She landed harshly on the ground and made her way to the graves, seeing what one would expect. It smelled a bit, but most of it wasn't intense since the graves had already aired out and it wasn't warm.

"Shit, gross." She still pinched her nose when she got too close for comfort and shuddered momentarily to shake off the feeling of disgust.

This wasn't where rich people were buried, at least not originally. Many of the village's craftsmen had lost their reputations as the more famous people left for the larger cities.

The novel had mentioned that Eisenwacht had once been very large, but she didn't know the details of its history, where it was settled before, or why it had been relocated.

But as a matter of fact, many of those graves had no coffins in them, just raw skeletons, or such shabby coffins that they were already broken apart, displaying everything inside to the world.

These people were interrupted in their eternal rest. 'Who would do something so foul?'

Not only that, but the elephant in the room had to be addressed. Her heart was pounding at the thought of all the unsuspecting people in the village just a few feet away.

She had to get a weapon, but at the same time, she had to get someone to close and bless those holes. Even if she dumped the soil back into the graves, it wouldn't change the fact that the holy ground had been desecrated. In other words, the intention that had been put into the ground had been dispersed and corrupted, making it too weak to disrupt the Surface anymore.

'That's just terrible, because it's a border area. We could easily dig it all up to widen the hole and be golden, but no, the blessing doesn't go deep enough to work with the soil down there.'

People in places of high protective value, such as the capital, could use cellars because the ground was blessed deep into the earth by the High Priests of the Temple, and now by the Saintess as well. The floor of the basement was just as blessed as everything above it.

'Shall I give you your old sword?'

Blinking into the void, Rowena had to clear her mind for a second to understand what her oldest friend had just said. 'Come again?' She couldn't understand after all.

'Your old sword. Do you need it?'

'What?' She could barely contain herself. "What sword? I don't have a sword. Do you?"

'I had no reason to throw away your belongings before following you.'

At that moment, her brain went into a state of suspended disarray as she realized where her thoughts had gone wrong. "Do you still have my stuff in your Subdimension?"

'I did not see fit to throw away your belongings,' he repeated himself with patience.

"Then why the fuck would you not fucking give it to me right away?" she snapped, yelling so loudly that she was afraid there would be an echo coming back to her, as she put her hand over her mouth after the fact.

He didn't answer. Now, she understood that he wouldn't open up Unholy Ground without asking her first. That was obvious. It was stressful for the human body when a Numbered latched onto it without an established physical contract between them.

After all, they would attach themselves to their Mana signature and forcibly connect with the world, at least with the space within a certain radius of the person they were connected to.

The downside was, among other things, that Unholy Ground literally meant to spoil the blessings on the very ground they forced themselves through. On the other hand, an ordinary Visitor would never dare approach a space soaked in the presence of a marked one.

All that would have happened is that she would have been discovered by her father or brother, for they would have felt his presence as he manifested in the world of the living. And he didn't even have to show up to give her back what was hers.

But in his eyes, she didn't need a weapon. Not until she actually needed one.

Instead of saying something, a soft clang resounded behind her. And when she peeked into the grave at her feet, there it lay.

A short sword with the inscription VAULT on the black hilt. 'See?' she thought, feeling weirdly emotional, stressed out, and maybe a bit nostalgic, rather than angry, 'You didn't need to come up to do it, so you should've just done it from the start.'

Because all he had to do was open the space and push the object out. Once more than half of it was on the other side, it would be ejected. Like a bottle of air being forced under water and then let go.

And since the graves opened holes in the holy ground, he didn't need to connect with Rowena to open it up in the first place either.

Sighing, she bent down and forced herself to ignore the fact that the blade was basically in the loving embrace of Jack Skellington himself, because she had to get it before it turned into Sally.

'I wish I had any other hobbies besides lying on the couch and watching TV. Maybe it would help.'

With the sword in her hand, she swung it a few times. It felt awkwardly heavy. The wooden sword from the basement might have been made rather heavy to serve as a training tool, but it wasn't quite like her sword. Mana Stones themselves were very light, as they weren't very dense in a physical sense.

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But the core inside the Mana Stone blade was heavy, and the fact that it wasn't completely balanced, due to the way a sword with a core was forged, made it feel very different.

She concentrated a bit, manifested a Vector to infuse the blade with Mana from the outside, and felt her head instantly lighten. She had to reduce the amount she gave in order to fully use the sword and still be able to support her physical abilities without collapsing from the Mana expenditure.

'Not easy.' That was the moment Rowena realized her limitations for the first time in a long time. 'Wow, I never knew I was that weak.'

It made her laugh bitterly as she brandished her sword and tried to circle her Mana through it, while at the same time searching for the remains of the person responsible for all the holes dug in the ground.

Yet even that wasn't so simple. An Executor's abilities might be limited by the abilities of the Numbered they were bound to, but an Executor with an exclusive contract would always gain a permanently stronger Mana Core. Though the size depended on the Numbered in question.

The real problem with much more limited Mana was that her tanto simply wasn't made for that kind of endeavor. The Mana Stones used to forge this thing were quite dull, and thus less conductive; the core was small, and still probably half made of some other material coated with silver instead of a piece of solid silver.

'Chrome vanadium, I bet you. And it's not even virgin silver, it's secondhand.'

To be fair, the silver ore in Celia's world had been exhausted about four decades earlier, so there was hardly any virgin silver left, it was all reused. There were a few people who still had silver in its natural state, but they mostly stockpiled it or sold it to the highest bidder, so there was no way for her to get one.

The handle was made of polymer with no silver inlays, which made it impossible for her Mana to flow smoothly from the handle to the blade through direct contact with her palm. Additionally, the decrepit core was unable to evenly transfer the Mana she injected from the outside from the core to the edge.

'Feels as if I'm just violently pounding my Vector all around this glorified piece of company-issued rubbish, like some lobotomized washing machine with an attitude problem,' she thought as sweat pooled on her forehead, 'and of course it's barely effective. Cheap-ass trash.'

'It's going to be trying,' Pan said, making her almost snap back at him about where he could have possibly gotten that crazy idea, but she didn't, as she felt that he wasn't trying to be smart with her by saying so. 'You know it would be easier if we reestablished our contract.'

His words, which sounded like a marketing pitch for America's least trustworthy insurance company, were in fact heavy with emotion. The young woman had to close her eyes and breathe slowly as an onslaught of emotion involuntarily flooded her mind.

There was something she had to remind herself of sometimes, for they had known each other for so long and he became a part as regular as no other to her life.

Numbered were the Special Grade Visitors, one step ahead of the Grade 5 "Sentinels". Sentinels that were supposedly be powerful enough to disrupt the flow of time and space, would be marked - "Numbered" - by an unknown higher order called the Divine Principle.

However, no one dared to comment on whether this was true or not. Neither their supposed power to destroy any and all life forms, resulting in them being cut off so that they could no longer interact with the world by themselves, nor the existence of some higher beings who would suddenly appear and decide that this was where they drew the line on how much human life was allowed to be threatened.

But even if she had no idea if it was true or not, they were anything but human, and in the end, emotions didn't come naturally to them. They weren't people, after all.

Nevertheless, she felt his worry and sadness, knowing full well where they came from. He was the last one who wanted to bring back their contract, but he was the only one who could ask her to take it back in order to help herself.

She also knew why he hadn't given her the sword right away - hadn't she decided just five minutes ago that she didn't need a weapon? 'Ironically, he was the one VAULT nicknamed 'The Heartless'.'

Cracking a sheepish smile, she shrugged her petite shoulders. "Don't ask if you already know the answer."

With that out of the way, she lowered her right arm to turn the sword so that it was held flat alongside the length of her forearm, beyond her elbow, pointing at the space behind her. A slight tug at her temples signaled the grip she had on the trail she sought out.

Locking on to the target the noble daughter assumed to be straight ahead, she charged at it the same time as a shiver ran down her spine without prior warning. Her feet were frozen in place by the sudden feeling hitting her senses and breaking her stance.

Her breath hitched and goose bumps crawled down her arms, starting from her shoulders and neck. A rush of panic made her heart skip a beat; adrenaline started pumping through her veins. As her mind went into overload, she turned point blank, shifting her blade and spinning it once out of the passive blocking position she had just put it in.

While turning around, she swung, blindly but surely, as the shattering impact of one sword against another numbed her arm and nearly sent her blade flying. 'Ridiculous,' she thought, putting more effort into holding on.

But the thing that perplexed her even more than the sudden attack itself was the "who". The "who would attack me from behind," as she realized it was none other than Jack Skellington.

She jumped back a few steps, for the sword the undead wielded was strong, yet not very precise. "Sorry, I didn't mean to bother you earlier," she said, her thin voice somewhere between amusement and fear.

Amusement, because this was ludicrous. It wasn't in her job description.

Fear... because there was no way this was a Visitor. Visitors hated the dead.

And as she looked at the guy who seemed to be struggling to coordinate his sword after breaking one of his crusty bones at her fierce resistance, several other graves showed movement until almost all of the open holes revealed a new foe for her.

"No way..." As if to mock her on top of the unrest she already felt, her eyes were drawn to the at least twenty sets of moving bones, some with more and some with less tissue left on them.

'They are dancing, aren't they?' She saw it, they were forming two rows and doing a dance, swinging their mostly not very curved hips. 'Please tell me this is a pipe dream, Pan.'

'You know I cannot see through your eyes.'

'Don't matter. Just tell me.' He could look into her memory of what she saw, but apparently the human mind wasn't very clear about that. Even if the memory was believed to be accurate, it was mostly distorted images with little distinct information.

And the recollection of dancing skeletons didn't seem very lucid to him. '…You are wide awake.'

"Bro, that's not what I wanted to hear." The hands on the handle of her sword were trembling and to did the blade.

It was a good moment to snap out of it and take a breath, as her opponent was just getting ready for another round. The broken ulna was back in one piece as well.

'Good for you. But how do I kill you, bitch?'

"What...?" The panicked voice of a woman Rowena had talked to quite a bit today reached her ear along with a dull thud. "What is this...?" Sometimes having an audience didn't make a performance much better.

'This is going to be trying, alright.'