Lowe's suspicion that he had been somewhat set up was not disproved by the absence of anyone stumbling upon his broken body. For a building as busy as the Tower of Law, it was unlikely that he could lie undisturbed for quite so long.

His attacker had not only been able to smack him about as if he were a newborn kitten - suggesting a Level of at least 40 - but also had enough clout, or at least his employer did, to clear the floor. Lowe remembered back to the avenue earlier when something eerily similiar had happened. Whoever was responsible for these two beatings had some significant pull . . .

As he waited for his Mana to come back - one of the key frustrations that he had with Roll with the Punches was that it sucked out his Mana immediately, meaning his current healing process was basically the equivalent of throwing a cupful of water on a towering inferno - Lowe reflected that he'd be wise not to jump too far in assuming whoever was focused upon kicking his arse had anything to do with the death of the High Priestess. The temptation was there, certainly, but the nature of Soar and the complexity of favours and backscratching meant that his most recent tormentor might be six, seven steps removed from the actual perpetrator of the crime he was investigating.

There was every chance he was taking a kicking because of something he'd done years before, and his current case was simply an excuse to get the expense of hiring muscle past some crime boss's .

Taking tiny little breaths so as not to disturb the fragility of his healing bones, Lowe accessed his inventory but quickly found he couldn't summon the requisite concentration to pull anything out. The throbbing pain was really quite distracting.

There was simply nothing to be done but lie in the corridor, helpless, until he'd healed up sufficiently to be able to grab one of Mylaf's creations.

Lowe was not overly disposed towards self-pity, but it was times like this where he found himself bitterly remembering those first few moments after his Class was stripped from him. He remembered being overwhelmed by helplessness that, until that second, had been quite alien to his life. Of course, it had since become his daily experience. At times like this - and this precise situation had played out far too often over the last year for the good of his mental health - he tended to pretend that he'd died at that moment and that a new, different, reduced Lowe had been born from the ashes.

In truth, it was the only way he could cope with the waves of shame and disgust that threatened to drown him as he lay, utterly powerless, waiting to be able to move again.

"Jana?"

And the hits just kept on coming.

"Jana, what's wrong?" There was a flurry of footsteps, and then Arebella's face appeared in his vision. "What happened to you? Are you okay?"

Lowe didn't trust himself to answer without sobbing. His jaw was in far too many pieces. Then, a Health Potion was pressed to his lips, and a minor portion of his agony receded. He moved his lips experimentally and found he could form the word "Mana".

As soon as the blue liquid sloshed down his open throat, Roll with the Punches sprang into action and started to reconfigure his shattered frame. It was an odd quirk of the Skill that it was far more efficient for him to be fed Mana potions than taking five or six of the equivalent red Health potions.

Even so, it took three more vials of Mana before the confounding agony receded sufficiently for Lowe to be able to pull a flask of Mylaf's breakfast smoothie out of his inventory. The +400 HP snapped, quite literally, everything back into place. Which was quite the vibe.

"Let's get you to my office, and then you can tell me what is happening."

Lowe barely had a chance to warn her about the likely undesirable outcome of using a portal right now before she pressed the stone she had retrieved from further down the corridor into his hand, and they both vanished.

*

With Roll with the Punches now having enough Mana to work with, Lowe was feeling a bit more like himself. If, of course, he could ignore the fact he'd recently redecorated Arebella's very nicely appointed office with the remains of a banana, orange and apple smoothie.

"Sorry about that," he managed as her appeared and cast a cleaning Skill on the rug. And the bookcase. And the curtains. And, after a moment of hesitation, Lowe himself.

"It's fine," Arebella said, filling a glass of water and passing it to him. And the most painful thing was that he knew, in her mind, it was. That was the biggest problem he found with dealing with her. She was absolutely the nicest and kindest person in the entire Soar. "I should have remembered a portal would have that effect on you. Especially without your Class."

The exited, giving Lowe the sort of look he assumed was the last thing a bag full of puppies saw before being lobbed into the river. It actually made him feel a touch more normal. Genifer had fucking hated his guts long before the scandal. In fact, it made him feel almost at home, being the recipient of her white-hot scorn.

Once she was sure he wouldn't drop the glass, Arebella perched opposite him, curling her legs beneath her in the chair. He knew she did this because, being so short, the alternative was that her legs would dangle about half a foot from the floor. "How are you feeling?"

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

Lowe shrugged. He wasn't in any physical pain anymore, and his mana exhaustion had passed, but the echoes of his beating lingered on. "You get used to it," he said with more bravado than he felt.

But the truth was, you didn't.

"And you have no idea who attacked you?"

He'd never liked to lie to Arebella, even before she'd gained a Skill that highlighted untruths. "It probably has something to do with the case I'm on."

She smiled. "Probably?"

"Well, in between arse kickings, he directed me to let it go. I'm just putting two and two together like the talented investigator I am."

Arebella stared at him for a moment as if weighing him up and deciding whether he was robust enough to share something. With a little nod, she appeared to make up her mind, stood, and crossed to the other side of her desk. She placed her hand on one of the draws—there was a quick flash of light—and the drawer slid open.

Lowe raised his eyebrows at that. Arebella had another new Skill, apparently. Her threshold options must have been unusually rewarding.

With no further ado, she dipped her hand into the open drawer and withdrew a manila folder. "This was pushed through the door of my apartment this morning."

With just a touch of hesitation, she passed it over to him.

Lowe flipped it open, already having a pretty good idea of what he would find. As threats went, he could appreciate the simplicity. The folder contained a bunch of detailed images of Arebella in and around Soar - was she on a date in one of them? - and also a handwritten note: 'Lowe will abandon his case.'

No 'otherwise'. There didn't need to be.

This was about as classic an intimidation technique as existed. It wasn't even the first time one of the criminal underclass had tried it on with the pair of them. Of course, back then, he had a Class to rely on to keep her safe . . .

"What are you thinking?" Arebella was watching him carefully, her face set.

"That it's disappointing the High Priestess's killer will never be brought to justice."

She scrunched up her nose in distaste at that. "Jana, I can take care of myself."

"Whose worrying about you! Did you not see the state I was left in?"

"I'm not even going to waste the Mana checking whether that was a lie. You're not going to drop your investigation because someone has threatened your ex-girlfriend."

Somehow, the 'ex' hurt more than anything that had happened since he'd entered the Tower of Law. Nevertheless, Lowe slapped a grin on his face and held up a picture of Arebella enjoying a candlelit meal with some long drink of water in an expensively tailored suit. "I'm sure he wouldn't be delighted to know I was putting you in danger. I've got enough troubles without your latest beau coming calling to teach me the lesson I so richly deserve."

"That's Petra from the gym. We're friends."

"Sure. Tell that to the look in his eye." Lowe tapped the picture, "Bloke's pretty confident he's on a promise in this shot."

Arebella took a deep breath, even as her face hardened. "Jana, I know what you're doing. You want a row because it makes it easier on you if I lose my temper and throw you out of here. And how do I recognise this? Because we've played out a hundred versions of this scene. I'm not sleeping with Petra. Not least because that would come as something of an unwelcome surprise to his husband of ten years."

That brightened Lowe's day a touch. Although the look in Arebella's eye as she continued dampened that slightly.

"I am, despite it all, grateful that you care for my wellbeing, but I am done being used as an excuse for you doing something that pisses you off. It's not me who decided I didn't want to be in a relationship with a Classless. It wasn't me who asked you to move out to the arse-end of nowhere and not be in touch for the best part of a year. And it's not going to be me who makes you step away from a case that, if you solve it, gives you a chance of getting back into the Security Service. I showed you these pictures because I thought they would be helpful to your investigation."

Arebella put a hand on her hip - oh dear, did he recognise that particular bit of body language - and stared him down. "So, put your ego away and look properly."

Grasping at anything that would allow him to break eye contact, Lowe looked down at the pictures. On a truly fundamental level, he recognised that he'd spent their entire relationship seeking to sabotage it before she had the opportunity to hurt him. That they were both perfectly aware of this did little to mitigate the drama.

He noted that there were eight images in all, and Arebella looked awesome in each. As for the restaurant scene—and yes, now he looked carefully, he could make out the wedding ring on her dinner companion's finger—she had been captured leaving work for the day and also returning. Out with a small group of friends - all of whom Lowe knew for a fact despised everything about him. One of her at the very desk from which she was now glowering at him. One in a small local market purchasing ingredients for a meal - just enough for one, he saw and was surprised how a tightness in his stomach released. And the last one was of her asleep in her bedroom, her hair spilling around her on the pillow like a halo.

It was a pretty damn intimidating 'we can get you whenever we want' message.

He leaned forward to pass them back to her, for Arebella to growl at him. "No, look properly!"

"Did you just bare your teeth at me?!"

"If you can't see it, that's the least I'll do to you."

Lowe looked back at the pictures. Presumably, there was something Arebella had seen that he was missing. He pushed his various, complicated feelings about the subject of the images away and looked at them with his investigator's eyes.

It took Lowe longer to realise what she had been getting at than he would have liked: he blamed his recent traumatic head wounds. Once he knew what he was looking for, he flicked quickly through them a few more times, making sure what he'd realised was the case in each of them.

Satisfied, he nodded and glanced up at her. "These are all taken in Skill dead zones."

Due to the occasionally homicidal instincts of the more powerful beings in Soar, the Mayor had decreed the construction - largely in the more well-to-do districts - of small areas where Skills could not be triggered. Of course, they weren't foolproof and were only as good as whoever had generated any particular 'dead zone', but it was pretty unlikely the protection would have failed in all eight images.

"So?" Arebella was smiling now.

Lowe's mind raced. If you assumed any remote image capture Skill would be difficult to activate in a dead zone—not impossible, but certainly a challenge—then the only guaranteed way to achieve these pictures was . . .

"A spotter. In order to anchor the image capture Skill, there would have to be someone near you, within the zone generating Mana. Did you happen to notice . . ."

"Pictures three, five and seven."

Lowe pulled out these images and studied them. Arebella came to stand behind him and seemed about to help. He shushed her good-naturedly. "Leave me my pride, Bella."

And there it was—the same hooded figure on the edge of the frame, the tell-tale glow of an active anchor Skill around his hands. And, what was more, it was someone Lowe recognised.

The , Setort.