With her hand buried deep in the drotling’s mouth, Akemi did the only thing that made sense—she cast [Knife Fingers].

Three razorblades shot through the creature’s cheek, and it screeched, the pain distracting enough that Akemi was able to remove her blood-gushing hand. As she did, she yanked the blades back out of its cheek, then in one fluid motion, dragged them across the creature’s neck. Leathery skin opened, and soil spilled out where blood should have been.

Feeling lightheaded, she scuttled backward on the floor. She expected the drotling to drop dead not a moment later, but instead, it began piling the dirt from the ground back into its open wound. It shoved its stuffy little fingers into the hole in its neck, packing in soil like it was potting a plant. It seemed to regain energy as it did so.

“What the hell?” Akemi strained, looking at Bamo for answers.

“Your insect ball,” Bamo shouted. “Cast it!”

So she did, pointing her hand toward the creature as it regained its footing. Red hornets raced toward the drotling, laying siege to its gum-wrapper of a body. Soil showered through the air in puffs, and Akemi brought the collar of her shirt around her mouth and nose in a makeshift mask, not wanting to breathe in the drotling’s corporeal particles.

After a minute, the dusty gore settled into a mulch pile on the floor. It quivered for an instant before Bamo stomped his shoe down on it, digging his heel in. His wings were in flight, his fur standing on edge—he looked equal parts disgusted and afraid. Akemi felt much the same.

He stood on top of the mulch for several more seconds than required, until finally signing out a breath.

“I can’t believe you killed him,” Bamo muttered. “Did you even think for a second what will happen when we come back up to the surface? They’ll know.”

He sounded more irritated with her than usual. Unfortunately—with her pulse in a frenzy, and blood still leaking from her hand—she wasn’t in the mood to be polite.

Akemi scoffed. “What was I supposed to do? Let it take my hand off?”

Only when the words escaped her lips did she realize that her hand was still gushing blood. The pain seeped into her nervous system not a moment later, as the adrenaline coursing through her began to fade. It was a terrible, piercing pain. No amount of practice in combat here made injuries like this easier—she only got better at dealing with them.

With a groan, she removed her shirt, struggling it over her shoulders with only a single hand.

“Help me tie this into a tourniquet,” she said gruffly.

Despite his annoyance, he did. He must have heard the urgency in her voice. Or rather, the lack of it. She was feeling lightheaded, her limbs beginning to numb.

Squatting at her side, he wrapped the shirt around her several times, then tightened it with a pull from his teeth. After that, he reached into his satchel and extracted a tub of green paste. Akemi knew the kind. It was a healing salve. It didn’t actually need to be applied on top of the injury—just on any part of the skin. He took her hand in his and gently scrubbed it on; it lathered like a soap, then faded.

She inhaled, her lungs expanding just a bit more than they did a second ago. With the bleeding stopped and the salve applied, she could feel her health regenerating.

Despite having applied more than enough salve, Bamo didn’t let her hand go. She met his eyes, confused and annoyed, and he replied with a strange, serious look.

“What—”

She stopped.

She realized that it wasn’t anger he was pointing at her—but caring. Gentle but firm caring. The irritation in his tone earlier; he had been worried about her. This was the closest blow the two of them had faced since their run in with the archer, and it had shaken him. Not because his life had been at risk, but because hers had.

A viciously uncomfortable feeling buried itself in Akemi’s stomach. Anger she could understand—she had been reckless, not to mention pulling him along through increasingly dangerous circumstances—but this? He had no business giving a shit about her. He was some toddler playing in the kiddie pool, and she kept throwing him in the deep end. Was the kid stuck with Stockholm Syndrome?

Still, no matter how much she tried to make light of it, that burning feeling in her stomach persisted. He cared if she lived or died. He wasn’t just tagging along with Akemi for the money—although she was sure that helped—but because he was getting attached.

Akemi withdrew her hand from his hastily, blinking back emotion.

“Thanks,” she said, but it was hard, stony. He looked back up at her like a puppy dog.

She brushed by him, stepping over Mort’s remnants until she was at the lip of the pool. Then she took off her hardwon turnshoes, not eager to wet them in the water.

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“Do you think the water’s safe to step in?” she asked Bamo, without turning to face him.

Unfortunately, the obelisk was just far enough away that she couldn’t just reach over and take the envelope. Normally, she would have forced Bamo to tread the water himself—always leave the dangerous work to the lackeys; they’re like a villain's stunt double—but the annoying ball of emotion in her chest prevented her from doing so.

“Wait,” he paused, then came by her side. He had grabbed another small container out from his pouch. This one was a potion bottle, filled to the brim with a dark purple liquid. His voice had regained some of its usual chipperness when he said, “I think I can test it. I bought this off the Street Magister. It lets you test liquids for toxins.”

“You bought something from the Street Magisters that I didn’t ask you to buy?”

Akemi felt a strange pride at that. Was she rubbing off on him?

He shrugged sheepishly. “I had a bit of extra cash. I bought this, and a few tests for mimics, too. A powder that you can throw at them to make them sneeze.”

She almost laughed, but she suppressed it. She knew it was stupid to suppress your own laughter—what kind of miserable person did that?—but she couldn’t knock the feeling that she didn’t want him to see her. She wanted to board her emotions up in an inflexible cage. She had made enough trades to get where she was now, standing in front of her ultimate prize. She wasn’t going to get all soft right at the finish line.

So instead, she turned her head and watched the water. It was turning the same color as the liquid in Bamo’s bottle: dark, festering purple.

“So, is it working?”

“I think so.”

“You think so or you know so?”

He narrowed his eyebrows and stared down at the liquid. “I know so.”

“Good.”

She gingerly placed a single toe in, waiting for another bite of festering pain, but none manifested. It seemed this was genuinely just water—holy water, if the drotlings were to be believed—but water nonetheless.

She grinned.

With a few practiced steps through the shallow water, she was already at the obelisk.

Her heart rabbeted in her chest as she gently lifted the paperweight, revealing the envelope underneath. This is it, she thought, goosebumps running up and down her arms. She didn’t even wait to exit the pond to look at it, she was so eager; she tore carefully through the casing, unveiling the letter stowed inside. It bore the same stamps and heading as the one she found in the Viscount’s office.

But instead of words on the page—it was just a symbol.

A rune.

It was an incredibly detailed rune. Dozens of interlocking symbols ran down the radius of the circle, all inked in red. The symbols themselves wouldn’t be difficult to reproduce, she thought immediately; they were mostly circles with inner circles, or intersecting lines that looked like T’s and F’s. Anyone with a steady hand and enough practice drawing runes could manage.

Especially someone like Pyre.

The thought came at her, unbidden, but she tossed it aside—she didn’t need Pyre for this. Any skill she’d ever needed in life she had learned on her own, and rune drawing would just be another one to add to the collection.

Her eyes fell to the end of the page, where a singular line of text was scribbled.

Rune of Heroic Consumption

She swallowed. A feeling like power trembled through her.

This was the one. This was going to take her to the top.

“Got what you were after?” Bamo said gently, tearing her eyes away. He seemed curious, but more so concerned.

And god—he was so innocent, so unbeknownst to the amount of power she was holding in her curled fist. And he won’t find out, she reminded herself. No one would. No one but the heroes when they reached the Immortal Marketplace.

“Sure did,” she said, finally, and put the scroll back into its envelope before taking it into her inventory. It was so light it barely moved the number up. “Alright, bat, it’s time to go. The other drotlings are going to start wondering where Mort went off to.”

Bamo nodded, then chided, as she began stalking out barefoot, “Don’t forget your shoes.”

—

“Up ahead. You see—just where that smoke is coming from.”

“Shit, is that a drotling enclave?”

“Looks like it.”

“Gods. Not sure Vokasha is paying us enough to raid a whole village of those soilsots.”

One of the carriage’s wheels rolled over jagged rock, and the boxes in the backseat jumped—and Pyre with them. She groaned as her head hit the top of the vehicle, red hair springing out of her cloaked head. She hastily shoved it back in as the grunts in front turned to look at her.

The driver—Blvar—was a Kerbes classic: veins popping out of muscled arms, runes running up every inch of skin. And even more classic: they weren’t effective runes etched into his skin, just show-off ones, dead and useless.

Pyre could tell because she knew exactly which runes they were trying—and failing—to imitate; on his upper arm, there was Vicious Vengeance, a rune that caused the attacker to feel the same pain as the attacked. In its correct form, it was a skull with an arrow that curved through both eyeballs. In Blvar’s imitation, the arrow only went in the right socket.

And just above his wrist was, of course, a rune she herself had become terribly acquainted with. One that made her skin crawl with frustration just to look at.

The Sigil of Undeath.

An obvious fake. She didn’t even have to look at it to know.

For some people, they didn’t care if they wasted skin on non-working runes. Having a powerful-looking rune on you was helpful enough with intimidation even if they were nonfunctional. And while Pyre understood the utility of that, the thought of wasting her body’s canvas like that made her mad—it was like permanently robbing yourself of power.

“I say we throw the kid in first,” Blvar said, grinning wide at her. His smile was about as pretty as a pit of sludge. “You look just about as old as the drots. Maybe they’ll accept you as one of their own, and you can go in there and finish the job, eh?”

“Sounds like a great idea,” the other, Trudor, agreed. “But make sure to bring the girl’s body back with you. Vokasha wants receipt, you know? Physical evidence.”

Pyre gripped the edge of the seat, anger coursing through her.

It had been the easiest way to find Akemi, hitching a ride with the mercenaries on her tail. It was a simple equation, really. The mercs had access to resources she didn’t: Hero Squires and bounty hunting maps, carriages and escorts. And it wasn’t like their goals didn’t align—in fact, there was no secret agenda here at all. Nocturne wanted Akemi dead. He didn’t care how it was done, or who got to see the embers.

So she should have been happy, really. Their comments shouldn’t have bothered her in the least. And she definitely shouldn’t have accepted their offer for her to go alone. They were monstrously powerful, way higher level than her own. They’d deal with Akemi in a flash, and Pyre wouldn’t have even had to look her in the eyes when they did it.

But she wasn’t happy.

She was inexplicably, unexplainably… furious.

“Fine,” she said, slamming the door behind her. “Make yourselves comfortable.”