“Trenton?”

About a dozen feet away, Leo stood watching Trenton, brow furrowed, Millie humming a pleasant tune quietly to herself at his side.

“You alright? You look disturbed,” Leo said, closing the distance.

“I could say the same,” Trenton commented, noticing the slight pale tone to Leo’s skin, the spastic jitters in his eyes.

His hand shot to the back of his neck, rubbing over a patch of blistered red skin, “I ran into a couple kids in the hallway, and…”

“Didn’t go well?”

“Kind of. Things got messy.”

“Are you alright?”

“I am…”

“Are they?”

Leo looked down at the ground, “...they’ll live.”

Trenton sighed, doing his best to relieve the tension of the encounter he’d just had, “Don’t worry about it. If something comes up, I can handle it. Do you know if Yissle’s free yet?”

Leo looked up, “Actually, that’s why I’m here. He told me-”

“To come get you,” Yissle interrupted, appearing behind the two boys in a burst of flowing wind, the crowd parting like the sea to make room for him. It seems even physical adjacency to him is a little too much for the student body. “I was just going to wait in my room for Leo to get you, but I’m realizing it’d be faster if I just led you myself. Follow me,” Yissle said, dropping off the edge of the bridge like a sack of bricks.

“Does he-” Leo started, peering over the edge.

Then, step by step, Yissle rose back through the air, supported by an incomplete earthen staircase of his own making. Its body curved around the side of the main sanctum, each step, slightly higher than the last, appearing when he placed his foot down to ascend the step prior. Trenton backed up a couple steps, taking a running leap off the side of the bridge with Millie in his arms, fighting to span the 60 or so foot gap over the easily 200 foot drop to the ground below.

Admittedly, Trenton probably should’ve checked if he could clear the distance before just gunning it. He was going to be short by a couple feet, his trajectory clearly leading him straight into the side of the staircase, not the top. Trenton reached out his hand, calling to the earth in front of him, pulling from it a solid platform a couple lengths below the top of the stairs, supported by a simple network of trusses. He landed heavy on his front, rolling to slow his momentum a bit and then leaping to just barely clear the wall making up the side of the stairs, Millie clutched close to his chest to protect her from the sudden shock of the fall.

He turned around as a wave of shock, applause, awe, and in some corners, hatred burst forth. Some students cheered him on, clearly entertained by the show and uninterested in his personal affairs, while others stared him down dead, lips curling into snarls. No doubt they wanted him to fail the jump, fall to his death for everyone to see. But such an eventuality would never occur. He had too much experience climbing in the desolate cliffs…and with Walibeld.

“You coming?” Yissle called out, pausing to watch Leo hesitate at the ledge.

“Uhhhh…I’m not so sure about this,” he replied, backing away a couple steps.

All around him, the other kids jeered, chanting for him to “jump” over and over again. Leo hesitated, stuck between the encroaching mob and a drop to almost certain death. But then, just as Leo looked like he was going to chicken out, a boy rushed forward, taking Leo from behind and shoving him forward. Leo stumbled towards the ledge, listing over without any means to stop himself, entering a free fall.

Yet, just as Trenton and Yissle stepped forward, desperate to catch him before he picked up too much speed, Leo simply stopped, body flailing midair a handful of feet under the bridge, but completely unmoving.

“Gods, leave for one day people start killing without me,” Garrote called out, stepping through the crowd, left arm outstretched, the right one giving Trenton a little two finger salute. “Sup.”

“Good timing,” Trenton called back, returning the salute and hopping down to pull Leo onto the stairs once Garrote had moved him close enough. “Don’t suppose you just got lost in the woods?”

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

“Pretty much. Turns out my sense of direction isn’t that great. Who’s that?” Garrote pointed at Yissle.

“Dead brother.”

“Delis?”

Trenton shook his head, “Nope, the other one.”

Garrote scratched his cheek, “There’s another one?”

Yissle looked down at himself, then over at Trenton, “Looks it.”

“Someone just tried to kill me,” Leo breathed, doubled over and clutching his heart.

“Yeah, we’ve had a pretty bad run of it lately. Didn’t think school boy would be top of our enemy list,” Trenton reassured, pulling him and Millie over to stand behind Yissle.

“Man, you Boulregaurds multiply like rats,” Garrote laughed. “Don’t let me keep you. I’ve got some business of my own to tend to, anyway. And you,” Garrote lifted the boy that pushed Leo into the air, hoisting him high above the crowd, “are coming with me,” he said, walking away with the screaming child in tow.

“That’s the boy I let through the gate earlier. He arrived just after you did. He another friend of yours?” Yissle asked, continuing to move, now with Leo, Millie, and Trenton just behind him.

“Garrote,” Leo said.

“Like-” Yissle started.

“Yes, like the wire,” Trenton and Leo said in unison, filling in for the absent Garrote.

“Huh, his parents must’ve hated him,” Yissle smiled to himself.

“...y-yeah,” Leo responded.

“He’s a Maiga,” Trenton elaborated. “Messed up family, apparently.”

“Wait,” Yissle stopped, head whipping to the side to watch as Garrote slipped into the Academy interior, “he’s a Maiga? Don’t tell me…what card does he have?” He asked, eyes wide with a sudden intensity.

“He’s the fool!” Millie exclaimed, “...I think. It’s on his chest, like a little crystal.”

“Shit…” Yissle muttered to himself.

“Is something wrong?” Leo asked.

“Yeah, for him, anyway. Poor kids practically at the top of the worst hunter’s list in the world. Both the Demon of the West and the Collector have been hunting him like madmen,” Yissle shook his head, connecting the stairs to the open window of a room towards the top spire of the Academy with a tap of his heel.

“I know, we met the Collector back in Avar,” Trenton said, climbing through the window after Yissle.

The room was well decorated, filled with fine arts, a statue of Yissle’s likeness, and plush furniture and fine mahogany desks. But so too was it messy, papers strewn randomly about, books sitting in odd piles here and there, cups half filled with coffee or water left sitting on his bedside table. Yup, this was Yissle alright, an organized disaster. The moment Trenton heard Yissle held a high authority position, he just knew it’d look a little something like this.

“No, you didn’t,” Yissle plopped down at one of his desks, spinning the chair round to talk to Leo and Trenton, who took a seat on the large window cill just next to the desk, Millie running around to avoid the boring practical talk, like usual. “Sorry for the clutter. I don’t have the maids go through here anymore. I don’t like them touching the classified files, and they’ve lost me a couple important memos before.”

“What do you mean we didn’t meet the Collector? How do you even know about that?” Trenton asked.

“Sorry, let me back up a bit. We’ve received quite a few reports from Wimbleton, that boy you were traveling with, about your progress and what was happening. He’s got good contact with Era, but you’d ask him if you wanted to know more about that. In anycase, we’ve been keeping an eye on your progress, making sure nothing went terribly wrong, more or less. That thing you met in Avar, although it spoke as the Collector, wasn’t his actual body. It was one of his puppets, and one of the strongest ones, too, given how it swallowed Avar. Just goes to show how serious the Collector is about Garrote’s card,” Yissle said, grabbing a random water cup and sipping from it.

“If he really cared that much, why wouldn’t he go personally?” Leo asked.

Yissle snorted, “Cause he’s a coward. Era’s only told me stories, and I’ve never met the kid, but apparently Wimbleton kicked the Collector’s ass so bad last time they met, he had to crawl to an entirely different kingdom and beg the Demon of the West to save him. That he was bold enough to make a direct attack against you with Wimbleton there is already surprising enough, let alone that new puppet he used.”

“What’s a puppet???” Millie shouted from across the room, coming out a rather impressive cartwheel in the middle of the floor.

Yissle’s face soured, “His slaves, effectively. His aspect lets him alter and reform life. He takes high value living creatures, tortures them until they haven’t a mind left to resist, then he starts switching out their parts, mixing and matching, shaping and altering until he’s got his perfect specimen. And he's gotten some particularly special ones as of late. If my hunch is correct, that particular puppet you saw, the one with the stomach in its chest, has the same aspect as the current 6th veil. Or in other words, it’s using his power. How the Collector got his hands on something that powerful, I couldn’t say, but it’s not impossible they struck a deal behind the scenes. The Collector always has been rather good at getting his way, quite the manipulator,” Yissle explained.

“You seem to know quite a bit about him,” Trenton asked, narrowing his eyes.

“Right, right, I guess I should address the elephant in the room,” Yissle pulled up his shirt, revealing a perfectly sculpted body adorned with various, jagged seams, clean arcane stitches holding the various pieces together. “The Yissle you knew, Trenton, the brother you had, did die. The Collector killed him, or me, ripped his body apart to serve as the base for something new, the very first in the humanoid line of puppets. That is to say, I’m no longer fully human, Trenton, and barely the man I once was.”