One of the most convenient things about Saucer, Nathan acknowledged readily in a rather dissociated way that would have been extremely troubling if it were not for the supernatural degree of trauma processing that he’d acquired through metalife means, was that killing with it was extremely neat.

He’d wound up in an altar room, one used for prayer and meditation. It was stark at its fundamentals, but decorated in soft rugs of vaguely neutral colors, mostly grays, along with tapestries of soft reds and browns in geometrical shapes on the walls. There was a low and simple altar near the window which was clearly meant to be knelt in front of and an oil light whose wick was already trimmed and ready to ignite. There was subtle iconography worked into the face of the altar itself, geometrical but hinting at faces in a variety of emotional expressions, and a carving of an androgynous figure in relief against the back of the altar itself, slightly darkened by the oil flame.

Nathan noticed none of that. His attention was entirely on the sound of footsteps as the light tread made its way towards the door, and he breathed quietly but deeply and steadily as he crouched just beside it. There was another sound as well, a faint not-quite-humming at the edge of his hearing range, and it drifted just behind those footsteps. This caused him some momentary anxiety—but then it was time to act, and there was no more time to consider or wait.

He did, however, change his plan slightly.

Instead of thrusting through the door with Saucer, piercing lancewise into the corridor and then having it flower open to shred whoever was walking, he raised it in the form of a shortsword and shoulder-checked the door open. He’d timed it so that the walker was just past the arc of the door’s swing, which meant that the door would slam into anyone behind his primary target; and indeed, it did, with a crunch sound that indicated some degree of efficacious outcome.

It also involved a significant spike of pain in his shoulder, one large enough that he immediately regretted what he’d done. Not enough, he thought to himself, to be a broken bone; but certainly enough to bruise, and he could have used Saucer as a pauldron, had he realized that in time.

Even as he considered that fact and his incomplete acts of planning, he cut up from below and to the right into his primary target’s stomach. There was very little resistance and no sound other than a soft, staccato clicking and hissing as Saucer drank greedily of the target’s mana via the vector of their blood—not that Nathan was aware of that—and the body collapsed on the floor as he stepped past it and pulled his attack through a smooth arc into a forward position. Seamlessly flowing into a lunge, he thrust forward with Saucer at full extension at a fifteen degree rise into the half-sized doppelganger of himself with wings who was still reeling backwards from the door’s force.

That target, too, died in moments. Collapsing around itself, the body hit the floor with a thud softened by the rugs, ichor pooling to stain the gray and brown with a vomit-textured translucent, slimy green.

Taking a deep breath, feeling vaguely baffled by the lack of any odor to the bodies on the floor—for Nathan was not aware that the stench of them, the tearing and vicious psyche-scarring stench of them, happened to take the form of odoriferous compounds that the human body is incapable of perceiving—he froze and listened for any sound of alarm or notice.

Nothing.

First time, he told himself with grim humor, for he’d made seventeen attempts at clean, quiet kills and this was the first success he’d had at it.

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With a few moments to get his bearings and figure out his next step, he glanced downwards. The diminutive Nathan-corpse was odd, elfin-thin and narrow-faced, and its wings had disappeared with its fall, which he correctly concluded was due to them being magical in nature rather than biological. The doppelganger of Honeydew was truer to form, though her thigh-, arm-, and back-baring garb was filled out a bit more than usual with slightly more body fat in a limited number of places. The proportions that resulted didn’t seem quite right to Nathan, but they might, he supposed (correctly, as it so happened) be distracting to anyone who was inclined towards being distracted by that kind of thing; and she was close enough to looking right, as was every other Doppelganger he’d seen, to provoke hesitation in most circumstances.

Conveniently, his “kill on sight, for if you can kill it, it’s a Doppelganger” orders rendered that concern a non-issue.

Having caught his bearings and confirmed via waiting for a few moments that nobody was on the way, Nathan crept his way through the relatively spartan house with as much stealth as he could manage, which was not very much. He managed to check the other upstairs room—a bedroom containing a queen-sized bed, starchly made with three decorative pillows pointlessly ruining any usability, and a bathroom with no products and, for that matter, no sink to keep the shower and toilet company—without drawing notice, but as soon as he started descending the stairs his luck ran out on account of his skill ceiling having been breached.

He half-ran, half-fell down the remaining half of the flight of stairs and cushioned his fall with the body of the woman who had just walked through the dining room door. She hadn’t stopped to gawk, but rather had immediately began to draw forth a spell that was visible to Nathan only in the glints of ice which had rapidly built around her before starting to rotate from pointing straight up towards pointing at him in the middle of his uncontrolled lunge-fall. They were released with her death, blasting up and forwards at an angle that took them a few critical inches over his head; they impacted against the wall after shredding a tapestry, shattering and leaving gaping rents in the wood.

With the spell having, he presumed, alerted the other occupants of the house, he sprinted around the corner into the living room to shift his location before he was perforated by someone who had more time to bring their spell on-target. This took him past a Doppelbaby, reaching out towards him from the center of an absorbent pad placed on a coffee table. Nathan dodged the grasping arm as it extended towards him, landing heavily on the floor in the process, but his throw of Saucer was effective and sufficiently on target—it flattened itself in the process, becoming a spinning disc multiple feet in width, which made “sufficiently” a matter of getting it in the right vague direction with enough force.

He picked himself up, wincing at the bruises he’d picked up, and retrieved what once more looked like a typical shortsword.

Moving past the table and its pad, the bassinet, and the two decohering puddles of ectoplasm, he spun to the right and ducked as a spear thrust for the center of his chest from a hallway whose door he hadn’t seen around a bookcase filled with soapstone carvings of calligraphy letters. Coming up with Saucer in a shallow slash, he severed the spear’s haft and stepped forwards, shortsword lengthening into a spear of his own as he thrust.

He took a strike to the solar plexus for his trouble, hands spasming open as he fell, unable to breathe.

When he could move again, it was to try to stab Tanya, who shook her head at him as she casually sidestepped his strike and hauled him up to his feet with a firm grip.

“You got a scratch on the old Dop as he hit you,” she told him approvingly. “That’s the whole house cleared without me needing to intervene. Do that again and we’ll move on to the Keep.”

“Hngzhgh,” Nathan replied eloquently, gasping for breath as his diaphragm refused to move enough to fill his lungs.

“Yeah, sure, take a minute.” Tanya smirked. “One minute. Then we’ll move on.”

She gave him two, in the end. But move on they did.