— Earlier that night...

Mira was the only other assassin from Jiraya who’d survived the escape from the harbor. She’d been rested on a bed in one of the upper rooms of Damian’s brothel, her whole torso wrapped in bandages. All she could do was sit up, eat, and lie back down to sleep.

Amani entered the room with a steaming bowl, closing the door behind her and locking it. As she pulled a chair to sit beside Mira, Mira obediently sat up and waited for her to get settled.

Amani handed over the bowl, sparing only a cursory glance to check on Mira’s overall condition: trembling arms, slight difficulty in breathing, but she was otherwise fine.

Mira held up the bowl with two hands, and yet, her arms slowly dropped. Still too weak. She let the bowl come to a rest on her lap. She’d have to be content with having just enough strength to lift the spoon.

As she ate, Amani stood up and moved to a nearby table where a black rod, an empty stone bowl, and a pitcher of water were prepared. She poured a small amount of water into the bowl, then she took the rod and ground it against the bowl as with a mortar and pestle, letting the action lap up water as she did.

Persisting with it for ten minutes, the ground-up pigments from the rod mixed with the water, turning it into ink. It had a rich and deep consistency, as if one were staring into the night sky.

She left the bowl of ink and moved back to Mira, who had finished eating by then. After taking away her bowl and placing it on the desk, she slowly unraveled Mira’s bandages, removing layers and layers of it and coming up with rolls and bundles of dirty gauze, until Mira’s back was fully exposed. It was slashed with new and old scars and dotted with fresh burn marks and healed-over punctures from stray grapefire and flying splinters.

Amani retrieved the bowl of ink. With a thin calligraphy brush, she painted lustrous black glyphs over Mira’s wounds. There were nine glyphs, in all, arranged in a cross pattern that took up the whole of her back.

That was the backbone of the healing spell. It would work as it was, yet she continued to fill in the empty spaces with all the ink she had left. She made sure to ink every wound she saw, connecting them all into an intricate, organic mess of lines that gave the impression of blood vessels — arteries, veins, capillaries and all — ultimately leading back to the glyphs, which all connected to the glyph in the very center of it all.

As she worked, the first lines of ink she’d laid down started to dry, soon turning into pretty shades of dark brown and orange.

The last dot was inked after half an hour, and they waited half an hour more for them all to surely dry.

“It’s dry now,” Amani said.

“I’ll start,” Mira replied. She closed her eyes and emptied her mind. Her heartbeat slowed to a crawl, and a deep quiet filled the room. It didn’t take long before her heart wasn’t even beating anymore, putting herself in a state between life and death — and choosing life.

The true will to live was a pure one, unadulterated by secondary concepts and desires, and unconcerned with fear, defeat, victory, or glory. Even without magic, a pure will to live spurred men with the will to act, to charge forward and choose cooler flames in a city of infernos.

The healing spell painted on Mira’s back sucked in all that power and channeled it into putting her body back together.

Amani had been helping her with this for a few nights, but she was still amazed by the glow that the spell gave off. Ordinary people could only manage ordinary meditation, after all, and the effects were proportionally weaker — but for Mira to go ahead and stop her heart, just how far was she willing to go to get better?

After counting to twenty, Amani pressed her hand over Mira’s heart, closed her eyes, and hummed a song. It put her into a trance-like state, giving her all the focus in the world ...

— To deliver an electric shock.

Mira jolted and gasped while Amani shook her own head and slapped her face to fully wake herself from the trance. The two looked at each other. “Good work,” Amani said, letting out the tension with a sigh. Mira nodded, though still steadying her breathing.

Amani helped dress her wounds again, and Mira was back to being a mummy.

“Priestess, may I ask?” Mira said.

“What is it?”

“Where’s the commander?”

“I don’t know.” She might have sent him to his death. “I’m sure he’ll be back soon.”

There was a knock on the door. Mira weakly took out a pistol from under her pillow, while Amani was already holding a deck of cards. Humbled by getting beaten up by some random kidnapper, she was going to fight as a death priestess, at least until Jon could keep his promise.

“Hey, it’s me! Do you have a wash basin I could borrow?” Damian’s muffled voice came from the other side of the door. What he’d said was, in fact, code for “Someone’s hurt.”

Amani hurried to the door and unbarred it, yanking it open. Damian hurried inside, followed by Jiraya, his left arm in a sling.

“What happened?” Amani asked.

Jiraya said nothing and handed her a folded up piece of paper.

She pinched it between her fingers, and though he’d meant for her to open it, she dreaded to. How could she, when Jiraya was wearing such a grim look?

Well, she just had to.

Unfolding the document, the first thing that greeted her — and shook her to the core — was a 101-glyph spell formation. Five spiral arms twisted into the center, where the 101st glyph gluttonously devoured all mana.

This wasn’t a fire spell. Those glyphs were written with a brush.

“Where did you get this?” She didn’t even look to Jiraya. She couldn’t tear her eyes from the document.

“The lord’s safehouse,” Jiraya replied.

Amani’s hands trembled. “The lord was responsible for this? All of this?”

“No,” he said. “He employs shadows who bleed black mist.”

Amani finally looked at Jiraya. His arm was in a sling. As an accomplished swordsman, very few people could beat him at his peak, not even when they came at him all at once.

He might not have been at his peak now, but he should’ve recovered enough to infiltrate the Kittari palace and take the king’s head. The only enemies who could do this to him would be either extremely skilled — or suicidally numerous, and when it came to suicidally numerous...

“Those shadows?” she asked.

Jiraya just nodded. They had surrounded him and nearly overwhelmed him not too far from here. If it weren’t for Damian and his men, he might’ve been minced meat on the pavement.

‘Minced meat’ was no exaggeration. These things were created from human bodies, but they, themselves, weren’t — couldn’t possibly — be human.

If your soul were ripped out, beaten into submission, and then your body taken and its insides scooped out and replaced with mana, then your soul were shoved back into it, what were you, anymore?

The question now, though... “Why are they here?” Amani said. Not that she was expecting an answer.

It went without saying, but with the presence of defiled death cards and shadows, there was a third party squarely interested in this city, wasn’t there?

Moreover... Amani looked back at the document. “Tell me, why does the lord have a precisely specification for an assassination ritual circle?”

That wasn’t even the only thing. There were several modifications from the ritual circle she knew about, in particular in the spaces between the spirals. Priestesses would typically have to sit on mana channels in those spaces and, much like Mira, they would meditate so deeply as to stop their hearts. There were typically only a few such seats: for five spirals, there were five seats in total between them. Why weren’t there any for this one? It was just a mess of intricate squiggles. Had they found a way to use ambient mana to power it? Impossible.

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“Their target is Jon,” Jiraya said.

Amani held her breath. “Jon? W-why Jon?” There were so many other people they could kill. If their goal were political, then why not kill the king? With an assassination ritual circle, they wouldn’t even need a strand of hair from the target — just a clear image and a name was enough!

“I don’t know,” Jiraya continued. The anguish of delivering this kind of news was already beginning to show in a frown and a bowed head. He knew that Amani could feel it too: the looming regret of never having paid back a single coin for someone who’d done so much for them.

It was right then that Damian decided to break up the mood. “You’ll have to move quickly, the two of you. I’ve got my hands full with the rest of the city, but if you’re daring, I can put you on the fast track to wherever you need to go.”

Yeah, there was no way in hell he was risking his life on this one. He’d watched several of his men get killed by the same shadows who’d pursued Jiraya, and frankly, shit’s terrifying.

Neither Amani nor Jiraya expected him to be saint, anyway. “There’s other details in the document,” Amani said. She took a closer look at the marginalia and the footnotes, but, “Wow.” She shook her head, blinked her eyes, but it was still there. “The cathedral?”

“Whoa there, madame, that’s a dangerous word,” Damian remarked.

Jiraya rubbed his chin...and sighed. “That... That makes sense. I almost forgot to mention this, but I happened to listen in on the lord’s conversation with a fisherman.”

“Was he a fisherman?” Amani asked.

“Not at all.”

“What did they say?”

“They were using some kind of codespeak, but I believe they referred to the recent harbor incident at some point, saying it was regretful.”

The slave ship incident... It still sent Amani into a flurry of emotions to think about it, but those people got out, at least.

Hold on. She looked at the document again — and realized something terrible.

The ordinary ritual circle she knew of was about 10 meters in diameter. Indicated in the marginalia, however, was a size of 50 meters.

What she had originally assumed as a lack of seats was wrong. The seats were just small, and there were hundreds of them.

“The slaves were supposed to be sacrifices,” she blurted. Heart-stopping meditation was just one way to draw out the will to survive, after all. Bleeding someone out was another, and though the output had messy variation, it was possible to just kill enough people to make it not matter.

“What?” Jiraya had heard of sacrificial magic, but on a scale like this? Just how badly did they want Jon dead? “But it makes sense,” he mused. “The cathedral has a large floor area, and a spell circle that large would fit inside.”

Amani furrowed her eyebrows. “But it’s the Order’s cathedral...”

“Should we involve the Order’s priestess in this? I’m sure they’ll come running and solve the problem for us,” Jiraya suggested.

“Bad luck there,” Damian interjected. “They assumed control of the cathedral, didn’t they? That means they have people in the Order’s ranks. If you, dear sir and madame, inform the priestess, and she moves the Order towards the cathedral, I’m sure those shady bastards would stir something up and throw the whole thing into the mixer.”

“Even so,” Amani replied. She’d already made up her mind. “We are outnumbered, and I doubt you or your men would be willing to sacrifice themselves.”

“That pains me to admit...”

“As someone who’s spoken to the priestess, I’ll do it. I’m sure she will react intelligently if I remind her to watch out for traitors on her side.”

The three exchanged looks, but most pointedly, Jiraya and Amani held their eyes on Damian.

He sighed. “Look, your friend there can’t move” — he pointed to Mira — “and the Order is hunting for me, so I’m staying here. I’ll have the alley boys guide you until right before the barricades, but you’re on your own after that. Best I can do.”

Amani and Jiraya expected as much.

“Priestess, commander,” Mira weakly said from the bed. The two turned towards her. “Be safe,” she said. The two nodded.

Before anything, Jiraya faced Amani. “I apologize that you have to put yourself in harm’s way.”

Amani nodded. They both knew that between them, she was the best counter for the shadows.

Damian accompanied the pair through a back exit. In the dark street outside, several men looked to their boss and his guests.

“Get them to the Order’s rear lines, would you, lads?” Damian said, running away and disappearing into the brothel before any of his men could complain.

One of the men — Damian’s personal lieutenant — stood up after him. “What — boss!” ... but he was already gone. The man sighed. He looked at the young girl and the assassin wrapped in black cloth. Easterners. He didn’t have any particular opinion of them, but so far, every troublesome thing that had happened in the past week had something to do with them.

He turned to face his subordinates. “Well, you heard the boss.”

“Seriously?” the lanky one said.

The lieutenant sighed again before facing Jiraya. “We’ll take you two corners before the closest barricade. Any closer’s too risky.”

“That’s good enough,” Amani said. The lieutenant was taken aback that she had been the one to answer, but that only meant that she was the one at the top of hierarchy, not the bulky assassin behind her. Scary.

He faced his men again. “Alright, boys! The sooner we do this, the sooner we can get back!”

With the lieutenant and his men in the lead, they left the sparsely urbanized edge of the harbor overlook and entered the densest, narrowest parts of the tenement zone. They stuck together, following each other’s silhouettes instead of relying on conspicuous lamps.

Based on the sharp shadows cast by the flares and artillery arcing over the castle in the distance, it seemed that they weren’t heading directly for it.

They paused at a corner, where one of the boys took a peek, making sure it was clear. Amani took this opportunity to ask, “Where are we going?”

The lieutenant glanced at her then turned away again, going back to scanning the roofline as he replied, “Too many patrols that way. We’ll take an Alleytunnel and get you as close as possible.”

The guy at the lead gestured for them to go, so they went.

After squeezing through a one-person-wide alley, they soon arrived in front of a run-down shed. The lieutenant knocked a 3-1-1-2 pattern on the door, and it creaked open. A pair of goggles peeked out.

“You got a ticket?” the lieutenant asked.

“Ye,” the goggles guy said. He opened the door, and the lieutenant gestured for everyone to follow him inside.

It was a small dwelling. There was a cot on either side of the door, and there was a child on one of them. An oven made of stacked bricks and a single pot was all that they had for cooking.

The goggles guy rolled up a fur carpet, revealing a trapdoor. He lifted the square lid out of the way by two handles. The lieutenant took a lantern from the floor and went into the hole, cueing everyone to follow after him.

Amani and Jiraya climbed down the steep, narrow stairs; it might be more appropriate to call it a ladder with especially wide rungs.

The light behind them vanished as the trapdoor came closed, and now the only light they had was the lieutenant’s lantern.

They followed a short tunnel to a door. The lieutenant knocked, and a viewport in the door slid open, two eyes confirming the faces of all present.

The door opened, and everyone went inside.

Aside from the group, there were three other men: one who’d opened the door, one seated by a table with playing cards in his hand, and another by a flat brick wall at the end of the rectangular room.

“How many?” the man by the brick wall asked.

“Just four, to Everson,” the lieutenant said. He faced the lanky guy. “Andy, you did good tonight. Stay here.”

The lanky guy scratched his head, leaning against the wall. “If you say so...”

The man touched the brick wall, and an elliptical shadow grew from the center until it was the size of a person.

“Peter, let’s go,” the lieutenant told his other subordinate, then he faced Amani. “We’ll check if it’s clear, then we’ll come back.”

The two men vanished into the swirling shadow portal. Neither Amani nor Jiraya had ever seen anything like it. Even if it was easy to surmise that it was some kind of portal, the fact that they couldn’t see through to the other side was unsettling.

After a moment, the lieutenant stuck his head out. “It’s clear. Come on out.”

First Jiraya, and then Amani, stepped through the portal. There was only a brief moment of darkness, as if a flying dragon eclipsed the sun for a split second, but other than that, it just felt like stepping into a different room.

They were in a much wider alley now, much closer to the city’s center. The sounds of gunfire were much louder, and they could feel the explosions thump in their chests.

The whistling of a rocket froze everyone on their feet, and when the rocket hit the adjacent block, they could hear the misfortunate building’s rubble raining back down, too.

“Gods damn it, this is why I didn’t want to get close,” the lieutenant muttered. “Well, this is about as close as we’re able.” He pointed down the alley. “Turn left there, then right. That should get you to the closest checkpoint from here.”

“ ‘Should’ ?” Jiraya asked.

“Maps are a couple of days old. The place could be bombed to bits by now, who knows?”

Watch your backs out here — the lieutenant and his subordinate disappeared into the shadow portal. It shrank until it was just a whispering dot, flickering into nothing like a candle flame snuffed out.

Amani and Jiraya followed the man’s directions and found the checkpoint he’d mentioned. There were cheval-de-frise and hastily built palisades, forming a funnel to a rolling gate.

Behind the rolling gate was an empty guard tower. The gate itself was shut closed.

“Priestess” —

“I know.”

Amani was already holding several cards. Jiraya’s right hand was on his sword’s hilt.

After a tense moment of scanning their environment, however ... nothing happened.

“Jiraya, take a peek over the gate. Whoever was here might have already moved on.”

He nodded and walked toe-heel to the righthand side of the gate. Jumping up, he grabbed the top edge of the gate with his right hand and slowly hoisted himself up — just enough to take a peek.

There, amid the camp’s three tents, were bodies stacked like fuel for a pyre. Each one wore the white cloth of the Order, now drenched in red. Whoever killed them weren’t content in just killing them; why were they stacked like a pyre?

He let go and landed on his feet, returning to Amani. To her questioning eyes, he only shook his head. She sighed.

Over Amani’s shoulder, however, he spotted a blur — approaching fast!

He knocked Amani aside and unsheathed his sword, stepping aside and striking at the shadow in the same motion. The shadow parried away his strike.

Amid all this, Amani had fallen to the ground, yet she never let go of her cards. As the shadow parried Jiraya’s strike, she saw an opportunity with the shadow’s back facing her, and she flicked a card at it, striking it in the head.

It was just a paper card, so it harmlessly bounced off the shadow’s cloak — but the shadow dropped like a puppet with its strings cut. The card had sucked away the tortured soul trapped in its body, removing the thing that ultimately operated a spell in the shape of a human body.

The shadow hit the ground first, dissolving into mist and leaving behind its clothes. The card fluttered over it soon after, resting over the deflated cloak. Frost crept out from the center of the card, consuming it — and it shattered into glitters.

“It only moved now,” Amani remarked.

“It must’ve been ordered to kill witnesses,” Jiraya said. “It only moved once I saw what was behind the gate.”

“There’s only one.”

Jiraya had the same thought. These almost never operated alone, which meant that its mission here wasn’t considered critical by whoever controlled them.

With the pile of bodies Jiraya had seen behind the gate, it was clear that there was a main force moving around — but why? Were they in support of the Houses? The fighting ahead hadn’t gone any quieter, which meant they weren’t directly participating in the fight.

Targeting Jon, and now targeting the Order — what was their objective?

“We need to find the Order’s priestess soon,” Amani said. “They might be after her.”