That night, there was a brief light show in the sky just above the city. A swarm of glowing papers chasing after a deep-blue comet, each letting off a shining beam of light before disintegrating.
It ended with a dozen rays of light scattering into the sky all at once, and the body of their target - a willowy, unassuming man - plummeting onto a rooftop. He rolled off the side, smashing into a balcony railing on his way down, leaving it bent. Nothing else broke his fall save for the hard stone, but that was fine. He wasn't as fragile as most.
Emitting an entirely inhuman groan of pain and effort, Jezail dragged himself off the ground and propped himself up against a nearby wall. He let out a wheezing, strained laugh. Despite the discomfort of a punctured lung and numerous small wounds that riddled his whole body, that laugh was the only appropriate reaction to his predicament.
"Hazard pay... Here I come," he cackled to himself as he conjured an injector out of his quick-access storage. Relief flooded him when he pressed it against his neck; a Class 3 painkiller, able to take the bite out of any pain without impairing other senses, while also providing a minor regenerative factor for several hours.
Once he was able to move again, Jezail simply returned to one of his hideouts in the city. He had done his job to the extent of the contract.
For the next hour, he sat there injecting himself, smoking, and slathering graft-paste on his wounds. Tens, hundreds of thousands of DDs in restoratives, spent without a second thought. After all, it was in his contract that his employer had to cover any expenses for injuries sustained on the job. Semzar wouldn't willingly shell out for that policy, he knew that. But he also knew that Damrus would pay. The Hashems were already in dire straits. The patriarch was smart enough to not risk souring his relationship with Jezail, or Zavesh forbid, risk having the assassin come after him personally.
Jezail still wasn't quite sure what had happened, and he was quite close to giving up on trying to figure it out. There had been no sign of the talisman being corrupt, and he had no way to discern how exactly Blackhand had turned it against him. A part of him wondered if she used some alternative to traditional barriers, and, since he himself used a "Distortion Impulse Barrier", that was where his mind wandered. While demanding a higher level of skill and active attention even for basic usage, a DI barrier conversely had a far higher performance ceiling. As per the words of his master, it was "the parry to an archetypal barrier's simple block."
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He knocked the burnt waste out of his pipe and absent-mindedly stuffed it with various mind-clearing herbs. The taste didn't even register anymore, he was so used to it. The initial kick was a flood of menthol, heat, and sour astringency, forcibly opening his airways and ensuring maximum absorption of the active ingredient, a specially cultivated type of Cassia of Jezail's own creation.
However, now that he thought on it with a clearer mind, Blackhand using a DI barrier was unlikely; as a user of this unique defensive technique, Jezail was certain he would have been able to detect it. It was also statistically exceedingly unlikely outside the DI barrier's region of origin, which was on another continent. Looking back, he hadn't even sensed the normal thaumic upsurge caused by the raising of a standard barrier. There had been an undeniable disturbance, but not one that felt like any kind of barrier. Moreover, his attacks weren't deflected, but seemed to merely pass through her space as if she was dodging them... To where? She hadn't moved. He saw it, she had stood in the same spot, yet was unharmed.
"How? Is that smoke form simply invulnerable?" he thought aloud. "No, that's not how thaumaturgy works. It's not omnipotent. If it was truly a self-transmutation into smoke, the Oblivion Flow would have erased it all the same. Then how?"
Crescent Jezail decided that it was high time to broaden his horizons, starting with obscure defensive techniques. For all his fame, he was far from a true veteran. He saw this incident as a stark reminder to not get complacent just because he was in the top 10%. That still left a whole 9% that could put him in the ground. Just a few years of being the Crescent Jezail had nearly made him stop polishing his edge.
"Next time, Blackhand..." he started, only to chuckle to himself. "Hopefully there won't be a next time. Best to prepare regardless."
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Something was wrong. Casus felt it in his gut.
Cornelius, the man to whom he had entrusted Tsetse's arm, was supposed to have contacted him by now. They had no official agreement of a particular time or method, but Cornelius was an exceedingly scrupulous and consistent man, despite his veneer of a quasi-rogue grafter. For this reason, Casus had developed a strong sense for when Cornelius would contact him. Even if his tests on the arm hadn't progressed by a millimetre, Cornelius would have still sent a message to update Casus on his efforts.
Therefore, Casus decided to check up on him. He hoped that Cornelius had made a breakthrough and had been too engrossed in his work to report back, or that he had worked himself into an exhaustion coma, because the alternative was just too unpleasant to consider.
An unsettling sense of urgency began to grow in his chest as he went. Eventually, he ended up riding a motorbike as fast as it would go through the city and even down into the underground, abusing its generous suspension by forcing it to go down stairways. He simply left it at the furthest possible spot it could take him.
Something was wrong. He could feel it in his gut. Cornelius wasn't the type to not check in just because of a breakthrough or just because he was tired. He wasn't that irresponsible. Something had to be wrong.