

  John thinks about that for a second, then shrugs. “I’m closer with Bella, Kane and I have gone out before.”

  “I dunnnoooo” Kid paces back to his side of the work bench.

  “Fuck you mean I don’t know? You do know.”

  Kid laughs and buries himself in his work.

  John wasn’t too happy about everyone else getting a last word in, but it was a good distraction, so instead of complaining he puts his head down and continues to work, passively wondering what kind of place he would take Bella to when they had the chance.

  As friends... of course.

  ? Smoll Seriouss Business ?

  by Alexanders

  The people of the good city of New York know what their city is like. The mafia runs rampant everywhere, and worst of all, they are aware that they are only seen as prey or money to further their plans.

  Among the multiple organizations that are vying for control over the city one that stands among the rest is the 'White Concord'. A family who stands in the middle of the underworld, keeping tight control over those who attempt to make a name for themselves, be it upstanding members of society, underworld workers, or even one of the echelons of society as a Mage or Knight.

  Trixie White is the princess of the White Concord and the hidden ace of their family, she alone is the reason they keep their power, the hidden trump card, the reason they manage to stay afloat even when the other families hire two or three circle mages. She also is five years old.

  And she may be... slightly evil. But even so, she only wants to enjoy her Tea time, play with her dolls and maybe get the attention of her Papa!

  Someone stole Papa's money? Remove their head!

  Someone broke her toys? Remove their head!

  Someone bought the last candy? Remove their head!

  Someone gave this series .5 stars? Remove their head!

  Wait, what was that last one? Who cares, either way. We will remove their head ;3

  [LitRPG] [Evil] [Will attempt to be written as a comedy so it ends as Evil] [Mayhaps somewhat slow burn]