8.

Silvah crashed landed, bonking her head and falling to the floor. She cried out, her voice joining the clattering of metal. Groaning, she pushed herself off the floor. Her hand went to the back of her head. What in the shit just happened?

Footsteps rushed her way.

‘What are you doing?!’

A woman’s figure shadowed Silvah who still on the floor on all fours. Silvah glanced. The woman was wearing a version of the assistant uniform. Only hers was green compared to Silvah’s simple, beige uniform. There was also an insignia on her left breast of two snakes biting each other, the symbol of the Bai. That couldn’t be good.

‘Sorry, I—’ Silvah began and trailed off.

I what? Am a fairy who magically appeared here? She didn’t even know what happened herself.

‘Can you please get off me?’ came a soft whisper from below.

Silvah looked down. She was leaning over someone.

‘Shit. Sorry!’

She rushed to get up. The person—who wasn’t Damien. Where had he gone to?—dragged herself off the floor and dusted herself off. Without saying another word, she eyed the third woman whose head would’ve whistled in anger if it could.

The two of them were like two children caught playing outside when their mother had told them to stay in. And this mother had a belt. Next to the Bai clan symbol on the chest of the woman who was most likely the assistant supervisor was a name plate: Bai Lilia.

Silvah looked at the artefacts she had knocked over. Luckily, all of them were sturdy weapons, so nothing was broken. She didn’t think Lilia cared for that distinction though. The woman’s skin complexion was growing redder as the seconds passed until finally—

‘You good for nothing whores! I give you a chance, an opportunity on the most important night of our lives, and this is how you repay me?! I knew it, I knew it—I should’ve listened to Aunt Cho. Aunt Cho knows what’s best for me. She’s the only one not out to get me…’

Silvah had seen enough managers in her lifetime to know one by heart, so she wasn’t surprised when Lilia started to rant like her life depended on it. Well. It probably did, given the way tears were welling up in the corner of her eyes.

Lilia was too busy looking at the ceiling, proclaiming her faith to Celestra and begging for forgiveness, to catch Silvah leaning to the side of the girl she had knocked over.

‘Managers. Am I right? One mistake and the whole world ends.’

The girl beside her sighed. A little too loud.

‘What are you sighing for?! You—’

‘Mrs. Lilia, please,’ Silvah said, bowing low and pulling the other girl with her, ‘my friend here is just a little dense. She hit her head too hard. It was my fault! We’ll put everything back how it was.’

‘Oh, you better! Know this—I’m dragging all of you down with me if Koushin comes for my head!’

Lilia stormed off towards the elevator, burning holes in the ledger in her arms and rifling through the pages with unnatural speed. Too much unnatural speed if you asked Silvah…an ability, she decided.

Clanging to her side caught her attention. The girl had started picking up the scattered weapons.

‘Ah. Let me,’ Silvah said, hurrying to help. Though she wasn’t here to play around, and crashing into the stack of weapons wasn’t really her fault, she felt sorry for the girl. She probably went through enough already without fate screwing her over.

‘I’m sorry for bumping into you,’ Silvah said.

‘Don’t mind. This was bound to happen sooner or later.’

The lighting in the basement was dim. But she could see the sides of the girl’s face. She looked like Aoki after he missed his last strike. Accepting. Not a word of complaint or anger had left her mouth after Silvah bumped into her.

‘What’s your name?’ Silvah said. ‘I’m Silvah.’

She picked up a particularly heavy spear and recognised the metal. Firasium—a rare alloy found near volcanic regions. Apparently, the metal was so rare that a single, small basket of it sold for the price of someone’s house. The audience of the auction would go crazy for this.

‘You must be a maid from a higher-ranked family,’ the girl said, breaking Silvah’s reverie.

Silvah frowned.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You still have your name,’ the girl said.

Looking lost in scenarios such as this was a good way to our yourself. So Silvah carefully avoided eye contact, busying herself with realigning the weapons as her brain tried to decipher what the girl was saying. Her silence worked for her.

The girl shook her head.

‘I was forced to give mine up when joining the Bai, but the others call me Three-leaf.’

‘Three-leaf?’

‘Have you ever seen a three-leaved clover?’

The girl, Three-leaf, wasn’t the one who answered. Another assistant worker strode over. A scar pulled on the right corner of her lip, permanently revealing part of her teeth.

‘That’s her luck,’ she said, pointing towards Three-leaf and grinning without having to move a muscle to do so. ‘Non-existent.’

The newcomer lifted her feet and shoved over a stack of weapons that Three-leaf had just put back into place and cackled. Three-leaf didn’t say anything and instead started cleaning up again without so much as looking up.

‘Better not forget anything,’ snarl-face said and sauntered off.

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Wow. Silvah thought to herself. She’d been too flabbergasted to say anything. She really showed up just to act like a dickhead?

Silvah turned to Three-leaf and took the girl in.

‘You shouldn’t let people walk all over you like that.’

‘It’s okay. I’m used to it. Talking back only makes it worse.’

There wasn’t a hint of sadness in the girl’s voice.

Silvah unconsciously gripped her necklace. She’s just like you, Asha. Her sister would rather die than fight others. Someone who let the world do with them as it pleased. Not because they were weak, but because they didn’t want to take part in unnecessary conflict. Even if that led them to suffer.

Silvah snarled and swallowed the lump in her throat. They were unsightly to her. People like that—they had no idea how selfish they truly were.

‘Lesha,’ Silvah said.

She crouched to help the other girl.

Three-leaf looked up from her work.

‘I’m calling you Lesha.’

Lesha remained silent.

Silvah turned over one of the wooden crates she had knocked down, doing her best to gather the spilled packing straw and place it back inside the box.

The shine of a golden handle caught her eye. Without thinking about it, she reached for the weapon. It was a dagger. Red lines interspersed the black blade. To Silvah, they didn’t form any recognisable pattern nor shape.

‘Soul pits,’ Lesha said. She was beaming.

Silvah was quite surprised at the display of emotion. She should’ve known better. Hadn’t she said they were alike? The one thing Asha was passionate about besides her family was antiques. Old, useless artefacts you would never see in your life. Yet she could tell you all about them.

‘Soul pits?’ Silvah asked, handing the blade to Lesha, fully aware of the monologue that would entice.

The girl traced her fingers over the lines.

‘Long ago, when sorcerers hadn’t learned to infuse their weapons with energy yet, artificers would dig pits in a blade using starstones.’

Silvah smiled reminiscently. The pitch of Lesha’s voice was rising in the way Asha’s always did.

‘That way the wielder only needed to force their energy down the handle, and the foul or cele energy would naturally follow the path of least resistance.’

‘This must be a thousand years old at minimum,’ Lesha finished.

‘It does have scratch marks all over,’ Silvah said.

‘That only proves its worth!’ Lesha’s tiny hands were balled in front of her chest.

Silvah held up both arms.

‘Don’t bite me, I believe you—’

A scream tore through the air.

What? Everyone turned to the elevator. Snarl-face was the closest, standing in front of it with a cart full of weapons of different kinds that she wanted to bring upstairs. She yelled: ‘What’s going on up there?!’

Then the entire ceiling rocked, an earthquake nearly ripping it apart.

The elevator was halfway down when Snarl-face started screaming for her life—the girl was backed up against one of the crates, shrinking at the sight of someone being pushed down by a big, shadow-like figure.

Huh?

Silvah stepped forwards to see better. Her confusion only increased. The assailant had wings spreading from their lower back that tried to blanket the assistant and block the view. But Silvah could still see the short sword the assistant struggled to keep between their face and the beast’s pointy teeth. They kicked the creature off them with a yell. It squealed, soaring through the air some and revealing its front side. Any doubt regarding its origins vanished; this thing could impossibly be a human. Though they had two legs, it’s head was that of a bat and its eye were the shape of that of a frog.

The beast saved its fall and glared. The assistant started running. There were two exits besides the elevator in the basement: a staircase that led towards the first floor, where guards were posted, and a mechanical rolling door that was currently closed. The girl chose the mechanical door.

Wrong choice. The path towards it was longer.

Squeezing its large eyes, the bat-creature opened its mouth, greedily swallowing air as the organ stretched three times wider than you would think possible.

Silvah realised the threat immediately.

‘Duck!’

The bat shrieked, blasting everything near the elevator away from it. Which meant spears and other weapons that had already been unboxed flew like arrows—some literal ones—and impaled whatever was in their path. Snarl-face hadn’t heard Silvah over her own screaming. She was also standing right in front of the first row of weapons. Silvah caught a snapshot of the result as she went down. She may have hated Snarl-face already, but she wouldn’t have wished that on her.

She had no time to grab for Lesha and instead rushed behind a particularly large and thick crate. Wood splinters rained on her face from above. But she felt nothing else.

A scream to her right. Lesha was to her left. Good. The fact that Silvah was still capable of thinking was also a sign of good fortune. She opened her eyes, finding that the whistling of metal through the air had stopped. She peeked above the crate, and her gaze immediately fell on the other girl with the sword. She wasn’t running anymore but lay bawling on the floor. A spear with a nasty set of hooks along its shaft had gored through her calf. The beast didn’t wait or give her a chance to recover and lunged, its crooked claws digging into her stomach. It cackled. Or rather, it did a malformed and bestial version of cackling, its too wide mouth opening and closing as it released high shrieks.

The sight siphoned the strength out of Silvah’s legs. What the fuck was happening? Was she dreaming? The assistant’s wailing said she wasn’t. Her next action seemed obvious. We have to get out of here. The elevator would be too slow. Which left the staircase or revolving door. She wasn’t going to make the same mistake as the assistant. Silvah turned towards Lesha.

‘We have to—’

‘Still.’

The words ringing through the basement were colder than winds that had travelled through a blizzard. Silvah’s neck stopped before she could get Lesha in her view. Her muscles were frozen. She couldn’t move. Her position did allow her to see another assistant jumping down the hole above the elevator. She grabbed at her face and tore off…a mask. She was not a girl. She, was instead a middle-aged man with a stubble beard. He arrived at the side of the downed girl and the beast. The beast was vibrating in place, struggling its hardest against the binding.

The man laid a palm on the creature’s head.

‘Explode.’

Brain matter and blood splattered against crates and the floor alike. Then the man coughed out a fat blob of blood.

Silvah went wide eyed. This shit was ripped straight from a fantasy novel.

‘Ko…,’ he said, voice shaky, ‘let’s get out of here. Whatever he’s paying us is not worth our lives.’

He placed a palm on her belly and Ko’s wounds visibly closed.

Two things happened in quick succession afterwards. One, Silvah heard the door to the staircase behind her burst open. Two, something else jumped down from the hole in the ceiling. Silvah couldn’t quite see who or what it was as it went too fast, but she knew for certain that something had jumped down.

‘I had been warned beforehand that you two were going to try something. Renowned thieves, you call yourself?’

The voice came from the staircase. A man slowly entered Silvah’s line of sight. It was the guard who had helped them enter the auction house at the start of the night.

‘Koushin,’ the not-girl assistant covered in blood and guts said in a voice so low it was almost a whisper.

‘You know of me. That makes this easier. Stand down and hand over the egg.’

The man laughed.

‘I can also make you an omelette if you want.’

‘Very funny. I promise you will not be hurt. Though I will hear how you managed to infiltrate us despite the number of sentries we had.’

Koushin notably did not say what they planned to do with them. He only said it wouldn’t hurt.

The old man helped Ko up. Only, he whirled behind him when a series of impacts battered the ceiling. A part of it caved in, creating the impression of a head, and then, because the night wasn’t chaotic enough, a cold beam of flames and light devoured the ceiling.

The man’s words were still in effect. Yet even if Silvah had been capable of moving, she would’ve stared agape. It was all she could do to hold on. To not faint. This was raw power descending from the heavens, which ravaged the earth.

When the firelight vanished, it revealed a crater. A hole in the foundation of the auction that steamed as the elements had melted underneath the glare of the flames. A beast clawed its way out of the debris.

It was a humanoid creature that looked vaguely like Damien. But it couldn’t be him. Because, though Damien’s skin was dark as well, it was now the colour of obsidian. A red horn grew out the side of its skull, and where braids should be was now loose, white hair. Whatever chest piece it was wearing was burnt away, which allowed Silvah to see the green blood dripping from its wounds.

‘You’re resilient. If anything.’

The voice came from the hole in the ceiling, and a boy Silvah recognised jumped down.

Ryu landed gracefully like a cat, leftover and fading flames licking his eyebrows.

‘Ji,’ he spoke, not raising his voice in the slightest. ‘Come down here. Let us deal with this demon parading in human skin.’

And a great shadow passed over the cavity.