At around the same time that Amani and Jiraya moved with the Order, and Jon was fighting with Bowyer, Alyssa and Wiz popped out of a manhole between two fire walls somewhere in town. Wiz came out first, turning around and offering a hand for Alyssa. She didn’t take it, though. “I can climb just fine,” she said.

Wiz sighed. Seemed the young lady still didn’t trust him. Well, he didn’t want to push it.

“I didn’t think there were any tunnels under the castle,” Alyssa remarked as she nudged the manhole cover back into place with her foot. She was wearing a new pair of magic goggles, “borrowed” from the castle.

“Oh, this one’s new.” Wiz put a finger to his chin. “Dug two years ago, I believe.”

Explains why it wasn’t on any of the Theater’s maps — she wouldn’t say that aloud around him, though. More importantly, that created another problem.

“Jon wouldn’t know these ones, then,” she said. “He’ll probably come out of a backdoor near the northern or eastern sections.”

Wiz sighed. “That’s a far walk for my old bones... We’re a tad southwest of the castle.”

“You can fly, can’t you, old man?”

What did he ever do to her? “Ever heard of mana arthritis, young lady?”

Alyssa rolled her eyes. The old man had been complaining the whole way here. Even if he was a powerful mage, just getting anywhere felt like a babysitting mission more than anything else.

She turned to face him. “Well, I’m leaving you behind” —

Wiz’s hand was raised, a fire bullet accumulated in his palm and pointed straight at her — no, past her?

She didn’t have the reflexes to lean away from the fire bullet that zipped past her face. The glow of the fire bullet was enough to illuminate the approaching figure behind Wiz: someone wearing a wooden mask, clad it tattered robes, and wielding a wooden stake, poised to strike.

A gun flew out of her holster and hovered beside her, firing once, lighting up the whole of the alley with the muzzle flash — and nailing the figure in the head.

Both attackers fell dead miles away from their targets. Alyssa and Wiz turned away from each other, scanning their environment, but there weren’t any more. All they saw were the dissolving bodies of the shadows.

“What were those?” Alyssa muttered.

“Fast, strong...fragile,” Wiz remarked. “First I’ve seen of them. Could be special golems, but I’ve never seen one dissolve into thin air like this.”

More guns floated around Alyssa. “We’re fetching Jon. I don’t like this situation.”

Wiz grunted in affirmation.

They decided on gunning for the castle’s south gate before moving clockwise around the perimeter to search for Jon. They exited the alley, quickly finding a road leading straight to the south gate.

It was dark, except for the burning husk of a building they passed on the way. The sounds of fighting were still around them, but not as fierce as it had been early on. The artillery slugging match had long stopped, and now only some illumination flares still hung in the sky.

The south gate ahead of them should have been the site of the fiercest fighting, but there wasn’t any sound from that direction — except for a man’s shout.

“Make a run for it!”

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Alyssa and Wiz hid by the side of the road as several riflemen dashed past them. There was more gunfire ahead, on top of a few screams, some defiant, some desperate.

Alyssa dashed ahead, hoping to find a survivor and ask them what’s happened.

The road opened up to the plaza before the south gate. At the moment, it was the smoking outcome of a battlefield. Fires and magic lanterns lit up the fortifications the Order had built facing the castle. Bodies were strewn behind mantlets and barricades, either bullet-riddled, blown to bits, or cut open by blades.

On the other hand, the castle’s gate had been blasted open. It could very well have been that the forces here had already charged straight inside, and were now fighting for control of the castle grounds.

However, the fact was that there was a rather terrified rifleman running towards Alyssa, screaming as a dozen shadows sprinted after him.

A dozen rifles, appropriated from the hands of the dead around Alyssa, lifted into the air and took individual aim — but when she willed them to fire, only seven did — figures that not ever rifle’s going to be unfired. Still, seven shadows went down, their chests and limbs exploding as if made of volcanic ash.

For the rest of the five, another dozen rifles rose into the air, but only five fired, hitting four of them.

The last shadow raised its saber, nearing its prey. For it, Alyssa chose a bayoneted rifle and threw it with all the force of Guntalker.

The rifle impaled the shadow right through the neck, even having enough leftover force to topple it over.

The rifleman didn’t even realize who’d saved him. He was about to run right past Alyssa, but she caught him by the collar like a cat.

“L-let go of me! They’re almost here!” —

“They’re dead.”

“H-huh?”

“What happened here?”

The rifleman looked at her in disbelief. He turned around and saw the dissolving bodies of the shadows. It was only then that he realized that all had gone deathly still, like the earlier carnage was just a dream —

Alyssa shook him. “Hey. Tell me.”

He turned to look at her, and it was only then that he realized that the woman manhandling him was far too young to be on a battlefield — but also smelled like powder, and her dress was burnt black around the edges. Her eyes, too, weren’t here to play games.

So, he answered. “Those things, they flooded out after we blew open the gate!” The rifleman pointed behind him with a shaky finger. “We were holding on, b-but she showed up.”

“ ‘She’ ?”

“Some kind of necromancer — I don’t know!”

As far as Alyssa knew, however, these creatures weren’t like anything a necromancer spawned. Zombies and skeletons? Sure. Fleshy megabominations? Certainly — but fragile shadows who vanish with a trace? This was no ordinary necromancer. “Why didn’t you shoot her down?”

Trauma and fire flashed before the man’s eyes, but so too, before him, were Alyssa’s floating guns: the rifles of his fallen comrades. That was when he remembered that there was one agent of Ravena who had this exact ability.

He covered his mouth before his smile could crack through. It’d be poetry and justice if dead men’s rifles shot down their killer, wouldn’t it? “Believe me” — the man’s eyes grew shot — “we tried, lady.”

Satisfied with the man’s tone, Alyssa released her grip on the man’s collar. He didn’t run away.

“Details,” she asked further.

“I” — his voice still shook, but his desires overpowered it — “bullets don’t work. The mages, they — she’d disppear just before the mages blew up wherever she was.”

“Anything else?”

“I was hiding in a crate, so I don’t know if I got this right — uh” — he looked left and right, paranoid that the shadows or the necromancer was still around — “takes about five seconds for her to turn a dead body into one of them, but it’s gotta be a body that ain’t in pieces, and it’s gotta be fresh for about a minute.”

Alyssa looked around. Most of the bodies here should be older than that. “None of these gentlemen, then?”

“No — ah, er — she can resurrect a bunch of them at once.”

“Near her? Far away?”

“From here to the,” he paused, seeing flashes of what had happened, “the gate. She … she was up there” — he pointed at the rampart to the right of the gatehouse — “turned half the brigade into those things.”

He turned around to make sure he was pointing at the right place — but right then, his face turned pale. She — she was there, right there! Why was she here? Didn’t she move on? Why did she come back?!

Alyssa clicked her tongue as she eyed the hooded figure, who remained crouched between merlons, her figure making a silhouette against the moon.

“Some of your buddies ran that way,” she told the man. “I’ll take care of this.”

“G-good luck!” His voice shook, but it was the thought that counted.

As his footsteps disappeared far behind Alyssa, she and the figure just stared at each other. Judging from what the man had said, she should be an even match against this necromancer: although Guntalker made her an effective trash sweeper, she didn’t have a way to deal with the necromancer herself, at least not one who was invulnerable to bullets, and especially not one who seemed to have something akin to short-range teleportation at her disposal.

There was a snap of a finger behind her. It must’ve been Wiz.

Wait, that’s right. The necromancer shouldn’t have seen Wiz at this point. All she had to do was stall for time, mow down every shadow that came, and let Wiz learn the necromancer’s teleport patterns and deal a critical blow.