“Hold still!” hisses Canta in a loud whisper, as he tugs on a piece of metal in her leg, trying to bend it back into place.

Alleluia holds her hands to her cheeks. “Honey! You’re so deep inside of me!”

“Will you cut it out!” snaps Canta, trying to fix the broken pieces of her body. “Somebody’s going to hear us!”

After escaping the cathedral, the two of them ran down alley after alley, most of which were thankfully empty this late at night. Eventually, having reached what seemed like a more decrepit part of the city, they ducked into an old building that looks like a dusty, half-forgotten warehouse. It was pretty easy for Alleluia to break the old chain that held the back-door closed, although she didn’t know why Canta insisted on this structure in particular.

Now she lays on her stomach, and Canta kneels over her, in a position that in most situations would be considered compromising. But he’s just trying to fix up the pieces of her body that got damaged in the fall from their window. She can’t heal like he can. Any damage to her body is permanent.

It’s lucky that he got a few strength points from all of his otherwise useless leveling, and it’s more than lucky that he got a novice’s insight into clock-making from Oriol, the man with the hat.

– Too lucky to be a coincidence. Canta doesn’t believe in them anymore.

But this new theory destroys his old one. If the Demon-King is afraid of Alleluia, then why on earth would he send someone with an ability that could be used against him, if his agent failed? Maybe because the clockmaker had the best chance of destroying her? But…

Canta shakes his head. Nothing makes sense anymore, and in all honesty, he doesn’t know anything about anything, and he’s decided to simply accept that.

He presses down on the small, metal pipe, which was jamming a larger gear in her side. It pops back out of the way.

“- Ah~!” she squeaks.

“Shut it!” says Canta, feeling his face get red. He’s pretty sure that she isn’t even able to feel anything in her mechanicals, only on the surfaces of her synthetic skin. She’s just doing it to mess with him.

She looks back at him with a scowl and then turns her head away in a huff, crossing her arms in front of herself on the floor. “Rude.”

Canta sighs. “Sorry. You’re right. I’m just freaking out about this. What the fuck?” he asks. “I mean, what the fuck? You know?” He fumbles around with the mechanical workings on her back. A lot more of her had gotten bent out of shape from the fall than he had thought. Clockwork is delicate, he supposes. “What the hell was that?”

She looks back at him, but then sighs, facing back forward. “They’re evil, magic-fingers.”

“Don’t call me that,” says Canta, his eyebrow twitching. She laughs, taking the extra step of making his life harder than it already is by starting to wiggle from side to side beneath him. “Will you cut it out! I’m going to lose a hand!”

“You don’t have to use your hands,” she suggests, but then she starts laughing.

Canta grabs her sides to hold her still. “Shh! You animal! Someone’s going to hear us!” He looks around before returning to his work. “We need to get out of the city.”

“Yes,” agrees Alleluia. “But I don’t think they’ll let us use the gate.”

“I’m the sin-eater. You think? Aren’t most of the people on my side?”

She shrugs. “Maybe. But that won’t matter if they have a few soldiers to stuff you into a carriage and drag you back.”

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

“Drag us back,” corrects Canta.

“No, I think they’ll kill me this time. It’d be too risky for them to bring me back now.”

Canta looks at her and sighs, prying a small lever back to the side. “You know. Sometimes I wonder if you’re playing dumb with me.” He leans down, checking that it’s sitting right. “You didn’t know what stars were, but with stuff like this, you’re on the ball.”

“A secret is what makes a woman, Can-ta,” replies Alleluia.

Canta sits upright, wiping the sweat off of his forehead. Standing up with a foot on either side of her, he starts turning the crank on her back. “Honesty is what makes a relationship,” he replies, and she stares at him for a second. Realizing that she’s been beaten, she simply smiles and looks away.

“My husband is so clever.”

“We’re not married,” sighs Canta. “Why do you always say that?”

“Well when are you going to ask me to get married?” she fires back.

“I already asked you down in the dungeon, you rust-bucket,” quips Canta.

She starts laughing, and then Canta does too. It’s all rather absurd. He steps back, letting go of the crank. Grabbing Alleluia’s hand, he helps her up as she rises to her feet. “Thank you,” she chimes.

“Yeah,” says Canta, looking away, feeling embarrassed now that they’re face to face again. “Anyways, Alleluia, if we can’t go through the gate, we’ll have to go over it, or under it.”

“I don’t think going over it will work,” she explains, twisting her body around. “We’d have to drop down again from the wall and I don’t know if I won’t break this time.”

“Then we have to go under it, and there’s only one way to do that. But I figured such a refined, high-born lady like yourself would be too delicate for it,” jokes Canta.

“Will you carry me?”

He rolls his eyes. “Lose some weight fir -” He stops himself, seeing her yellow glass eyes narrow themselves into a deathly glare. “Sorry. I was being a dick again.” Canta, still holding her hand, pulls her away through the warehouse. “I’ll carry you next time, when I’m stronger.”

“You promise?” she asks expectantly.

“I promise,” he sighs, knowing that there’s no turning back now. Then again, this was a secret, masochistic desire of his anyway. It’s why he was doing so many push-ups and squats to begin with, not that he’s going to admit that to her. Canta notices that his personal limitations, while oddly distributed, are still very much present.

The two of them move through the empty warehouse before reaching a small door on the other side. Turning the simple latch, Canta opens it and peeks inside the little room. There was a reason he had chosen this building as their hide-away, it wasn’t just because it had the best looking door.

Canta had been paying attention during his lessons and, despite not knowing the name of the old man who had educated him all of these weeks, he silently promises that he will cleanse a few sins in his name, because the information that he had taught him might just be what saves them.

He shakes his head, wondering how much useful information he has thrown away because he didn’t pay attention when Valenti was talking.

“What’s this?” asks Alleluia.

“It’s the drain room,” explains Canta. As part of his education on military tactics, logistics were discussed, and as a part of logistics, warehouses were talked about, and then finally, as a single side-sentence hardly of any relevance at all to the topic at hand, the old man mentioned that every industrial warehouse in the world has a drain-room. Given the abundance of alchemists among the professional artisans of the economy, it isn’t uncommon for thousands if not hundreds of thousands of potions to simply expire and go bad every year in transit and in storage. These concoctions could grow highly unstable and then, in many cases, become dangerous.

“- So every warehouse has a drain room, where they pour out expired potions,” explains Canta, telling her all of this, as if he had known it for his entire life. “It should feed into the tunnels below the city. But it’s going to be messy.”

Alleluia claps her hands together once in delight and holds them against her cheek. “You’re so smart!”

“I know,” says Canta, matter of factly as he pulls on the grate to try and lift it. It doesn’t budge. He tries again. Alleluia walks over, grabbing the metal bars and lifting them up with ease.

“I loosened it up for you,” says Canta, rolling his eyes.

“You sure did, Can-ta,” she chimes.

“Huh?” he asks, having the feeling that they were talking about different things. Canta decides to ignore that statement and to get his mind back on track. “Hold on, let me go first,” he says, pointing to the side. “Grab a lantern from the wall.”

He grabs the edge and lowers himself down as far as he can go, before letting go of the edge. Canta falls for a second, sure that there should at least be a stream of clean water here by the grate, if nothing else.

Sure enough, he splashes down a moment later. The fall isn’t that long, easily doable, even for someone who can’t regenerate. A trickle of water runs along his feet, but hardly rises past his toes. It’s just enough run-off to wash any potions down into the sewer. It’s important. Leaving stagnant potion-goo down here to collect could be bad, especially if some of them got mixed up and exploded.

Canta scratches his head, realizing that he really has learned a lot.

“Okay! Come on down!” he calls up to her. Canta makes his first mistake by looking up to see if she’s coming down after him. Then he makes his second and ultimately fatal mistake by admiring the view from below for just a second too long.

His bones are crushed into a fine dust as she lands on top of his head.

By the time he wakes up, held by her in one arm and the lantern in the other, he realizes that something new and troubling has awoken inside of himself again. He can’t help but wonder if his brain hasn’t gotten pretty messed up from all of this dying. Or maybe that’s just who he is as a person — messed up?

Canta blinks, looking up at her. “You know, I like you a whole lot.”

“I know, pancake,” she beams, setting him down. They seem to be in some kind of sewer tunnel. Thankfully, this still just seems to be normal drainage and not an actual sewer. Yet. The two of them stop, looking around the area that is illuminated by lantern-light.

“Which way do we go now?” asks Alleluia.

Canta looks around. The space they are in is shaped like a ‘Y’ and they stand in the middle of it, facing upwards. There are three paths. The one behind them, which they had come from. Then there is one on the left, where the clear-water seems to run.

He turns his head, looking at the rightward branching path. There is a pipe adorning the wall, leading down the tunnel.

“Come on, this way,” says Canta.

“You’re such a romantic,” coos Alleluia, clearly trying to fluster him again as she so likes to do. Canta narrows his eyes, ready this time for this newest provocation.

“You know it,” he replies, grabbing her hand and pulling her after him as they make their escape.