For a moment, time seemed to slow as Char’s mind raced. The world seemed to crystallize around her, and everything came into sharp focus.

  Mira moved like a poorly jointed puppet, her steps hitching and arms trembling as she fought against Voss’s magic. Leigh had tears running down her face. She moved with Mira, her eyes wide and frightened. A tiny drop of red welled up on her lower jaw where Mira’s trembling knife had already nicked her.

  The crowd was turning angry eyes on Voss. If he’d kept his cool, he might have had a chance to win them back, but taking a teenager hostage from desperation had blown any chance of that. He might as well have announced his guilt with a bullhorn. The moment of stunned silence erupted in angry shouts.

  Declan stepped sideways and vanished as Mira stepped up onto the platform. Lulu let out a baying howl and charged through the crowd like a flaming missile aimed at the stage. She left a trail of frightened people in her wake. Char could feel the anger boiling from the hellhound as her friend was threatened.

  “Take her. Kill her if you have to. I won’t have this interloper coming in here and trying to take over. I built this. I rule here.” Voss waved his goons forward. Char lost sight of him as she was forced to turn her attention to the men and women approaching her.

  They were a ragtag lot, but they were better armed and armored than most of the community. Several of them had system-awarded weapons like hers; swords mostly, but one carried a spear, and another a battle axe. None of them was level 20, so at least she didn’t have to worry about magic. That thought made her snap her gaze around to find Gina and Loman. They would be real threats.

  The crowd was surging forward. Someone threw a rock at Voss. He was retreating, pulling Mira and Leigh with him. Three more armed people came out of the Mercado as he vanished into it. Char took two steps, meaning to rush after him, but the thugs were on her, and the crowd had erupted into chaos. She had to hope that Declan had followed them.

  Char batted aside a spear thrust and danced around the point of a sword. Her implanted sword skills were hard-pressed as she faced down others with the same advantage, but her title-boosted stats and Wyrdsight kept her ahead of them. Barely.

  The light rune still shone from her hood, making her a beacon in the midst of the chaos as the light danced with her.

  She didn’t know how Voss’s mind control worked. There was no way to tell if these people were fighting her because they were loyal lackeys or if they’d been influenced by magic. It would have been easy to fire off an Arc spell to cut through them, but she’d regret it later, when she wondered how many of them had been innocent—when she saw their faces in her nightmares.

  She parried and blocked and dodged, but she hesitated to attack.

  They surrounded her, attacking in a mass. Every time she turned to face one opponent, another blade slid into the gap. She brought her sword up to block a descending axe strike, and her arms went nearly numb from the shock of the blow. When the spear-wielder scored a deep gash along her side, a blow that would have gutted her if she hadn’t been able to deflect it to the side, it shook her out of her passive mindset.

  Her blade flashed out, meeting a wrist where the threads of Wyrdsight told her it would be, slicing into tendons. Another slash took a hamstring. She spun and danced through the mob—a whirlwind of careful cuts. A twist of her sword disarmed the axe wielder, sending his weapon flying away to be lost under the feet of the surging crowd. Her blade found joints, her pommel knocked heads. Lightning mana surged to the surface to shock and daze any who tried to grab her.

  Lulu was fighting somewhere in the chaos, but Char couldn’t see her. The courtyard was all confusion. Some of the crowd, carried by anger and outrage, were storming the Mercado. Others had run out through the gap in the wall, but were afraid to venture into the woods where the monsters lurked. They scurried to avoid the fight or ran through it in blind panic. A running man collided with one of the thugs, knocking him spinning into Char, but the threads of fate gave her enough warning to shove him away before he could take her from her feet.

  She spun around a screaming woman with a rapier and drove her blade into the woman’s hip to send her to the ground. When she lifted her eyes to find her next opponent, she stared into the hateful gaze of Loman.

  He grinned at her, his eyes eager for the pain he wanted to inflict. He was shirtless, and his weapons of choice were a pair of old-fashioned straight razors. As he stared at her, he ran one of the razors lightly across his own chest, leaving a trail of crimson in its wake. The blood didn’t drip down his chest. It flowed outward in all directions, defying gravity. The blood coated him, smoothing out to cover his front in a thin layer of glistening, wet armor.

  “OK. That’s just disturbing,” Char said. She let him make his macabre display and used the moment to assess her situation. The crowd had thinned around her. The injured thugs were limping or crawling away from the fight. She counted five of them. Four were unaccounted for, but Lulu was still fighting someone near the front of the store. They would heal, and Char hoped she could finish this up before they got brave enough to jump back into the fray.

  Most importantly, the area around her was clear of innocent bystanders. As Loman stalked forward, she shaped the pattern for Arc in her left hand. Jagged white light split the gloom of the day as she let it fly into Loman, but he didn’t jerk and smoke. The electricity fizzled and dissipated against the bloody armor that covered his chest.

  “Well, shit.” The words were barely out of her mouth before he’d crossed the distance. In the blink of an eye, he was inside her reach. Char blocked the first razor blade as it came for her throat, and Loman slashed the second one low. Char sucked in her gut and bounced back to avoid it, and Loman stepped in again, moving almost as fast as she did.

  “I know your secret now. I’m in the club, too, bitch,” he snarled as he pressed the attack, his razors flashing. “It’s all in the bloodlines. The stats are great, but they’re nothing compared to the power of the blood.” He advanced on her with a flurry of slashes, and it was all she could do to stay ahead of them. He pressed into her space, giving her no room to swing her sword. The effort didn’t even distract him from his monologue. “I mean, I don’t know what a Tikbalang is, but I love this speed.” His mouth twisted up in a sneer, and he got faster. It was only her Wyrdsight that let her stay ahead of his spinning blades.

  This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

  Each step back from his furious attack took her closer to the wall. She couldn’t let herself get trapped against it. He was too close, right up in her face, and giving her no space. Her sword was useless if she couldn’t swing it. It was all she could do to maneuver it between herself and his razors.

  He pressed in farther, expecting to push her back another step, but this time, she stepped into him, and her left fist shot out. There was a crunch as his nose broke, and blood gushed down his face in a sheet. He staggered back, shaking his head against the pain.

  Char stepped back and sideways away from the wall to reclaim some space and brought up her sword. The blood gushing down over Loman’s mouth writhed and flowed upward across his face, forming a grotesque mask. He wasn’t dazed for long. The blood mask hardened into a sneer as he rushed forward with another flurry of blows.

  Her blade slashed out, forcing him back a step, but he surged back in. She landed a cut on one arm, but it only added to his blood armor. He pushed back inside her reach and opened a gash along her shoulder that sent blood flowing down her arm. Every wound she opened in him made him stronger, and every slice he landed drained and weakened her.

  He was killing her with a thousand slices, and it was taking every ounce of speed, skill, and forewarning she had to keep him from slicing open a major artery. Wyrdsight had been running for too long; it was draining her mana, but she couldn’t turn it off now. There had to be a way to get the upper hand, to change the game.

  His coating of blood acted like armor, and she couldn’t get her sword through it. It didn’t cover all of him yet, but every slice gave him more blood to work with. He was slowly becoming a nightmare figure of gleaming blood—less and less human, more and more monstrous. She needed to get rid of the blood.

  She leaned into her Wyrdsight, letting it predict his moves and batting them away as she tried a desperate experiment. She formed the pattern for Rune Scribe with the variations for the Cleanse rune with her left hand, with his chest as the target. She pictured it washing away the blood, leaving his skin clean. It was hard to keep her focus on it while fending off his attacks, and she lost it completely as he capitalized on her distraction.

  She backstepped and circled, trying to keep him at arm’s length, but he was too fast and agile. A wave of anxiety and nausea came from Lulu, distracting Char even more. Her head whipped around, looking for her fiery friend, and Loman’s blades bit into her to punish the lapse. Char refocused on the fight. She would have to trust Lulu to handle herself.

  With a leap, Char bounded up onto a rickety wooden scaffold and from there up onto the wall. There was no walkway; she had to balance on the narrow tops of the split logs. Loman was fast, but he didn’t have her raw stats; he had to climb where her strength had let her go in two jumps.

  She started the pattern for Cleanse again, letting him climb. She was slower with this spell. Arc took less than a second, but the changes and permutations of Rune Scribe meant she had to think it through to form it correctly. As soon as he was in range, she released the spell, pushing the Rune out to form on his chest, but it didn’t work. The rune wouldn’t form, as if it were water sliding off of an oiled surface. Her mind raced. For a moment, it had felt like it was going to work, but there was something incompatible with her intent. ‘Of course it didn’t work, Adair, it’s part of him. Not like you’ve tried this on a living thing before.’ That thought gave her an idea, but she’d need to make more space to try it.

  He was back in range and pressing her with his blades. He might not have been able to make the jumps, but he was just as agile as she was, and they danced along the top of the wall as sure-footed as they were on solid ground. Only now, she had fewer options for dodging, and Loman had the advantage again.

  The end of the wall butted up against the wall of the Mercado, and he was pushing her inexorably toward it. She was going to run out of room to retreat. Turning, she let him land a slash across her back, grunting with the stinging pain as her armor and flesh parted. Warm blood flowed down her back, but she ignored it. She ran three steps to the end of the wall and jumped up to the roof of the building.

  The roof was flat and graveled, an old AC unit squatting in the center. Otherwise, it was open. Nowhere to hide, nowhere else to run. She had one more thing to try, and she used the moment it took for Loman to grab the edge of the roof and pull himself up to put it together. If this didn’t work, then she wasn’t likely to win this fight.

  She formed the pattern for the Cleanse rune again, only this time, she used both Rune mana and a thread of Flesh mana to shape the spell. The two types of mana stayed distinct as she wove them into the pattern, but she twisted them together like different color threads wound around one another. It was a desperate gamble. She had no idea if it would work, but she had to get rid of his armor. Her blade couldn’t cut through it, her Lightning couldn’t pierce it. As long as he was coated in it, he could hurt her, but she could do nothing to him.

  She half expected the spell to fall apart rather than accept the foreign mana type, but it held together. It wasn’t easy. The Flesh mana didn’t want to move the way the Rune mana did. It wanted to round the corners, to loop back in on itself and move in organic ways, not in the ordered precision of Runes. It bucked against her will, threatening to rebound on her. She forced it into place, her Willpower and intent like an iron grip. The twist let the Rune mana guide it into place, and by the time Loman was closing with her again, the spell formed. She released it as his blades reached her. She took the slices to her chest in exchange for the chance to end the fight.

  The glowing Rune, the vivid purple of the Rune mana wrapped in the skin-tones of Flesh, burned itself into his chest, sinking under the blood armor to sear itself into his skin. With a pulse, a wave of cleansing power washed outward from the symbol branded into him, and Loman howled in agony. The blood was washed away, leaving his skin clean.

  He was staggered by the pain, his eyes wide with fear and confusion. His twirling razors stilled for the first time in the fight as he looked down at the rune branded into his chest. “No… that’s not…” She could hear the confusion in his voice. His eyes snapped back to hers, full of anger and fear.

  Char didn’t hesitate.

  She drove her sword through the convenient target created by her Rune, feeling the crack of his sternum as her enhanced strength let her push the blade right through it and into his heart. His eyes went wide with the shock and pain of it. His right hand came around with his blade, slashing one last burning line across her cheek before the light went out of his eyes, and the razors dropped to the rooftop.

  She pulled the sword free and let his body drop. “I can’t believe that worked,” she said as she eyed his corpse. She was breathing hard and bleeding freely from several wounds. The sound of the tumultuous crowd drifted up from below, and she could feel Lulu’s desperation and discomfort from somewhere down there, but she had a second to breathe and cast Mend Flesh.

  She tapped Loman’s body with her foot and looted it. As with the patients at the mental hospital, she got only gold credits, and the body didn’t crumble away. She scooped up his razors and stowed them as she jogged back to the wall and let herself down. Notifications sat unread at the corner of her HUD, but she didn’t have time for them. Her friends were still in danger, and Voss still needed to be dealt with.