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Tom didn’t get long to bask in his hard-fought victory as his hearing caught onto a hurried pair of footsteps approaching from one of the tunnels, the one that led to the treasury and also happened to be where the leader of the Shadow Guild resided.

Instead of wasting precious seconds looting the blonde-haired woman and even more organizing his inventory, he allowed his gaze to sweep across the room as he reached for her axes.

Aleph had dealt with the archer, her expression unreadable beneath her vizor as she towered above his bloodied form. It appeared that the archer had not gone down without a fight, but he had ultimately been ambushed and then his ability to fight at range had been snatched away.

His card had been quite the deadly one too, very suited to his long range capabilities. The same had been true for the blonde-haired woman. Breaking past her defenses would have been tricky if he was forced to rely upon his swordplay and her armor seemed like it would’ve weathered any glancing blows. Had it not been for her own ally’s poisonous arrow that had been amplified by Greater Reflection, Tom would’ve had to try riskier maneuvers.

His gaze lingered on a length of air that was now slicked with blood, as Zirel finished off the last of the black-robed assassins.

“They’re coming,” Tom softly said, knowing that his allies’ enhanced hearing would pick up on his words.

Aleph turned to face him and nodded, while Zirel used what little time he had to wipe the blood from his sword, not dropping his cloaking the entire time.

Then, their guests arrived.

A woman with fiery red hair that was tied into a ponytail, clad in flowing azure robes that were reinforced with strips of metal stepped into the cavern, closely followed by a gray-haired man that seemed to be well into his fifties, a long warhammer leaning on his shoulder for support as he held onto it with both hands.

The fiery red-haired woman’s eyes went wide as she took in the sheer extent of devastation that two people had seemingly wreaked, but that didn’t stop her from throwing a small black ball that she had concealed in her palm towards the center of the cavern

Aleph fired had fired off a crystal in her direction and Tom had thrown one of the axes he had acquired from the blonde-haired woman in her direction, seeing no reason to carry two when dual-wielding was not a skill he possessed nor a discipline he had trained for, but neither of their attacks stopped the black ball from shattering.

A torrent of pitch black smoke erupted outwards from it’s shattered remains, flooding the cavern with surprising speed.

Neither Tom nor Aleph got a confirmation on their respective attack’s efficacy, but it was far too unlikely for them to have injured the enforcers, let alone killed them.

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They both retreated and Tom’s free hand wrapped around his nose and mouth, doing his best not to breathe in any of the smoke. His survival instincts hadn’t gone haywire and the smoke didn’t sting at his skin or his eyes, but there was still no point in taking a chance.

His senses were stretched to the limits as he braced himself to counter any attack directed in his direction, but besides Aleph’s crystal encased figure, which still made itself visible in the darkness of the smoke, Tom failed to detect anyone encroaching upon his personal space.

A minute later, the smoke had cleared, leaving Tom and Aleph standing near each other as they exchanged confused looks.

The two Enforcers were gone.

They had fled.

That realization should’ve been reassuring, because it confirmed that the black smoke wasn’t some sort of poison, but it did not. Not in the slightest.

Stolen axe in hand, Tom’s gaze swept across the room in search of anything out of the ordinary. It seemed like Zirel’s cloaking had gotten even stronger, likely because he had killed many of the black-robed assassins, because Tom couldn’t figure out where the prince was hiding and for now, that was good.

Tom raised his empty palm in the air, signaling for Aleph not to pursue the two enforcers.

They had fled far too readily the moment they realized he had Aleph could pose them a threat. The Shadow Guild was one of assassins, yes, but that did not mean that they were cowards that would flee at the slightest sign of a fight.

While Tom was confident that he could’ve beaten the two, the fight wouldn’t have ended in an instant. They had likely gone back to the Sacred Forest to get reinforcements, but Tom doubted that they were faster than him, meaning it would take them at least an hour to get back to the headquarters.

It did not make any sense to abandon their headquarters to the enemy, unless… they were certain that there was someone far more capable than them that would deal with the threat.

A chill ran down Tom’s spine as he realized what was troubling him.

There was enough soft lighting in the room. There was enough debris strewn around, the ground littered with the assassin’s bodies. But where there should have been shadows, there were none.

Tom’s gaze flickered as he peeked behind him, just enough to get a glimpse of his own shadow.

His blood froze as he realized that it was far too long and too curved to belong to him.

“Aleph, dodge!” Tom bellowed as he threw himself to the side. A shadowy talon skewered through the spot where he had just been standing in, freezing into a glimmering metallic talon that jutted upwards from the ground. Had he been any slower, it would’ve skewered straight through him.

Aleph however wasn’t as lucky.

She had just been a fraction of a second too slow to react and a second talon and punched through her chest, shattering through her crystal armor and piercing through flesh to come out the other side.

A moment later she slid off the talon and crumpled to the ground, a bit too jerkily.

Zirel had acted.

Tom’s gaze furiously swept across the cavern just in time to notice a man stepping out of a pool of shadows that had been tucked away against the cavern’s walls.