Let it be known: Akemi might have been crazy, but she wasn’t stupid.

The moment she laid her eyes on Level 65, she didn’t think twice. She turned away from Pyre, who now seemed like a snarling shelter puppy in comparison, and thrust the hornets at the viscount with the full force of a small volcanic eruption. She didn’t wait to see if they did any damage; her turnshoes were already crunching on drotling ash faster than a motorbike, speeding in the opposite direction.

“Akemi!” Bamo yelled, catching pace with her. His expression was alarmed in a way Akemi had never seen before, his cheeks red even through the fur. “We have to hand it over!”

“Like hell we are.”

“This isn’t a time for your overinflated ego—seriously! You’re going to get us killed!”

Ignoring Bamo, Akemi risked a look behind her. She felt a sense of immediate relief to see that the viscount had remained where he was, fighting off the swarm of demonic hornets as if they were particularly tenacious fruit flies. As he waved them away with one hand, he used the other to draw a red sigil in the air with his staff.

It was a circular rune containing three smaller triangles. The moment the last stroke of it was complete, the hornets froze, twitched, then dropped dead on the ground. Akemi had never seen them do that—just die like they were actual, living insects.

Shit. Shit. Shit. Breath stuttering in her lungs, she tore away from the path and hid behind a tall tree trunk, tugging Bamo along with her. It was one of hundreds in the dense forest, providing a solid amount of camouflage. She tried to summon the orb again, but a blinking notification told her she had to wait an entire ten minutes, given that the hornets had not been deactivated, but instead destroyed.

That was not optimal. That was, she’d go as far to say, very bad.

“It’s no use hiding from me, you little worms,” the viscount cursed, his voice sounding like it was echoing on a loudspeaker. It was probably at a normal volume, but the fear it perpetuated in Akemi made it feel like it was being broadcast inside of her skin. “I was going to be nice enough and kill you quickly if you handed it over, but now I’m going to enjoy this.”

Blood pumping in her ears, Akemi’s eyes shot around the forest, looking for anything—a stone, a twig, a goddamn shovel—that might help. Instead, her eyes found bodies. Three of them, lying at the base of a tree, all mercenaries dressed in what looked like heavy, steel-plate armor. The heavy armor was really the only discernible thing about them, actually; their bodies had been totally disfigured, picked apart.

The work of the drotlings on invading outsiders, surely.

Wait.

“Bamo,” Akemi said in a hushed but urgent whisper, a sliver of naive hope hitting her. “I’m going to need you to cover your ears. Watch my back.”

Bamo gave her an utterly bewildered look as she stood and crept over to the corpses, careful to keep low in the weeds as she did so. With the tree no longer separating them, Akemi could see the viscount stalking vaguely in their direction, his teeth grinding. His ears were perked up like two straight lines, surveying.

She took another step, and accidentally broke a twig.

She winced. Damn it. The viscount’s head snapped to her, and his ears went even more rigid. His teeth stopped their chittering, and he smiled with an eerie clarity at her.

“There you are.”

He raised his staff, and a red hot beam of energy shot from the bulb of it. It seared a path of molten destruction straight toward her, frying the grass and bursting through tree bark. She made a jump for it, narrowly avoiding the death beam as it continued its course through the forest, and instead landed on top of the pile of corpses.

The litter of bodies smelled like wildly expired moldy deli meats, and if it wasn’t for the high likelihood of imminent death, she probably would have thrown up right then and there. But the viscount was rearing another attack just like the first one, grinding his teeth and painting a new sigil, so she held her breath and yanked off the helmet and the gauntlet of the knight on the top of the pile. Both detached easily from the pile of skin and bones.

She slapped the two of the steel pieces together, and they rang out with the violent cry of metal on metal. At least, that’s what she imagined it sounded like to the viscount: he immediately shuddered, his focus broken as the sigil in the air faded.

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Adrenaline rushed through Akemi and she turned to Bamo, a genuine, crazed smile on her face. The bat looked much less enthusiastic than she did; even though he had his ears pressed down, he could evidently still make out some of the sound waves.

She mouthed to him to grow up and get a move on, kicking him lightly with her shoe as she continued hammering the armor together. She could see that the viscount was plugging his ears too now, which surely worked to make the noise stop, but had the consequence that he could no longer pinpoint their location.

He was blinking around wildly and screaming his head off, casting incantations in any which direction. A few small explosions rattled in the grass around them, but nothing big enough to kill, or even truly injure. The chimera knew better than to fire off anything too catastrophic—it would risk destroying the rune he was so keen to get his hands on.

A laugh of pure joy escaped her. She couldn’t believe it, but it was genuinely working. They weren’t going to die, all because of a silly conversation Bamo and her had on the road about chimera fashion tastes. The utter glee of it carried her for almost two kilometers without stopping, as the two of them ran deeper and deeper into the forest, all the while clanging the armor together like pots and pans.

“Okay. I think we can take a breather,” Akemi said, momentarily setting down her treasured metal as she sank against the trunk of a tree. Bamo seemed infinitely more relieved to have a break from the sound than a break from the running. “God, that was close.”

“It’s still close,” he hissed, massaging his temples. “We have nowhere to run back to. Our carriage has probably been torched by Pyre. Oh, and I have the worst migraine of my entire life. If you keep that concert up, my brain just might explode.”

“That concert is actually the only thing preventing your brain from exploding,” Akemi pestered him quietly. “I can stop it for a little while, but then I’m going to have to continue. We’re only a few kilometers out. He’ll hear us once we start running again.”

Bamo looked like he was going to argue, but then he didn’t. He knew better than anyone that she was right.

“Better question is, can you still hear him?” she asked.

“A little.” Bamo swallowed, then looked up. “I think he’s in the air. He can move faster that way. He’s headed in the wrong direction, though. Away from us.”

Akemi let out a breath of relief. “Good. Then—”

Suddenly breaking out of the weeds were a pair of strong arms. That’s all Akemi knew before she was pinned to the ground, her wrists held to the dirt, a woman’s legs saddled over her midsection. A curtain of red, curly hair fell over her face, encasing her and the assailant in a staring match. And oh—Akemi’s breath hitched, anger welling in her stomach—of course.

“Be quiet,” Pyre said, pressing a finger to her lips. She looked so ridiculously serious about it, as if she had any right to be telling Akemi what to do after trying to kill her.

“[Knife Fingers],” Akemi cast, because fuck you. Blades shot out of her hands and snatched at Pyre’s wrists, and Pyre muffled the cry that spilled from her lips. Taking advantage of Pyre’s momentary falter, she ripped her arms from the other woman’s grasp, and violently pushed her off of her. Pyre stumbled back, wincing and gripping at her bleeding arms.

Akemi stalked toward her, feeling as if something was desperately trying to claw its way out of her ribcage. It was an overwhelming anger like she hadn’t felt since she was young.

“Akemi,” Bamo said, grabbing her shoulder. “Stop. He heard us. He’s—he’s turning around. I can hear him coming back this way.”

“I don’t care,” Akemi said, shrugging him off. She brought her bladed hands up, blood still dripping from the tips. She was seeing pure red as she looked down at the other woman.

Pyre raised her hands, warning flames spurting from the palms. “Listen to him,” she said quietly, clenching her jaw. “Akemi, I’m sorry. Okay? Fuck. I’m sorry I tried to kill you.”

Akemi stopped, her feet halting in the grass. Her stomach clenched.

An apology shouldn’t have given her pause, but it did. She hated that it did. But it was like she had been suddenly doused in cold water.

“I don’t think you can sorry your way out of a murder attempt,” she said anyway, trying to stir that familiar anger back into her chest.

She brandished her blades again, hanging them over Pyre’s head.

“I know. But listen,” Pyre said, sounding defeated. She fizzled the flames in her hands, so they were raised like white flags. “That rune you found. Nocturne told me about it, before he went on his… expedition. I know what it does. What it’s capable of.”

Akemi scowled. “Okay, and? Is that supposed to impress me? I know what it does, too.”

“But you don’t know how to draw runes, Akemi.”

“So? I’m sure this world has tracing paper. Do you really think I’m that stupid?”

Pyre frowned at her like she was indeed.

“Runes know the difference. They have to respect the skill of the one who drew them in order to function as intended,” she said, and it sounded unexpectedly bitter to Akemi’s ears, as if Pyre had been the victim of this reaction for quite a while. “Trust me.”

Akemi scoffed. “You’re just feeding me horseshit, now. And no, I don’t think I will trust the woman who just flung a fireball at me with no remorse. I think I’ll kill her.”

Pyre suddenly pushed herself off the ground, and grabbed Akemi’s left hand in her own, gripping it despite the blades that cut into the sides of her hands. Their faces hovered inches from each other. Pyre’s pupils were as dark as soot, and she looked at Akemi with such imploringness. Such strange, unfamiliar vulnerability.

“The viscount won’t stop until he’s hunted you down. And he will hunt you down. If not now, then in a day, or a week. He’ll hire every down-on-their-luck Hero Squire from here to Grimguard to pinpoint your exact location. Do you want to die uselessly, having done nothing to even try and save yourself,” she said, her breath hot like lava on Akemi’s face. “Or will you grow up, show me the damn rune, let me draw it in the grass, and we can sacrifice—together—a goddamn Level 65 Blood Arcanist.”

Akemi’s lungs constricted. Pyre continued before she could even get a breath out.

“You shouldn’t trust me. And I don’t trust you, either. But let me save your damn life, and then we can try and see who stabs the other in the back again first, alright?”