13.

‘Give me the egg.’

Ko wandered over, face completely blank. She flicked her hand. Space warped and appearing from literally nowhere was an egg she had to hold with both hands. Ryu took it, then slit her throat as well. The command was still being enforced even as she was dying. Watching the girl’s eyes go lifeless without her making a sound or moving a muscle was somehow affecting Silvah more than anything she had seen this evening.

Ryu glanced down at dying woman, pity ripe on his face.

‘This could’ve been avoided had you listened to me from the start.’

The emotion was gone within an instant. Finally, Silvah understood what she was facing. Ryu was no human. He was probably the least human of all within the auction, including the animated bones.

He held the egg aloft, raising it towards the viewing box on the fourth floor, where Shisui was. It was the first time Silvah had seen it. It was covered in rugged, layered scales, and down the middle ran a crack where saliva rolled out like pus.

‘Do you dare still deny me, Black Lord?! Me. Your rightful claimant!’

Silvah thought she could hear laughter coming from above.

‘Without question,’ Ryu said, closing his eyes, letting the light envelop him, ‘I am Celestra’s chosen. Why else would she give the most nobles of creatures to act as my servant?’

Ryu opened his eyes.

‘If you cannot understand that, then I will force you to.’

He looked at her, then.

‘Come here.’

Silvah did. Even when pain told her to stop moving. Even when her mind was screaming for her to run.

Ryu placed a hand on her cheek. It was soft. Like a mother’s touch.

‘I am going to kill you. It will be quick. Not painless, mind you. But quick.’

Time. I need to buy time. Yet her mind could not think of anything substantial fast enough. So she tried as hard as she could to move her mouth and curse at him or say anything at all.

‘You…monster,’ she got out.

He gave her a deadpan stare. But as it was with self-important people on the verge of winning, he could not help but bite.

‘Monster, huh. Why do you think that, dear Silvah?’

‘All of this…death…over an egg,’ she said.

‘It’s a pity,’ he said.

His eyelids drooped as he looked down at the floor.

‘You’re a detective, aren’t you? An enforcer of justice. Of the law.’

Silvah remained silent. Unsure of where he was going with this.

Ryu breathed in deep, the smell of blood, shit and death not unsettling the nerves running on his forehead in the slightest.

‘You understand nothing. Of the conviction needed to achieve justice in our world.’

She scoffed.

‘And you do?’

Good. Her strength was returning. Slowly. Keep him talking.

‘You’re doing this for you sister, aren’t you?’ Ryu said.

The sheer number of things he knew about her was starting to disturb her.

‘Then answer me this: if you had to slaughter a thousand people—not because they are guilty or complicit, but simply because they are in your way, stopping you from retrieving your sister—would you do it?’

He lifted the knife, the edge, coated in too much blood, unable to gleam in the spotlight above them.

‘Could you slit their throat in the night and convince yourself of being righteous? Kill after kill. Death after death. Mothers after children.’

Despite herself, she considered the question. Could she do it? Would she do it? In her head, she had always assumed saving her sister would take killing; she had already written her parent’s murderer off as dead. But that was one person. Maybe two or three, depending on the situation and how many invaded her home. But a thousand? She looked around her. At the destruction.

Some corpses were Ryūjin-kai. Most were not. And all of this when she had not even seen the faintest outline of her sister’s body yet? It made her question if a thousand dead people was that crazy to think about.

Ryu shook his head, seemingly reading her thoughts.

‘It requires a certain…conviction. A detachment of ego—but a few are capable of it.’

Asher chuckled.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

‘“Detachment of ego” he says. Good one.’

‘Laugh,’ Ryu said, unhurried. ‘Curse me. It’s all the same. The words of a pagan do not bother me.’

Then he turned his golden eyes back on her.

‘What I am trying to say, Silvah, is that despite what I am about to do to you, we are not enemies. Not truly. It was never personal.’

And the scariest part of it all was that Silvah was certain he truly believed what he was saying. Believed in the fact that he was causing so much death, her death, for a higher purpose, whatever that may be.

‘Try not to resent me after you die,’ he said. ‘For I played no hand in your death.’

This time when he lifted the knife, it went to her throat. His arm moved horizontally to cut, and she felt the edge biting into her skin—

Ryu was forced to step back when a half-formed, green spear narrowly missed the shoulder of his knife arm. It flew on and hit the bone-construct next to Asher instead. Though Asher’s beast didn’t crash to the floor, the hit seemed to drop the spell on it. It kicked Asher free, and the boy was in motion within a breath like he had been waiting on this moment his entire life.

‘Sto—’

Silvah called on every speck of cold left within her, discarding all her doubts, knowing this was her last chance to stop him. The final dregs of her power rattled against the spell chaining her down and it broke like glass. She threw herself with a yell, slamming her fist into Ryu’s mouth before he could cast his ability and sent his front teeth flying. But not before his foot smashed into her stomach.

She groaned and dropped to the floor in the fetal position. He’d hit her open wound on her left side dead centre. She could no longer breathe, and her mouth snapped open and shut like that of a beached trout.

‘…egg!’

Asher’s voice barely reached her. She rolled over, managing a single gulp of air that her body used to cough and deposit a fat glob of blood on the auditorium floor.

She looked up.

Asher had mounted Ryu and was doing his best to keep the other from speaking. He punched and poked at the boy’s eyes. Somehow, he found a way to take off his shoe and forced it into Ryu’s mouth.

The bone creature that had kicked Asher free from Ryu’s spell brandished its spear, the thick shoulder pads protecting it gleaming in the spotlights of the theatre hall. It aimed the point of its weapon at Ryu’s spirit beast, who had risen off its perch of corpses to help its master. Barrelling through the air, the wingless dragon opened its large mouth, making to swallow Asher’s construct whole. But the necromancer’s creature used its spear as a pole, vaulting over the dragon. Then it took a page out of its summoner’s book. Its spears drilled into the beasts’s flesh, acting as an anchor and allowing it to cling onto the ethereal dragon’s back. It was like an ant climbing a giant, and the dragon slammed itself into the walls of the auditorium to free itself of the pest as it stabbed its spear into the beast’s hide repeatedly.

Though the struggle was in their favour, it wouldn’t last. Asher had no more undead soldiers walking around, and one wouldn’t be enough to kill the dragon. The fight would turn once the beast freed itself.

Asher realised this, too. He locked eyes with her, taking one of Ryu’s punches on the chin without fazing.

‘The egg, Silvah. Grab it—’

His pupils went wide.

Silvah followed his gaze.

Ryu had been holding the egg at the start but must’ve dropped it when Silvah struck him in the mouth, because it was right in front of her. Previously, the crack running down the middle of the rugged, layered scales was just that. A crack. It could no longer be called such. Walking down the oval-shaped hole was a row of wickedly sharp teeth. They separated. Darkness greeted her from within, and two red orbs flashed to life in the blackness—

14.

His face had fallen.

She couldn’t tell why. In fact, she knew she knew him but couldn’t remember his name, or what she had been doing here in the first place. She watched in mute silence as another person threw the man whose face had fallen off. There was no feeling inside her chest. Her limbs felt cold, too, and it wasn’t the strange type of cold that she had been able to call upon for power this entire night.

Above her, the faded, victorious cry of a large beast crawled over her. That was bad, she knew. But Silvah—ah, yes. That was her name—simply stared at the ceiling. The cold threatening her existence halted. There was someone standing over her.

The spotlight falling through her corporeal form was nothing less than magic. It was her sister.

The one that should be dead.

‘I wanted to see you.’

Had she spoken the words or Asha? She couldn’t tell. Maybe because the distinction didn’t matter.

Asha smiled and put her forehead on Silvah’s. She pulled on something, then. That small bit of energy she had siphoned during their previous fight. It gathered, a tiny legion of cold versus other cold. Where the two met, the foreign invasion was banished to a thousand years of imprisonment. The sentence expanded and circulated through her entire body, and soon feeling in her limbs returned. Asha raised her head and stared at her.

Right then, Silvah was back. Back on the couch in her father’s living room as she read Asha stories after her bedtime. Those were the nights that appeared to last forever. The two of them enjoying themselves.

Yet no matter how late it got, their father always returned home, the sound of the front door opening their cue to silently run up the stairs and go to bed.

It was with this finality that Asha started to fade.

‘Don’t go.’

She went.

Her own cold, the one she was born with, gathered all of its killer cousin near her heart and surrounding it like a cage. Then both feelings vanished.

This time when Silvah heard cackling from the viewing box, she knew it was real.

‘Celestra be damned,’ Ryu said.

He threw the shoe to the side and hobbled over.

‘A perfect vessel.’

Ryu hadn’t used his spell, but it was as if he had—Silvah was stuck in animation.

Asher tried to get up, but Ryu’s summon descended on the podium with a vengeance and blocked his path. The Ryūjin-kai boss grinned. Energy gathered in his free arm.

‘It’s not personal, Silvah,’ he said again, repeating it like a mantra.

Then for what must’ve been the thousandth time tonight, something exploded.

Ryu shied back as he watched pieces of stone and glass rain down from the fourth floor.

‘That’s enough, kiddo.’

Miles had appeared next to her.

Silvah should’ve been mad, or at least questioned where the guy had been, but she couldn’t bring up anything except relief.

Smoke cleared up around the hole blown into Shisui’s viewing box. The man was still sitting at the same table, shuffling cards. Rose was seated to his left and there was someone else to his right that Silvah couldn’t quite see except for a blindfold.

Shisui turned, caught her eye, and gave her a sneaky upward turn of the lips. He motioned to his ears and turned back to his game.

‘Leave this place,’ Miles said. ‘You’ve caused enough destruction.’

Ryu looked up at the fourth floor. Shisui didn’t even deign to crane his neck and the boy was left gritting his teeth.

He cast a last glance at Silvah and showed her that pretty smile of his.

‘I’ll be seeing you again, soon.’ His dragon made way and showed an Asher barely capable of remaining on his feet. Ryu made to turn, walking towards Asher.

‘Didn’t I tell you?’ Miles spoke up, his voice ringing through the hall in a way that shouldn’t be possible naturally. ‘You’ve caused enough destruction for the night.’

Ryu’s head snapped around. That he was not in possession of an ability capable of killing with a gaze became clear. He descended the podium and stormed off. His dragon dissolved more with every step until eventually the beast was no more.

The tension didn’t drop till Ryu was out of view.

Asher collapsed, Silvah didn’t because she was already laying down, and Miles sighed.

‘Let’s go to the college,’ he said, and the last thing Silvah saw before the dark took her was his hand touching her arm.