The bullet slammed into Wolfe’s chest with a metallic bang even as Wolfe was staking a step forward. He was pitched backward, slamming into the elevator floor on his back. He hurt—quite a bit—but he was still moving somehow.

Surprised to be alive, but not about to look a gift horse in the mouth, Wolfe shot his hand out and touched his mantle before the enemy deckbearer could finish him off.

The man also didn’t hesitate and shot Wolfe three more times in quick succession, once in the head and twice in the chest. Wolfe’s noggin rang, and he got a notice of being stunned. But with the mantle, Wolfe was still tough enough to survive the experience of being repetitively shot. Although even with his mantle he lost eighteen health.

Half-blind and stunned, Wolfe still ripped his own Edge from the holster, but the man leapt on Wolfe and pinned the gun away at the same time. He tried to bring his own gun around but Wolfe caught that.

As Wolfe fought the man, wrestling for control of each other’s gun, Malviere hurled a spirit dog out the door at the dragon, accomplishing nothing.

The dragon, however, slammed its way inside, its bulk occupying the front of the elevator. Skeletal claws raked out, killing each of the Obsessive Cultists with a single blow.

“The deckbearer, Malviere! Kill the deckbearer,” Wolfe shouted. “It all ends if you accomplish that!”

“I cannot, my alpha,” Malviere said, her spooky voice filled with regret.

Right, even if she’s basically a person now, she has to obey the rules of the Great Game and attack cards first. I have to solve this.

Wolfe’s head cleared and the stunned notification went away.

Wolfe jerked both hands to the side, causing his opponents face to fall toward him. At the same time, he slammed his own head up into his opponent, and the man reeled back, his nose absolutely pulverized, his face split, and his eyes crossed. With Malviere still out—however briefly—and his own mantle and modifiers, Wolfe was deadly at any range. As the man fell back, Wolfe ripped his hand from his enemies and tried to bring his gun around.

He managed to get most way, but the man got lucky in his scrabbling and managed to push it away just a bit before Wolfe pulled the trigger. Wolfe’s enemy still screamed as the bullet ripped through his side. He dropped his own gun to poke a card now revealed by them briefly separating, and a black mantle settled over man, turning his flesh pale and giving him red eyes.

Wolfe slapped his own card, betting everything that the man had become Undead type, before the man fell back to being chest to chest with Wolfe.

He summoned the Xolo Spirit-Ward.

When the man attacked next, his blows slowed right before they hit Wolfe. Malviere was cut from the attacks by the dragon, but they didn’t finish her—and she triggered her power, speeding Wolfe up.

The total difference in the capabilities between Wolfe and his opponent was now ridiculous. Wolfe yanked and twisted, snapping the man’s wrist with his total freakish power. Wolfe’s enemy screamed, but still tried to get the purchase to punch Wolfe back. Wolfe brought his knee up into the side of the man, a blow that would, under normal circumstances, be weak from lack of leverage and distance. But with his current attack score, magic stacked upon magic, it audibly cracked the man’s ribs.

His opponent never stopped, and his one eye never even became fearful, not so much as a widening of the pupil as they fought on the once-pristine floor of the elevator, both of them spilling blood across it. Wolfe slammed the heel of his palm into the man’s face, once, twice, three times before the skull finally collapsed under the magically empowered strikes.

Then he fired repetitively into the dragon before it could finish Malviere off—it dissipated into nothing.

Wolfe pushed the twitching near-corpse from him and dragged himself back against the wall of the elevator.

“Are you okay, my alpha?” Malviere asked.

Wolfe cocked one eye up at her. Blood was running into the other eye from the shot to his head, which has scored along his bone, if his quick check with his fingers was anything like accurate.

“Do I look fine?” Wolfe asked.

Malviere’s lips twitched. “No, my alpha, you most emphatically do not. You look like you ought to be dead.”

At that moment, the man next to him gave one final spasm and completed his transformation to corpse. A shit stink filled the tiny elevator, and Wolfe gagged.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“Dammit, this guy was holding a whole damn loaf in for some reason. What a lovely addition to the day. I think this might be the most squalid thing that has ever happened in the Ekron Eternal, and we had some really bad ones in my time.”

Malviere nodded to his words.

Wolfe dragged himself standing, grabbed the cards that had appeared on the corpse of no-face, and glanced into the elevator mirror. He was busted up, with wounds all over the place, mostly the massive shot to his head. He looked like an extra in a zombie movie.

But he had very limited chest damage.

He opened his coat and pulled out the filigreed metal box with the certificate for Shel. The lid was shot through, but the bottom was merely heavily indented, and Wolfe had only a bruise where it had been.

“For only ten-thousand dollars a day, you could save the life of an ex-enforcer,” Wolfe said, his voice whimsically sappy.

Malviere giggled, a sound more like creepy horror-movie child than happy, but Wolfe knew it was legitimately a noise of enjoyment for his card.

Wolfe put the shattered case back in his pocket—now it was charity for Shel and a great story, he figured—and exited into the hall, carefully.

Now that he wasn’t fighting in an enclosed elevator, he heard banging, yelling, gunshots, growling, and other indistinguishable noises from way down the hall. A hall he remembered well, with not-yet-changed-out symbols of Baalzebub, plush red carpets, and painting of the Infernal Realms on the walls.

Wolfe knew he had to go have a whole additional fight, but was in agony—he would have been worried about how much he could help Shel under normal circumstances, even though he would have tried, of course.

Finally, however, he had a partial solution to being wounded that didn’t require Shel already be by his side. He sacrificed his Xolo, and felt the familiar warmth of healing flow through him, restoring him to ‘okay,’ with twelve total damage of his thirty health, and no injury penalties.

He rushed quietly down the hall, resummoning Cereboo and then swiping his cards as he did.

He reached the end of the hallway. Three men were there, all with decks floating around them. One was hauling a body back from a door that led into a stairway going up, a body that Wolfe didn’t recognize, fortunately.

The scene put Wolfe out of sorts for multiple reasons. He had no idea there was a fourth floor to the Ekron Eternal, for one, and for the other, one of the three men was Ahmed, one of Miriam’s men—and fuckboys.

Somehow, no one seemed to have heard Wolfe run up, probably because a hail of gunfire was coming down the stairs.

“Send more cards!” Ahmed snarled.

“We need another way onto the roof,” one of the other two men said. “It’ll take two long for the three of us to overwhelm them with sheer card numbers. Your incompetence infuriates me.”

The man was tall and muscled, and held himself with the deadly grace of a killer. But he also had red scales across his arms and claws on his hands, and his back had wings sprouting from them.

“You told me the police aren’t coming, Nathan,” Ahmad snarled.

“That’s Mr. Leopold, fool. The police can’t pretend they were far away forever, especially since this is a fire-fight that’s now on a roof,” the man said, then held one had up. “Never mind. I’ll just go out the window and fly up, and handle this myself. If you’d done your damn job instead of thinking with your dick, none of it would have come to this.”

Wolfe had heard enough. He knew that Ahmad wasn’t very dangerous, since he had been there when they got the cards that made up most of Ahmad’s deck in the Frozen Cairn dungeon.

He also sensed that this Nathan Leopold character was incredibly dangerous.

But his mantle was on.

All of it flashed through Wolfe’s mind in a fraction of a second as he shot the third man in the head, blowing his entire skull apart with his still-enhanced stats. Ahmed whirled, running into a door and bouncing off to try and escape, but the dragon-winged man leapt hard into the wall next to him and blew through it.

Ahmed touched one of his cards, and a massive crocodile with ice rime across its body appeared.

Wolfe casually blew Ahmed’s chest apart with three easy shots at less than twenty feet.

The wall next to Wolfe exploded outward. Wolfe was blown through the wall on the other side and into the next room, a nice suite with chairs, bed, and a desk that was also blown apart, leaving shattered chunks of wood across the ground. He took twelve more damage.

Malviere and Cereboo both disappeared in a brief flash of blood before becoming particles that flowed back to Wolfe.

Wolfe picked himself up off the floor even as Nathan flew through the door. He grabbed Wolfe by the wrist and yanked him toward him. Wolfe swung a punch with his other hand, and Nathan blocked, wincing as his arm cracked.

“You have a powerful mantle, criminal. It won’t be enough.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

Nathan dodged the next blow without letting go of Wolfe’s arm and then claw-punched Wolfe in the side, doing another two damage. As Wolfe stepped back, he kicked Wolfe low, tripping him back onto the ground.

Somehow, Wolfe knew where the next blow would come, and blocked the stomp-kick to his head with his own arm, hissing in pain. At the same time, he scrabbled through the shards on the ground, grabbed one, and stuck it in Nathan’s leg. The man grunted in agony and stepped back.

Wolfe tried to stand, but in an insane display of ignoring pain, Nathan caught him on the way up with a kick from his own wounded leg, and Wolfe was flung back a couple feet, hitting the ground on his back again.

“It doesn’t have to be this way,” Nathan said, his dragon wings fluttering to give him balance as he yanked the piece of wood from his leg with a hiss.

He tossed it onto the ground. “Just give me Fern, and you and whomever that’s left here can live out their pathetic lives, at least until we come for all the criminal scum like you.”

What a day to try and get engaged.

“Answer’s the same, numbnuts. Go fuck yourself,” Wolfe ground out, leaping up and back ward, slamming his back into the outside wall of the suite, next to a grand viewing window covered in curtains.

Nathan snarled, “So be it,” and rushed forward.

Wolfe reached up, yanked the curtains down onto Nathan as he came in. Nathan still hit him shoulder first, and something within Wolfe cracked. Wolfe punched Nathan twice, trying to use his opponent’s temporary blindness as an advantage. But at this close range, it was way less of an advantage than Wolfe had hoped for.

Nathan grabbed him and lifted him a few inches from the floor, which deprived Wolfe of any leverage.

Then Nathan spun in a half-circle, building a tiny bit of momentum, and threw Wolfe through the third story window, into the late afternoon sun, in an explosion of glass.