Jacob was given an address that brought him to the edge of the colony. He looked up at the skeleton of an old two-story warehouse, windows smashed and doors torn off. The Lich Kids were evidently not too concerned with hiding their presence. People in ghoulish face paint loitered out front and loud music played from inside the warehouse, along with strobing multicolored lights flashing through the windows.

He waited until nightfall, or at least what his System specified as such, because the sun was still shining. Indeed it would be shining for another week before night finally set over Port Longing, and then it would be dark for another two weeks. The constant brightness was the opposite problem that Jacob had had on Earth, where light had been dulled and muted by the ever-present soot clouds.

He engaged his second sight to gauge the number and locations of those inside. Visibility was good—they reeked of death, fatal essence wafting off of them like perspiration. He could make out most of the building’s layout and occupants through the walls, and after a casual stroll around the block he had a full picture. There were 24 of them, counting those outside. It was difficult to make out finer details with any clarity, but he thought he could make out weapons on many of them. It would have been a reasonable assumption to make anyway, so Jacob decided he would go in with the assumption that they were all armed.

He continued to pulse the death sense, using it only sparingly and in quick bursts to avoid straining it.

Finding the right moment to strike was not easy. The Lich Kids’ partying did not reach a natural conclusion, but carried on doggedly throughout the entire night. He sensed a few of them sleeping in various places, and most of them retreated inside as morning grew near, but the majority of them were still awake and bustling about as though their lives depended on it, or indeed as though the world was coming to an end. For how quickly information was spreading across Earth and her colonies, some people were noticeably slow on the uptake.

But they were at the very least slowing down, becoming sluggish. Addled on whatever substances they were hoarding in there, they would make for easy targets. He idly wished that he could pick out the Users from the crowd, but his new ability wasn’t that refined, at least yet, and at least with this level of coverage. He wondered if the Identify talent would work with his second sight, but that was a question for another time.

Deciding that the situation probably wouldn’t get more favorable than it already was, and not wanting gang members to start leaving as morning wore on, Jacob acted. He went around to one side of the building where there were no loiterers and scaled the side, fully engaging his death sense as he climbed in through one of the smashed windows on the second floor. The first thing that met him was the utter din of the thumping music being played, projected from bulky speakers in all corners of the warehouse and reverberating off the walls. He couldn’t imagine sleeping with this kind of noise.

Jacob guessed that this had once been reserved for administrative purposes, with several offices and an open section in the floor where one could look down on the main floor. There were fewer people up here, maybe eight, and several were obviously asleep in the offices, presumably converted into living quarters for the Lich Kids.

He snuck up to the nearest office on light feet and inched the door open before slipping inside. Inside, two men lay on disheveled mattresses at opposite ends of the room. Tools of the avid drug user lay scattered about on the unclean floor. The needles and pipes reeked of rot.

These people would probably end up killing themselves sooner rather than later, even if he didn’t intervene. But intervene he did. The two men choked on their own blood, and Jacob moved on to the next room, hands dripping. Their deaths created billowing ripples of sensation that further enhanced his awareness.

In this room, a ponderously large man was receiving a lap dance from two helper bots, sexless and stiff. The man—who was strongly addled by any of a number of substances—found the whole thing very funny and laughed uproariously while grabbing handfuls of nonexistent metal posterior. He did not look up when Jacob came in.

He regarded the man’s blocky face, huge hands, and scar-twisted lip. That guy looks villain-ish.

“Ironfoot?” he asked.

“What?” the man grunted.

By the time he looked up, Jacob had already shoved one of the helper bots aside and was on top of him. Before he could get out a cry of alarm, Jacob claimed a healthy bite out of his throat, and he managed only a strangled sucking sound as he flailed about and pawed at his own neck in some vain attempt to free up his airways as they pooled with blood.

Jacob watched him warily, knowing that a Blessing focused on physical traits could make their Users dangerous even after sustaining heavy damage. But he died like a good boy, and Jacob spat the piece he’d taken from Ironfoot back onto his chest.

The helper bots astutely identified that someone was having a medical emergency and informed him that they were calling emergency services while performing first aid on the dead man. They looked like they would be occupied with that for a while, so Jacob left and moved onto the last office.

There were three men in there; two asleep, and one leaned back against a chair, smearing a coarse powder across his gums with one finger, eyes half-lidded.

The awake one let out a yelp of surprise and fell backwards over his chair when he saw Jacob in the doorway, hands and mouth smeared with the last life of others. He imagined he must have looked like some deranged vampire. Jacob was over to him in two long strides and carved three strips of flesh out of his neck with his fingers, severing an artery that sprayed blood everywhere. He passed out in seconds.

The two others stirred from the cry, but Jacob flattened the head of the first with his boot, and delivered a heavy-cocked straight punch to the face of the second that sent the back of his head smacking off the wall. When he fell down, Jacob pierced his neck too, for good measure, and let him bleed out.

That made seven. Seventeen to go.

It doesn’t feel very sporting, killing them like this. But what am I supposed to do when it works so well?

Either way, things were about to get a whole lot more sporting. There were no more thugs upstairs, so the ones below were next, all spread out across the first floor of the warehouse, engaging in clumsy dancing and clumsier lovemaking. At least two people were passed out on the floor, people simply moving around them.

All right. I’ll count that as fifteen, then.

He swung around the overhang and let himself fall softly to the floor near the back wall of the warehouse. He had carved his way through three oblivious gang members before anyone even noticed he was there, and two more before they got around to pulling out and pulling weapons. The deaths allowed him to observe the brilliant, golden current that flowed about the men and weaved between them.

The music abruptly cut out as men shouted incoherently, trying their best to sober up enough to coordinate between themselves. They had little success at that.

He ducked, and the first gunshot went off, going wide. He sidestepped, and two more bullets missed him. He put a man between himself and the others, forcing them to stop shooting until he was dead and Jacob had already Dashed past, using his momentum to bury his knee in the face of a woman with a heavy wrench.

After what he’d been through, it wasn’t much of a challenge. Now that he was getting used to it, the lowered gravity allowed him to perform complex acrobatic feats with ease, and bouncing from target to target became his preferred method of navigation.

Three more face-painted Lich Kids came in from outside, bewildered and fumbling for weapons. Jacob retrieved a pistol from one of the corpses, took aim while strafing, and fired in rapid succession. Despite not being very familiar with guns, his points in Finesse gave him a steady hand. He felled all three newcomers in five shots.

One man hunched over and what looked like big dandelion puffballs shot out of his skin, drifting in the air around him and beginning to home in towards Jacob. The former hero, evidently. Jacob put a bullet in his head before his puffballs could reach him, and they jittered about and crashed to the floor like deflating balloons. So much for him.

A few more shots and the magazine clicked empty. Jacob threw the gun aside and kicked a man in the chest, caving in his ribs before he was sent tumbling. He ripped a knife from the hand of another and gave it right back to him, driving it clean through his nasal bone. He survived that, but lost any desire to keep fighting, just sitting on the floor and numbly prodding at the knife handle protruding from his face as though unwilling to believe that it was real.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

Despite the sweeping pleasure of feeding the death sense with the scent of fresh corpses, he found himself a little annoyed. They were making it too easy for him. This wasn’t sporting at all.

And then, suddenly, it was over. Jacob looked around, up to his elbows in blood, his breathing barely elevated. Nothing but dead and dying around him. One of the ones who had been passed out, a woman, began to stir. He was over to her in two seconds and stomped on the back of her neck, crushing her spine.

The only one left alive was the man with a knife coming out of his face. Jacob went over to him and sat down on his haunches, tapping the knife handle with two fingers.

“Hello, sir,” he said.

The man—gruff, bearded, and skull-painted—looked terrified. The fear in his eyes was something primordial; the fear of a child staring into his dark closet at night, in terror of what child-eating thing might climb out of it.

“Hello?” Jacob asked when he got no reply. “A little service, please?”

“Y… Yes?” Blood poured between his lips when he tried to speak, leaving him blubbering and coughing. Jacob knew that pain all too well.

“You got Rainbow in here?”

“Wh… What?”

“Raaainbooow. Wheeere isss ittt? Am I not speaking English?”

“Upstairs. Upstairs, I… I think.”

“What’s it look like?”

“Green… powder. Green powder.”

“Thanks.”

Rather than forcing him to suffer the indignity of a slow death, Jacob yanked the knife out of his face and stuck it back in his neck. He gargled on his own fluids for a while, fingers curled like spider legs, before going still with one last spasmodic kick.

Jacob sighed as he looked around at the carnage he had caused, death essence still hanging heavy and pooling across the floor like morning mist. He just stood there for a moment and basked in the bright glory of it. But there was still work to do, and he forced himself to continue down the checklist.

A quick count confirmed that everyone had been dealt with. Twenty-four. Disengaging his second sight, he leapt over the railing of the upper floor in one bound. He entered the office where he remembered seeing someone handling a powder. The second sight wasn’t good at telling color, at least the actual colors of objects, so he’d only know if it was the stuff he was looking for when he saw it.

Sure enough, there was a little pile of green stuff in there along with several half-full baggies. Jacob stuffed the baggies in his pocket, and was turning to leave when something caught his eye.

One of the men he’d killed, the one who had been using the powder, didn’t look like a man at all. He picked up the single lit lamp in the room and brought it over, letting the cable trail across the floor. He leaned close, holding the light up to the corpse’s face.

It was a boy.

He was about Tarim’s age, maybe even a little younger. He was pale and skinny, with short blond hair. There were dark circles under his tear-wet eyes, and his pupils were dilated so that there were almost no visible irises. His mouth was frozen in a pained grimace, lips peeled back from teeth stained green, his gums swollen and inflamed. Blood had pooled about him and soaked into his clothes, staining half his white shirt a deep crimson. He still clutched bloody fingers to his neck, as though even in death his corpse hoped to stem the bleeding.

Fear was the dominating emotion that shone through on his face. Fear of death. Fear of the attacker who’d come in the night to kill him and his friends.

He felt for a pulse. There was none. Checking with his second sight, he found the kid’s essence swirling about him, already beginning to disperse. Dead.

He had looked like a man through the second sight. He was the size of one, and the second sight wasn’t good at fine detail, either—at least not the kind of detail that separated a boy from a man.

Doesn’t matter.

Jacob dropped the lamp, stood, and walked out of the room. He went back downstairs, separated a dead man from his jacket, and threw whatever assorted guns and ammunition he could find into it. No point in letting it go to waste. He found a bottle of hard liquor that had rolled against a wall and took several healthy pulls from it, not bothering to check what type it was. Tasted like tequila. His hands left red prints on the glass. He threw the bottle away when he was done with it, hearing it smash in the distance, and left the warehouse with his makeshift sack of guns.

Despite the early hour, there were people in the dusty street outside. They looked away when he came out, but it was clear that he was the spectacle. The way they turned away, they were clearly afraid of him. And why wouldn’t they be? He’d just murdered two dozen people mostly with his bare hands. And he looked like a maniac. And he was wearing sunglasses for some reason.

Not remotely in the mood, Jacob moved briskly past them and went on his way. He ignored the lingering stares he could feel on his back. He called up Thatch to report his success and headed back to the governor’s tower.

The guards at the door, seeing his bloody clothes and black countenance, were far snappier in admitting him than last time. The governor knew of his success the moment he stepped into the penthouse, and paid him what he was due. He looked like he wanted to make a fuss about Jacob taking the guns, but kept it to himself in the end.

Jacob left the tower with Thatch, the two of them headed back to the Quickdraw so Jacob could drop off the guns, clean up, and change into new clothes. Also to pick up the Deady Bear case. He made sure to clean the bits of skin and flesh out from under his nails, and wondered idly if some of it belonged to the boy he’d killed.

Tarim was still asleep in his cabin, but when Jacob saw him next he’d no doubt be sulking over not being included. Fenris was still miserable and obsessively licking himself.

After that quick stop they went for the abode of Guppy the mystic and his apprentice, aptly named Little Guppy.

“You know, this could have been a whole ordeal,” Thatch said while they walked, the case tucked under one arm. “Sometimes I feel lucky to have someone with your moral flexibility around.”

It was not what Jacob wanted to hear at the moment. He gave a grunt of vague agreement by way of reply.

“That was a compliment, Jacob. Most people say ‘thank you’ to those.”

“Thank you.”

“There you go. And thank you for the ‘thank you’.”

Jacob snorted at that.

Thatch led them to Guppy’s place, which was little more than a squalid hovel. It certainly added to the semi-homeless fortune teller vibe, but did not do much to inspire confidence in the magical prowess of the man who dwelt within.

Little Guppy opened the door for them before they had a chance to knock. That impressed Jacob moderately, thinking that maybe the mystic had foreseen their coming, before the snot-nosed boy explained: “Saw you through the window.”

They were ushered inside the cramped dwelling, and Jacob was forced to stoop to avoid hitting his head on the low ceiling.

Guppy was directly facing the door when they came in, sitting in an old, faded recliner with popped seams. The main living space smelled like old books and was completely cluttered with random odds and ends, reminding Jacob more than a little of Cullyn’s shop.

Maybe all mystics were like that. At this point he assumed that Cullyn had at least some magical talent, considering the obviously fantastical conveyance of his shop.

Guppy himself was a man in his sixties with a shock of brittle gray hair and an uneven goatee. He was clad in nothing but an open robe covered in purple sequins, a pair of mysteriously stained underwear, and a pair of pink slippers. He had a steaming cup of something balancing on an armrest.

Yeah, it’s definitely a wizard thing. The magic must fuck with their brains or something. Or maybe only weird people learn to do magic in the first place. I don’t know what that says about me learning that rune. I guess I kind of do dress like a nutcase already…

“Do you have my drugs?” Guppy said with a grabby ‘gimme gimme’ gesture.

“You’re not even going to bother calling them your ‘gateway to the spirit realm’ or whatever?” Jacob asked.

“No. Give me my drugs, please.”

Jacob took the baggies out of his pocket and handed them to Little Guppy, who delivered them to his master. “I didn’t know how much you needed, so I got a lot. Ignore the, uh, blood on it.”

The tearful eyes of a dead boy flashed behind his eyelids. It was his blood on those bags. He blinked away the image.

Guppy licked a pinky finger and stuck it into one of the baggies. It came out with a heavy dusting of powdered Rainbow, which he smeared across his teeth. He smacked his lips thoughtfully for a few moments. “It’ll do.”

He passed the baggie to his apprentice, who repeated the same procedure, putting a hefty portion onto his teeth. Jacob and Thatch both scowled at that, but Guppy paid them no heed.

“Do you actually need this stuff for your magic, or do you just think drugs are yummy?” Jacob asked.

“I do actually need it. Mostly to steady my nerves. You know what you’re asking me to do, right?”

“We know,” Thatch said.

“Well, this is the first time anyone’s asked me to exorcise anything other than their dead grandma, so this is kind of a big deal for me. As in, there might be a big deal in my pants depending on how this goes.”

“But you’ll do it?”

Guppy nodded, tonguing at his top teeth. “With what you’re paying me? Sure.”

“What are you paying him?” Jacob asked.

“Twenty thousand flora,” Guppy supplied on his own. “And this Rainbow, well, right now it’s priceless.”

“Wow. Quite the payday.”

Maybe best not to mention I’m getting three mil. Might sour his mood a bit.

With Guppy on board and his apprentice in tow, Thatch took them to the barrier of the colony where a trio of armed guards waited for them, along with a sleek rover that had a load of spacesuits loaded in the back.

They would be going outside the bubble for the next part, just in case.

Of course, the governor didn’t know they were banishing a demon thane in their backyard. He just thought they were messing with a moderately dangerous magic item or something.

But he, along with the rest of Port Longing, would probably find out very quickly if things went wrong.